“So are bur boats. Added to that, they don’t take half a neighborhood out with them if one goes down. That happened with a big air transport during Canuche’s early years. Once was enough. Besides, the boats provide work for a lot more people. As incomprehensible as that may seem to a lot of off-worlders, keeping our population fully employed has just about top priority on Canuche. You don’t work, you emigrate.”
“What about the spaceport, then?” the Medic asked hastily, hearing the defensive irritation in their host’s voice. Handling the problem of a population a planet could not wholly support simply by kicking the excess off-world was not a policy favored by the Federation at large. “Granted it provides some good jobs, but starship crashes have been among the worst disasters in Federation history.”
“It’s not physically within the city,” he replied a trifle grimly, “and we do insist that all ships make their approach and depart from the landward side.”
“That’s about as much as anyone can do,” Jellico told him, “and the general procedures at the port’re as tight as I’ve encountered anywhere.”
The Captain gazed a moment through the transparent wall. “What are we seeing down there? What, for instance, is that huge white building on the right?”
“That’s Caledonia, Inc.’s, contribution to Canuche Town’s prosperity.” The industrialist scowled momentarily. “If I’d listened to my instincts instead of to my fools of financial advisers, there’d be two more stories on it, but even as it is, it’s the biggest single facility in the city, employing some thirty thousand people on-site alone, not counting our cadre of longshoremen, the crews manning our ships and transports, and those maintaining our feeder lines.”
“Factory?” Van Rycke asked.
He nodded. “Basically. It’s what we call a hodgepodge plant. We do some light manufacturing from scratch and a lot of assembly of parts and products begun elsewhere as well as a great deal of research and development.”
“Is that the usual procedure for the big manufacturers here?”
“Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Caledonia deals in construction and mining supplies, including very heavy major equipment, and in chemicals. Much of the preparation of both is done inland, either for safety’s sake or on or near the mining sites for economic reasons. Some of the smaller items can go more completely through the manufacturing process here, but almost all the chemicals are piped to us in their component parts and blended or treated or whatever in the plant, then sent to their destinations as quickly as possible. We don’t like holding them here. A good many of them have properties that make it undesirable to store them in quantity in a populous region.”
“What do the other factories make?”
“You name it. Every major company on Canuche has some sort of office in the city, and most of them do active work here. Few of us can resist the opportunity offered by the harbor. Anything produced in Canuche Town can be shipped directly from here with almost no intermediate transport costs, and the proximity of the spaceport is a plus beyond price for importers and exporters alike.”
Van Rycke studied the body of water below, an inlet six miles long and approximately a mile wide, whose dark blue color proclaimed considerable depth. “You could have done worse than that,” he remarked. “It’s what decided your ancestors to build on this site, of course?”
“Naturally. It’s one of the finest on a planet well supplied with good ports. — Just .look at this setup! Twelve miles, six on each bank, of Hat waterfront land perfect for industrial facilities of every sort. The slopes on either side are steep but not cliffs. People can readily live on them. The channel, which we call the Straight and Narrow, is sufficiently broad to permit the ready passage of any two vessels ever likely to travel our seas, and it’s deep enough that in the old days, it would have been termed almost bottomless.
“We’re truly blessed with respect to our defenses against the side effects of Canuche’s bad weather, too. Both the current and the prevailing wind run parallel to this part of the coast, and only under the rarest combination of unfortunate circumstances does a storm pummel it head-on. Even in that event, we usually escape its worst fury. The heights on the seaward side break the force of the gales, and the Straight pushes in at a diagonal. It opens away from the flow of the current, and a lot of the sea’s anger simply bypasses us. The harbor area has had real trouble from storms or the ocean on only four or five occasions since the area was first settled.”
“There’s still the potential for danger,” the woman warned, “if not from nature, then as a result of your own efforts. A few products at least of all those made or shipped here must be inflammable or violently unstable. These slopes are high and steep enough to confine and reflect back a blast or a sudden fire acting like one. The rest of the town would be spared a lot of grief as a result, but this area would pay the passage for all.”
Macgregory looked at her with new respect. “You’ve got an eye. Doctor, and a head to go with it. — The city planners are aware of that risk. It was brought home to us by the possibility scenarios we ran during the Crater War. Canuche went heavily into munitions production at the time. Quite literally every port of any size was handling the finished products or their components, and none of those in charge was stupid enough not to realize the enormous potential for disaster inherent in dealing with such materiel. We were determined to hold on to both our profits and our lives.
“Canuche Town responded by keeping the war goods as much as possible away from the city and inner harbor.” He turned in his chair so he could gaze back over his shoulder.
“See those red docks on the shoulders framing the mouth of the Straight?”
“Aye.”
“They continue some distance beyond along the seaward side, as far as there’s level land to hold the piers backing them. All combat materiel was loaded from them. Nothing ever did happen, praise the Lord of Light and Dark, but if a ship or dock had gone up, the worst of the blast would have broken on the heights or bypassed us, even as natural storms do. We’d have suffered some from the resultant sea surge, but that, too, would mostly have gone by.
“Munitions aren’t the same industry now, I’m not sorry to say, and they’re handled entirely on the west coast, where there are lower population levels. We use the red docks for fuel shipments, especially concoctions intended for the spaceport, the raw ingredients to make them, and other chemicals with chancy natures.”
“Aren’t those fuel tanks?” Jan inquired, pointing to a cluster of three tall cylinders just beneath their table. He could see approximately fifty similar structures scattered all along the waterfront. They were more heavily concentrated in some spots than others, but no section on either shore appeared to be completely devoid of them.
“Yes, they are that,” The industrialist’s voice was cold.
“I’ve made myself an unpopular man trying to have them removed and that damned stuff stored underground where it belongs.”
“One good fire’ll educate everyone for you,” Rael told him glumly.
“No doubt, but the poor people living and working around the thing’ll be the ones who foot the tuition bill.”
Jellico sighed to himself. They would wind up with a brace of disaster scholars in the party, he thought sourly. If the conversation turned to a detailed comparison of some of history’s grimmer episodes, it would be to the decided detriment of a magnificent meal. He, for one, wanted to reap full enjoyment out of the incredibly rich torte the waiter Charles had just set before him.
The Cargo-Master was of the same opinion. “Canuche’s citizens appear on the whole to be doing their part to ensure their safety. That and keeping on the alert are about all anyone can do.” He was quiet while he ate an experimental forkful of the torte. “This is excellent! — What other cargoes do your ships handle? There’s scarcely a dock vacant down there.”
The older man smiled. “A graphic description of folks being blown halfway to the next galaxy is no aid to the digestion,” he agreed. “To answer your question, almost anything grown or made on Canuche or imported from off-world finds its way to these docks at some point or other.
“Most of the bigger corporations own the port facilities fronting their establishments.—Caledonia has the four adjacent to our plant plus two red docks for the chemicals. — The rest are leased from the city by the smaller companies and the independent freight and passenger lines.
“The independents tend to group similar products together where practicable. Caledonia has its own longshoremen and equipment, but most draw on the city pool, and it’s more economical to have any necessary specialists and specific gear more or less permanently nearby and on hand. For example, all sorts of southern-made goods and produce come in to the docks in the Cup area, right there below us where the Straight ends and the two banks meet, and the various products the north makes to meet their needs are sent off to them from there. Three large corporations pull in a big part of their profits on fertilizer alone at this time of year despite the fact that the farmers mainly use animal byproducts. Sil plants respond so well to a feeding of ammonium nitrate that a lightly treated field will produce three crops in a year in subtropical areas, two in temperate regions.”