April 5: A Depth of Understanding (2 page)

"Do you enjoy taking the boat out like this for yourselves, or is it just work and you are anxious to get back home?" Barak asked.

Lin and Abe exchanged a significant look. Abe gave Lin a nod that said it was Lin's to answer. "We don't talk to you about port life, because you are on vacation and we didn't want to bring up unpleasantness. Things are getting rough on land. We have to post a watch overnight if we are at dock. There are people from other countries where things are even worse, who come to Italy. English and Germans and Romanians who can't find work. At least in southern Italy or Greece, they aren't going to freeze to death in the winter. But they will steal anything that isn't bolted down. They'll steal that too, if you leave them alone ten minutes with a wrench."

"Doesn't the government give them a little something to survive?" April asked.

"A little is right. Most of them are young men and fewer young women. The women tend to stay home. Life on the road is too dangerous for the young women. They get a small allowance deposited each month to an account. But if their card gets used outside their home area for more than a week they get cut off. It's the place they moved to that's now responsible for them,. There's usually a six month legal waiting period to get new benefits in Europe, but if not, there is usually enough bureaucratic red tape and indifference to delay it as long or longer," Lin said.

Abe changed his mind and decided to speak too. "A lot of them leave their card at home for their family to use. Their governments don't bother to DNA lock the cards for such small amounts. Some families may send a little of it to them in cash, if they don't desperately need it, but some have nothing but what they can steal if they can't find odd bits of work for cash. Such work doesn't pay much, because there are more workers than there is work. Some will work in a restaurant just to be fed a meal on their shift and maybe a sandwich to take home."

Lin nodded agreement. "We could have a dozen hands on the boat for practically nothing, but finding those who have any boat handling skills, or even who are trainable for such things as a cabin steward is difficult. They will desperately lie about their experience, hoping they can fake it and unless you try them out at dock, you won't know it until you are a hundred kilometers offshore. I couldn't send them into your cabin in good conscience, because they'd likely steal your things and I'd be afraid if we had two or three of them, they might cut our throats in the night and steal the boat."

"Sorry," Lin said, seeing Barak feeling his throat and looking entirely too thoughtful. "It's bad enough that we tend to anchor off in the harbor at night rather than stay at dock. We still put a watch out, but it's much harder to sneak up close to us in the open water. The watch can see an approach and call for help much earlier than at dock. At the dock nobody even looks up or pays any attention to gunfire in the city at night. When we are offshore we are freer to use the laser you gave us," he said glancing upward, since it was mounted high on the main mast. "It would raise entirely too many questions if we used it at dock and it left visible damage,"

"There have been two different weeks this season we weren't able to get a charter and we all agreed it was better to do some open ocean cruising, instead of staying at dock. Once we were in Florida and it saved us marina fees anyway, but another time it was in Sicily, where we
pay
to keep a permanent dock, even if we are not there. Standing a watch at the wheel at sea is much less stressful than watching the dock for boarders or small boats sneaking up to us. We can also do some serious fishing to fill up the larder."

Abe spoke again, "Since we have plenty of power, thanks to you," he nodded at April, "We put two commercial freezer chests down in the hold. We are usually able to catch more than we eat and we have arrangements with a couple farmers. We buy a bunch of chickens and pay them to raise a pig or calf, then buy the whole thing slaughtered and cut up. Sometimes we trade some of the frozen fish instead of all cash, it cuts our expenses and adds a little variety to both their diet and ours. On land there are a lot of areas now where it is too risky to keep a big freezer, unless you can generate your own power. If the public power goes down and you lose a freezer full it's a huge hit."

"We all live a little better than we could landbound," Lin asserted. "Although we lost a crewman because he was married and he worried too much about his wife and son when we were gone. He finally quit and moved them all up in the hills to his parents' house. It's not as comfortable as in the city, but it's safer. There was no way I wanted to start letting crew keep family aboard, which is what he was hinting. Pretty soon it would look like a refugee boat, with laundry in the rigging."

"So, none of the crew is married?"  Barak asked. You could tell from his intense look it held more than casual interest.

"No and the rate of marriage has gone down on land too. At least official, legal marriages. When the economy is bad enough people don't want to make the commitment. A lot forgo having kids too. Does that seem strange to you?"

"Not especially, I'm just thinking about the crew from Home, who went out to Jupiter not long ago to capture a snowball. They are six unmarried crew, the oldest twenty-seven. They decided to either do all singles, or a crew of couples, but they couldn't find three qualified couples who would agree to a three year voyage. They're forming a second company and soliciting investors to send a second expedition already, before the first has returned. It will be better equipped and should be more profitable, but the crew will be the same, all singles and I thought I might apply if I can get my mom to agree."

"How old will you be when it leaves?" Abe asked.

"I'll be fifteen, near sixteen and I'd be seventeen when I get back."

"In the Age of Sail, young gentlemen might be sent to serve as midshipmen, training to be officers at thirteen, sometimes even twelve years of age," Lin told them. "By sixteen they might be close to taking their lieutenant's exam. They had to pass an oral examination before three captains, to demonstrate they knew how to handle a ship and command. It wasn't easy, some never passed it to advance."

"I didn't get the sense things were so rough down here," April said, concern written on her face. "I've done research for Jeff for our bank and I've seen the numbers for sales and margins turn down, but employment has stayed steady and pretty much everybody has the same thing as negative tax like North America, even if they call it something else. I get the feeling I don't really understand what motivates Earthies. I'm missing something."

"They also all have price controls," Lin said, "even if they don't call them that. It always leads to shortages. Your negative tax may let you apply to the government distribution warehouse, but if you want oil it may be canola, instead of peanut or corn oil and if you want milk it may be non-fat powder instead of Ultra. They may run out of wheat flour or rye and you have to take corn meal. It's still listed as available, but they run out early in the month. If you get the prepared meals like in North America, then they can sneak the cheap stuff in even easier. It just slowly gets a little worse each year."

 "It spills over to the commercial sales too. Last time we wanted to buy diesel, when we were picking up some guests in England, it was fifty-seven EuroMarks a liter, priced higher for anything considered recreational use and another surcharge for foreigners. The marina was limiting boats that weren't based there to fifty liters. We were fortunate we had your generator and could beg off the sale at that price."

"We made a show of waiting the tide and taking her away from the dock under sail. There isn't much on the water moving under power only, just military and big freighters. A lot of the freighters now are fitted with sails or wings of some sort for auxiliary propulsion too. They'd rather come in a couple days later if the wind will let them save fuel."

"But isn't a lot of diesel made from waste bio-mass now?" Jeff asked.

"Yes, but if you add up the acres, there just isn't enough waste to meet the demand. Even if you don't factor in the energy costs to chop it up, take it to the tanks and then to separate and filter it. Then you still need to transport it to where it is needed, although a lot is reused for agriculture and never moves far."

"Now, you can get a lot more feedstock in tropical areas. You grow directly for fuel feedstock, not just waste from food crops.  But the Amazon basin and Africa both seem to be in a perpetual state of unrest. You spend a fortune guarding your processing plant from attack, or paying protection money to every local thug and warlord, as well as the central government in power. You may guard the plant, but they can keep the growers from bringing the feed stock to the plant. I don't see any changes to that very soon either."

"How long can it keep getting a little worse each year, like you are describing, before it doesn't work at all?" April asked. "I don't want us to get caught by surprise. There are still things we need from Earth that would be very hard to do without."

"Like what?" Lin asked.

"Copper wire," Heather responded without hesitation. "Especially the sort reinforced with Bucky tubes. Solder and fluxes, anything with silver or fluorine or boron in it, plastics, lubricants, cloth and paper of all kinds," she looked an invitation at Jeff.

"Anything with big glass. Ports and rigid display screens, a lot of medical things like dressings and instruments. Needles, gloves and IV bags. A lot of those things we could make, but people who make few hundred thousand units a month can make them much cheaper than we ever could. Big pieces of steel, especially the high end stuff that has to be high strength. Anything with beryllium in it and yeah, silver like she said."

"They know techie stuff better than me," April admitted.

"I don't think it's going to be one big dramatic crash," Lin said. "Prices will just keep creeping up and selection and delivery will keep getting worse. You'll just reach a point eventually where you've had to wait for wire a couple times, the price is really a hardship, then they will finally quote you a crazy price and tell you that you have to wait months for delivery and it will kick you over the edge, to make dies and draw your own wire."

"That means we still have to find sources of copper and other scarce materials in the outer system," Jeff said. "We already have iron and a few other metals and soon all the volatiles we could want. Nobody can stop us from scooping nitrogen from Earth, but a lot of these things we have no idea where we'll be able to find them, out past Mars."

"What about Mars itself?" April asked Jeff. "Has the joint expedition found any serious ore in their explorations?"

"The participants appear to have quietly come to some sort of a gentleman's agreement to not publicize any such finds. I have word searched every public document about Mars, with particular attention to multiple word searches of any dealing with geology, field trips to volcanoes or prominent dikes.  Not a single one gets specific about any minerals, except general descriptions of rock class. Indeed the only useful data is about the large number of iron meteorites to be found on some of the plains. I'm sure they mention those, only because they would consider it a desecration to see them as ore. A robot vehicle to follow a search pattern and scoop them up would be easy to do though. How many iron meteorites do they really need for scientific research? They'll never cut and examine one in a thousand, but they act like each one is precious. It's silly."

"Well, couldn't we go look for ourselves?" Heather asked. "They don't have any claim on the whole planet, do they?"

"There is a general treaty, signed back in the sixties, which basically says everything off Earth will be held in common. The moon has shown it is pretty much defunct. In particular trying to apply it to other star systems would be silly and if we find planets with owners it will look as arrogant and short sighted as the Pope dividing up the western hemisphere of Earth, without a thought to the fact it already had indigenous owners. Mars base has sent out drones, but the furthest anybody has been from base is about two-hundred kilometers. They won't take a flier beyond the distance they could be rescued in a rover."

"You'd support prospecting there then?" Heather asked.

"I'd rather see if perhaps the pickings are better among the asteroids and satellites of the gas giants first, before we look for what we need on a planet with inhabitants. It is after all at the bottom of another gravity-well, even if not as deep as Earth. In particular I'd rather none of us make a commitment to Mars, one way or the other, as Spox for any of our companies, before we discuss it again. Is that agreeable?" he asked. But he didn't sound bossy.

"Sure," Heather agreed. April was nodding her approval.

Lunch had progressed to cold drinks on a bare table. It was the hottest part of the day, everybody was full and nobody was in a hurry to go back on deck.

"What are our options to get materials,
beyond
the out system moons and asteroids, assuming Mars is out and Earth no longer can lift what we need?" Heather asked.

"Well, Venus is useless at our present tech level. We don't know much about Mercury. It's been mapped, but the only rovers examined a tiny area at the poles. The solar flux there should make processing ore on site easy. Eventually, I think we shall visit other stars. If our technology is good enough to do that, then I expect high value cargo will be worth shipping, organisms if we find living worlds and things like gold, indium and iridium. It's going to be awhile before we can synthesize them in quantity."

"How about separating out the trace quantities of elements, like a few parts per million, in asteroids?" Barak asked.

"That might be possible, if we can vacuum distill an entire asteroid, or concentrate all the trace elements in one end of a bar by zone refining. That's how a lot of semiconductors were first refined. Then there is mass spectroscopic separation, or chemically changing everything to various gasses and reducing them by vapor deposition. Melting a free-floating asteroid shouldn't be that difficult, but if you remove volatiles by raising the temperature past the boiling point of each element in stages, how do you capture the boil off?"