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Government could go under. Chaos and revolution could break out anywhere everywhere. Those men want a safe
retreat for themselves and their families. They've reserved Cylinder B for themselves."
"And they'll let the world collapse around them?"
"There's nothing they can do to prevent it, even if they wanted to."
"I don't believe that!"
"Well... there is one thing," Cobb said. "After the Board comes here to live, we can shoot anybody else out of the sky
when they try to come up here and invade us!"
BOOK TWO
June, 2028 A.D.
World Population: 7.26 Billion
The curse of the twentieth century was Nationalism, the antiquated and dangerous idea that individual nations are
entirely sovereign and may do whatever they wish. In international commerce, Nationalism led to enormous inequities
among the nations; the rich died of overeating while the poor starved. In international politics, Nationalism twice
devastated the planet with World Wars and was responsible for the long, bitter struggle known as the Cold War,
which was terminated only with the enforced founding of the World Government
Today, in the burgeoning years of the twenty-first century, the curse of Nationalism is still humankind's greatest
threat to peace, reason, and stability. Many benighted people would return to Nationalism and turn their backs on their
World Government. More importantly, many of the world's wealthiest individuals and corporations see the World
Government as a threat to their positions of wealth and power. They are entirely correct!
 Emanuel De Paolo, Address to the opening session of the World Legislature, 2028
NINE
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 Cyrus Cobb's office was like the inside of an insect's complexeye. It was a theater in reverse, with only one man
where the stage should be, sitting at a podium-like desk on a high, swiveling, plush-backed stool. Instead of tiers of
seats for an audience, there were tiers of viewing screens, dozens upon dozens of them, row after row, each showing a
different part of the mammoth colony. From where he sat, like some stern old Yankee schoolmaster, with his stubble of
white hair catching the screens' light like a miniature halo, Cobb could see virtually every public area of Island One.
A pair of technicians were replacing a cracked pane in the huge windows that ran the length of the colony. A
meteorite no bigger than a grain of sand had grazed the pane. Automatic sensors had alerted the repair crew, which
worked full-time keeping the windows airtight and clear.
Electrically powered harvesting machines, were clanking down a long row of corn, their multijointed arms plucking the
ripe ears from the stalks, other attachments cutting down the emptied stalks and mulching them.
A teenaged girl was soaring in a bright red-and-yellow hang glider, spiraling upward toward the center line of the vast
cylinder, where the spin-induced gravity was effectively zero and she could float easily until she got hungry enough
to come back to the ground.
One of the automated processing plants, out among the work pods, was silently and efficiently vaporizing a ton of
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BEN BOVA " 122
lunar rocks and converting the gaseous chemicals into antibiotics and immunological agents for sale back on Earth. A
lone supervisor sat at a bank of controls and looked at yawning the inhumanly complex spiderwork of metal and
glass. The plant's computer kept a microsecond-by-microsecond watch over every gram of material and erg of energy
used by the plant.
Down in the lower left area of his theater-office, five of Cobb's screens showed views of the lush tropical scenery of
Cylinder B. Nothing moved there. Not yet.
Cobb himself hardly glanced at the screens. They were so much a part of him that he could sense when all was well
and when something out of the ordinary was happening, something that needed his attention.
He was dictating into his desktop communicator: "... no matter what the World Government thinks they have a right to
do, or how much pressure they put on us. We will permit no repeat, no inspection tours of this colony by any
repeat,any  representative of the World Government whatsoever. The real problem is not so much their official
requests; it's their unofficial attempts at espionage...."
He looked up at a viewscreen perched near the ceiling. David was on his electrobike, racing pell-mell down the dirt
road that led to the Administrative Center building.
Cobb almost smiled, then glanced at the digital clock set into the desktop. He resumed dictating his memo.
Exactly fourteen minutes later, the red light flashed on the communicator's tiny box. Cobb touched it, then asked
gruffly, "What is it?"
"It's me." David's flustered, worried face filled the viewscreen that was dead center of Cobb's desk. "I'm here in your
outer office. I've got to talk with you."
"I know," Cobb said, looking at the boy from beneath his shaggy white brows. "Make yourself comfortable. I'll be out
in a minute or so."
The outer office was for show, for receiving visitors and chatting quietly without the viewscreens staring at you like a
thousand curious eyes. Cobb had no secretary, no assistants, no staff of flunkies cluttering up his Directorate. Why
COLONY " 123
Page 69
 waste valuable human minds in tasks that computers could handle so well? Typing, filing, sending messages, finding
people by phone, searching the data files for information computers did that better than people could, without
coffee breaks, calling in sick, asking for raises, or boredom.
Visitors were often surprised that they had to announce themselves to the Director of Island One. No leggy secretary
to smile at them. No officious assistant to make them wait while he decided if The Boss was ready to receive them. You
just came into the outer office and picked up the phone for yourself.
It was a plush-enough office: suede-covered couches and chairs gleaming with aluminum and chrome; handsome
three-dimensional pictures of Island One's construction days on the walls; thick carpet manufactured in the colony; a
room of warm browns and reds, with a few highlights of yellow.
Cobb let the door click shut loudly enough to make David whirl about and face him.
"What's your problem, son?"
For a moment, David didn't know what to say, where to begin.
"I've checked the standard Forecasts ... the overall picture ..."
Nodding, Cobb said, "And you found that I was telling you the truth. The world's heading for superdisaster as fast as
it can get there."
"It's starting already!"
"That's right."
"And I never saw it," David said, dropping onto one of the couches. "I'm one helluva Forecaster, aren't I?"
Cobb went over and sat beside him. "I've kept your nose pretty close to the grindstone, son. It's my fault as much as
yours. You can't see the Big Picture when you're hunting down the Gross National Product of Bolivia and
cross-indexing it with ..."
"I saw all the data," David said. "I had it all at my fingertips. But I never put it together before."
"Maybe you didn't want to," Cobb suggested. "It's pretty scarifying, isn't it?"
BEN BOVA " 124
David looked into his craggy, weathered face. "We've got to do something about it." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]