After a few minutes Jonnie notices that Pierre is unconscious. While he's hauling Frenchy into the plane, he is startled to find Pattie inside helping hold the door open, but reasons that "They must have overlooked her in their scramble to get through the rain. She made so little sound and motion these days she easily went unnoticed."
So Pattie's doting sister Chrissie completely overlooked her, nobody else amongst the passengers noticed the mopey ten-year-old getting left behind, and nobody realized she was missing after the plane took off and radioed Jonnie about it, either. Pattie's such a non-entity that even other characters forget about her.
Jonnie gets Pierre and the two frosty Psychlos loaded and flies back to the base, where there is, of course, a crowd of admirers. When they see two inert, damp Psychlos dropped by a forklift into the back of a truck like so many sacks of manure, everyone recoils in fear, because Battlefield Earth is full of frickin' idiots. Ker "explains" that the two corpses were Psychlo guerrillas hiding in the jungle who attacked Jonnie's copilot, but Jonnie got mad and strangled both of the aliens at once. A former Hawvin officer breathes "No wonder we lost this war," totally buying the story that Jonnie is strong enough to lift two hulking Psychlos, each twice his size, at once.
The chapter ends with Ker trying not to laugh, and me wondering if there was any point to these scenes besides showing how timid and gullible everyone is. I mean, we could've cut right to the dissection table with a paragraph explaining that Jonnie retrieved the Psychlo corpses from the mountains. But nooooo, Hubbard wanted to spend time laughing at a cowardly Frenchman and stupid Hawvins.
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~ A former Hawvin officer breathes "No wonder we lost this war," totally buying the story that Jonnie is strong enough to lift two hulking Psychlos, each twice his size, at once. ~
ReplyDeleteWhich, nicely, makes his statement totally accurate anyway.