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and Manufacturing Corporation on New Kashubia were seized. The stockholders of the corporation were paid in full for their property with New Kashubian bonds, but they were not happy with the arrangement. They had no faith in our ability to make good on those bonds, and maybe they were right.
    But doing what they did was the best way they had to make the bonds we gave them worthless bonds, it made our lives sheer hell, and I don't think that any of us will ever forgive them.
    Things had been bad. Now they got worse.
    For one thing, our previously shaky credit was now totally gone. Interstellar bankers were not interested in doing new business with a planet that had reverted to the horrors of Socialism.
    For another, we lost the engineering and managerial skills of the Japanese, who had promptly left for home when the seizure took place. Suddenly things didn't work so good anymore, and I'm sure that a lot of it was sabotage.
    And for a third, the Japanese launched a "Boycott New Kashubia" campaign, and the Japanese have an awful lot of clout.
    Export sales fell off disastrously, and there was some talk about the advantages of euthanasia and cannibalism.
     
     

CHAPTER SIX

HOW THE KASHUBIANS GOT OUT OF TROUBLE
    Then the Yugoslavians came to the rescue, arriving with tourist visas, the obligatory cameras, and loud clothes, but not fooling anybody except the inspectors from the Wealthy Nations Group.
    You see, the Serbian Yugoslavs wanted to go to war with the Croatian Yugoslavs, so the Croats were planning a sneak—excuse me— preemptive attack on the Serbs. It should be noted that both groups are ethnically almost identical. They spoke the same language, they had similar traditions, and they were racially identical. But the Croats were Roman Catholic Christians while Serbs were Greek Orthodox Christians, and that was enough to make them both want to go out and kill!
    I tell you that it was almost as dumb as what went on in Ireland!
    Do you realize that while they spoke the same language, the Croats printed their books using the Latin alphabet, while the Serbs used only the Greek alphabet? I assure you that they both worked very hard at not communicating!
    But while they were both determined to go to war, they both had similar agricultural economies, and neither one of them had an industrial base sufficient to build weapons more advanced than a crossbow.
    The Croats had heard that the Serbs had somehow talked the Wealthy Nations Group into selling them vast amounts of military aid. So the Croats came to us.
    What really made it interesting, from our point of view at least, was that the Serbians showed up a week later with the same story. We worked hard at keeping the two sets of belligerent "tourists" apart. Profits could get a lot better that way.
    My uncle Wlodzimierz lived in the bunk below me, and I got all the straight inside dope directly from him every night. In the first place, New Yugoslavia was a mere five light years from New Kashubia. We were practically next-door neighbors, as cosmic distances went, and only an hour and a half away by transporter, if such a thing as a transporter going between the two colonial planets could be built. It couldn't, of course. At least not legally.
    One of the lovely things that the Wealthy Nations Group did was to demand that all transporter shipments going from anyplace to anywhere else had to go through the Earth's solar system, to keep an eye out for contraband, to keep Earth people employed, and to insure that the Wealthy Nations Group got its considerable cut.
    But somehow, it seems that the Croatians had acquired the engineering capability to set up their own Hassan-Smith transporters. While they weren't eager to say just how they had obtained these designs, well, a certain amount of profitable smuggling was going on around the human universe, and New Kashubia was invited to take part in it.
    New Yugoslavia was an Earth-like world that already had a good agricultural system