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Stories from the Verse
In Verse Proportion
Chapter 145: Slade 213
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Brown 244
Slade was beginning to relax.
Maybe Shella was right.
After all, he had been here for what amounted to several years, and there had been no sign of an impending war despite the fact that he and his companions had given the world a powerful array of advances in weaponry. Oh, not energy weapons, of course, but automatic ones that significantly improved their fighting ability.
Further, he had been improving the fighting abilities of a small clutch of swordsbirds. It was entirely possible that he was here to recruit a few people for Ragnorak.
Or it could even be that he and his companions had arrived specifically to help push these peeps through their industrial revolution. After all, that included weaponry, but it included transportation and communication and so much more that was ultimately useful in war. He noticed that Joe had not done much to advance their medicine, as he had in other worlds, but that he and Derek had brought the dawn of the computer age and of the space race. Maybe they were here not to fight but to teach, to give these people advantages that might have taken another generation or two, advantages humans had not had.
Of course, he didn’t know for certain that humans had not been helped. Edison might have been an alien, Velikovsky a verser, Bell a time traveler. But these birds had the aid of people who knew what was possible and how to achieve it. This could be the point, the reason.
No sense discussing it with Joe. He would say it was nonsense, that there was no point, no reason. Derek might agree; but then, Derek was not really warrior of Odin material, and wouldn’t see things framed in the right light. Still, they might be right. Maybe he should relax.
Don’t relax, he told himself. That’s when the trouble comes.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with twenty other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #456: Versers Prepare. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
