But What of Earth by Piers Anthony

Author:Piers Anthony [Anthony, Piers]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0812530985
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

He came well outfitted with hiking shoes and backpack. “What’ll you take for a night?” he inquired.

“News,” Scot said.

“Done!” And the traveler entered. News had become a commodity second only to food in value, since the pony express had failed. Here and worldwide.

They fed him on what they had, and let him wash in their precious hot water, and gave him a spare room. In return, the visitor talked. His name was Donald—no one bothered with formal surnames these days—and he was on leave from government service, wrapping up personal matters so that he could emigrate.

He told how the worldwide exodus had now passed one and a half billion people, for there were now over a hundred MT units scattered across the planet, all exporting bodies at full capacity. He described the way the world was being impoverished in order to provide the necessary energy, but there was no way to stop it because the people demanded their continued right to emigrate. At first they had thought atomic fusion plants would generate the energy, but these had been caught by the squeeze of regression: there were not enough sufficiently-trained atomic engineers to set them up. Thus there was greater dependence on the old-fashioned radiation-polluting fission plants, and accumulating wastes such as plutonium—the most toxic stuff in the universe—had forced a number of shutdowns. The oil fields had been drained dry, including the vast American shale deposits; the mountains of spent shale seemed to rival the Rockies. Now they were back on coal, with monstrous strip mines tearing it out of the ground, leaving a literal wasteland and countless tons of sulfur pollution in the atmosphere. “And if this industrial depletion continues—and it will,” Donald assured them, “pretty soon we’ll be back on wood. And when that’s gone—well, I’m emigrating now, before it’s too late.”

Scot was shocked, but he did not comment. There was, after all, nothing he could do about this savaging of his home planet. Earth was consuming itself, like the fabled snake eating its own tail, and it could not continue indefinitely. And all this man wanted was to get his share of the spoils before the end came!

The traveler was a technician for MT. He explained how he calibrated the transport capsules for orientation on each new colony planet. Fifteen hundred worlds had now been colonized, so changeovers were frequent. The computer ran the program, but there were always unpredictable variations in the subspace that these instantaneous transmissions traversed. “We dummy it up with radiation calibrators,” he said. “Little checkers of metal like this.” He showed them a cylinder hardly thicker than his thumb. “This emits radiation at a standard rate. But conditions in subspace change it slightly. The computer interprets that shift, and adjusts the orientation of the capsule to compensate. Otherwise there would be a drift each time, only a tiny fraction of a trillionth of a percent—but we mattermit across light-years, and it’s cumulative. Know what would happen if a capsule came in skewed beyond tolerance? I’ll tell you,” he continued without pause.

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