First Cycle Part 3

"I'm sure we would. How long are you staying at Vallado? We'll have a list of what we want ready for you when you pa.s.s through here again."

With his new-found friend Koshtro, Dwallo examined the train which was waiting at the platform. Although he had made the cuts of the drawings to ill.u.s.trate the book his gang had published, Dwallo had never seen the actual locomotive and cars before. The locomotive was like a miniature steamboat engine, with a brick furnace and a sheet-iron boiler, mounted on a wheeled platform of iron-plated timbers, with the stack and the two cylinders in front. Behind it was the fuel wagon, which could hold either wood or coal, and the freight wagons, and the two pa.s.senger wagons at the rear. The wheels had wide f.l.a.n.g.ed iron tires; the track was built of squared timbers, faced with angle-iron on the inside. While Dwallo was examining the train, the little cannon on the platform boomed.

He and Koshto hastened to get seats in one of the pa.s.senger wagons.

"I'm from the Sky Lake country," Koshto told him. "I have the book your gang printed about the railroad. My gang and a couple of other farming gangs are teaming together to build a railroad of our own. We have a wonderful country for grain, but we've no place to trade it close enough for the wagon-trains. We make a little whiskey, but we can only trade so much of that; they raise sugar-roots on one side of us, and make rum, and they make fruit-brandy on the other side of us. So we decided to build a railroad, and I was sent up here to study this one.

"I've been here at Nardavo's three days," he continued. "I don't like this town. That fellow who tried to steal your bag was the fifth thief I've seen shot in these three days.

The first one I've shot myself, but still- "I've also seen maybe a dozen brawls, three or four of them serious enough to kill a person or two. There are too many gangs in this town, and none of them willing to see to it that things are kept peaceful. I'm going to recommend that the gangs in our railroad, when we get it built, see to keeping order in our railhead town. Any other gangs who want to come in can do so like trading-gangs in a craftsmen's village, on the understanding that they're guests, and have to behave themselves."

The locomotive made a series of whoos.h.i.+ng sounds, and then the train gave a couple of jerks, a jolt or two, and started creeping forward. "I noticed that there was a big crowd in town, seemed to be just standing around fingering their rifles and waiting for something to happen," Dwallo said as the train picked up speed.

"Oh, that. That's on account of the Thurkkas," Koshtro told him. "You've heard about that?" Dwallo shook his head. "Savages from over on the other side of the Rim Country,"

Koshtro went on to enlighten him. "There's been bad times over there-drought, cattle- plagues, gang-wars-and thousands of those people have migrated. They went through the Rim Country and onto the plains on this side. The ranching gangs wouldn't let them settle there; pushed them on, and they've come on into the Central Mountain country.About a thousand of them came down Crooked River; the gangs upstream didn't try to stop them, so they're camped below the lowest village on Crooked River, and starting to move into the isthmus. The gangs up Sulfur River are determined not to let them through; all the gangs have sent people to ride patrol and stop them."

Koshtro was riding to the end of the line, to get a look at the Bollardo Gang's repair shops. Dwallo bid him goodbye at Vallado's Village and got off. The Vallado Gang lived in a number of big barn-like houses against the side of the mountain; their furnaces and forge and rolling-mill were a kilometer up the river; there was a trestle-bridge carrying a track to and from the ore-pits. The furnace-stacks were blazing, and a couple of heavy drop-hammers boomed intermittently. A half-grown youngster helped him up the path to the houses with his box and bedroll.

A girl met him on the wide veranda as he climbed the front steps. He introduced himself and asked if Kursallo Vallado were about.

"He's up at the works," she said. "He'll be coming down in a few hours. I'm Sharra; Kursallo's mother and mine are sisters. He's told us about you, from the time you were at Mirror Lake Rendezvous with him. And we have a lot of books your gang printed."

She and the youngster helped him in with his things. She showed him the room where he could sleep, and the bath, where fifteen or twenty of the gang, who had just come from the furnaces, were was.h.i.+ng the soot out of each other's fur with a fresh-smelling soap. He ate with this group, and later Sharra and several others showed him around the living quarters and the works, and the mines across the river.

"My gang needs a new printing-machine," Dwallo told his friend Kursallo, as they and a dozen others sat on the west veranda, out of the glare of the sun. "We decided to contract your gang to make it because we like your work on heavy machinery, and because we could get it quicker and safer from you over the railroad. This will be a big machine; it's to be run by steam instead of by hand."

"I never heard of a printing-machine run by steam," one of the older Vallados said.

"Something that's just been invented?"

"Yes, we invented it ourselves. You see, the paper-making gang we trade with has invented a way of making paper in long rolls instead of sheets. They can make, in one strip, enough paper to reach from here to the railroad station," Dwallo said.

There were exclamations of surprise, but not of incredulity. If Dwallo had said that somebody could make a strip of paper long enough to reach to s.h.i.+ning Sister, it would have been accepted. People simply did not make statements that were contrary to fact.

One of the younger men nodded thoughtfully. "So, if you have a long strip of paper, on a roll, you'd run it between two rollers with the type on them. How wide is this roll of paper?"

"About two arms-widths," Dwallo said, holding his arms wide apart.

The young man nodded again. "Yes," he said. "For that you'd need steam-power. It would take the strength of fifty toulths, at least. What sort of steam-engine are you going to use? We have a nice design that might be appropriate. Do you want us to build one for you?"

"No. We have a used engine from a steamboat that wrecked itself below Klamdammo's Landing. The Kwissato Gang salvaged it for us. Very clever job, too.

We're doing a book about their methods. But we will need the printing machine builtentirely." He picked up a leather tube he had brought out onto the veranda with him; pulling off the cap, he withdrew a roll of thin paper. "Here are the plans for it."

They were pa.s.sed from hand to hand, among much murmuring and continuous appreciative exclamations.

"This is good designing, Dwallo," Kursallo approved. "With a machine like this, you could print more books in one waking-period than you could make by hand in a sun-trip!"

"We antic.i.p.ate a problem in keeping up with the job of binding all the books we expect to print with this new machine," Dwallo said. "But that's the sort of problem we like."

"There's only one thing, Dwallo," one of the older women said. "I don't know whether we can make this printing machine or not. Not that we lack the skill-I'll take a bath in the blood of whoever claims that! But we lack the time and the hands. It's getting harder every year to work the ore pits, and if we put enough of our people to mining, we don't have enough to work the furnaces. And about a third of our gang are carrying rifles on the isthmus, riding patrol against the Thurkkas."

"And then the Bollardos are going to build another line, from Red Lake to Sweet.w.a.ter," another said. "They're going to need facing for seventy-five thousand lances of track, and two new engines, and a lot of wagons. They want to do that in three years, too-"

Dwallo took back his plans and spread them out in front of him. "I'm sorry to hear all of this," he said. "We've really planned on having this new printing-machine, and I would be happier with your gang doing it. Now let me see; we can use timber for some of this, and we have a few of our own good blacksmiths who can forge most of the smaller parts.

I'll go over these plans again and cut the work for you down to what we just cannot do ourselves... Incidentally, I have some new books in that leather box. Why don't you look through it while I make some preliminary notes."

As soon as the box was opened, Kursallo s.n.a.t.c.hed a copy of the steam-engine book, leafing through it very rapidly. "I want one of these,-Dwallo!" he exclaimed.

"Oh, here's something I want!" Sharra cried, taking another book. "I never imagined there was such a book!"

Dwallo glanced up to look at the cover: A History of the Different Attempts to Scale the Peak of Skystabber, he read. "Yes, that was printed only three sun-trips ago. Are you interested in mountain climbing?"

"In climbing Skystabber, yes. The highest place in the world, right under s.h.i.+ning Sister." She looked up at the pale silver globe in the sky, and then to the distant horizon.

"You can see Skystabber from here-there, in the notch at the head of the valley. Some day I'm going to climb it."

During the next two waking periods, Dwallo made other trips around the Vallado Gang's ore-pits, smelters, and steel-works. The ore-pits, worked continuously for centuries, had gone deep into the mountains; they were becoming progressively harder to mine. The Vallados were working hard, by any standard acceptable to any craftsmen's gang-at least a quarter of the time-sleep periods included. And of the two-hundred-odd members of the gang, at least seventy were out riding patrol on the isthmus against the Thurkka menace.

The second train in from Red Lake after Dwallo's arrival brought news of fighting.

The Thurkkas had made a ma.s.s drive toward a thinly-guarded stretch of open country onthe left of Crooked River. Only the arrival of a large party from Nardavo's Town, with the cannon from the railroad station, had stopped them; and at that one band of several hundred had broken through and were camped on a rocky hill inside the isthmus.

There was a ma.s.s-meeting of the Vallados to decide whether they should send reinforcements, and whom they could spare. As he listened to the arguments, an idea suddenly struck Dwallo.

"Will you let an outsider offer a word?" he asked. "Then, instead of trying to wipe these Thurkkas out, why don't you bring a couple of hundred of them here, and put them to work in your ore-pits? Feed them, and let them earn their food by digging ore for you.

They were probably hard workers until the drought forced them out of their homes."

"You mean take these savages into our gang?" somebody shouted in horror.

"Certainly not! Let them form a gang of their own to work for you. Trade them for their work under a definite contract. Furnish them tools, and give them so much in trade for every cartload of ore they dig. And you could let them do shovel-work around the furnaces, too. That way your own gang would be free to do the real work at the mill and the forges."

There was silence for a moment. "Maybe it would work, at that," one of the older men considered. "Digging ore and shoveling coal is nothing but toulth work. Why, if we had a couple of hundred of those people in the ore-pits and on the coal-pile, we could build another furnace and put in a couple more hammers."

"We'd need a few of our people to show them what to do, and fire the blasting-shots, of course- Dwallo said nothing else. His suggestion had caught the imagination of the Vallados.

Now they'd be able to build his power-driven printing-machine, and his gang would be trading books all around the Central Mountains.

It never occurred to him that he had just invented the wage system.

Chapter Eight

Zaithu was an apostate Puzzan priest, as Puzza himself had been a renegade from the earlier polytheism. It was his thesis that Puzza had been an impudent and sacrilegious pretender and that his self-styled Successors were blasphemers and perverters of the Sacred Truth. That truth, Zaithu held, was found only in The Books of Tisse, and the individual, equal in the Mind of Vran with all others, must interpret them according to his own conscience. Instead of solemn liturgies, the religious services of Zaithu's followers consisted simply of readings from and discussions of The Books; whenever disagreement grew too pa.s.sionate over some obscure pa.s.sage, the service-leader-elected by the congregation; there were no separate priests-would call for prayer and meditation.

The new religion took liberty-loving Dudak by storm, in spite of all that the Puzzan hierarchy could do. A series of bitter religious wars blazed up; in the end the Successor, Glavrad XXII, and his council of Archpriests, were expelled and sought refuge at Tullon, the now-decayed seat of the ancient Empire. Freed from the strangling toils of religious absolutism, and lacking any powerful feudal n.o.bility or any strong guild tradition, Dudak plunged into a cultural and technological renaissance.

The two smaller continents of Gir-Zashon and Thurv, screened by Nimsh and Vashtur from the Central Sea, had been discovered in the third century of the Tissen Era; the discoverers had been pirates, interested only in a safe base of depredations. They had made friends, and finally amalgamated with, the natives, a barbarian race calling themselves the Hoz-Hozgaz, and had taught them the arts of civilization. In time, the descendants of the Hoz-Hozgaz and their pirate mentors turned from the sea and began exploiting the interior of Gir-Zashon and exploring the neighboring continent of Thurv, forgotten by the busy world around the Central Sea.

If they were forgotten, they were nonetheless not allowed to forget that world.

Refugees trickled across the straits, seeking a haven from war and persecution, bringing news. One of these refugees described the steam-turbine engine which had been built on Zabash. He had been foreman in a construction crew which built a few of them. Within his lifetime, he saw hundreds of them in operation on Gir-Zashon, and died rich and honored as a result. One of the Hoz-Hozgaz who had become interested in this new source of power began using briquettes of charcoal mixed with fish-oil for fuel; another discovered a method of refining fish-oil and invented a burner for it.

On Dudak, too, the steam-turbine found favor. There the fuel problem-the turbine is a hungry beast-was solved in the dense jungles along the inner coast, where two growing-seasons a year provided unlimited fermentable vegetable matter. The Dudakans invented an alcohol-burner and became distillers instead of fishermen. They also invented a steam-jet engine for s.h.i.+p propulsion.

The old rigid world of feudal estates and mercantile guilds shattered like gla.s.s all around the Central Sea. Merchants fumed, lords and kings stormed, priests thundered anathemas-but the s.h.i.+ps of Dudak could out sail the merchantmen and outfight the war- galleys of Zabash and Vashtur and Nimsh. They could only be met by imitation and improvement. And so, in every kingdom and city-state, for self-preservation, steam- turbines and steam-jet engines and s.h.i.+ps of the new pattern were being built.The search for sources of fuel became frantic. Dudak and Gvarda, now co-religionists and allies, controlled the alcohol-producing jungles. Zabash took to the sea with a fleet of trawlers, and, unable to get sufficient fish-oil from the Central Sea, pushed out into the unknown waters beyond the ring of continents. Some s.h.i.+ps, venturing far beyond the accepted limits of safety, found a chain of reefs and islands encircling the Horizon Zone.

It was these venturesome seamen, first of all Thala.s.sans, who sighted the globe of Hetaira on the distant skyline.

On Vashtur, in search of new fuels, the properties of pota.s.sium nitrate were discovered, as Talito Isleeta had demonstrated them almost two thousand years before and a quarter of a million kilometers away on Hetaira. On Vashtur, too, some body tried a mixture of charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter. Unfortunately, a fairly large batch was mixed in a fairly deep vessel. One of the survivors, fleeing an accusation of sorcery, carried an account of the experiment to Gir-Zashon. The Hoz-Hozgaz were deeply interested; they had access to large deposits of both sulfur and nitrates. In a short time they developed a really reliable black powder mixture. It was first used in bombs, to be thrown from mangonels; somebody found out how to make rockets, and shortly after somebody else deduced the principle of the gun.

By this time the s.h.i.+ps of Zabash were making regular trips to the Outward Islands. On several of the larger, where there was fresh water and vegetation, they established fis.h.i.+ng bases and oil refineries. Their s.h.i.+ps began venturing beyond the islands and into the Ocean Sea, where they discovered sea-monsters of a size hitherto undreamed of; things bigger than the largest s.h.i.+p, against which skippers sometimes were forced to use their mangonels and catapults, when the beasts got too inquisitive. Many s.h.i.+ps never came back from such encounters, but a few returned towing gigantic corpses from which enough oil would be tried and refined to load the largest tanker.

The people of Gir-Zashon and Thurv, too, built steam-jet s.h.i.+ps; they established bases and refineries in the Outward Islands. Word had reached them of the monsters of the Ocean Sea, and they fitted out s.h.i.+ps to hunt them and kill them with rockets and gunfire.

It was some time before the Zabashans learned of the new weapons developed on Gir- Zashon, but in time they were compound ing gunpowder and arming their s.h.i.+ps with cannon.

Collisions between fis.h.i.+ng fleets occurred. For the first time in Thala.s.san history, guns thundered back and forth in sea-battles, and rockets left their fiery trails. Armored wars.h.i.+ps appeared, hunting fishermen instead of fish. A flotilla of gunboats from Zabash caught and destroyed a fis.h.i.+ng fleet of Gir-Zashon; a Hoz-Hozgaz fleet, striking at a Zabashan base while the fis.h.i.+ng-boats and gunboats were away, ma.s.sacred the inhabitants, filled their tanks with oil, and blew up or burned the installations. When the news of this action got back to Karkasha, the capital of Gir-Zashon, another fleet was sent to forestall retaliation by attacking the Zabashan naval base of Harsh. The Fish Oil War had finally reached the Central Sea.

Chapter Nine

With the labor of two hundred hired Thurkkas, the Vallado Gang was so able to increase production that the Bollardo Gang finished the Sweet-water branch of the Red Lake To Sulfur Hiver Railroad by the year 14, using another eight hundred Thurkkas as track-laborers. These, on completion of the work, migrated to Sky Lake in time to help complete the railroad Koshtro Evarro and his a.s.sociates were building. The Sky Lake Line was finished in the Year 16.

In the Year 22, a combination of wagon-trading gangs, discerning the shape of the future, built a railroad to connect the Sky Lake Line with the Bollardos' Sweet.w.a.ter Branch. Halfway around the Central Mountains, three more railroads began building, sending to the Rim Country for more laborers. A line was built in the Rim Country in 54, extending almost fifteen hundred kilometers; in 78, the Central Mountains had been almost completely girdled, and the old tracks of iron-faced timbers were being rapidly replaced by steel rails. In 84, the Short Circle Line was built by a combination of railroad gangs; three thousand kilometers in length, it went completely around the great peaks at the middle of the mountain country, connecting with all the lines running in from the lake country.

As railroads and lake steamboats multiplied, outlets were provided for more and more goods. The Vallado Gang, for example, were forced to invent and build steam-shovels to facilitate mining, and to construct a railroad of their own to the source of Sulfur River to open new ore-pits. By this time, they had come to concentrate almost entirely upon rails, engines, and heavy machinery.

Small manufacturing gangs, depending upon local trade, began to vanish. Some merged with other gangs; some, unable to keep abreast of the changing industrial pattern, went out of business, their members going to work for wages for other gangs. A few concentrated upon quality handcrafts for a growing luxury trade; the artist as distinct from the artisan began to come into his own.

Wage-employment became more and more common, although the working out of barter-wages sometimes became incredibly complex in this society without money. The cleavage between labor and owners.h.i.+p grew sharper with the growing importance of the industrial plant, and the member of a hired gang watched, with each year, the increase of wealth which he had produced but in which he did not share. Resentment smouldered; for the first time Hetaira was experiencing what might be called a genuine cla.s.s-struggle.

There was even job-compet.i.tion; gangs of migratory workers in the agricultural and construction trades fought over employment, sometimes so bitterly that the survivors of two contending gangs would be barely enough for the available jobs. By the end of the Second Century of the Railroad, almost every industry was employing hired workers.

Among these, the idea began to spread that anybody who did work, at least on a permanent basis, for a gang, should be allowed to join that gang. There were demands for larger and larger shares in the profits, and refusals to work when these demands were not met. There was fighting when gangs of migratory workers were hired to replace the strikers. There were campaigns of sabotage, pilferage and s.h.i.+rking. There were strikes in which the workers occupied their places of employment and refused admittance to theiremployers; and when the employing gangs tried to prevent workers from bringing food and arms with them to work, there was more trouble. Occasionally a band of dissatisfied workers would form around the nucleus of a small manufacturing gang being forced out of business and organize a gang in compet.i.tion with their former employers; then there would be shootings and raids and bombings and arson.

The apex of violence was reached in 206, in the Sugar Valley Ma.s.sacre. A fairly small but wealthy gang of sugar-root planters, the Halzorro Gang, employed over a thousand workers, having cleared an entire valley and planted it in sugar-root. They had refineries and a distillery, and a railroad of their own to get their sugar and rum to market. While there had never been a page of Hetairan history defaced by any record of actual chattel slavery, conditions on the Halzorro plantations came nastily close to it. The Halzorros had even hired a gang of bandits to help them bully their workers into submission. They overreached themselves, however, when they tried to disarm the workers. Nothing of the sort had ever been heard of before; on Hetaira, the right to keep and bear arms was equivalent to the right to breathe.

Rebellion exploded instantly; inside half a waking-period the workers had killed all the Halzorros, to the youngest child, and all their hired bravos, and had taken the plantation. There was no destruction or looting or needless brutality; when the last Halzorro was dead, the workers returned quietly to their tasks, this time as owners. No authority existed to which anybody could appeal, were there anybody left to appeal; each gang was sovereign, and the sovereign Halzorros had been overthrown by revolution. The victors adopted the style of the Halzorro Gang and continued doing business under it.

Less violently, the same process had been going on everywhere. The Vallado Gang, a quarter of a century before, had admitted all their workers to gang members.h.i.+p. Neither the railroad gangs nor the Telegraph Gang had ever used wage-workers except on temporary construction jobs, and construction gangs had long ago become contractors, with their own tools, carts, toulths, and even steam-shovels, steam-rollers, and steam- tractors. The wage system, having served its purpose in the industrialization of Hetaira, decayed and vanished even before the invention of money.

Sharra Vallado joined in an attempt to scale Skystabber in the Year of the Railroad 17.

It was a well-equipped expedition, all veteran climbers, but it was brought to a stop on the north wall, at the second bench from the top. Four years later she made another attempt; of a party of eight, only she and two others returned alive. She made her final attempt in 27, accompanied only by two novice climbers. None of the three was seen again alive. The bodies of her companions were found two years later after a snow-slide; in 122, the Paldonno Expedition found Sharra Vallado's remains on a ledge, within a thousand feet of the summit, identifying her by her rusted ice-axe and a silver belt- buckle. They, themselves, could climb no higher. They cut her name and gang-symbol into the rock, left her bones where she had stopped using them, and carried down her axe, buckle, and rusted dirk, and deposited them in the museum at the Climbers' Rendezvous.

It was the Kalgravno Expedition, in 277, which finally reached the summit. Eight students and two instructors from the Kalgravno Rendezvous, in Traplino Valley, made their climb along the south face and crawled up a slanting knife-edged ridge until they found a crack extending all the way to the top of the highest spire. From below, the spire had seemed as sharp as a needle, but when they reached it they found, at the very tip, a cuplike depression almost fifty lances across.They cut their names and gang-symbols into the rock, and the date. One of the boys opened a tin of petroleum jelly and lit it under a snow-filled pot; after they drank tea and ate dehydrated stew, they lay on their backs, looking straight up at s.h.i.+ning Sister.

"This is the closest anybody has ever gotten to her," a girl said, putting her binoculars to her eyes and staring at the pale silver globe. "I can see some of the little islands along the Horizon Zone. I wonder what the other side's like. Do you suppose there's any land on the other side?"

"Very likely," Dirven Kalgravno, the party-leader, said. "She and our planet were both parts of a big planet beyond the orbit of Varri, that was broken up when the Red One entered our system, according to Dibbilo Stonyo. The chemical compositions of our planet and s.h.i.+ning Sister must be pretty much the same, so the surface conditions are probably pretty similar. Except, of course, that s.h.i.+ning Sister seems to have a surplus of water. But I'd say there's a good chance that most of the other side is dry land. Those islands must correspond to our Rim Country mountains."

"Why would that be?"

"Well, Dibbilo's theory of how gravitic attraction works shows that the water on s.h.i.+ning Sister would bunch up on the side of the planet attracted by us. And, since s.h.i.+ning Sister always keeps the same side turned toward us, the other side would always have less water. So it all depends on the depth of the planet-ocean. If it is as we think it is, then there must be a fair amount of land on the far side."

"But we'll never really know, will we?" the girl asked.

Dirven shook his head. "No. s.h.i.+ning Sister will always keep that side turned toward us. If there are people on the other side, they may not even know we exist."

"But why do you think we'll never know?" one of the boys, Kartho Alvarrarro, spoke up. "Halli Zarrono got her glider off the ground with a charge of ordinary rifle-powder.

One of these days, somebody will invent a special rocket explosive that will lift some kind of glider free of gravitation, and then-"

"It's theoretically possible," Vandro Kalgravno, the other instructor, said, rummaging under his fur coveralls for a pressed-food ration bar. "But there's one great problem that we cannot, at the present time, overcome."

Dirven turned to his fellow instructor. "One problem?" he asked. "I see a toulth-load of problems. The acceleration of a vehicle shot into s.p.a.ce might crush the pa.s.sengers. In s.p.a.ce there is no air; a s.p.a.ce-glider would have to carry its own air supply. Steering a glider in s.p.a.ce would take new methods, since there's no air to work against. And those are just the problems that come to mind without trying. What is this overwhelming single problem?"

"You've just said it," Vandro said. "The sheer magnitude of the undertaking. All of the things you have mentioned, and any others you can think of, can be solved. But think of the planning, the materials needed, the different gangs that would have to work together.

Probably hundreds of gangs before the project succeeded. How would anybody be able to organize such a thing? How would anybody be able to trade for everything that would be needed?"

Dirvan shook his head. "I don't know."

To be an efficient trading medium, money must either be something which compresses enormous worth into small bulk and weight, or it must be something generally acceptedas redeemable in valuable commodities, or it must be guaranteed by a private group of known wealth and honesty, or a government of such power as to make it valuable by fiat.

There was nothing of such value to a Hetairan that a few pounds of it were worth, say, a steamboat-load of grain or a trainload of steel. There were warehouse certificates, showing that the bearer had in storage so much grain or hides or whiskey or steel, but over a hundred gangs in and around Arrowwood Valley had been impoverished in 267, when a steamboat loaded with blasting-paste had blown up at the dock of Balsambo Town, destroying the warehouses and the merchandise for which they held script. And there was nothing on Hetaira with any of the powers and attributes of a central government; the mere idea of any government mechanism outside of the gang was alien to the Hetairan mind.

Not that the existence of any organization larger than the gang was, any longer, inconceivable. There had been many activities requiring the close cooperation of several gangs, and combinations had been formed to carry on many undertakings. There was the Rendezvous Combine, dating back to the Sixth Century Before the Railroad, for the purpose of exchanging and preserving scientific and technological information. It had been the Rendezvous Combine which had made possible the general use of breech- loading firearms by setting standards for chamber dimensions and barrel width to which all gunmaking and cartridge-manufacturing gangs had conformed. After that success, they had established screw-thread standards, and had taken the old, inexact and varying linear measure, the lance-length, and set up a standard lance, divisible into hundred- thousandths.

There were the Music Combines, and the Rifle and Revolver combine, which now set standards for manufacturing gangs and held annual matches, and the Climbers' Combine.

Perhaps most successful was the Railroad Combine, which insured uniform track gauges, set standards for load limits and wheel-and-axle construction and track grades and curves, traced cars which had been shunted from one road to another, and handled matters of inter-road fares and freight-bill tolls. There were even local protection combines, an early example of which was the force which had been raised at the time of the Thurkka invasion.

So Hetaira was not unready for the proposal of Kartho Alvararro when he called the meeting at Stockade Point, overlooking Timber Lake, in 307.