Battlefield Earth (18 page)

     Terl drove straight north, following the overgrown bed of an old highway. For all his joviality he was thinking very hard. Fear and leverage. If you didn’t have leverage you could make fear work. He felt he had already accomplished a little bit: the animal had seemed impressed back there. But he had a lot to do to get both fear and leverage and get enough of them to break this animal and cow it completely. “Comfortable?” asked Terl.

Jonnie snapped out of his daydream and became instantly alert. This was not the Terl he knew. Casual. Chatty even. Jonnie was on his guard.

“Where are we going?” he said.

“Just a little drive. New ground car. Doesn’t she run well?”

The tank ran well all right. The plate on the panel said “Mark III General Purpose Tank, Executive, ‘The Enemy Is Dead,’ Intergalactic Mining

Company Serial ET-5364724354-7.

Use Only Faro Power Cartridges and Breathe-Gas. ‘Faro is the Breath and Power of Life.”’

“Is ‘Faro’ part of Intergalactic?” said Jonnie.

Terl took his eyes off driving for a moment and looked suspiciously at Jonnie. Then he shrugged, “Don’t you bother your little rat brain about the size of Intergalactic, animal. It ’s a monopoly that stretches across every galaxy. It ’s a size and scope you couldn’t grasp if you had a thousand rat brains.”

“It’s all run from home planet, isn’t it?”

“Why not,” said Terl. “Something wrong with that?”

“No,” said Jonnie. “No. Just seems an awfully big company to be run from one planet.”

“That isn’t all Psychlo runs,” said Terl. “There’s dozens of companies the size of Intergalactic and Psychlo runs them all.”

“Must be a big planet,” said Jonnie.

“Big and powerful,” said Terl. Might as well add a little more fear. “Psychlo can and has crushed every opposition that ever stood in her path. One imperial check mark on an order and a whole race can go phuttt!”

“Like the Chinkos?” said Jonnie. “Yes.” Terl was bored. “Like the human race here?”

“Yes, and like one rat-brained animal will go phuttt if it doesn’t shut up,”

said Terl in sudden irritation. “Thank you,” said Jonnie.

“That’s better. Even becoming properly polite!” Terl’s good humor returned, but it wouldn’t have had he realized that the “thank you” had been for vital information.

Abruptly their headlong pace swept them into the outskirts of the city.

“Where are we?” said Jonnie. “They called it ‘Denver.’ “

Aha, thought Jonnie. The Great Village had been named Denver. If it had a name to itself, that implied that there were other Great Villages. He reached for the Chinko guidebook of the area and was just reading about the library when the ground car came to a stop.

“Where’s this?” inquired Jonnie, looking around. They were at the eastern edge of the town and slightly to the south.

“Knew you had a rat brain,” said Terl. “This is where you-’ he laughed suddenly and that made it hard to talk, “-where you attacked a tank!”

Jonnie looked around. It was indeed the place. He looked through all the slits, taking in the area. “What are we doing here?”

Terl grinned in what he was quite certain was his most friendly grin. “We’re looking for your horse! isn’t that nice?”

Jonnie thought fast. There was more to this. He had better be very calm. He saw no bones but that meant nothing, for wild animals would have been at work. He looked at Terl and realized the brute actually believed a horse would wait around. Windsplitter most probably had trotted on after them a while and then wandered back toward home in the mountains.

“There are countless animals out in the open here,” said Jonnie. “Picking out those two horses-”

“Rat brain, you don’t have a grip on machines. It shows. Look here.” Terl turned on a large screen set into the instrument panel. The immediate vicinity showed up on it. Terl turned a knob and the scene was viewable from different directions.

Then Terl pushed a button and there was a dull pop like a small explosion in the top of the car. Looking up through the overhead port Jonnie saw a spinning object fly up in the air a hundred feet. Terl pushed a lever up and the object went up. Terl pulled the lever down and the object came lower. What it was seeing registered on the viewscreen.

“That’s why you can’t get away,” said Terl. “Look.” He changed a lever on the screen and the image became enlarged. He pushed a button marked “Heat search” and the screen and spinner above went onto automatic.

Jonnie watched as groups of animals were zeroed in, enlarged, reduced; other groups found and inspected up close; more animals spotted and examined…

“Just sit and watch that,” said Terl, “and tell me if you see your horse.” He laughed. “Security chief of Earth running a lost-and-found department for an animal owned by an animal.” He laughed more loudly at his own joke.

There were cattle and cattle and cattle. There were wolves- small ones from the nearby mountains and huge ones down from the north. There were coyotes. There was even a rattler. There were no horses at all.

“Well,” said Terl, “we’ll just drive along to the south. You keep your eyes open, animal, and you’ll get your horse back.”

They drove at a leisurely pace. Jonnie watched the scope. Time went on. Still no horses, none at all.

Terl began to get irritated. Leverage, leverage. His luck was out today!

“No horses,” said Jonnie. And he knew very well that if he had seen Windsplitter he would have kept still.

Terl finally looked at the scope. Ahead of them was a small hill, rocky on top, with a lot of trees distributed around it and darkness in among the trees. There were cattle, some with rather big horns just to the north of it in the open. Fear, then. The day wouldn’t be wasted. He swerved the car into the trees and stopped.

“Get out,” said Terl. He put on his breathe-mask and hit the door buttons. He threw out the leash and then reached into the huge compartment under the seat and drew out a blast rifle along with a bag of grenades.

Jonnie stood in the open and took off his mask. He switched tanks before he put it on the seat. It had been a long drive.

Terl took a position at the edge of the trees, the rocks behind him, the open plain in front. “Come here, animal,” he said.

The leash was trailing. Jonnie walked over to Terl. He wasn’t going to give the monster a chance to gun him down.

“I’m going to give you a little exhibition,” said Terl. “I was top shot in my school. You ever notice how neat the rat heads were blown off?

Some of them were fifty paces away. You’re not listening, animal.”

No, Jonnie was not listening. He had caught a whiff of something and he looked at the rocks behind them. There was an opening in them. A cave? There was the whiff again.

Terl reached down and jerked the leash, almost snapping Jonnie off his feet. Jonnie got up from his knees and looked again toward the cave. He gripped the kill-club in his fist.

With an expert motion, Terl snapped a grenade onto the end of the blast rifle. “Watch this!”

There were a half-dozen cattle about eighty paces out on the plain. Two of them were heavy horned bulls, old and tough. The other four were cows.

Terl lifted the blast rifle muzzle-high and fired. The grenade soared in a long arc over the top of the cattle and landed well beyond them. It exploded in a bright green flash. One cow went down, hit by a fragment.

The others leaped and began to run. They ran away from the sound and straight toward Terl. Terl leveled the blast rifle. “Those hoofs are moving,” he said. “So you won’t think it’s an accident.”

The bulls were coming on in a headlong rush, the cows behind them. The ground shook. The distance was closing quickly.

Terl began to fire in quick single shots.

He broke the legs of the following cows and they tumbled to earth bawling.

He broke the right front leg of the farthest bull. The other was almost upon them.

One final shot and Terl broke the right front leg of the nearest bull, which skidded to a crumbled heap, mere feet in front of them.

The air was shattering with the bawls of pain from the cattle.

Terl grinned as he looked at them. Jonnie looked back at him in horror. That grin behind the faceplate was of pure joy.

Jonnie felt revulsion for the monster. Terl was- Jonnie suddenly realized there was no word for “cruel” in the Psychlo language. He turned toward the cattle.

Walking out in front with his kill-club to put them out of their agony, he heard a new sound, a rustling rumble.

Jonnie whirled. Coming away from the cave, awakened and angered by all the racket, charging straight at Terl’s back, was the biggest grizzly bear Jonnie had ever seen.

“Behind you!” he yelled. But his voice was drowned in the bawling of the cattle. Terl just stood there grinning.

A moment later the bear roared.

Terl heard it and started to turn. But he was too late.

The grizzly hit him in the back with an impact that sent out a shock wave.

The blast rifle, driven from Terl’s paws, soared into the air toward Jonnie. He caught it in his left hand.

But Jonnie wasn’t thinking of the blast rifle as any more than a club. And he had his own kill-club up and striking before the bear could aim a second blow at Terl. The kill-club caught the grizzly square on the brain pan. The bear staggered, distracted and stunned.

Jonnie sailed in again.

The bear struck out with a massive clawed blow. Jonnie went under it. The kill-club hit again on the brain pan.

The bear reared up and struck at the kill-club as it came in again. The thong snapped.

Jonnie grasped the rifle by the barrel.

The grizzly came at him with gaping jaws.

The rifle stock crashed into the bear’s teeth.

Jonnie struck again on the brain pan.

With a dwindling roar the bear went down.

It stayed down, its limbs twitching in death.

Jonnie backed up. Terl was lying on his side, conscious. His mask was in place. His eyes behind the faceplate were wide and staring.

Jonnie backed up farther. Thank god the leash hadn’t caught on anything and tripped him during the fight. He snapped the leash to him. Then he turned his attention to the gun. It had little labels on its controls. The safety catch was off. There was a charge under the trigger. It was scratched but not otherwise damaged.

Jonnie looked at Terl. Terl looked back, his claws flexing and unflexing, waiting. He was certain the animal would level the gun and kill him. His paw stole down to his belt gun.

If Jonnie saw the movement toward the belt gun he ignored it. He turned his back on Terl. He located the sights on the blast rifle and then, with six shots, put the crippled cattle out of their misery.

Jonnie put on the safety catch. He reached into his pouch and got a piece of sharp-edged glass and walked over to the bear and began to skin it.

Terl lay and looked at him. At length he realized he had better check himself out. A pain in his back, a rip in his collar, a bit of green blood on his paw. He tested his back. It was nothing serious. He went over to the car and sat down on a seat with the doors open and hunched there, still looking at Jonnie.

“You’re not going to carry that hide inside this car,” said Terl.

Jonnie didn’t look up from his skinning.

“I’ll lash it on top.”

At length Jonnie bundled up the hide and went over to the youngest cow. Working deftly with the sharp glass, he took out the tenderloin and tongue, cut a haunch, and wrapped them in the bear hide.

Jonnie took some thongs from his pouch and lashed the hide with its meat to a gunmount on the car top.

Then he handed the blast rifle to Terl. “The safety is on,” he said. He was cleaning himself up with handfuls of grass.

Terl looked at him. Fear? Fear be damned. This animal had no fear in him. Leverage. It had to be leverage. Lots of it!

“Get in,” said Terl. “It’s getting late.”

The following day, Terl was again a blur of activity. He was getting ready for another interview with Numph.

He rushed about doing mutiny interviews, recording each one on a type of tape that could be cut and spliced. It was a very artful task, requiring the greatest care. He approached numbers of employees on the job, inside the compound and out.

The interviews went very smoothly and rapidly.

Terl would ask, “What company regulations do you know concerning mutiny?” The employees, sometimes startled, always suspicious, would quote what they knew or thought they knew concerning mutiny.

The security chief would then request, “In your own words, tell me your opinion of mutiny.” The employees would of course get long-winded and reassuring: “Mutiny is a very bad thing. Executives would cause vaporizations wholesale and no one would be safe. I sure never intend to advocate or take part in any mutiny.”

The interviews went on and on through the day, Terl rushing about, mask on outside, mask off inside. Recording, recording, recording. He always wound up an interview shaking his head and smiling and saying it was just routine and they knew how it was with management being what it was and he, Terl, was on the employee’s side. But he left a bit of worry in his wake, employees vowing to themselves to have nothing whatever to do with any mutiny, pay cut or no pay cut.

From time to time, passing through his office, Terl would look at the image of the cage where the high button cameras still performed their guard duty. Curiosity and a vague unease made him keep checking.

The animal seemed very industrious. It had been up with first light. It had worked and worked, scraping the bear hide clean, and had taken old ashes and worked them into it. The hide was now hanging, pinned to the bars.

Then the fire had been built up and an odd network of branches, sort of racks, had been made, around the fireplace. The beef was cut into long, thin strips and hung on the racks near the fire. Leaves from the chopped-up trees kept being put on the fire, creating a great deal of smoke, and the smoke was winding around the meat.

Terl could not quite make out what the animal was really doing. But toward the end of the day he thought he knew. The animal was observing some kind of religious ritual having to do with spring. He had read something about this in the Chinko guidebooks. They had dances and other silly things. The smoke was supposed to carry the spirits of slain animals to the gods. Yesterday they had certainly slain enough animals. The thought of it made Terl’s back twinge.

He had never believed any of these Earth creatures could actually hurt a Psychlo, but that grizzly bear had shaken his confidence slightly. It had been an awfully big bear- it weighed almost as much as Terl himself.

Probably come sunset, the animal down there in the cage would build the fire up and begin to dance or something. He concluded it wasn’t up to anything dangerous and kept on with his headlong interviewing.

That night the recreation hall saw nothing of Terl. And he also forgot to see whether the animal danced. He was too busy with his tapes.

Working with an expertise only a trained security chief cherished, Terl was editing tapes, slicing out single words and even phrases and juggling them about.

By his readjusting of word positions and scrapping of whole paragraphs, employees began to say things on the reels that were building up that could hang them.

A typical answer would become, “I intend to advocate mutiny. In any mutiny it would be safe to vaporize executives.” It was painstaking work. And the reels built up.

Finally he copied them onto new, clean discs that would show no sign of editing or splicing, and with the east graying he sat back, finished.

Yawning, he puttered around, cleaning up, destroying the originals and the scraps, waiting for breakfast time. He realized he had forgotten to keep an eye on the animal to see whether it danced.

Terl decided he needed sleep more than breakfast and laid himself down for a short nap. His appointment with Numph was not until after lunch.

Later he was to tell himself that it was because he had missed both breakfast and lunch that he made the blunder.

The interview began well enough. Numph was sitting at his upholstered desk sucking at an after-lunch saucepan of kerbango. He was his usual bumbling self.

“I have the results of the investigation you requested,” Terl began.

“What?”

“I interviewed a lot of local employees.”

“About what?”

“Mutiny.”

Numph was immediately alert.

Terl put the disc player on Numph’s desk and made ready to play the “Interviews,” saying, “These are all very secret, of course. The employees were told that no one would hear about it and they did not know the interviews were recorded.”

“Wise. Wise,” said Numph. He had laid the saucepan aside and was all attention.

Terl let the discs spin one after another. The effect was everything he had hoped for. Numph looked grayer and grayer. When the discs were finished Numph poured himself a saucepan full of kerbango and sucked it down in one whoosh. Then he just sat there.

If ever he had seen guilt, Terl decided, he was seeing it now. Numph’s eyes were hunted.

“Therefore,” said Terl, “I advise that we keep all this secret. We must not let them know what each is actually thinking, for it would lead them to conspire and actually mutiny.”

“Yes!” said Numph.

“Good,” said Terl. “I have prepared certain papers and orders about this.” He put the sheaf on Numph’s desk. “The first one is an order to me to take what measures I deem necessary to handle this matter.”

“Yes!” said Numph and signed it.

“The second one is to strip all arsenals of all minesites and keep all weapons under lock and key.”

“Yes!” said Numph and signed it.

“This next one is to retrieve any battle planes from other minesites and localize them under seals, except those I might need.”

“Yes,” said Numph and signed it.

Terl removed that which had been signed and left Numph staring at the next one.

“What’s this?” said Numph.

“Authority to round up and train man-animals on machine operation so that company ore shipments can be kept rolling in event of deaths of company employees or refusals to work.”

“I don’t think it’s possible,” said Numph.

“It’s only a threat to force employees back to work. You know and I know it is not really feasible.”

Numph signed it doubtfully and only because it said: “Emergency plan, strategic alternative ploy. Objective: employee dissuasion from strike.”

And then Terl made his blunder. He took the signed authorization and added it to the rest. “It permits us to handle forced reduction of employees,” he commented.

Afterward he realized he need not have said a thing.

Oh? said Numph.

“And I am sure,” Terl had gone on, confirming his blunder, “I am very certain that your nephew Nipe would heartily approve of it.”

“Approve of what?”

“Reduction of employee numbers,”

Terl rattled on.

And then Terl saw it. There was a relieved look on Numph’s face- a knowing look- a look of realization that gave Numph great satisfaction.

Numph gave Terl an almost amused glance. Relief seemed to soak into him. Confidence took the place of fear.

Terl knew he had messed it up. He had had only a hint of the leverage connected to Nipe. And right now he had been guilty of exposing that he was only pretending he knew. Numph knew that Terl really didn’t know. And Terl never had really known what Numph was up to. A real blunder.

“Well,” said Numph, suddenly expansive, “you just run along now and do your job. I’m sure everything will work out just fine.”

Terl stopped outside the door. What the blast was the leverage? What was the real story behind it? Numph was no longer afraid. Terl could hear him chuckling.

The security chief threw off the black cloud that threatened. He moved off. At least he had the animals and he could carry on. And when he had finished with them he could vaporize them. He wished he could also vaporize

Numph!

Leverage, leverage. He had none on Numph. And he had none at all on the animal.

Terl would have to get busy.