The next morning I was up early, and walked to Kaufer’s News while the sky was still that vague gray color that won’t tell you yet whether it’s clear or overcast. The Blade had done the smart thing and printed extra copies of the morning paper—the stack in the bin was almost as tall as I was—and I watched three other people buy copies as I walked up the street to the newsstand. The Lakeland Republic flag snapped in a brisk wind from the flagpole out in front of the Capitol, and lights already burned in the windows. The Republic’s government had a long day ahead of it, and so did I.
Back in the hotel, I settled down in a chair and spent a few minutes checking the news. Most of the front section was about the war down south, of course; both sides’ naval forces were still duking it out with long-range missiles, and the Confederate advance toward Dallas-Fort Worth had begun to slow as Texan forces reached the war zone and flung themselves into the struggle. The presidents of Missouri, New England, East and West Canada, and Quebec had joined Meeker in calling for an immediate ceasefire and a negotiated settlement of the dispute over the Gulf oil fields; back home, outgoing President Barfield and president-elect Montrose would be holding a joint press conference later that day to announce something of the same sort. That last story made my eyebrows go up. The Dem-Reps had been sore losers in a big way since their landslide defeat a few weeks back; if Barlow had loosened up enough to appear on a stage with his replacement, things might have shifted, and not in a bad way.
There was more—another attempt at a ceasefire in the Californian civil war, another report by an international panel on the worsening phosphate shortage, another recap of the satellite situation that ran through a roster of collisions, and estimated that the world had less than three months left before all satellite services in the midrange orbits were out of commission—but I folded the paper after a glance at each of those and tossed it on the desk. I had a little over a day left to spend in the Lakeland Republic before catching the train back home, and most of that was already spoken for. Between talking to Marjorie Vanich at the university and Janice Mikkelson in her mansion, I had decisions to make that would affect the lives of a lot of people I’d never meet.
You learn to get used to that if you’re in politics, but if you get too used to it you land in trouble really fast. Half the reason the Dem-Reps got clobbered in our elections a few weeks back is that they’d gotten into the habit of thinking that the only people who mattered politically were the people who had the money and connections to show up at fundraisers and get their interests represented by lobbyists—and much more than half the reason why Montrose’s New Alliance swept the legislative races and put her into the presidency with the strongest mandate in a generation was that she’d had the sense to look past the lobbyists and fundraising dinners, and reach out to everyone whose interests had been ignored for the last thirty years. I’d played a part in that strategy, and the choices ahead of me might also play a certain part in determining whether Montrose’s victory would turn out to be a long-term gamechanger or a flash in the pan.
So I sat there in my room for a few more minutes, then called Professor Vanich to confirm our appointment and headed out to the street. A few minutes later I was tucked into the cab of a two-wheel taxi, heading northwest from the Capitol district through one mostly residential neighborhood after another. I’d gotten used to Lakeland habits by then, and so it didn’t surprise me that the houses looked sturdy and old-fashioned, with flower beds out front that would be blazing with color come spring; that trees were everywhere; that there were corner shops all over and little retail districts at intervals, close enough that people could walk to do most of their everyday shopping; that the schools didn’t look like prisons, the libraries didn’t look like prisons—in fact, I passed something I’m pretty sure was the county jail and even that didn’t look like a prison.
The houses got bigger as we went further from the Maumee River. None of the trees looked more than thirty years old—I recalled from some half-forgotten history vid that there was a major battle west of Toledo during the Second Civil War—and all the houses looked better than a century older than that, even though I knew they were all recent construction. I looked at them and mulled over everything else I’d seen over the last two weeks.
Finally the buildings of the university came into sight, and I had to remind myself that they were just as new as the houses. They were all built of white stone, with the sort of university Gothic look you see in the few places where colleges and universities managed to dodge the architectural fads of the late twentieth century and the bombs and missiles of the early twenty-first, and the trees and lawns and brick walkways reminded me of universities I’d seen in history vids. Back home, if you visit one of the universities that hasn’t scrapped teaching altogether and turned into a sports team franchise pure and simple, you’re going to find a ten- to twenty-story glass and steel structure where a couple of thousand students at a time file into big auditoriums to watch prerecorded lectures. One look at the buildings suggested that that wasn’t the way things were done here.
The cab let me off at a midsized white building with a sign that said RITTER PLANETARIUM. It took me a couple of tries to find the right door, but finally I got into the office and classroom part of the building, followed the directions I’d gotten from Fred Vanich, and eventually found my way to Dr. Marjorie Vanich’s office, a pleasant little space with shelves practically creaking under the weight of big hardback books.
“Yes, Fred told me about your conversation,” she said when we’d finished saying the usual polite things. She had thick glasses and a mop of mostly gray hair, and typical Lakeland clothing, a hempcloth blouse and a brown woolen jacket and skirt that had probably seen years of wear. “He mentioned you were interested in the satellite situation—I’d be happy to discuss that, since it’s been a major research project of mine for close to twenty years now.”
“I’m definitely interested in that,” I said, “but also in the university system here generally—and I’ve got one simple practical question.” In response to her raised eyebrows: “How on earth do you calculate satellite orbits without computers?”
That got a sudden smile, and it wasn’t the usual Lakeland you-don’t-get-it smile, either. “That’s something we’re really proud of,” Dr. Vanich said. “I can demonstrate that once I’ve fielded your questions about Toledo University and our universities here in Lakeland generally.”
It didn’t take many questions on my part to get her talking enthusiastically about the university system, and she didn’t mind at all that I pulled out my notebook and started jotting down details. The short version was that the Lakeland Republic, like everyone else, had its higher education system flattened by the Second Civil War, but they’d gone about rebuilding it in a completely different way.
“One of the big problems of higher education back before the war,” she explained, “was that the universities tried to turn themselves into trade schools for every possible profession. Want to be a police officer? Get a criminal justice degree. Want to be a practical nurse? Get a nursing degree. Want to be a garbage collector? Get a waste stream management degree—and yes, there were institutions offering that last one before things finally fell apart.
“So when the fighting was over and the Republic needed people to do every kind of skilled and unskilled job you care to name, an assortment of former university administrators got together and drew up a grandiose plan to build hundreds of new universities, and train tens of thousands of new professors, so that after a decade or two they could start turning out graduates in all the necessary job categories. The provisional legislature told them that the country couldn’t afford to wait for a decade or two, they insisted that there wasn’t an alternative—and then the Restos came up with a better alternative.”
“The apprenticeship programs,” I said.
That got me exactly the look you’d expect a teacher to give a bright student. “Exactly, Mr. Carr. The Restos knew that most teachers, lawyers, physicians, engineers, and the like were educated by apprenticeship in the nineteenth century, so they brought out a plan to do the same thing, and of course it was adopted. The university people kept insisting that their plan was better, but before long it became clear to everyone else that apprenticeship really was the best way to go for most of those things—and that’s when a group of professors who’d taught at prewar colleges went to the legislature with a proposal of their own.
“Their proposal took the same tack the Restos’ did. Back in the nineteenth century, you see, universities weren’t saddled with the kind of huge overpaid administrative staff they got in the second half of the twentieth, and they didn’t try to teach everything under the sun. They were mostly run by faculty senates and taught the scholarly disciplines, along with advanced degrees for specialists in medicine and law. So the professors drew up a proposal to relaunch higher education in the Lakeland Republic on that basis, they got the Restos on board with it, and the result was the higher education system we’ve got now.”
I nodded. “That makes sense. How much does it cost for an average bachelor’s degree?”
“In terms of cost to the student? Not a cent.” At my surprise, she smiled. “Entrance is by competitive examination, and if you qualify for admission and keep your grades above a C minus, tuition is free. We treat higher education as a public utility; it’s not that much of a tax burden because none of the universities admit that many students—the last thing any country needs is a couple of million people with degrees they’ll never be able to use.”
“Don’t you think there’s something to be gained by general education?”
“Of course! We also run public education classes, mostly nights and weekends, that are open to anyone. I teach astronomy classes here two nights a week, and run weekend trips to the university’s observatory in Defiance County—it’s tier one, so there are no streetlights and very few other sources of light pollution at all, and we’ve got a new eighty-inch Newtonian reflector that gives just stunning views of the sky. You’ve never seen what wonder looks like until you watch a class full of ten-year-olds get their first look at the rings of Saturn.”
“I bet,” I said.
“Now, as far as the satellite situation goes, probably the best place to start is with this.” She opened a desk drawer, pulled out something that looked like a complicated ruler with a long strip down the middle that slid. “I don’t imagine you’ve seen one of these before, but the rockets that put human bootprints on the moon were designed using them. It’s called a slide rule—think of it as a pocket calculator with no buttons. This one has scales for spherical trigonometry, since that’s the branch of math we use for orbital calculations.”
Two books came down from a bookshelf and joined the slide rule on the desk. “This one’s got trigonometric tables, and this one’s something we worked up here at U of Toledo, a set of orbital tables that factor in Earth’s gravity and diameter. With these three things and the places and times from two clear observations of an orbiting object, you can work out its orbital parameters in about twenty minutes.”
“Without a computer,” I said, shaking my head.
“Without a computer. The mechanics of orbiting objects were worked out back in the seventeenth century, and the equations we use to calculate orbital parameters were invented by Gauss in 1801. For the last thirty years, we’ve been refining our methods so that we can track any satellite or satellite fragment and predict its position as far into the future as we want. It’s been a great program, but it’ll be shut down at the end of this school year.”
I gave her a startled look. “Why are you doing that?”
“Because the space age is over.”
For a moment the silence was deep enough that I could just faintly hear the sounds of traffic on the far side of the windows. “Manned space flight was never really more than a stunt,” Dr. Vanich said then, “and the notion of putting colonies on other worlds went away once scientists found out that Earth is the only habitable body in the solar system with a magnetic field strong enough to keep off the radiation from the Sun. A trip from here to Mars and back amounts to a death sentence from radiation poisoning, you know.”
“I’d heard that,” I admitted.
“That left satellites, which do pay for themselves. The problem there, of course, was that nobody took the time to think about what was going to happen if we just kept on launching volleys of satellites every year into the same finite set of orbits. Even after the Kessler syndrome in low earth orbit kicked off in ‘29, too many people and too many governments insisted that there was no alternative to an ever increasing load of satellites in the remaining orbits—and here we are.” She glanced at me. “I cowrote a paper for Nature in ‘51, suggesting that it was past time for an international agreement to ration access to orbital space. You might find it educational to look up the dismissive responses I got. They were all variations on the theme of ‘they’ll think of something.’ I never did find out who ‘they’ were, but somehow ‘they’ never did.”
I pondered that. “The paper this morning said that the midrange orbits won’t be free of debris again for some appalling length of time,” I said.
“We did a series of estimates based on different initial assumptions. The average worked out to just over twelve hundred years, with a standard deviation of three hundred eighty years. The low earth orbits will be usable again in two to four hundred years, we’ve calculated.”
“And the high geosynchronous orbits?”
She shook her head. “Probably not within the lifetime of our species.”
I stared at her for a good long moment.
“That didn’t have to happen,” Dr. Vanich said. “As a species, we could have paid more attention to the future and less to immediate gratification—but we didn’t. Now certain possibilities are gone forever, and we’ll just have to live with that.” She shook her head. “I’ve cowritten another paper on that theme. It’s been submitted to Nature, too, but I haven’t yet heard whether they’re going to publish it or not.”
I sat there trying to process it all.
“On the off chance we’re wrong,” she said, “we’ve made sure that there are plenty of copies of our book of tables in circulation. Still, it’s a bit sad to have put so many years into something that is probably never going to be used again.”
We talked a little more about the satellite situation, and then I excused myself and left. I had another appointment to keep, and lunch to get before I kept it; Janice Mikkelson had said something about drinks, and I didn’t want to try to deal with that on an empty stomach. Still, there was more to it than that. Even though I’d been tracking the satellite situation for years now, it had never really quite sunk in that we weren’t just talking about a temporary thing.
Sure, I’d heard all the grand plans to use ground-based lasers and the like to knock debris out of the near-earth orbits; everybody has. Those sound really great until you tot up exactly how much electricity those would need to draw to make any kind of difference, and ask where that’s going to come from, when most of the world’s industrial countries can’t reliably keep the lights on in their capital cities when the temperature spikes. I’d heard the same line Dr. Vanich had mentioned more times than I could count—“they’ll think of something” —and of course she was right; whoever “they” were, “they” hadn’t gotten around to thinking of anything that mattered.
I laughed, then. Fortunately I was crossing part of the campus that was mostly empty and nobody heard me, because it wasn’t a pleasant laugh. It was the kind of bitter laugh that comes out when you realize the joke’s been on you all along. When Melanie said that progress had turned into the enemy of prosperity, I’d realized, she was understating the case considerably. If people hadn’t let short term interest blind them to hard realities, we wouldn’t be looking at the end of the space age, but we’d all just assumed that progress would fix everything and gone walking straight ahead into a preventable disaster.
One more preventable disaster, I thought. On top of all the others.
I was on the edge of campus by then, and the district of restaurants and shops you always find around a university was right in front of me. It didn’t take too long to find a place for lunch, and I took my time because my appointment with Janice Mikkelson wasn’t until two o’clock. A meatball sandwich and a green salad made a decent meal; I read through the campus paper—it was full of pieces on little intramural sports teams, but there apparently wasn’t an intercollegiate team of any kind—and then did a little window shopping at the places along the street.
I was familiar enough with the Lakeland Republic by then that the grocery store full of fresh produce and bulk grains and beans, the butcher shop wrapping meat up in white paper parcels, and the drugstore with a soda fountain down one side and a compounding pharmacy of its own in back, didn’t surprise me at all. The record store on the corner was a bit of a shock, though, because it sold actual records: big black disks in paper sleeves meant to be played on the kind of old-fashioned record player my grandmother still had for her old opera records. I guessed that the disks weren’t actually vinyl, Lakeland resource taxes being what they were, but they looked like it. No doubt one of the Lakeland Republic’s mad scientists had gone digging through old journal articles, the way Emily Franken had found her maser, and figured out how to make something close enough out of industrial hemp or some other locally produced feedstock.
By the time I got over my surprise it was time to catch a cab for Janice Mikkelson’s place. I flagged one down; the cabbie gave me a startled look when I told him the address, but he didn’t argue, and a minute later we were on our way, first through your typical student neighborhood, then through big comfortable houses, and finally into what was obviously one of the wealthier districts in the greater Toledo area. Finally the taxi turned off a winding road onto a circular driveway, and brought me up to the door of a genuine mansion.
The place was the sort of big half-timbered pile that makes you think of ivy-covered English aristocrats and nineteenth-century New York robber baron industrialists. I gave it a slightly glazed look, then paid the cabby and went to the door, and I kid you not, it opened right as I got there. The doorman asked my name and business in the sort of utterly polite tone that sounds ever so slightly snotty, which amused me, and then handed me over to some other category of flunkey in formal wear, who took me up one of the grandest grand staircases I’ve ever seen, down a corridor lined with the kind of old-fashioned oil paintings that actually looked like something, and into a big windowed room with a grand piano near one wall, an assortment of tastefully overpriced furniture, and Janice Mikkelson.
We shook hands, she asked about my preferred drink, and then sent the flunkey off to get a couple of martinis while we walked over to the windows. Down below was a formal garden, with a crew of gardeners doing whatever it is that gardeners do in late November; further off were trees, lots of them, and roofs at intervals, most of them large but none as large as the one over my head just then.
“Quite a place,” I said.
She chuckled. “Thank you. I try to set an example.”
I gave her a startled look, but just then the flunkey came back in with the martinis. Mikkelson thanked him, which was another surprise, and then we took our drinks and waited while he vanished.
“I’d like to talk business first, if you don’t mind,” she said then. I’m not in the habit of arguing with the very rich, and so I agreed and we spent half an hour discussing the prospects of selling Mikkelson locomotives, rolling stock, and streetcar systems to the Atlantic Republic.
“I’ve got one requirement,” she said, emphasizing the number with a sharp gesture. “If other transport modes get a subsidy, rail and streetcars get an equal subsidy, or they get treated as a public utility. If rail and streetcars don’t get subsidized, neither does anything else. Are you at all familiar with the way they handled funding for different transport modes back in the old Union?”
“Not to speak of,” I admitted.
“Roads, highways and airports got huge subsidies from federal, state, and local governments, and so did car and airplane manufacturers. Rail? Pennies on the hundred-dollar bill, and then the politicians yelled that rail was a waste of public funds and should get its subsidies cut even further. I won’t enter a market that’s run on those terms—it’s like gambling in a crooked casino. Equal subsidies for all modes, no subsidies for any, or a straightforward public-utility model like we use here for streetcars, I’m fine with any of those.”
“I’m surprised you don’t lobby for more subsidies than other modes,” I said.
“Not a good business plan,” she said at once. “Look at the way the nuclear industry’s tanking—everyone knows at this point that nuclear power never turns a profit, and the only thing that ever made it look economically viable was huge government subsidies.”
“Someone I know calls nukes subsidy dumpsters.”
That got a quick smile. “Nice. I’m not willing to risk my products going the same route. If what I’m producing can’t compete on a level playing field, no matter what gimmicks I use to try to hide that, eventually that’s going to bite me in the butt. So I ask for a level playing field, and my systems can match anybody else’s on that basis.”
“Do you do a lot of export on those terms?”
“A fair amount. Missouri’s gone to a no-subsidies system across the board, and they’re buying my locomotives and rolling stock as funds permit; they aren’t flush with cash, so it’s a few at a time. Quebec treats urban transit as a public utility, which works for me—I’ve sold three streetcar systems there since the borders opened, and my people and theirs are negotiating two more. East Canada? The car manufacturers still have too much clout to allow parity for rail, so no dice. The Confederacy’s still sore about the way the ‘49 war went, so they buy from Brazil.” She shrugged. “Their loss. Our products are better.”
“I don’t happen to know about the subsidy regime back home,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it. You’ve got some highway and airport subsidies and a lot of public funding for roads, but no domestic auto or aircraft industries and no subsidies for buying those from overseas. If Montrose’s people are willing to negotiate, we can work something out—and from what I hear, your urban transit is a disaster area, so her administration could get even more popular than it is by getting streetcar systems up and running in half a dozen of your big cities.”
All in all, it wasn’t exactly hard for me to figure out why she was the richest person in the Lakeland Republic; we talked over the possibilities, I agreed to discuss the matter with Ellen Montrose when I got back home, and the conversation strayed elsewhere.
When we got to the third martini each, I asked, “You said you try to set an example. I’m still trying to parse that.”
That got me an assessing look: “I was the first of our homegrown millionaires here in the Lakeland Republic—there’s a good dozen of us now, and there’ll be more in due time, but I was first through that particular gate.” She gestured around at the mansion. “Quite a place, as you said. During the Second Civil War, my brother and I—we were the only two of our family who survived the bombing of Toledo in 2025—we lived in the basement of a wrecked house in a suburb thirty miles south of here. We ate a lot of rat, and were glad to get it, and so I decided then and there that if I survived, I was going to live in the fanciest house in the state of Ohio, and all I’d have to do is snap my fingers and somebody would bring me a roast turkey, just like that.” She laughed reminiscently. “I got so sick of roast turkey.”
I laughed too, but I knew that she meant it. “Did your brother survive the war?”
“Fortunately, yes—he’s younger than I am, and wasn’t old enough to be drafted by either side until after the war was over. He’s a professor of political science at Milwaukee these days—he came out of the whole business wanting to know why it is that nations do dumb things. Me, I just wanted to get rich.” She sipped her martini. “And fortunately I learned an important lesson on how to do that and survive. Do you mind hearing an ugly story?”
“Not at all,” I said, wondering what she had in mind.
“This was right after the war, when I was working any job I could get, trying to put aside enough cash to start my first business. I got hired as day labor to do salvage on what was left of a gated community, west of here a ways. It was one of the really high-end places, where the very rich planned to hole up when things came crashing down; it had its own private security force, airstrip, power plant, farms, the whole nine yards.
“Now here’s the thing. There were sixty big houses for the families that lived there, and every single one of them was full of what’s left when you leave dead people lying around for four years. As far as we could tell, right after the old federal government lost control of the Midwest, the security guards turned off the alarm systems one night and went from house to house. They shot everyone but the domestic staff, took all the gold and goodies they could carry, and headed off somewhere else. That wasn’t the only place that happened, either.”
“I heard some really ugly stories from the Hamptons back in the day,” I said.
“I bet you did. The thing that really made an impression on me at the time, though, is that they didn’t shoot the domestic staff. All the skeletons were up in the family quarters. That told me that it wasn’t just about the money. There was a grudge involved—and if you know how the rich used to treat everyone else in the old Union, you know why.” She sipped more booze. “Rich people only exist because the rest of society tolerates us, you know. Have you ever considered why they do that?”
I shook my head, and she went on. “Part of it’s because we give them a place to anchor their unused dreams. Poeple here daydream about the rich the way that people back before the war obsessed about Hollywood stars or people in Britain follow the doings of their royal family. They’ll put up with the most astonishing things from the people they idolize, the people they allow to get rich and stay rich, so long as the rich keep their side of the deal. I could get by with a quarter of the staff I have here; I could get by without the four-star dinners with a big tip for everyone right down to the dishwashers, the big donations to every charitable cause in sight, the private railroad car with its own chef, for God’s sake—but that’s my side of the bargain.”
“It gives everyone else something to dream about,” I guessed.
“Yes, and it also pays one hell of a lot of wages and salaries.”
I took that in.
“They tolerate me because I live out their dreams for them,” Mikkelson said. “They can afford to tolerate me because I don’t let myself become too expensive a luxury, and they want to tolerate me because their sister’s best friend got a hundred-buck tip the last time I had dinner at the restaurant where she waits tables, and their cousin’s husband works in the garden down there for a good wage and a big bonus come Christmas, and a guy they know from high school just got promoted off the shop floor at the Mikkelson factory and is getting trained as a mechanical engineer on my nickel.”
“As I recall,” I said, “You get some pretty fair tax benefits from that last one.”
“Of course.” She smiled. “And I lobbied like you wouldn’t believe to get that into the tax code. Partly because I don’t mind being paid to do the right thing, and partly because I knew it would keep my work force happy. Half the reason Mikkelson products are better quality than anybody else’s is that all my people know that if the company wins, they win. There’s a stock ownership plan, bonuses based on the annual profit, plenty of opportunity to move from the shop floor to better-paying jobs. All of it gets me a break on taxes, but it also means that I and all my limited partners do better in the long run, and so do my employees and the union.”
I gave her a puzzled look. “I didn’t know you still had unions here.”
“Couldn’t get by without them. Of course we have binding arbitration on contracts—if my people and the union can’t reach an agreement, the Department of Labor sends in an arbitration team and they decide what the new contract will be—but the union does a lot of the day-to-day management of the work force. When I need to sort something out with my factory employees, I can pick up a phone and call the local president here in Toledo, say, and settle it in ten minutes or less. They’re not pushovers—the union presidents and shop stewards can be tossed out of office by the workers by a two-thirds vote on no notice—but they work with me. They know their jobs depend on the company making a profit, and the union funds have a big stake in Mikkelson stock and seats on the board, so it’s in our interest to work together.”
She turned toward the windows. “That was what nobody seemed to be able to figure out in the old United States,” she said. “You can cooperate and compromise, share the gains, and keep things going for the long term, or you can try to grab everything for yourself and shove the poor and the weak to the wall, and watch it all come crashing down. In world politics, the United States tried to grab everything; in domestic politics, the executive branch tried to grab everything; in the economy, the rich tried to grab everything—and down it came.” She glanced back at me over her shoulder. “I wonder if anyone thinks about that in Philadelphia.”
It was a hell of a good question, and I didn’t have an answer for it.