Battlefield Earth

With a dig of his claw, he opened the book to the point where all the equations were summarized and pointed to the top one. “Now you see this 'B'? You might think it is a symbol for something in Psychlo mathematics. But there is no 'B' that represents anything mathematical except 'Betrayer's.'

He pulled the first paper back. “So where that 'B' occurs, we see that the letter 'B' has a number value of two. So we just have to add or subtract or whatever it says to do to 'B,' the number two.

“When we get to the second stage of the equation, there is no letter but a Psychlo mathematician knows you must take the second letter of 'Betrayer's,' which is 'E' and then look up the number value of 'E,' which is five, and factor the second stage of the equation with five. Now you get the same equation to its third stage and a mathematician knows he has to factor it with the number value of 'T' which is twenty. And so on.

"If the letter in the original equation were 'l,' then we would use its number value and follow right on down with the number values of the letters for 'Infernal.'

“You always have one of these letters in the first equation, so you always have the gate name. And you have to use it. When they put the equations together, they constructed them backward from the answer so a gate name would fit. Got it?”

Jo

No wonder nothing ever seemed to balance. This made even the original equations rigged.

And add to that all the complexity of a base-eleven math and you had what would appear to any outsider to be an utter mess.

He was glad he had the recorder ru

“I have to be honest with you,” said Soth. “I don't know where I am getting all this impulse to be honest. But all this will be of limited use to you.”

Chapter 6

Jo

Soth fiddled a bit with his papers. He picked up the contract Jo

“You have to understand how crazy they were on secrecy,” he said at length. “Although what I have given you applies to Psychlo math in general, there is another circumstance. When equations are applied to the calculation of teleportation, you won't find all the answers in the texts.”

Soth sighed. “The government was afraid of a lot of things. Among them was the possibility that Intergalactic

Mining employees, out in some far planet, might get ideas or go into business for them selves. So the exact sequence in which you use the force equations is not revealed in the texts and I think there are dummy equations there as well. I could not work you out a console.”

Jo

“Oh, the Chamco brothers!” said Soth impatiently. “They might have monkeyed about. They might even have tried. But they wouldn't know!”

He swept a paw in the general direction of the other Psychlo dormitories. “These clods here,” he said with contempt, “could none of them build a console. They would know what I have told you and it would work for other things. But not consoles!”

He looked at the contract longingly.

Then he confronted Jo

“The imperial government was determined that only one perso

“And as the government and company were so crazy on the subject of secrecy, of course the post to which these 'brain-brains' were appointed was that of security officer.'

Terl! thought Jo

And almost as if he was reading Jo

Jo

And then his hopes were dashed. Soth said, “That also applies to computing motors. Only Terl could have computed out the full circuits for motor consoles.”

Jo

“They are,” said Soth, “quite different, you know. The firing console overrides and gets around the 'samespace' principle. The motor runs on the resistance space puts up to being changed.”

Soth was dangling the contract in his claws. “What I have told you about Psychlo math applies to all of it and can be used in solving anything but teleportation."

Jo

Desperation Defense wouldn't have an easy conversion to peacetime. Then he recalled something.

“But executives used to repair motor consoles,” he said.

Soth sat up. He looked at the contract and then at Jo

In minutes they were outside and Jo

A console was to be removed from a plane, one from a ground car and one from a flying platform. And they were to be brought at once to the repair shop without being further tampered with. Mechanics went racing about.

Presently the three consoles were sitting on the floor of the repair shop.

“These are the three different types of consoles for motor drives. All other motor consoles are one or another of these types. Now you will have to give me a hand. I am not as strong as I was once.”

Soth closed the door, barring everyone else. He reached up on a shelf and brought down a “poison ore bag.” Jo

Soth, with a little help from Jo

He picked up a pressure gauge and a tool kit and shoved these through the armholes. Then he put his own arms in and snapped seals around his elbows.

Through the transparent top he watched the pressure gauge he had put in. “One hundred pounds is what you want,” he said.

The bag inflated. The gauge went up to one hundred. He checked his elbow seals. The pressure was holding.

Soth picked up a screwdriver from the kit he had put inside and swiftly took out the screws of the top plate.

Jo