The Return | Page 7

country, who have managed to save anything of the Old Times. Most of them lived in little villages and cultivated land. A few had horses, or cows. None, that we have ever found before, made guns and powder for themselves. But they remembered that they were men, and did not eat one another. Whenever we find a group of people like this, we try to persuade them to let us help them."
"Why?" the Toon Leader asked. "Why do you do this for people you've never met before? What do you want from them--from us--in return for your help?" He was speaking to Altamont, rather than to Loudons; it seemed obvious that he believed Altamont to be the leader and Loudons the subordinate.
* * * * *
"Because we're trying to bring back the best things of the Old Times," Altamont told him. "Look; you've had troubles, here. So have we, many times. Years when the crops failed; years of storms, or floods; troubles with these beast-men in the woods. And you were alone, as we were, with no one to help. We want to put all men who are still men in touch with one another, so that they can help each other in trouble, and work together. If this isn't done soon, everything which makes men different from beasts will soon be no more."
"He's right. One of us, alone, is helpless," the Reader said. "It is only in the Toon that there is strength. He wants to organize a Toon of all Toons."
"That's about it. We are beginning to make helicopters like the one Loudons and I came here in. We'll furnish your community with one or more of them. We can give you a radio, so that you can communicate with other communities. We can give you rifles and machine guns and ammunition, to fight the ... the Scowrers, did you call them? And we can give you atomic engines, so that you can build machines for yourselves."
"Some of our people--Alex Barrett, here, the gunsmith, and Stan Markovitch, the distiller, and Harrison Grant, the iron worker--get their living by making things. How'd they make out, after your machines came in here?" Verner Hughes asked.
"We've thought of that; we had that problem with other groups we've helped," Loudons said. "In some communities, everybody owns everything in common; we don't have much of a problem, there. Is that the way you do it, here?"
"Well, no. If a man makes a thing, or digs it out of the ruins, or catches it in the woods, it's his."
"Then we'll work out some way. Give the machines to the people who are already in a trade, or something like that. We'll have to talk it over with you and with the people who'd be concerned."
"How is it you took so long finding us," Alex Barrett asked. "It's been two hundred or so years since the Wars."
"Alex! You see but you do not observe!" The Toon Leader rebuked. "These people have their flying machines, which are highly complicated mechanisms. They would have to make tools and machines to make them, and tools and machines to make those tools and machines. They would have to find materials, often going far in search of them. The marvel is not that they took so long, but that they did it so quickly."
"That's right," Altamont said. "Originally, Fort Ridgeway was a military research and development center. As the country became disorganized, the Government set this project up, to develop ways of improvising power and transportation and communication methods and extracting raw materials. If they'd had a little more time, they might have saved the country. As it was, they were able to keep themselves alive and keep something like civilization going at the Fort, while the whole country was breaking apart around them. Then, when the rockets stopped falling, they started to rebuild. Fortunately, more than half the technicians at the Fort were women; there was no question of them dying out. But it's only been in the last twenty years that we've been able to make nuclear-electric engines, and this is the first time any of us have gotten east of the Mississippi."
"How did your group manage to survive?" Loudons said. "You call it the Toon; I suppose that's what the word platoon has become, with time. You were, originally, a military platoon?"
"Pla-toon!" the white-bearded man said. "Of all the unpardonable stupidity! Of course that was what it was. And the title, Tenant, was originally lieu-tenant; I know that, though we have all dropped the first part of the word. That should have led me, if I'd used my wits, to deduce platoon from toon.
"Yes, sir. We were originally a platoon of soldiers, two hundred years ago, at the time when the Wars ended. The Old Toon, and