Battlefield Earth

But at that moment they were startled when a hazy image appeared on all their screens. It was a gray black-haired and bearded human visage. The eyes were blue. The being seemed to be wearing an old cloak.

"If you will turn up your transmission to planetary strength,” this newcomer said in Psychlo, “I would like to discuss returning your members to you. The two Bolbods are shaken up but not hurt. The four Hockners are just stu

They turned up to planetary strength, but their response was an emphatic uniform no!

The Tolnep half-captain managed to get his voice above the uproar. “So you can capture the rescue party? Emphatically, no!”

“We can put them all out on a slope-over by that black volcanic cone. All in the open and no ships of ours in the air.” The terrestrial was persuasive. “Call it a truce. Your pickup ship will not be fired upon or molested.”

“You haven't interrogated them that fast,” said the Jambitchow, “so they must be dead!”

“They are quite all right,” said the terrestrial. “Are you sure you won't pick them up?”

Emphatically, no!

“Very well,” said the terrestrial with a shrug of his shoulders. “At least tell us what they eat.”

The Tolnep gave a signal on his screen to the others. Let him speak. “Why, of course,” he said smoothly, smiling.

“We will make up a food package and send it down.”

They went off planetary. “I told you,” said the Tolnep, “that those incidents were a lure. Now two of you have bungled, so let me handle this.”

Presently a rocket-borne package went out of an airlock of the Tolnep ship. It was very well aimed and its parachute burst open below the overcast. It went drifting down and landed just short of the lake shore.

Presently a vehicle went speeding away from the compound toward it. The faces on the viewscreens smiled. If those were Psychlos down there, or whoever they were, they were in for a surprise!

Then suddenly the Hockner super-lieutenant, who had been leafing hurriedly through a recognition book, said, “Oh, I say! That's a Basher 'Bash

Our Way to Glory' tank! Totally armored!”

The tank went down near the package, lowered a turret gun, and fired a mild stun shot into it. The package, being a bomb of course, exploded in a geyser of flame. The tank fired a second shot at the remains. Then somebody got out of it and collected the hot fragments.

“We even gave them bomb fragments for analysis!” shouted the Hawvin.

They held a hasty conference. The small gray man listened to them. Military minds, he thought to himself, could be quite remarkable at times. They decided that anything those terrestrials did was just a lure; that the strategy of those people was to take the invader to bits piecemeal and then pulverize him; that they should now wait for the courier the small gray man said was coming sometime, the one that might tell them if the one had been found; meanwhile only the safest type of probes should be attempted in areas obviously not guarded or covered. Then the moment they knew, one way or the other, whether this was the one, they would plunge in with a mass war-vessel attack and defeat and gut the place.

All the commanders agreed except the Tolnep. He was still in a rage about his bomb failing.

“I should go down there right now,” hissed the Tolnep, “and bite the lot of them to death!”

“We think that's an excellent idea,” drawled the Hockner, adjusting his monocle.

“Yes, why don't you do that!” the rest agreed. And, “We're sure you should.”

The Tolnep realized they would only be too happy to get rid of him. He subsided

for now. Later would be another matter.

Chapter 2

Jo

The flight had been pleasant enough. A new pilot had thought he would be flying Jo

He opened the door and was blasted with sound. They were cheering themselves hoarse! He couldn't even understand what they were saying, such were the rolling waves of sound. He couldn't really distinguish individual faces among so many.

Colonel Ivan dismounted as Jo

They had brought him a horse, a golden-colored stallion with a sheepskin saddle, and he swung up. The crowd cheered. He only knew one word of Russian and that was "zdrastvuitye," which meant “How do you do, hello.” So he called it loudly and the crowd cheered.

Jo

They had snow on them. The ancient Russian base must be nearby. He had thought they would go right to it and he could get his observation and estimation done right away. But no, everybody seemed to have other ideas. There were some skin and felt tents, and fires put their smoke in the air, and suddenly Jo

The Colonel's horsemen were opening the way. Every time Jo

The smell of roasting meat and the tang of dung fires was in the air. A band made up of balalaikas and Spanish guitars and Andean flutes and Mongol drums was splitting the air.

The colonel got him to a skin tent that had been set up for him and with a final wave of the hand and his one word of Russian– now no longer adequate– he got inside.

A Coordinator had also come in and through him Jo

The colonel was aghast. Nyet, nyet, there was time for all that. One had to think of the people! Many of them, in fact most of them, had never met Jo

Jo

Well, harm was always around, according to the colonel, but not every day was an opportunity to meet Jo

At that, Jo