Battlefield Earth (91 page)

     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 sadistic 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 buttons, 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 assemblies, 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 button 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 buttons 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 buttons 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 hit one button 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 button 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!

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 buttons, 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 exactitude in white on the board. It was a long and complicated procedure and it was a very complex circuit that emerged. The console buttons, 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 booby 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.

He speculated on the possibility of just making several boards and working it out. No, it might do something else too.

He made a full file and plenty of notes.

They couldn’t make teleportation motors from this, but possibly they could open them and trace the circuit. Maybe. But without that one switch…

Jonnie knew they would have to go over and seize that console just to see where Terl set it.

It was an appalling risk and might cost men’s lives.

He knew they would have to do it.

     Jonnie quietly and efficiently neatened up his scene.

In case anything happened to him, which he felt was more than likely in this American raid, he carefully briefed Angus in all the intricacies of the console. He made copious notes especially for Angus, so that he could duplicate and operate such a console. He told him some of the things that could be done with it.

Angus objected violently to Jonnie’s going on the raid. Jonnie said he was not going to risk anyone else’s life, for the actions he had to take were too dicey. He would have the backup of thirty Scots, ten drivers, and fifteen pilots. Angus was still trying to protest but it didn’t do any good. If Robert the Fox had been there the two of them might have prevailed, but Sir Robert was over in America moving the

Academy and Angus gave in reluctantly.

A Scot aide of Sir Robert’s was there and Jonnie briefed him on the military aspects of their situation: the visitors were waiting for something- he was not sure what. Jonnie felt it had to do with whether or not they got a transshipment rig operating. An analysis of their chatter among themselves showed they were observing the American compound, waiting for something to happen: the visitors had seen Psychlos there (probably Terl and Ker) and seemed to think the American scene might still be in Psychlo hands, or in any event might be political. Jonnie expected the sky to fall in right after that transshipment rig was fired and an alert should be out, then for Day 92, which was approaching very quickly.

Jonnie briefed another Scot officer and arranged a decoy platform to be hastily built in the Singapore area. There was a minesite there northwest of the ancient, deserted man-city where the Psychlos had mined tin, titanium, and tungsten; it had full hydroelectric power, atmosphere armor, and a certain amount of stores and planes left in it. A handful of Chinese, three pilots, a communicator, a Coordinator and this officer were to play out a platform and poles. Jonnie gave them the old burned-out console which they repainted. Under the protection of the cable they were to make like they were busy firing, complete with things appearing and disappearing on the platform. When the flights left the American area with the real console, the heaviest part of the escort would streak to the Singapore area and pull any pursuit of the real console away. The Kariba platform had been under camouflage nets from the beginning and chatter from the visitors showed they thought it was a temple. He warned the officer that the attack would be heavy there in the Singapore area. But the Scot just smiled and grabbed his allocated men and left.

Jonnie made a fast tour of Kariba. The Chinese had done wonderfully well. There was a roof under the screen but over the firing platform, all held together with wooden pegs; swooping gables and points made it very artistic. They had a lot of dragons around, carved from wood and cast in clay, that pointed out from the beam ends with flaming mouths and scaly tails. They had bunkers inside the protected cone. They all had tiled interiors. They even had a little hospital. Their own village was inside the protective cable over by the lakeshore. It was all very colorful and attractive, more like a garden than a war area.

Dr. Allen had gotten some juice of plants from up in the old Nairobi area- he called it “pyrethrum”-that killed insects very efficiently, and despite the number of animals in the woods thereabouts that attracted flies, they had had no trouble with tsetse sleeping sickness.

Jonnie heard them singing and playing on strange string and wind instruments that evening so he recorded a lot of it and had them rig loudspeakers ready to play it when they activated the area- it would foul up any listening beams from upstairs. That plus the interference the armor cable posed would keep them ignorant of what was going on here.

When he returned to the African compound, it was Day 87. He found Stormalong there with more discs that showed the color codes of the cables and the pole wires. They could simply hack off the console’s cables and reconnect them at Kariba. He gave the code to Angus.

Stormalong said this would be his last run so Jonnie briefed him carefully on the military situation. It was Jonnie’s belief that the visitors would attack in force after any American firing. Stormalong had better be prepared to take control of air defenses on the planet. Jonnie would not let him go on the raid. Dunneldeen was handling air cover for them on that. Thor would be with them in the raiding party. Jonnie missed Robert the Fox who usually handled these briefings and actions.

Stormalong, like Angus, did not want Jonnie to go. He said America was stripped now. The Academy was empty. Jonnie would have only his own raiding party, and though he knew it had been drilled within an inch of the participants’ lives, there were an awful lot of Brigantes over there. Just after they had pulled the recorders out of the three places at the Academy, Brigantes had begun to systematically loot the place. But with no Sir Robert to support his objections, Stormalong did not prevail.

Jonnie was going up to an upper level of the compound and he ran into Ker.

The Psychlo midget was all smiles. They swatted “paws.” He had been looking for Jonnie to show him the silly money they were now printing for America and in which he had been “paid.” Jonnie pulled him into a deserted office and shook his head over the hundred-credit note and the picture of Brown Limper Staffor.

“The stuff is worthless!” said Ker. “The Brigantes just throw it into the street!”

Ker was so happy to be out of that area. He told Jonnie all about it. “And he offered me seven hundred and fifty thousand Galactic credits that I’ll never see. He’s one crazy Psychlo. Not sane like us half-humans!” Ker laughed over that.

Ker gave him the final layouts of the firing platform area. There was nothing new. Ker had dug and done exactly according to plan. It was the same plan on which his raiding team had been drilled and Ker assured him everything was in place.

But Ker hadn’t realized Jonnie was going over there. When he heard that he got very serious. “This Terl is a very bad one. He’s liable to have surprises. I don’t like your going,

Jonnie.”

Jonnie said he had to go.

“What if you get a Psychlo war party back on that platform in return?” said Ker.

“I don’t think we will,” said Jonnie. “And we have a present for Psychlo.”

“I hope so,” said Ker. “It’s my furry neck if they ever turn up here again.

The I.B.I. would take days to kill me!”

“I don’t think you have anything to worry about,” said Jonnie. “But you stay here among these defenses. There’s quite a few enemy prisoners in the place and all the Psychlos that are left. Maybe you can teach them to play cards!”

Ker laughed. And then he said, “Did the one you call Sir Robert come back here?”

“Why?”

“Well, right in the middle of the Academy move to England, we didn’t see him anymore. I wanted to check a couple of points with him and I couldn’t find him. And Dunneldeen put in calls. He isn’t in Edinburgh or Luxembourg or Russia. I thought he must be here. The reason I ask is he knows all your dispositions of forces and even some of your raid details.”

Jonnie was very concerned about Sir Robert. He threw off Ker’s question with, “They could never make him talk.”

“The I.B.I. could make anybody talk,” said Ker.

“We don’t know the enemy has him,” said Jonnie.

Shortly afterward he instituted his own queries. There was no sign of Sir

Robert in any area. A couple of ferry planes had gone down lately from enemy attack. They had been en route from America to Scotland. Had Sir Robert been on one of them?

Sir Robert had not handled many of the details of this raid. There was no reason to change planning this late.

Jonnie spent his last day at the Lake Victoria minesite neatening up what there was of his personal life. He was under no illusion that this raid was not dangerous.

He wrote a letter to Chrissie that he knew the parson would read for her and put it in plain sight on his desk, the envelope marked “To Chrissie in Case of Something Happening to Me.”

He had heard one wrote wills to leave personal possessions. He started one. All he had was his horses and some odds and ends of clothes. He couldn’t think of anything else he owned. Then he thought maybe Chrissie had occupied the Edinburgh house in his name, so he put down any interest he had in that or its contents and left it to Chrissie. Then he remembered he had a few books so he left those to Pattie. For the life of him he couldn’t recall anything else he owned. But maybe people would think he owned gifts like the chrome AK 47. They weren’t very many. Still, they might be. So he added a clause, “And anything else I am found to own shall be equally divided among…” and he listed the names of those men who had been closest to him. He thought for a while and then added Ker.

He had also heard that you signed these things and got them witnessed so he did that. Then he put it in an envelope and put it alongside the letter to Chrissie.

Feeling he had made things very orderly, he spent that evening making sure all his weapons and gear worked, that his radiation suit had no holes in it, that his air mask tanks were full and that half a dozen kill-clubs were in throwing condition. He put copies of the latest sales contract Terl had signed into his pouch. He checked the beryllium bomb case for safe carrying. He tested the edge of a hatchet to cut console cables.

He felt he was ready and got a good  sleep on his last night before the American raid. He had done everything he could. Now it was in the hands of the gods. Or a devil like Terl.

- Part XXIV -