Battlefield Earth

“Very good,” said Jo

Out of their sight on the other side of the dragon, he reached in, heard a soft “now” from Angus at the console, and ratcheted down the time fuse lever of the ultimate bomb, lying in the dragon's hollow belly, to five minutes. With the thumbnail of his other hand he pierced the cap of a smoke bomb used in mines to trace currents of air in shafts.

White smoke began to pour from the dragon's mouth in jets. Ferocious!

Jo

Jo

Wires hummed.

The dragon, smoke and all, shimmered and was gone.

There was a very small recoil.

Jo

He walked back across the platform. There was a cold, cold hangover on it where it had doubled with the icy space of Asart.

“Now do any of you lords have a picto-recorder you can trust?” said Jo

The lord from Fowljopan, an empire of seven hundred worlds, said he'd oblige. He went to his apartment and got it out of his hamper. He came back and checked the loading. Jo

The two mechanics now rushed to the platform and laid down a gyro cage from a drone. Jo

Jo

Now! said Angus. The wires hummed.

The picto-recorder and cage shimmered and vanished.

There was no recoil.

Numbers on Jo

There was a change in the humming.

There was a shimmer on the platform.

The picto-recorder and cage reappeared.

The humming went off. There was a slight recoil.

Two mechanics rolled up the dolly the projector sat on so that it was among the emissaries.

“Now if you please, my lord,” said Jo

Lord of Fowljopan did exactly as requested. “The recorder is ice cold!” was all he said.

Jo

He hit the remote. Off went the spotlights. On went the recorder picture.

There in the dark before them was Asart, three-dimensional. There were the five ellipses which identified it.

Used to bombs and explosions, they had indifferently expected to see some high tower of dust or smoke. Actually, they had not thought, most of them, that much would happen. Jo

They didn't see anything strange for a moment. And then as the picture rolled off the disc, they saw a hole. A hole occurring in the upper right surface of Asart. Just a hole. No, there was a bit of black around the edge of it.

Schleim, ear cocked at the sky, felt a jar of alarm. What in the name of fifty devils was going on here? But he relaxed. Bombs went boom. There were no bombs that made just a hole. The picture went off and Fowljopan's “My voice here,” came on.

“Theatrics!” laughed Schleim. “You're engaging in nonsense!”

“My lords,” said Jo

Yes, my Lord Dom had one. He went and got it and they went through the same procedure as before.

Angus updated the time, cast the recorder to a new angle, and got it back.

Lord Dom, a little bit frightened at the implications of this to the twelve hundred worlds of his republic, had a quaver in his voice when he put it on the disc.

Jo

Asart gleamed in the dark before them.

About a hundredth of the moon had become a hole edged in curling black clouds. And just before the view went off, down in the lower left, it looked like a door had opened in the crust, not part of the growing hole.

A breath of terror trembled through the gathering. But Jo

“You see, my lords, the dragon hungry.” He laughed lightly. “He is also a very obedient dragon. Told to eat the moon, he is eating Asart! A very controllable dragon after all.”

Had he hit them with ice water he could not have produced a more chilling effect. Their eyes focused on him in growing horror.

Schleim broke the spell. It had occurred to him that he had a new way to guarantee success. He had a spare gun in his hamper as well as a recorder. He had just felt in his boot and discovered the weapon gone.

Damn that valet! Hawvin slaves were never any good.

“All you are doing,” said Schleim, “is casting that recorder out somewhere to a model you've made in the hills. And you have people regulating a model for it to photograph! You're a fraud!” And Schleim really believed it. But he had to make sure before he went off the edge. “There's a recorder in my hamper.”

“Go get it,” said Jo

Schleim rushed to his apartment. He scrambled through the hamper. Ah! Not just a spare gun but also a spare scepter hidden in the bottom, a spare with another paralysis beam in its heel. He could leave one on in a chair while he carried the other one out to turn the power cable off. Ha-ha! Three blast grenades! After he turned the beam on he'd pitch one into the ops room and use the other two to silence anyone rushing out of another door. Perfect! He wouldn't torture the Hawvin slave after all. Good fellow!

Schleim carried the whole hamper back to the gathering and set it beside his chair. Cautiously opening it so they wouldn't see what else was in it, he removed the picto-recorder. It was a different make and type but it played a disc.

“Devil,” said Schleim, “we will end your fraud here and now. You would not know, not being a native of a proper planet, that on the back of Asart is a huge diamond with a slash. It is done with hyperband nullifying material to act as a navigation and identification marker. It is unknown to practically everyone except a fleet officer. The marker will not show up on your standard recorders. And you have none like this one that takes the hyper-spectrum as well as what you call visible light. It will show that diamond and slash. Yours won't. So of course you didn't put one on your fake model. I am about to expose you as the fraud of all time!”

He sounded confident. But before that rig was destroyed he really had to know. Was it a model up in the hills or was that Asart? If it was Asart...should he be sure his torturer got the secret of teleportation? What a weapon!

He slithered over and put his recorder into the gyrocage, sealed the cage shut with a claw pattern, and walked off the platform.

Angus had heard it all. He shifted coordinates so that the recorder would view both the back of Asart and the hole.

He fired it and recalled it, and when the recoil died, Lord Schleim raced up to it, checked the claw pattern. It had not been broken.