“Perhaps, but it is also wise not to offend your only ally. If you want to keep your own system secret, that’s fine by me. But I’d like you to look over this stuff, to be sure that we do not offend you. Among other things, it involves dumping an awful lot of pulverized granite into the oceans that your people live in, and we don’t want to cause you problems.”
“Indeed? Let me look.”
But instead of crawling out of the swimming pool and looking at the drawings that I was unrolling on the garage floor, he just sort of leaned back and floated for a bit.
“Yes, I see,” he said. “Well, with your permission, I have a number of suggestions to make.”
“I’d like to hear them, but before that, please tell me what you just did.”
“I simply queried the good professor, and he downloaded the plans to me. I found it convenient to grow a data link to him, similar in some ways to the inductive mat that you wear under your scalp.”
“Mine had to be surgically implanted,” I said. “You just grew yours?”
“My people have developed that ability, yes. We know how to make and use machines, of course, but for many things, it is convenient to modify our body structure to do these things more easily. Please don’t be offended, Mickolai, but yours is a very young race. In a few million years, it is quite possible that you will develop such abilities.
“Now then,” he continued. “There is no need to transport the powdered granite to the oceans and dump it there. You may use our ‘Disappearing Gun’ to simply make the granite disappear. Oh. I see that your engineering group has not gotten the plans that I sent to New Kashubia. Well, there. They have them now. Next, I see that you have a very extensive system of power generators and electrical conductors going all over the place. It would be far simpler to simply generate the power where it is needed. In a closed system like this, you already have plenty of thermal power. Indeed, at three kilometers down, you will have a vast surplus of it, and I see that you were planning on an extensive air-conditioning system. That would involve a heat plume that the Mitchegai would undoubtedly notice.”
“Wait a minute!” I said, “You are talking about using ambient thermal energy to generate power? Surely, that’s impossible!”
“And why should that be so? Even with your primitive physics, you realize that heat is not a separate form of energy. It is simply mechanical energy on a very small scale. The individual atoms and molecules are vibrating and sometimes spinning. Their average speed is what you call heat. By slowing them down, one can extract useful energy. Surely, this is obvious. There are several practical methods of doing this, but I have just sent your engineers the plans for a simple light that gets its power from ambient heat. They will also need some larger systems to cool the housing units you propose, and I have just sent plans for those as well. They will have to put some resistive units in the oceans, to get rid of the surplus energy, but there are several volcanoes under the sea that will hide the heat quite nicely from our enemies. The rest of your plans seem workable enough, and I wouldn’t want to upset your excellent engineers too much in one day.
“Please tell me,” he said, changing the subject. “How soon do you think it might be before we can receive the rest of the Everclear you promised?”
I was too stunned to say anything but “Probably in about twelve days. After that, we can ship you a like amount every three months.” They knew how to build perpetual motion machines?
“That would be most convenient. But you must please excuse me now, as there are several calls waiting.”
I left the plans lying on the floor and went home.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
FROM CAPTURED HISTORY TAPES,
FILE 1846583A ca. 1832 a.d.
BUT CONCERNING EVENTS OF UP TO
2000 YEARS EARLIER
In Your Face Sports
The next day in the locker room, the director of Athletics just happened to stop Kren and him if he knew who Kodo was.
“Yes, sir, he is the director of the College of Architecture. Someone pointed him out to me once, in a crowd.” As always, lying came easily to Kren.
“Have you seen him around lately? I’ve been looking for him.”
“No sir, I haven’t. But if I do see him, I’ll ask him to contact you.”
“No! Don’t do that! If you see him, you come straight to me and tell me about it.”
“Very good, sir. I will do as you wish.”
Kren walked away, knowing who at least one member of Kodo’s syndicate had been. After all the athletes that he had skinned alive for using drugs, the director had been buying into a drug syndicate.
If Kren had had any faith in anything, he might have lost some of it then. But of course he didn’t, so he didn’t.
On the way to the locker room, Kren met a stranger who identified herself as Bo, the runner who had been killed at the Death Match at the first meet of the year.
“You took my money, and you didn’t perform the services you promised!” Bo said.
“Well, I tried to perform those services, but the director of athletics forbade me to do it. What else could I do? Anyway, before this goes any further, I want you to prove who you are.”
Bo produced sufficient ID cards to convince Kren.
“Very well then,” Kren said, pulling out his money pouch. “Here is your ten thousand Ke.”
“But you got a dozen and nine times that much, when you collected on that bet!”
“So? If I had lost that contest, would you feel that I didn’t owe you anything at all?”
“Well, no, of course not, but what you are doing isn’t fair!”
“Bo, I do not understand this ‘fair’ thing that you talk about. Your options are that you can either take what I am offering, or you can fight me. Take your pick,” Kren said, drawing his sword.
“You know that I can’t fight you!”
“The choice is yours. Decide.”
Bo took the money and went away. Apparently, her new body wasn’t that of an athlete. Kren never saw her again.
Kren returned home to find Dol at work on her new computer, an oversized thing with more than the usual number of lights and gadgets.
While Mitchegai computer hardware was comparatively primitive, their programmers had had over a million years to catch up with their hardware. Their programs were very efficient, and they could accomplish a great deal despite small memories and slow circuits. When one of their computers crashed, it was always a hardware problem.
“I’ve gotten prices in on various forms of fencing, ranging from glazed brick, through stainless steel, and down to some galvanized steel mesh temporary stuff that’s only guaranteed for six dozen years. It’s only a twelfth the price of good brick, though.”
“Since we don’t really know if my design will work yet, and we don’t know if there will be legal objections to what we have in mind, we might as well go with the cheap stuff.”
“My thought exactly, sir. Then, I’ve gotten in a set of standard survey maps for the area, but the most recent are over nine thousand years old. The Space Mitchegai had some satellite photos that are less than a year old, and I’ve been comparing the two. There were three new houses built lately, or in the last nine millennia, anyway, and an additional underground winter housing unit for juvenals, but that’s about it, that I can see, anyway.”
“How many of these wintering centers are there, and what’s their capacity?”
“There are a dozen and nine units, with an average capacity of just over a million juvenals each. I have all of that compiled here for you, sir,” Dol said, handing him a stack of fan folded computer printouts.
“You have been very efficient.”
“I don’t have to study my homework anymore, and I want to make myself indispensable to you, sir, so that I won’t be dispensed with. I think that this project could make you a world power, and I like the idea of being close to a world power.”
“Thank you. How is everything else going?”
“The gambling situation is not so good. We’d planned on having you win the épée tournament on Saturday morning, but the odds on you have dropped to a payout of only three for two! Someone has apparently bet a huge fortune on you. I suggest that we change the plan, and have you win the javelin distance competition instead.”
“Ordinarily, that would be a good idea. But the person who placed the huge bet is probably Duke Dennon. The fool must have bet everything he got yesterday on the tip I gave him. No, I’ll have to win with the épée, or I might turn a friendly, wealthy neighbor with a big army into an angry, impoverished neighbor, with a big army.”