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would otherwise be doing?"
"So who cares if the Yugoslavian's planet-wide system gets done a few months late? They don't even
know about it yet, themselves! And who ever heard of a major engineering project getting done on time.
Remember Cheop's Law."
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"Cheop's Law?"
" 'Everything costs more and takes longer.' The Great Pyramid of Cheops went four hundred percent
over budget, and took twenty years longer than originally planned to build. The pharaoh kept changing
his specifications, moving his burial chamber around. Being two months late on something this big is
peanuts."
"Just don't get me sent to jail."
"You won't, not with us doing the accounting. And even if they did, they'd just put you into a tank again.
Wasn't that what you said a while ago?"
"Okay. Okay. What about the irrigation equipment?"
"It's all on order, and will be delivered within the month. I got our order pushed to the front of the line by
paying for it all in advance."
"What about the rest of it?"
"Forty thousand tons of soil development microbes, earthworm eggs, and so on are on order from the
Planetary Ecological Council's laboratories, with delivery guaranteed. They are also selling us the seeds
of a bioengineered version of rye grass, designed to build the soil in desert areas. Actually, the law
requires that we buy all of our seeds through them, and you don't want to mess with those ecology boys.
They come in with poisons, flame throwers and gamma ray generators if they don't like what you are
doing. The trees will take a little longer. Very superior trees are being cloned for us now, over three
hundred varieties of them, and will be ready for planting in two years."
"Very good. I take it that Quincy's ideas on pig farming are economically sound?"
"Yes, although our facility will be more productive than his, eventually, since we will have better trees
than he has planted. He was in a bit of a hurry, and bought what he could get. We recommend that one
half of your valley be dedicated to pig and hardwood production. The other half will be in dairy farming,
which will be tied in with butter, yogurt, and cheese production, rather than in selling fresh milk. Prices for
agricultural products are low on New Yugoslavia, and most of our products will be processed to be sold
off planet."
"Just as well, I suppose, since on New Yugoslavia, we might have difficulty explaining just where all of
this stuff was being produced. So the beef cattle will be moved out to the plain?"
"Yes. The most profitable method of cattle ranching is still to let the herds reproduce in a fairly natural
way on the open plain, and then to bring individuals in for three months of indoor fattening before
slaughter. Half of your plains area will be dedicated to a special high-protein grass, with salt licks and
watering troughs available for the cows, sheep, and camels. The other half will be for agricultural
production, mostly grains, for use as animal feed."
"Step back. Camels?"
"Arabs eat camels. There is a good market for camel meat on some planets."
"If you say so. We won't be producing vegetables at all?"
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"Only in your kitchen garden. Most planets produce their own fresh vegetables, in greenhouses if
nowhere else, and they aren't worth the cost of interstellar shipping. The New Yugoslavian market is
glutted. If this market situation changes, we can always plant them out on the plains."
"And no grain sales, either?"
"We anticipate both buying and selling on the local grain markets, as our needs for animal feed fluctuate.
But the highest profits will be in processed meat products."
"So it's pigs, cows, horses . . ."
"Horses, boss?"
"Yes, I'll want a stable of riding horses. Only a few dozen, and just for fun."
"Yes, sir. One stable of riding horses, coming up."
"And as I was saying before the interruption, pigs, cows, horses, sheep, camels, chickens, turkeys, and
fish, the last three to be raised underground."
"Not fish. New Yugoslavia is half ocean, and the strong tidal currents caused by its large, nearby moon
keep nutrients from settling to the bottom the way they do on Earth. Every square kilometer of those
oceans is richer than the richest fishing grounds on your home planet. Carefully selected Earth-type
aquatic creatures have completely dominated the aquatic ecology, with the result that there is a surplus of
high-quality fish on the entire interstellar market. The one exception is that lobsters have not adapted to
the oceans here, and nobody is sure why. We are digging the underground fishponds that you asked for,
but we expect to use them exclusively for lobster production. Since lobsters are scavengers, when they
are not cannibals, feeding them gives us something to do with the half of the other animals that you
humans prefer not to eat."
"Like the lungs, brains, and eyeballs. I see myself becoming the Interstellar Lobster King."
"There are worse things to be, sir. Anyway, all of this has to be carefully scheduled. The grass has to be
growing before we can bring in the cows. The trees have to be five years old before we bring in the
pollinating bees. The cattle have to be grown before we install the slaughter houses and tanneries, and so
on. Your first lobster won't go on sale for ten years."
"And not even then. I intend to eat it myself. But lobsters grow that slowly?"
"It's their exoskeletons, sir. They have to shed the old one every time they're ready to grow twenty
percent larger."
"Well, good. I'll be a properly educated farmer long before my ranch is in full production. Now then,
show me what your architects have come up with for my home, my mansion."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
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Visitors
We were interrupted by the doorbell. I answered it to find a thin little fellow with thinning hair and an
expensive suit standing in the doorway.
"General Derdowski, it is so pleasant to see you again. We met, of course, at your wedding reception."
At least that's what I thought he said, since he was speaking Croatian. I must have met a thousand
people in that reception line, but I doubt if I remember a single one of them.
Agnieshka came to my rescue by appearing on the screen in the living room. She never forgot anything.
"Dr. Sciszinski, it's so pleasant to see you again," she said in Croatian, then switching to Kashubian she
said, "Boss, you remember that Dr. Sciszinski is in charge of the Croatian Mental Health Services."
I suddenly realized that Agnieshka was talking in Kashubian and Croatian simultaneously, only it seemed
to me that she was louder in Kashubian. I guessed that she was somehow beaming the sound to each of
us in our own language. A neat trick, and one she hadn't done before.
"Yes, of course," I lied. "Please come in. What can I do for you, sir?"
"Well, I just had lunch downstairs with my cousin, who happens to be the Chief Justice of our Supreme
Court."
These people seemed to carry nepotism about as far as it could go. Well, it was their country, not mine.
"Yes. I had the pleasure of meeting His Honor a few days ago. Won't you sit down?"
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