Battlefield Earth: Saga of the Year 3000 by L. Ron Hubbard

Author:L. Ron Hubbard [Hubbard, L. Ron]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Galaxy Press
Published: 2016-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

9

The underground room at the Lake Victoria minesite was chilled. Angus had rigged heavy-duty motor cooling coils along the wall and the humidity in the air dripped from them and made dark pools along the floor.

The metal and mineral analysis machine hummed; its screen cast an eerie green light on everything around it. Five tense faces were turned to that screen: Doctor MacKendrick’s, Angus’s, Sir Robert’s, Dunneldeen’s and Jonnie’s.

Massive, more than eighteen inches in diameter, the ugly head of the Psychlo corpse lay on the machine’s plate. Such a head was mostly bone. It bore considerable resemblance to a human head and could be mistaken for one in bad light, but where a human had hair, eyebrows, fleshy lips, nose and ears, the Psychlo had bone whose shape was more or less the same as the corresponding human features, and the distribution and spacing were similar; the result was a kind of caricature of a human head. Until you touched the features, they did not seem to be bone, but contact proved them hard and unyielding.

The analysis machine was not penetrating the head. Not only were the features bone, but the whole top half of the skull was bone. As the parson in his earlier, inexpert autopsy had discovered, the brain was low down and to the back; he had discovered nothing in the brain because he had not opened the brain of the cadavers.

“Bone!” said Angus. “It’s almost as hard to penetrate as metal!”

Jonnie could attest to that from the negligible effects of his kill-club on Terl’s skull back in the morgue.

Angus was resetting dials. The Psychlo letters were codings for various metals and ores. He swung the intensity dial up five clicks.

“Wait!” said MacKendrick. “Back it up one! I thought I saw something.”

Angus backed the intensity of penetration dial back one, then two. It was sitting on “Lime” now.

There was a hazy difference in density on the screen, one little spot. Angus adjusted the beam’s “in depth” control, focusing it. The internal bones and fissures of the skull came clear on the screen. Five pairs of eyes watched intensely.

The Scot’s fingers took another knob, one that swept a second beam to various positions in the subject.

“Wait,” said MacKendrick. “Move the beam back to about two inches behind the mouth cavity. There! Now focus it again.” Then, “That’s it!”

There was something there, something hard and black on the screen that was not passing waves at this intensity. Angus touched the recorder of the machine and the whir-flap sound of registry of the images on the paper roll was loud.

“They do have something in their skulls!” said Robert the Fox.

“Not so fast,” said MacKendrick. “We jump to no conclusions. It could be some fragment of an old injury, some metal picked up in a mine explosion.”

“Naw, naw, naw,” said Robert the Fox. “It’s very plain!”

Jonnie had pulled out the recording sheets. They had the metal analysis trace squiggling down one side. He had left the Psychlo metal analysis code book, usually used to analyze drone transmissions as they hunted a surface for ore, outside.

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