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time, even though that was against the law, too. After years of only male companionship, even talking to a woman on the phone was worth the risk, something to spend the whole day looking forward to.
    What else can I say? I'd found the one woman that I wanted in all the world, and I don't even fantasize about anybody else. We fell in love with each other and we promised to marry as soon as we possibly could.
    So my personal life improved a bit, but things on the whole were getting worse.
    Despite our best efforts, some air and water were still being lost, around seals or even right through the metal walls. Everything is at least a little bit porous. Our losses weren't really all that much, but we weren't able to import much to replace them, either.
    Despite the most severe privations, and despite the maximum possible shipments of metals and manufactured goods back to Earth, the balance of payments was still negative, and interest rates were at an all-time high for the century. Projections showed that it would be at least two hundred years before we colonists could have a standard of living comparable to that which we had been forced to leave behind on Earth.
    Despite our fabulous wealth in metals and despite the vastly expanded system of automated factories, for a long time, life would be hungry, dirty, and cramped.
     
     

CHAPTER FIVE

LIFE ON NEW KASHUBIA
    I stretched as best I could in the confinement of my liquid filled coffin to get the kinks out of my muscles, and started back in on my story to calibrate my tank.
    "There were just too many people," I said.
    "Please subvocalize, Mickolai."
    Sorry. So if we could have had twenty or thirty years to build up slowly, the story would have been different, but as things were, we could never get ahead of the game. Everything had to be done on an emergency basis, just to stay alive. We never had a chance to make any really long term investments.
    Until somebody invented some sort of matter transmuter, New Kashubia was stuck. Only, nobody had the slightest idea how to go about doing that.
    Then somebody remembered that the Japanese had had a hundred people living on the planet for eighty years, and it was known that they hadn't recycled anything. They had to be dumping their sewage someplace, but the computer records never mentioned their sewage. The sewer just went into the metal and nobody could figure out where that line went! Our crude attempts at echo tracing yielded nothing. One group even drilled after it for two and a half miles miles, and they still hadn't come to the end of that sewer! The search for the fabulous hoard went on for years, but it was only found three days after we'd made our deal with New Yugoslavia, and we knew we'd soon have all the organics we needed coming in.
    I guess I've drifted off the subject. Are you still getting what you need, Kasia?
    "Yes, Mickolai. Just continue as you have been doing." Now her voice was not only warm and pleasant, it was downright sexy!
    "Thank you, Mickolai. Continue."
    So you can tell what I think? Even when I'm not consciously subvocalizing?
    "That's part of the purpose of this exercise. Remember that I'm just a machine. It's not as though another real person was invading your thoughts."
    Okay. I'll try to, only it's strange.
    So after four years of going further and further into debt, with no way in the near future to get out of the hole, the New Kashubian Parliament decided that there was nothing for it but to steal the Japanese slice of the pie.
    That's to say, to nationalize all of Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing Corporation's property on the planet and keep the profits it had earned for ourselves. On paper, this would put the planet on a break-even basis, and maybe even permit paying off some of our considerable debts. The whole thing was put to a public vote, and yeah, I voted for it just like almost everybody else. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
    So the vote passed and the total assets of the Tokyo Mining