“We know now,” said Robert the Fox. “MacTyler, you know this demon. Wouldn’t you say he was borderline daft?”
“Do you suppose he meant to blast you when he drove in?” asked Dunneldeen. “But you handled it very well, Jonnie MacTyler.”
“He’s dangerous,” said Jonnie.
Two hours later he saw a fire start, a tiny pinpoint of light in the distant cage. Later a scout would confirm the removal of the sentries and he himself would check on the water and Chrissie.
An insane Terl was making this a much more hazardous game they were playing. A treacherous Terl was one thing. A maniac Terl was quite another.
Part 9
1
The snows were late, but when they came they made up for it with a violent, howling vengeance that almost stopped the work at the lode.
The staircase was not working. Jonnie had helped all he could, flying an overheating platform to drive in the pins, hanging from safety wires over the yawning chasm, encouraging the others. They had almost made it, had even taken out another ninety pounds in gold, when the first real storm of winter hit them. Under winds of near hurricane force, driving frozen pellets as hard as bullets, almost shaking the very mountains themselves, the staircase had collapsed. Fortunately it had just been abandoned during a shift change when it went, and there were no casualties.
They were waiting now for a lull in the storm to see what else they could do.
It was mandatory that they appear industrious, for it was the opinion of Robert the Fox that Terl would not act violently unless it appeared there was no hope. But just now the driving snow masked any pictures the recon drone might take in its daily overfly.
Besides, it was not vital, they all assured him, that Jonnie be there. Long ago the planning had provided that three who looked like him keep up the appearance that he was always there. One of these three was always visible to the recon drone—each one to his own watch. It had even been Thor who had held up the sign, not Jonnie. Three watches were vital, for no crew could stand it for more than two hours in this bitter cold.
So Jonnie was not there today. Through the driving storm, he and three others were heading for a place once called “Uravan.”
The historian, Doctor MacDermott, was developing quite a knack for picking up information out of the tattered remains of books. He even had a young Scot, an accomplished scout, assigned to him now just to go off and dig up ancient maps and books. And MacDermott had found a reference that said that Uravan had “one of the world’s largest uranium deposits.” It was supposed to be west and slightly south of the base about two hundred twenty miles, just beyond and a bit southwest of an enormous, distinctive plateau.
Uranium!
So Jonnie and one of the pilots and Angus MacTavish were on their way in a personnel plane. Who knew, they might be lucky.
Angus MacTavish was delighted. He was the one who figured out man-mechanics and got things working.
Jonnie had trained him and another half-dozen Scots in electronics, and they were all good at that and mechanics, but it was Angus MacTavish who was the star. Pugnacious, never knowing the meaning of defeat, a bundle of enthusiastic black-haired optimism, Angus was quite certain they would find mountains of uranium right there, all ready to shovel into a bag and cart off.
Jonnie didn’t think so. In the first place they had no protection from radiation yet, so they were a long way from shoveling anything. But a uranium mine might have enough left around to test breathe-gas. He wisely refrained from dampening Angus’s enthusiasm. All they were out for was, in fact, a scout to find a place to test breathe-gas.
The storm made visibility very poor. The passenger craft bucketed along, battered by the machine-gunning of occasional local storms. The plane had damn-all in the way of instruments and it was all contact flying. A time or two a peak would flash by a mite too close, but from way up high it was a carpet of turbulent whiteness and one might lose his bearings. Fortunately the storm was blowing eastward and its worst furies were past by the time they had gone a hundred miles.
They burst out of a cloud into clear weather. The panorama of the western Rockies spread out, glistening in the late morning sun, breathtaking in its beauty.
“Scotland may be the best land in the world,” said the copilot, “but ’tis never like this!”
Jonnie punched their speed up to about five hundred, and the white vast world fled by. He spotted the plateau, estimated from the ancient schoolbook map he held where Uravan might be. Even in the snow they could make out where an ancient, curving road had been. He spotted the southeast point where the road forked and, down to treetop level and counting the white-coated remains of towns, brought them to the mounds and dumps that must be Uravan. He landed in front of some buildings, the plane crunching into the fresh snow.
Angus MacTavish was out of the door like a running buck, his kilt flying behind him. He dashed into one ruined building after another and suddenly came speeding back.
His voice thin in the sharp air, he yelled, “’Tis Uravan!” He held up some tattered scraps of paper.
Jonnie reached in back and got out a breathe-gas cartridge and the equipment. He and Angus had worked half the night making a remote control that would turn the regulator on and off. All they had to do was find a hot radiation spot, back off, turn on the remote, and see whether they got a flash of exploding breathe-gas. Jonnie also got out some shovels, climbing ropes and mine lamps.
Running all over the place like a hunting hound, Angus was tracking down likely spots. There were ore dumps. There had been fences but these had long since rusted away.
They tried repeatedly. They would scoop out an old dump and put the breathe-gas cartridge down, back off, release some breathe-gas, and see whether it flashed in a small explosion.
After a dozen tries, Angus became convinced it must be a spent cartridge. He switched it on in front of his face and promptly turned blue with coughing. No, it wasn’t a spent cartridge. They went down in pits. They scrambled into drifts long since unsafe.
They used up five cartridges of breathe-gas.
No explosions.
Jonnie felt a bit disheartened. He let Angus and the pilot go on with the experiments while he wandered around through the ruins. It was all so badly decayed there was difficulty in recognizing what the buildings had been used for. How Angus had found paper simply added up to Angus: it must have been protected by being preserved under something.
Then Jonnie started to get suspicious. In all this area he had only found one pitiful remnant that might have been a body, merely teeth fillings and buttons lying in a certain pattern in a room.
No remains of file cabinets. No distinguishable remains of machinery aside from some decayed hoists. But no bodies save that one.
He went back to the plane and sat down. This place had been mined out before the Psychlo attack. And it had been mined out with such care that the waste dumps weren’t even hot.
Angus came streaming back shouting: “It works! It works!” He was carrying something that had been framed.
Jonnie got out and looked at it. One corner of the ancient frame was not charred. Inset into the dilapidated mounting was a piece of ore. It had a brass plate under it, mostly undecipherable. There must have been a leaded glass face on the frame once, for a scrap of it remained in a corner.
He carried it over to a rock and sat down and studied it. The ore was brown and black. It had been mounted as an exhibit on a lead background. He held the inscription this way and that. He couldn’t make out more than that it was the first something. And then a person’s name he couldn’t make out either. He turned the plate in another way and then saw the letters at the top more plainly. They said PITCHBLENDE.
“Look!” said Angus. “Let me show you.”
He took the frame from Jonnie and put it about thirty feet away. He pointed the breathe-gas cartridge at it and came back to Jonnie. He flipped on a remote switch. The breathe-gas emission exploded!
&nbs
p; “I’ll do it again,” yelped Angus. He turned the switch full on and left it on. He wouldn’t have had time to turn it off anyway.
The bottle, its emitting snout flaming like a rocket engine, took off and went about ten feet. The pilot and Angus shouted with delight.
“Pitchblende,” said Jonnie, who had done a lot of homework. “That’s uranite ore. It’s the source of a lot of radioactive isotopes. Where’d you get it?”
They dragged him off to the broken shambles of a building that was so collapsed they had to tug and pull at a lot of roof to get at anything else in it.
Covered with dust and hot from work despite the chill air, Jonnie at last went out and sat down on what had once been a porch.
A museum. A small museum it had been. Other specimens were there. Rose quartz, hematite, things that weren’t from this immediate place. There wasn’t even any evidence that the pitchblende had been from here. “The test for breathe-gas works!” said the irrepressible Angus.
Jonnie felt depressed. He knew it worked. He had seen a blade scraper canopy blow up and kill a Psychlo long ago when some radioactive dust hit it.
“I’m glad it works,” he said. “But even if there is any uranium left under us it’s too deep for us to get to. Collect some more lead and wrap that specimen up. We’ll take it home.”
“Let’s look around here some more!” said Angus.
Jonnie had to wait out the storm to the east anyway. “Go ahead,” he said.
But he knew it was mined out. Only one body and a museum.
Where in heaven’s name was he going to find uranium—lots of it? Where?
2
Jonnie gazed with horror into the deep canyon. There was a flying drill platform down there, close to the river, and it was in real trouble.
It was the day after their return from Uravan. The storm had blown over, leaving a sparkling, white-coated day. But at these altitudes it was bitterly cold, and the canyon, as ever, was funneling winds into torrents of turbulence.
Two Scots, one of them Dunneldeen, the other a black-haired youth named Andrew, were down on that platform trying to recover the staircase, which had fallen nine hundred feet down into the frozen river. Sixty feet long and built of rods, it had pierced the river ice, leaving an end on the bank.
They had grappled the end with a hook lowered from the flying drill platform and had tried to fly the staircase up and out of the river. It was caught underwater. Now sprays coming up through the broken ice were coating the platform with water that instantly froze, increasing the platform’s weight by the moment.
He knew what they were trying to do. They were trying to look busy for the benefit of the recon drone that would be there in a moment or two. The rest of the shift crew were strung out along the chasm’s edge untangling the masses of cables and drums that had been scrambled by the storm. Dunneldeen and Andrew had gone down there to look busy salvaging the staircase.
Jonnie had been returning in the small passenger plane to work out some new method of getting the gold. He didn’t have a copilot. He had only old Doctor MacDermott, the historian, who had begged a ride so that he could come up to the lode and write the saga of the storm. The ancient Scot, who had considered himself expendable at the recruiting, was a very wise and valued dean of literature, but he was not in the slightest bit trained in their work and frail beyond estimation, with hardly the muscle and skill one needed. There was no time at all to drop down and pick up a trained and agile Scot from the site on the cliff.
They were using local radios. All the items of equipment had them built in, for their range and the range of mine intercoms was only a mile. The transmissions were also masked by the mountains to the east. The radio down there on the platform was evidently open.
“Throw off the reel brakes, Andrew!” Dunneldeen was saying tensely. “The motors are overheating.”
“They wilna disengage. ’Tis this spray!”
“Andrew! Disengage the hooks to that staircase!”
“They wilna budge, Dunneldeen! And the thing is stuck under the ice!”
The whine of the overloaded motors was also coming through the open mikes.
Jonnie knew what was going to happen. They couldn’t fly the platform free. They couldn’t drop down into the rolling, freezing water. And that platform was going to go up in flames any moment.
Such a platform had rudimentary flying controls, usually covered by a lead glass canopy. But the humans didn’t use the canopies and Dunneldeen was down there in the midst of flying spray that was coating not only himself but also the controls with instant ice.
The recon drone would be by in another second or two. It must see efforts to mine, not disaster. Jonnie could hear its nearing rumble outside his open side port.
Its hypersonic explosion would occur any moment now. The instant it went by he would have to somehow get those two off that platform.
“Doctor Mac,” shouted Jonnie into the rear of the plane. “Get ready. You’re about to be a hero!”
“Oh, my goodness,” said Doctor MacDermott.
“Open the side door and throw out two lifelines!” shouted Jonnie. “Make sure our ends are secure to this ship.”
The old man scrambled about, grabbing at unfamiliar coils and tangles of cables in the rear.
“Hold on!” shouted Jonnie.
He sent the passenger craft plummeting a thousand feet into the racketing, wind-blasting roar of the chasm. The walls flashed by.
Doctor MacDermott’s stomach stayed a thousand feet up. The nearby white and red blur of canyon walls streaked past the open door and he stared at it open-mouthed, barely able to hold on.
Jonnie cracked open the plane’s radio. “Dunneldeen!” he yelled into the mike. “Stand by to abandon that thing!”
There was the crack of the sonic boom. The recon drone had passed.
Dunneldeen’s fur-hooded face was looking up, and Jonnie realized it was not for the passenger plane but for the benefit of the drone so Terl would suppose it was Jonnie there.
Smoke was coming from the platform motor housings, blue smoke, different from the geysers of spray.
The ice-pressured river was taking full advantage of the hole just made to geyser its way to freedom.
Andrew was pounding on the encrusted winch with a sledge. Then he dropped the sledge and seized a bottle of burning gas and tried to open its controls in order to burn the cable in two. The bottle was thick with ice and would not open.
The passenger plane came down to twenty-five feet from the top of the platform, Jonnie madly punching control buttons to hold it there. Smoke from the burning motors of the platform swirled, chokingly, into the plane above.
“Doctor Mac!” shouted Jonnie. “Throw out those lifelines!”
The old man fumbled with the coils. He could not tell one cable from another. Then he found an end. He pitched it out the door.
Scrambling, he let about fifty feet uncoil and then fastened the cable to a clamp in the plane as best he could. Jonnie maneuvered the cable end over the spray-battered platform.
“I cannot find another cable end!” wailed Doctor MacDermott.
Jonnie shouted into the mike, “Grab that rope!”
“You, Andrew!” shouted Dunneldeen.
Twenty feet of cable from the plane coiled down on the platform and was promptly covered with spray that instantly turned to ice.
Andrew took a turn of cable around his arm.
“Don’t put it around your arm!” shouted Jonnie. If Dunneldeen were below him the tightening of the rope would break or sever Andrew’s arm. “Put it around that sledgehammer!”
Tongues of flame were coming from the motor housing of the platform.
Andrew managed to break the sledge loose from the ice. He took two turns of cable around the head of it.
“Grab hold!” yelled Jonnie.
Andrew grabbed the slippery sledge handle with his mittened hands.
Jonnie jumped the passenger plane up twenty feet, pulling
Andrew up and leaving the end of the cable dangling over Dunneldeen.
“The captain abandons ship!” said Dunneldeen and grabbed the cable end.
Jonnie put the passenger plane up slowly. It would not do to whip-snap the two men off into the roiling river to be swept under the ice.
Andrew was hanging to the sledge twenty feet below the passenger plane. Dunneldeen was dangling forty feet below on the same rope.
“I think this clamp is slipping!” wailed Doctor MacDermott in the back.
The iced mittens of the men below were certainly slipping. It was impossible to raise them a thousand feet to the top of the gorge. Jonnie looked wildly at the river.
The flying platform below exploded in a violence of orange flame.
The passenger plane bucked in the concussion.
Jonnie looked down at the men. The flames had hit Dunneldeen. His leggings were on fire!
Jonnie swept the plane downriver. With frantically racing fingers he brought it to forty-five feet above the snow-coated ice of the stream. Was that ice thick enough?
He dipped the plane. Dunneldeen struck the deep snow. Jonnie dragged him a hundred feet through the drifts on the river to put the fire out.
He saw a shelf beside the river, narrow and snow-covered.
Bringing the plane within feet of the canyon wall, he lowered Dunneldeen onto it and then dropped further.
Andrew’s gloves, which had been slipping down the sledge handle inch by inch, let go, and he fell the last ten feet. He almost went off the ledge. Dunneldeen grabbed him.
Jonnie, battling the wind, turned the plane around and brought the open door to the ledge.
The two men scrambled in, helped by Doctor MacDermott.
Andrew reeled in the cable and got the side door shut. Jonnie vaulted the plane two thousand feet up and maneuvered to land at the pad on the top.
Doctor MacDermott was stammering with apologies to the two men. “I could not find a second rope.”
“Think nothing of it,” said Dunneldeen. “I even got a sleigh ride out of it!”
Doctor MacDermott was clucking over his charred leggings, terribly relieved to find Dunneldeen was just singed and not badly burned.
Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 Page 32
