“And no grain sales, either?”
“We anticipate both buying and selling on the local grain markets, as our needs for animal feed fluctuate. But the highest profits will be in processed meat products.”
“So it’s pigs, cows, horses . . .”
“Horses, boss?”
“Yes, I’ll want a stable of riding horses. Only a few dozen, and just for fun.”
“Yes, sir. One stable of riding horses, coming up.”
“And as I was saying before the interruption, pigs, cows, horses, sheep, camels, chickens, turkeys, and fish, the last three to be raised underground.”
“Not fish. New Yugoslavia is half ocean, and the strong tidal currents caused by its large, nearby moon keep nutrients from settling to the bottom the way they do on Earth. Every square kilometer of those oceans is richer than the richest fishing grounds on your home planet. Carefully selected Earth-type aquatic creatures have completely dominated the aquatic ecology, with the result that there is a surplus of high-quality fish on the entire interstellar market. The one exception is that lobsters have not adapted to the oceans here, and nobody is sure why. We are digging the underground fishponds that you asked for, but we expect to use them exclusively for lobster production. Since lobsters are scavengers, when they are not cannibals, feeding them gives us something to do with the half of the other animals that you humans prefer not to eat.”
“Like the lungs, brains, and eyeballs. I see myself becoming the Interstellar Lobster King.”
“There are worse things to be, sir. Anyway, all of this has to be carefully scheduled. The grass has to be growing before we can bring in the cows. The trees have to be five years old before we bring in the pollinating bees. The cattle have to be grown before we install the slaughter houses and tanneries, and so on. Your first lobster won’t go on sale for ten years.”
“And not even then. I intend to eat it myself. But lobsters grow that slowly?”
“It’s their exoskeletons, sir. They have to shed the old one every time they’re ready to grow twenty percent larger.”
“Well, good. I’ll be a properly educated farmer long before my ranch is in full production. Now then, show me what your architects have come up with for my home, my mansion.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Visitors
We were interrupted by the doorbell. I answered it to find a thin little fellow with thinning hair and an expensive suit standing in the doorway.
“General Derdowski, it is so pleasant to see you again. We met, of course, at your wedding reception.”
At least that’s what I thought he said, since he was speaking Croatian. I must have met a thousand people in that reception line, but I doubt if I remember a single one of them.
Agnieshka came to my rescue by appearing on the screen in the living room. She never forgot anything.
“Dr. Sciszinski, it’s so pleasant to see you again,” she said in Croatian, then switching to Kashubian she said, “Boss, you remember that Dr. Sciszinski is in charge of the Croatian Mental Health Services.”
I suddenly realized that Agnieshka was talking in Kashubian and Croatian simultaneously, only it seemed to me that she was louder in Kashubian. I guessed that she was somehow beaming the sound to each of us in our own language. A neat trick, and one she hadn’t done before.
“Yes, of course,” I lied. “Please come in. What can I do for you, sir?”
“Well, I just had lunch downstairs with my cousin, who happens to be the Chief Justice of our Supreme Court.”
These people seemed to carry nepotism about as far as it could go. Well, it was their country, not mine.
“Yes. I had the pleasure of meeting His Honor a few days ago. Won’t you sit down?”
“Thank you. Well, to get to the point, he told me about the way you trained your enlistees, putting them into a controlled environment with an intelligent computer training them on a one-on-one basis. May I take it that this attractive young lady is in reality one of those artificial intelligences?”
“You may,” I said, wondering where this was leading to. And, was his department as rich as his cousin’s department?
“Then I wonder if I might ask her some questions. They call you Agnieshka, don’t they?”
“Yes, sir.”
“A lovely name. Tell me, Agnieshka, can you reprogram yourself to learn certain new skills? Could you teach yourself to be an engineer, for example?”
“I could download a college-level course and take it myself, if I wanted to. I recently took an extensive course in agriculture, for example.”
“Excellent. Tell me, do you think that you could become a psychologist, or a psychiatrist?”
“I could learn the skills, yes, but I don’t think that I could ever get a license to practice those professions. I am, after all, only a machine.”
“But you are a very remarkable machine, my dear lady. Furthermore, in New Croatia at least, I, ultimately, am the person who would make the decision as to whether you would be permitted to practice. Now then, please consider my position. I presently have some ninety-one thousand seriously disturbed people being treated in various institutions around the country. It is costing my government an average of fifty-six thousand marks to support and treat each of them every year, and even with that huge financial outlay, these people are not getting the best possible care. It is difficult to see to it that they are all properly washed and fed, and often it is even more difficult to be sure that they each get and actually take the proper pharmaceuticals. We don’t have nearly enough trained psychiatric help available, even if we could afford to pay them properly. On top of all this, I have just been ordered to cut my budgets in half. Unless something drastic is done, I will be forced to arbitrarily declare half of those poor people to be cured, even though they are not, and to dump them on the streets.”
“I have sympathy for your difficult position,” I said. “But we are a military organization, not a medical one.”
“True, but you have the intelligent machinery that would enable us to put each patient in a safe, secure environment, with a trained psychiatrist on full-time duty for each one of them. I know that you can keep them physically fit and healthy, as is obvious from your own excellent physique. I think that your Dream World capabilities could be very useful therapeutically. You have the ability to see to it that medication is always administered properly. You could do a great deal of good for these unfortunate people.”
“Perhaps, but such a thing has never been tried before. Also, we are mercenaries, and not a philanthropic organization.”
“Yes. But you are accepting criminals into your ranks. Why not take those who could really benefit by what you have to offer?”
“Criminals are still sane, for the most part. In a war situation, one really crazy person could easily get his entire squad killed,” I said.
“Or, he just might save them. Until the situation actually occurs, we have no way of knowing what would happen. What I am suggesting is that we at least try this program. I could pay you far more than you are getting for your custodial fees for criminals.”
“You would have to, since I would be extremely hesitant about committing psychiatric patients into frontline combat. Even without the attachable external weapons, each of my tanks is worth a million marks. Those tanks that are committed to this program would be militarily useless. At even a three percent return on our investment, we would have to charge you thirty thousand marks per year per patient.”
“That is more than I hoped to have to pay. It would mean discharging thousands of people who still need help. Could you possibly accept twenty-five thousand?”
Agnieshka stepped into the conversation, instead of just translating. “Boss, please? We’d really like to do this. We could help a lot of these people, I’m sure of it. And I’m sure that at least some of them could be made into good observers. If even half of them could be made into good soldiers, wouldn’t that make the whole project worthwhile?”
“Hmmm. Maybe. But I’m also worried about our legal liabilities in all of this. I can see myself being sued by somebody because his crazy maiden aunt was killed in combat.”
Agnieshka said, “But if I were a government-licensed psychologist, and I recommended this therapy, wouldn’t that get you off the hook?”
Our visitor said, “And I would have to insist that each tank had such a license before therapy began.”
“Okay. Okay. With the clear understanding that this is an experimental program, and that either side may back out of it with, say, three months’ notification to the other, we’ll do it. Twenty-five thousand marks per patient per year, to be paid quarterly in advance.”