“That is interesting. Perhaps I will go.”
“You must go,” Bronki said. “If I show up without you, the athletic director will claim that my letter to him was a practical joke, and then he would make my life very difficult.”
Five days later, they locked up the house and started walking to the public transportation terminal.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A Business Lunch
New Kashubia, 2205 a.d.
As we went to the dining room, I found that a name tag had appeared on my chest. Apparently, the idea was that we should all get to know each other. This impression was confirmed when I saw that the tables all had place cards at them. I found myself seated at a round table with five other generals. My colonels and electronic people were scattered out at other tables.
“So,” General Hastings said. “We find that we are up against an enemy with at least sixty-eight thousand planets with a typical population of a hundred and fifty billion people on each of them. We have got maybe fifty planets, depending on what you want to call a planet, with a total population of perhaps thirty-two billion people. It would appear that we are outnumbered by something like three hundred thousand to one. Does anyone have any comments on this situation?”
“It kind of makes you want to find an asteroid in an uninhabited solar system, hollow it out, and live there for the rest of your life,” General Castaneda said.
Some of the stunningly beautiful and nearly naked waitresses that Sobieski preferred started serving food and drinks. We each got our favorite drinks and dishes, but nobody paid any attention to it, or to them.
“I wonder how many asteroids like that there are?” General Fong asked.
“Joking aside,” General Toronaga said, “It might be a very good idea to set up a large number of such hidey-holes. That way, even if we lose this war, humanity itself could go on.”
“I suppose that you are right,” I said. “Still, it’s a depressing thought. Humanity, hiding inside of rocks for the rest of eternity? Maybe death would be better.”
“We might win,” General Nasser said. “After all, we know about them and they don’t know about us.”
“Don’t bet on it!” Fong said. “For well over a hundred and fifty years, we have been sending robot probes out into the universe. We’ve lost a lot of those probes. How do we know what happened to them? Maybe these aliens know all about us!”
“Good point!” Hastings said. “One of the first orders of business will have to be that all of our probes are equipped with an array of modern sensors, a decent machine intelligence, and one bodacious self-destruct mechanism!”
“I’ll second that,” I said. “The problem there is that we don’t have communication with most of those probes just now. I just had a hand in destroying Earth’s Solar Station, which kept in touch with them, and kept them fed.”
Castaneda said, “Then they haven’t filled you in on that yet. It turned out that there was enough surplus capacity around the old Smuggling Net to keep in touch with the probes. Those that really needed it are getting enough fuel to keep blasting, and the rest are at least operational. Building enough dedicated accelerators and transmitters for them is way up on the priority screen.”
“That’s some relief,” I said. “Why don’t people tell me these things?”
“Probably because you didn’t ask,” Hastings said. “So. We need smarter probes, better protected probes, and much better sensors on our probes. We also need a whole lot more probes. Currently, there are many light-years between many of them. We need a much tighter net than that.”
“And we need at least two layers of net,” I said. “One farther out, to find intruders, and a second one that can send in interceptors if the first one picks up anything.”
“I’d like at least a third backup in the system, too,” Toronaga said.
Nasser said, “Wouldn’t we all! The question is, how much of this can we do, and how fast can we get it done?”
The conversation became more animated, and eventually we’d spent fifteen hours at that luncheon table, and eaten three lunches each. We finally determined just what we needed and where, and when we were likely to get it.
For a while there, I kept insisting that we needed planetary defenses just as much as we needed system-wide defenses, but I didn’t get much support from the others. “Later,” they kept on saying. “We’ll get to that later.”
As things started to wind down, I said, “Didn’t we have an afternoon meeting with Sobieski?”
Hastings said, “Of course we did, and still do. But in the Command Center’s version of Dream World, there’s always time to argue things out. You’re new here. You’ll get used to it after a while. Look around you. Is anybody else moving?”
I looked, and it was as if all of the other tables in the restaurant were tenanted by statues.
“Now, that’s your signal that everyone else has finished their conversations. Actually, we might have delayed things by ten or fifteen minutes, real time. Nothing to worry about,” he said.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
FROM CAPTURED HISTORY TAPES,
FILE 1846583A ca. 1832 a.d.
BUT CONCERNING EVENTS OF UP TO
2000 YEARS EARLIER
A Girl and Her Vampire: Plans for Power and Glory
“What a lovely day for a walk!” Bronki said, “I had become so used to the little aches and pains of my old body that I had almost forgotten how wonderful a fine, new one feels.”
They walked south, Bronki in her colorful academic robes, and Kren in his helmet and cloak, with his spear and sword belt, but no other baggage, since he didn’t own any. Bronki went empty handed because she kept a complete set of belongings at each of her houses.
She still considered the house that they had spent the summer at to be hers, because the quit claim deed she had given Kren simply assigned to him any ownership which she had in the property, but made no other promises.
Legally, she had never actually owned it in the first place. It was owned by a corporation which was owned by another corporation which she controlled. To her mind, she was simply permitting Kren to indulge in a pleasant fantasy, while he paid the expenses on the place.
And between these expenses, and various other ways she had to get money out of him, she was sure that she’d break even on the deal within two years. It was a small period of time for a person of her age. After that, their relationship would be profitable for her. Perhaps very profitable.
“You’ve never lived in a city before, have you,” Bronki said.
“No, I haven’t.”
“Then there are a few things that you should know. The population density of a city is much higher than it is in the countryside. If everybody killed and ate as many juvenals as she wanted, soon there wouldn’t be any left, and the grass would suffer. For the most part, you must either travel away from the city to eat, or you must buy your food from someone who makes a business of collecting juvenals for sale. The cost is about the same, either way, and it saves time to simply buy what you need. The punishment for killing a juvenal without a permit within city limits is quite severe.”
“Then what do they do with the juvenals that live there?” Kren asked.
“They have a lottery that you can sign up for, and if you win, you have a right to make one kill. At the university, odds are that you will get one every two years.”
“If cities are so expensive, why do so many live there?”
“Many individuals don’t,” she said. “But cities have a lot to offer that the country doesn’t. More social interaction, more entertainment, more jobs. In your case, it is difficult to get an education all by yourself. You need others around you.”
“I see.”
“Another thing. In the country, there is enough grass to take care of our sanitary needs. In the city, you must use a toilet. Do you understand what a toilet is?”
“We used toilets in the mine,” he said.
“Good. Again, the penalties for not using one in a city are severe.”
They topped a rise as they walked south.
“I’ve passed that thing six times since I left the mine, and I still don’t know what it is,” Kren said, pointing, as they walked down the road.
“It’s a field of grass, of course,” Bronki said.
“There’s no ‘of course’ about it! It has some kind of a structure around it, and there’s this tall green stuff towering above it.”
“That is a walled field. The wall keeps the juvenals out. And that’s what grass looks like when nobody keeps it trimmed down.”