Eden's Hammer - By Lloyd Tackitt Page 0,10
men to adapt as necessary to any given situation.
“What I don’t want to do is cause any of you to wonder why you won’t be given a military rank for this operation, or to feel slighted in any way. Everyone else will have rank—you guys won’t—but it’s you that I will be fully dependent on to bring this thing off. What do you think?”
“Bollinger, you tell him,” Clif said. Adrian smiled; that was more like the Clif he knew.
Bollinger said, “Sounds like a good plan to me. It takes everything into account, and it’s a smart move.”
Adrian waited to see if there would be any more comments. There weren’t. The men just looked steadily at him, waiting for orders. Adrian thought, just like old times. God, I miss those days.
Adrian finally spoke again. “Tomorrow, two of you will go out and get the information on what we’re going to be dealing with. Any volunteers to be first?”
MARCH 3, MORNING
John and Isaac left before daybreak, promising to be back as quickly as possible—which was most likely in a few days—with the information. The other three were a little let down that they hadn’t been the first to go, but they knew their turns would come soon enough. Waiting was a skill soldiers develop, so they waited the way soldiers usually waited: bitching and crabbing amongst themselves. A soldier that didn’t bitch about a soldier’s life was a soldier with low morale.
Adrian walked the village to get an idea of the new structures and people, reviewing the terrain and building placements for defensive purposes. Roman walked with him. As they passed yet another new cabin, Adrian said, “Looking at this place It’s hard to believe I was only gone a year. It’s three times bigger, and I see so many faces I don’t recognize.”
Roman replied, “It could have been ten times, maybe twenty times bigger, but we’ve been extremely picky who we let in on a permanent basis. There are still many just looking for an easier ride, people who would be anything but an asset. Some of the grid survivors are just plain loony, also. As it is, we’ve still grown too big too fast. What was a tribe is a small town now. We’ve gone from the original handful to over two hundred. It’s unwieldy, but we let in people who have skills we need. I don’t know which I am prouder to have here: the doctor or the shoemaker. It’s unbelievable how fast we wear out shoes now, walking everywhere we go, working in the fields, going out hunting. We’re going to have to change our setup soon, though. Tribal meetings don’t work well anymore, and the majority of the villagers are new. The newcomers have been patient with me running things, but it can’t last much longer. We need to be better organized.”
Roman stopped and bent down to retie one of his shoe laces that had begun to come loose. He straightened up and resumed after a short pause, reminding himself of where he was in his talk.
“Thinking about that, I invited two new families in—old friends of mine. Perry was a lawyer, best one I ever knew, smart as hell and extraordinarily honest for any man, much less a lawyer. I asked him to come and write us a new constitution and a new set of laws. He’s been here a bit over six months and says they are almost ready to publish. The proposed laws are written in plain language that anyone can understand, but that didn’t make them easy to write. It’s amazing how hard it is to write a simple declarative sentence that can’t be twisted to suit anyone’s needs, tortured into a meaning it was never intended to have. There’s nothing more diabolical than the human mind when it is in trouble. But if anyone can do it, Perry can. He’s borrowing a lot from the old Constitution, but he’s plugging the holes in it. The new one won’t be warped into what the old one was turned into. We’re intent on Learning from our past mistakes, so that this one will be much clearer, simpler, and harder to ruin. Along with the constitution, he’s writing an instruction manual on how to follow it, getting into more detail on the thought process and philosophy behind it and using concrete examples. It’s sort of like the Federalist Papers, but his are officially binding because they are referred to in the constitution itself as such.