kissed him on the ear, and ran out of the room.
Adams stared thoughtfully at the closed door. That let Barbara out-or did it? It did not.
Nor did it put her in any deeper. The operator, if any, was supernormal; super-psionic.
The problem was, by definition, insoluble; one more of the many mysteries of Nature that
the mind of man could not yet solve. Therefore he would not waste any more time on it.
He shrugged his shoulders, crumpled the sheet of paper up into a ball, dropped the ball
into his wastebasket, and went to work on a problem that he might be able to solve.
Chapter 13
THE OUTPLANETS
While no one knows when man first appeared upon Earth, it is generally agreed that it
required many hundreds of thousands of years for the human population of Earth to
reach the billion mark, which it probably did sometime in the eighteen twenties. In the
next scant century, however, it doubled. In another seventy five or eighty years it doubled
again, to four billions. Then, due to limitation of births in most cultures and to famine and
pestilence in the few remaining backward ones, the rate of increase began to drop; and
early in the twenty second century Earth’s population seemed to be approaching seven
billions as a limit.
Although cities had increased tremendously in size there was still much farmland, and
every acre of it including the Sahara, irrigated by demineralized and remineralized water
from the ocean-was cultivated and fertilized to the maximum possible constant yield.
There were also vast hydroponics installations. Complete diet had been synthesized long
since; hence Earthly fare for many years had been synthetic for most, vege-
tarian-and-synthetic for almost all of the upper twenty percent. Cow’s milk and real meat
were for millionaires only.
The dwindling of Earth’s reserves of oil and coal had forced the price of hydrocarbons up
to where it became profitable to work oil shale, and it was from the immense deposits of
that material that most of Earth’s oil was being produced. Very little of this oil, however,
was being used as fuel; almost every ton of it was going into the insatiable conversion
plants of the plastics and synthetics industries.
Of power, fortunately, there was no lack. It was available everywhere, at relatively low
cost and in infinite amount.
Infinite? Well, not quite, perhaps. Inexhaustible, certainly. Also incalculable, since no two
mathematicians ever agreed even approximately in estimating the total kinetic energy of
the universe. And that super-genius Lee Chaytor, in developing the engine that still bears
her name-the engine that taps that inexhaustible source of energy-gave to mankind one
of the two greatest gifts it has ever received. The other, of course, was Wesley’s
Subspace Drive; by virtue of which man peopled the planets of the stars.
However, it was only the bold, the hardy, and the independent, and the discontented who
went. Nor was there at first any such thing as Capital: the bankers of Earth were, then
as now, highly allergic to risking their money in any venture less certain than a
fifty-percent of-appraised-value first mortgage upon a practically sure thing. Hence
everything was on shares.
Elbridge Warner, Barbara Deston’s great-great-great and-so-on grandfather, a
multi-millionaire oil man and a rabid anti-union capitalist, was the first big operator to go
off-Earth. Following the “hunches” that had made him what he was, he hired a crew of
the hardest, toughest, most intransigent men he could find and sniffed out a fantastically
oil-rich planet, theretofore unknown to man. He named this planet “Newmars” and
claimed it in toto as his own personal private property.
Then, having put down a tremendously productive well, he built and populated a
balanced-economy colony. He then put down a few more gushers and built an arms plant
and a couple of battleships, after which he: 1) Moved everything he owned that was
movable from Earth to Newmars, and 2) Fired every union man in his employ. The United
Oil Workers struck, of course, whereupon he made or stole-the record is not clear upon
this point-some Chaytor superfusers and destroyed every Warner well on Earth.
Destroyed them so thoroughly (everyone has seen a tri-di of what a superfuser does)
that not one of them could be made to produce again for years, if ever. He then sat back
on his wholly-owned, self-sufficient, fortified planet and waited.
The result was inevitable. Even with Warner Oil at full production, the demand had been
crowding the supply. And, because of the meagerness of Earth’s reserves and because
the shale-oil people would not expand their plants-they knew that Warner could undersell
them by any margin he chose-Earth had to make terms with Elbridge Warner. The
Chamber of Commerce and the government of the United States of America forced the
United Oil Workers to surrender; whereupon Warner graciously allowed fleets of tankers
to haul oil from Newmars to Earth-at shale oil’s exact delivered price.
Elbridge never did put down another well on Earth. In fact, as far as is known, he did not
even visit Earth throughout the remainder of his hundred years of life. He was not bitter,
exactly; he was stubborn, hard-headed, fiercely independent, and contumaceous; and he
surrounded himself by preference with people of his own hard kind. Which, with that start
and with Warner Oil always dominating the business, is why the oil-men of the planets
have never been a gentle breed.
The Asteroid Mining Company followed WarnOil’s lead. Iron and nickel, of course, and a
few other metals, were available in plenty in Sol’s asteroid belt; but a great many other
highly important metals, particularly the heavier ones, were not. Wherefore the Asteroid
Mining Company changed its name to Galactic Metals, Incorporated, and sent hundreds
of prospectors out to explore new solar systems. These men, too-hard-muscled,
hard-fighting, hard-playing hard-rock men all were rugged, rough, and tough.
They found a sun with an asteroid belt so big and so full of chunks of heavy metal that it
was all but unapproachable along any radial line anywhere near the plane of the ecliptic.
This sun’s fourth planet, while it was Tellus-Type as to gravity, temperature, water, air,
and so forth, was much richer than Earth in metals heavier than nickel. Whereupon
Galactic Metals pre-empted this metalliferous planet, named it “Galmetia”, and pro-
ceeded to stock it with metalsmen-a breed perhaps one number Brinnell harder even
than Elbridge Warner’s oilmen.
With colonization an actuality, and productive of profits far beyond anything possible on
Earth, a few of the most venturesome capitalists of Earth decided to dip into this flowing
fountain for themselves. Lactia Incorporated, the leading-milk-and-meat producer, was
the first banker-backed, consumer-oriented firm to take the big plunge. Knowing that it
could fly a fifty-thousand ton tanker from an out-planet to Earth in little more time and at
little more expense than was required to ship a five-gallon container from Trempealeau,
Wisconsin, to Chicago, Illinois, it found and claimed a Tellus type planet whose
tremendous expanses of fertile plains and whose equable climate made it ideal for the
production of milk and meat. It named its planet Lactia. Then Lactia the firm colonized
Lactia the planet with feedraisers, dairymen, and stockmen, and began to spend money
hand over fist.
It required years, of course, to build up the herds, and an immense amount of money, but
when many hundreds of millions of cattle lived upon hundreds of millions of fertile acres,
the retail price of milk had come down from twenty five dollars a pint to the mythically-old
figure of twenty cents per quart. Beef, pork, and mutton were available in every
marketplace. Clothing of real wool and of real leather was being sold at prices almost
anyone could afford. For, then as now, the businessmen of the planets adhered as
closely as they possibly could to the Law of Diminishing Returns.
Dozens of other industries followed Milk’s lead. Wheatfields were measured by the
“square” (one hundred square kilometers) instead of by the acre and bread again
became a basic food. Rice became available in full supply and at low cost. Breakfast
cereals reappeared upon the shelves of even the smallest food stores. All of this came
about because, with all due respect to the biochemical engineers, natural food tasted
better than synthetic and “felt” better in the mouth, and vast numbers of consumers were
willing to pay a premium for it.
(With increasing automation, ever-mounting demand, and ever-increasing production as
costs were lowered, planetary agriculture eventually, of course, put the synthetic-food
industry completely out of business.)
These subsidiary planets, unlike Newmars and Galmetia, were at first dependent upon
Earth. However, each one grew in population at an exponential rate. For, despite all the
automation that is economically feasible, it takes a lot of men to work even as small a
holding as a hundred squares of land. Men need women and women go with their men.
Men and women have children -on the planets, as many children as they want. Families