Without modern technology at its most advanced, the town could never have been built. Yet in the streets of the town there was a village rudeness of construction which no pioneering effort could quite efface: a wide main street that gleamed red in the sunlight on which three caterpillar tractors stood stalled, their guard rails caked with yellow mud; a pool of stagnant black water with a wooden plank thrown haphazardly across it; a discarded fuel container upended against a half-rusted away metal cable, and the remnants of an hydraulic actuator overgrown with hardy lichens that had colored it yellow and ash gray. And here and there, projecting from the tumbled sand, were spiny cactus-like growths.
Yet it was not too small a town. Its inhabitants numbered eight thousand, two-thirds of them men. There were ninety-seven children. It was not too small a town, and now, in each of the houses, a new day was beginning.
At least thirty men and a few women had collected about the haggard-eyed desert straggler. Every one of them hung on his words. Every one of these people had been ruined by Ramsey's rapacious greed. Their past accomplishments were destroyed; their futures were non-existent. They lived in a terrorized state, from hand-to-mouth, indifferent now to any more wrongdoing that could be visited upon them. The fires of their hatred for Ramsey gave them the basic energy to go on existing.
Out of grinding desperation they had turned to Henley, had given him a free hand, even when most, in their heart-of-hearts, knew he was a scoundrel. The fact was that he was the only man among them not so cowed as to be actively enraged against Ramsey. He promised that the mines would be given back to the people. And, having nothing, they believed everything.
They came from everywhere in the colony, and from every trade and profession. Who was this man? And was he friend or foe?
The crowd grew slowly. Despite the shouts and the sudden stir of excitement which had greeted the speaker on his arrival, there was no headlong rush to surround him. The colonists emerged from their lodgings and converged calmly upon the square, some having the look of tradesfolk concerned with a possible interruption of business, and others seemingly intent only on what the stranger might have to say.