Battlefield Earth

Part XXIX

Chapter 1

The next two days were the most horrible in Jo

Stormalong had simply flown into thin air and vanished.

He didn't answer on radio even when Jo

The bank office in Luxembourg was open and answering but there was just a girl there, and she didn't speak any tongue anyone at Kariba could speak– French?– and even though they said "MacAdam" and she tried to tell them something back, they couldn't make it out.

Jo

The emissaries in the conference room would go in and out. They were working on and on with the trial. They didn't pay much attention to him.

Jo

Truth told, there was not too much coming through that Jo

Angus was spending some time with the transshipment rig. He had left the gyrocage on a Tolnep mountain to learn the full fate of the moon Asart. “I wanted to see whether there were earthquakes on Tolnep,” he told

Jo

A few hours later, Jo

Angus said something about wanting to see whether the ultimate bomb were still active.

“Well, don't bring anything back here that touches that area,” said Jo

The next morning Angus had come in to eat a bowl of noodles with him and tell him about it.

“I put that scrap metal way out beyond Asart," said Angus. “I thought it would fall through the gas-'

“What gas?” said Jo

“Oh, Asart just seems to be gas now,” said Angus. “Just a huge cloud of gas. It was blackish for a while but then it cleared up. You can see it is a cloud of gas but you can see through it. It 's pretty obvious now why the Psychlos never used that bomb. As mining people they needed metal, not gas!”

“So what happened to the scrap iron?” asked Jo

“I thought it would fall through the gas and go on down and hit the surface of

Tolnep. It didn't. It fell all right, but it just went to the center of the gas cloud and it's still there. Want to see a picture of it?”

“Just don't fire into that cloud and bring any of that stuff back here on recoil!” said Jo

“Oh, I won't,” promised Angus. “But what I believe is, once that ultimate bomb converted everything to gas, it went null. It doesn't have anything to work on and the reaction isn't self-starting again once it's complete. The metal trace says that it's all very low-order gases now. Hydrogen.”

“Then the ultimate bomb brings about low-order fission,” said Jo

“Anyway,” said Angus, “all I’m trying to tell you is that the mass of the moon didn't change so far as gravitic influence is concerned. In that coldness, the resulting gas has kind of gone liquid and the moon is a sort of bubble with a much bigger diameter. I think you could fly through it.”

“Great,” said Jo

Angus finished up his noodles. “I just thought you'd like to know that destroying that moon won't upset our coordinate tables. A shift of mass could throw every coordinate out eventually.”

“Ah,” said Jo

Angus thought so, too.

But news from other areas was not so encouraging. It was not that anything bad was adding up. It was just the nonexistence of news so far as the fate of Chrissie and the people in Scotland was concerned, and the fate of his people in the Russian base.

They had found the Chief of Clanfearghus outside, very close to death, and after emergency transfusions had rushed him up to the old underground hospital in Aberdeen. There was not much hope.

They had drilled holes through rubble that blocked the tu

The city was just towers of smoke, as was Castle Rock.

They were having a terrible time trying to open the approach tu

The Russian-base news was not much better. They had put the surface coal fires out but the mine was burning underground, and they did not know whether it was reaching the actual levels of the base. The huge doors were so warped they could not be opened even with burning torches, and they were now driving in a brand-new entrance to bypass them, a drift through solid rock, working over ground that was still burning under them down deep. The ventilator shafts were too tortuous and too barred with armor and filter to be of any use.

To add to the tension in Kariba, the original small gray man, Dries Gloton, had vanished. The one antiaircraft gu

Lord Voraz, when asked, had shrugged and said it probably came under the heading of prerogatives of a branch manager and was probably bank business, and he had gone on eating the perpetual bites-between-meals the cook served him up. He was no help.

But what gave Jo

The conference had called him in as a witness and they didn't tell Jo

The first Jo

Lord Dom came rolling into operations like a liquid jelly fish, roaring and rumbling to cease fire!

Jo

“He's been called as a witness!” shouted Lord Dom. “Don't you know there's a trial going on?”

Trial or no trial, Jo

Suppressing an urge to shoot Rogodeter on sight, he limited himself to confiscating his vision filter, making sure the Tolnep had no spare, and personally escorting him to the conference room. He left the Tolnep there but told them that when they were through with him, they better call ops to escort him out because Rogodeter was going to be stone blind all the time he was around Kariba.