Battlefield Earth

After a dozen tries, Angus became convinced it must be a spent cartridge. He switched it on in front of his face and promptly turned blue with coughing. No, it wasn't a spent cartridge. They went down in pits. They scrambled into drifts long since unsafe.

They used up five cartridges of breathe-gas.

No explosions.

Jo

Then Jo

No remains of file cabinets. No distinguishable remains of machinery aside from some decayed hoists. But no bodies save that one.

He went back to the plane and sat down. This place had been mined out before the Psychlo attack. And it had been mined out with such care that the waste dumps weren't even hot.

Angus came streaming back shouting: “It works! It works!” He was carrying something that had been framed.

Jo

He carried it over to a rock and sat down and studied it. The ore was brown and black. It had been mounted as an exhibit on a lead background. He held the inscription this way and that. He couldn't make out more than that it was the “first” something. And then a person's name he couldn't make out either. He turned the plate in another way and then saw the letters at the top more plainly. They said

"PITCHBLENDE."

“Look!” said Angus. “Let me show you.” He took the frame from Jo

"I’ll do it again,” yelped Angus. He turned the switch full on and left it on. He wouldn't have had time to turn it off any way.

The bottle, its emitting snout flaming like a rocket engine, took off and went about ten feet. The pilot and Angus shouted with delight.

“Pitchblende,” said Jo

They dragged him off to the broken shambles of a building that was so collapsed they had to tug and pull at a lot of roof to get at anything else in it.

Covered with dust and hot from work despite the chill air, Jo

A museum. A small museum it had been. Other specimens were there. Rose quartz, hematite, things that weren't from this immediate place. There wasn't even any evidence that the pitchblende had been from here. “The test for breathe-gas works!” said the irrepressible Angus.

Jo

"I’m glad it works,” he said. “But even if there is any uranium left under us it's too deep for us to get to. Collect some more lead and wrap that specimen up. We'll take it home.”

“Let's look around here some more!” said Angus.

Jo

But he knew it was mined out. Only one body and a museum.

Where in heaven's name was he going to find uranium– lots of it? Where.

Chapter 2

Jo

It was the day after their return from Uravan. The storm had blown over, leaving a sparkling, white-coated day. But at these altitudes it was bitterly cold, and the canyon, as ever, was fu

Two Scots, one of them Du

They had grappled the end with a hook lowered from the flying drill platform and had tried to fly the staircase up and out of the river. It was caught underwater. Now sprays coming up through the broken ice were coating the platform with water that instantly froze, increasing the platform's weight by the moment.

He knew what they were trying to do. They were trying to look busy for the benefit of the recon drone that would be there in a moment or two. The rest of the shift crew were strung out along the chasm's edge untangling the masses of cables and drums that had been scrambled by the storm. Du

Jo

They were using local radios. All the items of equipment had them built in, for their range and the range of mine intercoms was only a mile. The transmissions were also masked by the mountains to the east. The radio down there on the platform was evidently open.

“Throw off the reel brakes, Andrew!” Du

“They wilna disengage. 'Tis this spray!”

“Andrew! Disengage the hooks to that staircase!”

“They wilna budge, Du

The whine of the overloaded motors was also coming through the open mikes.

Jo

Such a platform had rudimentary flying controls, usually covered by a lead glass canopy. But the humans didn't use the canopies and Du

The recon drone would be by in another second or two. It must see efforts to mine, not disaster. Jo

Its hypersonic explosion would occur any moment now. The instant it went by he would have to somehow get those two off that platform.

“Doctor Mac,” shouted Jo

“Oh my goodness,” said Doctor MacDermott.

“Open the side door and throw out two life lines!” shouted Jo

The old man scrambled about, grabbing at unfamiliar coils and tangles of cables in the rear. “Hold on!” shouted Jo

He sent the passenger craft plummeting a thousand feet into the racketing, wind-blasting roar of the chasm. The walls flashed by.