Garamond shook his head. “It can’t be done without people. A culture which had never developed the concept of money, or property, could cross space just as well as we do.”
“At last!” Elizabeth took two quick steps towards Garamond, then stopped, swaying in magnetic shoes. “At last I know you, Captain. If money is so distasteful to you, I take it you are refusing a place on the development council?”
“I am.”
“And your bounty? Ten million monits taken from the pockets of the people of the Two Worlds. You’re refusing that, too?”
“I’m refusing that, too.”
“You’re too late,” Elizabeth snapped, savouring a triumph which only she understood. “It has already been credited to your account.”
“I’ll return it to you.”
Elizabeth shook her head decisively. “No, Captain. You’re a very famous man back on the Two Worlds — and I must be seen to give you everything you deserve. Now, return to your ship.”
On the way back to the Bissendorf, Garamond’s mind was filled with the President’s admission that he had become too important to be disposed of like any other human being. And yet, came the disturbing thought, there had been that look of satisfaction in her eyes.
nine
The new house allocated for Garamond’s use was a rectangular, single-storey affair. It was one of several dozen built from plastic panels which had been prefabricated in a Starflight workshop on board one of Elizabeth’s ships.
The compact structure was situated less than two kilometres from the aperture to the outside universe, where the coating of soil was still thin, and so was held in place by suction pads which gripped the underlying metal of the shell. After a matter of days living in it Garamond found that he could forget about the hard vacuum of space beginning only a few centimetres below his living-room floor. The furnishings were sparse but comfortable, and a full range of colour projectors and entertainment machines — plus an electronic tutor for Christopher — gave it something of the atmosphere of a luxury week-end lodge.
There was an efficient kitchen supplied with provisions from shipboard stores in the early stages, but the expectation was that the colonists would become self-supporting as regards food within a year. It was late summer in that part of Orbitsville and the edible grasses were approaching a tawny ripeness. Even before a systemized agriculture could be established to produce grain harvests, the grass would be fully utilized — part of it synthetically digested to create protein foods, the rest yielding cellulose for the production of a range of acetate plastics.
Garamond was technically still in command of the Bissendorf, but he spent much of his time in the house, telling himself he was helping his family to put down roots. In reality he was trying to cope with the sense of having been cut adrift. He acquired the habit of standing at a window which faced the aperture and watching the ever-increasing tempo of activity at the Starflight outpost. Machinery, vehicles, supplies of all kinds came through the L-shaped entry tubes in a continuous stream; new buildings were erected every day amid moraines of displaced soil; a skein of dirt roads wound around and through the complex, with its loose ends straggling off into the grasslands. Earth’s beachhead was becoming well established, and as it did so Garamond felt more and more redundant. “The weirdest thing about it is that I feel possessive,” he said to his wife. “I keep lecturing people about the inconceivable size of Orbitsville, telling them it couldn’t be controlled by a thousand Starflight corporations — yet I have a gut-feeling it’s my personal property. I guess that in a way I’m as much out of touch with reality as Liz Lindstrom.”
Aileen shook her head. “You’re angry at the way she’s proposing to handle things.”
“Angry at myself.”
“Why?”
“What made me think Starflight House would quietly bow out of existence to make way for a publicly-funded transportation system? From what I hear, Liz’s public relations teams are plugging the notion that Starflight already is a semi-governmental concern. That was a hard one to put over when there was just Terranova and the amount of land a settler got was determined by how much he paid for his passage, but now it’s different.”
“In what way?” Aileen looked up from the boy’s shirt she was hand-stitching. Her deeply tanned face was sympathetic but unconcerned — since arriving on Orbitsville she had developed a peaceful optimism. It seemed that the principal element of his wife’s personality, her unremarkable pleasantness, was standing her in good stead in the alien environment.
“There’s to be a standard transportation charge and no limitation to the amount of land a settler can occupy. That will make the operation seem pretty altruistic to most people. The trouble is it’s easy to see how they would get that impression.”
Since turning down membership of Elizabeth’s development council Garamond had found it difficult to keep himself informed of her activities, but he could visualize the approach she was using to sell Orbitsville on overcrowded Earth. The newly-established fact that the volume of space within the sphere was totally free of hydrogen or other matter, ruling out the use of flickerwing ships, could even be turned to Starflight’s advantage. It was likely that a very long time would elapse before the unwieldy and inefficient type of ship which carried its own reaction mass could be redeveloped sufficiently to make any impression on the five billion Earth-areas available within the sphere. Orbitsville, then, was truly the ultimate frontier, a place where a man and his family could load up a solar-powered vehicle with supplies, plus an ‘iron cow’ to convert grass into food, and drive off into a green infinity. The life offered would be simple, and perhaps hard — in many ways similar to that of a pioneer in the American West — but in the coast-to-coast urbs of Earth there was a great yearning for just that kind of escape. The risk of dying of overwork or simple appendicitis on a lonely farm hundreds of light-years from Earth was infinitely preferable to the prospect of going down in a food riot in Paris or Melbourne. No matter how much Starflight charged for passage to Orbitsville, there would always be more than enough people to fill the big ships.
“Does the President have to be altruistic?” Aileen said, and Garamond knew that she was drawing comparisons between Liz Lindstrom and herself, between a woman who had unexpectedly lost a son and one whose husband and child had been reprieved. “What’s wrong with making a reasonable percentage on services rendered?”
“In this case — everything.” Garamond suppressed a pang of annoyance. “Don’t you see that? Look, Earth has been raped and polluted and choked to death, but right here on Orbitsville there’s room for every human being there is to lose himself for ever. We’ve made all the mistakes and learned all the lessons back on Earth, and now we’ve been given this chance to start off from scratch again. The whole situation demands an almost complete transfer of population — and it could be done, Aileen. At our level of technology it could be done, but the entire Starflight operation is based on it not being done!
“In order for Elizabeth to go on making her quote reasonable percentage unquote there has to be a potential, a high population pressure on Earth and a low one elsewhere. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that the Lindstroms are behind the failure of all the main population control programmes.”
“That’s ridiculous, Vance.” Aileen began to laugh.