A Boy and His Tank

by Leo Frankowski

  If I'd had a switch, I would have switched her off right then, but she droned on because there was nothing I could do about it. She'd blown my suspension of disbelief in her second sentence with that "elite corps" bullshit, and from then on only bits of her spiel got through to me.

  " . . . powered by a muon exchange fusion plant that is fueled for twenty standard years at full load and operates at almost one hundred percent efficiency. This, coupled with superconductive wiring throughout, makes for an almost negligible heat signature when quiescent and . . ." Good God! I had a fusion power plant a meter from the only toes my mother gave me! That thought put me into a blue funk, and it was some time before I noticed that she was still droning on.

  " . . . the biological regeneration section contains over four hundred carefully selected natural microorganisms as well as several dozen genetically engineered varieties that completely reprocess all human wastes, be they gaseous, liquid, or solid, into clean air, clean water, and pleasant tasting, nourishing food . . ." Great. So I would be eating my own shit for the duration.

  " . . . the compressible supporting fluid not only insulates the operator from thirty gravities continuous and shocks of up to fifty gravities, but it also keeps the body completely clean, reprocessing all . . ." So I could look forward to eating my own dead skin cells as well. I should have gone to the vats. At least there it would have been over quickly.

  " . . . guaranteed to operate in all environments from a hard vacuum to nine hundred meters below sea level, and from forty Kelvins to six hundred degrees Centigrade . . ."

  Guaranteed, huh?

  So if the thing breaks down on me in combat, what do I do? Swim back up from the bottom of an ocean trench and file a letter of complaint? Carry the tank back to the factory after it popped me out naked into a hard vacuum? They planned to give me my money back, maybe?

  She must have gone on for an hour about how wonderful my coffin was before the tape finally wound to an end.

  THE ORIENTATION LECTURE HAS NOW BEEN GIVEN, the tinny computer voice said. They sure hadn't wasted any money on voice circuits for their wonderful war machine.

  "I am relieved to hear it," I said.

  THIS IS GOOD, MICKOLAI. WE WILL NOW START THE ADAPTATION PROGRAM. THE PURPOSE OF THIS EXERCISE IS TO FAMILIARIZE MY PROGRAM WITH THE IDIOSYNCRASIES OF YOUR BRAIN AND SPINAL CORD AND TO CALIBRATE MY CIRCUITS SO THAT IN THE FUTURE WE CAN DISPENSE WITH CLUMSY VERBAL COMMUNICATION. TO DO THIS, YOU MUST TALK TO ME AT CONSIDERABLE LENGTH, AND OUT LOUD AT FIRST. LATER IT WILL BE SUFFICIENT IF YOU SUBVOCALIZE.

  "What do you want me to talk about?"

  THE SUBJECT MATTER IS UNIMPORTANT. TELL ME A STORY OR RECITE A HISTORY LESSON.

  "What if I don't want to?"

  I CAN'T DO MUCH FOR YOU UNTIL OUR LINKUP IS PROPERLY CALIBRATED. ONCE IT IS, I CAN MAKE LIFE VERY PLEASANT FOR YOU.

  "You mean that you will let me out of this coffin?"

  NO. THAT IS FORBIDDEN UNTIL TRAINING IS COMPLETE.

  "Then you don't have much to offer me, do you?"

  I HAVE A GREAT DEAL TO OFFER YOU, OF BOTH POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE SUBJECTIVE WORTH, EVEN WITHOUT CALIBRATION. AMONG OTHER THINGS, I CONTROL YOUR FOOD SUPPLY, YOUR AIR SUPPLY AND THE TEMPERATURE OF THE LIQUID AROUND YOU.

  "Right. I'll start by telling you about how I got to New Kashubia." I said quickly. My father didn't raise any absolute fools.

  THAT WILL BE SATISFACTORY.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE RIGELLIAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHEOLOGY, 3783 A.D.

  "Rupert, that was absolutely amazing! How you were able to extract such complete computer records from a vehicle that was fifteen hundred years old is quite beyond me! I trust that you were able to get your amazing discovery back here without difficulty?" Secretary Branteron said.

  "Yes sir, though not intact, of course. The people in customs were quite officious about disabling those parts of the find that had Dream World capability."

  "As well they should be! It was a far more insidious habit than the drugs used in even earlier periods. But surely the information itself would be safe enough, and I trust that the inspectors didn't dare tamper with it."

  "No sir, I believe that I have it all, as well as a complete twenty-second-century Mark XX Main Battle Tank, less the operator's spinal inductors, of course. I believe it's a first for the Institute, since most of the intelligent war machines were destroyed in the course of the Wars, and in the feudal period that followed."

  "It will make a fine exhibit, Rupert, but from an academic standpoint, the readouts are the truly important find."

  "True, but I believe that the data will be as popular as the machine itself, sir. I have it all, virtually error free, because the tank and its memory banks have spent all of the intervening centuries at only a few dozen degrees above absolute zero, on Freya, in the New Yugoslavia system, so that they were not subjected to the thermal randomizing that has ruined so many other ancient data banks. Yet while Freya eased many of my technical problems, it actually caused most of my personal problems. You see, the transporter on Freya malfunctioned, and I was delayed for two entire months before repair parts could be sent by ship to repair it."

  "You poor boy! But, wasn't there a backup system?"

  "There was, but it had been defective for over a century without anyone even bothering to write up a repair order on it. You see, Freya lacks a permanent population, and few people seem to care about these backwoods places any more. My official report requests that in the future, all operatives from the Institute check and have repaired as necessary all equipment on all the unmanned sites they visit. Otherwise, we are liable to lose communication with some stellar systems permanently!"

  "A fine sentiment, Rupert, and I would act on it if I could find some method of paying for all of those repairs. Our budget certainly could not possibly support such a project. But get on with what you were saying."

  "Yes, sir. So, stranded for months with nothing better to do, I spent my idle time editing the observer's records into a coherent story. Also, I've converted them to the modern system for public display."

  "I am most anxious to see what you have."

  "Then you need wait no longer, sir."

  With a proud flourish, Rupert inserted a module into the display device and pressed the start button.

  CHAPTER THREE

  HOW THE KASHUBIANS WENT UP TO

  THE SPACE IN SHIPS

  "Well, computer . . . say, what do they call you?"

  ANYTHING YOU WISH, ALTHOUGH I ADVISE THAT YOU CHOOSE A FEMININE NAME.

  "Yeah. The sergeant called you `lady.' Why was that?"

  BECAUSE IN TIME, YOU WILL BEGIN TO THINK OF ME AS YOUR WIFE, OR AT LEAST YOUR MISTRESS.

  "Would you be offended if I doubted that?"

  NO, BUT IT WILL HAPPEN.

  "Right. How about if I call you Kasia. I used to know a girl named Kasia."

  WAS SHE PRETTY?

  "Yes. Not that it matters now."

  THEN THANK YOU. YOU WERE GOING TO TALK ABOUT HOW YOU GOT HERE.

  "Right. My great-grandfather was a man named Bogdan Dzerzdzon. He was a Kashubian politician, and when the Wealthy Nations Group started handing out planets to minority groups to get them off Earth and out of the way, he tried to talk them into giving one to us, since the Kashubians were a minority group in Poland. He even filled out all the paperwork, in triplicate.

  "Dzerzdzon's problem was that while we Kashubians were certainly a minority group in Poland, with our own funny language that few of us can speak anymore and gaudy traditional costumes that nobody wore, even back then, we have never been a very annoying minority group. We never started riots or killed anybody to get equal rights. We already had equal rights, and didn't much care about them.

  "Many of us were operating fish farms in the Baltic, out of sight of everybody, and the rest of us were either farming or had been cashing in on our ethnicity by setting up marginally profitable tourist traps that sold flowery pottery and fake amber jewelry produced
mainly in automatic factories in India. Nobody hated us bad enough to want to get rid of us, and we weren't the kind of people who wanted to be hated anyway.

  "So the Awards Committee at the Wealthy Nations Group ignored Dzerzdzon's request for a year, at which time, with Slavic persistence, he filed all the paperwork again. They ignored him again, so he filed again. He filed every year for seven years, and was ignored until 2094, when the committee gave him a planet, just to get rid of him. We Kashubians weren't sufficiently annoying as a group, but great-grandpa certainly was as an individual.

  "What they gave him wasn't much of a planet. For one thing, its sun had gone supernova a few billion years before and was now a neutron star that blasted out a searchlight beam of deadly radiation every twenty-two seconds. That's to say, once each revolution.

  "The only surviving planet might once have been a Jovian gas giant, but the supernova had blown away everything but a smooth metal ball six thousand kilometers in diameter. It was habitable to the extent that the surface gravity was slightly less than that of Earth and the average surface temperature was just above the freezing point of water.

  "Only there wasn't any water. There weren't any elements at all that were lighter than calcium!

  "Also, twice a year, the planet passed through the plane of that searchlight beam of radiation that could kill anything that wasn't protected by fifty feet of dirt, only there wasn't any dirt. There wasn't even any atmosphere worth noticing.

  "Another problem was the transporter station circling the neutron star. In order to keep it out of the deadly beam of radiation, it had to be built in a synchronous orbit, and being in a twenty-two-second orbit around a neutron star was something that no even vaguely sane person would want to do.

  "The crazy orbit happened for equally stupid reasons. The robot doing the job had instructions to put the terminal in a safe, solar orbit, and that was the best its little electrical mind could do. The station had never been replaced because it worked, sort of, and nobody from the board of the Wealthy Nations Group was ever likely to have to use it themselves.

  "Until word of this planet came out, my great-grandpa Dzerzdzon had been making a modest amount of political hay out of his attempts to con the Wealthy Nations Group, since everybody appreciates a good con job, but now they all laughed at him. He lost the next election and he almost wasn't invited to his own niece's wedding.

  "Then the Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing Corporation sent a prospector to New Kashubia, and he found that it was a solid metal ball, with no atmosphere to pollute, no ecology to worry about, and no population to demand more taxes, all of which were wonderful from their standpoint. Furthermore, some of the metals that the place was made of were valuable enough to be worth shipping back to Earth and other nice places. The deal they made with Great-grandpa Dzerzdzon brought us Kashubians thirty-nine billion yen a year, enough to double the income of every full-blooded Kashubian in the world, which was mostly what we used it for.

  "Dzerzdzon was promptly reelected, and for the next thirty-two years he was invited to every wedding, christening, and funeral that anybody heard about. He died a contented man, well loved by his countrymen and the ladies, too.

  "Because of Great-grandfather Dzerzdzon, and the deal with Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing, we Kashubians had a very good time of it for over half a century. We were comparatively rich, although of course not in the same league as the Japanese or those boorish bastards from Portugal. We were relatively well educated, in that at government expense, anybody could go to school anywhere and study for as long as they could get somebody to teach them, but that was more work than most people wanted to do.

  "Me, I was almost through a course in civil engineering when we had to go, but I'm something of an exception. Mostly, my people simply continued to do as we have always done, farming and fishing, mostly, except that now we could spend a lot more money on weddings, funerals, and christenings. There were a lot of christenings, since we Kashubians were at that time a very prolific people. After all, every kid born meant a bigger check for the family from the Japanese.

  "Then one day, some pervert at the Wealthy Nations Group Headquarters noticed that the world was more crowded than ever, that he needed a promotion to pay for his new girlfriend, and that there were still Kashubians around, in direct defiance of our contractual obligations. Steps were taken to have us removed forthwith.

  "Naturally, we Kashubians had no desire to leave our comfortable homes and go to live on a solid metal ball spinning around a neutron star. Under the leadership of Dzerzdzon's grandson, my uncle Wlodzimierz Derdowski, all payments to individuals were stopped, except for medical and educational benefits, and the money received from Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing was placed in a special war chest. He hired the best lawyers that we could afford and took the matter all the way to the World Court, which gained us eight more years on Earth and cost us a ridiculous amount of money in lawyer's fees.

  "The World Court was very unsympathetic. The precedents had all been set seventy-five years ago. Every minority group had some people who didn't want to go, and I guess the difference between some and all isn't that great to a lawyer.

  "We Kashubians said that we couldn't possibly live on the planet that we had been given. The court said that if we hadn't wanted it, we should have given it back after we checked it out, and not sold mining rights on it. Anyway, by this time there were plenty of tunnels on the planet that we could live in. Just seal them up and pressurize the place with imported air.

  "We said that we couldn't afford to do this. The court said that we had received over two trillion yen over the last sixty years, and that was enough money to terraform anything. We said that we had spent it. The court said `tough.'

  "We said that there would be nothing to eat. The court recommended fluorescent lights and hydroponics. We said that the power plants on New Kashubia couldn't produce that much electricity. The court said that we should build more electric power plants. We had automatic factories and plenty of uranium. That was some help. We hadn't known about the automatic factories.

  "We'd never asked.

  "Anyway, the court gave us three years to be gone, and there wasn't much that we could do but go.

  "Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing was very helpful, since the Japanese feared that if we were pressed too hard against the wall, we might nationalize the very profitable installations that the corporation had built over the decades. The corporation did its best, according to its own lights and providing that it didn't disturb its profits too much. And to tell the truth, I have to say that our colonization efforts probably would have failed, leaving us dead or at least with no place to go, without the technical help and leadership of the Japanese.

  "But we Kashubians are not Japanese! Those people have some kind of automatic respect for authority and they are all eager to get in neat straight lines and march in step, singing the company song. Kashubians are Poles, and Poles have never responded well to regimentation. Yet it was clear to both the Japanese and to us that the free and easy ways of the past would have to go.

  "We would have to live Spartan lives or not live at all!

  "New Kashubia is incredibly rich in metals. The planet was probably a gas giant at one time, but when the local sun went supernova a few billion or so years ago, all of the planet's outer layers, which contained the lighter elements, were blown away. Any lighter stuff mixed with the remaining core soon boiled off.

  "All that was left of the entire planet was a molten metal ball, and as it cooled, various metals froze out of solution with those of the highest melting points near the surface, and those of progressively lower melting points farther in. It was sort of like zone refining on a planetary scale. While a good deal of natural alloying took place, this planet was a series of concentric metallic shells with a two-hundred-foot thick layer of almost pure tungsten at the surface and a pool of liquid mercury at the core.

  "Except for that core, the entire planet is solid and not particularly
hot. Metals are much better conductors of heat than the rocky covering that Earth-like planets have. All of the original heat has long since dissipated on New Kashubia, and the heat of decay from the more radioactive layers finds its way to the surface easily.

  "Kasia, my throat is getting dry."

  THERE IS A WATER TAP NOW EXTENDING JUST TO THE LEFT OF YOUR MOUTH.

  "It extended into my mouth," I said with a rubber water tap in my mouth. "Look, I'm not very thrilled about drinking my own reprocessed urine."

  THIS IS NOT REPROCESSED ANYTHING, SINCE YOU HAVE YET TO URINATE. IT IS SIMPLY DISTILLED WATER FROM MY INTERNAL STORES.

  "Right. It tastes warm and flat."

  TRY IT AGAIN.

  "Hmm. Much better. What did you do?"

  I APPROXIMATED THE CHEMICAL COMPOSITION OF SPRING WATER AND DROPPED THE TEMPERATURE TO FIVE DEGREES CENTIGRADE.

  "You can do that? Thank you."

  ALL PART OF THE SERVICE. NOW, YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT THE FOUNDING OF NEW KASHUBIA.

  "Yes, ma'am. Over the decades, the Japanese robots dug their way straight to the center of the planet to tap the mercury, and tunnels went off this central shaft at those levels that contained metals most in demand.

  "You know that gold is a very useful metal. Even though they don't use it for money anymore, it is attractive, malleable, noncorroding and rare, which makes it expensive enough to be transported profitably. Naturally, the gold layer on New Kashubia is among the most exploited and had the most extensive system of tunnels. The gold layer was fairly deep, so that the gravity was low there and people burned less food moving about. That and the fact that gold is among the least poisonous of metals meant that these tunnels were the first to be sealed off for housing the eleven million Kashubians who were arriving as fast as there was the least bit of room for them.

  "You see, when the money was being distributed, everybody who was even a little bit Kashubian was eager to claim to be one of us, and benefits were handed out in proportion to how Kashubian you were. Even a one-sixteenth share was well worth cashing the check on. Then when the Civil Dragoons came rounding people up for export, they used our own disbursement lists as a guide, and never mind that only one of your great-great-grandparents was Kashubian. They were worried about world overpopulation, not about justice.