Short Fiction by Poul Anderson (free ebook novel .txt) 📕

of all the romantic stories about the wild free life of the rockhound, it’s the dullest place in the System.”

“Not to me,” she smiled. “I was working. There were experiments to be done, factors to be measured, away from solar radiation. There are always ions around inside the orbit of Mars to jamble up a delicate apparatus.”

Bo sat quiet, trying to keep his eyes off her. She looked good in shorts and half-cape. Too good.

“It’s something to do with power beaming, isn’t it?” Lundgard’s handsome face creased in a frown. “Afraid I don’t quite understand. They’ve been beaming power on the planets for a long time now.”

“So they have,” she nodded. “What we’re after is an interplanetary power beam. And we’ve got it.” She gestured to the baggage rack and a thick trunk full of papers she had put there. “That’s it. The basic circuits, factors, and constants. Any competent engineer could draw up a design from them.”

“Hmmm⁠ ⁠… precision work, eh?”

“Obviously! It was hard enough to do on, say, Earth⁠—you need a really tight beam in just the right frequencies, a feedback signal to direct each beam at the desired outlet, relay stations⁠—oh, yes, it was a ten-year research project before they could even think about building. An interplanetary beam has all those problems plus a number of its own. You have to get the dispersion down to a figure so low it hardly seems possible. You can’t use feedback because of the time lag, so the beams have to be aimed exactly right⁠—and the planets are always moving, at miles per second. An error of one degree would throw your beam almost two million miles off in crossing one A.U. And besides being so precise, the beam has to carry a begawatt at least to be worth the trouble. The problem looked insoluble till someone in the Order of Planetary Engineers came up with an idea for a trick control circuit hooked into a special computer. My lab’s been working together with the Order on it, and I was making certain final determinations for them. It’s finished now⁠ ⁠… twelve years of work and we’re done.” She laughed. “Except for building the stations and getting the bugs out!”

Lundgard cocked an oddly sardonic brow. “And what do you hope for from it?” he asked. “What have the psychotechs decided to do with this thing?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” she cried. “Power! Nuclear fuel is getting scarcer every day, and civilization is finished if we can’t find another energy source. The sun is pouring out more than we’ll ever need, but sheer distance dilutes it below a useful level by the time it gets to Venus.

“We’ll build stations on the hot side of Mercury. Orbital stations can relay. We can get the beams as far out as Mars without too much dispersion. It’ll bring down the rising price of atomic energy, which is making all other prices rise, and stretch our supply of fissionables for centuries more. No more fuel worries, no more Martians freezing to death because a converter fails, no more clan feuds on Venus starting over uranium beds⁠—” The excited flush on her cheeks was lovely to look at.

Lundgard shook his head. There was a sadness in his smile. “You’re a true child of the New Enlightenment,” he said. “Reason will solve everything. Science will find a cure for all our ills. Give man a cheap energy source and leave him forever happy. It won’t work, you know.”

Something like anger crossed her eyes. “What are you?” she asked. “A Humanist?”

“Yes,” said Lundgard quietly.

Bo started. He’d known about the anti-psychotechnic movement which was growing on Earth, seen a few of its adherents, but⁠—

“I never thought a spaceman would be a Humanist,” he stammered.

Lundgard shrugged wryly. “Don’t be afraid. I don’t eat babies. I don’t even get hysterics in an argument. All I’ve done is use the scientific method, observing the world without preconceptions, and learned by it that the scientific method doesn’t have all the answers.”

“Instead,” said Valeria, scornfully, “we should all go back to church and pray for what we want rather than working for it.”

“Not at all,” said Lundgard mildly. “The New Enlightenment is⁠—or was, because it’s dying⁠—a very natural state of mind. Here Earth had come out of the World Wars, racked and ruined, starving and chaotic, and all because of unbridled ideology. So the physical scientists produced goods and machines and conquered the planets; the biologists found new food sources and new cures for disease; the psychotechs built up their knowledge to a point where the socioeconomic unity could really be planned and the plan worked. Man was unified, war had sunken to an occasional small ‘police action,’ people were eating and had comfort and security⁠—all through applied, working science. Naturally they came to believe reason would solve their remaining problems. But this faith in reason was itself an emotional reaction from the preceding age of unreason.

“Well, we’ve had a century of enlightenment now, and it has created its own troubles which it cannot solve. No age can handle the difficulties it raises for itself; that’s left to the next era. There are practical problems arising, and no matter how desperately the psychotechs work they aren’t succeeding with them.”

“What problems?” asked Bo, feeling a little bewildered.

“Man, don’t you ever see a newscast?” challenged Lundgard. “The Second Industrial Revolution, millions of people thrown out of work by the new automata. They aren’t going hungry, but they are displaced and bitter. The economic center of Earth is shifting to Asia, the political power with it, and hundreds of millions of Asians are skeptical aboard this antiseptic New Order the West has been bringing them: cultural resistance, and not all the psychotechnic propaganda in the System can shake it off. The men of Mars, Venus, the Belt, the Jovian moons are developing their own civilizations⁠—inevitably, in alien environments; their own ways of living and thinking, which just don’t fit into the neat scheme of an Earth-dominated Solar Union. The psychotechs