Battlefield Earth

Chapter 20

The workroom in the ancient smelter had been all set up by Terl. The windows had been shuttered and the doors made snug. The only piece of equipment of the original man-setup that he was using was the huge metal cauldron in the middle of the floor, and this too he had reworked, surrounding it with Psychlo speed heaters.

Tools, molds and molecular sprays were all laid out.

The marking equipment was that of the morgue down at the compound.

Terl parked the flatbed in front of the unlighted door and with practically no effort at all carried in ore sacks six or eight at a time and emptied them into the cauldron.

He hid the flatbed, came in and barred the door, and checked to see that all the shutters were in place. He did not notice a newly drilled hole in one. He turned on the portable lights.

With practiced ease he darted the point of a probe around the interior to make sure there were no bugs or button cameras. Satisfied, he laid the equipment aside.

The instant it clattered to the bench, an unseen hand unfastened an ancient ventilator door and placed two button cameras in advantageous positions. The ventilator door, well oiled, was shut again. A bit of dust, dislodged in the action, drifted down across a lamp beam.

Terl looked up. Rats, he thought. Always rats in these buildings.

He turned on the speed heaters of the cauldron and the wire gold and lumps began to settle down and shrink. Bubbles began to form. One had to be careful not to overheat gold; it went into gaseous form and much could be lost in vapors. The roof beams of this old smelter must be saturated in gold gas that had recondensed. He watched the thermometers carefully.

The yellow orange content of the cauldron went liquid and he turned the heaters to “maintain.”

The molds were all laid out. They were for coffin lids ordinarily used in manufacture, for coffins were a local product, made in the shops of the compound.

Terl held a huge ladle in mittened paws and began to transfer liquid gold into the first lid mold.

Two hundred pounds of gold per coffin. Ten coffin lids. He worked fast and expertly, taking care to spill none. The hiss of the molten metal striking the molds was pleasant to his earbones.

How easy all this was! The company insisted on lead coffins. Now and then an employee died in a radiation accident on some far planet, and after some messy experiences such as coffins falling apart in transshipment or creating minor accidents with radiation, the company, fifty or sixty thousand years ago, had laid down exact rules.

Lead was a glut on the market on Psychlo. They had lots of that. They also had plenty of iron and copper and chrome. What were scarce were gold, bauxite, molybdenum and several other metals. And what was absent, thank the evil gods, was uranium and all its family of ores. So the coffins were always made of lead, stiffened up with an alloy or two such as bismuth.

He only had to make lids. There were stacks and stacks of coffins in the morgue. One of the reasons he had to be secretive was that it would look a bit silly for him to be making more coffins and bringing them in.

Presently he had nine lid molds full. It was a bit tricky on the tenth. The cauldron was down to the bottom and a residue of rock was mixed in the dregs.

He had to be rather speedy with all this as it had to be done before dawn. He speed-chilled the dregs and dumped in a demijohn of acid to dissolve the rock and sediment left. Then he speed-warmed it again. The clouds of boiling acid looked good to him. He was in a breathe-mask, so who cared. He spooned the dissolved dregs out and reheated the gold.

By scraping very carefully, he was able to get the last lid fairly full. He made up the weight with a bit of melted lead.

While the lid molds cooled, he cleaned up the cauldron and ladle and made sure there were no splatters on the floor.

The lids weren’t cooling fast enough and he put a portable fan to them. He gingerly tapped one. Good!

With care he tapped the lids out of the molds and laid them on a bench. He got out a molecular spray and fed a lead-bismuth rod into it and began to paint the gold with a lead-bismuth covering. About seven lead-bismuth rods later he had ten leadlike coffin lids.

He took off his mittens and gathered up the marking equipment that usually stayed in the morgue. He pulled a list from his pocket.

With great neatness, he marked ten names, company worker serial numbers, and dates of death on the lids.

It had taken some trouble getting ten bodies. There were the three sentries blown up by the exploding g*n. There was Numph. There was Jayed, blast him. But a mine safety program being run over in medical had kept casualties down from normal, and there had been only three mine deaths since the last semiannual firing. This left Terl two bodies short.

One he had acquired by casually dropping a blasting cap into a shot hole before they tamped in the explosive. He had thought to get two or three with this but he only got the explosives expert.

The other one had been rather involved. He had loosened the steering bar of a triwheeler. The things were quite high speed and ran around lots of obstacles. But he had had to wait three boring days until it finally spilled and killed the admin personnel riding it.

So he had his ten names.

He punched them into the soft metal of the lids with the marker. He inspected them. Two showed gold through and that would not do. He got out his molecular spray and sprayed lead-bismuth over them. Fine.

He made a test with a claw point. The covering didn’t scratch. It would probably also stand up to the handling of fork trucks.

He then took a marker and made a small X, hard to see unless you looked for it, on the lower left-hand corner of each lid.

X,Time was getting on. He rapidly scooped up his equipment and disengaged the speed heater from the cauldron. He looked around. He had everything.

He turned out the lights, pulled the truck in front of the door, and loaded two or three lids at a time. He dumped the equipment on it.

He went back in, took a bag of dust and scattered it around the room, flashed his lamp about one more time to make sure, closed the doors, and happily drove off.

In the smelter, the ventilator opened and the button cameras were retrieved with a quick hand. The hole in the shutter was repaired.

Terl drove rapidly to the compound. It was now very late but he had, as of recent weeks, made a practice of driving about the compound as though doing rounds and the sound of the motor would alert no one.

It was very dark.

He stopped at the morgue. Without lights he carried the ten lids inside. Then he drove the truck to the nearby scrap dump and dug the equipment into and under another pile of scrap.

He walked back to the morgue, closed the door, and turned on the lights. He probed the place for bugs.

He did not notice a small hole drilled through the thick wall or the button camera that appeared there right after his probe.

Terl lined up ten coffins from the stacks of empties. He took off their lids and dumped them back of the stack. He moved the ten around so they would be in position to be picked up by the forklifts on Day 92.

From the shelves he yanked down the ten bodies and dumped them with thuds into the coffins.

Jayed’s was the last one. “Jayed, you silly crunch, what a crap lousy IBI agent you were. It ain’t smart, Jayed, to come in here worrying your betters. And what did you get for it?” Terl picked up the lid he’d made, checked the name. “A coffin and a grave burying you under the phony name of Snit.”

The glazed eyes seemed to regard him reproachfully.

“No, Jayed,” said Terl. “It will do no good to argue. None at all. Neither your murder, nor that of Numph, will ever be traced to me. Goodbye, Jayed!” He slammed the coffin lid down on Jayed.

He covered the rest of the coffins with his lids. He checked the small Xs.

XHe took a tool that cold-bonded metal and sealed the lids down to the coffins. He put the tool on the shelf. He took the name-marking tool out of his pocket and put it where it belonged.

He looked around and stood straighter. So far all was perfect.

And he was all ready, a whole day early for the semiannual firing. He reached for the light.

He did not hear the whisper against stone as the button camera was withdrawn from the hole or the squish of cement as the hole was blocked.

Terl opened the door. It was getting dimly light.

He walked across the open space, the firing platform, and up the hill to his quarters.

Behind him at the morgue, two caped figures slipped away into the ravine.

Four hours later on this Day 91, Jonnie, Robert the Fox, the council and team members concerned went over and over the picto-recorder pictures. They must not miss the tiniest possibility or the largest option. They could not afford to miss. The fate, not just of themselves, but of galaxies depended upon making no mistakes.