Battlefield Earth Read Online Free PDF

of it. Why did the pigs and horses and cattle in the plains have little pigs and horses and cattle so numerously and so continuously? Yes, and why were there more and more wolves and coyotes and pumas and birds up in the higher ranges, and fewer and fewer men?
        
    The villagers had been quite happy with the funeral, especially since Jonnie and a couple of others had done most of the work.
        
    Jonnie had not been happy with it at all. It wasn’t good enough.
        
    They had gathered at sun straight-up on the knoll above the village where some said the graveyard had been. The markers were all gone. Maybe it had been a graveyard. When Jonnie had toiled- naked so as not to stain his puma-skin cloak and doe britches-in the morning sun, he had dug into something that might have been an old grave. At least there was a bone in it that could have been human.
        
    The villagers had come slouching around and there had been a wait while Pattie tore back to the courthouse and awakened Parson Staffor again. Only twenty-five of them had assembled. The others had said they were tired and asked for any food to be brought back to them.
        
    Then there had been an argument about the shape of the grave hole. Jonnie had dug it oblong so the body could lie level, but when Staffor arrived he said it should be straight up and down, that graves were dug straight up and down because you could get more bodies into a graveyard that way. When Jonnie pointed out that there weren’t any burials these days and there was plenty of room, Staffor told him off in front of everybody.
        
    “You’re too smart,” Staffor rapped at him. “When we had even half a council they used to remark on it. Every few council meetings, some prank of yours would come up. You’d ridden to the high ridge and killed a goat. You’d gone clear up Highpeak and gotten lost in a blizzard and found your way back, you said, by following the downslope of the ground. Too smart. Who else trained six horses? Everybody knows graves should be straight up and down.”
        
    But they had buried his father lying flat anyway, because nobody else had wanted to do more digging and the sun was now past straight-up and it was getting hot.
        
    Jonnie hadn’t dared suggest what he really wanted to do. There would have been a riot.
        
    He had wanted to put his father in the cave of the ancient gods, far up at the top of the dark canyon, a savage cleft in the side of the tallest peak. When he was twelve he had strayed up there, more trying out a pony than going someplace. But the way up the canyon had been very flat and inviting. He had gone for miles and miles and miles and then he had been abruptly halted by giant, vertical doors. They were of some kind of metal, heavily corroded. One couldn’t see them from above or even from the canyon rims. They were absolutely huge. They went up and up.
        
    He had gotten off his pony and climbed over the rubble in front of them and simply stared. He had walked all around in circles and then come back and stared some more.
        
    After a while he had gotten brave and had walked up to them. But push as he might, he couldn’t open them. Then he had found a latch-like bar and he had pried it off and it fell, just missing his foot. Rusted but very heavy.
        
    He had braced his shoulder against one door, sure that it was a door, and pushed and pushed. But his twelve-year-old shoulder and weight hadn’t had much effect on it.
        
    Then he had taken the fallen bar and begun to pry it into the slight crack, and after a few minutes he had gotten a purchase with it.
        
    There had been a horrible groaning sound that almost stood his hair up straight, and he dropped the bar and ran for the pony.
        
    Once he was mounted, his fright ebbed a bit. Maybe it was just a sound caused by the rusted hinges. Maybe it wasn’t a monster.
        
    He had gone back and worked some more