Jake said thoughtfully. “The trimaran is the favorite craft of the dropout.”
“Excuse me? I missed something. ‘Dropout’?”
“I don’t mean the barefooted bums in the Abandoned Areas, Eunice, nor the ones skulking around the hills. It takes money to drop out by water. But people do. Millions have. Nobody knows how many because it has been subject to an ‘exception’ for years—the government does not want attention called to it; But take those yachts below us: I’ll bet that at least one out of ten has registration papers for some ‘flag of convenience’ and the owner’s passport is as phony as that of ‘Mr. and Mrs. MacKenzie.’ He has to be registered somewhere and carry some sort of passport, or the Coast Guard wherever he goes will give him a bad time, even impound his craft. But if he takes care of that minimum, he can dodge almost everything else—no income tax, no local taxes except when he buys something, nobody tries to force his kids into public schools, no real estate taxes, no politics—no violence in the streets. That last is the best part, with the cycle of riots swinging up again?’
“Then it is possible to ‘get away from it all.’”
“Mmm, not quite. No matter how much fish he eats, he has to touch land occasionally. He can’t play Vanderdecken; only a ghost ship can stay at sea forever, real ones have to be put up on the ways at intervals.” Jake Salomon looked thoughtful. “But it’s closer to that antithetical combination of ‘peace’ and ‘freedom’ than is possible on land. If it suits one. But, Eunice, I know what I would do—if I were young.”
“What, Jake?”
“Look up there.”
“Where, dear? I don’t see anything.”
“There.”
“The Moon?”
“Right! Eunice, that’s the only place with plenty of room and not too many people. Our last frontier—but an endless one. Anyone under the cut-off age should at least try to out-migrate.”
“Are you serious, Jacob? Certainly space travel is scientifically interesting but I’ve never seen much use in it.
Oh, some ‘fallout.’ Videosatellites and so forth. New materials. But the Moon itself?—why, it doesn’t even pay its own way.”
“Eunice, what use is that baby in your belly?”
“I trust that you are joking, sir. I hope you are.”
“Simmer down, Bulgy. Darling, a newborn baby is as useless a thing as one can imagine. It isn’t even pretty—except to its doting parents. It does not pay its own way and it’s unreasonably expensive. It takes twenty to thirty years for the investment to begin to pay off and in many—no, most—cases it never does pay off. Because it is much easier to support a child than it is to bring one up to amount to anything.”
“Our baby will amount to something!”
“I feel sure that it will. But look around you; my generalization stands. But, Eunice, despite these shortcomings, a baby has a unique virtue. It is always the hope of our race. Its only h6pe.”
She smiled. “Jacob, you’re an exasperating man.”
“I try to be, dear; it’s good for your metabolism. Now look back up at the sky. That’s a newborn baby, too. The best hope of our race; if that baby lives, the human race lives. If we let it die—and it is vulnerable for a few more years—the race dies, too. Oh, I don’t mean H-bombs. We’re faced with far greater dangers than H-bombs. We’ve reached an impasse; we can’t go on the way we’re headed—and we can’t go back—and we’re dying in our own poisons. That’s why that little Lunar colony has got to survive. Because we can’t. It isn’t the threat of war, or crime in the streets, or corruption in high places, or pesticides, or smog, or ‘education’ that doesn’t teach; those things are just symptoms of the underlying cancer. It’s too many people. Not too many souls, or honks, or thirds—just. . . too many. Seven billion people, sitting in each other’s laps, trying to take in each other’s washing, pick each other’s pockets. Too many. Nothing wrong with the individual in most cases—but collectively we’re the Kilkenny Cats, unable to do anything but starve and fight and eat each other. Too many. So anyone who can ought to go to the Moon as fast as he can manage it.”