"Dar! You've been studying!"
"Huh?" Dar had looked around in panic. "I won't do it again! I promise!"
"No, do!" Lona bent over to look more closely, and Dar bad a dizzy spell. "It's about wave propagation!"
Dar glanced at his desk, irritated; waves were the last thing he'd wanted to propagate, just then. "Well, sure. I promised you I'd learn enough to run the factory, remember?"
"But I already taught you enough for that. This is above and beyond the call—and it's all on your own! Oh, you wonderful man!" And she turned to him, hauling his face up to hers for a kiss that was so deep and dazzling that he began to think maybe he was pretty wonderful, after all.
When she let him up for air, he gasped, "You keep that up, and I'll have to study all the time."
She did it again, then propped him up before he could slide to the floor. "All right, I'm keeping it up—and you! So start studying. Even when I'm around. Why didn't you before?"
"Uh…" Dar bit his lip. "Well, uh… I kinda thought you might feel like I was, uh…"
"Poaching on my territory?" She shook her head (her hair bounced so prettily when she did that!), eyes shining up at him. "Knowledge is free, sweetheart—or at least, the price is limited to how much studying you're willing to do to gain it. And the more you know, the prouder I am to be with you." Then she'd co-opted his lips again, to show just what form her pride took.
Well, she was body-proud, Dar reflected—and had a perfect right to be. She'd sure given him reason to keep his nose in the books when she was gone. He'd learned calculus and was beginning on some of the more esoteric branches of mathematics, and was almost up to date on wave mechanics—but that still left an awful lot he didn't know: circuitry, information theory, particle physics… "I wonder if I'll ever be able to learn it faster than the scientists are developing the knowledge," he wondered aloud.
"That is possible, Dar." Fess lay in the cargo hold, his computer plugged into the car's controls. "The rate of new discoveries is slowing down, on Terra. There are as many articles published as ever, but they are increasingly derivative. The number of original concepts published and tested declines every year."
Dar frowned. "Odd, that. I'd heard the universities were graduating more Ph.D.s than ever."
"True, Dar, but they no longer require truly original work for their dissertations. Nor will they—bureaucracy tends toward stability, and truly new ideas can upset that stability."
"Well, the Proletarian Eclectic State of Terra is bureaucratic." Dar frowned. "But its most prominent characteristic is that it's one of the tightest totalitarian governments ever seen. I thought dictatorships wanted research, to give them new and better weapons."
"Only if there is an enemy who threatens the dictator's rule, Dar—and PEST has no rivals for the government of the Terran Sphere, at the moment. Such weapons research as is done, is only a seeking after new applications of existing principles. A dictatorship does not encourage the discovery of new ideas."
"I can understand their viewpoint; I'm a little reluctant to try coming up with new ideas, myself."
"That is only because you know enough to know how little you know."
"In which case, I'll probably never outgrow it. Still, I'll be glad when I've learned enough to understand why Lona tells me to do something a certain way. It'd be nice to know what I'm doing, instead of just following her directions blindly."
"That will boost your self-esteem, Dar, perhaps to the point of developing the occasional idea or two, yourself."
Dar shuddered. "Please! I want to court Lona, not disaster. I'm not about to start trying to do things my own way for a long time, yet."
"I think you have Lona on a bit of a pedestal, Dar."
"No, I'm only awed by her knowledge. Well, maybe by her business instincts, too. All of her instincts, in fact…"
He stifled the thought. Later, boy, he told himself sternly. When she comes home. Let's keep to the business at hand here.
Unfortunate turn of phrase.
"Your attention is drifting again, Dar."
"That's, why I've got a robot pilot." But Dar reluctantly hauled his mind back to business. "In the meantime, if I don't follow Lona's instructions to the letter, our little five-robot factory will break down or start producing defective computers."
"True, Dar, and you will start losing sales."
Dar nodded. "No sales means no money—and on Maxima, no money means no food."
"That statement is true in any civilized society, Dar."
"True. But on an asteroid, 'no money' also means no water after we finish mining the ice on our own homestead—and there're only two pockets left, scarcely ten years' supply. And no water means no oxygen to breathe, and no hydrogen for fusion, which means no electricity."
"True—and, though our airproofing is very good, there is always a slight loss from day to day."
"Yes, and 'No money' also means no nitrogen or trace gases for the atmosphere, and no replacement parts for the life-support machinery. 'No money, no life,' as the Chinese say."
"I do not think Maxima is in any economic danger, though, Dar."
"Not as a whole, no." Dar gazed at the Ngoyas' house, off in the distance. It was a French chateau that could have rivaled Versailles. In fact, it was a copy of Versailles, on a smaller scale (but not much smaller). "The Ngoyas don't seem to be doing too badly. Of course, their factory is almost as big as their house, now." He could see its skylights poking above the ground behind the mansion. (That was the nice thing about ice pockets—when you mined them out, you had great underground chambers for automated machinery). "Their sales have to be over a million therms a year.''
"One million three hundred sixty-eight thousand, Dar. It is a matter of public record."
"Which means our income is, too." Dar winced. "No wonder they're being patronizing toward us."
"I still believe that to be primarily a matter of your perception, Dar. An analysis of speech patterns and facial expressions does not reveal any such attitude in any of your neighbors but the Laurentians, the Mulhearns, and the Bolwheels."
"Those are definitely the worst of them, yes.'' Dar watched a small mountain of a house come into view. "There's the Mulhearns' palace, now." It was Buckingham Palace, in fact—the Maximans were not shy in their pretensions. "Remind me to try to stay away from them."
"If you insist, Dar, though they are relatively harmless."
"Which means they won't harm me, if I don't come near them. Oh, don't worry, I won't insult them. They are human, after all."
"You must not sneer at your neighbors, Dar, if you plan to co-exist with them."
"Come on, Fess! You know I get along okay with most of 'em. I just don't particularly have a yen to build a palace in a vacuum, that's all."
"But you would, if you could surround it with atmosphere and a grassy park?"
"Well, maybe." Dar frowned. "There must be some way to enclose those mansions. Maybe if we built underground…"
Fess made a buzzing noise, the robotic equivalent of clearing his throat.
Dar looked up sharply, startled. "Was I drifting again?"
"Yes, Dar, and such speculation is to be encouraged—but within the context of the present discussion, I would like to point out that you are not entirely out of sympathy with the pretensions of your technocratic fellows.''
"Well, maybe a little." Dar frowned. "But then, I'm only skilled labor so far."
"Yes, and you have not yet begun your own dynasty."
The simple thought of offspring made Dar's head whirl.
"Town" was a cluster of one-story basalt buildings in three concentric circles; at their hub was a spaceport. The structures were almost all shops—ship repair, retail import/export, and recreation. There was even a small hotel mixed in with the three bars, but it was only for genuine lodging. The good citizens of Maxima were all engineers, scientists, programmers, and other high-tech workers; none of the women had the time, or the need, to be prostitutes. They had also been very successful in keeping professionals from moving in; the last entrepreneur who had tried it had been chained to a desk with a computer terminal which was hooked to an autochef. The 'chef wouldn't supply food unless the prisoner took, and passed, a computerized exam.