What bothers us and produces an insuperable problem is something that few people foresaw. It is the difficulty of keeping up a viable ecology. Each Settlement must support itself. It contains people, plants, and animals; it contains air, water, and soil. The living things must multiply and maintain their numbers, but not outpace the ability of the Settlement to support them.
The plants and animals? Well, we control them. We supervise their breeding and we consume any excess. Maintaining the human population at a reasonable level is more difficult. We cannot allow human births to outstrip human deaths, and we keep the number of deaths as low as possible, of course. This makes our culture a nonyouthful one compared to Earth’s. There are few youngsters and a large percentage of those mature and postmature. This produces psychological strains, but there is the general feeling among Settlers that those strains are worth it, since with a carefully controlled population, there are no poor, no homeless, and no helpless.
Again, the water, air, and food must be carefully recycled, and much of our technology is devoted to the distillation of used water, and to the treatment of solid bodily wastes and their conversion to clean fertilizer. We cannot afford to have anything go wrong with our recycling technology, for there is little room for slack. And, of course, even when all goes well, the feeling that we eat and drink recycled materials is a bit unpalatable. All is recycled on Earth, too, but Earth is so large and the natural cycling system so unnoticeable, that Earthpeople tend to be unaware of the matter.
Then, too, there is always the fear that a sizable meteor may strike and damage the outer shell of a Settlement. A bit of matter no larger than a piece of gravel might do damage, and one a foot across would surely destroy any Settlement. Fortunately, the chances for such a misadventure are small and we will eventually learn to detect and divert such objects before they reach us. Still, these dangers weigh upon us, and help mitigate the feeling of over-security that some of us complain about.
With an effort, however, with close attention and unremitting care, we can maintain our ecology, were it not for the matter of trade and travel.
Each Settlement produces something that other Settlements would like to have, in the matter of food, of art, of ingenious devices. What’s more, we must trade with Earth as well, and many Settlers want to visit Earth and see some of the things we don’t have in the Settlements. Earthpeople can’t realize how exciting it is for us to see a vast blue horizon, or to look out upon a true ocean, or to see an ice-capped mountain.
Therefore, there is a constant coming and going among the Settlements and Earth. But each Settlement has its own ecological balance; and, of course, Earth has, even these days, an ecology that is enormously and impossibly rich by Settlement standards.
We have our insects that are acclimated and under control, but what if strange insects are casually and unintentionally introduced from another Settlement or from Earth?
A strange insect, a strange worm, even a strange rodent might totally upset our ecology, inflict damage on our native plants and animals. On numerous occasions, in fact, a Settlement has had to take extraordinary measures to eliminate an unwanted life-form. For months every effort had to be taken to track down every last insect of some species that, in its own Settlement, is harmless, or that, on Earth, can keep its depredations local.
Even worse, what if pathogenic parasites-bacteria, viruses, protozoa-are introduced? What if they produce diseases against which another Settlement and, of course, Earth itself, have developed a certain immunity, but one against which the Settlement that suffers the invasion is helpless. For a while, the entire effort of the Settlement must go into the preparation or importation of sera designed to confer immunity, or to fight the disease once it is established. Deaths, of course, occur invariably.
Naturally, there is always an outcry when this happens and a demand for more controls. As a result, no one from another Settlement, and no one returning to his own Settlement from a trip elsewhere, can be allowed to enter without a complete search of his baggage, a complete analysis of his bodily fluids, and a certain period of quarantine to see if some undetected disease is developing.
What’s more, rightly or wrongly, the inhabitants of the Settlements persist in viewing Earthpeople themselves as particularly dangerous. It is on Earth where the most undesirable life-forms and parasites are to be found; it is Earthpeople who are most likely to be infested, and there are parties on all the Settlements who support the notion-sometimes quite vehemently-of breaking all contacts between the Settlements and Earth.
That is the danger of which I want to warn Earthpeople. Distrust-and even hatred-of Earthpeople is constantly growing among the Settlers.
As long as Earth is only a few tens or hundreds of thousands of miles away, it is useless to talk of breaking off all contact. The lure and attraction of Earth is too great. Therefore, there is now talk-it is only a whisper, so far, but it will grow louder, I assure you-of leaving the Solar system altogether.
Each Settlement can be outfitted with a propulsive mechanism, making use of microfusion motors. Solar energy will suffice us while we are still among the planets and we will pick up small comets as a source of hydrogen fuel, in the process of leaving all the planets behind, when the Sun becomes too distant to be of use to us.
Each Settlement will say good-bye to Earth, then, and launch itself as an independent world into the unimaginable wastes between the stars. And who knows, someday a million years hence a Settlement may find an Earth-like world, empty and waiting, that it can populate.
But that is what I must warn Earth of. The Settlements will someday leave, and if you build others, they will eventually leave, too, and you will be left alone. And yet, in a way, your descendants will be expanding into, and populating, the entire Galaxy. You may find that a consoling thought as you watch them disappear.
Battle-Hymn
There didn't seem much room for hope. Sibelius Hopkins put it into the simplest words. “We’ve got to have Martian consent, and we won’t get it, that’s all.”
The gloom among the others was thick enough to impede breathing. “We should never have granted the colonists autonomy,” said Ralph Colodny.
“Agreed,” said Hopkins. “Now who wants to volunteer to go back in time twenty-eight years and change history. Mars has the sovereign right to decide how its territory is to be used, and there’s nothing to be done about it.”
“We might choose another site, “ said Ben Devers, who was the youngest of the group and hadn’t yet worked himself to the proper pitch of cynicism.
“No other site,” said Hopkins flatly. “If you don’t know that experiments with hyperspace are dangerous, go back to school. You can’t do them on Earth, and even the Moon is far too built up. The space settlements are too small by three orders of magnitude and it’s not possible to reach anything beyond Mars for at least twenty years. But Mars is perfect. It’s still practically empty. It has a low surface gravity and a thin atmosphere. It’s cold. Everything’s perfect for hyperspatial flight-except the colonists.”
“You can never tell,” said young Devers. “People are funny. They might vote in favor of hyperspatial experiments on Mars, if we play it right.”
“How do we play it right,” said Hopkins. “The opposition has blanketed Mars with an old hillbilly tune that has the words:
“No, no, a thousand times, no! You cannot buy my caress! “No, no, a thousand times, no! I’d rather die than say, yes.”
He grinned mirthlessly. “Mars is blanketed with the tune. It’s being drilled into the minds of the Martian colonists. They’ll vote ‘no’ automatically, and we won’t have hyperspatial experiments and that means we won’t have flights to the stars for decades, maybe generations-certainly not in our lifetimes.” Devers said, frowning in thought, “Can’t we use a tune for our side of the argument?”