You did not kill to get it. Anybody who did, and was caught, faced summary
execution, no reprieve. It was one of the Trader’s iron rules. Even when he’d
destroyed Cooperville, there’d been no rape.
It was one of the things that had bolstered his rep, given him the key to all
those small towns that were tight little enclaves, well defended, well
manned—all those small towns with their strong guard units who turned away
other, lesser, traders who were not so choosy in the way they conducted their
business; who were, when you got down to it, little more than marauding bands of
killers and cutthroats, looters and pillagers. That was not, and never had been,
the Trader’s way, and most recognized this in the Deathlands, and welcomed him
with open arms instead of gun barrels.
Still, his methods had changed over the years. Whereas before he’d been willing
to get shot of all he came across for the best price he could find, now he held
back on much he discovered in his foraging trips. In his early days he’d let too
many guys have too much hardware, too much high-powered hardware, and it seemed
to him now that such a practice had been not merely unwise but an outright
disaster whose hideous ramifications lingered with him still. He had come to
realize that unwittingly, thoughtlessly—greedily—he had armed groups whose aims
were by no means altruistic, whose ideas were in fact solely concentrated on
power for its own sake.
As the years had gone by the Trader had brooded long on the guns problem and had
still come up with no firm solution. You had to have weapons to defend yourself.
In an ordered world, maybe, you relied on those forces you yourself set up to
guard your rights and liberties, hold the peace, defend the weak against the
strong. And even then, even in the most orderly society there might ever have
been, there would still be those who secretly sought evil and who therefore
preyed on the less fortunate.
And what if those who carried the weapons, those whom you’d set up, turned
against you, were corrupted by the very power you had bestowed upon them? It
happened. It always happened. Marsh Folsom, who knew about these things, had
said it had happened all the time, throughout recorded history.
Because the trouble was that for some people power was a heady drug. The more
they had, the more they wanted. It was that simple.
And yet it seemed to the Trader, thinking about such things, arguing the problem
out with his captains through the long watches of the night, over many years,
that though in a sense he’d been dead wrong to let loose all that vicious
ordnance he’d discovered, in a sense he’d been dead right.
There was no denying that he had armed certain communities, deep in the wilder
reaches of the Deathlands, that, because of him, had stayed intact and had
flourished when by all rights they ought to have gone under, been ravaged by the
fireblasting drivers and muties and crazies who roamed the land. At least with
weapons they’d stood a chance.
The fact was, whichever way you cut it, a weaponless burg didn’t have a hope.
Not now. Not in these wild times. The Trader has seen what could happen to such
communities too often to deny this. There had been many towns, mostly of a
strong religious persuasion of one kind or another, that had denounced violence,
renounced weaponry; that had proclaimed a new era of peace and harmony following
the Apocalypse. All had fallen prey to the men of violence who had renounced
nothing. Sometimes they had merely been invaded, enslaved. Sometimes,
dreadfully, serfdom had been the least of their woes.
The Trader acknowledged to himself and to those closest to him that the blame
for many of these atrocities had to find its way back to him. He sometimes
wondered how in hell what passed for civilization these days had managed to make
it through the past hundred years or so, not only through the Cold, which by all
accounts had been grim enough, but beyond, when folks had started crawling out