“How’s Eva?” de Smet asked.
“Herself healthy.” Coffin was silent for a heartbeat. “As we feared, we can’t take the kid home.”
De Smet winced. “That’s hard.” His fingers stole forth to touch his companion’s arm. “I’m awfully damn sorry.”
Coffin grew busy charging his pipe. “We’ve seen it happen to neighbors of ours. Eva feels bad, but she’s tough. We’ll get us another exogene baby who can live with us.” They had long since added to their brood the one that law required every family to adopt. “I reminded her of how she, and I for that matter, how we’re as fond of Betty as of those we made ourselves. Which is true.”
“Naturally. Uh, have you made any arrangements for … yours?”
“Not yet. We couldn’t, before we got the verdict.” Coffin hesitated. “Don’t be afraid to say no, I realize this is none of my business and we do have ample opportunities. But what might you and Jane think about taking our Charlie in?”
“Huh? Why, mmm—”
“You haven’t taken your exogene yet. Well, we’ll be adopting a second. The rules allow a family to do that on another’s behalf, you know. Eva and I would be mighty glad to have you raise Charlie. Then you’d be free to order an exogene later on, or not, whichever you chose.”
“This is rather sudden, Dan” De Smet sat awhile in thought. “I’ll have to discuss it with Jane, of course. Frankly, though, to me it looks like a very attractive proposition. Instead of getting some doubtless nice kid, but one whose parentage is a total blank, we’d get one that we’re certain comes of high-grade stock.” After a moment: “And, hmm, it’d create a tie between two influential houses, in highlands and lowlands.”
Coffin chuckled. “In effect,” he said, “we’d swap babies. You’d have to adopt a tank-orphan—except that now Eva must take a second. So you gain freedom of choice, we gain a proper home for Charlie, both families gain, as you say, a kind of alliance … and, well, the babies gain, too. Mind you, this is my own notion. I’ll have to talk it over with Eva also. I’m sure she’ll agree if Jane does.”
He kindled his pipe. De Smet, though a non-smoker, didn’t object. Among numerous achievements on his plantation, Coffin had, with the help of a consulting agronomist, developed tobacco that could grow in Rustumite soil without becoming utterly vile.
He puffed for a bit before he added, “It’s what you’ve kept insisting, Tom, as we argued. A fair exchange is no robbery.”
De Smet had first quoted that proverb of economists to Coffin on the first occasion that the two men seriously discussed business. This was several lunations after they began to be well acquainted. They amused themselves by calculating precisely how many, since only a short while before, the lunation—the time it took for both moons to return to the same position in the sky—had been defined officially, if not quite truthfully, as five Rustumite days.
Coffin had returned from one of his frequent expeditions into the highland wilds, returned to Anchor and Eva. The de Smets invited him to dinner. Later the men sat far into the night, talking.
That meant less on Rustum than it did on Earth. Here, folk were regularly active through part of each long darkness. Nevertheless, most of the town was abed when Coffin asked: “Why won’t you? I tell you, and I’d expect you and your experts to check me out beforehand, I tell you, it’ll pay. The Smithy will turn a profit.”
De Smet was slow to respond. They sat side by side in companionable wise, whisky and soda to hand, pipe in the fist of the guest, out on a balcony. The air was warm; somewhere a fiddlebug stridulated, and rivers boomed and clucked; the windows of Anchor were lightless, and it had no street lamps, but it glowed coppery-silver beneath a sky full of stars, in which the moons were aloft, gibbous Raksh and tiny hurtling Shorab.
“I hate to sound like a Scrooge,” de Smet said at length. “You leave me no choice, though. The profit’s too small.”
“Really? The resources we’ve got—”
De Smet drew breath. “Let me make a speech at you, Dan. I sympathize with you lowlanders, especially your own Moondance community, which is the largest. You want industries, too, besides agriculture and timber and suchlike nature-dependent enterprises. Currently, the machines that make machines are all here, because that’s where colonization started and High America is where the great majority of people still live. You want me to bring down a lot of expensive apparatus and technical personnel, and build you facilities that’ll belong to you, not me.”
“True. True. Except we’re not asking for any handouts. We have money from the sale of what we produce—”
De Smet raised a palm. “Please. Let me continue. I’m going to get a little abstract, if you don’t mind.
“Money is nothing but a symbol. It gives the owner a certain call on the labor and property of others. One can play many different games with money, until at last one loses sight of what the stuff is and ends by wrecking its value. Luckily, that’s no danger on Rustum, yet. First, we’re too few to maintain elaborate fiscal schemes. Second, we have a free-market economy with a strictly gold-standard currency.
“Why do we have that? First, because the founders of the colony wanted to be free, free as individuals; and the right to buy, sell, or trade as one chooses is an important part of this. Second, they’d read their history. They knew what funny money leads to, always, as inevitably as fire will burn if you stick your bare hand in it. Therefore the Covenant ties the currency to gold, whose supply grows too slowly to outrun the growth of real wealth. This causes most transactions to be in cash. One can borrow, of course, if one can find a willing lender; but the lender had better have that claim-on-wealth in his personal pocket.
“As a result, now that the hard early days are behind us, now that production is expanding faster than the money supply, the price of nearly everything is falling.”
“I know that,” Coffin protested. “What I got for my wheat last year barely paid the cost of raising it.”
De Smet nodded. “That was bound to happen. Fertile soil, new varieties of grain suited to local conditions—how easily we get surpluses that drive prices down! Meanwhile machinery and human labor are in shorter supply, with more call on them. Hence their price gets bid up; or, to be exact, it doesn’t fall in proportion to the price of natural products.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“You aren’t starving, are you? One advantage of tight money is that it discourages speculation, especially by an individual. He can’t have a mortgage foreclosed on his land because he was never able to get a mortgage on it in the first place, valuable though it is.” In haste: “I don’t mean to insult your intelligence, Dan. This is the same elementary economics you and I both learned in school. I’m simply recapitulating. I want to spell out that I have better reasons than greed for saying no to you.”
“Well, but look, Tom, I’m better off than most of my friends down there, and I often feel the pinch.”
“What you mean is, you’d like to do certain things, and can’t do them without High American help. You might wish for an up-to-date flour mill, for instance, instead of a waterwheel or windmill—or instead of selling your wheat here and buying back part of it, as bread, at a considerable markup. Yes, surely. The fact is, however, I regret it very much, but the fact is you will simply have to do without until there’s enough machinery available to bring its rental or purchase price down. Meanwhile, you can be self-sufficient. And nobody is pointing a gun at your head forcing you to overproduce.”
De Smet filled his lungs afresh before he continued: “You see, if we gave you a subsidy, the cost of that would have to be met either through taxation or inflation. No matter which way, it’d amount to taking earnings from the highlander for the benefit of the lowlander, who gives nothing in return. Price controls would have the same effect. In fact, any kind of official intervention would distort the economy. Instead of meeting our difficulties head-on and solving them once and for all, we’d hide them behind a screen of paper, wher
e they’d grow worse and breed new troubles to boot.
“Machinery and labor are costly because there’s a demand for them—they’re wanted, in both senses of the word—and at the same time, for the nonce, they remain scarce. In a free market, the price of a commodity is nothing more nor less than an index of how much people are prepared to exchange for it.”
“You High Americans, though”—Coffin chopped the air with his hand—“you’ve got more than your share of machines. Even per capita you do. Which means, yours is the way the money flows, no matter what we lowlanders do. It isn’t right!”
De Smet took a sip of whisky before he shook his head and sighed, “Dan, Dan, you’re a frontiersman. You know better than I, from experience, no two people ever have identical luck.
“It isn’t as if your folk were in dire want. If they were, I’d be the first to bring them relief. The free market doesn’t forbid helping your fellow man. It only makes such acts voluntary—and so in the long run, I believe, encourages altruism, though I admit that’s just my opinion.
“Your folk aren’t suffering, except in their own minds. The poorest of them eats well, dresses decently, his adequate shelter. You yourself, to judge from the pictures you’ve shown me, you live in a bigger and better house than mine, live like a medieval baron. All you lowlanders enjoy many things we don’t, such as unlimited room to move around. And … whoever can’t stand it is welcome here. We have this chronic labor shortage; he can earn excellent wages.”
“We want to be our own men,” Coffin growled, albeit not hostilely.
“I admire you for that,” de Smet said in a mild tone. “Still, recall your origins. Individuals who could live in the low country went there first to study it, paid by High America because the knowledge they could get was essential. They fell in love with the land and settled. And this was right. Mankind ought to take over the whole planet.
“That’ll be slow, however. Meanwhile, most of us are confined to the uplands. We have the same right as you to improve our standards of living, don’t we? Since you lowlanders can come join us but would rather not, why should we sacrifice to support you in your own free choice—a much freer choice than we have?
“That’s where the social utility of the supply-demand law shows itself, Dan. High America is also still young, has plenty left to do. Plenty that must be done, because we’ll be crowded long before the typical lowlander can see his neighbor’s chimney smoke. The quicker return—the effectively higher profit—to be made here, simply reflects that urgency, as well as the fact that here, today, are far more persons needing to be served.
“Please don’t take this wrong; but honestly, it looks to me as if your community is the one asking for more than is fair, not ours.”
“I told you, we don’t want a handout,” Coffin answered with somewhat strained patience. “I can prove to you that the return on any investment you make among us will be good. Okay, granted, maybe not as good as equal investment made on High America. Still, you’ll gain, and gain well.”
“We already have considerable investments in the lowlands,” de Smet pointed out.
Coffin nodded violently. “Yes! Mines, power stations, transport lines that you own, you High Americans. You employ lowlanders to work in them, but they’re your property, and the profits go to you.”
He leaned over. His pipestem jabbed, stopping barely short of the other man’s chest. “Now let me explain some home truths,” he said. “Believe it or not, I understand your economics. I know that I’m asking, on behalf of my community, I’m asking you to use part of the stuff and staff you command, part of it to come build us—oh, that flour mill, or a factory producing machine tools, or whatever—come build that for us, instead of building something like it for High America.
“Well, I tell you, my friend, economics is not all there is to life. Rightly or wrongly, the lowlanders are starting to feel slighted. After a while they’ll come to feel neglected, and then go on to feeling exploited. I’m not saying that makes sense, but I am saying it’s true.”
“I know,” de Smet replied as if half-apologetic. “I’ve been down there myself, inside an air helmet, remember. You’re not the first lowlander I’ve talked to at length. Yes, you’re already beginning to think of yourselves as a separate breed, rough, tough, bluff frontiersmen opposed to us dandified, calculating uplanders. That notion hasn’t developed far yet—”
“It will. Unless you come help us. If you do, maybe this will stay a unified planet. Or don’t you care about your grandchildren?” Coffin waited before he added, gravely, “This is not a threat. But do bear in mind, Tom, several generations from tonight the highlanders will be an enclave. The population will nearly all be down yonder. And so will the power. Man, win their good will before it’s too late.”
“I’ve thought about that. I genuinely have. I’m aware that this isn’t a problem with any neat either-or solution. If some arrangement could be made, an economically sensible arrangement, so it’d endure But why should the lowlands be industrialized? In time, and not such a terribly longtime, the prices of food and timber will soar, as High America fills up. Wouldn’t it be wiser to wait for that day? Meanwhile you’d keep your attractive surroundings.”
“They’re not that attractive, when we have to overwork our kids for lack of equipment we know could be built. Anyway, nobody wants to found an industrial slum. Of course not. We just want a few specific items. We’ve ample space to locate them properly, ample resources to treat the wastes so they don’t poison the land.”
“We haven’t. At least, we don’t have that kind of chance much longer, at the rate we’re going.” De Smet locked eyes with his guest and said in a voice tautened by intensity: “That’s my main reason for wanting to get rich fast. I mean to buy up as much virgin highland as possible and make a preserve of it.”
Coffin smiled in fellow feeling. De Smet’s out-doorsmanship was what had originally brought them together. It is hard not to like a man with whom you have been hiking, boating, camping for days on end.
“Maybe we can work something out,” de Smet finished. “However, it has got to involve a quid pro quo, or it’s no good. As the saying goes, a fair exchange is no robbery.”
Lake Royal, where they planned to fish, gleamed remotely on the right. Still the car whined ahead. A ways further came a break in the forest, an ugly scar where the ground had been ripped open across several kilometers. No life save a few weeds had returned to heal it.
Coffin gestured with his pipestem. “How old is that thing, anyway?”
De Smet peered out the canopy. “Oh, the strip mine?” He grimaced. “Seventy, eighty years, I guess. From the early days.”
“Industrialization,” Coffin grunted.
De Smet stared at him. “What’re you talking about? Necessity. They had to have fuel. Their nuclear generator was broken down, couldn’t be fixed soon, and winter was coming on. Here was a surface seam of coal which they could easily quarry and airlift out.”
“Nevertheless, industry, huh? Earlier this morning, I caught a knock-you-over stink from the refinery.”
“That’ll have to be corrected. I’m leaning on the owners. So are others. Mainly, Dan, you know as well as I do, we’ve had to take temporary measures, but we’re almost back to a clean hydrogen-fueled technology.”
“Then why do you worry about industrialization? Why do you want to set aside parts of High America?”
De Smet seemed bewildered. “Isn’t it obvious? Because … I, highlanders who feel like me, we can never really belong in your unspoiled lowland nature. Shouldn’t we too have a few places to be, well, alone with our souls?” He uttered a nervous laugh. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to get pompous.”
“No matter.” Coffin blew a smoke ring. “As population grows, won’t there be more and more pressure to turn this whole plateau into a big loose city? Do you really think your wilderness areas won’t be bought out, or simply seized? Unless ample goods are coming from the lowlands. Then High American
s will be able to afford letting plenty of land lie fallow. … Well, that can’t happen without trade, which can’t happen unless the lowlanders have something—not only raw materials but finished products—to trade with.
“Don’t you think, even today, even at the cost of some profit, it makes better sense to spread the industry more thin?”
De Smet leaned back and regarded Coffin for a while before he said, “You promised me, no further arguments on our holiday.”
“Nor’ve I broken my promise, Tom. I just reminded you about what I’d said before, to help you appreciate the interesting thing I also promised to show you.”
The autopilot beeped. Coffin switched it off, took the controls, checked landmarks, and slanted the car downward. Below was a rough and lovely upthrust of hills. A lake gleamed among them like a star, and overhead circled uncountably many waterfowl. Sunlight made rainbow iridescences on their wings.
“You recall, several close friends and I have been around here quite a bit,” Coffin said. “We gave out that we were investigating botanical matters, to try to get a line on a problem we’re having in our home ecology. It wasn’t altogether false—we did even get the information we wanted—and nobody paid much attention anyhow.”
De Smet waited, braced.
“In addition,” Coffin said, “we prospected.”
Air whistled around the hull. Ground leaped dizzyingly upward.
“You see,” Coffin went on, “if we lowlanders don’t have the wherewithal to develop our country as we’d like, and if nobody’ll help us get it, why, we’d better go help ourselves. If we could stake out a claim in your country, then transportation to Anchor would be fast and cheap, giving us a competitive break. Or we might sell out to a highland combine, or maybe take a royalty. In any case, we’d have the money we need to bid for the equipment and personnel we need.”
“Nobody’s prospected these parts to speak of,” de Smet said slowly.
Orbit Unlimited Page 24
