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operating. They had plenty of surplus food which they would be happy to trade for machinery and other industrial products. They had a normal, Earth-type solar system, with one habitable planet and a dozen more that weren't very useful except as a source of raw materials. On the moons of their outer planets, they had plenty of ice, ammonia, carbon dioxide, and all the other lovely things that New Kashubia lacked. They even had real dirt!
    What the Yugoslavians didn't have was a system of factories that were currently building stockpiles of modern weapons, whereas, they told us, we Kashubians did.
    This revelation took us by surprise, but a check with our computers showed that we, or rather our automatic factories, were indeed making and stockpiling vast quantities of war materials on a contract basis for the Wealthy Nations Group, just in case those worthies ever wanted to make war on anybody. See, when everything is far underground, and tunnel systems are many decades old and go on for thousands of airless miles, it's pretty easy to hide stuff.
    Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing had never mentioned these factories to us, and was in fact still collecting from the Wealthy Nations Group for the equipment being built and stockpiled on our planet. The factories and stockpiles were quickly found, but further searches yielded nothing.
    Our first thought was that weapons meant explosives, and explosives are all organic chemicals! A few million tons of organic chemicals of any kind could be reprocessed by our factories into enough food and air to put us on easy street, or at least above the bare subsistence level. Unfortunately, a check with the engineering specifications on the weapons shot this beautiful dream right down to the mercury zone.
    We had atomic weapons up the tailpipe. We had lasers up the kazoo. We had rail guns and magnetic launchers and every kind of energy weapon known to man, but no explosives. There were plenty of small arms, but not the ammunition to go with them. There were land mines, artillery shells, and hand grenades, but they were all empty, all waiting to be filled someplace else with the glorious organic chemicals that we needed but didn't have. Oh, there was a little plastic in some of the wiring, and a little silicon in the computers, but not really enough to write home about. We'd been screwed again.
    It was easy to see why the Powers that Be in the Wealthy Nations Group were building armaments on New Kashubia. It was cheap. All that they had had to pay for was some one-time engineering and the short-term rent on the automatic factories that made the automatic factories that made the munitions, plus some minor supervisory fees to Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing. Then, if they ever needed weapons in a hurry, all they had to pay for was the raw materials and transportation fees, most of which would revert back to themselves, anyway. And for the Japanese, it was free money, since at that particular time they had had automatic factories and raw materials sitting around with nothing to do.
    Our politicians decided that we owned the munitions factories, since we had already stolen everything that Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing used to own on the planet. If the corporation was still being paid by the Wealthy Nations Group, so much the better, since if we ever got friendly with the Japanese again, we could always subtract those Wealthy Nations Group payments from what we owed Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing. At least we could try, and we liked the Wealthy Nations Group even less than we liked the Japanese, anyway.
    The ownership of the weapon stockpiles themselves was perhaps debatable, since the Wealthy Nations Group had paid for the engineering and the production time, but not the raw materials that the weapons were actually made of. Nonetheless, everybody was fairly certain that the Wealthy Nations Group would not like their future property to be sold by a third party to a fourth and a fifth party.
    But after