Chapter 14

The previous chapter may have given the impression that I was not pressing ahead with my campaign to spread humans throughout the galaxy. Well, that impression would have been entirely wrong. I was working with several other organizations to help them get colonies set up. It just was not one of those fire and forget type of endeavors.

Take, for example, my efforts to help Humanity First! Humanity First! has an unfortunate sound to its name. Despite the sound of a hate group, Humanity First! simply means that they are putting humanity first, ahead of narrow regional or national concerns. In other words, they don't care what your race, religion, or ethnic group might be. As long as you are human, you have a chance to take part in the grand expansion of the human boundaries.

I had found a planet orbiting around QR-179-47 that looked like a good prospect for colonization. There were no sentient creatures that we could find. In fact, as far as we could tell, the primitive plant life on the planet was the extent of it. The oceans were full of plant life, too, but there was no animal life there, even at the microscopic level. The air was high in oxygen, 24%, but the remaining gases were a mixture of xenon, argon, and neon, with low carbon dioxide and water vapor. I will say this, the atmosphere lit up beautifully whenever there was a lightning strike!

The people that Humanity First! wanted to put there was a group of disaffected African Americans who wanted to start a society where their skin color was the only one. Normally, I would not have associated myself with them because I abhor references to skin color as differentiating people, but they were committed, so I went along with them. It was kind of funny to me in that they were using the old Mississippi classification of 1/16 Negroid blood making you one of them. This made for some awfully light skins in the crowd, but I hid my grins and was outwardly placid.

They had 17,000 people that they wanted to move to King's Dream, so I figured that the best bet was to use the same ship, Noah's Ark, that had been used to populate Jenny. This would take 14 or 15 trips, but Noah's Ark was certainly up to it, so that was what I recommended to the colonists. They agreed, so that part was set.

We moved a preliminary group of 537 experts of all types and their families to King's Dream and gave them six months to see if living there was feasible. Everybody was happy with the 0.97 g. Their only complaint was that the year was a bit short, 281 days, and the days were a bit long, 27.43 hours. The orbit was nearly circular, so all we had to do to check on the relative summer and winter temperatures was to look in each hemisphere. They were acceptable, so Humanity First! was ready to buy into King's Dream.

Two sites, fairly close together, were selected and we started to move people in. Since there were no trees, or similar materials, to use for housing, the decision was made for the people to live in shipping containers. A standard design was worked out so that two units could be mated if more space was needed by a family, and we started moving them in. All of the units were a gray-black, the people could paint them any color they wanted after they were in place and connected.

As usual, some people thought that they were being discriminated against because they were forced to live in shipping containers, instead of regular houses, but most were convinced that this was best. The few that were not convinced were simply left behind. There was no time to mess around with cry-babies. The few others who didn't like what necessity was forcing on them were also left behind for the same reason.

In contrast to the Jenny colonization, these people wanted industrial capability right off the bat. We modified a container ship to move large items that would not fit onto Noah's Ark. Somebody wanted to call the second ship "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," but I drew the line at that. However, I did agree to "Camel Express." I could see long term applications for the Camel Express class, so we went to some extra trouble to work out all of the bugs on the first model. Sherry Bodine took particular pride in the final result with Camel Express.

King's Dream had rich deposits of iron ore, copper ore, and tin ore, so I could see an eventual business shipping finished steel, copper, tin, and bronze items from place to place on ships of the Camel Express class. One of the earliest trips was to deliver a highly automated steel mill. Most of the work done by humans in this mill was from in front of a computer display. That was the sort of thing that King's Dream needed, high value output with relatively small human input.

Their power needs were met by a combination of wind mills, solar cells, and nuclear energy. They went in heavily for public transportation, with personal transportation limited to bicycles and tricycles. A few electric powered trucks were used for intracity deliveries of major items.

King's Dream was putting a lot of faith and resources into high tech items. I wished them well and hoped that they didn't run into trouble. Their internal management appeared to be on the ball, and there was an emphasis on personal freedom, so they looked like a good bet. I saw them as a long term future customer. We should work well together.

So far, there were enough empty Earth-like planets floating around that we did not have to worry about conflicts with aliens over who owned a particular planet. We did find sentient beings on a number of planets, and we simply wrote those off to be dealt with later. Right now, we had enough prime planets that we did not need to poach on someone else's territory.

We found a planet that looked so much like the "Great American Desert" that I could see it being taken over by the Hollywood types for one continuous Western movie. The whole planet looked like one big field of grass. It didn't work out that way at all. Instead, a business conglomerate heavy into meat packing saw it exactly that way, but from a different point of view. They wanted to set up cattle ranches effectively covering the whole planet and pack meat there to be sold all over the galaxy to anybody who ate meat. Initially, of course, their customers would be limited to the few planets with humans, but surely there were other customers. After all, there were literally billions of other planets, and, surely, some of the dominant species must be carnivores who would like to buy their meat prepackaged. Our transportation costs were certainly low enough that shipment of luxury goods between planets would be feasible.

We worked with the meat packer and moved thousands of head of cattle to "Bar-B-Que" to take up residence as meat producers and breeders. Cowboys were moved in, along with their horses, but ATVs and pickup trucks were also shipped in.

Meat packing plants were moved in, too, but with a twist. They were mounted on large platforms with a gravity shield and a simple propulsion system installed. This way, the packing plant was moved from ranch to ranch so that the animals would not lose weight by being shipped.

Before long, the meat packer discovered that it was not cut out to raise cattle, so the "ranches" were sold to the cowboys, and they became independent operators working for themselves. The meat packer was gratified to find that the quantity and quality of the meat moved up by a significant factor.

As it turned out the human population also grew to keep pace with the growth of the cattle ranches. The cowboys had brought in their families and were producing children with as much enthusiasm as they were cattle. One day, Bar-B-Que should be an important planet in the eventual Empire of Man!

I had become so involved with the spread of humanity that I had neglected ET. I regretted it, but he was not able to follow me around when I made an FTL jump. For some reason, he lost his lock on my beacon at that point and was not able to pick it up again until I returned to Auburn. We never did figure that one out.

However, ET was not abandoned completely. Jenny made a concerted effort to keep in contact with him, and there was communication almost every day. Thus, when the idea occurred to me, she was able to bring it up with him immediately, which was a good thing.