A Boy and His Tank (6 page)

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 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.

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 immigrate 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.

So everything was finally starting to look up. What with the food imports, we were all getting almost enough to eat for a change (including soon, we were promised, some real meat!), and of course we were also getting in the raw materials with which to expand our system of hydroponic vats. The growing light factory was going at full production for the first time since we'd built it. We finally had the sand to make enough glass. We'd have no problems reprocessing all these new organics again and again. The new projections showed that within a year, we could relax most of the emergency measures, and start living like human beings again, with clothes on, and with our families, and dating girls and having weddings and everything!

I guess the big problem was that Kasia and I started celebrating a little early, and she turned up pregnant.

"But Mickolai, I thought you said that you were totally segregated," my tank said.

"We were," I said. If she could talk, I figured I could talk.

"Then how . . . ? You know that I'm a machine, and that my grasp of this sort of thing is only theoretical, but my information was that physical contact was required . . ."

"It is. Love found a way."

"But I still don't understand, Mickolai."

"Look! I said there was that hole in the wall, didn't I? How graphic do I have to get?"

"That doesn't sound very satisfying."

"It was a hell of a lot better than nothing at all," I said. "Say, just how much longer does this calibration thing have to go on, anyway?"

"I had enough data a while ago, Mickolai, but I was interested in what you were telling me. Why don't you complete your story."

"There's nothing much else to say. Kasia was pregnant and the gene prints said that I was the father. My uncle tried to help, but he got absolutely nowhere. Nobody cared about our work records or education or anything. The court case lasted three minutes and the jury didn't even leave the room before they gave their verdict. Our kid was aborted as the law required, and we were both sentenced to death or worse."

"Living with me can't be worse than death, Mickolai."

"It's a lot like being buried alive, and the view is boring." I'd been forced to stare at these magic television goggles inside my helmet since I got up and they showed nothing but a blank wall.

"What do you think of this, Mickolai?"

Suddenly, my view changed from a blank palladium wall to a lovely forest scene from Earth, with a brook and a little waterfall. But more importantly, the view on the screen in my helmet was like an old-style TV picture, with the scan lines visible, but this was just like real life!

"It's beautiful!" I said. Then a breeze blew through the woods, rustling the leaves,
and I felt it on my cheek!
 

"How in the world did you do that?!" I shouted, and realized that I was smelling the trees and flowers, too.

"Direct neural stimulation, Mickolai. This is part of what I have been calibrating for. Get up. Walk around!"

"You're serious?"

"Of course I'm serious! Do it!"

So I did. I stood up and looked down at my feet. I was wearing a tee shirt, blue jeans, and a comfortable pair of sturdy hiking boots, just like I used to own on Earth. I looked at my hands, flexed my fingers, and they really were my own hands, not those of some movie actor. This wasn't some kind of recording. I was wearing my old flannel shirt!

"It's like a dream!" I said.

"Very perceptive, Mickolai. It's called Dream World. It
is
very like a dream, except that you are awake and I am controlling it."

"I've never heard of such a thing! How could this be possible without my ever hearing about it?"

"Dream World is not the sort of thing that they'd tell a poor boy about, Mickolai. It takes some massive computer power and some very expensive sensors and inductors to do it, but if you were a manager with the Wealthy Nations Group, you'd probably have a Dream World set of your very own to play with."

"Then why would they put something this fancy on a tank?"

"Because almost everything required to do it with was already needed here for some other reason. In fact, all of the special equipment required for Dream World was originally developed for military purposes. The neural pickups are also needed for both biological monitoring and for receiving your command inputs. The neural induction circuits are required militarily to give you rapid feedback on combat situations. A Mark XIX already has a sentient computer, so more computer power is already available than is needed. In fact, the only additional cost was the fairly minor, one-time cost of purchasing an off-the-shelf program.