he Sheriff thundered at them. "I repeat: you don't deserve
to be as lucky as you are! But you aren't going to get out of taking
your part in pulling things back together again. Help is needed out
there north of town, and you're going to help.

"You help or you don't eat!"

A roar of rage thundered from the group. One man stepped forward. "You
can't pull a thing like this, Johnson. We've got guns, too. We've used
them before, and we can use them again!"

"Then you had better go home and get them right now," said Johnson. "My
men and I will be waiting for you. I suppose there could be a lot more
of you than there are of us, so you can probably shoot us down. Then you
can eat all you want for a month, and die. Go get your gun, Hank, and
come after your rations!"

The man turned to the crowd. "Okay, you heard what he said! Let's go and
get 'em!"

He strode away, then turned back to beckon his followers. In the empty
street before the converted theater, he stood alone. "Come on!" he
cried. "Who's coming with me?"

The crowd avoided his eyes. They shifted uneasily and looked at Johnson
again. "What do you mean?" another man asked. "About, we work or we
don't eat--"

"Come on, you guys!" Hank shouted.

"The assignments on the projector will be rotated," said Johnson. "We'll
spare as many men as we can from everything else. Those of you who have
been given assignment slips will get 3 days' rations. When you bring
back the slips with a verification that you did your job on the
projector you'll get an assignment somewhere else until it's your turn
again. The ones without verification on the slips don't get the next 3
days' rations. That's the way it's going to be. If there's no more
argument, we'll get on with the distribution.

"Hank, get down at the end of the line!"

By mid-afternoon, the scientists had their full crew of sullen and
unwilling helpers. The Sheriff had sent along a half-dozen of his own
men, fully armed, to see there was no disturbance, but the objectors
seemed to have had their say.

With a gradual increase of co-operativeness, they did the tasks they
were assigned, bringing up materials, laying out the first members of
the great, skeletal structure that would rise in the pasture. Johnson
came at the end of the day to see how it was going. He breathed a sigh
of relief at the lack of disturbance. "It looks like we've got it made,"
he said.

"I think so," Ken agreed. "All we have to do now is see