Dunneldeen was very composed. “It makes a better story that way and that’s the way the historian will write it. He lit a beacon fire in the sky!”
The other chiefs nodded firmly. That was the way it should be.
“What day is this?” whispered Jonnie.
“Day 95.”
Jonnie felt a bit confused. He had lost a day, two days? Where had he been? Where was he? Why?
The doctor saw the puzzlement. He had seen it before in head injuries. This young man had lost track of time. “They had to wait for me,” he said. “I was not in Aberdeen at the moment. And then we had to type your blood and find someone with the same type. I’m sorry it took long. But we also had to bring you out of shock, get you warm.” He shook his head sadly. “I should have gone with you all along. I’ll help the others when we get there.”
This upset Jonnie a little bit. “Were there a lot of Scots hurt? You shouldn’t have delayed for me if you had a doctor.”
“No, no,” said the chief of the Camerons. “Dr. Allen, who’s so expert with burns, was sent two days gone.”
“Twenty-one hurt,” said Dunneldeen. “The one being you. Only two died. Very light casualties. The others will all recover.”
“Who are they?” whispered Jonnie, making a slight motion with his hand to the four young men on the bench.
“Why, those,” said Dunneldeen, “are four members of the World Federation for the Unification of the Human Race. The first one is a MacDonald and he speaks Russian now. The second is an Argyll and he speaks German. . . .” That wasn’t why they were there at all. They were the others they’d found of Jonnie’s blood type, waiting in case more transfusions were needed.
“And why am I in a plane?” whispered Jonnie.
That was the question they didn’t want to answer. The doctor had told them not to worry this young man. They had him in a plane and were rushing him to the huge underground defense base in the mountains. There was some chance of a Psychlo counterattack. They had no idea at all whether the bombs sent to Psychlo had succeeded or failed. The Chamco brothers had told them about the force screen on Psychlo’s transshipment area and that the early recoil had shown evidence of the screen’s closing. The Chamcos had also told them that common salt neutralized the kill-gas completely. Angus had gotten mine ventilation fans into the old base and they’d found salt for filters of air. A group of excited, imported, awed Russians were at that very moment cleaning up the old base and the parson was burying the dead there. And they were not about to leave Jonnie MacTyler anywhere but safe in that base!
Dunneldeen answered, “What? Why not in the plane? You want to miss the victory celebration? We can’t have that!”
A Scot helping Dwight up in the cockpit area came back and whispered in Dunneldeen’s ear. He was dragging a mike on a long cord. They had it on the planetary band.
Dunneldeen turned to Jonnie. “They want to hear your voice so they can believe you’re alive.”
“Who?” said Jonnie.
“The compound, the people. Just say something about how you are.” Dunneldeen put the mike very close to Jonnie’s mouth.
“I’m fine,” Jonnie whispered. Then something told him he should try harder. He tried to speak louder. “I’m just fine.”
Dunneldeen gave the mike back to the Scot who hesitated, not sure the message had gone out. Dunneldeen waved him away.
“I hear other planes,” whispered Jonnie.
With a glance at the doctor for permission, Dunneldeen helped him turn his head. Jonnie looked through the plane ports.
There were five planes out there, stacked in a long echelon. He turned his eyes and looked out the other port. There were five planes out there in another echelon.
“It’s your escort,” said Dunneldeen.
“My escort?” whispered Jonnie. “But why? Everybody helped.”
“Aye, laddie,” said the chief of Clanfearghus. “But you were the one. You were the bonnie one!”
The doctor disconnected the tube. He felt Jonnie’s pulse. He nodded and motioned the others to silence. He had let this go on too long. The plane was not vibrating; the flight was very smooth. He had his patient out of shock. He wished he were in his own operating cave. But the others would not leave this young man there. And he himself, having heard but a small part of it, could share their awe and respect for what he had done.
“If you’ll just drink this,” said the doctor, “it will make things easier.”
They held the cup to Jonnie’s mouth. It was whiskey and it had heavy herbs in it. He managed to drink it. Shortly the pain grew less and he seemed to be floating.
The doctor signaled them all to be quiet. He had a trephine in his hand. The brain was being pressed upon in three places, not two, and the pressure must be relieved.
Dunneldeen went up to the cockpit to help Dwight. He glanced at their escort. Most of them were flying with one pilot. They had each smashed their minesites and come hammering back here when he put out the call for a massive patrol to the north of Scotland. They all should have gone home, but they wouldn’t hear of it when they knew about Jonnie. They’d gone down with a Scot war party and gotten more planes from the Cornwall minesite after shooting the few Psychlos staggering around, and those not ordered back for urgent duty had been sitting, waiting for news about Jonnie. Now they were escorting him home.
“You better tell them he’s all right,” said Dwight. “They keep calling in every two or three minutes for news. And so does Robert the Fox. Takes one man just to handle the radio!”
“He’s not all right,” said Dunneldeen. And he looked down the long corridor to where the doctor had begun the operation.
Dwight glanced at Dunneldeen. Was the young prince crying? He felt like it himself.
2
Jonnie had been in a coma for three days.
They had brought him to the ancient underground military base in the Rocky Mountains where salt filters could be dropped into place at once if a counterattack materialized from the planet Psychlo.
The hospital complex was very extensive. It was all white tile, hardly any of it cracked. The Russians had cleaned it all up and the parson had buried the crumbling dead.
Fifteen of the wounded Scots were there, including Thor and Glencannon. They were in a separate series of rooms from Jonnie’s, but one could hear them now and then, especially when the pipe major gave them an afternoon concert. Dr. Allen and Dr. MacKendrick had already discharged five of them as reasonably well and certainly too restless and impatient to keep idle when so many things were going on elsewhere.
Chrissie had been in constant attendance at Jonnie’s bedside and she rose when Dr. MacKendrick and Angus MacTavish came in. They seemed angry with one another and Chrissie hoped they would go soon. MacKendrick put a hand on Jonnie’s forehead and stood there for a moment looking at the ashen pallor. Then he turned to Angus with an expressive hand that seemed to say, “See?” Jonnie’s breathing was shallow.
Three days before, Jonnie had awakened and whispered to her to send for somebody. There was always a Scot guard at the door, his assault rifle blocking out would-be visitors, of which there were too many. Chrissie had brought him in and watched worriedly while Jonnie whispered a long message to Robert the Fox, and the guard got it on a picto-recorder mike held close to Jonnie’s lips. The message had been to the effect that if another gas drone appeared in the sky they could probably stop it by landing thirty recon drones on it with magnetic skids and racing their engines on reverse coordinates so the gas drone’s motors would burn out. Chrissie didn’t understand the message, but she did understand that it was too tiring to Jonnie. He had relapsed back into a coma, and when the guard came back to say Sir Robert sent his thanks and would do that, Chrissie was quite cross with him.
The same guard was on again when Dr. MacKendrick and Angus were let in, and Chrissie vowed she would reason with him. MacKendrick, yes. Angus, definitely no!
MacKendrick and Angus went out and
the guard closed the door behind them.
“Look,” said MacKendrick, dragging Angus into one side room after another. “Machines, machines, machines. This was once a very well appointed and outfitted hospital. Those big things over there—I have seen them in an ancient book—were called X-ray machines. It was a subject called radiology.”
“Radiation?” said Angus. “No, man, not on Jonnie! Radiation is for killing Psychlos. You’re daft!”
“Those machines let you look inside the body and find out what is wrong. They were invaluable.”
“Those machines,” said Angus, angrily, “were run by electricity! Why do you think we light this place with mine lamps?”
“You must get them running!” said MacKendrick.
“Even if I did, I see by that one they have tubes. The gas in those tubes is over a thousand years old. We can’t get any more of it and couldn’t get it into the tubes if we had any! You’re daft, man.”
MacKendrick glared at him. “There is something pressing on his brain! I can’t just go plunging into it with a scalpel. I can’t guess. Not with Jonnie MacTyler! People would slaughter me!”
“You want to see inside his head,” said Angus. “Well, why didn’t you say so?” Angus went off muttering about electricity.
He told a standby pilot at the heliport that he needed to get to the compound fast. The pilots were very few and they were being run ragged. They were zipping off to all parts of the world; they had a sort of inter-national airline going that was beginning to visit every remaining pocket of men on the planet at least once a week. They were ferrying World Federation coordinators and chiefs and tribal leaders as fast as they could. More pilots were in training, but right now they only had thirty plus the two in hospital. So a casual request, even from a Scot, even from a member of the original combat force, was not likely to get much heed. Travel from the underground base to the compound was usually by ground car.
Angus told him it had to do with Jonnie, and the pilot said why hadn’t he said so, and pushed him into a plane and said he would wait for him to come back.
With grim purpose, Angus went to the compound section where they kept the captive Psychlos. A small area of the old dormitory level had been rigged to circulate breathe-gas and “unreconstructed” Psychlos were there under heavy guard. They numbered about sixty now, for occasional ones were brought here from distant minesites when they surrendered peacefully. Terl was captive elsewhere.
Angus got an air mask and the Scot guard let him in. The place was very dim and the huge Psychlos sat around in attitudes of despair. One didn’t walk in the place without being covered by the guard. The prisoners expected a Psychlo counterattack and were not too cooperative.
The Scot engineer located Ker and dug him out of his apathy. He demanded of Ker to tell him whether he knew of any mining equipment that would let one look through solid objects. Ker shrugged. Angus told him who it was for and Ker sat there for a while, his amber eyes thoughtful. Then suddenly he wanted to be reassured as to who this was for, and Angus told him it was for Jonnie. Ker was turning a tiny gold band around in his claws. Suddenly he sprang up and demanded that Angus give him an escort and a breathe-mask.
Ker went down to the shops and in a storeroom there dug up a strange machine. He explained it was used to analyze the internal structure of mineral samples and to find crystalline cracks inside metals. He showed Angus how to work it. You put the emanation tube under the object to be examined and you read the results on the top screen. There was also a trace paper reader that showed metals in alloys or rocks. It worked on some wavelength he called sub-proton field emanation, and this was intensified by the lower tube, and the influence went through the sample and you read it on the top screen. Being Psychlo, it was quite massive, and Ker carried it for him to the waiting plane. A guard took Ker back and Angus returned to the military base.
They tried it with some cats they had that were cleaning the rat population out, and the cats afterward seemed cheerful enough. The screen showed the skull outline very nicely. They tried it on one of the wounded Scots who volunteered and they found a piece of stone in his hand from a mine injury, and he too seemed fine afterward.
About 4:00 that afternoon they used it on Jonnie. By 4:30 they had a three-dimensional picture and the trace paper.
A very relieved Dr. MacKendrick pointed it out to Angus. “A piece of metal! See it? A sliver just below one of the trephine holes. Well! We’ll just get him ready and I can have that out with a scalpel soon enough!”
“Metal?” said Angus. “Scalpel? On Jonnie? No you don’t! Don’t you dare touch him! I’ll be right back!”
With the metal trace paper flying behind him, Angus fifteen minutes later charged in on the Chamco brothers. They worked in a separate breathe-gas dome at the compound, industriously trying to assist Robert the Fox to put things back together. Angus shoved the trace under their pug nosebones: “What metal is this?”
The Chamcos examined the trace squiggles. “Ferrous daminite,” they said. “A very strong support alloy.”
“Is it magnetic?” demanded Angus. And they said yes, of course it was.
By six o’clock Angus was back in the hospital. He had a heavy electrocoil he had just made. It had handgrips on it.
Angus showed MacKendrick how to guide it and MacKendrick worked out the best path to bring the sliver out with the least damage to tissue.
A few minutes later they had the broad sliver in their hands, withdrawn by the magnet.
Later the Chamco brothers identified it with closer analysis as a piece of a battle plane skid strut “which has to be very strong and very light.”
Jonnie had not been conscious enough to tell anyone what he had done on the drone and Chrissie had shooed off the historian when he tried to find out earlier. So it was a bit of a mystery as to how a sliver piece of a strut could have been daggered into Jonnie’s head.
But whatever they had done to him, Chrissie was extremely relieved. The fever he had had dropped. His breathing improved and his color got better.
The following morning he came out of the coma and smiled a little at Chrissie and MacKendrick and dropped into a natural sleep.
Planetary radio was not slow in crackling with the news. Their Jonnie was out of danger!
The pipe major paraded his pipes and drums all around the compound on the heels of the crier who was yelling it out to work parties. Bonfires blazed both there and in various other parts of the world, and a coordinator in the Andes relayed the news that the chiefs of some peoples they had found there had declared this an annual celebration day, and could they come now and pay homage? A pilot standing by with a plane in the Mountains of the Moon in Africa had to get help from both coordinators and chiefs of that small colony in order to get space to take off again, so mobbed had the field become with celebrating, jubilant people. The compound radio operators had to double up on shifts to handle the message traffic roaring in on them as a result of the announcement.
Robert the Fox just went around grinning at everybody.
3
As the days wore on into weeks, it became obvious to the council, originally composed of the parson, the schoolmaster, the historian and Robert the Fox, and now augmented by several clanchiefs who left deputies in Scotland, that Jonnie was brooding about something.
He would smile at them from his bed and talk to them when spoken to, but there was something deep in his eyes that was dull and moody.
Chrissie tried not to let them come very often, and when they did she was a bit impatient with them if they overstayed.
Some of the Russians and some Swedes were rebuilding parts of the Academy due to the desperate need for pilots. Until the ancient capitol building in Denver could be rebuilt, the council had a room at the Academy. They could get to both the compound and the underground military base from there, and all their berthing quarters were there.
At this particular meeting, Robert the Fox was walking up and down, his kilt flaring ou
t each time he turned, his claymore held snug enough by an ancient officer’s belt from the base—which also held a Smith and Wesson—knocking against chairs. “Something is bothering him. He is not like the old Jonnie.”
“Does he think we are doing something wrong?” said the chief of Clanfearghus.
“No, no, it isn’t that,” said Robert the Fox. “There’s not a scrap of criticism for anyone in his makeup. It’s just he . . . he seems worried.”
The parson cleared his throat, “It just could be his side has something to do with it. He cannot much move his right arm and he cannot walk as yet. He is, after all, used to being about and very briskly as well. After all, the lad had a dreadful time of it, all alone, injured. I can’t think how he managed. All that time in a cage, earlier . . . You’re all expecting too much, too fast, gentlemen. He is a brave spirit and I have faith. . . .”
“Could be worry over the possibility of a Psychlo counterattack,” said the chief of Clanargyll.
“We must reassure him somehow,” said the chief of Clanfearghus. “Heaven knows, we are working hard enough on planetary affairs.”
And they were. The World Federation for the Unification of the Human Race had been formed from those Jonnie had not accepted for the group that had come with him to America. Some two hundred young Scots and another fifty oldsters had done their beginning work well. In two dangerous but successful raids, one to the site of an ancient university named Oxford and another to a similar ruin at Cambridge, they had obtained language books and a mound of material on other countries. They had worked out where isolated groups of humans might still be and had formed up a unit for each language they thought might still be in use. Their selection was proving not far off, and ruler-bruised hands attested to the diligence of their study. They called themselves “coordinators” and they were making a vital contribution all over the world where groups were being found.
The current estimate was that there were nearly thirty-five thousand human beings left on Earth, an astonishing number that, the council agreed, was far too great for any one town. The groups were mostly survivors who had withdrawn to mountainous places, natural fortresses their forebears had mined, as in the case of the Rockies. But some were in the frozen north in which the Psychlos had had no interest, and some were simply overlooked strays.
Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 Page 51
