And these groups did not include the enclaves of Albanians, Hungarians, Turks, and Germans who had simply, and perhaps rationally, decided to sit this one out.
Studying the political situation, you could almost develop a certain sympathy for the powers that be at the Wealthy Nations Group. Almost. The Yugoslavians were a complicated assembly of many mutually antagonistic peoples, and all living in one country! They were a time bomb and one would prefer them to explode as far away as possible!
Be that as it may, the money was coming in so fast that the new New Yugoslavian transporter terminals were paid for in cash on the day that Soul City delivered them. New Kashubia was on its way to getting a new credit rating, at least among the smuggling set.
Oh, we couldn’t spend the money through regular channels to improve things on the planet that way. It might alert the inspectors of the Wealthy Nations Group to the smuggling going on. In fact, we were careful that shipments and orders to and from Earth went on through regular channels exactly as before, to keep from tipping our hand. But the food coming in from New Yugoslavia sure helped a lot. For the first time in years, we were averaging over twelve hundred calories a day, each. Almost half what the Chinese got!
By the time the transporters were ready, we had orders for fifty-five divisions of ten thousand men each, and everybody was getting antsy about shipping them out. We needed more than a half a million volunteers, and we had less than ten thousand, which fact it would not be wise to let the Yugoslavians know about, since they had mostly paid in advance.
The New Kashubian legal system came to the aid of the recruiting service. What with all the rules that had to be enforced to make bare survival possible on New Kashubia, there was a growing class of perpetual criminals that something had to be done with. It did no good to put them in jail, since ordinary life on New Kashubia was worse than any jail that anybody could think of. Physical punishment was considered barbarous, and what else was there? Shooting them all? For what were on the whole really trivial misdemeanors? Better to send them off to the army. It was the traditional thing to do. Maybe the military would make men out of boys and the girls too.
My own uncle voted for it, and he even had me believing it was a good idea, at the time anyway.
CHAPTER SEVEN
HOW MICKOLAI DERDOWSKI GOT INTO TROUBLE
So everything was finally starting to look up. What with the food imports, we were all getting almost enough to eat for a change (including soon, we were promised, some real meat!), and of course we were also getting in the raw materials with which to expand our system of hydroponic vats. The growing light factory was going at full production for the first time since we’d built it. We finally had the sand to make enough glass. We’d have no problems reprocessing all these new organics again and again. The new projections showed that within a year, we could relax most of the emergency measures, and start living like human beings again, with clothes on, and with our families, and dating girls and having weddings and everything!
I guess the big problem was that Kasia and I started celebrating a little early, and she turned up pregnant.
“But Mickolai, I thought you said that you were totally segregated,” my tank said.
“We were,” I said. If she could talk, I figured I could talk.
“Then how . . . ? You know that I’m a machine, and that my grasp of this sort of thing is only theoretical, but my information was that physical contact was required . . .”
“It is. Love found a way.”
“But I still don’t understand, Mickolai.”
“Look! I said there was that hole in the wall, didn’t I? How graphic do I have to get?”
“That doesn’t sound very satisfying.”
“It was a hell of a lot better than nothing at all,” I said. “Say, just how much longer does this calibration thing have to go on, anyway?”
“I had enough data a while ago, Mickolai, but I was interested in what you were telling me. Why don’t you complete your story.”
“There’s nothing much else to say. Kasia was pregnant and the gene prints said that I was the father. My uncle tried to help, but he got absolutely nowhere. Nobody cared about our work records or education or anything. The court case lasted three minutes and the jury didn’t even leave the room before they gave their verdict. Our kid was aborted as the law required, and we were both sentenced to death or worse.”
“Living with me can’t be worse than death, Mickolai.”
“It’s a lot like being buried alive, and the view is boring.” I’d been forced to stare at these magic television goggles inside my helmet since I got up and they showed nothing but a blank wall.
“What do you think of this, Mickolai?”
Suddenly, my view changed from a blank palladium wall to a lovely forest scene from Earth, with a brook and a little waterfall. But more importantly, the view on the screen in my helmet was like an old-style TV picture, with the scan lines visible, but this was just like real life!
“It’s beautiful!” I said. Then a breeze blew through the woods, rustling the leaves, and I felt it on my cheek!
“How in the world did you do that?!” I shouted, and realized that I was smelling the trees and flowers, too.
“Direct neural stimulation, Mickolai. This is part of what I have been calibrating for. Get up. Walk around!”
“You’re serious?”
“Of course I’m serious! Do it!”
So I did. I stood up and looked down at my feet. I was wearing a tee shirt, blue jeans, and a comfortable pair of sturdy hiking boots, just like I used to own on Earth. I looked at my hands, flexed my fingers, and they really were my own hands, not those of some movie actor. This wasn’t some kind of recording. I was wearing my old flannel shirt!
“It’s like a dream!” I said.
“Very perceptive, Mickolai. It’s called Dream World. It is very like a dream, except that you are awake and I am controlling it.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing! How could this be possible without my ever hearing about it?”
“Dream World is not the sort of thing that they’d tell a poor boy about, Mickolai. It takes some massive computer power and some very expensive sensors and inductors to do it, but if you were a manager with the Wealthy Nations Group, you’d probably have a Dream World set of your very own to play with.”
“Then why would they put something this fancy on a tank?”
“Because almost everything required to do it with was already needed here for some other reason. In fact, all of the special equipment required for Dream World was originally developed for military purposes. The neural pickups are also needed for both biological monitoring and for receiving your command inputs. The neural induction circuits are required militarily to give you rapid feedback on combat situations. A Mark XIX already has a sentient computer, so more computer power is already available than is needed. In fact, the only additional cost was the fairly minor, one-time cost of purchasing an off-the-shelf program.
“In return, the army can vastly lower its expenses and logistical problems by not having to provide field kitchens, barracks, and Rest and Recuperation Facilities. Military training costs are reduced to almost nothing. Combat fatigue is greatly reduced. Military leave requirements are reduced. Reenlistment is no longer a serious problem. In fact, some troops elect to so rarely leave their tanks that they don’t even bother to draw their pay! It is good for morale and it doesn’t cost very much more. On top of that, I’m a weapon, and ever since the beginning of time, men have always done everything possible to make their weapons as perfect as possible, and hang the expense.”
While pondering it all, I waved my hand in front of my face. “I’m controlling this dream, too.”
“Correct, within certain parameters.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I have decided that this is a realistic environment. If you decided to flap your wings and fly, it wouldn’t work. You’d just flap your arms and stay where you were.”
“But it doesn’t have to be realistic, does it?”
“No. The world can be anything that I want it to be, Mickolai,” she said as a white unicorn walked by. “Go ahead! Try to catch it! You need to work up an appetite for lunch!”
It was all too magic for argument, so I took off running down the forest path after the beautiful creature. It was exhilarating, and it felt like I was in better shape than I’d ever been before. Even so, after more than a kilometer, I was gasping for breath and I had to slow down. The unicorn had fled, but I hadn’t been qualified to catch it since I was sixteen, anyway.