Jimmy Throxton called out, “What do we want any speeches for? Let’s elect Rod and go to bed. I’m tired and I’ve got a two hour watch coming up.”
“Out of order. The chair recognizes Grant Cowper.” Cowper stood up. The firelight caught his handsome features and curly, short beard. Rod rubbed the scraggly growth on his own chin and wished that he looked like Cowper. The young man was dressed only in walking shorts and soft bush shoes but he carried himself with the easy dignity of a distinguished speaker before some important body. “Friends,” he said, “brothers and sisters, we are gathered here tonight not to elect a survival team captain, but to found a new nation.”
He paused to let the idea sink in. “You know the situation we are in. We fervently hope to be rescued, none more so than I. I will even go so far as to say that I think we will be rescued . . . eventually. But we have no way of knowing, we have no data on which to base an intelligent guess, as to when we will be rescued.
“It might be tomorrow . . . it might be our descendants a thousand years from now.” He said the last very solemnly.
“But when the main body of our great race re-establishes contact with us, it is up to us, this little group here tonight, whether they find a civilized society or fleabitten animals without language, without arts, with the light of reason grown dim . . . or no survivors at all, nothing but bones picked clean.”
“Not mine!” called out Caroline. Kilroy gave her a dirty look and called for order.
“Not yours, Caroline,” Cowper agreed gravely. “Nor mine. Not any of us. Because tonight we will take the step that will keep this colony alive. We are poor in things; we will make what we need. We are rich in knowledge; among us we hold the basic knowledge of our great race. We must preserve it . . . we will!”
Caroline cut through Cowper’s dramatic pause with a stage whisper. “Talks pretty, doesn’t he? Maybe I’ll marry him.”
He did not try to fit this heckling into his speech. “What is the prime knowledge acquired by our race? That without which the rest is useless? What flame must we guard like vestal virgins?”
Some one called out, “Fire.” Cowper shook his head.
“Writing!”
“The decimal system.”
“Atomics!”
“The wheel, of course.
“No, none of those. They are all important, but they are not the keystone. The greatest invention of mankind is government. It is also the hardest of all. More individualistic than cats, nevertheless we have learned to cooperate more efficiently than ants or bees or termites. Wilder, bloodier, and more deadly than sharks, we have learned to live together as peacefully as lambs. But these things are not easy. That is why that which we do tonight will decide our future . . . and perhaps the future of our children, our children’s children, our descendants far into the womb of time. We are not picking a temporary survival leader; we are setting up a government. We must do it with care. We must pick a chief executive for our new nation, a mayor of our city state. But we must draw up a constitution, sign articles binding us together. We must organize and plan.”
“Hear, hear!”
“Bravo!”
“We must establish law, appoint judges, arrange for orderly administration of our code. Take for example, this morning” Cowper turned to Rod and gave him a friendly smile. “Nothing personal, Rod, you understand that. I think you acted with wisdom and I was happy that you tempered justice with mercy. Yet no one could have criticized if you had yielded to your impulse and killed all four of those, uh . . . antisocial individuals. But justice should not be subject to the whims of a dictator. We can’t stake our lives on your temper . . . good or bad. You see that, don’t you?”
Rod did not answer He felt that he was being accused of bad temper, of being a tyrant and dictator, of being a danger to the group. But he could not put his finger on it. Grant Cowper’s remarks had been friendly . . . yet they felt intensely personal and critical.