All the survey stakes were gone. Generally flyers landed nearby and took off again from the field as soon as the pilot had pulled up the trophy, but one fellow managed to blast a rod with his flashgun while his buddy flew from the other saddle.
"You have no right to do this!" the older Zenith shouted. He must be the ship's captain. "You have no right!"
Yerby stepped off the edge of the ramp so that the first of the jeeps could race aboard past the officers. Mark and Dagmar Wately jumped down beside him. A flyer banked away from the hatch as the pilot cried, "Yee-hah!"
"I have all law and justice on my side!" Yerby said. "And besides that-"
He pointed his flashgun at the undersurface of the starship. Mark turned and covered his eyes with his hands. The laser fired with a hisscrack! The target clanged like a huge bell. A little of the intense saffron pulse leaked through Mark's flesh.
"What are you doing?" screamed the female officer from the edge of the hatch where the jeep's passage had pushed her. "You're shooting at us!"
"I just blew out one of your nozzles," Yerby said calmly. He unsnapped the charging mechanism from the flashgun's butt and spread the sail to the sun. "You got seven more, that'll get you up well enough. But-"
The big frontiersman had never stopped smiling.
"-I'd suggest you take off before this fellow recharges in three minutes or so."
A second jeep drove up the ramp and collided with the first, which was blocking the entrance to the hold. The third and fourth vehicles halted by the outriggers. The surveyors scrambled aboard on foot, glancing over their shoulders in panic at Mark and the Greenwoods.
The starship's rocket nozzles were tungsten, forged hollow so that the liquid-hydrogen fuel could circulate within and chill them in operation. Yerby's laser bolt had blown a fist-sized hole in the outer jacket of the nearest nozzle. If it was used again, the uncooled metal would vaporize in a bright green flash.
The fifth and last jeep skidded to a stop. The Zenith officers were already aboard. The last pair of surveyors ran up the ramp as it lifted.
"I think," Yerby said in satisfaction, "we'd best put a little distance between us and them. They're going to tear up the landscape just as bad leaving as they did when they arrived."
Mark's knees were suddenly so weak that he thought he was going to fall down. He didn't, but he was thankful for Amy's help as he climbed onto the flyer's saddle.
10. Party Time
Where floodlights on the eaves of the Bannock house illuminated the ground, two fiddles and a locally made double bass played tunes for several dozen dancers. Only about half the couples were a man with a woman. A number of men (far in the majority at the gathering) pirouetted by themselves.
At the other end of the courtyard, vocal music wailed moodily from a recorder with over a thousand songs loaded into its memory. The selection keypad didn't work, so the unit repeated over and over a Zenith hit from twenty years before, "Apartment House Heart."
Mark sat on a shed's flat roof, watching the festivities. Eighty or a hundred people ate, danced, and drank-especially drank-in general good fellowship. Flyers and dirigibles in profusion sat on the slopes surrounding the compound.
Folk had gathered spontaneously at the Bannock compound in the aftermath of running the surveyors off. Those who'd been present in Dagmar's soybeans bragged about their heroism to neighbors come too late to take part.
"Does this happen often?" Mark said to Amy beside him. "I'd thought life on the frontier would be, well, lonely."
"There's more of a community here than there is in a Kilbourn neighborhood," Amy said. "They must have come from a hundred miles around, though. Yerby's grant is fifty miles square-that's twenty-five hundred square miles. Most of the neighbors have big tracts too."
The impromptu party would go on at least overnight. The majority of visitors had come in flyers that couldn't take off again until daybreak. Most of the dirigibles had battery backup for their solar collectors, but navigation across the nighted landscape was too chancy to attempt without need.
"I suppose that'll change when Greenwood gets settled," Mark said. "Funny that more people means less fellowship."
He couldn't help sounding sad. It wasn't that folk here were friendly, exactly. Yerby and Dagmar had obviously had their differences over boundary lines, for example. Nevertheless, the two grant holders were members of a single community. Mark was sure that Dagmar would have come equally fast to Yerby's aid in a crisis.
"Do you think that Greenwood has to be settled like Kilbourn, then?" Amy asked. "I think what Yerby's talking about is perfectly possible. There's a practically infinite number of human habitable planets, so why should any one of them have more than, say, ten thousand residents?"
"Yeah, I agree," Mark said. "But how are you going to keep people from settling? You heard those Zeniths today. They were surveying for a planned community of fifty thousand. So long as somebody can make a fortune by putting up housing for immigrant drafts from Earth, that's what he's going to do. Maybe the immigrants would be happier scattered in little communities of a hundred or so like here, but that's not the way the planners in Paris arrange things."
"Maybe it's time for Paris to stop making the arrangements," Amy said.
"There's enough people on Quelhagen saying that the Protector's only in charge because she's got a couple thousand troops," Mark said. "But she does have the troops."
Dr. Jesilind walked by the shed, peering at the faces of the folk he passed. Mark held himself very still, hoping Jesilind would continue on. With the same thought in her mind, Amy pulled her dangling legs up onto the roof.
The motion drew Jesilind's attention. "Ah, there you are, Amy!" he said. "And, ah, Mr. Maxwell."
The shed was seven feet high in front, where Mark and Amy sat, though it slanted lower in the back. The doctor mentally measured the effort needed to mount, then decided to remain where he was. "I'd been hoping to find you," he said. "Amy, could I bring you refreshment?"
The trio began to play "Jimmie Crack Corn." The bass had a remarkably pure resonance for an instrument that looked as crude as a packing crate. The dancers formed for a reel, regardless of the sex of their pairings. More spectators joined the circle, many of them holding drinking jars of Bannock whiskey in one hand.
Amy's fingers drummed on the edge of the roof, a ridged plate of cellulose plastic rather than boards of raw wood that would need shingles to be rainproof. "No thank you," she said. She turned her face deliberately toward Mark and continued their discussion with, "If Greenwood had its own government, it could limit density of development."
"That's a fine idea, but it won't work, dear girl," Jesilind said from beneath them. The doctor's voice made it clear that he understood law and government. Amy was simply naive. "Since Mr. Maxwell and your brother failed in their mission to get troops from Dittersdorf-"
Mark stiffened. He didn't speak.
"-the only government Greenwood 's going to get is some flunky from the Zenith bureaucracy. According to Yerby, the surveyors today said the investor they were working for was the Vice-Protector of Zenith. I don't imagine he's going to appoint a vicar who'll limit immigration."
"I didn't have to hear Yerby," Amy said. "I was there, Doctor. While you were no doubt at your studies."
"Amy," Mark said. He'd decided to ignore Jesilind's comments. "I agree with you, but people just don't do things the way they ought to."
"We'd better start doing things the way we ought to," Amy snapped. "Because if it's mankind versus the universe, Mark, the universe is going to win sooner or later! We can't just go on turning every planet we settle into a garbage dump."