ankets or going up to the barracks rooms above.

The next day they found the relay station which rebroadcast signals
from the buried aerial--or wouldn't one say, sub-terrial--on top of
the mesa. As Conn had expected, it was on top of a high butte three
and a half miles to the south; it had been so skillfully camouflaged
that none of the outlaw bands who roamed the Badlands had found it.
After that, Force Command Duplicate was in communication with the rest
of Poictesme.

They moved into the staff headquarters at the top; Foxx Travis's
office, tidied up, became the headquarters for the company officials
and chief supervisors. The workmen quartered themselves in the
enlisted barracks, helping themselves liberally to anything they
found. The crowds of sightseers kept swarming in, giving Tom
Brangwyn's police plenty to do. Tom himself turned the marshal's
office in Litchfield over to his chief deputy. Klem Zareff insisted on
more men for his guard force. A dozen gunboats, eighty-foot craft
mounting one 90-mm gun, several smaller auto-cannon and one
missile-launcher, had been found; he took them over immediately,
naming them for capital ships of the old System States Navy. It took
some argument to dissuade him from repainting all of them black and
green. He kept them all in the air, with a swarm of smaller airboats
and combat-cars, circling the underground headquarters at a radius of
a hundred miles. These patrols reported a general exodus from the
region. At least a dozen outlaw bands, all with fast contragravity,
had been camped inside the zone. Some fled at once; the rest needed
only a few warning shots to send them away. Other bands, looking like
legitimate prospecting parties, began to filter into the Badlands.
Zareff came to Rodney Maxwell--instead of Kurt Fawzi, the titular head
of the company, which was significant--to find out what policy
regarding them would be.

"Well, we have no right to keep them out, as long as they stay outside
our ten-mile radius," Conn's father said. "And as we're the only
thing that even looks like law around here, I'd say we have an
obligation to give them protection. Have your boats investigate them;
if they're legitimate, tell them they can call on us for help if they
need it."

Conn protested, privately.

"There's a lot of stuff around here, in small caches," he said.
"Equipment for guerrilla companies, in event of invasion. When work
slacks off here, we could pick that stuff up.