“Marten!” said a woman.
Marten turned. “Oh, hello Beth.”
Beth was Molly’s best friend. She constantly urged Molly to see someone else. Beth worked in records, wore her dark hair short and never smiled except during hum-a-longs when it was considered bad manners not to.
Beth eyed Marten’s leather jacket with distaste, hesitated and then moved closer.
“Really, Marten, don’t you ever think of anyone but yourself?”
He didn’t want to argue with Beth. So he said, “Sometimes. Have you seen Molly?”
Beth took another step. “Marten… why do you have to make it so hard for Molly?”
“Beth, please, not now.”
“No, listen for once. She’d like you to move in with her. But your insistence that you get married first, Marten! That’s so….”
“Reactionary?”
“It’s worse than that. What if she wants to see other people?”
“What?” he said. “Like who?”
“See. That’s what I’m talking about. We all belong to each other. To insist upon marriage—you don’t own her, Marten.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?”
Maybe it was the synthahol, because he wasn’t sure why he asked, “Haven’t you ever wanted to belong solely to one person? To be a team, you and your partner, against the world?”
Beth drew back in horror. “We’re all one, Marten. No one is better than anyone else.”
“Yes, but—”
“How dare you want to be…” she sputtered for the right word “…elitist!”
“No, that’s not what I mean.”
“Do you think you’re the only one good enough for Molly?”
“Beth…”
“I think she should see Quirn more.”
“More? What do you mean
Beth blinked in surprise. “Uh, what I mean is—”
“She’s been seeing Quirn?”
“Not seeing, really.”
With his heart hammering, Marten turned and glanced for sight of the hall leader.
Beth plucked at his sleeve. “She can’t just see one person. People might think her odd. Really, Marten, sometimes I think you’re corrupting her.”
Marten could hardly think as he stalked away.
“Don’t be elitist, Marten! Or—Where’s the major?” he heard Beth ask someone.
Quirn! He couldn’t believe Molly was actually seeing him, maybe even kissing him. Rage flared within him. He hunted for the hall leader. Then he saw ferns thrash and he heard a muffled, “Stop. Not here.”
Hall Leader Quirn struggled to hold onto Molly.
Several quick strides brought Marten near. He yanked back the fern.
“Marten!” said the hall leader, his features a mixture of rage, surprise and drugged lethargy.
Marten lunged at Quirn.
“Marten, no!” Molly cried.
“Take your hands off me,” Quirn warned, who finally released Molly to defend himself. “I can—”
He never finished. Marten slugged him in the mouth. Quirn slammed against the wall. Marten grabbed the front of Quirn’s shirt and…
“You!”
Marten looked over his shoulder.
With her sidearm stunner, PHC Major Orlov shot Marten in the back.
5.
Each day the forty billion people of Sol III consumed billions of kilograms of food. The government’s nightmare—even before the civil war—was where to find all those calories. Earth’s environment was strained to the maximum and still there wasn’t enough to go around. A hundred of the solar system’s biggest gigahabs orbited the planet. On the gigahabs were fish farms, wheat farms, chicken farms and rice farms churning out food around the clock in order to provide the teeming hordes with their daily bread. Still that wasn’t enough. Beef had vanished long ago for the average man. Fish, chicken and rabbit returned more meat per bushel of feed than a steer did. Also, cows weighed ten times more than goats and ate ten times as much feed. Unfortunately, a cow only produced four times as much milk as a goat. For the same amount of feed, a goat produced twice what a cow could. For this reason, Earthmen in 2349 drank goat milk and ate goat-derived cheese.
Breakthrough food technologies became stopgap measures. Massive starvation would have occurred but for humanity’s creativity. “Necessity is the mother of invention,” went the ancient saying. And men invented with a passion in the area of food production.
In the end, one of the oldest foods in the chain came to humanity’s rescue. It happened partly for another basic need: oxygen. Near each major city gargantuan algae vats were constructed underground. In order to increase growth, powerful sunlamps burned every minute of the rotation cycle. Many names abounded for these life-saving, sustenance-rich algae a vicious, thick, goopy scum that clogged all known machinery. The nearest to the truth in terms of its rawest form was pond scum. Everything about this high-grade algae production required around the clock maintenance. From the heat flats, to the chutes that drained excess algae to the settling tanks, to the processing bins, the churn cycle and then the constantly cleaned canals that brought the vitamin-rich slop to the enhancing vats. Robotic machinery and androids cared for ninety-seven percent of the process. The last three-percent took flesh and blood workers in slick-suits slaving harder than any Egyptian had raising the pyramids.
The slime pits became one of the supreme teaching tools for Social Unity. Reform through labor, first raised to an art centuries ago by Mao Zedong in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, now once more came into its own in the middle of the Twenty-fourth Century.
For those who found normal social interaction intolerable, for those too thickheaded to understand the beauty of the system, well, a long stint in the slime pits often cured them of their pathological malaise. Perhaps as importantly, for the first time many of them performed a socially useful function. It wasn’t nice or easy. Sometimes, regrettably, workers lost lives to drowning, heat exhaustion, algae gorging, excess bleeding from torn limbs in the choppers, red-syrup lung, sludge parasite and a vicious form of black gangrene. Studies showed that unless the trainees bonded quickly with their counselors, their probability for survival was minimal. Upon initiation, each trainee or student was encouraged to develop the proper work ethic and enthusiasm for his instructor.
Marten Kluge found himself placed among the incorrigibles, due in large measure to Major Orlov backing up Hall Leader Quirn’s testimonial. No one thought Marten’s odds very good for survival, least of all Marten Kluge. But he’d be damned if he were going to just lie down and die.
6.
For four days, Marten Kluge uttered no word to anybody. They cut his rations in half, quartered them, and then they told him he could eat when he decided to cooperate and talk. Stubbornly, day and after day, he kept his lips shut and his eyes peeled. His cellmates stole food from the refectory, he discovered on his fifth day after the judgment. On the eighth day, he successfully performed his first theft from them. The day they caught him started ordinarily enough.
