"What are battlefield weapons? How are they different from other weapons?"
"I don't know. But I gather they used to have them, on Earth. I've found references to something called a main battle tank."
"We'd better ask the meteor people. They use big lasers, don't they? And bomb-missiles."
Are you seriously suggesting… "
"Yes. Of course I am! There are old launching lasers on Tiamat and down at Equatoria. They're got to be brought back on line."
Other voices raised.
"Think of the cost! Runaway inflation! We've only got one economy to play with on this planet!"
We don't want factories for strakkakers! We want factories for plutonium!"
"Whatever for? Plutonium's dangerous… Oh, I see."
"It's already happening. The Meteor Guard… "
"Shut up, you fool!"
"What trained fighters have we got? Only a handful of cops. They should be training instructors to train recruits!"
"Don't you think they've got enough to do already?"
Grotius turned to me: "Did you overfly the whole swamp?
"No. It's big."
"We should overfly it. I said we haven't time to consider homicides, but there may have been other things, things left behind."
"Aren't we jumping to conclusions?" van Roberts said. "This could be a completely purposeless panic that will do nothing but damage if we let it go on."
"But the monks saw-"
"The monks could have been mistaken. Or worse. The monastery has always been friendly to the Families, hasn't it?"
"I suppose so. The Order got the land as a deed of gift from the original Freuchens, before they moved out to the Norlands."
"And I imagine the old records will show that Families paid their passage here!"
"As a matter of fact, they don't." I happened to know that, because while waiting I had combed the old passenger lists looking for people whose occupations or profiles suggested might have brought useful books or equipment that their descendants might still have. A couple of the Families had brought private chaplains, but there was no record of the monks aboard the original slowboats. He ignored my interruption.
"And they've survived on handouts from the Families since. All that's left of the Church has. It's been very handy for the Families. Keeping people docile by promising them a pie-in-the-sky Afterlife, and at the same time getting rid of landless younger sons by putting them into skirts."
"That's propaganda, and utterly false! Anyway, there's plenty of land left!"
"Then why do you restrict the sale of it?"
"So there will be someone to work it. Do you want a planet all of landowners starving for lack of labor?"
That argument might have made sense six hundred years ago. There are such things as machines now! I suppose you spend so little time on your own estates you neither know nor care whether they are worked by robots or peons. You keep the land of a nearly empty world locked up to preserve your own hegemony, and your own rents!"
"Then go to the High Limestone! Go and settle in the badlands! Some people do. Tougher, gutsier people than you, Teutie prole!"
I waited for Grotius to intervene. Then I saw he was asleep at the table. We'll have to bring back electrocurrent sleep, I thought. Natural sleep is a luxury we may not be able to afford soon. I was tired myself, I knew, and my thoughts were jumping about ineffectually.
"All right," van Roberts was saying. "So you admit the monastery is in the pocket of the Families."
I admit some of the Families have been friends of the Church. That's hardly anything to be ashamed of."
And your monks will say anything they're told to, including corroborating your story of hostile aliens!"
This is preposterous!" I intervened. "They are trusted friends of mine. I saw the tracks, I saw the destroyed shacks, and found human bones."
"I assume you are telling the truth," said van Roberts, "but what does it prove? People have lied before. The Families may have got rid of the marshmen one way or another. What evidence are bones of anything-bones you didn't even bring back with you for testing? Apart from more obvious possibilities, they could have come from a cemetery, or a medical school, or even a plastics factory. Didn't monasteries once keep what they called relics of saints?"
"Why should anyone do such a thing?"
"Because the Nineteen Families are losing power. Bring in a police state, a regime of strict social control, and they can keep power forever. In the meantime everyone is panicking."
"Do you really believe that?"
"The whole tendency of political progress here has been evolution toward a less hierarchical, more representative form of government. This is profoundly regressive. It means increasing coercive authority which means giving the Families further powers."
"Who do you want in authority? The Families and the council on which you sit or cats with six-inch fangs?"
I looked around the faces. The Defense Committee did not want to believe in the-what was the word?-the Kzin. I did not want to believe in them myself. But I had stood in that swamp. My collecting clothes were stained with the mud and blood of the place… unless… I grabbed my own telephone and shut my house down.
I know the body language of animals professionally. A majority of the members of the Defense Committee were looking at van Roberts as a leader. Not because they all agreed with him politically, far from it. But he was presenting reassurance of a sort.
"We've got our families' futures to think of," said van der Stratt. "I have a little daughter who I want to grow up in a free and peaceful world. Some of you have children too."
Grotius woke up. "I'm sorry," he said. "Too much to do. I've also been reading all the military literature we can find. So many new terms. Everything from electronic battlefield management to caltrops. I really need a whole staff to help me."
"What's Electronic Battlefield Management?" asked van der Trott.
"What's caltrops?" asked Apfel.
"What's a staff?" asked somebody else.
"I don't like the degree of emotion that's getting into all this," said Lufft. "It's an unprecedented situation, certainly, but that doesn't mean we can't make decisions rationally. Let's bear in mind the fact we are twenty-fourth-century Humans, the children of a high science, the star-born, and guided by science and reason. We are not primitives and we shouldn't behave like primitives."
"All battles and all wars are won in the end by infantrymen."
What on Earth (literally what on Earth?) did it mean? It was attributed to someone with the odd and cumbersome name of Field Marshal Viscount Wavell.
Infantrymen? Infant men?
We were in a dusty back room in the warren of the old Mechanics' Institute, which had once served as Munchen's public library. Hermanson had opened it and was rummaging through boxes of old disks. We were lucky to have an almost equally antique computer that could display them. It had been standing under a dome as an exhibit in the entrance hall.
When the first slowboats had set out from Earth to Wunderland they had carried libraries of Earth historical material. Not much military historical material, though. ARM didn't approve of that even at first. We gathered that things had got even tighter by the time the last slowboat left.
Not that anyone had cared much. Some of the first generation had missed Earth, but why study its history when we had our own world, a wonderful, beautiful and exciting world? We had our own history to make, and life to live on a scale flatlanders could only dream of. The Belters had been humanity's first proud space-born. We, in exalted moments, sometimes called ourselves the Children of the Stars. Weight and volume had been critical for our migrating ancestors, too, even in craft the size of the slowboats. Practically all books had been reduced to computer disks. Some, over the years, had been lost or corrupted. Some had been reprinted in conventional book form, but these had been largely textbooks of strictly practical matters, of which there were many, or the literary classics. There were books published on Wunderland, certainly-this library and the new and bigger ones were a matter of some pride-but they were our books. And after the frontier, pioneering days, librarianship had largely had to be rediscovered.