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asked.
"That the garrison commander is over seventy, and he has one
sixty-three-year-old major on his staff, as well as a sixty-two-year-old
captain. Also, the youngest Marine officer on Arrarat is over sixty, and the
only junior officers are militia."
"Bah. A retirement post," Bonneyman said. "So why did they ask for a
regiment?"
"Don't be silly, Louis," Deane said. "Because they've run into something they
can't handle with their militia and their superannuated officers, of course."
"Meaning we'll have to," I said. Only, of course, we didn't have a regiment,
only less than a thousand Marines, three junior officers, a captain with the
Military Cross, and - well, and nothing, unless the local militia were capable
of something. "The heroes have arrived."
"Yes. Nice, isn't it?" Deane said. "I expect the women will be friendly."
"And is that all you ever think about?" Louis demanded.
"What else is there? Marching in the sun?"
A younger townman in dark clerical clothing stood at his table under the
awning of a sidewalk cafe. He raised a hand in a gesture of blessing. There
were more cheers from a group of children.
"Nice to be loved," Deane said.
Despite the way he said it, Deane meant that. It was nice to be loved. I
remembered my last visit to Earth. There were a lot of places where CD
officers didn't dare go without a squad of troopers. Out here the people
wanted us. The paladins, I thought, and I laughed at myself because
I could imagine what Deane and Louis would say if I'd said that aloud, but I
wondered if they didn't think it, too.
"They don't seem to have much transport," Louis said.
"Unless you count those." Deane pointed to a watering trough where five horses
were tied.
There were also two camels, and an animal that looked like a clumsy
combination of camel, moose, and mule, with big splayed feet and silly
antlers.
That had to be an alien beast, the first thing I was certain was native to
this planet. I wondered what they called it, and how it had been domesticated.
There was almost no motor transport: a few pickup trucks, and one old
ground-effects car with no top; everything else was animal transport. There
were wagons, and men on horseback, and two women dressed in coveralls and
mounted on mules.
Bonneyman shook his head. "Looks as if they stirred up a brew from the
American Wild
West, medieval Paris, and threw in scenes from the Arabian Nights."
We all laughed, but Louis wasn't far wrong.
Arrarat was discovered soon after the first private exploration ships went out
from Earth. It was an inhabitable planet, and although there are a number of
those in the regions near Earth, they aren't all that common. A survey team
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was sent to find out what riches could be taken.
There weren't any. Earth crops would grow, and men could live on the planet,
but no one was going to invest money in agriculture. Shipping foodstuffs
through interstellar space is a simple way of going bankrupt unless there are
nearby markets with valuable minerals and no agriculture.
This planet had no nearby market at all.
The American Express Company owned settlement rights through discovery. AmEx
sold the planet to a combine of churches. The World Federation of Churches
named it Arrarat and advertised it as "a place of refuge for the unwanted of
Earth." They began to raise money for its development, and since this was
before the Bureau of Relocation began involuntary colonies, they had a lot of
help. Charity, tithes, government grants, all helped, and then the church
groups hit on the idea of a lottery. Prizes were free transportation to
Arrarat for winners and their families; and there were plenty of people
willing to trade Earth for a place where there was free land, plenty to eat,
hard work, no government harrassment, and no pollution. The World
Federation of Churches sold tens of millions of one-credit lottery tickets.
They soon had enough money to charter ships and sent people out.
There was plenty of room for colonists, even though the inhabitable portion of
Arrarat is comparatively small. The planet has a higher mean temperature than
Earth, and the regions near the equator are far too hot for men to live in. At
the very poles it is too cold. The southern hemisphere is nearly all water.
Even so, there is plenty of land in the north temperate zone. The delta area
where Harmony was founded was chosen as the best of the lot. It had a climate
like the
Mediterranean region of Earth. Rainfall was erratic, but the colony thrived.
The churches had very little money, but the planet didn't need heavy industry.
Animals were shipped instead of tractors, on the theory that horses and oxen
can make other horses and oxen, but tractors make only oil refineries and
smog. Industry wasn't wanted; Arrarat was to be a place where each man could
prune his own vineyard and sit in the shade of his fig tree. Some of the
Federation of Churches' governing board actively hated industrial technology,
and none loved it;
and there was no need, anyway. The planet could easily support far more than
the half to three-
quarters of a million people the churches sent out as colonists.
Then the disaster struck. A survey ship found thorium and other valuable
metals in the asteroid belt of Arrarat's system. It wasn't a disaster for
everyone, of course. American Express was happy enough, and so was Kennicott
Metals after they bought mining rights; but for the church groups it was
disaster enough. The miners came, and with them came trouble. The only
convenient place for the miners to go for recreation was Arrarat, and the
kinds of establishments asteroid miners liked weren't what the Federation of
Churches had in mind. The "Holy Joes" and the "Goddamns"
shouted at each other and petitioned the Grand Senate for help, while the
madams and gamblers and distillers set up for business.
That wasn't the worst of it. The Federation of Churches' petition to the
CoDominium Grand
Senate ended up in the CD bureaucracy, and an official in Bureau of
Corrections noticed that a lot of empty ships were going from Earth to
Arrarat. They came back full of refined thorium, but they went out deadhead .
. . and BuCorrect had plenty of prisoners they didn't know what to do with. It
cost money to keep them. Why not, BuCorrect reasoned, send the prisoners to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]