In the early days, clothing wore out and, being organic, could not be replaced except at huge cost. Long before I got here, a program was instituted to make nudity popular, and the tunnels were warmed up to compensate. There was plenty of waste heat available from the power reactors that were being built as fast as possible.
Nudity caused fewer changes than would have been expected since even before it was instituted, the sexes had been absolutely segregated in both living quarters and in work situations. Nothing else had proved effective for totally stopping the birth rate, and the one thing that New Kashubia did not need was more people.
That’s what got me into trouble. At first, I was put to work with a crew stringing communication cables, which sure beat what they had most other people doing. The hydroponic vats could have been tended by machines, but not as efficiently as humans could do it. It was vitally important that every square inch of soil and light was used to support green plants. We were producing less than we absolutely needed to survive, and there was no slack at all. Most of our people spent twelve hours a day working as no Chinese coolie ever did for long. We couldn’t keep it up forever. We were all losing weight.
For entertainment, we had television and not much else. Tapes and discs could be sent from Earth cheaply enough, and we had a factory that built the sets. Home-grown entertainment mostly didn’t happen. After working twelve or fourteen hours a day, nobody much felt like playing a violin.
Most of us got to going to church a lot more than we had on Earth. When times are rough, people turn to God, I guess. Anyway, it started meaning a lot more to me than it had before.
But like I said, I was put to stringing wires, when I wasn’t pulled off the job to do engineering work. Communications and controls had to be installed throughout the living sections, since heat and ventilation had to be right or people died. The women’s sections had their own crews, of course, but the systems had to tie together, and that’s when I met Katarzyna Garczegoz, whom everybody called Kasia. Not you. The real Kasia.
“Perhaps you should choose another name for me, Mickolai,” the tank said.
Stop interrupting. So there was this eight-inch hole, and I was feeding wires through for her to terminate. I had to tell her which wires were what, and naturally we got to talking, even if it was against the law. She must have been looking forward to the job, because she already had a way worked out where we could talk later, using some of the spare wires as phone lines, and that’s how I got to spending my spare time, even though that was against the law, too. After years of only male companionship, even talking to a woman on the phone was worth the risk, something to spend the whole day looking forward to.
What else can I say? I’d found the one woman that I wanted in all the world, and I don’t even fantasize about anybody else. We fell in love with each other and we promised to marry as soon as we possibly could.
So my personal life improved a bit, but things on the whole were getting worse.
Despite our best efforts, some air and water were still being lost, around seals or even right through the metal walls. Everything is at least a little bit porous. Our losses weren’t really all that much, but we weren’t able to import much to replace them, either.
Despite the most severe privations, and despite the maximum possible shipments of metals and manufactured goods back to Earth, the balance of payments was still negative, and interest rates were at an all-time high for the century. Projections showed that it would be at least two hundred years before we colonists could have a standard of living comparable to that which we had been forced to leave behind on Earth.
Despite our fabulous wealth in metals and despite the vastly expanded system of automated factories, for a long time, life would be hungry, dirty, and cramped.
CHAPTER FIVE
LIFE ON NEW KASHUBIA
I stretched as best I could in the confinement of my liquid filled coffin to get the kinks out of my muscles, and started back in on my story to calibrate my tank.
“There were just too many people,” I said.
“Please subvocalize, Mickolai.”
Sorry. So if we could have had twenty or thirty years to build up slowly, the story would have been different, but as things were, we could never get ahead of the game. Everything had to be done on an emergency basis, just to stay alive. We never had a chance to make any really long term investments.
Until somebody invented some sort of matter transmuter, New Kashubia was stuck. Only, nobody had the slightest idea how to go about doing that.
Then somebody remembered that the Japanese had had a hundred people living on the planet for eighty years, and it was known that they hadn’t recycled anything. They had to be dumping their sewage someplace, but the computer records never mentioned their sewage. The sewer just went into the metal and nobody could figure out where that line went! Our crude attempts at echo tracing yielded nothing. One group even drilled after it for two and a half miles miles, and they still hadn’t come to the end of that sewer! The search for the fabulous hoard went on for years, but it was only found three days after we’d made our deal with New Yugoslavia, and we knew we’d soon have all the organics we needed coming in.
I guess I’ve drifted off the subject. Are you still getting what you need, Kasia?
“Yes, Mickolai. Just continue as you have been doing.” Now her voice was not only warm and pleasant, it was downright sexy!
“Thank you, Mickolai. Continue.”
So you can tell what I think? Even when I’m not consciously subvocalizing?
“That’s part of the purpose of this exercise. Remember that I’m just a machine. It’s not as though another real person was invading your thoughts.”
Okay. I’ll try to, only it’s strange.
So after four years of going further and further into debt, with no way in the near future to get out of the hole, the New Kashubian Parliament decided that there was nothing for it but to steal the Japanese slice of the pie.
That’s to say, to nationalize all of Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing Corporation’s property on the planet and keep the profits it had earned for ourselves. On paper, this would put the planet on a break-even basis, and maybe even permit paying off some of our considerable debts. The whole thing was put to a public vote, and yeah, I voted for it just like almost everybody else. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
So the vote passed and the total assets of the Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing Corporation on New Kashubia were seized. The stockholders of the corporation were paid in full for their property with New Kashubian bonds, but they were not happy with the arrangement. They had no faith in our ability to make good on those bonds, and maybe they were right.
But doing what they did was the best way they had to make the bonds we gave them worthless bonds, it made our lives sheer hell, and I don’t think that any of us will ever forgive them.
Things had been bad. Now they got worse.
For one thing, our previously shaky credit was now totally gone. Interstellar bankers were not interested in doing new business with a planet that had reverted to the horrors of Socialism.
For another, we lost the engineering and managerial skills of the Japanese, who had promptly left for home when the seizure took place. Suddenly things didn’t work so good anymore, and I’m sure that a lot of it was sabotage.
And for a third, the Japanese launched a “Boycott New Kashubia” campaign, and the Japanese have an awful lot of clout.
Export sales fell off disastrously, and there was some talk about the advantages of euthanasia and cannibalism.
CHAPTER SIX
HOW THE KASHUBIANS GOT OUT OF TROUBLE
Then the Yugoslavians came to the rescue, arriving with tourist visas, the obligatory cameras, and loud clothes, but not fooling anybody except the inspectors from the Wealthy Nations Group.
You see, the Serbian Yugoslavs wanted to go to war with the Croatian Yugoslavs, so the Croats were planning a sneak—excuse me—preemptive attack on the Serbs. It should be noted that both groups are ethnically almost identical. They spoke the same language, they had similar traditions, and they were racially identical. But the Croats were Roman Catholic Christians while Serbs were Greek Orthodox Christians, and that was enough to make them both want to go out and kill!