They lunched together at the house of Toon Sarge Hughes with theToon Leader and the Reader and five or six of the leaders of thecommunity. The food was plentiful, but Altamont found himselfwishing that the first book they found in the Carnegie Librarycrypt would be a cook-book.
In the afternoon, he and Loudons separated.
Loudons attached himself to the Tenant, the Reader and an oldwoman, Irene Klein, who was almost a hundred years old and wasthe repository and arbiter of most of the community's orallegends.
Altamont, on the other hand, started with Alex Barrett, thegunsmith, and Mordecai Ricci, the miller, to inspect the gunshopand the grist mill. They were later joined by a half dozen moreof the village craftsmen and so also visited the forge andfoundry, the sawmill and the wagon shop. Altamont additionallylooked at the flume, a rough structure of logs lined with sheetaluminum; and at the nitriary, a shed-roofed pit in whichpotassium nitrate was extracted from the community's animalrefuse.
But he reversed matters when it came to visiting the powder millon the island: he became the host and took them by helicopter tothe island and then for a trip up the river.
The guests were a badly-scared lot, for the first few minutes, asthey watched the ground receding under them through thetransparent plastic nose. Then, when nothing serious seemed to behappening, exhilaration took the place of fear. By the time theyset down on the tip of the island, the eight men were confirmedaviation enthusiasts.
The trip up-river was an even bigger success, the high pointcoming when Altamont set his controls for Hover, pointed out asnarl of driftwood in the stream, and allowed his passengers tofire one of the machine-guns at it.
The lead balls of their own black-powder rifles would haveplunked into the water-logged wood without visible effect. Thecopper-jacketed machine-gun bullets ripped it to splinters.
They returned for a final visit to the distillery awed by whatthey had seen.