Battlefield Earth

Chapter 3

Jo

Jo

“We're awfully low,” he timidly offered.

“People in back,” said Jo

Drones, drones, drones! All his life Jo

As the system was incomplete, a lot of emergency stand-in drones were about and they were attracted to anything flying. A huge green flashing light was going on top of the plane, and the box there, newly installed, was sending out the “code of the day,” which was so fast and so scrambled and changing microsecond to microsecond that an attacker could not hope to duplicate it. If the drones didn't see and hear it, they'd shoot.

Ah, yes, here came the Mediterranean emergency drones, three of them, shooting over to “have a look.” The copilot was slow and Jo

Chatovarian drones, all right. Each one had a big eye painted on its nose. But those big, staring eyes were not a Chatovarian fixation on decoration: a pilot would instinctively shoot into the center of them, and if a pilot did, the drone used the shot as a return carrier wave to send a surge back that blew up the attacker's own ammunition and thereby his ship. Don't shoot at one of those eyes!

Nevertheless they were a bit disconcerting, glaring out of the viewscreen. They nudged in like sniffing dogs, and then satisfied by automatically cross-verifying with each other, they fell away and returned to their patrol sectors.

The French pilot was looking back at the Alps. They hadn't hit any!

But Jo

And what was this? He had a space probe on the screen. He hadn't known you could see one. Was it hostile?

Like any star drone or probe, these things had a “lens” that was made of a “light magnet.” This reacted on light beams and pulled them in from a zone many miles in diameter and concentrated them, magnetically corrected for aberration, into a spot smaller than a dot on paper. In effect, it made a lens many, many miles in diameter. The problem was too much light rather than too little, and they had blinders or filters that dropped into place to keep them from burning out their receivers or recording discs should they turn toward a sun too close. In that way one could get magnifications into the tens of trillions.

One of the contractors had drilled Jo

It was their own space probe all right.

He was looking at the copilot and himself behind their own viewscreen. Yet that space probe was over ten thousand miles away. It must be at the near end of a run. Friendly, so he threw the tap off.

He didn't really think anybody would attack Earth now. The peace treaty had gone in, as promised, with claws! Very, very popular. The delegates had even taken home copies of the end of Psychlo and the death of Asart.

The bank was shoveling out food loans like a waterfall. Consumer products had not yet begun to roll. That would take time. He hoped he could get at the secret of how one built a teleportation motor: that would open the door to a lot of consumer products. And even more important, keep the vehicles they had here operating. These planes wouldn't last forever.

“Take over,” he told the French pilot,

Pierre, and went back into the body of the plane.

Chrissie stirred herself and unwrapped a bowl. "I’m afraid the venison stew might be cold now.”

Jo

Mr. Tsung, he saw, was going to use this time-space to catch up with his diplomatic and social duties, for here he came with about ten pounds of paper. Jo

“The week's dispatch box came in from Snautch," he said.

So that was what Dries was doing coming down from Zurich. “Send the business matters down to the minesite office; it's their job.”

“Oh, I did, I did,” said Mr. Tsung. “These are all social and diplomatic. Invitations to weddings, banquets, christenings. Requests to address meetings-”

“Well, thank them or tell them no,” said Jo

“Oh, I have, I have,” said Mr. Tsung. “We don't have any trouble. We use a vocoreader, a vocoder, and a vocotyper. We can handle correspondence in about eighteen thousand languages now. But this is going to get heavier.”

Here it comes, thought Jo

“You got another brother?” said Jo

“I am sorry that I don't,” retorted Mr. Tsung. "I’m talking about the nephew of Baron von Roth. He wants to apprentice as a diplomat in my office.”

“Fine,” said Jo

Mr. Tsung adjusted the vocoder volume higher as the plane was roaring more with Pierre at the console. “I want to hire about thirty more Russian and Chinese girls to train as clerks and vocotyper operators. It 's really very simple. One reads invitations with a vocoreader into one's own language and then one uses a vocoder to talk to the vocotyper and it types the answer back into the tongue of the original letter-”

“Go ahead,” said Jo

“I think there should be a new building to take care of all these people and files. Something more on a Chinese-”

“Go ahead,” said Jo

“There was one letter that I pulled out that you should see,” said Mr. Tsung. “It’s from Lord Voraz to MacAdam with a copy to you, and Dries said MacAdam had to hear from you before he answered.”

Trouble, thought Jo

"Voraz wants a formula to determine the validity of a commercial loan.”

“That's not diplomatic or social,” said Jo

“It’s kind of diplomatic,” said Mr.

Tsung, “Voraz and MacAdam being who they are, one does not wish to see tensions. The whole problem is consumer products should arms companies convert to. If they convert to the wrong ones, the whole program will fail and the bank will have granted useless loans.”