Jonnie hadn’t even known the form existed. And he found himself staring at one item checked as missing: War Vessel Recognition Tables of Hostile Races. And another, Individual Troop Combat Capabilities Catalogued by Alien Races.
Chirk went back to work putting books in order on shelves, but within minutes, Jonnie had thirty people including two pilots ransacking the place. The “visitors” upstairs could be identified, and some means of defense might exist!
Sir Robert had returned from Scotland that morning and it was he who guessed it: “Jonnie, that group here didn’t know who was attacking. Anyone in command here would have been tearing through those books. Have you looked on the corpses?”
That’s where they were! In a shoulder bag on the body of the former mine manager up in the snow.
Not more than three hours later, comparing his own and Stormalong’s pictures and the texts, he knew he was dealing with Tolneps, Hockners, Bolbods and Hawvins. And he knew what they looked like and what their capabilities were—all dangerously nasty. There was no listing for the globe-shaped ship with the ring around it or any race of small gray men.
But the following day his luck ran out with Chirk. She had been doing very well. But he made a mistake.
She was sitting, all eight hundred pounds of her, at a desk in the library making some lists. Jonnie was looking at a sheet of figures he had drawn up.
The sheet concerned distances from Earth to various hostile bases nearest to it and the speeds of the types of alien ships. They had different types of drives. For the most part they ran on energy accumulated from suns, but they handled it differently. He was trying to calculate how many months those ships were from their relative bases. Terl’s lists of inhabited planets had now been copied off in sheet form and it was evident they didn’t include all systems or suns but only those in which Psychlo had an interest.
Jonnie had been amazed to find in other texts that there were four hundred billion suns in this galaxy alone and that this universe contained more than a hundred billion galaxies. And he had sixteen universes to look at.
The possible bases of hostile peoples were easier to mentally encompass. From Earth to this galaxy’s center was about thirty thousand light-years. And one light-year was about six trillion miles. All these enemy ships exceeded the speed of light one way or another, but this still made it necessary to compute by how much they exceeded it against what base where.
It was an awful lot of Psychlo arithmetic. He was not too patient doing it by hand. Thoughtlessly, he said to Chirk, “Could you help me add these figures up?”
She looked at him, totally blank for about a minute. Then she said, “I don’t know how.”
Jonnie smiled. “It’s just arithmetic. Here, I’ll show you—”
Chirk’s eyes glazed. She fell forward across the desk.
There was no response from her. She was totally unconscious. They had to get a forklift in and take her to her room and put her to bed.
Three days later, MacKendrick told Jonnie, “She’s just lying there in a coma. Maybe in time she’ll come out of it. She seems to have had a heavy shock.”
Although he felt bad about it, Jonnie had an idea now of what the silver capsule in the females was. They were not to be taught any Psychlo mathematics ever!
The key to the whole Psychlo empire must be mathematics. And aside from their arithmetic, he couldn’t make head or tail of their equations. It seemed to be a dead end.
7
They had just completed the installation of a radio telescope when the courier came in.
Angus, his face red, first from sun at lake level and then from wind and snow up at the summit of nearby Mount Elgon, was very proud of himself. The German and Swedish pilots, with something to do besides train under the relentless Stormalong, had helped find and install the huge reflector bowls and relays from the peaks and down to the minesite.
Now that they had the frequencies, Angus was saying, they would soon be hearing everything those monkeys up there were saying to each other. He’d even have them on the screens!
Jonnie’s ear caught the far-off approach of the plane above the overcast. He thanked Angus and the pilots and said they had done very well, and yes, now maybe they would know more about the intentions of their visitors.
Glencannon had taken over the ferrying of the vital disks from America. A copy was now going to Doctor MacDermott to bury in a deep underground vault and the originals were coming through to Jonnie in Africa.
Glencannon had lots of news. Pattie had been extremely ill for weeks, but Chrissie was nursing her and there was hope. And Chrissie sent her love and said she’d found a lovely old house right near Castle Rock, and some of the chiefs’ wives were helping her find real furniture in old ruins, and she sent her love, and when was he coming back?
Castle Rock was now so surrounded with antiaircraft blast cannon it made one fair nervous to fly near it.
Dunneldeen? Oh, he was flying the pants off new recruits but there weren’t as many coming in now. Mostly machine operators were getting trained. Ker was fine and sent him some brand-new air masks he’d made that fit better and said not to turn him in for stealing company materials, ha, ha. And here were some personal letters for Sir Robert. And here was the latest set of you-know-whats.
Jonnie went deep underground and got the disks rolling. They had the place well set up now. Watching the female Psychlos, while not letting them handle anything vital, they had learned the use of some of the office machinery they had earlier ignored, and they could copy disks and make blowups of sections with a fine-line accuracy they had not thought possible. They had cabinets for files and all in all they could make the disks “talk” much better.
Terl! He was sitting there doing force equations. Incomprehensible. The equations didn’t balance and didn’t make any sense. He was filling pages and pages with them. Still nothing to do with teleportation.
Jonnie almost skimmed by it. He backtracked. The pictures showed Terl getting up, going over to the cabinet, and opening up another false bottom. He took out a huge sheet of paper, so big it would take three scanners’ views to encompass it. The paper was very old, creased until it nearly fell apart, stained brown and faded.
Terl spread it out, looked at it and then shook his head over it. He traced one claw along the north side of the big dam, way to the southwest of the American minesite. He nodded.
Then he wadded the paper up and threw it at the shredder bin. He wrote down some footage figures and some voltage figures and then went back to his equations, and it was just equations for the next two days. And that was all there was in the disks.
It took an hour of patching from three different scanner channels to get it. But Jonnie recovered the huge piece of paper in its entirety and got a half-dozen huge copies of it.
It was entitled, “Defense Installations of Planet Number 203,534.” Jonnie knew already that was the Psychlo name for Earth.
It showed every minesite, every dam, every gun battery and every ——— ? A little symbol that trailed around each dam and below each power line from dams to minesites and branch minesites. Jonnie had no idea what that symbol was.
But there was a goody he had never, never dreamed of. Marked clearly was a firing transshipment platform!
He compared the Psychlo mass of numbered locations with a man-map of ancient times. The second platform was alongside a dam which had once been named Kariba in a country which had once been called Rhodesia and then Zimbabwe.
The platform was marked “Emergency Defense Armament Receipt Point.” Obviously, if the main minesite were ever knocked out, Psychlo could send in another force or the Psychlo command on the planet could demand troops or at least inform the home office.
Hopes soaring, but a little held down by the age of the map and Terl’s treatment of it, Jonnie had a marine-attack plane on the line and Scots piling into it. Robert the Fox boarded hastily. Just as they were about to close the door, MacKendrick piled in with a medical
kit. Jonnie sent the plane racing to the south.
It was only about a thousand miles away, and it only took them thirty-five minutes to spot the huge dam and lake and the mammoth installation. Some distance to the south and east of that they saw what had been called Victoria Falls, one of the biggest waterfalls on the planet. Spectacular country!
Because the area had been marked “heavily defended,” Jonnie approached it cautiously. It was another branch mine they hadn’t known the existence of.
They found the compound some distance to the east and landed a platoon with assault rifles and radiation ammunition to make a cautious approach. A half-hour later they had the report on mine radio. The place was deserted and, the platoon officer reported, not much different from the one in the Ituri Forest to the north.
The map had not shown the second platform at the minesite but it was quite close to the huge dam. They took the platoon back aboard and Jonnie began to cruise the area.
Trees, trees, trees. This was a high plateau, but not an open plain. Trees had been knocked down in swathes where elephant herds had passed through.
There were lots of little hills. Everything was masked with undergrowth except a few open places.
Cruising along, elephant and African buffalo looking up at them, Jonnie searched and searched. He had found before that it was one thing to look at a map and quite another to be on the ground, and he was experiencing it again.
Time after time, he studied the map while Stormalong in the copilot’s seat kept them cruising above the treetops. Jonnie finally got out some dividers and very carefully measured the distance from the dam edge and then, taking the plane to that point and cruising it at the speed a horse walks, finally got them in the center of what must have been the point. Stormalong threw out a smoke flare to mark it and a couple of big elephants took off.
It was a bowl in the ground, the edges of which rose about two hundred feet above the middle. It was like a crater, possibly even made with a bomb blast. It was about a thousand feet in diameter.
The bowl itself was so overgrown one could not see what was in it. But as the white smoke spired up, the truth hit Jonnie.
For centuries, perhaps, the company security officers of this planet had paid no attention to maintaining the elaborate planetary company defenses which once existed. No wonder Terl had thrown the map away. He looked so disappointed that Sir Robert tried to cheer him up. “We won’t really know until we look closer.” But it certainly was wilderness, receiving no care for centuries.
Jonnie put them down on the upper edge of the crater, and with riflemen ready to handle any hostile game, others got axes and began to hack their way down.
“Be careful around here,” said Dr. MacKendrick. “This area had an insect called the tsetse fly that brought on sleeping sickness. Also the water had a worm in it that gets into the bloodstream. I don’t have much in the way of medicines, but wear nets and stay out of the water.”
“Great,” said Jonnie. That was all they needed.
They cut their way down to the center of the bowl. They passed one of the transshipment poles three times before they spotted it. They paced out in various directions and located another two. The fourth was easy.
Jonnie took a shovel and started down through the humus. He was hoping the company maxim of “never salvage anything” would hold true. Two feet of dead leaves and humus down, he hit the platform.
Axes ringing, they were getting trees and brush out of the way. They found the concrete base of the operations firing dome and then finally the dome itself, upside down and some distance away.
No console!
Wires were eventually uncovered within the concrete base. Typically Psychlo, they were still well insulated when you scraped the mold off.
Jonnie was struck by the absence of the power lines. There should be power lines coming in from the dam. There was a power channel marked on the map and also that old squiggle he couldn’t identify.
Light was failing and they would have kept on, but MacKendrick made them get up to high ground. They spent the night listening to elephants trumpeting, lions roaring, and all the other cacophony of a very live jungle. But the night was quite cool since this plateau had a fairly high altitude.
In the morning they dug a crosscut trench and found the power line, being careful not to cut into it. They cut another trench and found the same line went on underground to the distant minesite.
And there was another cable they couldn’t identify that went along with the power line.
Flogging their way through the brush, they went over to the huge dam. It was a real soaring monster of a dam. It seemed intact. The spillways were running. There were signs that Psychlos had landed near it and gone in and out the access door to the powerhouse in some recent time.
Jonnie had never been inside one of these dams before. They vibrated with sheer, raw power. The thunder of the water and the high whine of generators made it impossible to be heard.
It was the usual Psychlo conversion, he supposed. It was very, very old and some bits of the original man-equipment that had been cast aside were very much older.
Angus found the switchboard and bus bars—a vast, towering affair in a separate control room. Only two of the handles were clean and it didn’t need a little tuft of fur caught in one of them to tell that Psychlos had come here to shut power on and off.
But what were all these other bus bars? They got some mine sacks and tried to wipe the panel down without causing short circuits. There were Psychlo letters inset into it. A whole row said, “Force Stage One, Force Stage Two, Force Stage Three.” A second row said, “Transshipment One, Transshipment Two, Transshipment Three.”
Jonnie gingerly rubbed some more with a mine sack, careful of closing any gap. “They’re color-coded.” He tried to tell Angus this but there was no talking in this place. They went back out.
“Terl,” said Jonnie to Angus and Sir Robert, “is working on force equations. There is something on the north side of the American dam I think he must want. The squiggles on this map must have to do with force.” He sent Angus back into the power control house and placed some Scots along the underground line of squiggles and connected every one up with mine radios.
“Close Force Stage One!” he radioed to Angus.
The effect was far more drastic and dramatic than anything they expected.
All inferno broke loose!
Along the squiggle line of the map, all around the crater, trees erupted, splintered, soared, crashed.
It was as if a bomb had exploded.
Trunks and leaves and branches were falling for over a minute afterward.
Sir Robert was running to find out what had happened to their spotters. Were they all killed? Their radios had gone silent!
It took them an hour to dig the Scots out. One had been knocked unconscious, the rest were bruised and slightly cut. Six had been involved.
MacKendrick collected them and assessed the damages and began applying the antiseptics and tape. Jonnie made his way over to them from the dam. It looked like a first-aid station after a battle. The one who had been knocked out had come to now. He had been blown in the air. Jonnie apologized to them.
The Scot that had been knocked out was grinning. “A little thing like that isn’t likely to ruin a Scot!” he said. “What was it?”
Yes, indeed. What was it?
“Did I do something wrong?” Angus’s voice came over the radio.
The Scots were all taking it as a joke so Jonnie said, “I think you did something right!” They were out of the area now. “Close that switch again!”
A bit of the tree wreckage stirred and moved and then was still. Jonnie cautiously moved toward the bowl. And couldn’t leave the dam area!
He walked straight ahead and then he couldn’t go any further. He could not walk through the air before him!
He threw a rock at it. The rock bounced! He tried again, throwing harder. Same result.
He had Angus o
pen the bus bar again. No barrier! Closed. Barrier!
For the next two hours, by opening and closing the first and second row of bus bars and throwing rocks, they found that the dam itself was surrounded by a protective screen. The bowl had a screen all around its top and was completely enclosed!
Riflemen even fired shots at it and they glanced off.
At Stage Two the air got a bit shimmery, and Angus reported the power output meters were lower. At Stage Three there was a strange electrical smell in the air and the output meters of the total dam power dropped way down.
Defense and more defense. A transshipment platform operating in that bowl could not be interfered with by attack. Not from the sides and not from above. And neither could the dam.
The amount of raw power it took to operate it was a large portion of the total output of this huge dam, and Jonnie surmised that they changed stages of output to repel extreme attack and then eased them off to Stage One when they needed power to transship.
Jonnie had them booby-trap the entrances in case their visitors upstairs came down for a look and prowl. And they took off in the early afternoon for home.
A glimmer of hope. Not much, but a glimmer, Jonnie told Sir Robert on the way home.
He wanted Sir Robert, Jonnie said, to take charge in the African area for the moment, for Jonnie had some other things to look into elsewhere. He rebriefed the grizzled war chief on the existing situation: they were threatened by a possible counterattack from Psychlo; the visitors upstairs were waiting for something—he did not know what, but he was certain they would eventually strike; the political scene in America was a lesser menace but existed and they had to let it go on for now. The thing that would solve their troubles, Jonnie said, was to get control of teleportation or at least an operating console; with that they could operate far more widely, but it seemed to be the most closely guarded secret the Psychlos had, and avenues to cracking it were not very hopeful.
The main problem, Jonnie said, was protecting what was left of the human race; they were no longer very numerous; a wide attack by the visitors or a counterattack by Psychlo could, either one, finish them as a race forever. Jonnie, as soon as they landed, was going to leave for Russia to begin to handle this point.
Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 Page 76
