"Bitter?" I said out loud, "You're damn right I'm bitter! Look, I was a student in school, minding my own business and getting decent grades. Then just because my great-grandfather pulled an innocent little con job, I got yanked out of class a week before graduation! I was robbed of all of my property, even my underwear! I got stuffed into a tin can half full of floating vomit and shit and piss and screaming people for almost a whole day! I was stripped naked and forced to live in a barracks with a hundred other smelly men! I've spent almost three years breathing foul air and eating half rations that wouldn't satisfy a rabbit, and you ask me if I'm bitter? I'm forced to go two years without even seeing a female human being, and you ask me if I'm bitter? And when I finally do manage to meet a nice girl, we're limited to what you can do through a goddamn hole in the wall! And then, despite all I've done for this colony, they murder our child and sentence the two of us to death or life sealed up in a goddamn tank, and you ask if I'm bitter?

Hell yes I'm bitter! I'm bloody fucking goddamn well pissed off is what I am!"

"Yes, Mickolai. You have a very real grievance. I would like you to tell me about it. But would you subvocalize, please? I need to complete my calibration," she said in a sweet and all too reasonable voice.

Okay, I thought to her, we'll go at it again. You see, the Japanese had never kept more than a hundred people on New Kashubia, there being limits to what even a Japanese engineer will put up with. With that low a population and plenty of ships returning empty, anyway, they had simply imported all of the food, air, and other things they needed for survival. No attempt had been made to recycle anything locally.

Things had to be done much differently with eleven million largely untrained Kashubians to somehow support.

There were plenty of automatic factories around, although they were mostly set up to build heavy industrial goods and metal components for the various luxury products in demand. While the automatic factories couldn't directly produce many of the things that were desperately needed, they could produce other factories that could make useful stuff, providing that the engineering and the raw materials were available.

There weren't many of us with a technical background, but we could get the engineering done. Raw materials were the problem. We had almost no light elements at all. I helped design a factory that made growing lights for the food production tunnels, but sand had to be imported from Earth to make the glass.

Copper for wires was available by the megaton, but the plastic to insulate the wires had to be imported.

Plumbing was cheap, but the sewage in the pipe was vastly expensive and had to be reprocessed quickly. This forced us to use very small drain pipes that were constantly getting plugged.

Some things could be improvised using local materials. We're pulverizing gold and palladium and using it as soil to support the roots of food plants. It's a lot cheaper than importing dirt. At least we don't have to build reflectors for the lights. The drilled tunnels are already bright and shiny.

In the early days, clothing wore out and, being organic, could not be replaced except at huge cost. Long before I got here, a program was instituted to make nudity popular, and the tunnels were warmed up to compensate. There was plenty of waste heat available from the power reactors that were being built as fast as possible.

Nudity caused fewer changes than would have been expected since even before it was instituted, the sexes had been absolutely segregated in both living quarters and in work situations. Nothing else had proved effective fortotally stopping the birth rate, and the one thing that New Kashubia did not need was more people.

That's what got me into trouble. At first, I was put to work with a crew stringing communication cables, which sure beat what they had most other people doing. The hydroponic vats could have been tended by machines, but not as efficiently as humans could do it. It was vitally important that every square inch of soil and light was used to support green plants. We were producing less than we absolutely needed to survive, and there was no slack at all. Most of our people spent twelve hours a day working as no Chinese coolie ever did for long. We couldn't keep it up forever. We were all losing weight.

For entertainment, we had television and not much else. Tapes and discs could be sent from Earth cheaply enough, and we had a factory that built the sets. Home-grown entertainment mostly didn't happen. After working twelve or fourteen hours a day, nobody much felt like playing a violin.

Most of us got to going to church a lot more than we had on Earth. When times are rough, people turn to God, I guess. Anyway, it started meaning a lot more to me than it had before.

But like I said, I was put to stringing wires, when I wasn't pulled off the job to do engineering work.

Communications and controls had to be installed throughout the living sections, since heat and ventilation had to be right or people died. The women's sections had their own crews, of course, but the systems had to tie together, and that's when I met Katarzyna Garczegoz, whom everybody called Kasia. Not you. The real Kasia.

"Perhaps you should choose another name for me, Mickolai," the tank said.

Stop interrupting. So there was this eight-inch hole, and I was feeding wires through for her to terminate.

I had to tell her which wires were what, and naturally we got to talking, even if it was against the law. She must have been looking forward to the job, because she already had a way worked out where we could talk later, using some of the spare wires as phone lines, and that's how I got to spending my spare time, even though that was against the law, too. After years of only male companionship, eventalking to a woman on the phone was worth the risk, something to spend the whole day looking forward to.

What else can I say? I'd found the one woman that I wanted in all the world, and I don't even fantasize about anybody else. We fell in love with each other and we promised to marry as soon as we possibly could.

So my personal life improved a bit, but things on the whole were getting worse.

Despite our best efforts, some air and water were still being lost, around seals or even right through the metal walls. Everything is at least a little bit porous. Our losses weren't really all that much, but we weren't able to import much to replace them, either.

Despite the most severe privations, and despite the maximum possible shipments of metals and manufactured goods back to Earth, the balance of payments was still negative, and interest rates were at an all-time high for the century. Projections showed that it would be at least two hundred years before we colonists could have a standard of living comparable to that which we had been forced to leave behind on Earth.

Despite our fabulous wealth in metals and despite the vastly expanded system of automated factories, for a long time, life would be hungry, dirty, and cramped.

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 I 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 worthless bonds, it made our lives sheer 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.

CHAPTER SIX.

HOW THE KASHUBIANS GOT OUT OF TROUBLE.

Then the Yugoslavians came to the rescue, arriving with tourist visas, 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-preemptiveattack 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 couldborrow 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 verysmall 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 withthem ! 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 a 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 withus 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 losses 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.