embark on a naval war, nor to put what few arms we have into the hands of our fishermen. If we have to forfeit an occasional boatload of fish, so be it. At the moment, there does not seem to be any great peril to the crews. If the raids persist and become more worrisome, or if it turns out that there are more pirate ships sailing the seas, this policy should be immediately reviewed.
Wil Hardy wrote quickly, grateful that the two leaders spoke in more or less complete sentences. But there was a gnawing feeling of doubt and fear in his gut.
Second, this incident compels us to address without delay a matter we had hoped to defer: national defense—or, since we have no formal nation to speak of, let us say military security. We suggest that Deck Officer Carl Gustafsson, representing our Governing Council, and Stephen Healey, representing the Ulundi Indaba, be designated to co-chair a Defense Committee. There are military people among both the Inlanders and the Newcomers, and a small number of them should be convened to make preliminary strategic plans.
Obviously, from what we have heard, we must consider the possibility of attack from the sea. But it is only prudent also to consider potential invasion by land. We have been assuming that outside of the Ulundi Circle there is nothing but death and devastation. Yet we seem to have forgotten about Madagascar, even though we were told it was partly within the safety zone. And there may well be other pockets of survival about which we know nothing. Not that we should expect other survivors to be hostile. But it would be folly to make no preparations at all.
Sensible, Wil thought, although far from reassuring.
The Defense Committee should make plans for armed forces—probably in the form of militia, since we cannot afford to assign people full time to military service. And the Committee must make recommendations concerning armaments—the use of such guns as we have, and the manufacture of ammunition and new weapons. This manufacture will naturally have to be processed through the Joint Planning Subcommittee. Difficult trade-offs will be entailed, since we cannot let the production of armaments constrain vital industrial development. In this domain, final decisions should be authorized by the entire Coordinating Committee.
The enterprise is inherently complex and dangerous. It is crucial that any armed forces we establish must be completely under control of the communal authorities. We do not want military juntas in a position to usurp authority. Yet to do nothing is to leave ourselves helpless in the face of potential aggression.
Wil Hardy felt a cold chill grip his spine and he tried to shake off a feeling of impending doom. No… it couldn’t be, after all that the group had so far endured… He and Sarah and the rest of them were destined to survive, to meet any challenge or danger. Weren’t they?
Later, when Wil crawled under the blanket next to Sarah, he was relieved that she stirred but did not awaken. Time enough the next day to talk about the strange new turn of events. Happily, compared to what the survivors had lived through since Christmas, this new encounter had to be considered a relatively minor threat. In the telling, Hardy planned to emphasize the fanciful drama of the incident while downplaying the element of danger.
Yet it was a long time before he fell asleep. Once he had started to think about pirates, it was difficult to stop. It wasn’t only the existence of Queen Ranavalona that disturbed him; there was the phenomenon of piracy itself. Captain Kidd is commissioned by the British government to protect merchant ships, and he decides instead to prey upon them. Greed? Simple perversity? So be it. There had been few human societies in history without buccaneers of some kind. The aggressive impulse is as old as
Having reached this rational, dispassionate conclusion, he slept.
But even as he slept, he dreamed. Deep in his subconscious, and concurrently far off in the distant reaches of the universe, a sloop with red sails sliced through foam-topped waves, a pirate queen at the wheel… mysterious, romantic, ominous, and ultimately beyond the reach of logic.
8
Alf Richards gaveled the meeting to order with a wooden mallet designed to crack shellfish, an item he had appropriated from the ship’s galley. He glowered at latecomers and proceeded immediately to the business at hand.
The opening presentation at this, the second meeting of the Joint Planning Subcommittee, was scheduled to be given by Ichiro Nagasaka, the group’s most eminent authority on iron and steel. Nagasaka was a compact man, narrow-shouldered, with a large head and a shock of black hair combed in a stiff pompadour. His dark eyebrows flicked as he spoke. Because of his specialty, everyone expected that he would be talking about metals. But he had a surprise in store.
“I wish to introduce an important topic,” he said. “Kilns.”
“What?” “Huh?” Several people had not understood the word.
“Kilns,” Ichiro Nagasaka repeated, “furnaces, ovens, places in which to build fires.”
This seemed like a strange detour on the way to restoring an industrial society, and several subcommittee members snorted as if to say as much.
Alf Richards spoke for the majority when he asked, “What happened to iron and steel?”
Dr. Nagasaka smiled. “All in good time. We will get to iron and steel. But the fact is that we cannot even begin to plan a technological future without talking about controlled heat.”
Seeing the puzzlement on the faces of his audience, the speaker continued: “Just consider: If there is a single factor that enabled the human race to move out of the Stone Age and embark on its journey toward technical mastery, one must say it was the ability to create intense fires. By intense fires I do not mean simple combustion, but rather infernos hot beyond the imagining of early peoples. Ordinary flame, burning in the open air, is good mainly for keeping warm, cooking, and scaring away animals. Granted, learning how to ignite and control such flame was a vitally important step toward advanced civilization. Yet, to garner metals from their hiding places in the rocks of the earth, fiercely hot fires were required, fires contained in blazing furnaces and brought to a feverish pitch by force-feeding them with air.”
Members of the group nodded but shrugged and shifted in their seats, indicating a grudging understanding mixed with impatience. Nagasaka, unperturbed, continued.
“Human beings have been hardening clay pottery in heated, enclosed spaces for more than eight thousand years. But the heat suitable for baking clay is nowhere near as intense as that needed to work metals. To melt copper, we require a temperature of 1,083 degrees Centigrade. And that is nothing compared to iron, which has a melting point of 1,535 degrees Centigrade. So, you can see that we have to give a lot of thought to heat—how to create it and how to contain it.
“Our engineers have with them many plans and specifications to follow when we are ready to build our furnaces. But we need to address the question of which locally available materials can be used to make the refractory bricks with which to line these furnaces. In addition to withstanding intense heat without cracking, these materials must also be able to resist such destructive influences as rapid changes in temperature, abrasion by dust-bearing gases, and erosion by molten metals. Of course, the bricks or tiles that we need for building kilns have themselves to be manufactured in kilns. In order to make a kiln, a kiln is required.”
Several subcommittee members nodded thoughtfully. It was clear that in practically every one of their endeavors they would be running into this Catch-22 of technological progress.
“But,” Ichiro said, “we escape the predicament by starting with the most primitive oven, simply a hole in the ground with walls and roof made of stones and mud—or perhaps of crude bricks made of clay dried in the sun. Then in this primitive oven we make good, solid, fired bricks, using clay mixed with straw. These bricks in turn enable us
