A Boy and His Tank (3 page)

"Another problem was the transporter station circling the neutron star. In order to keep it out of the deadly beam of radiation, it had to be built in a synchronous orbit, and being in a twenty-two-second orbit around a neutron star was something that no even vaguely sane person would want to do.

"The crazy orbit happened for equally stupid reasons. The robot doing the job had instructions to put the terminal in a safe, solar orbit, and that was the best its little electrical mind could do. The station had never been replaced because it worked, sort of, and nobody from the board of the Wealthy Nations Group was ever likely to have to use it themselves.

"Until word of this planet came out, my great-grandpa Dzerzdzon had been making a modest amount of political hay out of his attempts to con the Wealthy Nations Group, since everybody appreciates a good con job, but now they all laughed at him. He lost the next election and he almost wasn't invited to his own niece's wedding.

"Then the Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing Corporation sent a prospector to New Kashubia, and he found that it was a solid metal ball, with no atmosphere to pollute, no ecology to worry about, and no population to demand more taxes, all of which were wonderful from their standpoint. Furthermore, some of the metals that the place was made of were valuable enough to be worth shipping back to Earth and other nice places. The deal they made with Great-grandpa Dzerzdzon brought us Kashubians thirty-nine billion yen a year, enough to double the income of every full-blooded Kashubian in the world, which was mostly what we used it for.

"Dzerzdzon was promptly reelected, and for the next thirty-two years he was invited to every wedding, christening, and funeral that anybody heard about. He died a contented man, well loved by his countrymen and the ladies, too.

"Because of Great-grandfather Dzerzdzon, and the deal with Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing, we Kashubians had a very good time of it for over half a century. We were comparatively rich, although of course not in the same league as the Japanese or those boorish bastards from Portugal. We were relatively well educated, in that at government expense, anybody could go to school anywhere and study for as long as they could get somebody to teach them, but that was more work than most people wanted to do.

"Me, I was almost through a course in civil engineering when we had to go, but I'm something of an exception. Mostly, my people simply continued to do as we have always done, farming and fishing, mostly, except that now we could spend a lot more money on weddings, funerals, and christenings. There were a lot of christenings, since we Kashubians were at that time a very prolific people. After all, every kid born meant a bigger check for the family from the Japanese.

"Then one day, some pervert at the Wealthy Nations Group Headquarters noticed that the world was more crowded than ever, that he needed a promotion to pay for his new girlfriend, and that there were still Kashubians around, in direct defiance of our contractual obligations. Steps were taken to have us removed forthwith.

"Naturally, we Kashubians had no desire to leave our comfortable homes and go to live on a solid metal ball spinning around a neutron star. Under the leadership of Dzerzdzon's grandson, my uncle Wlodzimierz Derdowski, all payments to individuals were stopped, except for medical and educational benefits, and the money received from Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing was placed in a special war chest. He hired the best lawyers that we could afford and took the matter all the way to the World Court, which gained us eight more years on Earth and cost us a ridiculous amount of money in lawyer's fees.

"The World Court was very unsympathetic. The precedents had all been set seventy-five years ago. Every minority group had some people who didn't want to go, and I guess the difference between some and all isn't that great to a lawyer.

"We Kashubians said that we couldn't possibly live on the planet that we had been given. The court said that if we hadn't wanted it, we should have given it back after we checked it out, and not sold mining rights on it. Anyway, by this time there were plenty of tunnels on the planet that we could live in. Just seal them up and pressurize the place with imported air.

"We said that we couldn't afford to do this. The court said that we had received over two trillion yen over the last sixty years, and that was enough money to terraform anything. We said that we had spent it. The court said `tough.'

"We said that there would be nothing to eat. The court recommended fluorescent lights and hydroponics. We said that the power plants on New Kashubia couldn't produce that much electricity. The court said that we should build more electric power plants. We had automatic factories and plenty of uranium. That was some help. We hadn't known about the automatic factories.

"We'd never asked.

"Anyway, the court gave us three years to be gone, and there wasn't much that we could do but go.

"Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing was very helpful, since the Japanese feared that if we were pressed too hard against the wall, we might nationalize the very profitable installations that the corporation had built over the decades. The corporation did its best, according to its own lights and providing that it didn't disturb its profits too much. And to tell the truth, I have to say that our colonization efforts probably would have failed, leaving us dead or at least with no place to go, without the technical help and leadership of the Japanese.

"But we Kashubians are not Japanese! Those people have some kind of automatic respect for authority and they are all eager to get in neat straight lines and march in step, singing the company song. Kashubians are Poles, and Poles have never responded well to regimentation. Yet it was clear to both the Japanese and to us that the free and easy ways of the past would have to go.

"We would have to live Spartan lives or not live at all!

"New Kashubia is incredibly rich in metals. The planet was probably a gas giant at one time, but when the local sun went supernova a few billion or so years ago, all of the planet's outer layers, which contained the lighter elements, were blown away. Any lighter stuff mixed with the remaining core soon boiled off.

"All that was left of the entire planet was a molten metal ball, and as it cooled, various metals froze out of solution with those of the highest melting points near the surface, and those of progressively lower melting points farther in. It was sort of like zone refining on a planetary scale. While a good deal of natural alloying took place, this planet was a series of concentric metallic shells with a two-hundred-foot thick layer of almost pure tungsten at the surface and a pool of liquid mercury at the core.

"Except for that core, the entire planet is solid and not particularly hot. Metals are much better conductors of heat than the rocky covering that Earth-like planets have. All of the original heat has long since dissipated on New Kashubia, and the heat of decay from the more radioactive layers finds its way to the surface easily.

"Kasia, my throat is getting dry."

THERE IS A WATER TAP NOW EXTENDING JUST TO THE LEFT OF YOUR MOUTH.

"It extended
into
my mouth," I said with a rubber water tap in my mouth. "Look, I'm not very thrilled about drinking my own reprocessed urine."

THIS IS NOT REPROCESSED ANYTHING, SINCE YOU HAVE YET TO URINATE. IT IS SIMPLY DISTILLED WATER FROM MY INTERNAL STORES.

"Right. It tastes warm and flat."

TRY IT AGAIN.

"Hmm. Much better. What did you do?"

I APPROXIMATED THE CHEMICAL COMPOSITION OF SPRING WATER AND DROPPED THE TEMPERATURE TO FIVE DEGREES CENTIGRADE.

"You can do that? Thank you."

ALL PART OF THE SERVICE. NOW, YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT THE FOUNDING OF NEW KASHUBIA.

"Yes, ma'am. Over the decades, the Japanese robots dug their way straight to the center of the planet to tap the mercury, and tunnels went off this central shaft at those levels that contained metals most in demand.

"You know that gold is a very useful metal. Even though they don't use it for money anymore, it is attractive, malleable, noncorroding and rare, which makes it expensive enough to be transported profitably. Naturally, the gold layer on New Kashubia is among the most exploited and had the most extensive system of tunnels. The gold layer was fairly deep, so that the gravity was low there and people burned less food moving about. That and the fact that gold is among the least poisonous of metals meant that these tunnels were the first to be sealed off for housing the eleven million Kashubians who were arriving as fast as there was the least bit of room for them.

"You see, when the money was being distributed, everybody who was even a little bit Kashubian was eager to claim to be one of us, and benefits were handed out in proportion to
how
Kashubian you were. Even a one-sixteenth share was well worth cashing the check on. Then when the Civil Dragoons came rounding people up for export, they used our own disbursement lists as a guide, and never mind that only one of your great-great-grandparents was Kashubian. They were worried about world overpopulation, not about justice.

"Many people came to regret their grandparents' greed. I mean, some of the people they sent to New Kashubia looked Chinese, and a few of us were even black, if you can believe an Afro-Kashubian. Me, I always was one hundred percent Kashubian, so I never had much choice one way or another.

"I had managed to get a few student deferments, so that I could complete my education before I was forced to emigrate, but they yanked me out of school just before I graduated, right in the middle of final exams. Even so, I was on almost the last immigrant canister to go to New Kashubia.

"I guess a degree wouldn't have made much of a difference here, anyway.

"They had me fly from my school in England to Warszawa International, but then I had to get on the same ancient, decrepit railroad train that everybody else used when they were being deported. They didn't want us in a group at the airport to remind the
nice, decent
people of what they were doing to us.

"We were transported from a station in what had been Belgrade, Yugoslavia, before the Yugoslavs had left twenty years before, to the vast relief of everyone around, the Wealthy Nations Group included. For variously historically significant reasons, those people had been responsible for causing, or at least starting, at least three major wars and who knows how many small ones, including World War I, the Bosnian Conflict, and the Serbian Reunification. Yugoslavia, of course, had so many ethnic minorities that it actually didn't have any group in the majority, so they just gave the whole nation a planet of their own.

"Now, of course, that whole area of Europe is a resort area used by the citizens of the Wealthy Nations Group, so we disreputable Kashubians were shuttled directly from our railroad cars to the transport station in closed busses, before we had a chance to disturb
nice, decent
people and cause their wonderful property values to drop.

"I watched when our canister came in, and over three thousand tons of gold were pulled out of it with sturdy lift trucks, to be shipped to the Wealthy Nations. Then collapsible bunks were folded out and thin, new, plastic covered mattresses were put on them. We soon found out the reason for the plastic covers.

"They'd told us that absolutely no luggage or personal effects were allowed, but some people still didn't believe them.

"Their property was simply trashed by the guards. We had nothing but the clothes on our backs, and we'd be losing even those before it was through. We colonists were loaded forty at a time into tiny ships that consisted of nothing but a metal canister with a minimal life-support system and tiny bunks that had been designed by a very short Japanese engineer.

"These ships, like most of those used throughout human space, had been built in an automatic factory right here on New Kashubia, but we unappreciative occupants were not gratified. The ships had no propulsion system, no guidance system, no pilots, and no windows.

"As the door was being sealed shut from the outside, one of the guards handed my uncle a manual written in Japanese. They told him to read it to the group to let them know what was happening. Not that my uncle or any of the rest of us could read Japanese. I tell you that it was not an auspicious beginning!

"The Hassan-Smith transporters work on the principle of shunting matter through several alternate dimensions. This made our trip much shorter, but did not reduce it to zero. The trip took us colonists nineteen hours, and the consensus was that it was probably better that we couldn't look out of the windows that weren't there. Things were bad enough as it was. Once we left Earth, there was no gravity and only one Porta-Potty.

"From Belgrade we were transmitted to the Solar Factory Station inside the orbit of Mercury, where transmitter power was cheap. After only a few minutes in free fall, just long enough for Mrs. Mostnikow to vomit, we were sent to the station that orbited New Kashubia's neutron star. Of course, this meant almost a day without gravity, so everybody had a chance to catch up with Mrs. Mostnikow, which we did. Also, nobody got the hang of using the Porta-Potty in free fall, so vomit wasn't the only lovely semisolid floating around.

"The station at New Kashubia's star was in a synchronous orbit, which kept it out of the searchlight beam of deadly radiation, and for a few minutes we had some gravity. Only it was tidal gravity that pulled us and our messes to both ends of the canister, and a few of the people at each bottom nearly drowned. Even without that, I wouldn't have wanted to stay there. A twenty-two second orbit is scary!

"From there, our unfortunate group was transmitted down to below the surface of the planet and we colonists, coated with every possible noxious human effluent, were decanted.

THAT WILL BE SUFFICIENT FOR THE TIME BEING. I WILL REQUIRE SEVERAL HOURS TO CORRELATE MY DATA, AND YOU ARE SCHEDULED FOR A SLEEP PERIOD ANYWAY. GOOD NIGHT MICKOLAI.

"I'm not tired yet."

YES YOU ARE. YOU ARE GETTING VERY SLEEPY. VERY, VERY SLEEPY. . . .