“Many of us were operating fish farms in the Baltic, out of sight of everybody, and the rest of us were either farming or had been cashing in on our ethnicity by setting up marginally profitable tourist traps that sold flowery pottery and fake amber jewelry produced mainly in automatic factories in India. Nobody hated us bad enough to want to get rid of us, and we weren’t the kind of people who wanted to be hated anyway.
“So the Awards Committee at the Wealthy Nations Group ignored Dzerzdzon’s request for a year, at which time, with Slavic persistence, he filed all the paperwork again. They ignored him again, so he filed again. He filed every year for seven years, and was ignored until 2094, when the committee gave him a planet, just to get rid of him. We Kashubians weren’t sufficiently annoying as a group, but great-grandpa certainly was as an individual.
“What they gave him wasn’t much of a planet. For one thing, its sun had gone supernova a few billion years before and was now a neutron star that blasted out a searchlight beam of deadly radiation every twenty-two seconds. That’s to say, once each revolution.
“The only surviving planet might once have been a Jovian gas giant, but the supernova had blown away everything but a smooth metal ball six thousand kilometers in diameter. It was habitable to the extent that the surface gravity was slightly less than that of Earth and the average surface temperature was just above the freezing point of water.
“Only there wasn’t any water. There weren’t any elements at all that were lighter than calcium!
“Also, twice a year, the planet passed through the plane of that searchlight beam of radiation that could kill anything that wasn’t protected by fifty feet of dirt, only there wasn’t any dirt. There wasn’t even any atmosphere worth noticing.
“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.