They reassembled the Rock, rebuilt its interior shelters, covered the whole thing with blue It alian marble, got it all armor hard and glowing, and then put Duncan's castle on it in gleaming white. They found a cathedral they liked in an ancient city called Rheims that they said agreed with the architecture of the castle and put it up on the rock in shimmering scarlet and called it “Saint Giles” again.
The Scots were enraptured with the result of what they had “financed.”
Jonnie thought it looked pretty good, too. But it did produce a problem. The Chatovarians, being overpopulated at home, always overhired and as this job had been “rush” and “for the boss himself,” they had accumulated a very huge crew. They also had a policy that you never fired anybody ever. It left him with a swollen city-building team almost the size of Earth's entire population. So he put them to work rebuilding the cities the “visitors” had burned.
This, too, gave the Chatovarians a problem. What were the cities for? Nobody had lived in a city for eleven hundred years. So their research teams had to figure out what future use the cities might be put to, based on resources, proximity to rivers and the sea, what crops grew in that climate, who they might some day trade with, how many people would have to be housed for what industry. It was very complex and quite difficult.
Establishing the indigenous architecture was easy in Asia, fairly easy in Europe, impossible in America: this last continent had gone madly modern and the Chatovarians couldn't abide it. So they just had to take the most interesting landmark sort of buildings they found on the sites, duplicate those, and make lots and lots of parks. The parent company in Chatovaria had overbought zip monorails on another job so they shipped those in and internally connected the cities up high so their parks wouldn't be spoiled with roads.
They had to get a Hawvin company in to clean up the radiation around Denver– they did it with flying magnetic sweeps. Then the Chatovarians rebuilt that whole area, including even Jonnie's village.
There were no populations, so when they would finish a city, they would just seal up the doors and windows, put a caretaker crew in, and leave it.
Oh, well, Jonnie thought, when he saw all these empty cities going up, maybe somebody would live in them someday.
Ker took charge of the mine school in Edinburgh and the Psychlos that were left alive moved there and gave lectures and demonstrations. Absolute hordes of extraterrestrials were pouring in to learn how to mine their own planets and get the metals moving again. Ker pictographed all the lectures so the technology wouldn't be lost. He used Cornwall and Victoria for practical training and it kept him pretty busy, tearing around with Chirk who had the job of building up the libraries. Ker had a trick of wearing breathe-masks with the face of the race he was training painted on it. It made for friendlier relations, he said.
There was an awful lot of ex-Psychlo planets that had slave populations or people withdrawn to mountains, and the Coordinators were very busy running their Coordinator College in Edinburgh, showing former subject races how to get organized and prosper. Their enrollment was greatly assisted by the fact that the Galactic Bank gave much more favorable interest rates to such planets when they had Coordinators trained in Edinburgh.
The new Earth government claimed that Chief of Clanfearghus was King, probably due to the influence of Mr. Tsung's brother. This made Dunneldeen the Crown Prince, but from all Jonnie could see, neither the Chief nor Dunneldeen took his elevation very seriously. The government was very reluctant to pass laws and generally left things up to tribal chiefs in their own areas, intervening only when there was no other way to end a dispute among them. They were very popular.
Colonel Ivan, with the title of “The Democratic Valiant-red-army People's Colonel,” ruled Russia. Jonnie's village people helped him, and then some of the younger ones went back to America to try to get it started again.
Chief Chong-won and the North Chinese tribe made an alliance and began to build up China. Handicraft and silk for export handled their economic needs. They also had a cooking school that became widely attended, for the Selachees, spread all over the galaxies even farther due to their “neighborhood banks,” swore it was the best cooking anywhere, particularly for fish dishes, and were quick to finance any extraterrestrial who wanted to start a Chinese restaurant in his area providing he sent some cook trainees to learn how. There were usually more cook trainees in China than Chinese. They not only had to learn to cook but also had to learn how to grow much of the food. The extra labor and machinery boomed Chinese agriculture and fisheries, and, as Chief Chong-won remarked every time he saw Jonnie, which was often, starvation was no longer the main product of the Chinese. Jonnie often wondered how an extraterrestrial, who ate quite another diet, could learn to cook food he would never eat. But the power of the bank and the appetites of the Selachees were similarly wonderful.
Pursuant to wide galactic conversion to the decimal system, the bank distributed new issues of money. These upset Chrissie considerably: the coins and bank notes looked even less like Jonnie. She went on for some days about how they looked even more like a Selachee and even less like Jonnie. But Jonnie didn't tell her he had carefully maneuvered things in that direction: these days he could walk right down a street and hardly anybody pointed. A couple more issues and no stranger would know him on sight at all.
The bank in Snautch never did return their gold. When they built the huge new bank complex there, they put the gold behind armor glass in the main lobby with a multilanguage sign on it: “This gold was mined personally by Jonnie Goodboy Tyler and some Scots. He has left it with us because he TRUSTS us. So can you. If you start your new account today, you can reach through a slot and touch it!”
When Jonnie wanted some gold to plate the inaugural display model of a new teleport car Desperation Defense was now converting to build in Chatovaria, Dwight had to go to the Andes with a team of the old crew and open up a mine there to get it.
After the surveys on what people wanted were done by the bank as Jonnie suggested, the conversion of ex-arms companies to consumer products went very swiftly. Few of the Intergalactic patents were in any demand for a while. They found the people on civilized planets wanted pots and pans and such like, all of which were easily made and quite profitable.
The original emissaries were now becoming very wealthy and powerful and backed Jonnie's measures to the limit, even guiding their countries toward social democracy. Jonnie seldom attended their conferences, but they often rushed dispatch boxes to him to get his opinion on something. As they often told each other, antiwar was the most profitable venture they had ever heard of.
The Hawvin Commercial Intelligence Service circulated a secret report on the twenty-eight platforms without knowing it had been planted on them by the Galactic Bank. They had been chosen for the “leak” because they were the most infiltrated intelligence service in any universe. The report was rapidly and secretly relayed all over the galaxies.
It alleged that the original twenty-eight had been increased to fifty-three to allow for new nations and that the platforms were actually located in the seventeenth universe.
The report created a new flurry of antiwar. But it also created astrographic turmoil as it upset the stable datum that, as the number four when squared made sixteen, there could only be sixteen universes.