- Chapter 37






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Chapter 37
Andy Blacklock shook head. "Rod, we can't go back to the prison. Not yet. The way I understand it, another village is about to wiped off the face of the planet. This planet, not the one we came from. This planet, that doesn't have very many villages to start with. And we have to rescue those people already enslaved, too. You said yourself most of them were women and girls."
Lieutenant Hulbert set his jaws. "Look, I understand your reaction. Believe me, I had the same reaction myself—and then some—watching those thugs brutalizing people. But you're not looking at the whole picture, Andy."
They were sitting in the cabin the Cherokees had provided them. Rod nodded toward the door. "Since tying up with Geoffrey's people, we have women and children and old people. Damn it, we could lose them. And if we do, we will never have it again. We will never see an old man or old woman and a baby on the same day. There's more at stake here than just us. Andy, it's like you've said a hundred times, our future—who we will be—is on the line. We have to pick our battles, and make sure we win them. We can't risk a loss. If we die trying to help that village, then there won't be anyone to protect this town or the people we still have at the prison."
He stopped, and took a deep breath. Obviously, trying to keep his temper under control. This was the first time since the Quiver that Rod and Andy had had a serious disagreement, and neither one of them wanted to risk escalating it into a shouting match.
Andy took a deep breath himself and looked away.
"Okay, Rod. But you're the one who's not looking at the whole picture. This isn't simply a moral issue. It isn't even simply a strategic or tactical issue, in a narrow military sense. It's quite possibly a matter of life and death for every human being on the planet. Not now, but generations from now."
Rod frowned. "That seems awfully melodramatic, Andy."
"No, it isn't. We've got a problem—and you can spell that with a capital P—that I hadn't even thought about until Jeff raised it with me privately, the same night you left on your expedition. And it's about as crude and simple as problems get."
He looked at Edelman, the third man in the cabin. "Tell him, Jeff."
"Rod, I'm worried about the genetic pool."
"Huh?"
"Genetic pool. Breeding population. There are various terms for it. But what they all come down to is that if the numbers of a species drop too far, that species is doomed. It either goes extinct quickly, or it starts developing such serious genetic problems that its chances of survival get really dicey. That's why population numbers is the key benchmark they use to declare a species endangered."
By the time Jeff was done, Rod had his eyes closed. Andy understood the reason. He'd done exactly the same thing when Jeff had raised the issue with him earlier. Closed his eyes and did the math himself.
The arithmetic was pretty damn stark. A little over two hundred guards and nurses, the majority of them male. And of the females, a good percentage were no longer young enough to have children. Certainly not more than one child. Two thousand plus convicts, all of them male—leaving aside any other consideration, such as the fact that some of them were psychotic. Somewhere between three hundred and seven hundred Spanish conquistadores. All of them male. A small number of U.S. soldiers. All of them male. About three hundred Cherokees, evenly divided in terms of gender but with a number of the women beyond child-bearing years.
"Well, aren't we screwed?" muttered Hulbert.
Jeff chuckled humorlessly. "Probably a poor choice of words, given the circumstances. Aren't we not screwed would be a lot closer."
Rod blew out some air and rubbed his face. "We needed this like we needed a hole in the head." He thought about it for a moment. "Okay, then. What's the magic number? How many do you need?"
Edelman shrugged. "Nobody really knows, is the only honest answer. The minimum, of course, is the Biblical two. Adam and Eve. But even in the Bible, their sons found wives somewhere else. Where'd they come from? Even the Lord Almighty doesn't seem to have known the answer. We sure as hell don't."
Hulbert glared at him. "Will you puh-lease stop being such a damn academic? Give me a ballpark figure, Jeff."
"Sorry. Can't even do that. The problem is that the number seems to vary, from species to species—and nobody's ever put it to the test, with human beings."
Hulbert's glare didn't fade at all. Jeff sighed. "Look, I can put it this way. Leaving out of the equation for the moment whatever number of Indians are out there other than the Cherokees, I figure we've got somewhere around two hundred females, all told, who are capable of having children. Please note that I'm being wildly optimistic, in that I'm presuming that each and every one of them is capable of bearing a child and is willing to do so. I've already told Andy that if and when the time comes that we have to declare a public policy, I'm ducking behind the podium and letting him tell Bird Matthews that she's gotta start screwing guys."
Rod laughed. One of the guards, Bird Matthews, was a confirmed and I'm-not-kidding lesbian. She was cheerful about it, not belligerent, and she wasn't a "militant" in the usual sense of the word. In fact, she was quite popular with the other guards, of either sex. But she'd made clear the I'm-not-kidding part by organizing a small motorcycle club that called itself Dykes on Bikes. They even had the logo on their motorcycle jackets.
"Okay, point taken. But let's assume the two hundred figure is valid. What then?"
"Well, like I told Andy, I'm not positive. But I'm pretty sure that's not enough. Not in the long run. It's not a simple matter of arithmetic. Obviously, if two hundred women each have two daughters, and those daughters each have two, etc. etc., you wind up with a problem of overpopulation faster than you might imagine. But people are complex packages of DNA, on a genetic level, they're not numbers. If the original breeding stock is too low, you run into what's called a bottleneck problem. That won't just apply to us, either. Any of the animals that came through in small numbers, such as the horses, are looking at a bottleneck too.
"Even something as random as genetic drift can screw you up. All it takes is one or two bad mutations and you can find yourself dying off. It's not so much an arithmetical problem as a statistical one. Theoretically, a species could survive with an initial breeding stock of one male and one female. It's just that the smaller the pool, the worse the odds get."
He looked at the small fire in the chimney they were sitting by, for a moment. "On the other side of the coin—again, with the caveat that this is really just an educated guess—I think that two thousand females would be enough."
"Oh, swell. We're screwed, then." A bit grumpily: "And don't lecture me about my choice of words. We're still not even in the ballpark."
"Not . . . necessarily. We have no idea how many little Indian villages or hunter-gatherer bands are out there. But I can tell you this much. I think it has to be a fair number."
"Why?"
"Because the Quiver—whatever it was; which we don't know and I doubt we ever will—wasn't just a temporal phenomenon. It was also a spacial phenomenon. And it looks to me as if the spacial dimension involved in its effects—call it the radius—got larger the farther back in time it went. Or maybe it started way back in ancient time and came forward, narrowing as it went. Either way, if you were to plot the Quiver in three dimensions, it would look like a cone rather than a cylinder."
"Run that by me again."
"Think about it, Rod. Who got taken in our day? Just us. The prison, and a little bit of territory around it. Go back almost a hundred and seventy years, and who got taken among the Cherokee? I've asked, and the answer is interesting. Chief Watkins and his people weren't all gathered together in one small area when they got snatched by the Quiver, the way we were. They were strung out along a trail—and the soldiers were riding point quite a ways ahead. Still, most of them got snatched. The only ones who didn't, in his band, were a group that had been bringing up the rear a long ways behind, and the soldiers who were with them. Which was most of them."
"Ha. I'll be damned. I hadn't even thought about that."
"Don't feel bad," said Andy. "Neither had I."
"Jeff, have you tried to figure out—"
"Don't teach your grandmother to suck eggs. Of course I've tried to figure out what the radius must have been. As near as I can tell, at least a half a mile and maybe even a mile. The problem is that nobody knows exactly how far back the group that didn't get taken were lagging. The soldiers were a good quarter of a mile ahead, though, according to Sergeant Kershner. So no matter how you slice it, the territory involved was a lot bigger than the prison area."
Idly, he picked up a stick and fed it to the fire. "Okay. The next group of people who got snatched, that we know of, were de Soto and his army. Please note the use of the term 'army.' Fine, a small army—but you don't cram even a small army into a small space. Not when you're on campaign, for sure—and every report we've gotten about the Spaniards seems to indicate they're foraging constantly. What little we've been able to squeeze out of the one Spaniard we captured seems to confirm that. No matter which way I look at it, I figure it has to have been a lot bigger radius than the one the Cherokees were in, much less us."
Another stick went into the fire. "I get the same results when I look at the animals, except it's even more extreme. We haven't seen more than four deer—and yet, between us and the Cherokees, we've seen three allosaurs. There's no way to explain that ratio without presuming a steady increase in the radius of the Quiver as it went further and further back in time."
"Uh . . . sorry, I'm not following you."
"That's because you're not a biologist. One of the laws of biology is that predators are always outnumbered—a lot—by prey, and the bigger an animal gets, the scarcer it gets. Especially predators. That's because big predators need a very big hunting range."
It didn't take Rod, with his extensive outdoor experience, more than a second to grasp the point. "Jesus. What's the hunting range of something like a grizzly bear or a tiger?"
"Tigers, I don't know. And I don't remember the specific numbers for big bears. It's different anyway, for male and female bears. But I do know the numbers, from the lowest to highest, are all measured in square kilometers. Hundreds of square kilometers."
"Gotcha. And a big bear weighs what, approximately? Half a ton?"
"Not quite, although a few individuals get even bigger that that. The biggest are the southern Alaskan brown bears. If I remember right, the males average somewhere around four hundred kilos. Call it nine hundred pounds."
Hulbert nodded. "What do you figure an allosaur weighs? And spare me the lecture about variation. I know that. Ballpark figures, Jeff, ballpark figures. For right now, that's plenty good enough."
Edelman smiled. "They're at least three times bigger than a large male Alaskan brown bear. Probably closer to five or six times bigger, on average, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of them got up to four or five tons. Which would make them eight to ten times bigger."
"Four deer and three allosaurs . . ." Rod mused. "Yeah, I see your point. There's simply no way you could have found three allosaurs in an area the size of the prison, or even that stretch of trail the Cherokees were on."
"Not unless they were having a convention or a rock concert. No, by the time the Quiver reached the Cretaceous, the radius had to have been something like fifty miles. Probably more, and maybe a lot more. We have no reason to think that the three allosaurs we've seen or heard about are all there are."
Rod pondered the matter, for a minute or so. "In other words—this is the gist of it, stripped down to the essentials—the future of the human race in this world depends ultimately on the most primitive people in it. Those pre-Mounds Indians out there, in their villages."
"Yup. Just like the Bible says. The meek shall inherit the Earth."
Rod scratched his cheek. "Andy, since you're the big shot, I do believe I'll follow Jeff's example. When the time comes, I'm ducking behind the podium while you tell an assembled crowd of prison guards and prehistoric hunter-gatherers that they've got to start dating."
All three of them laughed. When the laughter died down, Edelman shook his head. "It won't have to come that, thankfully. This is a generational problem, not something measured in years. And while I don't know nearly as much history and anthropology as I do biology and geology, I do know one thing. There has never been a time recorded in human history or told about in myths and legends, when two groups of human beings met for the first time, that they didn't start screwing each other." He leaned back on his stool, looking very complacent. "Besides, that's what adolescence is for. Let our teenage descendants deal with it, the snotty worthless brats."
Rod sighed, and ran fingers through his hair. "But we can do what they can't. Keep those Indians alive to begin with."
"Yeah, that's right," said Andy. "Look at it this way, Rod. We had a job to do in our old world, and all that seems to have happened is that we're picking up the same job in this one. Protecting people against the worst people."
Rod chuckled, softly and without much humor. "I don't think the term 'correctional officer' was ever intended to be applied to Spanish damn-the-bastards conquistadores. But, okay, I see your point. When do we leave tomorrow?"
 
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