Battlefield Earth

The guard opened the atmosphere curtain. A fire-fighting crew was there now spraying the burning wreckage of the Tolnep ship. Jo

Glenca

“I had orders to come through,” Glenca

“There are many things for the Academy of pilots to do in America,” the Buddhist told Jo

“A Swiss pilot, a close friend of his but a very new pilot, volunteered. The Tolneps hit us just after we crossed the coast in northern Africa. It was too far away for Cornwall or Luxembourg to help us.

“The Swiss fought them off. He shot down three. But he needed help and Glenca

“He feels that if he had turned back to help the Swiss, they wouldn't have got him. The Swiss pilot was alone, he had no communicator, but he also told Glenca

“The Tolneps shot the Swiss to pieces. When he ejected and tried to get down by backpack they closed in and killed him in the air.

“Glenca

They got Glenca

Glenca

Jo

Chapter 8

It was!

Minutes after Jo

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, Jo

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 co

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 disco

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 a

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.

Jo

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.