Bronki and Dol used the same deal with the same bookie, betting such money as they had left over after paying their own taxes.
The javelin accuracy event paid five to one, and distance paid seven. The result was that Kren’s personal account increased to over three dozen billion, and the corporation’s account to over four times that amount.
Afterward, Kren met with his bookie, and suggested that she invest a dozen billion Ke in Kren’s corporation.
“But I don’t have anything like a dozen billion Ke!” the bookie protested.
“That is unfortunate, because if you don’t make this excellent, but long-term investment, I will be forced to take my future business elsewhere,” Kren explained.
The bookie made the investment, though she was not happy about it.
The director of athletics was also unhappy.
“Burn you, Kren! You never said that you would win at two events on Saturday!”
“I didn’t intend to, sir. But at the distance event, just when I was letting fly, my foot slipped on something, maybe some juvenal droppings, and I had to throw too hard to keep myself from falling on my face! It was an accident! Surely, the tapes of my performance will prove that!”
Kren had indeed faked slipping on that throw, but the director said that he needed more practice, and insisted that until further notice, he would attend all physical training sessions.
Kren thought that for well over a gross billion Ke, he could put up with a lot, and making the payments with the late penalties to his contractors didn’t hurt him at all.
The next day, since the odds on him were down to typically two to one, Kren proposed that they slough off for at least three weeks, and the director agreed.
The rest of the year went that way. It was more profitable to win big once every three to five weeks than it was to win small every week.
* * *
Bronki completed her first paper on chaos theory, and it was enthusiastically accepted by their world’s mathematical community. She was soon attending conventions around the planet as an Honored Guest Speaker, and was giving a course on chaos theory at the College of Mathematics to a large, packed auditorium, three days a week. Of course, all of this paid well.
And she did this while she kept the sales of children well above their ambitious early projections. She soon had six stores scattered around the City of Dren.
* * *
The early experiments with growing grass under artificial, monochromatic light had turned out extremely well. The lights used were actually twice as bright as normal sunlight at the wavelength useful to plants, but the total amount of energy radiated was only one-sixth that of sunlight. The result was that it was more than twice as productive as it would have been in a well-watered field at noon in the tropics, and without heat stress.
Grass had no difficulty adopting to a two-dozen-hour day, since it sometimes did that already in high latitudes, near the poles. There were always just the right amounts of water and nutrients available to it. The light was directly overhead, from a diffused area all the time, so the leaves did not have to waste energy turning to the sun. There were no cloudy days, no evenings, no nights. There were no juvenals walking on it, hurting the roots. There were no winters, when nothing grew.
The net result was that the annual production was a dozen and a half times higher per square yard than it was in the average field. It had to be mowed twice daily, or it would turn rank. Also, some research studies indicated that if the carbon dioxide content of the air could be quadrupled, production might be doubled once again.
Kren was pleased. Especially so since the underground grass-growing project was already well under way. Had growing grass in tunnels proved to be inefficient, a huge fortune would have been lost.
The MagFloat railroad system cut Kren’s lands into vaguely hexagonal areas an average of six dozen miles across. This was so that they could meet their ancient political mandate of having a station within a brisk day’s walk of every point on the planet.
Since it was convenient to have the production tunnels at the same level as the railroad tracks, and since, in theory, the MagFloat Corporation owned the subsurface soil under their tracks, Kren and Dol had picked a hexagon in the center of their property. They started to bore a tunnel from a station at the east of it to one at the west, a distance of six dozen and eleven miles.
The tunneling machines were not capable of starting a new tunnel at right angles to the one they were in, but the cutters were capable of pivoting enough to start a tunnel at half of that angle. As additional tunnelers were brought on line, this resulted in an array of tunnels that a human would have called a herringbone pattern, or perhaps something that looked like the shaft and veins of a feather.
Since the Mitchegai had never heard of a herringbone or a bird’s feather, they just called it Dol’s Design.
They bought roll-forming machinery to take a coil of the almost immortal metal alloy the Mitchegai used and shape it into a flooring panel. This was followed by a punch press to cut the floors to length and shape the ends to be welded to the tunnel walls. Lighting panels were then welded on the bottoms of all but the lowest ones, and wired up.
Once a tunnel was dug, a large assembly machine went in and welded in floors, attached side rails for the mowers, covered the floors with dirt, and spread grass seed. Water pipes, air ducts, and power conduits were installed.
The rail to the right that supported the mower was also a high-pressure water line that doubled as the electrical power common wire. The rail to the left doubled as the high-tension electrical conduit, and the rest of the structure was also a ground line. Kren thought that Dol had come up with an efficient design.
In a few months, there were two dozen of these assembly machines working, manned by Duke Dennon’s soldiers, and supervised by his engineers.
The twelve-yard-high tunnels had ten floors in them, with only a half a yard between them for the mower to work in. If maintenance was ever required, the workers would have to be dragged in on a sled, lying on their backs, behind the mower working at that level.
The first few gross yards of each tunnel had fewer floors, and would be used to house the juvenals who ate the grass.
Using all seven big tunnelers, they figured to have one layer of tunnels, over ten thousand miles of them, completed in four years, and the whole thing in full production a year after that. Completed, it should produce over three and a half million large juvenals per year for market. It would produce more than that if indeed juvenals were more efficient at growing when they didn’t have to spend most of their time and energy hunting for food and water. And much more than that if their selective breeding program bore fruit.
Dol said, “You know, sir, three and a half million a year at two dozen Ke each is really not a very good return on our investment. The bank would pay us better interest.”
“Right now, yes,” Kren agreed. “But I’m thinking long-term. Right now, the price of children is very low, because so many of them are available, free for the taking, in the countryside. But as we start producing more, the population of this planet will grow, and those available free won’t be enough to feed it. At that point, we will be able to raise our prices, considerably.”
“I see. But is our population actually limited by the food supply? Will the addition of more food really cause the population to grow?”
“If the population doesn’t grow, we will have to take steps to make it grow. I can think of many ways to do this. We might become righteous warriors who will eliminate the criminal elements in the cities. They seem to be currently doing a lot to keep the population down. However, from this point on, it will be company policy to do whatever we can to increase the planetary population.”
“Very well, sir. Then again, this one hexagon would feed an army of almost a quarter of a million warriors,” Dol said.
“True. If we can’t take this planet economically, we can always do it militarily.”
“Still, there is a lot more money to be made gambling, sir. The citizens of this planet spend more than seven times as much on gambling as they do on food.”
“Just now, there is, and this will continue so long as I am an undergraduate, another five years at most. After that, well, the betting on professional sports is not nearly as good as that on collegiate sports. I’ll get involved with them only if I have to. I understand that on some planets, it is different, but not here. We must see to it that we make our fortune at gambling now, and then that we have a sustainable income that allows for considerable expansion later. The current profits on food might be low, but they are dependable. And in time, the food to gambling ratio just might reverse.”