Battlefield Earth

Chapter 6

Jo

"Where's the epidemic?” demanded MacKendrick. “I got your call in the middle of a medical lecture. I brought a whole medical team! And when I get here, I find you've taken off-'

“This time,” said Jo

“Oh,” said MacKendrick. “You mean the capsules. Jo

The doctor went over to where he'd last left the huge Psychlo skull. He knocked his knuckles on it. “It’s just plain, solid bone! The brain is clear down under the lower back plate. If I drill out enough bone to get to it, you'll just have a dead Psychlo.

“Ah,” said Jo

He walked over to the skull and picked it up, all half a hundred pounds of it.

MacKendrick had wired on the joints and Jo

The hinge, not the place a Psychlo heard through, but the place where the earbone met the back jawline, opened to show a hole about a thirty-second of an inch in diameter.

“You showed me this once,” said Jo

MacKendrick was skeptical. "Jo

Jo

Jo

“What are you doing?” demanded MacKendrick.

“Now the question you must answer is, will these wires, pushed in, tear up any jaw or ear muscles?”

“Oh, they might hit some tissue, but the main muscles aren't there. That hole occurs because the jawbone, when extended to the extreme lower position, would have to leave a hole: otherwise there would have to be two additional bone plates and lord knows, there's enough already! I don't think-'

Jo

MacKendrick was at sea. “You can't get a gun like that in a head!”

“The gun unit goes outside.” He dug out an electrical terminal plate. “Where is one of those capsules we removed?”

MacKendrick got one of the two half-circles of bronze.

Jo

plating gun and co

He pressed the trigger.

The terminal plate began to be plated in bronze.

A tiny hole appeared in the capsule taken from a Psychlo head.

No electrician, MacKendrick said, “It’s disappearing!”

“We're flowing the metal molecules up the wire to the plate. I think it's called 'electrolysis.' We're just not letting the metal molecules spray. We're flowing them onto a plate.”

He adjusted the wires to the bit of bronze so that an inflow hit a different spot and the outflow occurred from a new place.

MacKendrick gawped. “That piece of metal is disappearing!”

“It’s reappearing over on the terminal plate,” said Jo

He picked up a new bit of wire and with a small torch melted the end of it round. "If we take the sharp point off, can you wiggle this wire in through that hinge hole, around the various nerves, and touch the bronze bit in the skull? And then do the same thing from the other side?”

This was something MacKendrick knew about. The corded nerves of a Psychlo brain were easy to push around. The cortex, or covering of the brain, could probably be pierced in a couple of tiny places without much damage.

“We'll see!” said MacKendrick, giving up all thought of waiting for morning.

The Psychlo bodies were lying on two mine carts outside the door. Pierre seemed to have vanished. MacKendrick called in two nurses and another doctor and they wheeled the workman Psychlo into the dissection room. It was about five times as much body as they were used to handling, but with everyone helping, they got it on a table.

“It’s probably still frozen inside,” said Jo

“No problem,” said MacKendrick. “You forgot we've been through this before. A couple of times I was all hopeful we could even operate.” He took a stack of microwave emanating pads and plopped them on either side of the head to thaw it out with a quick defreeze.

The room seemed awfully populated. Mr. Tsung was giving Jo

Gone are the days,

When my heart was young and gay.

Gone are the days...

The medical team was startled and a bit shocked. The scene was macabre enough without somebody singing a doleful dirge!

Jo

Pulling other bits out of his kit, Jo

The other doctor was mopping up water that had run off the cadaver's head and was getting the lower wave-emanation plate wet.

A nurse leaned over to Jo

Jo

She must have followed him in. She was looking with interest at the bleached skull.

This was the first day in all these months he had seen Pattie noticing her environment. He was not going to suppress her by telling her to get out. “Let her stay,” he whispered to the nurse. The woman was a bit disapproving but she did not push it.

Jo

Watching the viewplate and checking the sketches he began to work a blunted wire end in. He finally, with a few minor detours, got it to the embedded bronze. Then he got the other wire through to the other side of the metal.