noon
That made sense . It also made sense out of the billions of sols the Federation had spent preparing for an invasion that never came . If it had come and found them unprepared , the loss might have been the war itself . The scows and the newly hired workers began arriving a little after noon . The scows had been borrowed from plantations where the crop had been gotten in ; there were melon leaves and bits of vine in the bottoms . The workers were a bleary-eyed and unsavory lot ; Conn had a suspicion , which Brangwyn 's deputy confirmed , that they had been collected by mass vagrancy arrests in Tramptown . As soon as they started arriving , Jerry Rivas hurried down to the old provost-marshal 's headquarters and came back with a lot of rubber billy-clubs , which he issued to his gang-bosses , regular and temporary .