"But if aliens do exist, good or bad, you do have precise instructions?"
"We got some pretty comprehensive manuals when we set out. As far as that precise situation goes, I've never had cause to look, though no doubt it exercised our Founding Father when we first landed, along with a lot of other concerns. I'll have to get Brother Librarian to find them. But we have to be orthodox. We're too far from the Holy Father to risk departing from his instructions. Perhaps he'll send us a laser message."
If Earth's lasers aren't all busy with another thing, I thought.
"Don't go out at night," said Dimity. "Keep your lights on and your doors locked. Don't go out unarmed even in daylight. Don't go out alone."
"Now there's something odd," said Dimity as we flew toward Munchen .
Although ground-effect air cars were common, there was still plenty of wheeled traffic, particularly for heavy hauling. The road we were passing over turned south and led to the industrial districts of Glenrothes and Gelsenkirchen, then on to Dresden (still sometimes Neue Dresden), which had been created deliberately to recapitulate the history of its famous namesake town on Old Earth, and was famous for its experiments in low-gravity baroque architecture and artistic china.
Glenrothes and Gelsenkirchen shared a small landing field well out of the way of the main port's traffic and had some industries based on recycling redundant or obsolescent space material, the equivalent of old-time ship-breaking. Old, material-fatigued or overly damaged spacecraft were disassembled there and their component parts generally taken to Munchen for resale. A spacecraft life system, for example, had all sorts of uses for someone needing a habitat when establishing a new farm, whether on land or sea, and their complex computer hardware and powerful engines always found plenty of uses in things like industrial process control and mining. Sometimes, of course, old ships were cannibalized for new ones.
There were plenty of spaceships getting hard wear in our cluttered and dusty system, filled as it was with minable asteroids, and ship-breaking was quite a busy industry. It reminded me a little, and unpleasantly, of the way criminals had been dissembled for organ banks until modern medicine made such customs unnecessary, which was silly and irrational of me. But possibly others felt the same, because, apart from the fact that it was often a noisy business, it was kept well away from the city.
We were passing over a column of transports carrying parts of spacecraft, the bulk of main engines, including toroid sections of what looked like a ramscoop collector-head, being the most obvious. But on this road it was an everyday sight.
"What's odd about that?" I asked.
"The direction they're traveling," said Dimity. "They're taking those engines to Glenrothes Field, not from it."
"I heard there had been a special meeting called last night," said Dimity. "Would it have been about what I think it was about?"
"I can't say." Again, that was all the answer needed.
"I told you about the Sea Statue."
"Oh, yes." We had talked for a long time after returning from the monastery. She had told me more about the near-catastrophic attempt to open the ancient stasis field discovered on Earth many years ago. I had had a vague idea: What had been learned as a result of "opening" the Sea Statue was knowledge similar to the knowledge in the Dark Ages that the Earth was sphericaclass="underline" A lot of educated people knew about it but didn't talk about it much. "What's the connection?"
"It appears likely that the ancients seeded this part of the galaxy at least with common life-forms."
Yes." We had both studied what was known about the two-billion-year-departed ancient races and their omnicidal war, which wasn't much.
"That's probably why our plants and animals can grow on Wunderland, and why we can eat a lot of Wunderland plants and animals."
"Yes." I was beginning to see where she was leading, and didn't like it.
"Tigripards eat our sheep. Beam's beast bites poison us. Advokats eat our garbage. Zeitungers eat our garbage and affect our moods as well… Something that the old SETI people could never have foreseen, but we should: Beings from at least two different star systems have biochemistry alike enough for them to be able to eat each other."
"So it seems."
"It puts some of my… mathematical speculations… in a rather different light, doesn't it?" I had thought that before. But the full implications of what she was saying took a moment to hit me. Then it was like a physical blow. "We've got to get you out!"
"That may not be so easy. Where am I going to go?"
"We've got to get you back to Earth."
"How?"
There seemed no answer to that. I was beyond regretting that I had basically confirmed to her what the previous night's meeting had been about.
Chapter 5
That fatal drollery called a representative government
Despite the seriousness of what I had found, several days passed before I got a chance to see Grotius. I filed a report with the police but received a mere mechanical acknowledgment. Grotius, when I did see him at a meeting of the committee, was abstracted and uninterested. He looked weary and surprisingly aged. My report of evidence of multiple homicides produced little more than a shake of the head. "I've no officers to spare now," he said. "Most of them are busy trying to find out how to reinvent the wheel. Or they're at the spaceport, working on the meteor guardships.
"And I need them in the streets, as well as everywhere else. One thing we've learned already is that a bunch of fifty people can't keep a secret. There have been rumors in the streets for days. It'll be on the newscast in a few hours. We can't stop that… We could, actually, but it would do more harm than good. My cops are so busy that I'm expecting crime too. There are almost no police on patrol. We've got a few extra strakkakers in store and I'm issuing them. At least that will look threatening if there's an emergency. "
"How many strakkakers have we got?" That was Talbot.
"I don't know, exactly. We had the one batch made for police needs, plus replacements and spares."
When?"
"Years ago. The factory's closed down now."
"Don't you think we should open it again? Fast!"
"What for?" A pause, then, "Oh, I see."
"There are police message-lasers, too. We can dial them up to weapons."
"Really?"
"Of course. It was always in the design."
"Yes. I see."
"I should clear it with the council."
"Later."
Grotius looked at him, then opened a hand-phone and began to speak fast. The Defense Committee had taken an executive action.
"I've been at the library all day," said Talbot. "Reading every book on war I could find. There aren't many."
"ARM went through our library before we left Earth. There are some records of old wars in a general way, even some copies of ancient visual films. There are a few books. But so little that is actually of practical use. They didn't want us building armies."
"No."
"I found one on a Japanese attack on some American sea-ships at Hawaii, Day of Infamy. The American ships had guns to defend themselves against flying engines, covered by awnings. An officer on one began untying the lines that held the awnings in place as the flying engines attacked. A cook ran up and cut them with a knife. We have to think differently.
"Grotius, we don't want one factory making strakkakers. We want every factory we can get on line. We want factories making factories making strakkakers. Now!"
"No! Strakkakers aren't the be-all and end-all. They are police weapons of last resort. We may want battlefield weapons, space weapons! Tie up too much of our industrial production in one thing and you lose in other ways."