A Boy and His Tank Read Online Free PDF Page B

Kashubians to somehow support.
    There were plenty of automatic factories around, although they were mostly set up to build heavy industrial goods and metal components for the various luxury products in demand. While the automatic factories couldn't directly produce many of the things that were desperately needed, they could produce other factories that could make useful stuff, providing that the engineering and the raw materials were available.
    There weren't many of us with a technical background, but we could get the engineering done. Raw materials were the problem. We had almost no light elements at all. I helped design a factory that made growing lights for the food production tunnels, but sand had to be imported from Earth to make the glass. Copper for wires was available by the megaton, but the plastic to insulate the wires had to be imported. Plumbing was cheap, but the sewage in the pipe was vastly expensive and had to be reprocessed quickly. This forced us to use very small drain pipes that were constantly getting plugged.
    Some things could be improvised using local materials. We're pulverizing gold and palladium and using it as soil to support the roots of food plants. It's a lot cheaper than importing dirt. At least we don't have to build reflectors for the lights. The drilled tunnels are already bright and shiny.
    In the early days, clothing wore out and, being organic, could not be replaced except at huge cost. Long before I got here, a program was instituted to make nudity popular, and the tunnels were warmed up to compensate. There was plenty of waste heat available from the power reactors that were being built as fast as possible.
    Nudity caused fewer changes than would have been expected since even before it was instituted, the sexes had been absolutely segregated in both living quarters and in work situations. Nothing else had proved effective for totally stopping the birth rate, and the one thing that New Kashubia did not need was more people.
    That's what got me into trouble. At first, I was put to work with a crew stringing communication cables, which sure beat what they had most other people doing. The hydroponic vats could have been tended by machines, but not as efficiently as humans could do it. It was vitally important that every square inch of soil and light was used to support green plants. We were producing less than we absolutely needed to survive, and there was no slack at all. Most of our people spent twelve hours a day working as no Chinese coolie ever did for long. We couldn't keep it up forever. We were all losing weight.
    For entertainment, we had television and not much else. Tapes and discs could be sent from Earth cheaply enough, and we had a factory that built the sets. Home-grown entertainment mostly didn't happen. After working twelve or fourteen hours a day, nobody much felt like playing a violin.
    Most of us got to going to church a lot more than we had on Earth. When times are rough, people turn to God, I guess. Anyway, it started meaning a lot more to me than it had before.
    But like I said, I was put to stringing wires, when I wasn't pulled off the job to do engineering work. Communications and controls had to be installed throughout the living sections, since heat and ventilation had to be right or people died. The women's sections had their own crews, of course, but the systems had to tie together, and that's when I met Katarzyna Garczegoz, whom everybody called Kasia. Not you. The real Kasia.
    "Perhaps you should choose another name for me, Mickolai," the tank said.
    Stop interrupting. So there was this eight-inch hole, and I was feeding wires through for her to terminate. I had to tell her which wires were what, and naturally we got to talking, even if it was against the law. She must have been looking forward to the job, because she already had a way worked out where we could talk later, using some of the spare wires as phone lines, and that's how I got to spending my spare