CHAPTER SIX

HOW THE KASHUBIANS GOT OUT OF TROUBLE

Then the Yugoslavians came to the rescue, arriving with tourist visas and the obligatory cameras and loud clothes, but not fooling anybody except the inspectors from the Wealthy Nations Group.

You see, the Serbian Yugoslavs wanted to go to war with the Croatian Yugoslavs, so the Croats were planning a sneak—excuse me—preemptive attack on the Serbs. It should be noted that both groups are ethnically almost identical. They spoke the same language, they had similar traditions, and they were racially identical. But the Croats were Roman Catholic Christians while Serbs were Greek Orthodox Christians, and that was enough to make them both want to go out and kill!

I tell you that it was almost as dumb as what went on in Ireland!

Do you realize that while they spoke the same language, the Croats printed their books using the Latin alphabet, while the Serbs used only the Greek alphabet? I assure you that they both worked very hard at not communicating!

But while they were both determined to go to war, they both had similar agricultural economies, and neither one of them had an industrial base sufficient to build weapons more advanced than a crossbow.

The Croats had heard that the Serbs had somehow talked the Wealthy Nations Group into selling them vast amounts of military aid. So the Croats came to us.

What really made it interesting, from our point of view at least, was that the Serbians showed up a week later with the same story. We worked hard at keeping the two sets of belligerent "tourists" apart. Profits could get a lot better that way.

My uncle Wlodzimierz lived in the bunk below me, and I got all the straight inside dope directly from him every night. In the first place, New Yugoslavia was a mere five light years from New Kashubia. We were practically next-door neighbors, as cosmic distances went, and only an hour and a half away by transporter, if such a thing as a transporter going between the two colonial planets could be built. It couldn’t, of course. At least not legally.

One of the lovely things that the Wealthy Nations Group did was to demand that all transporter shipments going from anyplace to anywhere else had to go through the Earth’s solar system, to keep an eye out for contraband, to keep Earth people employed, and to insure that the Wealthy Nations Group got its considerable cut.

But somehow, it seems that the Croatians had acquired the engineering capability to set up their own Hassan-Smith transporters. While they weren’t eager to say just how they had obtained these designs, well, a certain amount of profitable smuggling was going on around the human universe, and New Kashubia was invited to take part in it.

New Yugoslavia was an Earth-like world that already had a good agricultural system operating. They had plenty of surplus food which they would be happy to trade for machinery and other industrial products. They had a normal, Earth-type solar system, with one habitable planet and a dozen more that weren’t very useful except as a source of raw materials. On the moons of their outer planets, they had plenty of ice, ammonia, carbon dioxide, and all the other lovely things that New Kashubia lacked. They even had real dirt!

What the Yugoslavians didn’t have was a system of factories that were currently building stockpiles of modern weapons, whereas, they told us, we Kashubians did.

This revelation took us by surprise, but a check with our computers showed that we, or rather our automatic factories, were indeed making and stockpiling vast quantities of war materials on a contract basis for the Wealthy Nations Group, just in case those worthies ever wanted to make war on anybody. See, when everything is far underground, and tunnel systems are many decades old and go on for thousands of airless miles, it’s pretty easy to hide stuff.

Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing had never mentioned these factories to us, and was in fact still collecting from the Wealthy Nations Group for the equipment being built and stockpiled on our planet. The factories and stockpiles were quickly found, but further searches yielded nothing.

Our first thought was that weapons meant explosives, and explosives are all organic chemicals! A few million tons of organic chemicals of any kind could be reprocessed by our factories into enough food and air to put us on easy street, or at least above the bare subsistence level. Unfortunately, a check with the engineering specifications on the weapons shot this beautiful dream right down to the mercury zone.

We had atomic weapons up the tailpipe. We had lasers up the kazoo. We had rail guns and magnetic launchers and every kind of energy weapon known to man, but no explosives. There were plenty of small arms, but not the ammunition to go with them. There were land mines, artillery shells, and hand grenades, but they were all empty, all waiting to be filled someplace else with the glorious organic chemicals that we needed but didn’t have. Oh, there was a little plastic in some of the wiring, and a little silicon in the computers, but not really enough to write home about. We’d been screwed again.

It was easy to see why the Powers that Be in the Wealthy Nations Group were building armaments on New Kashubia. It was cheap. All that they had had to pay for was some one-time engineering and the short-term rent on the automatic factories that made the automatic factories that made the munitions, plus some minor supervisory fees to Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing. Then, if they ever needed weapons in a hurry, all they had to pay for was the raw materials and transportation fees, most of which would revert back to themselves, anyway. And for the Japanese, it was free money, since at that particular time they had had automatic factories and raw materials sitting around with nothing to do.

Our politicians decided that we owned the munitions factories, since we had already stolen everything that Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing used to own on the planet. If the corporation was still being paid by the Wealthy Nations Group, so much the better, since if we ever got friendly with the Japanese again, we could always subtract those Wealthy Nations Group payments from what we owed Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing. At least we could try, and we liked the Wealthy Nations Group even less than we liked the Japanese, anyway.

The ownership of the weapon stockpiles themselves was perhaps debatable, since the Wealthy Nations Group had paid for the engineering and the production time, but not the raw materials that the weapons were actually made of. Nonetheless, everybody was fairly certain that the Wealthy Nations Group would not like their future property to be sold by a third party to a fourth and a fifth party.

But after considerable debate, our politicians figured that perhaps we could borrow some of this war material, paying theoretical rent on the weapons to ourselves to offset the equally theoretical storage fees on their weapons that we would charge the Wealthy Nations Group, if the Wealthy Nations Group ever found out about what we were doing. At least we could argue that way for a while and maybe stave off an attack launched by the bastards from Earth.

A minority party in our parliament suggested that maybe an attack from Earth would not be all that bad a thing. For one, it would doubtlessly reduce our own population, which was all to the better. More importantly, there would be all the spent explosives and dead enemy bodies that would add to our stock of organic chemicals, and this addition just might be enough to insure our salvation! Fortunately, this suggestion was made by a very small minority party, with only one delegate, and she was safely laughed off the podium.

After weeks of debate, my uncle and his cronies decided that all of this meant that they could probably get away with permanently borrowing the millions of tanks, guns, and other armaments that were sitting around, mostly because nobody was guarding them at present.

All of the stuff was of the latest designs, with lasers, smart missiles (awaiting fuel and explosives), and rail guns. And there was plenty of tunneling, bridging, and drilling equipment, besides. Add to this materiel abundance New Kashubia’s overpopulation, and you can guess what the politicians had in mind.

The offer that they (including my own uncle!) made to the Yugoslavians was that New Kashubia should build and run both ends of the new Hassan-Smith line between the two planets, ostensibly so that the other Yugoslavian belligerents could not consider it an enemy military target, but really so that we could get in on the smuggling that was going on to the other colony planets. This plan also let us get our hands on the engineering for the Hassan-Smith transporters, and that was considered to be very important. There would be other trading partners in the future, and who knew where else we might be able to sell transporters?

Then, rather than just selling the Yugoslavs war materiel at fabulous market prices, and possibly getting the Wealthy Nations Group mad at New Yugoslavia, we offered to rent the equipment and Kashubian operators to go with it. This way, nobody would be buying or selling equipment that was maybe legally the property of the Wealthy Nations Group. Nobody wanted to risk a war with them! Not just yet, anyway.

The Yugoslavs loved the idea, because while they wanted to kill the opposing bastards, cooler heads pointed out that it was always better to go on living oneself. They ordered twenty divisions of armored troops each, to be paid for mostly in agricultural products, and New Kashubia was in the mercenary business.

In addition to paying a hefty mercenary rental fee, the Croatians said that New Kashubia could have all the ice, ammonia, carbon dioxide, and whatever else we wanted and could carry away from the outer planets and moons of the New Yugoslavia system, since the Serbs were not likely to find out about it, or to locate our transporters, even if they did.

Then we got the same deal from the Serbs, just to be on the safe side.

It looked like good deal for all concerned, except maybe for those poor bastards who would have to be fighting somebody else’s war. But that wasn’t my problem. I was in engineering!

I was coopted into the engineering group that worked on setting up the transporters between us and the Yugoslavians.

It proved to be impossible for us to manufacture the new Yugoslavian Transporter terminal and smuggle it through Earth to New Yugoslavia. All of the existing "legal" terminals were carefully guarded by Terran security, and those boys are always entirely too efficient. Oh, you could get coded messages by them easily enough in the mail, but heavy machinery? No way!

The Yugoslavians themselves did not have the industrial capacity to do the job, but they did have the connections on the smuggling circuit to get the job done. See, the terminal they had on the smuggling circuit was built on the cheap, and wasn’t tunable for New Kashubia. We wanted control over what was going in and out, and we told the Yugoslavians that compared to rebuilding what they had, it was cheaper to build a whole new one, and they bought it.

It turned out that it was possible to build a

Hassan-Smith device under the surface of New Kashubia that could transmit directly to one below the surface on New Yugoslavia, without the need for the usual pair of orbiting solar power stations. All you had to have was enough power, and we had uranium by the megaton. Uranium power plants were easier for us to build than solar plants, since we lacked spaceships, or thought we did, and they were nice from the standpoint of keeping the transporters hidden from the Wealthy Nations Group.

Another advantage was that nobody used fission plants anymore, and we were the only people who had reactor grade uranium available. If the transmitters ever fell into other hands, well, the thieves would have to deal with us to keep the stations working.

Soul City, the planet given to the American Black People, got the contracts for the transporter receivers built for New Yugoslavia since they were in the contraband net and had the necessary industrial facilities. Financing was arranged through the Yugoslavians, of course. New Kashubia still didn’t have any credit.

I spoke English, so I had a hand in the engineering arrangements that were made with the Soul City designers for the construction of both of the New Yugoslavia Transporter terminals. One was to be built underground on the planet itself at a secret location that everybody soon knew about, and through it we would deliver our armies and pick up our agricultural booty. It was to be powered by its own fission plant, which would be built and fueled by New Kashubia. It takes a lot of power to transmit, but very little to receive, so we could send the power plant through after the receiver was working. The other transporter was the same as the first, but installed on Freya, one of the moons of Woden, the only gas giant in the system. This was to give us a limitless supply of carbon dioxide, nitrogen (in the form of ammonia), water and other lovely things.

Another part of the deal was that the New Yugoslavians would be using the transporter on Freya, too. Their Planetary Ecological Board passed a ruling that if they were going to be exporting large quantities of foodstuffs, the exporter would be required to replace the elements shipped—oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and etc.—with raw materials from Freya to keep the biosphere of New Yugoslavia in balance.

Actually, it would take huge shipments for thousands of years for any such loses to be noticeable, and I think my uncle talked them into the ruling just to get them to pay for half of the Freyan transporter. He always believed in doing well by doing good.

Then there was the building of our end of the New Kashubian–New Yugoslavian Transporter Link, but that involved little more than feeding the engineering data into the input device of an automatic factory and picking the options we wanted off a menu.

All in all, it only took us a few months to get the new transporters built.

While I was thusly occupied, impressing my colleagues and getting promoted in the engineering section, Uncle Wlodzimierz was deep into the politics of the situation.

First there was the worry about training the mercenaries. We Kashubians hadn’t gone to war for a hundred and fifty years, and even back then we had not gone voluntarily. Except for what we had read in cheap paperback novels, nobody knew anything about being a soldier. Were we going to have to hire mercenaries from someplace else to train our own mercenaries so that we could go to New Yugoslavia to get killed? Where could we get mercenaries in this day and age? What could we pay these foreigners with? Gold? Would they take that? And how could we feed them when we couldn’t even feed our own people?

Then somebody pointed out that nobody on the other side of the fight would know anything about soldiering either, because they would mostly be just like us, so it wouldn’t matter if our own troops in New Croatia were ignorant. We were hiring ourselves out to another bunch of amateurs! We didn’t really hate the opposition, so the less efficient we were at killing, the better!

What was important was that we should put on a good, big show, with lots of parades and demonstrations blowing up a lot of useless desert and so on. But to be seriously out trying to kill somebody we didn’t even know? Are you crazy?

After three weeks of heated debate on the subject of military training, my uncle suggested that we should inspect the weapons stockpile to see just what our boys would be training to use.

The council immediately voted him to be made a committee of one to go do just that thing, and he went. When he inspected the weapons that we intended to borrow, he found that all of our fears were for nought. Every major piece of military hardware was equipped with computers that were either sentient or so close to it that you couldn’t tell the difference. He knew it was true because they told him so themselves! And like any other personal computers worth having, they were programed to train their own operators, so that the problem was either solved or hadn’t existed in the first place. He reported back, and the argument on the floor immediately changed subject.

The next problem was getting a sufficient number of volunteers for the New Kashubian Expeditionary Forces. A few romantic souls yearned for the glory of flashing sabers and cavalry charges, and if they couldn’t get that, well, an armored assault would be okay, too.

Some more sensible folks joined up because they were sick of living on rotten food, and too little of it, and in single sex barracks, even if they were made of gold. The army looked like a better deal since nothing could possibly be worse than their present situation.

Then too, the deal involved transportation to New Yugoslavia, and by all reports, New Yugoslavia was a pretty nice place. And who knows? Once you got there, maybe the Yugos would let you emigrate permanently. They already had thirty other ethnic groups. What were a few Kashubians, more or less?

But while volunteers flocked in by the hundreds and hundreds, our existing contracts with the Croatians alone called for mercenaries by the thousands and thousands.

The lack of volunteers was made more serious since the Macedonian Yugoslavians were worried about the Montenegrin Yugoslavians, and had ordered four divisions just to be on the safe side. And so naturally the Montenegrins promptly ordered five divisions just in case, and paid cash in advance to get their divisions first.

This set a trend that our warmongering Kashubian salesmen couldn’t refuse, and before long the various Yugoslavian factions were clamoring with money in their hands to outbid one another with such vigor that they forgot to get mad at us for renting ourselves out to fight on most of the sides of what was shaping up to be a twelve-sided war.

The Slovenes ordered a few divisions in case the war spilled over onto them, and the few Muslims left in New Bosnia did the same.

The real minorities in New Yugoslavia, namely the Slovaks, the Bulgarians, the Ruthenians, the Czechs, the Romanians, the Vlachs, the Italians, and the Gypsies, all of whom were living separately on fairly small islands, clubbed together to order two divisions of seagoing troops to stand guard just in case while everybody else was fighting.

And these groups did not include the enclaves of Albanians, Hungarians, Turks, and Germans who had simply, and perhaps rationally, decided to sit this one out.

Studying the political situation, you could almost develop a certain sympathy for the powers that be at the Wealthy Nations Group. Almost. The Yugoslavians were a complicated assembly of many mutually antagonistic peoples, and all living in one country! They were a time bomb and one would prefer them to explode as far away as possible!

Be that as it may, the money was coming in so fast that the new New Yugoslavian transporter terminals were paid for in cash on the day that Soul City delivered them. New Kashubia was on its way to getting a new credit rating, at least among the smuggling set.

Oh, we couldn’t spend the money through regular channels to improve things on the planet that way. It might alert the inspectors of the Wealthy Nations Group to the smuggling going on. In fact, we were careful that shipments and orders to and from Earth went on through regular channels exactly as before, to keep from tipping our hand. But the food coming in from New Yugoslavia sure helped a lot. For the first time in years, we were averaging over twelve hundred calories a day, each. Almost half what the Chinese got!

By the time the transporters were ready, we had orders for fifty-five divisions of ten thousand men each, and everybody was getting antsy about shipping them out. We needed more than a half a million volunteers, and we had less than ten thousand, which fact it would not be wise to let the Yugoslavians know about, since they had mostly paid in advance.

The New Kashubian legal system came to the aid of the recruiting service. What with all the rules that had to be enforced to make bare survival possible on New Kashubia, there was a growing class of perpetual criminals that something had to be done with. It did no good to put them in jail, since ordinary life on New Kashubia was worse than any jail that anybody could think of. Physical punishment was considered barbarous, and what else was there? Shooting them all? For what were on the whole really trivial misdemeanors? Better to send them off to the army. It was the traditional thing to do. Maybe the military would make men out of boys and the girls too.

My own uncle voted for it, and he even had me believing it was a good idea, at the time anyway.