“It was a great moment for us all,” Reverend Hengethorg was saying, as he at last released Ensign Benson’s hand with a little superior smile, “when Lieutenant Shelby confirmed what we have for so long believed: that Earth is firmly Antiben. I may say I took it as a personal vindication.”
“Actually,” Ensign Benson said, massaging his fingers and speaking with caution, “Earth’s philosophical position anent the Benchley Paradox is somewhat more sophisticated than that. Essentially, I would say Earth’s position encompasses elements of both the Ben and the Antiben points of view.”
Reverend Hengethorg’s frown had something of the Inquisition in it. “Both points of view? How can a position encompass absolute contradictions?”
“Well, we don’t see the Bens and the Antibens as being absolutely contradictory,” Ensign Benson explained.
“They are on Gemini,” the reverend said. “But you must come with me to the chaplains’ tent and explain Earth’s position to the reverend fathers.”
“I’d like that.”
With the smiling, unconscious Billy trailing after, they walked together toward the chaplains’ tent, safely placed on the far side of the slope, and Ensign Benson said, “This is quite a large encampment. How many of your people are here?”
“Why, all of us,” Reverend Hengethorg said in some surprise. “Except for a few spies in the Bens’ camp, of course. Where else would we be?”
“Don’t you have a town? Forts?”
“I don’t know what you mean by town,” the reverend said. “We have had forts, but they were vulnerable to fire and siege and difficult to move, unlike that fort of yours, which we all admire very much.”
“So the women are right here with the army.”
“The women are in the army. We are all in the army.”
“Children?”
“Military school, just over there,” the reverend said, pointing toward a nearby copse from which came the shrieks of childish savagery.
“What about farms? Food?”
“We have our herds. We hunt and we pick fruits and so on in season.”
They walked past a smithy, where metal bits for harnesses were being hammered into shape. “How many of you are there?” Ensign Benson asked.
“That’s a military secret.”
“More than five hundred, I’d guess,” Ensign Benson said, looking around. “Fewer than a thousand.”
“If you say so.” The reverend clearly didn’t like having his military secret guessed at so easily and accurately.
“But as the population grows—”
“Why should it grow?” Gesturing around them, the reverend said, “We and the Bens have had stable populations for four hundred years.”
Ensign Benson nodded. “Birth control?”
The reverend shook his head. “War,” he said.
They had reached the chaplains’ tent. “My colleagues will be delighted to meet with you,” the reverend said. “There’s nothing we all like more than lively philosophical debate.”
“That’s fine.”
“Of course,” the reverend went on, “the liveliest philosophical debates take place under torture. But there’s no question of that here,” he said, holding open the tent flap, smiling wistfully to show how bravely he was taking the deprivation, “is there — Earth being our ally against the Bens.”
“Indeed,” Ensign Benson said and followed Reverend Hengethorg into the tent.
“Captain,” Pam said, tapping her finger tips against the frame of the cabin’s open door,
Captain Standforth looked up. A knife was in his right hand, a palmful of desiccated guts in his left, and a pitiful lump of orange feathers lay before him on the desk, oozing green blood. “Yes, Pam? I’m very busy. I must finish stuffing this Nibelungen nuthatch before it dries out.”
“There’s someone here,” Pam told him. “To see you. A man named Colonel Alderpee.”
“Oh, yes,” the captain said, rising, wiping green phlug from his hands onto his uniform jacket. “I told him he could drop by. He was very interested in the ship.”
“He certainly is,” said Pam.
He certainly was. The captain and Pam met him in a corridor well within the ship, one level above the entry port. Colonel Alderpee, looking very happy, was accompanied by a small, skinny scribe who earnestly scribbled notes to the colonel’s directives: “Granaries along here, I think. Horse stalls below; we’ll need straw. Oh, and moat detail to report at fifteen hundred hours.”
Seeing the captain and Pam, Colonel Alderpee said, “Ah, Captain, delighted! It’s a different fort from anything I’ve seen before, but very adaptable.”
“Colonel, what are you—” the captain began, then stopped with a squawk when he saw, ambling around the far corner of (the corridor, a purple cow, closely followed by a yellow-and-white polka-dotted dog. “What— What’s that?”
“Eh? Oh, the herd,” the colonel answered.
And it was. It was the herd and the herders and the herders’ dogs and the herders’ wives and children. And the army, with banners, marching to the squeal of bagpipes. And the clergy, with collection baskets, and the cooks and the smithies and the leatherworkers and the teachers and the glee club and the magicians and the storytellers and the horses and the hay and the forges and the whips and the thumbscrews and the tents (folded) and the extra arrow feathers and the cooking pots and the bits of string that might be useful someday and the unfinished wooden statues of horses and the supreme commander, Krraich, who shook the captain’s hand very hard and said, “I shall take command now.”
“Oh, my goodness,” the captain said to Pam. “We’ve got the Bens!”
Ensign Benson sat on a low stool in the chaplains’ tent, in the midst of the reverend fathers, both hearing them and asking them questions. And what he’d already heard had not been at all encouraging. He’d entered this den of iniquity intending by easy stages to lead the Antibens around to a more open point of view, but he’d soon seen it was hopeless. Never in his life had he met so many firmly closed minds.
Every approach he’d made to broaden the Benchley Paradox had brought angry frowns and mutterings of Heresy. Ensign Benson could imagine — far too well — what happened to heretics on Gemini, so by now he was simply vamping along, trying to figure out some way to get out of there alive. “if we accept the Runyon Postulate,” he was saying, “that all of life is six to five against, as glossed by Sturgeon’s Second Law, that ninety percent of everything is crud, we can then see that Benchley’s Paradox merely acknowledges that there will at all times be unenlightened people who—”
Were they mumbling “Heresy” again, for God’s sake? Was the word blasphemy being bandied about? “What I’m trying to say—” Ensign Benson began again, wondering what he was trying to say, and Billy came into the tent, crying, “Ensign Benson! Come look!”
“Look?”
“The ship!”
More trouble? “Excuse me,” Ensign Benson told the chaplains. “I must be about my captain’s business.” And he marched right on out of the chaplains’ tent.
To see, down in the center of the valley, the Hopeful filling up with Bens. “Oh, now what?” Ensign Benson cried, at the end of his tether.
“You,” said a knife-thin, harsh-faced resplendently uniformed man pointing a bony finger at Ensign Benson, “shall pay for this treachery.”