Jack Chalker - Balshazzar's Serpent

And then it was over, and the old preacher got a lot of applause, and that was that. Eve and John met near the back, and he gave her a shrug. “Not tonight, looks like,” he said.

“I don’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed,” she told him. “If they’re not going to attack us during a service, and they aren’t staking us out, then what’s all this about?”

“We’ve got almost a week left,” he reminded her. “And, well, maybe they just haven’t had enough time to get all the weaponry out they need. Don’t be so bloodthirsty. You still might get what you wish for, and worse.”

A staff and strategy meeting presided over by Woodward himself was held deep into the night following the successful launch of the Mission Classes, as he liked to refer to them.

“We can’t afford this kind of distraction,” he grumbled. “We’ve got the Lord’s work to do, and I sensed we made some real headway tonight. That means we’re going to have to get to the bottom of these people’s origins and secrets whether they want to talk to us or not.”

Thomas Cromwell, chief of Tactical Security, was first to speak. “The problem is, we can’t infiltrate them because they’ve basically kept to these small village groups where everybody knows everybody. And while everybody’s civil and friendly enough, at least so far, they volunteer virtually no information. We’ve gotten more from hostile crowds than from this one. And there are no records, no depictions of their arrival, no legends that they’ve allowed us to hear, nothing. Even the kids don’t talk.”

The big preacher nodded. “It’s not so much a closed society as a socially libertarian one. Everybody minds their own business, period. From what I’ve been able to tell from all the reports, while there are leader types there appears to be no civil authority, either on a village or larger level. Zip. And they have a brisk and well-organized trading system that brings things here and elsewhere that are needed in a smoothly functioning barter system, but nobody runs it. Nor is there any apparent crime, hence, no police. Governments began in ancient times because people got scared. Scared of the gods, scared of marauding tribes, scared of other countries. They organized collectively to mass their defenses, and, if that wasn’t enough, they basically wound up selling their freedom to the meanest, nastiest group of killers around who got absolute power in a bargain that said these killers would protect the people from all outside sources of harm. Tribal chieftains, allied with priests and shamans, with their warriors evolved into princes and then kings and emperors, dictators and ruling bodies. The odd thing is, I sense real fear running through these people, but not what it is they are afraid of. And I see no evidence that fear, unlike all other times in history, has led to a breakdown in the simple village assignments based on work. It’s bizarre.”

They were silent for a moment, trying to figure out where to go, and Eve, who was a little scared herself just to be in this kind of company, nonetheless felt she had to put herself into the deliberations. “Excuse me, sir? Sirs?”

“Yes, child? What is it?” the white-bearded leader asked.

“They are hiding all this from us, and it’s worldwide and deliberate. I can prove it.”

“Go on.”

“Those people who came tonight—they were reading their Bibles. They were following along.”

“Yes?”

“Sir, there aren’t any books! There aren’t any records, computers, you name it. All those people could read our Bibles, but they have nothing at all to read of their own! ”

“Well, I’ll be damned!” muttered Woodward, thunderstruck at how he could define exactly how many angels were on the heads of pins and yet miss something that obvious. “Have you seen any sign of schools? Of where they learn to read?”

“No, sir. Not even the most primitive slate drawing boards or gathering halls. Children are basically baby-sat until they’re big, and then, starting as young as seven or eight, they go off into the fields and help with the work or they do work under grown-up supervision in the villages.”

They considered that. “Just how long do you think these people have been here?” Woodward asked them.

“Centuries. At least a century, maybe a century and a half, anyway,” John Robey replied. “We had a careful examination of the original site, we dated the defense computers coming in at older than that, and none of the arsenal seems to date past the Great Silence. Besides, sir, this continent is quite well developed. You can’t do that overnight.”

“No, you can’t,” the Doctor agreed. “Still, there’s something phoney here. I sometimes think it’s too bad we aren’t old order Roman Catholics. They know obedience to authority as well as anybody and, more importantly, once we had a few of these folks in confessionals we’d get the story.” He sat back and sighed. “Well, unless you have anything else, we’ll just have to keep thinking about this and hope we get another break. Anybody come back for more weapons?”

“No, sir,” Cromwell told him. “And that has us a little worried. If they have that much firepower and they don’t keep coming back to get more, it suggests they now have all that they require for whatever it is they’re planning.”

“Any idea how much they took out?” the bearded man asked. “Can we deduce it?”

“No, sir. Not from the way it’s stacked and distributed, and the cave floor is much too scuffed up. Worse, I’m worried that with our mag scooters and small transports we’ve managed to give them the means they didn’t have to distribute those weapons far and wide. Suppose they suddenly just decide to kill all the Arms of Gideon in their areas?”

“It would be ugly,” Doc Woodward agreed. “Still, I don’t think that’s the problem. What would it get them? We still have this ship with potential unknown to them sitting here, and we have a more imposing presence above with a population and weaponry we’ve not allowed them to know the size of.”

“Unless they think that, being people of God, we wouldn’t retaliate,” Cromwell suggested.

“Hmmm… Maybe I should preach a little tomorrow night on who Gideon was and what the three hundred did, eh?”

“It couldn’t hurt,” Cromwell replied. “Still, it would make the additional point if, say, we began wearing conspicuous sidearms.”

“No! Never! Not in an environment where we’re only guessing at a threat and have people listening and interested! How can I teach them to practice faith when such a move would clearly show us doing the opposite? No, not unless we are actually under threat will a single weapon be shown or produced. But I want a solid aerial grid survey of this entire continent using our best equipment, understand?”

“What are we looking for?” Cromwell asked him.

“Anything that shows up that just doesn’t fit. And let’s get it started as soon as possible! In the meantime, we proceed as if everything is normal.”

The survey began methodically, meter by square meter, from cameras in orbit guided by computers. The one problem even with the smartest computers, though, was that they were at their worst when told to look for “anything unusual.” Even though this planet was inhabited by people whose ancestry was definitely Earth, it was another world, and not enough was known about it to give anyone, human or machine, enough information to really know when something was “normal” or “abnormal.”

Still, as things went on as usual down below, and people went out in the fields to manage crops while others processed the harvest and still others cooked or looked after the kids, a few things did turn up, not close to the original landing site or the close-in villages but farther away, along the shores of some of the great internal lakes to the south and west of Mount Olivet ’s landing site. The computers dutifully flagged the anthropologists, geologists, and other experts aboard the orbiting Mount Sinai.