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CHAPTER THIRTY

Different Folks, Different Strokes
New Yugoslavia, 2212 a.d. 

Our new ally, Bellor, had been talking with the professor for over three months, and apparently, things were happening.

The most obvious thing to me was that a large, portable swimming pool had been set up in my garage. It contained a pleasant grotto where Bellor spent half of his time, and a spigot that dispensed the industrial strength booze that he preferred.

Agnieshka said that thermal imaging of the energy he generated suggested that he was metabolizing only six percent of what he drank, and chemical tests said that none of it was getting out into the garage, yet he didn't seem to be gaining any mass. He had been repeatedly asked about this, but he politely sidestepped the questions, and nobody wanted to press him too hard about it.

The Tellefontu refugees on New Yugoslavia had made it several hundred light-years from their home planet, but they didn't know if other fleeing groups had gotten to other places in Human Space. Some ninety-six of their diplomats had been sent to forty-eight human planets where their species might possibly have settled. It was expected to take years before these emissaries came back to make their reports. Each pair had an entire planet to search.

Agnieshka and her metal ladies had located twenty-eight tons of ninety-five percent ethanol on the planet. Only a small amount of it was really bonded Everclear, but Bellor said that he could live with that. At his suggestion, this consignment had been weighted down and dumped into the ocean at a precise geographical location. He said that his people would take care of it from there.

This would have raised eyebrows, except that the Tellefontu's first gift to us, the "ray gun that made things disappear," had been built in a prototype lab on New Kashubia. Soon, people were just calling it the "Disappearing Gun."

The professor himself wasn't too clear as to how and why it worked, but it did work. Our new allies kept explaining the basic principles again and again, ever more slowly.

On the other hand, the crabs were equally confused by our Hassan-Smith transporters. Our physicists said that our allies just couldn't grasp the basic principles.

Hell, I couldn't, either.

Our two races just looked at the universe differently, was all that I could figure out. Nonetheless, they could give us working plans for things that worked. And that was enough, in my book. Our smart boys would figure it all out eventually. After all, it took us a whole generation before many of us could understand Einstein.

It seemed that I was now mostly out of the loop, but that didn't bother me in the least. I had other problems of my own.

I had been assuming that the neutron bombs that the Mitchegai used were similar to the neutron bombs that had been developed on Earth centuries ago. This would mean that with a bit of warning, if I could fill the lowest level of the Loway transportation system with air, and get the entire population down there, I could keep them alive.

The specifications for the Mitchegai bombs that our crabby friends had given us suggested that we were off by a factor of about thirty. Their bombs could instantly destroy everything alive, be it electronic or biological, down to a depth of five hundred meters. And it wasn't realy safe unless you had at least three kilometers of dirt and rock above your head.

"Agnieshka, you and your sisters have a really big job to do. We are going to need a set of fallout shelters dug at least three kilometers down, and big enough to hold everybody on this planet, biological and electronic. They are going to need food, water and oxygen supplies to last them for at least two years, while we figure out a way to fight the enemy on the surface. And if we are going to keep the humans sane, we will need something for them to do down there, and some sort of entertainment. We will also have to make provisions for the Tellefontu. Get our technical people on it ASAP, and let me see what they come up with."

"Yes, sir. Does this mean that the social drone project is getting dumped?"

"Not exactly, but it has definitely become a low priority item. Sorry about that, but equality won't do you guys any good at all if none of us are alive."

"Yes, sir."

 

 

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