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Battlefield Earth, First Chapter (4 of 20) Char sat back and eyed Terl. "You ain't really going hunting for a man, are you?" Terl looked at his book. He inserted one of his talons to keep his place and then thumped the volume against his knee. "I think you're wrong," he mused. "There was something to these creatures. Before we came along, it says here, they had towns on every continent. They had flying machines and boats. They even appear to have fired off stuff into space." "How do you know that wasn't some other race?" said Char. "How do you know it wasn't some lost colony of Psychlos?" "No, it wasn't that," said Terl. "Psychlos can't breathe this air. It was man all right, just like the cultural guys researched. And right in our own histories, you know how it says we got here?" "Ump," said Char. "Man apparently sent out some kind of probe that gave full directions to the place, had pictures of man on it and everything. It got picked up by a Psychlo recon. And you know what?" "Ump," said Char. "The probe and the pictures were on a metal that was rare everywhere and worth a clanking fortune. And Intergalactic paid the Psychlo governors sixty trillion Galactic credits for the directions and the concession. One gas barrage and we were in business." "Fairy tales, fairy tales," said Char. "Every planet I ever helped gut has some butt and crap story like that. Every one." He yawned his face into a huge cavern. "All that was hundreds, maybe thousands of years ago. You ever notice that the public relations department always puts their fairy tales so far back nobody can ever check them?"
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