Any reply Randifer might have made was lost in the thunderous laughter of the entire crowd. Randifer had friends in the gathering, but a joke that made Mark blink in amazement-it was a joke, wasn't it?-was just the thing to win over a thousand frontiersmen of both sexes.
Yerby let the noise settle before raising the microphone again. "The other thing's this," he said. "If you do pick me to lead you, you'd better be ready to obey. Because you will obey. I won't warn you again."
The crowd dissolved into a low-pitched roar. Everyone was talking with the two or three people nearest. Some folks gestured violently. Mark saw a number of fights break out, but they didn't last more than a few punches.
Mark looked at Yerby Bannock, a man he'd known less than three weeks. All the people at this assembly were tough and committed, or they would have stayed on their home worlds rather than emigrate to an uninhabited wilderness.
But Yerby had a fire in him that was as uncommon here as it would have been on Quelhagen.
The noise muted to the point that Dagmar Wately could be heard bellowing into a microphone, "All right, all right. Let me say this, will you?"
Two men helped the stocky woman clamber to the top of the wall. Mark gave her a hand.
"I guess most of you know me," Dagmar said. "Those that do, you know I don't like worth a damn what I'm going to say now."
She waved a hand toward the platform without looking away from the crowd, "Bannock's the only choice we got, people. It's him or it's fifty or so of us fighting each other instead of Zenith. So that means it's Yerby Bannock."
The crowd shouted savage agreement. Mark, his arm around Amy, yelled until his throat was raw.
12. Legal Process
"My name's Zebulon Randifer," the frontiersman mumbled to Mark at the table Blaney had set up in the Spiker's courtyard. "I got tract NK-twenty-five and about three hundred square miles of NL-twenty-five to the center of Blue River. I got a flashgun but the battery needs replacing. It don't hold a charge more than maybe an hour."
Mark keyed the information into his hypnagogue/viewer. The Spiker was the repository for settlement records for a large portion of the main continent, but Randifer's tract was to the north, in the Wanker's Doodle database. There was no reason the information couldn't have been combined; Mark intended to do just that as soon as he got to the Doodle and patched his unit to the repository server. For now, though, he could only note the location and add it to the map when he had one.
Randifer had a cloth cap, which he repeatedly took off, twisted in his hands, and replaced. He was stone bald. Mark didn't know if the frontiersman was embarrassed because of Yerby's joke during the assembly or if the sight of Amy recording the sign-up was making him nervous.
"And what kind of communications do you have?" Mark asked.
"Huh?" said Randifer. "Oh, I got a radio in my cabin. Tania Dolen flew over and told me about this meeting, though, because the damned thing was on the blink and I couldn't hear nothing."
Mark and Amy had come up with the checklist. In fact, it was Amy who suggested that Yerby do more than file in his head the names of those willing to "join the militia." So far as Yerby was concerned, the whole business was simply a legal fiction. He'd intended to operate exactly that way he had at Dagmar's: sound an alarm from high in the air to get the greatest coverage, then pile on. That the next attempted landing might be anywhere on the planet didn't concern him.
"Thank you, Mr. Randifer," Mark said. "Next?"
He'd processed almost a hundred and there were still two hundred people, mostly men, in line waiting to be enrolled. Others at the assembly might come to a summons also. Mark didn't have a clue as to how these frontiersmen's minds would work in a crisis, though he hadn't noticed many people on Greenwood unwilling to get into a fight.
The woman behind Randifer was looking up at the sky. The whole line snaking out the gate turned man by man to watch a dirigible crawling twenty feet in the air toward the courtyard to land.
"Hey, you danged fools!" a man shouted up. "Not here! Go out in the field!"
"Hey, that's Ardis Saunderson's blimp!" Randifer said. "He and every soul with him in Blind Cove's from Zenith on a Zenith grant!"
"Amy," Mark said as he closed his viewer, "go tell Yerby that-"
The dozen or so leading settlers were meeting in the tavern's taproom to thrash out an organization for the militia. The courtyard door flew open. Old Man Blaney was the first out, but Yerby and Dagmar Wately were next through the doorway.
The Blind Cove dirigible hovered over the center of the courtyard. Amy helped Mark move the table closer to the wall where it was out of the way.
There were five people in the gondola, three of them dressed as if they came from off-planet. One of the locals dropped a rope from the open half of the car. None of the folk in the courtyard grabbed it to haul the dirigible in as they would normally do. The pilot in the closed cabin scowled through a window and vented hydrogen, bringing the airship down with a rush and a bang on the hard ground.
The three strangers got to their feet and stepped iron-faced from the car. The woman as well as the two men wore black coats with white trousers, but the cut was flamboyant even though the garments' color was not.
They weren't armed. Mark still tried to place himself in front of Amy. She elbowed him hard and went on recording the event.
The trio faced Yerby. "Court officials," Mark whispered. "Process servers from Zenith." He'd seen their sort before in his father's office. Lucius Maxwell had a practice that involved a score of Protected Worlds and the courts on Earth as well.
"We have a summons for ejectment lodged against persons occupying certain tracts of land in violation of the rights of ownership of Heinrich Biber and other parties," one of the men said. He spoke in a strong voice, but his face was pale and his eyes looked a mile through Yerby.
"Where you from, lad?" Yerby said mildly. "Zenith, ain't you? You're on Greenwood now."
"The summonses are signed by Magistrate Ardis Saunderson," the Zenith spokesman said. "Justice Saunderson is an official validly appointed by the Protector of Zenith. The court date is in one month in New Paris."
The woman carried a hologram projector embossed with a gold Zenith Protectorate crest. "Come on, then, honey," Yerby said to her with his usual easy chauvinism. "Let's see who it is."
The bailiffs whispered among themselves. From the corner of his eye, Mark saw the Quelhagen investors watching from the tavern doorway. They'd been in the meeting with the settlers' leaders, but they were being careful rather than rushing into whatever was about to happen in the courtyard.
The bailiff switched on the projector and handed it to Yerby, who turned it so that he could make out the shimmering orange words hanging over the unit. "Wately," Yerby read aloud. "Barnes, O'Neill, Emmreich, Koslovsky, and Chin."
He gave the bailiffs a playful scowl. "Come on, where's my name? Yerby Bannock?"
"The only tracts covered by this action are the ones owned by those individuals," the Zenith spokesman said. He'd relaxed very slightly now that he and his companions hadn't been attacked the instant they said what they were here for.
Mark stepped forward. He didn't know what he was about to do until the instant he did it. "Ms. Wately?" he said in a clear voice. "Will you please sell me an acre of your holdings? I'd like to be joined as a defendant in this lawsuit."
"Attaboy, Mark, lad!" Yerby boomed. "Dagmar, I want a piece of this one too!"
He stuck his hands on his hips and added, "By all that's holy, we'll show them what it means to mess with the free citizens of Greenwood!"