“No, sir,” Calvin replied. “Been in Marine assault boats just about as bad, I reckon. But I can’t say I fancy being stuffed into no cubicle with ten, fifteen thousand civilians for six months.”
“We may all see the inside of one of those,” Falkenberg said. “And be glad of the chance. Tell me about the situation here, Banners.”
“I don’t even know where to start, sir,” the lieutenant answered. “I—do you know about Hadley?”
“Assume I don’t,” Falkenberg said. May as well see what kind of estimate of the situation the President’s officers can make, he thought. He could feel the Fleet Intelligence report bulging in an inner pocket of his tunic, but those reports always left out important details; and the attitudes of the Presidential Guard could be important to his plans.
“Yes, sir. Well, to begin with, we’re a long way from the nearest shipping lanes—but I guess you knew that. The only real reason we had any merchant trade was the mines. Thorium, richest veins known anywhere for a while, until they started to run out.
“For the first few years that’s all we had. The mines are up in the hills, about eighty miles over that way.” He pointed to a thin blue line just visible at the horizon.
“Must be pretty high mountains,” Falkenberg said. “What’s the diameter of Hadley? About eighty percent of Earth? Something like that. The horizon ought to be pretty close.”
“Yes, sir. They are high mountains. Hadley is small, but we’ve got bigger and better everything here.” There was pride in the young officer’s voice.
“Them bags seem pretty heavy for a planet this small,” Calvin said.
“Hadley’s very dense,” Banners answered. “Gravity nearly ninety percent standard. Anyway, the mines are over there, and they have their own spaceport at a lake nearby. Refuge—that’s this city—was founded by the American Express Company. They brought in the first colonists, quite a lot of them.”
“Volunteers?” Falkenberg asked.
“Yes. All volunteers. The usual misfits. I suppose my father was typical enough, an engineer who couldn’t keep up with the rat race and was tired of Bureau of Technology restrictions on what he could learn. They were the first wave, and they took the best land. They founded the city and got an economy going. American Express was paid back all advances within twenty years.” Banners’ pride was evident, and Falkenberg knew it had been a difficult job.
“That was, what, fifty years ago?” Falkenberg asked.
“Yes.”
They were driving through crowded streets lined with wooden houses and a few stone buildings. There were rooming houses, bars, sailors’ brothels, all the usual establishments of a dock street, but there were no other cars on the road. Instead the traffic was all horses and oxen pulling carts, bicycles, and pedestrians.
The sky above Refuge was clear. There was no trace of smog or industrial wastes. Out in the harbor tugboats moved with the silent efficiency of electric power, and there were also wind-driven sailing ships, lobster boats powered by oars, even a topsail schooner lovely against clean blue water. She threw up white spume as she raced out to sea. A three-masted, full-rigged ship was drawn up to a wharf where men loaded her by hand with huge bales of what might have been cotton.
They passed a wagonload of melons. A gaily dressed young couple waved cheerfully at them, then the man snapped a long whip at the team of horses that pulled their wagon. Falkenberg studied the primitive scene and said, “It doesn’t look like you’ve been here fifty years.”
“No.” Banners gave them a bitter look. Then he swerved to avoid a group of shapeless teenagers lounging in the dockside street. He had to swerve again to avoid the barricade of paving stones that they had masked. The car jounced wildly. Banners gunned it to lift it higher and headed for a low place in the barricade. It scraped as it went over the top, then he accelerated away.
Falkenberg took his hand from inside his shirt jacket.
Behind him Calvin was inspecting a submachine gun that had appeared from the oversized barracks bag he’d brought into the car with him. When Banners said nothing about the incident, Falkenberg frowned and leaned back in his seat, listening. The Intelligence reports mentioned lawlessness, but this was as bad as a Welfare Island on Earth.
“No, we’re not much industrialized,” Banners continued. “At first there wasn’t any need to develop basic industries. The mines made everyone rich, so we imported everything we needed. The farmers sold fresh produce to the miners for enormous prices. Refuge was a service industry town. People who worked here could soon afford farm animals, and they scattered out across the plains and into the forests.”
Falkenberg nodded. “Many of them wouldn’t care for cities.”
“Precisely. They didn’t want industry, they’d come here to escape it.” Banners drove in silence for a moment. “Then some blasted CoDominium bureaucrat read the ecology reports about Hadley. The Population Control Bureau in Washington decided this was a perfect place for involuntary colonization. The ships were coming here for the thorium anyway, so instead of luxuries and machinery they were ordered to carry convicts. Hundreds of thousands of them, Colonel Falkenberg. For the last ten years there have been better than fifty thousand people a year dumped in on us.”
“And you couldn’t support them all,” Falkenberg said gently.
“No, sir.” Banners’ face tightened. He seemed to be fighting tears. “God knows we try. Every erg the fusion generators can make goes into converting petroleum into basic protocarb just to feed them. But they’re not like the original colonists! They don’t know anything, they won’t do anything! Oh, not really, of course. Some of them work. Some of our best citizens are transportees. But there are so many of the other kind.”
“Why’n’t you tell ’em to work or starve?” Calvin asked bluntly. Falkenberg gave him a cold look, and the sergeant nodded slightly and sank back into his seat.
“Because the CD wouldn’t let us!” Banners shouted. “Damn it, we didn’t have self-government. The CD Bureau of Relocation people told us what to do. They ran everything . . .”
“We know,” Falkenberg said gently. “We’ve seen the results of Humanity League influence over BuRelock. My sergeant major wasn’t asking you a question, he was expressing an opinion. Nevertheless, I am surprised. I would have thought your farms could support the urban population.”
“They should be able to, sir.” Banners drove in grim silence for a long minute. “But there’s no transportation. The people are here, and most of the agricultural land is five hundred miles inland. There’s arable land closer, but it isn’t cleared. Our settlers wanted to get away from Refuge and BuRelock. We have a railroad, but bandit gangs keep blowing it up. We can’t rely on Hadley’s produce to keep Refuge alive. There are a million people on Hadley, and half of them are crammed into this one ungovernable city.”
They were approaching an enormous bowl-shaped structure attached to a massive square stone fortress. Falkenberg studied the buildings carefully, them asked what they were.
“Our stadium,” Banners replied. There was no pride in his voice now. “The CD built it for us. We’d rather have had a new fusion plant, but we got a stadium that can hold a hundred thousand people.”
“Built by the GLC Construction and Development Company, I presume,” Falkenberg said.
“Yes . . . how did you know?”
“I think I saw it somewhere.” He hadn’t, but it was an easy guess: GLC was owned by a holding company that was in turn owned by the Bronson family. It was easy enough to understand why aid sent by the CD Grand Senate would end up used for something GLC might participate in.
“We have very fine sports teams and racehorses,” Banners said bitterly. “The building next to it is the Presidential Palace. Its architecture is quite functional.”
The Palace loomed up before them, squat and massive; it looked more fortress than capital building.
The city was more thickly populated as they approached the Palace. The buildings here were mostly stone and poured concrete instead of wood. Few were more than three stories high, so that Refuge sprawled far along the shore. The population density increased rapidly beyond the stadium-palace complex. Banners was watchful as he drove along the wide streets, but he seemed less nervous than he had been at dockside.
Refuge was a city of contrasts. The streets were straight and wide, and there was evidently a good waste-disposal system, but the lower floors of the buildings were open shops, and the sidewalks were clogged with market stalls. Clouds of pedestrians moved through the kiosks and shops.
There was still no motor traffic and no moving pedways. Horse troughs and hitching posts had been constructed at frequent intervals along with starkly functional street lights and water distribution towers. The few signs of technology contrasted strongly with the general primitive air of the city.