"Very well, and I already have a plotter on order, to do proper technical drawings. It should get here in a week. You really should learn to use a computer, sir."
"Later, maybe. Just now, I don't have time. We'll need the packaging center, to gather juvenals from the fields and prepare them for shipment. I'll want it built and running by spring, and I'm very eager to start in on the breeding projects we talked about."
"Not to mention the grass-mowing machines and the business of growing grass under artificial lights."
"Right. The grass mowing is your project. We'll need it by next summer, I expect. Keep me posted. As to the artificial lights, I need some research done there. All of the artificial lights I've seen have imitated the spectrum of sunlight. But plants are most efficient under a particular wave length of monochromatic red light. Any photons with less energy simply do the plant no good at all. Any energy above a certain level is wasted, and just goes into waste heat, which has to be gotten rid of. I want you to find me some inexpensive, monochromatic light sources."
"I'll see what I can do, sir. Do you know the precise wave length we need?"
"No, that slips my memory. I only remember that it was red. Vampire memories are not perfect."
"Or maybe Kodo forgot it."
"That too is possible. Well, you know what to do."
* * *
The next weekend was an away game, and the opposing javelin tennis team had been studying tapes of Kren's last performance. They all showed up to the meet wearing protective headgear, and they made all of their shots to the rear of the court, from which Kren could not effectively pole-vault. This made for some long and boring games. One of them was indeed a world record setter for both length and dullness, but they didn't give away any platinum medals for that. Kren didn't come close to winning.
Kren had suspected that something like this would happen, and hadn't bet on the tennis tournament. The odds were too low, anyway.
Instead, he won the javelin distance event, without setting any records. The payoff was only two to one, and Kren, in keeping with his earlier vows, had only bet half of his purse on the outcome. Bronki had always been a bit secretive about her betting, but Dol said that she would continue betting everything she had, since a girl never could tell when she might need another billion Ke.
* * *
"Dol, I've been invited back to Duke Dennon's palace for the weekend. Would you like to come along?" Kren asked.
"A visit to a ducal palace? Most definitely, sir!"
"Then book us a cabin on an express train on Friday afternoon, and find out from Bronki who we should contact at the palace to tell them we're coming. Tell her that she's invited along, if she wants, but if she's too busy, that's okay, too."
* * *
As he and Dol walked into the ducal palace, Kren noted that many small changes had taken place. The carpeting was new, and of the very best quality, as were the drapes. Minor repairs had been made where necessary, and the servants all sported new uniforms. Only the very professional guards were unchanged, although Kren was sure that by now they'd all gotten their back pay.
They were immediately escorted to Duke Dennon's private quarters, which had been lavishly redecorated. They made the proper bow to His Grace, who stood up to greet them.
The duke said, "Kren! Welcome back! All the more so since you have made me a half gross billion Ke richer!"
"I thought that it might have been you who bet a gross billion Ke on that fencing match! Your wager drove the odds down so low that we almost decided to win the javelin accuracy throw instead!"
"I'm glad that you didn't! But the gross billion Ke you paid me for my land barely covered my debts. The additional money I made on that wager has given me financial security and permitted me to make some very needed repairs to my estate. Who is your friend?"
"Your Grace, this is Dol. She's nominally my servant, but she's also on my board of directors, and she has been acting as my chief engineer, so I suppose that makes her my friend as well."
"Your friends are always welcome," the duke said.
They had been speaking in Meno, the military language, which Dol was completely ignorant of, but the duke's smile was all that she really needed to go on.
Mitchegai do smile to express pleasure. Like humans, they do this by looking at the person they are addressing and exposing their fangs.
"I thank you, Your Grace," Dol said in Deno, the common language.
"I am almost completely ignorant of Reno, the engineering language, so I guess Deno it is," the duke said in fluent Deno. "It is difficult to express anything but the simplest things in the common tongue, though. I'm sure that you'd be far more comfortable talking with my chief engineer, Dako. In fact, I want you to meet her. Among other things, I am now the owner of a huge supply of mining machinery that is completely useless to me. It occurs to me that a conveyor belt designed to haul ore might prove useful in hauling grass clippings. I could give Kren here a very good price on it."
"That is a very interesting idea, Your Grace. Yes, Dol, by all means, find out what they have available," Kren said.
A servant was assigned to escort Dol to Dako's office.
"Just be sure and come to the party tonight," the duke said as they left. Turning to Kren, he said, "Now then, have you been thinking more about your fascinating plans for your new lands?"
"More than thinking, Your Grace. We've already started doing. For a week now, I've had a crew putting up fences around my land."
"First, you have now used up your allotment of 'Your Graces' for the entire weekend. Just call me Dennon. Second, you have been putting up your fences on the boundary with my lands, and the reports I've been getting are strange. You are building these curving things that have to be costing you half again more than a straight fence would. Your workers have told my men that you are doing this for aesthetic reasons, but that does not fit with my judgment of your character. Please explain this to me."
Kren said, "Very well, but you must agree to keep this a secret."
The Mitchegai never had anything remotely like a patent office. The only way they had to make a profit off of an idea was to keep it secret. This could be another reason for their general lack of creativity.
Kren then explained his new idea, the fish weir, drawing sketches on a pad of paper that the duke provided.
"And this strange device actually works?" the duke asked.
"In fact, it does. Dol found a standard industrial product, a long armed mechanical switch that operates a mechanical counter when something goes by in one direction. Putting two of them on one of the openings gave us the ratio of juvenals going one way as opposed to those going the other. More of them are going in the wrong direction than I thought they would, but it is still much better than a gross to one. My fence is an effective valve. I also intend to use something similar to make collection paths, where juvenals in the fields are collected up and sent to my packaging facility. They'll come to us, we'll select the ones we want and send the rest back out to the fields," Kren said.
"Remarkable. But all of this means that you will be denuding my lands of the juvenals that my subjects need to survive."
"That remains to be seen. Many will be entering my lands, but many more will be drifting into yours from the other directions. I do, however, promise that none of your subjects will starve because of what I am doing."
"I'll take your word on that, and hold you to it," Duke Dennon said. "Now, what of your other thoughts?"
Kren explained about how grass only absorbed red light, and how any artificial lights should be monochromatic.
"Now that is odd," Dennon said. "Somehow, I'd always thought of grass as being the perfect energy converter, changing sunlight into food for the children."
"If it was a perfect converter, it would absorb all of the light and look black. Grass is green because it doesn't need the green light, and reflects it back to our eyes."
"Interesting. But can you buy monochromatic lights
?"
"I was surprised to find out that they are the only sort that you can buy," Kren said. "The white lighting panels that are used everywhere are made up of seven different sorts of tiny light emitting diodes, each of which is monochromatic, but of a different color. The numbers of each sort is such that together they appear to us as being white. Making a panel with only a single sort of LED actually cuts the cost in half, assuming that you are buying in large quantities, which of course I will be."
"I didn't know that."
"Neither did I until Dol did some research on it."
"And what about that business of breeding more efficient juvenals?" the duke asked.
"That will be a long-term project, of course. I have designed a research building with three dozen large complexes that will let us test three dozen types of juvenals simultaneously, keeping each type separate from the grub stage, through the pollywog stage, and then as juvenals and even a few brainless adults to make more eggs. We can have three dozen selective breeding projects going at the same time. Also, I will have a complete genetics laboratory, so that we can know exactly what we are dealing with in every experiment."
"But I thought that the DNA experiments had wound down, well, many millennia ago, when everything that could be learned had been learned."
"You are right, they did," Kren said. "The equipment I'm buying has been in storage for over twelve thousand years. I've put a clause in the contract whereby I won't have to pay for it if it doesn't work, but I'm more than a little worried about it. Having to build all new equipment from ancient plans would be expensive! Also, I've got seven biochemists on the payroll trying to learn what the ancients knew about DNA analysis."
"I wish you well! But now, it's Friday Night and Party Time! Come with me to the great hall, and we'll get the festivities started!"
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Politics and My Boys
New Yugoslavia, 2212 a.d.
The Tellefontu normally carried an organic version of the Disappearing Gun in one of their front claws. This was necessary, since they lived in an ocean filled with large, small-brained carnivores like bluefinned tuna, who sometimes mistook them for a tasty treat. But while killing your attacker eliminated the immediate problem, it didn't teach him anything. It only killed him, leaving the others with no change in their behavior. Therefore, the Tellefontu had developed a weapon that caused intense pain, but no physical damage. It was a beam that really rattled the pain centers of the brain.
The pain-generating weapon had proved ineffective against the Earthly lobsters the early inhabitants had tried to grow in New Yugoslavia's oceans, as these crustaceans lacked enough of a brain to feel pain, apparently. And since the lobsters had developed a taste for young Tellefontu, our new allies had made a point of eradicating them.
I had been unaware of this, but with demand and no supply, it looked to be profitable to grow lobsters in tanks on my land, especially since as carnivores, they would give me something to do with that half of a cow (eyeballs, lungs, etc.) that people didn't want to eat.
The first eating-sized lobsters were finally coming out of the tanks, and Kasia and I ate the first two with gusto!
Bellor declined to join us.
* * *
My annoying uncle, Wlodzimierz Derdowski, the President of New Kashubia, was now lording it over the Interplanetary Council of the Union of Human Planets. The new constitution was still being haggled over, and we still didn't have anything like a single individual in charge, but my uncle was currently the closest thing we had to it.
He'd written me that my "discovery" of the Tellefontu had been tremendously important, politically. The fact that I hadn't discovered anything, and that they had come to me didn't faze him in the least. Politicians are never very concerned with actual facts.
While the governments of the various planets were still behind the huge defense budgets that were required to prepare us to face the Mitchegai, the people were getting increasingly restless about the taxation and the dearth of civilian goods available.
Now, however, there was a race of intelligent beings who had witnessed and suffered through an invasion by the Mitchegai, and this forced people to take the whole thing seriously. While it would have been better if they could have been furry, cute, and cuddly, instead of looking like crabs, they nonetheless were instrumental in keeping the war effort going.
And the Tellefontu were cooperating very nicely, giving lots of press interviews and showing up regularly on talk shows.
In addition to the psychological boost, it was expected that as the new technology that the Tellefontu were giving us worked its way into the market, the economic boost would be considerable, and that would help the political situation a lot. What we had been able to learn from the Mitchegai scout ship wouldn't hurt, either.
My uncle invited me to come to New Kashubia, so he could pin a few more medals on my chest. I respectfully declined, claiming the press of things to be done.
Actually, I still hated the bastard. I never have forgiven him for letting the courts give Kasia and me the choice of death or joining the army, all those years ago, not when they had aborted our first child in the process.
My boys were now my great joy in life. The oldest were getting to the point where I could teach them to fish, to ride horses, and to play ball. They were spending more and more of their time in the golden castle that I'd had built, but couldn't sell, and that was good. The spirit of true knighthood was starting to grow in them.
* * *
Our machine tool industry was expanding with surprising rapidity. Our intelligent computers were keeping everything working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and without holidays. There was very little downtime. A great deal was being done very quickly.
The engineers computed that with the Disappearing Guns, and the other things that Bellor had suggested, we could produce the fallout shelters at a quarter of the price originally estimated. We would want the Guns as weapons anyway, so we built a production line to mass produce them. We also built lines to make the self-powered lighting fixtures and the power-generating air conditioners.
Kasia never mentioned these savings in her dealings with the local governments, and got full prices out of them. I took much of the extra money, and spent it on better food supplies. We would now be able to serve something a little bit better than gruel. But we didn't tell them about that, either. It might have hurt sales on the luxury apartments.
As these new factories started to come on line, the shelters started to be dug in a hurry. One of our standard tanks, usually with a young soldier in training inside and oblivious to what his tank was really doing, could cut a tunnel eight meters across and ten meters high while traveling at eighty kilometers an hour!
It was a fast way to make floor space!
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
FROM CAPTURED HISTORY TAPES,
FILE 1846583A ca. 1832 a.d.
BUT CONCERNING EVENTS OF UP TO
2000 YEARS EARLIER
For War and Profit!
After the duke started things out by cutting off a pretty little girl's finger with a dull knife, and eating it to the applause of all present, Dol made a hit at the party by borrowing a large soldering iron from one of the repair shops in the engineering wing, putting it up one of the party snack's cloaca, and plugging it in. It was something she had learned at one of Bronki's parties, but it was a new innovation here. The resulting screams were outstanding!
Later, Dol told Kren that she would spend all day Saturday going over the mining machinery with Dako, but it looked as if most of it could be extremely useful. Besides the conveyor belts, there were eleven major power stations in storage here. These were high efficiency muon-exchange fusion units, capable of running for a thousand years at peak output before they needed refueling.
Dol said, "They have a massive amount of lighting fixtures, wires and cabling, and seven big tunneling machines. With them, it might prove feasible to connect the winte
ring centers directly to the train stations, which would greatly ease the job of collecting juvenals in the winter time. We could just run the children we want down underground tunnels to the train station and box them up there."
Also, the duke's engineers didn't have nearly enough to do, and Dol expected to get a lot of free engineering help from them.
The duke came up to them and said, "Now, now, you two. No discussion of business at a party! Anyway, the entertainment is about to begin in the arena, so come along, both of you."
They went to a small circular stadium surrounding a patch of synthetic grass two dozen yards across. At first, Kren thought that they would be in for some sort of gladiatorial event, but no, no one was killed. The duke thought too much of his troops to waste them on mere entertainment.
It was a tournament between two platoons of combat troops from two rival regiments. It was fought with weapons of full weight, but without sharp edges. The troops wore full, head-to-toe armor of a sort Kren had never seen before. The helmets were similar to what most of Dennon's soldiers wore, except that the face was also protected. The body armor was obviously of a more advanced technology, with many dozens of intricately fitting, overlapping plates that permitted complete freedom of motion.
The first event was one-on-one fighting with sword and spear between members of the two platoons. What with the armor and the blunted weapons, no one was seriously injured, but these troops were really fighting.
Kren found it good to watch real professionals go at it, and not the stupid buffoons on Big Time Gladiators. The rules were anything goes, and the fighting continued until the slain warrior declared herself to be dead. Honor was very important to these warriors, and the thought of cheating was abhorrent to them. Once a warrior took a blow that would have killed her, had the weapon been real and she without her armor, she fell over "dead" and the crowd applauded.
They even gave an award for the "Best Death of the Evening."
Most of the three dozen bouts lasted less than a minute.
Kren of the Mitchegai Page 23