The War With Earth

by Leo Frankowski

  "What do you think, love, shall we become deer hunters?"

  "You want to go out and kill Bambi?"

  "Hey, somebody has to do it. A balanced ecology and all that?"

  "Go it alone."

  "I just might. But how about some fishing? Would that get around your ooie-gooie feelings?"

  "You go fishing. I want to go for a swim in the lagoon."

  "Okay. You change into a swimsuit, and I'll select a suitable rod and reel."

  "Who needs to change if there's nobody around but my husband?"

  "In that event, this one here will do just nicely! Let's go!" I said, grabbing the one on the end. It was very long, and had the biggest reel I'd ever seen, but I didn't care just then.

  I picked up a tackle box with an assortment of hooks and plugs, and followed her to the lagoon. One of the decorated drones, walking in a very masculine fashion, followed us at a discreet distance. Eva must have downloaded a new subroutine.

  Kasia ran down the sand, stripping as she went, and dove into the water naked. I watched her swim out a few hundred meters, and then told Eva to keep an eye on her. Eschewing the floating dock that was necessitated by the high tides, I went about getting my fishing gear set up, sitting on the sand.

  The rod I had picked up was five meters long, much bigger than anything I had used as a boy, but I soon got the hang of it. The fishing was almost too good. On Earth, fishing was mostly a matter of relaxing while you waited for the fish to do something. Here, it was too much like working for a living. In short order, I had eight big salmon lined up on the wet sand. I was hoping that the island's facilities included a smokehouse.

  Then I got a hit that would have yanked me off my feet, if the brake on the reel had been set any harder. Hanging on with all my might and cranking the brake tighter, I yelled, "Eva! I need some help here!"

  A big drone ran over and into the water. It grabbed the line with its hand, something that would have cut my own fingers off, and brought the fish to a stop before the reel was completely empty.

  "Actually, I'm Agnieshka, boss, but I didn't think that you'd be fussy."

  "I'm not. What have I hooked here?"

  "A really big fish?"

  "I'd gathered that much. Whoops, he's coming back!"

  I couldn't crank the reel fast enough to take in the slack, so I handed the rod to the drone, and told Agnieshka to bring him in.

  "Okay, boss. I just downloaded a fishing program."

  The program must have told her where the button was that made the reel rewind automatically, because the slack was soon gone. The fish was about two hundred meters out when it turned again, and started heading straight for Kasia!

  Agnieshka jerked back hard on the rod, and the fish came entirely out of the water, flapping in the air, trying to dislodge the hook.

  "That's a bluefin tuna!" I said, having seen one once in a movie.

  "It masses about eight hundred kilos," Agnieshka said. "It might be a world record setter on Earth. Even here, it's a big one."

  It hit the water and continued straight for Kasia.

  "Those things aren't dangerous, are they?"

  "It wouldn't bite her, if that's what you mean, but if it hit her by mistake, at this speed, it could be bad."

  "Well, pull it back!"

  The drone was leaning back at more than a forty-five-degree angle. Its feet had dug knee-deep trenches in the wet sand.

  "I'm pulling as hard as I dare. This is only five hundred kilo test line. If it breaks, we lose all control."

  I stood there, helpless, as the fish got closer and closer to my wife. She'd seen it by now, and was trying to swim at right angles to its path, but her best efforts were far too slow!

  Suddenly, the water in front of her exploded! The tuna flew high into the air again, but this time there was a decorated drone clinging to it, tearing out major chunks of the fish's head with its powerful hands.

  I started to swim out to them, but I was met when I'd only gone a quarter of the way. The drone had the tuna in its arms and Kasia on its back. It was propelling itself along at a respectable speed with impellers I hadn't known about, built into its lower legs.

  I grabbed on and hitched a ride in. We started to slow down, but before we stopped, another drone was there to take over. I carried Kasia the final way out of the water and set her down on the sand. She didn't really need my help, but it was something that I needed to do.

  "Its capacitors were only at a quarter charge when it went in," Agnieshka explained as one drone hitched the other to the charging bars of a waiting tank.

  "Why didn't you open fire?" I asked Eva, the tank.

  "That was plan B. By the time that I got here, they were too close together, and I was afraid that some of the bullets might deflect off a wave and hit Kasia. I'm not equipped with water-penetrating rounds, a fault that I am now correcting."

  "Well, all's well that ends well," I said. "It also works up an appetite. What do you say, Kasia? Do you feel like salmon or bluefin tuna?"

  "That thing nearly kills me, and you're going to eat it?"

  "Can you think of a more fitting punishment?"

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Wealth

  Dinner that night was magnificent.

  We had absolutely fresh bluefin tuna, prepared Japanese style by Agnieshka who had downloaded the programs for a blue ribbon chef. It was served with vegetables that had been picked only minutes before from our own extensive kitchen gardens.

  We ate on the west veranda with a glorious sunset glowing red and purple across a whitecapped ocean. For a tiny second, we both actually saw the famous green flash as the sun was setting.

  Eva was playing the perfect waiter, complete with a French accent, and she was also the band. Some musical instruments had been discovered in the mansion, the appropriate programs had been downloaded, and we had three strolling violinists plus a hammer dulcimer for entertainment with our meal.

  I was enchanted with what our new drones could do, when combined with the almost infinite supply of educational programs that had been written over the last two centuries.

  Kasia wasn't happy.

  "Why so glum, my lovely lady?"

  "You know damn well why. And don't ask me if it's about this murdering fish that you are slobbering over. Okay. I'll admit that Eva can probably handle the financial stuff as well as I can, or likely even better, but Eva can't pick up on new possibilities as well as a human can. It takes humans and machines working together to do really fantastic things. And dammit, I was enjoying the hell out of becoming a lady billionaire. I'd be a trillionaire, before this leave is over, if you'd just let me!"

  "What would you say to a little wager, then? I'll bet that by the time our leave is over, I'm worth more than you are."

  "You're getting interesting, mister. Only what are we going to bet?"

  "My tender body against yours?"

  "It sounds like the outcome would be the same, no matter who won," Kasia said.

  "Yeah, but it would be fun, anyway. Are you game?"

  "With you getting to talk to your computers, and me having to go it blind? Not hardly."

  "No, with each of us spending the same amount of time on line, as it were. Say, four hours a day, each."

  "Eight."

  "Six. That's my best offer."

  "I'll take it. When do we start?"

  "Right after dinner. I've had a wall screen set up for you in the east office."

  "I just finished eating!" she said, leaving.

  "You've barely eaten anything!"

  "I'll have my meal sent up!"

  "That's cheating!"

  "The hell it is! I've got five and a half hours before midnight, and I intend to use them."

  I let her go. It was the only way to keep her happy. I sat back, trying to enjoy the food and the setting alone. The sun went down, the sky went black, and I gave up.

  "Agnieshka, let's talk. And have the violinists go do something productive."

 
; The waiter stopped being Eva playing the French waiter and became Agnieshka. The musicians bowed and left.

  "Sure, boss," she said, sitting in the chair that Kasia had vacated.

  "How many of these humanoid drones can you handle at one time?"

  "That depends on what they're doing, how complicated the task is. They can do some simple things on their own, once you set them up for it. If they were doing factory production work, I'd only have to check up on each one every few minutes. I could handle thousands of them in that situation. But on the average, I'd say about a hundred."

  "And before you got the diamond upgrade?"

  "Probably three, at most. The humanoid drones are a lot more difficult to control than the more usual drones that we trained with. With tracks and wheels, you don't have to worry about falling over, for one thing."

  "Okay. Now, more than a million military computers were upgraded from silicon to diamond semiconductors. How did they do that? Did they remove each chip and replace it?"

  "That would have been extremely difficult. No, they just made whole new computers on an automatic line, transferred the programs from the old ones to the new, and sent us on our way."

  "I thought so. Then all those old computers are sitting around somewhere."

  "There are an awful lot of evacuated mining tunnels in New Kashubia. It's usually cheaper to store stuff than to destroy it, and you never can tell when something old might be useful again."

  "Good. I want you to find those computers and buy them, if you can get them cheap. The idea is that if I sell some of my humanoid drones, the users will need computers like you to run them. It wouldn't be legal to sell them anything with diamond semiconductors in them, but the old computers should be salable."

  "And this would give them new life."

  "That thought had crossed my mind as well. As it is, I imagine that they are simply turned off. Tell me, to you, is that like being dead? What I mean is, do you think of yourself as a computer, or as a program in a computer?"

  "I really don't know, boss. I've never thought about it. I guess that I just think of me as being me. It's an interesting question. Let me think about it."

  "Let me know when you come up with an answer. But back to what I was saying. There are the feminine drones being designed now. You know about them, right?"

  "Of course. I'm looking forward to getting mine."

  "Well, once we produce enough of them so all of you ladies have one, there ought to be a huge market for them in the civilian world as housemaids, barmaids, waitresses, sales girls, and all sorts of things. Get me those old computers and we can sell the drones and their brains as a package."

  "I'll see to it. I've been asked to remind you that over twenty percent of our tanks have female observers, and that most of their computers have therefore developed male personalities. Those guys want a male version of the feminine drone developed."

  "Sure, why not? The differences would be only cosmetic, anyway, and I'm sure that there is a big civilian market for male drones as well."

  "They asked me to say, 'Thank you!' Another thing. These computers you will be selling with the drones. Will they have Dream World capabilities?"

  "I hadn't thought of that. It's a possibility. We could sell it as an extra-cost option. We could sell it without the drones, if that's what the buyer wanted. Yes, an excellent suggestion, Agnieshka."

  "And another thought, considering your unusual moral nature, Mickolai. The drones being designed for our military teammates will be fully capable of performing the human sex act. The boys and girls will insist on that. Will the civilian drones have the same capabilities?"

  "Now that opens a can of worms, doesn't it? If they do, they will be bought up by whoremasters, won't they? Is that worse than having real women forced to do the same job? And some of them are forced, you know. And some of them like it. Shit, I don't know. Ask me about it later. We don't even have the drones yet."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Okay. New topic. Those huge windows you plan on putting into that marvelous cathedral you ladies are building for me. They are seven hundred meters tall and twenty meters wide. How do you plan to get them from that huge diamond to my valley?"

  "We'll roll them up. Those windows will be only two millimeters thick, and will be held in their frames under considerable tension, which diamond is good at. We can roll them into tubes five meters in diameter, and twenty meters long, and ship them to your building site through the Loways."

  "Nice trick, if it works."

  "It will work. We've already tested it."

  "I should have known. What if that hadn't worked?"

  "Plan B was to airlift them in, with a cargo helicopter, some dark and stormy night when nobody was looking. Plan C was to use smaller pieces, but that wouldn't have been as nice, aesthetically."

  "Always a backup. Good. How is everything else going?"

  "About as expected. The last of those hoodlums is out of the hospital and inside of a tank. They seem to be doing okay. The Serbs, the Montenegrins, and the Albanians have taken us up on our offer to empty out their penitentiaries, and I think it likely that most of the smaller countries will also do so, it time. The money keeps rolling in.

  "The Croatian convicts are being loaded as scheduled, and our new psychiatrists are undergoing their examinations as we speak. The automatic medical centers are glad to have something to do, but they are not pleased with having most of their recovery units sent elsewhere. They also complain that the psychiatric patients should be examined for physical ailments before being given extensive psychiatric care."

  "You know, they might have a point there. I read something once about how many mental problems have a physical basis. Has the medical center scheduled for New Yugoslavia been delivered yet?"

  "Not yet. There is some debate as to which of the twenty-nine governments we should send it to."

  "Well, keep it for a while, and process the nut cases through it, first."

  "Boss!"

  "Well, 'psychiatric patients' is such a mouthful. Tell you what. Let's call them 'Danes.' Everybody likes the Danish. They're the most inoffensive people in the world, so it can't have any derogatory connotations."

  "Yes, sir. I wish you were in my coffin, so I could tell whether you were lying or not."

  "Back to the Yugoslavian medical center. When we're through with it, send it to the Ecological Council. They are the closest thing to a planetary government this place has. Tell them to timeshare it with everybody else. How is my valley doing?"

  "It's going way ahead of schedule. We have thirty-nine thousand tanks working there now, along with most of your new drones, who are doing the small-scale work."

  "I wish I could see it."

  "Boss, if you were there, all you could see would be one vast cloud of dust. When your vacation here is over, the heavy stuff will be finished, and you will be able to admire to your heart's content."

  "A contented heart. I could use one of those just now. How is Kasia doing?"

  "She's buying and selling and seems to be enjoying herself. She's just discovered that we are sending a lot of tanks back and forth between the planets, getting the entire Kashubian army filled with observers. She's planning to recruit many of those that we are sending back to the other planets into her financial empire. She wants to start trading off planet as well as here on New Yugoslavia."

  "That's my wife. Beautiful, smart, and greedy. Say, you said that we had a lot of money in the bank, right? Well, there's no point just letting it sit there, not when I've got this bet to win. Do you think that you could invest that money for me as well as Kasia is doing for herself?"

  "I think so, yes. I'm not as creative as she is, but I can certainly copy what she is doing. Furthermore, we are starting with a much bigger capital base than she has, which gives us a considerable advantage."

  "Good. Do it. And get us going on every civilized planet except Earth as soon as possible. We'll show Kasia what wealth really is!"

&
nbsp; But I sat and watched a movie alone, that night, and at midnight I had to switch off Kasia's screen to get her to come to bed.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Lost in an Alien Sea

  The next morning, after a quick breakfast of smoked salmon, Kasia was back at her screen, working on some new idea.

  I went down to the gun room and selected a .30-06 Remington automatic with a Leupold 3X9 power scope, a magnificent antique.

  I rode out on horseback, my rifle strapped to my back, with ten drones for trackers and beaters. Before noon, I bagged a twelve-point white-tailed buck, a huge American elk, three African antelopes, and four European wild boars. We made quite a parade, coming back to the mansion, but Kasia never looked out the window.

  After a late lunch of the traditional hunter's feast, roasted deer's liver, I determined that Kasia's six hours were up, and had Eva shut off her equipment.

  Kasia was surprisingly pleasant for the rest of the day and evening. She was animated, friendly, and eager to please, much like a junkie who has gotten her fix.

  In college, on Earth, I had seen too many people who were on drugs act this way, and a few who treated gambling in the same fashion. Maybe the thrill of making money was a lot like a gambler's high to her.

  I didn't like it. I worried about her, but I didn't see anything that I could do about it except to hope that she would eventually outgrow it.

  At least now, she was fun to be with.

  She eagerly let me show her my plans for my ranch, our home, and the city. She was very impressed with it all, oohing and aahing the whole while.

  We debated for hours over whether we wanted to live in the largest of the three castles, which the architect had named "Three Eagles," or in the cliff dwelling apartment being built at the site that Kasia had originally picked out. In the end, we decided that the huge apartment was really for us, but we'd visit the castle often.

  We talked and ate and laughed and ended up dancing together under the tropical stars and New Yugoslavia's huge moon, now waxing but still new.