Battlefield Earth

Sometime after that Stormalong got bored with demonstrating the new teleportation-motored atmosphere transports Desperation Defense was selling all over the galaxies and training pilots for, and he talked Jo

Stormalong had the excuse that he wanted to go see whether he could find some more of that heavy metal.

He figured that flights of meteorites had now hit the moon. It took them two months to get ready and to make the trip and return.

They found the meteorites with heavy metal traces, all right, and mined them and brought back about two hundred tons of ore to process. But Stormalong brought back startling news:

“There's footprints up there,” he told

Jo

This being in the world of tracking, Jo

Jo

Yessir! Footprints! Tire treads!

Then the sharp, trained eye of Jo

Stormalong thought it must be some salvage gear from a wreck maybe. But there was no wreck. Dries thought that maybe it was used to repair holes. Gum, you know.

Jo

The real discovery was made on the way back. Jo

He did more comparisons. They were flashing down toward Europe, of course, but they could still see northern Africa and the Middle East. The latter was green. And the former had a new sea in the middle of it.

Landed again, even though he was late for Sunday night supper, Jo

“You ordered us to show a profit,” the general manager said defensively. “So we hired some more Chatovarians and started a Health Subsidiary. We figured 'Buildstrong' could also be interpreted to mean strong bodies.”

Jo

Jo

Another incident worthy of note happened about that time.

Jo

There were so many exaggerations and lies going around about Jo

There was a bizarre incident that occurred in Edinburgh. The sarcophagus of Bittie MacLeod had been miraculously preserved in the bombings: three beams of the collapsing cathedral had fallen across it almost protectively; the Chatovarians had repositioned it in the new cathedral crypt in a row of dead war heroes which included Glenca

When she was sixteen, Pattie demanded that she be taken to the crypt and married to Bittie MacLeod. Nothing could dissuade her and she stood there beside the sarcophagus in a white wedding dress, holding Bittie's locket with “To my future wife” on it. The parson, who could find no law against it, went through the wedding ceremony. She then changed to widow's weeds and after that called herself Mrs. Pattie MacLeod.

Still continuing with her medical training, she founded the MacLeod Intergalactic Health Organization. Jo

Two other events had occurred. Jo

When Timmie was six, Jo

Chatovarian, Psychlo, and English. He could do sums in his head when it suited him. And he could drive a teleportation go-cart Angus and Tom Smiley had made for him. But Jo

Jo