Patriots

"We do have a right to be here," said the younger of the two men. His epaulettes were orange, like the garments of the survey crewmen in the jeeps. "We're laying out a city of fifty thousand here. The construction crews will arrive as soon as we've completed our end. The first of the immigrant ships from Earth will be landing before the year is out."

"There's no mistake about our landfall," said the older man. "We're right in the center of the grant. You can come with me to the bridge and check the navigational data if you like."

Yerby gri

"You know damned well it is, Ba

"You're talking about Hestia grants," the woman in uniform said. "We're employed by Vice-Protector Finch of Zenith under Zenith grants. If you've got a problem, take it up with him."

"Ah, but you lot are closer than Finch, ain't you?" Yerby said. "Amy, love, tell the boys to start picking up them spikes, will you? I reckon there's not much of a survey without markers."

The Zenith with orange surveyor's tabs reached into his pocket. Dagmar kicked him in the crotch. The Zenith gasped and bent forward. Mark dipped a gun out of the pocket, then stepped clear so that the overbalanced man could tumble down the ramp. Dagmar kicked him in the ribs as he fell past.

The uniformed woman took a step backward. She touched her own jacket pocket.

"Please don't do that," Mark said to her politely. "I won't hit you, but Ms. Wately will."

The flyers were dipping down across the soybean field. One buzzed an air-cushion Jeep. While a man piloted the flyer, the woman slipped from the other saddle and stood on the lower frame to snatch a surveyor's cap.

Another flyer pivoted around a survey stake-the white rods contained transponders to provide precise measurement to the satellite the ship would have dropped in orbit-and the pilot himself snatched it out of the ground. Mark wouldn't have thought that was possible.

Yerby continued to smile at the two Zeniths still standing. Mark looked at the gun he'd taken from the groaning man. It was a nerve scrambler like the one the baggage handler had carried. No way Mark could rip the weapon apart the way Yerby'd done the other one, but…

The upper surface of the ramp was made of plates welded to an internal framework. There was a slight gap between the edges of the two plates at Mark's feet. He stuck the needle point of the pistol's muzzle between them and snapped it off with a quick twist.

"You can't do this!" the older Zenith cried.

"Now," said Yerby, "there's another difference of opinion."

The jeeps were rushing back toward the ship, jouncing high at every bump and grounding jarringly as the plenum chamber spilled air. For a moment Mark wasn't sure he should have destroyed the nasty little gun, but it was pretty obvious that the surveyors were fleeing rather than coming to help their officers.

All the survey stakes were gone. Generally flyers landed nearby and took off again from the field as soon as the pilot had pulled up the trophy, but one fellow managed to blast a rod with his flashgun while his buddy flew from the other saddle.

"You have no right to do this!" the older Zenith shouted. He must be the ship's captain. "You have no right!"

Yerby stepped off the edge of the ramp so that the first of the jeeps could race aboard past the officers. Mark and Dagmar Wately jumped down beside him. A flyer banked away from the hatch as the pilot cried, "Yee-hah!"

"I have all law and justice on my side!" Yerby said. "And besides that-"

He pointed his flashgun at the undersurface of the starship. Mark turned and covered his eyes with his hands. The laser fired with a hisscrack! The target clanged like a huge bell. A little of the intense saffron pulse leaked through Mark's flesh.

"What are you doing?" screamed the female officer from the edge of the hatch where the jeep's passage had pushed her. "You're shooting at us!"

"I just blew out one of your nozzles," Yerby said calmly. He unsnapped the charging mechanism from the flashgun's butt and spread the sail to the sun. "You got seven more, that'll get you up well enough. But-"

The big frontiersman had never stopped smiling.

"-I'd suggest you take off before this fellow recharges in three minutes or so."

A second jeep drove up the ramp and collided with the first, which was blocking the entrance to the hold. The third and fourth vehicles halted by the outriggers. The surveyors scrambled aboard on foot, glancing over their shoulders in panic at Mark and the Greenwoods.

The starship's rocket nozzles were tungsten, forged hollow so that the liquid-hydrogen fuel could circulate within and chill them in operation. Yerby's laser bolt had blown a fist-sized hole in the outer jacket of the nearest nozzle. If it was used again, the uncooled metal would vaporize in a bright green flash.

The fifth and last jeep skidded to a stop. The Zenith officers were already aboard. The last pair of surveyors ran up the ramp as it lifted.

"I think," Yerby said in satisfaction, "we'd best put a little distance between us and them. They're going to tear up the landscape just as bad leaving as they did when they arrived."

Mark's knees were suddenly so weak that he thought he was going to fall down. He didn't, but he was thankful for Amy's help as he climbed onto the flyer's saddle.

10. Party Time

Where floodlights on the eaves of the Ba

At the other end of the courtyard, vocal music wailed moodily from a recorder with over a thousand songs loaded into its memory. The selection keypad didn't work, so the unit repeated over and over a Zenith hit from twenty years before, "Apartment House Heart."

Mark sat on a shed's flat roof, watching the festivities. Eighty or a hundred people ate, danced, and drank-especially drank-in general good fellowship. Flyers and dirigibles in profusion sat on the slopes surrounding the compound.

Folk had gathered spontaneously at the Ba

"Does this happen often?" Mark said to Amy beside him. "I'd thought life on the frontier would be, well, lonely."

"There's more of a community here than there is in a Kilbourn neighborhood," Amy said. "They must have come from a hundred miles around, though. Yerby's grant is fifty miles square-that's twenty-five hundred square miles. Most of the neighbors have big tracts too."

The impromptu party would go on at least overnight. The majority of visitors had come in flyers that couldn't take off again until daybreak. Most of the dirigibles had battery backup for their solar collectors, but navigation across the nighted landscape was too chancy to attempt without need.

"I suppose that'll change when Greenwood gets settled," Mark said. "Fu

He couldn't help sounding sad. It wasn't that folk here were friendly, exactly. Yerby and Dagmar had obviously had their differences over boundary lines, for example. Nevertheless, the two grant holders were members of a single community. Mark was sure that Dagmar would have come equally fast to Yerby's aid in a crisis.