“He’s right. One of us, alone, is helpless,” the Reader said. “It is only in the Toon that there is strength. He wants to organize a Toon of all Toons.”
“That’s about it. We are beginning to make helicopters like the one Loudons and I came here in. We’ll furnish your community with one or more of them. We can give you a radio, so that you can communicate with other communities. We can give you rifles and machine guns and ammunition, to fight the … the Scowrers, did you call them? And we can give you atomic engines, so that you can build machines for yourselves.”
“Some of our people—Alex Barrett, here, the gunsmith, and Stan Markovitch, the distiller, and Harrison Grant, the iron worker—get their living by making things. How’d they make out, after your machines came in here?” Verner Hughes asked.
“We’ve thought of that; we had that problem with other groups we’ve helped,” Loudons said. “In some communities, everybody owns everything in common; we don’t have much of a problem, there. Is that the way you do it, here?”
“Well, no. If a man makes a thing, or digs it out of the ruins, or catches it in the woods, it’s his.”
“Then we’ll work out some way. Give the machines to the people who are already in a trade, or something like that. We’ll have to talk it over with you and with the people who’d be concerned.”
“How is it you took so long finding us,” Alex Barrett asked. “It’s been two hundred or so years since the Wars.”
“Alex! You see but you do not observe!” The Toon Leader rebuked. “These people have their flying machines, which are highly complicated mechanisms. They would have to make tools and machines to make them, and tools and machines to make those tools and machines. They would have to find materials, often going far in search of them. The marvel is not that they took so long, but that they did it so quickly.”
“That’s right,” Altamont said. “Originally, Fort Ridgeway was a military research and development center. As the country became disorganized, the Government set this project up, to develop ways of improvising power and transportation and communication methods and extracting raw materials. If they’d had a little more time, they might have saved the country. As it was, they were able to keep themselves alive and keep something like civilization going at the Fort, while the whole country was breaking apart around them. Then, when the rockets stopped falling, they started to rebuild. Fortunately, more than half the technicians at the Fort were women; there was no question of them dying out. But it’s only been in the last twenty years that we’ve been able to make nuclear-electric engines, and this is the first time any of us have gotten east of the Mississippi.”
“How did your group manage to survive?” Loudons said. “You call it the Toon; I suppose that’s what the word platoon has become, with time. You were, originally, a military platoon?”
“Pla-toon!” the white-bearded man said. “Of all the unpardonable stupidity! Of course that was what it was. And the title, Tenant, was originally lieu-tenant; I know that, though we have all dropped the first part of the word. That should have led me, if I’d used my wits, to deduce platoon from toon.
“Yes, sir. We were originally a platoon of soldiers, two hundred years ago, at the time when the Wars ended. The Old Toon, and the First Tenant, were guarding pows, whatever they were. The pows were all killed by a big bomb, and the First Tenant, Lieutenant Gilbert Dunbar, took his … his platoon and started to march to Deecee, where the Government was, but there was no Government, any more. They fought with the people along the way. When they needed food, or ammunition, or animals to pull their wagons, they took them, and killed those who tried to prevent them. Other people joined the Toon, and when they found women whom they wanted, they took them. They did all sorts of things that would have been crimes if there had been any law, but since there was no law any longer, it was obvious that there could be no crime. The First Ten—Lieutenant—kept his men together, because he had The Books. Each evening, at the end of each day’s march, he read to his men out of them.
“Finally, they came here. There had been a town here, but it had been burned and destroyed, and there were people camping in the ruins. Some of them fought and were killed; others came in and joined the platoon. At first, they built shelters around this building, and made this their fort. Then they cleared away the ruins, and built new houses. When the cartridges for the rifles began to get scarce, they began to make gunpowder, and new rifles, like these we are using now, to shoot without cartridges. Lieutenant Dunbar did this out of his own knowledge, because there is nothing in The Books about making gunpowder; the guns in The Books are rifles and shotguns and revolvers and airguns; except for the airguns, which we haven’t been able to make, these all shot cartridges. As with your people, we did not die out, because we had women. Neither did we increase greatly—too many died or were killed young. But several times we’ve had to tear down the wall and rebuild it, to make room inside it for more houses, and we’ve been clearing
