Empire Builders Read Free Page B

soon?”

    “Soon. A few decades. Maybe as soon as ten years from now.” He ran a hand across his forehead. “I think maybe it’s already started.”

    “You’re sure? Certain?”

    Freiberg nodded unhappily. “I’ve had half a dozen people check it out. It’s real. Floods, killer storms, croplands turned to deserts—the whole thing. All that stuff the environmentalists have been spouting for the past fifty years. It’s all going to happen, Dan. And it’ll happen so fast there’s practically nothing we can do about it.”

    “We’ve got ten years?”

    “Maybe more. Maybe less.”

    Dan sucked in a deep breath. He knew he should feel alarmed, frightened. But he did not. He was more annoyed than anything else. His mind accepted what Freiberg was saying; he knew intellectually that this was a real emergency looming, a disaster of incalculable proportions. But deep in his innermost animal being he felt no terror, no panic. The reality of this threat was too remote, too academic, to spark his emotions.

    And that’s the real danger of it, he told himself. It’s too far in the future to stir the guts, even though it’s close enough to kill us all.

    To Freiberg he said, “Haul your ass up here, Zach. I want to go through this with you inch by inch.”

    Freiberg nodded glumly. “The numbers aren’t going to change, boss.”

    “Yeah, I know. But there must be something we can do about it.”

    “Learn to swim,” said Freiberg.

FOUR

    THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC COUNCIL WAS headquartered in Paris, a city just beginning to brighten once again after the turmoil of the past few decades.

    Western Europe had found it much more difficult to digest Eastern Europe than even the most pessimistic economic forecaster had predicted. After more than four decades of stagnation and repression, the peoples of Eastern Europe shouted for democracy and freedom. What they really wanted was the economic well-being of their Western neighbors, the higher standard of living that they saw in the capitalist nations.

    But the capitalist idea of working hard was foreign to them. At first they demanded bread and meat and milk for their children. And they got it, for it was impossible for the West to deny humanitarian aid to their impoverished brethren. But quickly they began to demand the toys and trinkets of capitalist societies—without working to produce the wealth that could pay for them.

    A whole generation simmered in distrust and bitter animosities as slowly, painfully, the peoples of the formerly socialist world learned that it was the capitalists who truly followed Marx’s original dictum: “From each according to his ability; to each according to his work.”

    At last the Poles and Czechs and Romanians and even the Russians learned to work once again, learned to produce the goods and services that paid for their happiness. The Hungarians reasserted their marketing craft. The centuries-old hatreds between ethnic groups were subdued—but not entirely forgotten—in the new rush to obtain expensive gadgets and personal wealth. Now Paris was a happy city once more.

    The economic boom was partially fueled from space.

    Much of the wealth that allowed Europe and the rest of the world to prosper came from the energy, the raw materials, the manufactured products produced in space. From the Moon came raw materials for space construction and isotopic fuel for Earth’s fusion power generators. From factories in space came new alloys and electronics crystals, medicines and vaccines of incredible purity, solarvoltaic cells cheap and efficient enough to turn a family home’s rooftop into a self-sufficient solar energy generator. And hovering in orbit around the Earth, giant solar power satellites converted unfiltered sunlight into electricity and beamed it to energy-hungry cities and factories cleanly, without polluting the atmosphere.

    The economic boom that was just getting started was heavily dependent on this new wealth streaming