LaNague withdrew his hand and lay his head back into the upper portion of the padded seat. His eyes closed as he visibly relaxed. After a while he exhaled slowly but kept his lids shut, basking in the dying rays of the sinking sun as they played off the sharp planes of his face.
Finally: “If you really want, I'll set up a small credit balance for you when we get to the peninsula.”
“Forget it,” Broohnin replied, hating the meekness he heard in his voice. “Where are we going?”
LaNague opened his eyes. “I punched in a course for the South Pole, but we'll never reach it. They'll stop us long before we get near it.”
The flitter took them across Drake Passage, over the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, and along the western shore of the Weddell Sea. The concepts of “east” and “west” steadily lost meaning as they traveled toward the point where even “south” held no meaning, where every way was north.
Darkness swallowed them as they cut through the cold air above the monotonous white wastes of the Edith Ronne Ice Shelf. When all around him had become featureless darkness, Broohnin finally admitted to himself that he was frightened. He doubted either of them could survive an hour down there in that cold and wind if the flitter went down.
“This was a stupid idea,” he muttered.
“What was?” LaNague, as usual, seemed unperturbed.
“Renting this flitter. We should have taken a commercial flight. What if we have a power failure?”
“A commercial flight wouldn't take us where we have to go. I told you before – I have to see this new protein source myself before I'll really believe it exists.”
“What protein are you going to find on an ice cap? Everything's frozen!” This trip was becoming more idiotic by the minute.
“Not everything, I'll bet,” LaNague said, craning his neck forward as he scanned the sky through the observation bubble. He pointed upward and fifteen degrees off the flitter's port bow. “Look. What do you think those are?”
Broohnin saw them almost immediately. Three long, narrow ellipses of intensely bright light hung in the black of the sky, motionless, eerie.
“How high you think they are?” LaNague asked.
Broohnin squinted. They looked very high, almost fixed in the sky. “I'd say they were in orbit.”
“You're right. They're in a tight polar orbit.”
“Orbiting lights?”
“That's sunlight.”
“By the Core!” Broohnin said in a breathy voice. He knew what they were now – mirrors. Orbiting solar reflectors were almost as old in practice as they were in concept. They had been used by wealthy snow belt cities in the pre-interstellar days to reduce the severity of their winter storms. But the advent of weather modification technology had made them obsolete and most of them had been junked or forgotten.
“I've got it!” he said. “Someone's melted enough ice to be able to plant crops at the South Pole!”
LaNague shook his head. “Close, but not quite. I doubt if there's enough arable soil under the ice to plant a crop. And if there were, I certainly wouldn't feel impelled to see it with my own eyes. What I've–”
The traffic control comm indicator on the console flashed red as a voice came through the speaker.
“Restricted zone! Restricted zone! Turn back unless you have authorized clearance! Restricted zone! Restricted–”
“We going to do it?” Broohnin asked.
“No.”
He fumbled with the knobs on the console. “Can't we turn it off then?” The repetitious monotone of the recorded warning was getting on his nerves. When the volume control on the vid panel did nothing to lessen the droning voice, Broohnin raised his hand to strike at the speaker. LaNague stopped him.
“We'll need that later. Don't break anything.”
Broohnin leaned back and bottled his growing irritation. Covering his ears with his hands, he watched the solar mirrors fatten in the middle, growing more circular, less ellipsoid. As the flitter continued southward, they became almost too bright to look at.
The cabin was suddenly filled with intolerably bright light, but not from the mirrors. A police cutter was directly above them, matching their air speed. The voice from the traffic control comm finally cut off and a new one spoke.
“You have violated restricted air space. Proceed 11.2 kilometers due south and dock in the lighted area next to the sentry post. Deviation from that course will force me to disable your craft.”
LaNague cleared the pre-programmed course and took manual control of the flitter. “Let's do what the man says.”
“You don't seem surprised.”
“I'm not. This is the only way to get to the South Polar Plateau without getting blasted out of the air.”
The cutter stayed above them all the way to the sentry station and remained hovering over their observation bubble even after they had docked.
“Debark and enter the sentry station,” the voice said from the speaker. Without protest, LaNague and Broohnin broke the seal on the bubble, stumbled to the ground, and made a mad dash through the icy wind to the door of the station. The sentry joined them a moment later. He was young, personable, and alone. Broohnin considered the odds to be in their favor, but LaNague no doubt had other ideas.
THE CAB OF THE SENTRY'S CUTTER was much roomier. Broohnin stretched out his legs and started to doze.
“Keep awake!” LaNague said, nudging him. “I want you to see this, too.”
Broohnin struggled to a more upright sitting position and glared at the Tolivian. He felt tired, more irritable than usual, and didn't like anyone nudging him for any reason. But his annoyance faded quickly as he remembered LaNague's masterful handling of the sentry.
“Are all Earthies that easy to bribe?” he asked.
There was no humor in LaNague's smile. “I wouldn't be surprised if they were. Those two coin tubes I gave him were full of Tolivian ags, and each ag contains one troy ounce of .999 fine silver. With silver coins, that sentry can operate outside the electronic currency system. The official exchange rate is about six solar credits per ag, but the coins are each worth ten times that in the black market. And believe me, Earth's black market is second to none in size and diversity.”
Broohnin remembered the way the sentry's eyes had widened at the sight of the silver coins. The man had looked as if he were about to lick his lips in anticipation. He had hardly seemed to hear LaNague as he explained what he wanted in return for the coins.
“Black market prices are higher,” Broohnin said. “Why bother with it?”
“Of course they're higher. That's because they've got something to sell. Look: all prices and wages are fixed on Earth, all goods are rationed. Whatever makes it to the market at the official price disappears in an instant, usually into the hands of friends and relatives of the people with political connections. These people sell it to black marketeers, who sell it to everyday people; the price goes up at each stop along the way.”
“That's my point–”
“No. You've missed the point. The price of a three-dimensional display module for a home computer is ‘X’ Solar credits in the government-controlled store; it's a fixed bargain price, but the store never has any. So what good is a fixed price? The black marketeer, however, has plenty of them, only he wants ‘double-X’ Solar credits for each. It's an axiom of Kyfhon economics: the more rigidly controlled the economy, the bigger and better the black market. Earth's economy is run completely from the top, therefore there's hardly a thing you cannot buy in Earth's black market. It's the biggest and best there is!
“The black market here also means freedom from surveillance. You can buy anything you want without leaving a record of what, where, and when. Of course the sentry was easy to bribe. It costs him nothing to let us take this ride, and look what he got in return.”
The sentry had not come along. There was no need to. He had searched them for weapons and cameras; finding none, he had sealed them into the cutter and programmed a low-lev
el reconnaissance flight into the craft's computer. The two out-worlders would get a slow fly-by of the area that interested them, with no stops. Anyone monitoring the flight would detect nothing out of the ordinary – a routine fence ride. The chance of the cutter's being stopped with the out-worlders aboard was virtually nil. The sentry was risking nothing and gaining a pocketful of silver.
The solar mirrors were now almost perfect circles in the night sky, intolerably bright. LaNague pointed to a soft glow ahead on the horizon.
“That's it. That's got to be it.”
The glow grew and spread left and right until most of the horizon ahead of them was suffused with a soft yellow haze. Suddenly they were upon it and in it and sinking through wispy clouds of bright mist. When those cleared, they could see huge fields of green far below them. A sheer wall of ice was behind them, swinging away to each side in a huge crystal arc.
“By the Core,” Broohnin said softly. “It's a huge valley cut right out of the ice!”
LaNague was nodding excitedly. “Yes, a huge circular cut measuring thirty kilometers across if my reports are correct – and they haven't failed me yet. But the real surprise is below.”
Broohnin watched as their slow descent brought them toward the floor of the valley. The fine mist that layered over the top of the huge manmade depression in the South Polar Plateau diffused the light from the solar mirrors, spreading it evenly through the air. Acting as a translucent screen, it retained most of the radiant heat. The valley was one huge greenhouse. Looking down, Broohnin saw that what had initially appeared to be a solid carpet of green on the valley floor was actually a tight grove of some sort of huge, single-leafed plants. Then he saw that the plants had legs. And some were walking.
“It's true,” LaNague whispered in a voice full of wonder. “The first experiments were begun centuries ago, but now they've finally done it.”
“What? Walking plants?”
“No. Photosynthetic cattle.”
They were like no cattle Broohnin had ever seen. A vivid bice green all over, eight-legged, and eyeless, they were constantly bumping into and rubbing against each other. He could discern no nose, and the small mouth seemed suited only to sucking water from the countless rivulets that crisscrossed the valley floor. The body of each was a long tapered cylinder topped by a huge, green, rear-slanting rhomboidal vane averaging two meters on a side. All the vanes, all the countless thousands of them, were angled so their broad surfaces presented toward the solar mirrors for maximum exposure to the light… like an endless becalmed regatta of green-sailed ships.
“Welcome to Emerald City,” LaNague said in a low voice.
“Hmmmm?”
“Nothing.”
They watched in silence as the sentry's cutter completed its low, slow circuit of the valley, passing at the end over herds of smaller green calves penned off from the rest of the herd, held aside until they were large enough to hold their own with the adults. The cutter rose gently, leaving the valley hidden beneath its lid of bright mist.
“Didn't look to me like one of those skinny things could feed too many people,” Broohnin remarked as the wonder of what they had seen ebbed away.
“You'd be surprised. The official reports say that even the bones are edible. And there are more hidden valleys like that one down here.”
“But what's the advantage?”
“They don't graze. Do you realize what that means? They don't take up land that can be used for growing food for people; they don't eat grains that can be fed to people. All they need is water, sunlight, and an ambient temperature of 15 to 20 degrees.”
“But they're so thin!”
“They have to be if they're going to be photosynthetic. They need a high surface-area-to-mass ratio to feed themselves via their chlorophyll. And don't forget, there's virtually no fat on those things – what you see is what you eat. As each green herd reaches maturity, they're slaughtered, the derived protein is mixed with extenders and marketed as some sort of meat. New ones are cloned and started on their way.”
Broohnin nodded his understanding, but the puzzled expression remained on his face. “I still don't understand why it's being kept a secret, though. This is the kind of breakthrough I'd expect Earth to be beating its chest about all over Occupied Space.”
“It doesn't want the out-worlds to know yet. Earth realizes that those green cows down there could spell economic ruin for the out-worlds. And the longer they keep the out-worlds in the dark about them, the worse shape they'll all be in when grain imports are completely cut off.”
“But why –?”
“Because I don't think Earth has ever given up hope of getting the out-worlds under its wing again.” “You going to break the news?”
“No.”
They flew in silence through the polar darkness for a while, each man digesting what he had just seen.
“I imagine that once the word gets out,” LaNague said finally, “and it should leak within a few standard years, the Earthies will move the herds into the less hospitable desert areas where they can probably expect a faster growth rate. Of course, the water requirement will be higher because of increased evaporation. But that's when Earth's need for imported grain will really begin to drop… she'll be fast on her way to feeding all her billions on her own.”
The lights of the sentry station appeared ahead.
“Speaking of all these billions,” Broohnin said, “where are they? The spaceport wasn't crowded, and there's nothing below but snow. I thought you told me every available centimeter of living space on Earth was being used. Looks like there's a whole continent below with no one on it. What kind of residue you been giving me?”
“The coast of the South Polar continent is settled all around, and the Antarctic Peninsula is crowded with people. But from what I understand, inland settlements have been discouraged. It's possible to live down there,” he said, glancing at the featureless wastes racing by below the cutter. “The technology exists to make it habitable, but not without extensive melting of the ice layers.”
Broohnin shrugged. He managed to make it a hostile gesture. “So?”
“So, a significant ice melt means significant lowland flooding and there are millions upon millions of people inhabiting lowlands. A few thousand square kilometers of living space down here could result in the loss of millions elsewhere in the world. Not a good trade-off. Also, 80 per cent of Earth's fresh water is down there. So Antarctica remains untouched.”
The cutter slowed to a hover over the sentry station, then descended. As they prepared to debark, LaNague turned to Broohnin.
“You want to see billions of people, my friend? I'll show you more than you ever imagined. Our next stop is the Eastern Megalopolis of North America. By the time we're through there, you'll crave the solitude of the cabin you occupied on the trip in from the out-worlds.”
VIII
…human beings cease to be human when they congregate and a mob is a monster. If you think of a mob as a living thing and you want to get its I.Q., take the average intelligence of the people there and divide it by the number of people there. Which means that a mob of fifty has somewhat less intelligence than an earthworm.
Theodore Sturgeon
“You sure you know where you're going?”
“Exactly. Why?”
“It's not the type of neighborhood I'd expect to see the ‘third richest man in Sol System’ in.”
“You're right. This is a side trip.”
The press of people was beyond anything Broohnin had ever imagined. They were everywhere under the bleary eye of the noonday sun, lining the streets, crowding onto the pavement until only the hardiest ground-effect vehicles dared to push their way through. There were no fat people to be seen, and the streets themselves were immaculate, all a part of the ethics of starvation wherein everything must be recycled. The air was thick with the noise, the smell, the presence of packed humanity. And even behind the high, cheap, quickly poured apartment walls that canyoniz
ed the street, Broohnin was sure he could feel unseen millions.
“I don't like it here,” he told LaNague.
“I told you you wouldn't.”
“I don't mean that. There's something wrong here. I can feel it.”
“It's just the crowds. Ignore it.”
“Something is wrong!” he said, grabbing LaNague's arm and spinning him around.
LaNague looked at him carefully, searchingly. “What's bothering you?”
“I can't explain it,” Broohnin said, rubbing his damp palms in fearful frustration. There was sweat clinging to his armpits, his mouth felt dry, and the skin at the back of his neck was tight. “Something's going to happen here. These people are building toward something.”
LaNague gave him another long look, then nodded abruptly. “All right. I know better than to ignore the instincts of a former street urchin. We'll make this quick, then we'll get out of here.” He looked down at the locus indicator disk in his palm, and pointed to the right. “This way.”
They had returned to the tip of the South American continent and dropped off their flitter at the Cape Town Spaceport. From there a stratospheric rammer had shot them north to the Bosyorkington Spaceport, which occupied the far end of Long Island, formerly called the Hamptons. Three hundred kilometers west northwest from there by flitter brought them to the putrescent trickle that was still called the Delaware River, but only after carrying them over an endless, unbroken grid of clogged streets with apartments stretching skyward from the interstices. Everything looked so carefully planned, so well thought-out and laid out… why then had Broohnin felt as if he were descending into the first ring of Hell when their flitter lowered toward the roof of one of the municipal garages?
LaNague had purchased a locus indicator at the spaceport. They were big sellers to tourists and people trying to find their roots. It was a fad on Earth to locate the exact spot where a relative had lived or a famous man had been born or had died, or a historical event had occurred. One could either pay homage, or relive that moment of history with the aid of holograms or a sensory-cognitive button for those who were wired.