Spinneret

His grandmother had been a midwife in a small Southern Yemeni village … a village with a fifteen percent infant mortality rate.

Chapter 26

Suddenly, it seemed, it was autumn.

Not like autumn in Pe

Carmen's voice drifting up from below interrupted his idle reverie. "Aren't you supposed to plant a flag or something when you get to the summit?"

Turning back, he gri

"You're an aesthetic snob," she said, laughing. "Come on down; lunch is ready."

He scrambled back down the gentle slope and joined her on the spread-out blanket. "At least we won't have any problem with ants," Carmen commented, handing him a sandwich. "Eat hearty; it's the first batch of processed algae from the Flying Hothouse."

Cautiously, Hafner took a bite. It was pretty good, actually, though not quite up to normal California standards. The texture was about right, and it took no real effort to believe he was eating actual ham. "Not bad," he nodded, the words coming out mushy around the food. "Especially with, what, only a week of work?"

"Closer to two—you've been spending too much time underground lately. Of course, the processing'll go much faster now that all the bugs are out of the system."

"Yeah." Hafner took another bite. "Speaking of being underground, you haven't told me yet what you thought of the Spi

She shook her head. "I wish I had the words to do it properly. It's the most fantastic thing I've ever seen. Does that artificial sun actually track across the sky?"

"Sure does," he nodded. "Gives us a cycle of twenty hours of daylight to ten of night, presumably matching that of the Spi

She shook her head again. "I see now why you and Cris and the colonel were so dead-set on keeping the place out of the wrong hands—human or otherwise. I've been thinking—well, never mind."

"You've been thinking we were all going megalomaniac?" he prompted.

"Well … maybe a little. But I think I understand now."

"Good. Maybe it'll help you in your trade negotiations. How are they going, by the way?"

"Oh, business is booming. I've got six contracts in the stack, just waiting on the raw metal deliveries. I calculate that in a couple of years we'll have a shot at passing the U.S.'s GNP"

"And with a fraction of its population. The old oil barons will turn over in their graves."

Carmen was silent for a moment. "Maybe we should start figuring out how we're going to share all that wealth."

He frowned at her, trying to place that tone of voice. "You've been talking to Perez, haven't you?" he asked. "All that stuff about the New Mayflower."

"The who?"

"Oh, he hasn't sprung that one on you yet? He wants us to buy the Aurora or Pathfinder and outfit it for shuttling immigrants here from Earth."

She sighed. "That sounds like him: great with people but no head at all for economics. We could probably rent M'zarch troop carriers a lot cheaper than buying one of our own."

Hafner made a face. "Well, I hope one of you experts is thinking about where we'd put this flood of fo—flood of people," he corrected himself hastily.

"We recognize the problems," Carmen said, giving him an odd look. "We're not going to rush into anything half-cocked. What kind of flood were you going to call it?"

Silently, Hafner cursed his tongue. "A flood of foreigners," he admitted reluctantly. "Perez wants to recruit people mostly from the poorer Third World nations."

"And?" Carmen prompted, her voice studiously neutral.

"Well, face it—if that happens we original Astrans are going to wind up as a pretty small minority here. Those of us who came here because we wanted to are going to be flooded out by people looking for the ticket window to the galaxy's gravy train."

"Yeah. Maybe." For a moment Carmen gazed out at the waters of the Dead Sea, her forehead furrowed in thought. "I don't know what to say," she sighed at last. "It will change Astra—there's no doubt about that. We're four small villages that are going to become huge cities, and those of us who've sweated through the rough times are likely to get lost in the crowd, But we can't simply live here alone like—well, like the oil barons you mentioned. After all, it's not like this is profit from something we've done ourselves."

"Why do we have to bring all of them here, though?" Hafner grumbled. "Why not just give the money to them right where they are or something? Hey—that may be it."

"May be what?" Carmen asked, eyeing him suspiciously.

"The answer to our dilemma." The thoughts were corning thick and fast now, and Hafner fumbled a bit as he tried to keep up with them. "It'll be like foreign aid—better yet, like a new Marshall Plan. We can ru

"And how do you guarantee it goes to the people who need it most?"

"—with a clause to prevent—Um? Oh." The grand scheme seemed to explode into soap suds in front of him. "Yeah. Well … we could write something into the agreements, I suppose."

Carmen smiled sadly. "Half the countries that need that sort of aid already reject help that has any strings attached. Besides, the contract hasn't been written yet that someone couldn't find a loophole in."

Hafner pursed his lips tightly. She had indeed been talking to Perez, he decided; talking and listening. "It'd still be better than trying to bring the starving millions here," he growled. "Most of them don't have any skill except farming, and they sure as potholes aren't going to continue that line of work here."

"I know," Carmen sighed. "And I don't know how we're going to get around that.

All we can do is keep working on it."

"Yeah." Hafner looked down at the half sandwich still clutched in his hand. "So much for our nice, quiet lunch away from the universe," he said, shaking his head.

"Look, why don't we sort of back out and come in again, okay? Let's just enjoy our algae and the lovely gray-brown scenery and forget about politics for a while."

"Sure. I'm sorry I brought up the subject." Carmen smiled wanly and took a bite of her own sandwich. "So … what sort of gossip do you hear lately?"

They talked about people, the rate of progress of the Earth scientists, and other relatively i

He pretended to believe her … but as she drove off toward Unie he felt his own cheerful expression sag into a grimace. Just too dedicated to her job, he thought, shaking his head as he trudged toward his crackerbox apartment to await his earlyevening shift. Probably won't be able to really relax until this whole immigrant thing is resolved. Perez will see to that, I'm sure. The thought of the Hispanic infecting her with his own excessively liberal philosophy was more than a little a