CHAPTER FIVE

LIFE ON NEW KASHUBIA

I stretched as best I could in the confinement of my liquid filled coffin to get the kinks out of my muscles, and started back in on my story to calibrate my tank.

"There were just too many people," I said.

"Please subvocalize, Mickolai."

Sorry. So if we could have had twenty or thirty years to build up slowly, the story would have been different, but as things were, we could never get ahead of the game. Everything had to be done on an emergency basis, just to stay alive. We never had a chance to make any really long term investments.

Until somebody invented some sort of matter transmuter, New Kashubia was stuck. Only, nobody had the slightest idea how to go about doing that.

Then somebody remembered that the Japanese had had a hundred people living on the planet for eighty years, and it was known that they hadn’t recycled anything. They had to be dumping their sewage someplace, but the computer records never mentioned their sewage. The sewer just went into the metal and nobody could figure out where that line went! Our crude attempts at echo tracing yielded nothing. One group even drilled after it for two and a half miles miles, and they still hadn’t come to the end of that sewer! The search for the fabulous hoard went on for years, but it was only found three days after we’d made our deal with New Yugoslavia, and we knew we’d soon have all the organics we needed coming in.

I guess I’ve drifted off the subject. Are you still getting what you need, Kasia?

"Yes, Mickolai. Just continue as you have been doing." Now her voice was not only warm and pleasant, it was downright sexy!

"Thank you, Mickolai. Continue."

So you can tell what think? Even when I’m not consciously subvocalizing?

"That’s part of the purpose of this exercise. Remember that I’m just a machine. It’s not as though another real person was invading your thoughts."

Okay. I’ll try to, only it’s strange.

So after four years of going further and further into debt, with no way in the near future to get out of the hole, the New Kashubian Parliament decided that there was nothing for it but to steal the Japanese slice of the pie.

That’s to say, to nationalize all of Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing Corporation’s property on the planet and keep the profits it had earned for ourselves. On paper, this would put the planet on a break-even basis, and maybe even permit paying off some of our considerable debts. The whole thing was put to a public vote, and yeah, I voted for it just like almost everybody else. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

So the vote passed and the total assets of the Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing Corporation on New Kashubia were seized. The stockholders of the corporation were paid in full for their property with New Kashubian bonds, but they were not happy with the arrangement. They had no faith in our ability to make good on those bonds, and maybe they were right.

But doing what they did was the best way they had to make the bonds we gave them bonds worthless, it made our lives shear hell, and I don’t think that any of us will ever forgive them.

Things had been bad. Now they got worse.

For one thing, our previously shaky credit was now totally gone. Interstellar bankers were not interested in doing new business with a planet that had reverted to the horrors of Socialism.

For another, we lost the engineering and managerial skills of the Japanese, who had promptly left for home when the seizure took place. Suddenly things didn’t work so good anymore, and I’m sure that a lot of it was sabotage.

And for a third, the Japanese launched a "Boycott New Kashubia" campaign, and the Japanese have an awful lot of clout.

Export sales fell off disastrously, and there was some talk about the advantages of euthanasia and cannibalism.