Leo Frankowski

that?”
    “You are at liberty to believe
anything that you want, sir. Just now I have
a job to do. If you go due west for two miles, you will come to a road.
Follow it south for three miles and you
will find an uninhabited tree house. I suggest
that you stay there.”
    “What are you doing out here, anyway?
I thought that all of you things were in
Death Valley,” Hastings said.
    “I prefer ‘LDU’
to ‘things.’ We call it Life Valley now. And I’m on a scouting mission. We’ll be coming through here
in force in a few weeks.”
    “You are a
trusting soul. May I have some more of that water?”
    “You may keep
both gourds, sir. As to being trusting, may I point out that the tree house I
mentioned is forty miles from the nearest source of water? Even if you were my enemy,
without mechanical transportation you could not go anywhere to harm us.”
    “Forty miles in
which direction?” Hastings asked.
    “South. But
please don’t do anything suicidal.”
    The LDU headed north
at a run.
    *
    Hastings eventually
made it to the tree house. He refreshed himself and got a night’s sleep.
    He woke shivering
with a fever and for weeks he wondered if he had survived the desert only to die in
the bowels of a plant.
    Now, a month after
being ejected from his plane, the sickness was gone and his body was again
strong. He packed all the food and water he could carry and started south.
     
    They had been
distributing food and water to people en route to Life Valley since morning, and
Winnie’s load was twelve thousand pounds lighter. But he had been designed to work in
tunnels where the temperature was held at fifty-five degrees, and fifty miles
from Flagstaff, the heat was starting to tell on him. He had been slowing down since noon and
now was down to trotting at only twenty mph.
    But Winnie’s
juvenile pride was involved. He was on his first big trip, and he wasn’t going
to let anybody think he was a softy. He unfolded one huge arm from the top of his
forty-foot-long body, wiped the sweat from his eyes with a yard-wide hand, and
plodded onward.
    His passengers were
similarly uncomfortable. While the heat didn’t bother Dirk, his burns still troubled
him, and
he was worried about Liebchen. The faun had put herself into a trance to better
endure the heat, and Dirk was gently swabbing her body with water. “It was
stupid of
me to have allowed her along, my ladies,” the LDU said.
    “I’m afraid
that none of us were thinking too clearly,” Mona said. “She’ll be okay.
Fauns are tough, and it’ll be dark in a few hours.”
    “It’s the people
that get me down,” Patricia said. “We must have passed ten thousand of them
today, and all we could do was give them a handout and directions to the valley.”
    “We’ll give the
worst cases a lift on our way back.” Mona took two frosted glasses from
the synthesizer and put one on the table in front of Patricia. “Buck up,
girl. In
a few months it’ll all be over.”
    “There are ten
billion people out there! We couldn’t feed them all when we had machines. We’ll never be able to do it now.”
    “Nonsense!”
Mona said, “There never was a good technical reason for famine. Even before
Heinrich and Uncle Martin got into the act, the Earth could have supported ten
times the people than it does today.”
    “Huh? There have
been famines for the last ten years.”
    “Figure it out.
Every day the Earth receives three point five times ten to the eighteenth
calories of solar energy, half of which reaches the surface. Now, if only one percent of the
Earth’s surface was planted with crops that were only one percent efficient,
you have fifty billion people on thirty-five hundred calories a day, enough to get fat
on.
    “Then figure
that ten percent, not one percent, of the Earth’s surface is arable and that some
natural plants are three percent efficient. We could feel one point five trillion people.”
    “Then for God’s
sake, why didn’t we?” Patricia asked.
    “Because we
never got our shit together. Uncle Martin blames it all on the ‘Big Shot
Problem,’ the fact that people in power don’t like to change the status quo, but his views on
social problems tend to be overly simplistic. You’d have to add in tradition, inertia, world trade agreements, greed, ignorance, and stupidity
to get a complete answer. Mostly
stupidity.”
    Patricia finished her
drink and looked up. Another group of refugees was just ahead.
    Winnie was slowing
down as Mona