Eric Flint - Time spike

They certainly didn't look much like the pigs Rod was accustomed to seeing at county fairs. One of the pigs had gotten away and escaped into the brush. The man called Moscoso had apparently decided the Indian closest to the animal was responsible and needed to be punished. He began cursing and beating him savagely with a quirt, until the Indian was writhing on the ground pleading for mercy. Even then, Moscoso didn't stop for at least half a minute. This went well beyond even the harshest notions of discipline. It was pure and simple cruelty. Throughout, Hulbert ignored the Indian and studied Moscoso, making sure he could recognize the man anywhere he saw him, in any kind of reasonable lighting. When the time came, he'd see to it personally that Moscoso was a dead man. "We can't just leave those Indians they way they are. We have to do something to help them,"

Hartshorn said. Hulbert glanced at the man and shook his head. "We'll help them when we can, Gary. But not today. We're outnumbered almost a hundred to one." Hartshorn looked ferocious. "Sure, not today. But what about after the sun sets? We can go down and tie them. Man, what I wouldn't give for a half dozen grenades. These sonsabitches are worse than anything we have behind bars inside the prison." "We can't," Hulbert said between gritted teeth. "There are too many of them, and too few of us. I don't care if it's noon or midnight. If you want to save lives, Gary, we do nothing. We have to get back to the captain and Watkins. They have to be warned." He started crawling back the way they had come. Just a few feet down the hill he stopped and whispered, "The Cherokee town isn't far off from the creek the Spaniards are following. They outnumber the Cherokees even if you include all the women and children and old men. Watkins only has three dozen or so warriors. These guys are all warriors. They'll find the Cherokees and destroy them. And when they're done, they'll move on like a swarm of locusts. Eventually, they'll run across the prison."

Hulbert forced himself to take several slow steady breaths. It was time to get the hell out of Dodge. He was not going to risk being seen. Too much depended on them coming home. They had to start moving now. He knew he could get back to the town before de Soto could get close enough to be a threat to the Cherokees. A group as large as the Spaniards, and driving slaves, wouldn't be able to travel more than a few miles a day through this type of terrain. Ten, at most. If he pushed, and he intended to push damn hard, they should be able to get back in plenty of time to warn Blacklock and Watkins. For a moment, he considered trying to warn the villagers they'd been observing. But that just wasn't possible, in the time they had. The language barrier would make communication impossible in any period short of several days, and for all he knew he could wind up frightening them right into the arms of the Spaniards. He could only hope they were maintaining their own scouting parties and would spot the Spaniards in time to escape into the wilderness. No. The four of them would report back to Blacklock and Watkins. They were in charge, and it would be their decision.

Chapter 37 Andy Blacklock shook head. "Rod, we can't go back to the prison. Not yet. The way I understand it, another village is about to wiped off the face of the planet. This planet, not the one we came from. This planet, that doesn't have very many villages to start with.

And we have to rescue those people already enslaved, too. You said yourself most of them were women and girls." Lieutenant Hulbert set his jaws. "Look, I understand your reaction. Believe me, I had the same reaction myself-and then some-watching those thugs brutalizing people. But you're not looking at the whole picture, Andy." They were sitting in the cabin the Cherokees had provided them. Rod nodded toward the door. "Since tying up with Geoffrey's people, we have women and children and old people. Damn it, we could lose them. And if we do, we will never have it again. We will never see an old man or old woman and a baby on the same day. There's more at stake here than just us. Andy, it's like you've said a hundred times, our future-who we will be-is on the line. We have to pick our battles, and make sure we win them. We can't risk a loss. If we die trying to help that village, then there won't be anyone to protect this town or the people we still have at the prison." He stopped, and took a deep breath. Obviously, trying to keep his temper under control. This was the first time since the Quiver that Rod and Andy had had a serious disagreement, and neither one of them wanted to risk escalating it into a shouting match. Andy took a deep breath himself and looked away. "Okay, Rod.

But you're the one who's not looking at the whole picture. This isn't simply a moral issue. It isn't even simply a strategic or tactical issue, in a narrow military sense. It's quite possibly a matter of life and death for every human being on the planet. Not now, but generations from now." Rod frowned. "That seems awfully melodramatic, Andy." "No, it isn't. We've got a problem-and you can spell that with a capital P-that I hadn't even thought about until Jeff raised it with me privately, the same night you left on your expedition. And it's about as crude and simple as problems get." He looked at Edelman, the third man in the cabin. "Tell him, Jeff." "Rod, I'm worried about the genetic pool." "Huh?" "Genetic pool. Breeding population. There are various terms for it. But what they all come down to is that if the numbers of a species drop too far, that species is doomed. It either goes extinct quickly, or it starts developing such serious genetic problems that its chances of survival get really dicey. That's why population numbers is the key benchmark they use to declare a species endangered." By the time Jeff was done, Rod had his eyes closed. Andy understood the reason. He'd done exactly the same thing when Jeff had raised the issue with him earlier. Closed his eyes and did the math himself. The arithmetic was pretty damn stark. A little over two hundred guards and nurses, the majority of them male. And of the females, a good percentage were no longer young enough to have children. Certainly not more than one child. Two thousand plus convicts, all of them male-leaving aside any other consideration, such as the fact that some of them were psychotic. Somewhere between three hundred and seven hundred Spanish conquistadores. All of them male. A small number of U.S. soldiers. All of them male. About three hundred Cherokees, evenly divided in terms of gender but with a number of the women beyond child-bearing years. "Well, aren't we screwed?" muttered Hulbert. Jeff chuckled humorlessly. "Probably a poor choice of words, given the circumstances. Aren't wenot screwed would be a lot closer."

Rod blew out some air and rubbed his face. "We needed this like we needed a hole in the head." He thought about it for a moment. "Okay, then. What's the magic number? How manydo you need?" Edelman shrugged.

"Nobody really knows, is the only honest answer. The minimum, of course, is the Biblical two. Adam and Eve. But even in the Bible, their sons found wives somewhere else. Where'd they come from? Even the Lord Almighty doesn't seem to have known the answer. We sure as hell don't." Hulbert glared at him. "Will you puh-lease stop being such a damn academic? Give me a ballpark figure, Jeff." "Sorry. Can't even do that. The problem is that the number seems to vary, from species to species-and nobody's ever put it to the test, with human beings." Hulbert's glare didn't fade at all. Jeff sighed. "Look, I can put it this way. Leaving out of the equation for the moment whatever number of Indians are out there other than the Cherokees, I figure we've got somewhere around two hundred females, all told, who are capable of having children. Please note that I'm being wildly optimistic, in that I'm presuming that each and every one of them is capable of bearing a child and is willing to do so. I've already told Andy that if and when the time comes that we have to declare a public policy, I'm ducking behind the podium and lettinghim tell Bird Matthews that she's gotta start screwing guys." Rod laughed. One of the guards, Bird Matthews, was a confirmed and I'm-not-kidding lesbian. She was cheerful about it, not belligerent, and she wasn't a "militant" in the usual sense of the word. In fact, she was quite popular with the other guards, of either sex. But she'd made clear the I'm-not-kidding part by organizing a small motorcycle club that called itselfDykes on Bikes. They even had the logo on their motorcycle jackets. "Okay, point taken. But let's assume the two hundred figure is valid. What then?" "Well, like I told Andy, I'm not positive. But I'm pretty sure that's not enough. Not in the long run. It's not a simple matter of arithmetic. Obviously, if two hundred women each have two daughters, and those daughters each have two, etc. etc., you wind up with a problem of overpopulation faster than you might imagine. But people are complex packages of DNA, on a genetic level, they're not numbers. If the original breeding stock is too low, you run into what's called a bottleneck problem. That won't just apply to us, either. Any of the animals that came through in small numbers, such as the horses, are looking at a bottleneck too. "Even something as random as genetic drift can screw you up. All it takes is one or two bad mutations and you can find yourself dying off. It's not so much an arithmetical problem as a statistical one. Theoretically, a species could survive with an initial breeding stock of one male and one female. It's just that the smaller the pool, the worse the odds get."