Frederik Pohl - Jem

Her father rubbed the spot below his navel thoughtfully. “Of course, with the Peeps you never know. Heir-of-Mao has an investment in Klong. The Bengalis wouldn’t be starting anything they didn’t clear with the Forbidden City.”

Margie’s hair prickled erect at the back of her neck. “Are you saying I should worry? I don’t want my mission withdrawn!”

“Oh, no. No chance of that, honey. Relax, will you? You’re too much like your old lady. She never did learn to swing with the action. When the PLO kidnapped you I thought she’d have a nervous breakdown.”

“She was scared shitless, poppa. And you never turned a hair.” Not even, she thought, when your own four-year-old daughter was bawling into the jetliner’s radio.

“But I knew you were going to be all right, honey. I really did.”

“Well, I’m not bringing that up again, ol’ buddy.” Margie folded her hands in her lap and stared out the window. Between the UN complex and the airport there was no building, no street, that Margie had not seen a dozen times before. She was not really seeing them now. But they helped spur and clarify her thoughts, the long tandem buses hobbling down the slow lanes, the apartment dwellers walking their dogs, the school kids, stores, police on their tricycles, sidewalk vendors with their handmade jewelry and pocket computers. Thomas Jefferson, as he returned to Monticello, might have looked out of his stagecoach in just the same detached but proprietary way at the slaves weeding his crops.

She said slowly, “Listen, poppa. I want to get our mission reinforced. Now.”

“What’s the hurry?”

“I don’t know, but there’s a hurry. I want it done before the Peeps and the Greasies cut us off at the roots or get enough of their own people up there to own Kungson. I want us there first and biggest, because I want it all.”

“Shit, honey. Didn’t they teach you about priorities at the Point? There’s the krill business and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the Greasies threatening to raise their prices again — do you have any idea how tough all this is? I’ve only got one stack, and there’s only room for one thing at the top of it.”

“No, poppa, I don’t want to be told how hard it is. Don’t you understand this is a whole planet?”

“Of course I do, but—”

“No. No buts. I guess you don’t really understand what it means to have a whole planet to play with. For us, poppa, all for us. To start from scratch with, to develop in a systematic manner. Find all the fossil fuels, develop them in a rational way. Locate the cities where they don’t destroy arable land. Plant crops where they won’t damage the soil. Develop industry where it’s most convenient. Plan the population. Let it grow as it is needed, but not to where you have a surplus: good, strong, self-reliant people. American people, poppa. Maybe the place stinks now, but give it a hundred years and you’d rather be there than here, I promise. And I want it.”

Godfrey Menninger sighed, looking in love and some awe at the oldest and most troublesome of his children. “You’re worse than your mother ever was,” he said ruefully. “Well, I hear what you say. The Poles owe us one. I’ll see what I can do.”

TechTowTwo sprawled over the bank of the Charles River, more than twice the cubage of all the old brick buildings put together. There were no classrooms in Technology Tower Two. There was no administration, either. It was all for research, from the computer storage in the subbasements to the solar-radiation experiments that decorated the roof with saucers and bow ties.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology had a long tradition of involvement with space exploration, going back even before there was any — or any that did not take place on a printed page. As early as the 1950s there had been a design class whose entire curriculum revolved around the creation of products for export to the inhabitants of the third planet of the star Arcturus. The fact that there was no known planet of Arcturus, let alone inhabitants of it, did not disturb either teacher or students. Techpersons were used to unhinging their imaginations on demand. In the Cambridge community that centered around MIT, Harvard, the Garden Street observatories, and all the wonderlands of Route 128 there had been designers of interstellar spacecraft before the first Sputnik went into orbit, anatomists of extraterrestrials when there was no proof of life anywhere off the surface of Earth, and specialists in interplanetary communications before anyone was on the other end of the line. Margie Menninger had taken six months of graduate studies there, dashing from Tech to Harvard. She had been careful to keep her contacts bright.

The woman Margie wanted to see was a former president of the MISFITS and thus would have been a power in the Tech world even if she had not also held the title of assistant dean of the college. She had arranged a breakfast meeting at Margie’s request and had turned out five department heads on order.

The dean introduced them around the table and said, “Make it good now, Margie. Department heads aren’t crazy about getting up so early in the morning.”

Margie sampled her scrambled eggs. “For this kind of food, I don’t blame them,” she said, putting down her fork. “Let me get right to it. I have about ten minutes’ worth of holos of the autochthons of Son of Kung, alias Klong. No sound. Just visible.” She leaned back to the sideboard and snapped a switch, and the first of the holographic pictures condensed out of a pinkish glow. “You’ve probably seen most of this stuff anyway,” she said. “That’s a Krinpit. They are one of the three intelligent, or anyway possibly intelligent, races on Klong, and the only one of the lot that is urban. In a moment you’ll see some of their buildings. They’re open at the top. Evidently the Krinpit don’t worry much about weather. Why they have buildings at all is anyone’s guess, but they do. They would seem much the easiest of the three races to conduct trade with, but unfortunately the Peeps have a head start with them. No doubt we’ll catch up.”

The head of the design staff was a lean young black woman who had limited her breakfast to orange juice and black coffee and was already through with it. “Catch up at what, Captain Menninger?” she asked.

Margie took her measure and refused combat. “For openers, Dr. Ravenel, I’d like to see your people create some trade goods. For all three races. They’re all going to be our customers one of these days.”

The economist took his eyes off the holo of a Krinpit coracle to challenge Margie. “ ‘Customers’ implies two-way trade. What do you think these, ah, Klongans are going to have to sell us that’s worth the trouble of shipping it all those light-years?”

Margie grinned. “I thought you’d never ask.” She pulled an attachй case off the floor and opened it on the table in front of her, pushing the plate of eggs out of the way. “So far,” she said, “we don’t exactly have any manufactured objects. But take a look at this.” She passed around several ten-centimeter squares of a filmy, resilient substance. “That’s the stuff the balloonists’ hydrogen sacs are made out of. It’s really pretty special stuff — I mean, it holds gaseous H 2with less than one percent leakage in a twenty-four-hour period. We could supply quite a lot of that if there was a specialty market for it.”

“Don’t you have to kill a balloonist to get it?”

“Good question.” Margie nodded to the economist with a lying smile. “Actually, no. That is, there are other, nonsentient races with the same body structure, although this one is, I believe, from one of the sentients. How about a market? If I remember correctly, the Germans had to use the second stomach of the ox when they were building the Hindenburg. ”