s simply didn't believe that.

When they got back to the Administration Building on top, they found
Rodney Maxwell, Jerry Rivas, the general foremen, and half a dozen
gang foremen, in consultation.

"We're getting a hundred and fifty more men and ten farm scows from
Litchfield," his father said. "Dave McCade's coming out from our yard,
and Tom Brangwyn's sending one of his deputies to help boss them. Well
have to keep an eye on this crowd; they're all Tramptown hoodlums, but
that's the best we can get. We're going to have to get this place
cleaned out in a hurry. We only have about two weeks till the
wine-pressing's over, and then we want to start the next operation.
Conn, did you see all that engineering equipment, down on the bottom
level?"

"Yes. I think we ought to leave a lot of that here--the shovels and
bulldozers and manipulators and so on. We can move it direct to Force
Command. How are we fixed for blasting explosives?"

"Name it and we have it. Cataclysmite, FJ-7, anything you want."

"We'll need a lot of it."

"We're going to have to get a ship. I mean a contragravity ship, a
freighter; first, to move this stuff out of here, and then to move the
stuff out of Force Command. And we want it mounted with heavy
armament, too. We not only want a freighter, we want a fighting ship."

"You think so?"

"I'm sure of it," Rodney Maxwell said. "Where we're going is full of
outlaws; there must be hundreds of them holing up over there. That's
where all the trouble on the east coast comes from. Now, outlaws are
sure-thing players. They want to be alive to spend their loot, and
they won't tackle anything that's too tough for them. A lot of guards
and combat equipment may look like a loss on the books, but the books
won't show how much of a loss you might take if you didn't have them.
I want this operation armed till it'll be too much for all the outlaws
on the planet to tackle."

That made sense. It also made sense out of the billions of sols the
Federation had spent preparing for an invasion that never came. If it
had come and found them unprepared, the loss might have been the war
itself.

The scows and the newly hired workers began arriving a little after
noon. The scows had been borrowed from plantations where the crop
had been gotten in; there were melon leaves and bits of vine in
the bottoms. The workers were a bleary-eyed and unsavory lot;
Conn had a suspicion, which Brangwyn's deputy confirmed, that
th