Battlefield Earth Part 96

The alert had come just over half an hour ago. Glencannon was in trouble.

It was Day 78, only fourteen days before Terl had scheduled himself to fire. He had not begun his panel on the last discs Jonnie had had. There had been a delay.

And now this! Glencannon was under attack en route.

The visitors, four hundred miles above Earth, had increased. There were eighteen of them now. Half-Captain RoG.o.deter Snowl had come back and with him he had brought four heavy war vessels. One of them at least, if not more, was a plane carrier. It was probably from this that the attack on Glencannon had been launched.

Jonnie had no communicator with him. He had simply been outside when the alert came. Stormalong and two other pilots had scrambled and Jonnie had simply grabbed an air mask and a plane. All the communication in the air right now was in Pali- both Glencannon and Stormalong had communicators with them and were using them. Thus Jonnie could not tell what was happening. The singsong of the Buddhists never showed excitement even in combat, so their voice tones told him nothing.

He was gaining alt.i.tude and widening his viewscreens. He had Stormalong and the other two ships just ahead of him. He had not yet picked up Glencannon.

Jonnie threw a scanner upward. Three of their visitors were way up there, not as clear in this bright daylight as they would be on scanners at night due to daytime ultraviolet in the air.

Was that the Vulcor-cla.s.s vessel? The other two with it were larger, more bulky. Yes, that was the Vulcor-cla.s.s: diamond-shaped bridge. Half-Captain RoG.o.deter Snowl himself.

The three weren't coming down-apparently it took a lot of solar acc.u.mulation to do that and they tended to reserve themselves. The other two must be plane carriers.

Yes! From one of them came a new launch.

Six needle-like craft were coming down like arrows.

Clearly, using Psychlo, Jonnie said, "Six new hornets from above!" That would warn Stormalong.

There was Glencannon. Streaking along at about one hundred thousand feet, flat-out, heading for the minesite. Where was his escort? He should have an escort. No sign of them!

Four needles were shooting along behind Glencannon. Occasionally a long-range flash of fire laced out from them.

There went Stormalong!

In tight formation, the three planes cut straight through the pursuing Tolneps.

An explosion! A second gout of hot blue flame. And a third.

There was only one Tolnep racing out of the smoke.

Jonnie turned up to intercept the six coming down. They grew larger and larger in his sights.

He centered on the nose of the leader. His thumb hit the firing trip as he wildly swung sideways, sweeping his awesome firepower into the Tolnep's tight formation.

His viewscreen flared out with the explosions ahead.

A slight thump as a broken piece of a Tolnep plane touched his wing.

Jonnie flipped around as they went by him. He sighted in on the tail of the last ship. He hit the trip of the blast cannon. He was skidding so wildly from his turn that he missed. Four Tolneps left to go.

He flashed ahead of them and spun about. He was almost head-on with the Tolnep now leading. An instant before they would have collided, Jonnie's shots stuffed the Tolnep's own fire up his cannon barrels. The ship exploded.

Three Tolneps left. They looped and came on, firing in formation. The air about Jonnie was slashed. The Mark 32 took a hit in the windscreen. Half of it went black.

Jonnie's guns were going. One Tolnep! Two Tolneps!

The last one tried to make a run for it, shooting back into the heights.

Jonnie steadied his battle plane. He threw the firing sets onto "Flame" and "Maximum Range." He sent searching needles straight up.

The Tolnep shattered into a ragged ball of fire.

Where was Glencannon?

There he was, racing down to the minesite, almost there.

He had a Tolnep right on his tail.

Stormalong and his other two ships were slashing down on the Tolnep.

The guard opened the atmosphere armor curtain and Glencannon flashed through. He was safe!

A scythe of fire hit the Tolnep as Stormalong and the other two pilots let drive from extreme range.

The guard got the atmosphere curtain on. The Tolnep hit it and slammed through.

The air had not had time to reionize enough.

The Tolnep ship exploded in a ball of flame in the scramble area, narrowly missing Glencannon's ship as it landed.

Jonnie and Stormalong scanned the skies for more enemy. There was none. Some smoke palls rose in the distance where enemy ships had disintegrated.

The guard opened the atmosphere curtain. A fire-fighting crew was there now spraying the burning wreckage of the Tolnep ship. Jonnie, Stormalong, and the other two landed.

Glencannon was sitting in his seat still. His Buddhist communicator was trying to calm him. Glencannon was crying. His hands were shaking. It was a reaction of total frustration.

"I had orders to come through," Glencannon was repeating over and over. The communicator waved the others away and then came to them.

"There are many things for the Academy of pilots to do in America," the Buddhist told Jonnie and Stormalong. "They also have to maintain their air cover. There were no escort pilots and we delayed coming for days. Then Glencannon felt he could not delay anymore.

"A Swiss pilot, a close friend of his but a very new pilot, volunteered. The Tolneps. .h.i.t us just after we crossed the coast in northern Africa. It was too far away for Cornwall or Luxembourg to help us.

"The Swiss fought them off. He shot down three. But he needed help and Glencannon had orders to keep going in such an event and he kept going.

"He feels that if he had turned back to help the Swiss, they wouldn't have got him. The Swiss pilot was alone, he had no communicator, but he also told Glencannon to keep going.

"The Tolneps shot the Swiss to pieces. When he ejected and tried to get down by backpack they closed in and killed him in the air.

"Glencannon wants to go up and shoot down those ships in orbit. They would murder him. Please help."

They got Glencannon calmed down. Stormalong said that he would call Sir Robert and get the vital communication line made more secure. Sir Robert was going over to move the Academy out of America and to the Cornwall minesite in a few days but meanwhile better arrangements should be made. The ferrying of innumerable planes and equipment to safe places was now all complete. The tribes were centralized. Stormalong also said he would take over the run.

Glencannon handed over the pouch of discs.

Jonnie looked at the packet. He hoped it was worth it.

Chapter 8.

It was!

Minutes after Jonnie opened the courier pouch and got a disc on a viewscreen, he realized that for the first time in all ofPsychlos long and s.a.d.i.s.tic history, non-Psychlo eyes were looking upon the actual construction of a teleportation transshipment console.

Terl, having no models or patterns, was working from scratch. And crazy though he might be, his workmanship was exact. Of course, his own life depended upon its being so.

He had already made the console case. He had fitted the rows of b.u.t.tons, spares from the storerooms, all properly marked, into the panel top. He had made the screw holes which held the top on to the bottom case.

Watching the view discs, fascinated, Jonnie saw him take a yard-square piece of common black insulating board, the kind that was used to back all electronic a.s.semblies, and fit it into the area between the top panel and the case sides. It was this board, evidently, which would hold the various components of the circuit he would build. He carefully and precisely drilled the holes in this insulating board so it would fit between the top panel and the case and be held in place by the same joining screws.

He temporarily fastened down the board in the case and put a smear of powder over it and then pressed each b.u.t.ton so the location where it touched the board was exactly marked. Then he took it all apart again and made more exact marks with a red pencil wherever the powder had been dented. He drilled small holes in each one of these points and put in a metal plug. Now the b.u.t.tons of the top panel, when pressed, would come down and touch a metal plug.

Terl now turned the insulating board over. The little metal plugs showed on the underside. He marked which was the top and which was the bottom of the board and really went to work.

Scarcely consulting his notes and formulas at all, he began to cover the underside of the board with various electronic components: resistors, capacitors, tiny amplifiers, relays and switches. It was actually a rather crude and old-fashioned sort of layout. It seemed to match up to the metal plugs the b.u.t.tons would hit from above and often connected to it.

But there was an oddity. He was putting fuses in places where, if you used the board at all, they would certainly blow. In fact, for every metal plug through the board, there was a fuse that would disconnect it from the circuitry now being built. It looked to Jonnie that all you had to do was. .h.i.t one b.u.t.ton on the upper console and a fuse would blow. Dozens of such fuses.

In a dumb kind of way, this mysterious circuit he was building made sense. All except these fuses. Why would one put fuses all through a piece of electronic circuitry?

Terl neatened up this whole complicated circuit. He color-coded it and polished it. And at last it was complete. It really looked marvelous, if one admired all the complexities of an electronic circuit board. It almost made sense- you pushed a top console b.u.t.ton and current went here, you pushed another and current would go there.

The board was complete. Terl admired it, even took a break and bit off some kerbango. Then he did the strangest thing imaginable. With a flourish of his paws, he hooked up some leads to a power source, snapped the clips to the terminals of the very artistic board circuit he had just built, and blew all the fuses in it! blew all the fuses in it!

They went with little glowing pops and smoke puffs.

He had just made the whole circuit inoperational.

Now he really got down to work. He pulled over his vast pile of equations and worked-out formulas, got out micrometer measuring tools, cleaned up a set of drafting triangles and rulers, sharpened up white marking pens to a hairline point.

He turned the board he had just made over to the blank side, made some reference points on it, and for the next two days, meticulously consulting his notes, he circuit. Aside from matching up with the metal plugs for the console b.u.t.tons, this new circuit had nothing whatever to do with the one he had so laboriously built on the bottom side of the board.

He drew in the resistors and amplifiers and capacitors and every other electronic component. All in tiny lines and squiggles and curls.

Terl consulted his equations and worksheets and duplicated the measurements with enormous exact.i.tude in white on the board. It was a long and complicated procedure and it was a very complex circuit that emerged. The console b.u.t.tons, when pressed, would activate it if it were composed of wire.

He got that finished. Then he dusted the whole drawing with a thin coating of reddish paste. You could see the circuit through it but when you put something on the paste like a pencil it would show that that bit of the circuit had been traced.

Terl now got a thin-bladed annealing knife. One end of these knives, by the process of separating molecules through destruction of their cohesion, cut metal. The other end was used to restore the molecular cohesion and "sew" the metal up.

He took the sewing end of the knife and began to trace his circuit with it. Wherever he followed a line, the thin red paste showed he had followed it. Thus, he could keep track of where he had traced and work without any skips.

Jonnie stared at this activity. Then he rushed out of his viewing room, raced up to one of the compound storerooms, and got a piece of insulating board and an annealing knife. He made a diagonal mark across the board with the sewing end of the knife. He put clips at both ends of his mark and put current through it. The current flowed!

By aligning usually insulative molecules in a straight line, one had a path, a "wire."

He had seen that Psychlos, in cutting these boards to size to install circuit breakers, always sawed them. He had just thought knives didn't work on them. True enough, knives were not efficient in cutting them. But by aligning molecules, the insulating board conducted electricity at the points of touch.

Jonnie, starry-eyed, went back to further view this activity Terl had been engaged upon.

It had taken Terl two days just to trace that circuit. Finally he finished.

And then Terl took some solvent and a rag and wiped the whole board clean.

There was not one visible trace left. But that "insulating" board now contained all the alignments of a complex circuit.

The underside's visible components were a total fake. They weren't ever intended to work. And anybody examining one of these boards would think he had blown its fuses. Scientists of many races had probably spent hundreds of years of time trying to make that false circuit make sense and agree with Psychlo math.

Terl was doing something in the upper left corner of the board. Unfortunately he had carelessly dropped a text open in such a position that its cover obscured much of what he was doing. It had something to do with the installation of a switch. It was a switch which would appear in the top panel. All Jonnie could see on the discs was that the switch probably had to be changed with every use of the board. Up one firing, down the next, up the next, and so on. The switch was misleadingly labeled, "Dimmer." The component it was attached to was visible enough.

If activated by a wrong turn of the switch, that component would send a surge through the board and erase the invisible circuit.

Jonnie couldn't see what position the switch was rigged to be in at the first firing.

Terl now was putting the board together.

And Jonnie found why loosening the screws which held it all together made the board inoperational.

Terl took a large electromagnet and put it around the case. Then just inside one screw, where it went through the insulating board, he inserted a fuse.

Jonnie went down and got one. It was a "magnet fuse." As long as a current went through it, it stayed whole. The moment a magnetic current was absent, it blew. To remove a console top, one had to put a magnetic field around the console.

When the screw was touching the top edge of the console, the magnetic top edge kept a tiny current running forever. The moment that screw was loosened, the magnetic current ceased and the fuse blew.

More: when it blew it activated one of the components just under it and wiped the invisible circuit out of the board.

But to take a panel top off all you had to do was put a magnetic field generator near that screw and the fuse wouldn't blow.

An invisible circuit, two b.o.o.by traps to wipe it out, a completely false circuit to distract.

And that was the secret of the Psychlos.

A sober Jonnie made plentiful copies of Terl's circuit. One could simply put it on a piece of insulating board and trace it in. The metal plugs through it activated the invisible circuit. They could duplicate it.

All except for one switch. And that was why he was sober. Exactly how it was rigged he did not know. The position it would have to be in for each sequential firing he did not know.

He reviewed the discs again. No, he could not make it out.