When we reached the doors at the end, we emerged into one end of a big rectangular plaza, at least five hundred yards in length. Most of the uproar was centered at the opposite end, where several thousand people, in costumes colored through the whole spectrum, were milling about. There seemed to be at least two square-dances going on, to the music of competing bands. At the distant end of the plaza, over the heads of the crowd, I could see the piles and tracks of an overhead crane, towering above what looked like an open-hearth furnace. Between us and the bulk of the crowd, in a cleared space, two medium tanks, heavily padded with mats, were ramming and trying to overturn each other, the mob of spectators crowding as close to them as they dared. The din was positively deafening, though we were at least two hundred yards from the center of the crowd.
“Oh, dear, I always dread these things!” Palme was saying.
“Yes, absolutely anything could happen,” Thrombley twittered.
“Man, this is a real barbecue!” Hoddy gloated. “Now I really feel at home!”
“Over this way, Mr. Silk,” Palme said, guiding me toward the short end of the plaza, on our left. “We will see the President and then. …”
He gulped.
“… then we will all go to the barbecue.”
In the center of the short end of the plaza, dwarfed by the monster bulks of steel and concrete and glass around it, stood a little old building of warm-tinted adobe. I had never seen it before, but somehow it was familiar-looking. And then I remembered. Although I had never seen it before, I had seen it pictured many times; pictured under attack, with gunsmoke spouting from windows and parapets.
I plucked Thrombley’s sleeve.
“Isn’t that a replica of the Alamo?”
He was shocked. “Oh, dear, Mr. Ambassador, don’t let anybody hear you ask that. That’s no replica. It is the Alamo. The Alamo.”
I stood there a moment, looking at it. I was remembering, and finally understanding, what my psycho-history lessons about the “Romantic Freeze” had meant.
They had taken this little mission-fort down, brick by adobe brick, loaded it carefully into a spaceship, brought it here, forty two light-years away from Terra, and reverently set it up again. Then they had built a whole world and a whole social philosophy around it.
It had been the dissatisfied, of course, the discontented, the dreamers, who had led the vanguard of man’s explosion into space following the discovery of the hyperspace-drive. They had gone from Terra cherishing dreams of things that had been dumped into the dust bin of history, carrying with them pictures of ways of life that had passed away, or that had never really been. Then, in their new life, on new planets, they had set to work making those dreams and those pictures live.
And, many times, they had come close to succeeding.
These Texans, now: they had left behind the cold fact that it had been their state’s great industrial complex that had made their migration possible. They ignored the fact that their life here on Capella IV was possible only by application of modern industrial technology. That rodeo down the plaza—tank-tilting instead of bronco-busting. Here they were, living frozen in a romantic dream, a world of roving cowboys and ranch kingdoms.
No wonder Hoddy hadn’t liked the books I had been reading on the ship. They shook the fabric of that dream.
There were people moving about, at this relatively quiet end of the plaza, mostly in the direction of the barbecue. Ten or twelve Rangers loitered at the front of the Alamo, and with them I saw the dress blues of my two Marines. There was a little three-wheeled motorcart among them, from which they were helping themselves to food and drink. When they saw us coming, the two Marines shoved their sandwiches into the hands of a couple of Rangers and tried to come to attention.
“At ease, at ease,” I told them. “Have a good time, boys. Hoddy, you better get in on some of this grub; I may be inside for quite a while.”
As soon as the Rangers saw Hoddy, they hastily got things out of their right hands. Hoddy grinned at them.
“Take it easy, boys,” he said. “I’m protected by the game laws. I’m a diplomat, I am.”
There were a couple of Rangers lounging outside the door of the President’s office and both of them carried autorifles, implying things I didn’t like.
I had seen the President of the Solar League wandering around the dome-city of Artemis unattended, looking for all the world like a professor in his academic halls. Since then, maybe before then, I had always had a healthy suspicion of governments whose chiefs had to surround themselves with bodyguards.
But the President of New Texas, John Hutchinson, was alone in his office when we were shown in. He got up and came around his desk to greet us, a slender, stoop-shouldered man in a black-and-gold laced jacket. He had a narrow compressed mouth and eyes that seemed to be watching every corner of the room at once. He wore a pair of small pistols in crossbody holsters under his coat, and he always kept one hand or the other close to his abdomen.
He was like, and yet unlike, the Secretary of State. Both had the look of hunted animals; but where Palme was a rabbit, twitching to take flight
