Anderson, Poul The Unicorn Trade

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words to her.
I'd better not go in just yet. .
But the trouble wasn't Dad's fault. If things had worked out right, why, we'd be headed for Alpha
Centauri in a couple of years. Her and him and me The planets yonderward, sure, they're the real
treasure. But the ship itself! I remember Jake-Jake telling me I'd be dead of
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The Unicom Trade
boredom inside six months. "Bored aboard, ha\y, haw, haw!" He really is a lardbrain. A good leader, I
guess, but a lardbrain at heart hey, once Mother would have laughed to hear me say that How could
you get tired of Dad's ship? A million books and tapes, a hundred of the brightest and most alive people
who ever walked a deck
Why, the trip would be like the revels in Elf Hill that Mother used to read me about when I was small,
those old, old stories, the flutes and fiddles, bright clothes, food, drink, dancing, girls sweet in the
moonlight. . ..
Murphy's Hill?
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From Ganymede, Jupiter shows fifteen times as broad as Luna seen from Earth; and however far away
the sun, the king planet reflects so brilliantly that it casts more than fifty times the radiance that the
brightest night of man's home will ever know.
"Here is man's home," Catalina Sanchez murmured.
Arne Jensen cast her a look which lingered. She was fair to see in the goldenness streaming through the
conservatory's clear walls. He ventured to put an arm about her waist. She sighed and leaned against
him. They were scantily clad the colony favored brief though colorful indoor garments and he felt the
warmth and silkiness of her. Among the manifold perfumes of blossoms (on planets everywhere to right
and left and behind, extravagantly tall stalks and big
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flowers of every possible hue and some you would swear were impossible, dreamlike catenaries of vines
and labyrinths of creepers) he caught her summary odor.
The sun was down and Jupiter c!6se to the full. While the terraforming project was going rapidly ahead,
as yet the satellite had too little air to blur vision. Tawny shone that shield, emblazoned with slowly
moving cloud-bands that were green, blue, orange, umber, and with the jewel-like Red Spot. To know
that a single one of the storms raging there could swallow Earth whole added majesty to beauty and
serenity. A few stars had the brilliance to pierce that luminousness, down by the rugged horizon. The gold
poured soft across crags, cliffs, craters, glaciers, and the machines that would claim this world for man.
Outside lay a great quietness, but here music lilted from the ballroom. Folk had reason to celebrate. The
newest electrolysis plant had gone into operation and was releasing oxygen at a rate fifteen percent above
estimate. However, low-weight or no, you got tired dancing since Ganymedean steps took advantage,
soaring and bounding aloft mirth bubbled like champagne and the girl you admired said yes, she was in
a mood for Jupiter watching
"I hope you're right," Arne said. "Less on our account we have a good, happy life, fascinating work,
the best of company than on our children's." He squeezed a bit harder.
She didn't object. "How can we fail?" she
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answered. "We've become better than self-sufficient. We produce a surplus, to trade to Earth, Luna,
Mars, or plow directly back into development. The growth is exponential." She smiled. "You must think
I'm awfully professorish. Still, really, what can go wrong?"
"I don't know," he said. "War, overpopulation, environmental degradation "
"Don't be a gloomy," Catalina chided him. The lambent light struck rainbows from the tiara of native
crystal that she wore in her hair. "People can learn. They needn't make the same mistakes forever. We'll
build paradise here. A strange sort of paradise, yes, where trees soar into a sky full of Jupiter, and
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waterfalls tumble slowly, slowly down into deep-blue lakes, and birds fly like tiny bright-colored bullets,
and deer cross the meadows in ten-meter leaps ... but paradise."
"Not perfect," he said. "Nothing is."
"No, and we wouldn't wish that," she agreed. "We want some discontent left to keep minds active, keep
them hankering for the stars." She chuckled. "I'm sure history will find ways to make them believe things
could be better elsewhere. Or nature will Oh!"
Her eyes widened. A hand went to her mouth. And then, frantically, she was kissing him, and he her,
and they were clasping and feeling each other while the waltz melody sparkled and the flowers breathed
and Jupiter's glory cataracted over them uncaring whether they existed.
He tasted tears on her mouth. "Let's go dancing," she begged. "Let's dance till we drop."
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"Surely," he promised, and led her back to the ballroom,
It would help them once more forget the giant meteoroid, among the many which the planet sucked in
from the Belt, that had plowed into grim and marginal Outpost Ganymede precisely half a decade before
the Martian colony was discontinued.
Well, I guess people don't learn. They breed, and fight, and devour, and pollute, till:
Mother: "We can't afford it."
Dad: "We can't not afford it." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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