He then went ahead and proved his statements. There were two flocks of chickens in the complex of caves, one for eggs and one for early eating, just as is the practice in the rest of the world. The difference was that the eating chickens were full grown in three weeks flat, compared with the outside record of five weeks. Also, they managed this without using growth hormones, and without feeding the birds anything more than what amounted to being hay. The egg layers were averaging four eggs per day per hen, and again, doing it on waste vegetable matter. Compare that with the grain-fed chickens back home that put out one egg a day.
There were rabbits that grew about as fast as the eating chickens, but whether that was superlative or not, we didn't know. They had just one single mature sow and her sixteen offspring. Being omnivores, just like people, pigs have a diet that competes with ours. The small herd was fed on the table scraps collected from all over the island, and ate them all. Pork was in short supply, and sold for astoundingly high prices. Perhaps this accounted for the popularity of Spam. Or perhaps it was the scarcity of fats in their diet. Chickens, rabbits and fish are fairly fat free. In any event, I saw us importing a lot of canned ham. Then came the real surprise.
"That is the strangest looking creature I've ever seen," I said.
"I think it's a cow," Adam said. "But I wouldn't bet serious money on it."
It was standing upright, but those spindly limbs couldn't possibly have moved it very far. Judging from its legs and neck, the animal looked to be in the final stages of death by starvation. Yet there was a full manger of greens in front of it and a tub of water nearby, so it wasn't being maltreated. It was only when we stepped back and saw it from the side that we realized that the animal was mostly udder. The huge milk gland ran from just behind the forelegs and all the way back to the tail. It was wider than the rest of the beast, and the teats actually hung down into a hole in the floor dug to accommodate them. They milked the critter from the floor below!
"We milk her every two hours, day and night," Master d'Este said. "She produces some four hundred of your gallons of milk a day, and her three sisters each do about as well."
"Unbelievable," I said.
"You don't believe me? You call me a liar?"
"No! Please! I'm sorry. My command of your language is still poor. You must forgive me."
"Well, I suppose, if I must."
"I meant to say that I couldn't believe my own eyes. Your accomplishment is astounding, an amazing scientific achievement."
"Oh. Well, that's different. Thank you."
"How large is your total herd?" Adam asked.
"Two. Plus the other two on the other islands. Or six, if you want to count the new heifer and the bull as well. We generally have him rented out for plowing and suchlike work."
"And four cows produce enough milk to satisfy twelve thousand people?"
"We make all we can sell, and even have some left over for making butter and cheese."
We bid Master d'Este good-bye, and started back.
"They satisfy the dairy needs of twelve thousand people with only four cows. Adam, there's a fortune to be made here."
"How? I don't see any way to do it. No matter how productive each cow is, we can't feed them here on imported grain and ship fresh milk back to the world outside. If we take something as strange-looking as that animal back to the States, she's going to be noticed in no time flat, and if she is as valuable as we both know she is, somebody is going to steal her. Or kill her just to prevent the competition."
"You're right, I suppose. Anyway, it would be a very long-term project. As slow as cows reproduce, it would take thirty years to build a big herd. What's more, most of your arguments apply to the rest of these animals, too."
"I'm not so sure. I think something could be done with chicken eggs, but we won't have time for it on the first trip," he said.
"Yeah. Maybe, someday, we can sell some of these animals to breeders back in the States for good prices, but that's not going to be for a long while. It's a pity. Well, it's getting late and I'm getting hungry. The girls won't be expecting us for a while, so let's go find a restaurant with a good bar."
"Moved, seconded, and passed by general acclaim," Adam said.
Our guide, Judah, told us of a small, unpretentious men's club deep in the bowels of the island. We'd been following his lead all day long, and we saw no good reason to stop now.
Oil lamps were few in the tunnels getting there, and Adam had to light our way with the penlight he always carried. For a while, the way was so long and dark that I thought that Judah was pulling our leg, but when we finally got there, the place was as advertised. It was a quiet, all-male sort of establishment, except for the help, who were mostly attractive young ladies, and naked at that. A single dancer undulated on a small stage, to the music of a drum and a single flute. The decor, except for the women, was nonexistent, and our waitress started out by offering us a menu, a beer and wine list, and herself.
We took the first two, and said that we wouldn't be needing any additional company. She acted only politely disappointed, and the service remained good throughout our stay there. It was a vast improvement on the only other brothel I'd ever been taken to, years before. I suppose that prostitution was unavoidable on the islands. There was no venereal disease, and they had an effective birth control method. With easygoing morals and a percentage of the population facing mandatory permanent sterilization if they had to spend too many generations being poor, perhaps it was inevitable. But like everything else around here, when these people did a thing, they did it right.
There's something very relaxing about having a surplus of naked ladies about. It tends to eliminate a certain sexual tension that nags you from back in your subconscious and gets in the way of your thinking. Or perhaps it's that it gives the sexual part of your mind full reign, so that your libido in turn lets the rest of you get on with what you really wanted to do. In any event, I liked the establishment, and I didn't hear Adam making any complaints, either. The food was good and the beer outstanding, even though, like all the beer on the island, it was flat. With Judah's help, we started outlining just what would go into our first cargo back to the real world.
The real world. I'd actually gotten to thinking about it that way. These islands, and to a certain extent the yearlong trip getting here, had sort of a dreamy quality to them that was pleasant enough, but was somehow unreal. A part of me was ready to go back to Bay City, and open up a new machinery factory. But that wouldn't happen for a while. If ever. Anyway, we had an important job to do right here.
After a half dozen beers, each, we had our supper digesting and the program worked out. It was time to go. Our ladies would be waiting for us back home, and we called for the check. Fumbling for our money, we found that neither Adam nor I had anything smaller than a silver quarter, which was a huge sum on these islands.
"My lords." The waitress stared at the coin in her hand and flushed, and being naked, she did it with a ripple that started from her forehead and went all the way on down to her toes. "This is a hundred times too much. I can't make change for such a coin. There isn't that much money in the whole place!"
In truth, it was the first time that either of us had actually been asked to pay for anything since we had been shipwrecked, the custom being for the women to take care of that sort of thing when they were around. Our guide offered to pick up the tab, but we refused him. After all, we were far more wealthy than he was, and he had spent the entire day doing us a favor.
"Adam, it's only a quarter," I said, turning to the waitress. "Miss, please take this anyway. Pay the bill, give yourself a tip of equal size, and have the manager put the rest on a tab for Adam and me. I think that we'll become regular customers here, in time."
The size of the tip delighted her. She squealed pleasantly and ran for the back room. Shortly, the manager came out to meet us, a big man with a limp and a scarred face. He introduced himself as Chevalier Iwo, confirmed with us what we had told the wa
itress, and offered us another round, on the house. We thanked him, said that our ladies were waiting, and declined the round. We started to leave. Iwo then became more persistent, insisting that we stay longer. We, in turn, insisted on leaving. Adam, in fact, even got a bit rude about it. As we left, I saw there was a certain look of sadness in the big chevalier's eye.
THIRTY
"When I took the Oath of Absolute Obedience, I never thought that I would ever be involved in something like this," Brother Bartholomew said.
"Nor did I, but our orders come directly from the archbishop, himself, and he is having us do this to ease the burdens on the duke."
"But if brutal things must be done, why can't they be done by men trained for brutality? Why can't the duke do his own dirty work himself? And if this is really God's work, why can't we don our cassocks?"
"That was all covered in the archbishop's speech. Weren't you listening? Now, hush. Here they come."
* * *
* * *
Once outside the door, Judah ben Salomon asked if it would be all right if he left us there, since he lived in the opposite direction from where we were going.
"Certainly, but how do we find our way home?"
There were no street signs on the island, no street or tunnel names, and no house or apartment numbering system. Since the island was mobile, even directions were hard to give. Designations like East, North, and South were meaningless. To make matters worse, few tunnels were straight. Dug over the centuries, they met each other at odd angles, most of them curved, and they were as apt to slant up or down as they were to go left or right. Some tunnels managed to do all four. Everybody on the island except us had lived there all their lives and already knew where everything was.
"Simply follow this tunnel until it comes to a split. Take the left-hand branch. When it comes to a crossing, turn left, and you are three steps from your doorway," Judah said.
"That's easy enough, but how do we get there in the dark? My penlight won't last forever," Adam said.
"The manager will sell you a lantern. The taverns all have them for sale."
Adam stepped back in and came out with something similar to a Japanese paper lantern on a long, thin bamboo stick. We bid our guide good night and headed out on our way.
"That didn't feel right," Adam said.
"What didn't feel right?"
"The way our guide took off. That innkeeper knew something we don't, too. Something's wrong."
"It's late and he's been drinking. Probably, he was just in a hurry to get home to his girl. A lot of us are," I said.
Adam was shifting his glance, trying to cover both directions of the long dark tunnel. "I'm serious, Treet. Keep your eyes open."
"You're getting paranoid. Anyway, there's nothing to see," I said, looking often over my shoulder. I like to argue with Adam, but I'm smart enough to take his advice.
"Look, you didn't grow up in the slums of Detroit the way I did."
"I thought you grew up in Hamtramck."
"I lived in Hamtramck. I grew up two blocks away, in Detroit, if you get my meaning. On the streets, you get a kind of feeling about when trouble is coming."
"Maybe I wasn't raised in Detroit, but everybody has trouble growing up."
Maybe Bay City was a lot less violent than Detroit, but I grew up as the only Oriental kid in my class, and I was always much smaller than the rest of the guys, besides. After being pounded a few times by the local hoodlums, I suppose that I overcompensated the way any other boy would. With the shining example of those Bruce Lee movies they were showing back then, I studied the martial arts all through high school under a Korean Tae Kwan Do master. After a while, the bullies learned to stay away from me.
Just after my high-school graduation, my problems with religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular came to a head. I had a row with my parents that got me thoroughly disowned. I was out on the street and absolutely penniless. Karate really came in handy then. Teaching it paid for most of my college expenses.
After I got my sheepskin, I grew up some, and have never needed to resort to violence since. I had been twenty years without even seeing a fight, let alone having to get involved in one.
Until that night with Adam in the tunnel.
I first noticed that something was definitely wrong when somebody hit me in the back of the head with a club.
I went flying down on my knees and elbows, but fighting is a lot like riding a bicycle. Once you learn, your head might forget how it's done, but your body remembers just exactly what to do. I slapped the ground, yelled, and came up on the bounce, smashing someone's testicles in the process.
A whole platoon of thugs was pouring out of a small doorway in the side of the tunnel. I caught a flash of Adam propping his lantern against the tunnel wall with one hand while swinging with the other, and then there were other things to do. It seemed like I was surrounded by dozens of the bastards!
In the movies, the hero can take on vast numbers of bad guys because the stunt men have the courtesy to come at him one at a time. That way, he only has to fight one opponent at a time, ten times in a row. If your enemies have any brains and coordination at all, they will mob you, all of them at once, and then you will go down, no matter how good you are. At best, you might take out one or two before you are deleted.
My opponents seemed to have neither brains nor coordination, but they did have enthusiasm, and there were an awful lot of them. Also, even waiting in line takes a certain amount of coordination, and for these idiots, fighting seemed to be a series of random events. Once, apparently by accident, four of them came at me at once, and I had to drop and roll. Fortunately, they weren't bright enough to know what to do to me once I was down. I was up again in a hurry, and dancing around.
I swear that there were at least fifteen of them on me alone. Against odds like that, you fight to win, without thinking about the damage, jail time, or lawsuits you might be generating. The places you go for are right down the center, the weak "seam" where the two halves of the body seem to join together. Eyes, noses, throats, solar plexi, guts and testicles. That and the knees, and I've always been partial to knees. Knees are low and easy to get to without the flashy, dangerous, high kicks that some of the other good targets require. Also, knees break easily, they put your opponent down fast, and barring modern surgery, they generally don't heal properly for years, if they heal at all.
I guess I broke a lot of knees that night. Six or eight, at least. In a while, the still-vertical portion of the crowd had thinned out quite a bit, and it was actually starting to get fun when a shot rang out loud in the stone corridor, and everything stopped.
"Figure it out, you bastards! I got five shots left and there are eight of you!" Adam said with a gun in his hand and blood running down his face. "All you need are five heroes who want to die, and the rest of you can get me! Okay! Step right up! What? No heroes? Okay, I'll pick 'em myself. How 'bout you, ugly? Want to impress your girlfriend with your heroic dead body?"
As Adam pointed the pistol at him, the fellow who had been singled out froze, then broke and ran. That started the the rest of our playmates running for home, limping, bleeding, and dragging some of their friends behind. In a few moments we were alone, except for nine would-be muggers who were out cold on the floor. A few of them were groaning a bit, but none of them looked ready to get up.
Especially the one with the bullet hole through his throat.
"You okay, Treet?" Adam said, leaning wearily against the wall.
"A bump on the back of the head and a few bruises, but I'll live. Your face is bleeding."
"Face wounds bleed a lot, but they heal fast, too. See if you can get a bandage or a handkerchief or something on it, would you?"
I stepped over a few enemy casualties as I went over to him. I stood on top of one to get a better view of Adam's head. That still left me shorter than Adam, and the cut was near the top of his head. I stepped down, piled two more muggers on top of the first, and
then stepped up to the top of the heap. Better.
"I didn't know you were carrying a six-gun," I said as I worked.
The wound was a laceration, a tear in the skin. I cleaned it a bit with my handkerchief, and Adam handed me his own from his pouch as well.
"I wasn't. That was my penlight."
"Your penlight? Then what about the bullet I heard go through that guy's throat?"
"It wasn't exactly a bullet. It was a fifty caliber Gyro-Jet."
"I haven't heard of one of those things in twenty-five years."
"That's when I built one into the bottom of my penlight. Back when I was in high school. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Ouch!"
"Well, hold still. I'm surprised that it did as much damage as it did. I'd always thought of those little rockets as being one of those neat ideas that didn't quite work out. They were too inaccurate to hit anything at a distance and too slow-moving up close to make much of a hole."
I used my handkerchief as a compress and Adam's, which was bigger, to wrap around his head to hold the compress in place.
"Yeah, well, I had some ideas about that. I figured that if I could grip the rocket tight for a while, until it built up some pressure behind it, it would come out of the barrel fast enough to do you some good without giving the gun too much of a kick."
"There, that should do it, at least until we get home. So your idea worked. But I don't see how you could do that with the other five rounds."
"What other five rounds? How much room do you think there is in a penlight? It was a single shot. All that talk about the other shots was just showmanship."
"Adam, if it works, it's sound engineering. Do you need help getting home?"
"Nah, I can walk okay."
"Good. Then how about you helping me?"
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