“I don’t think I want to snitch a planet from these people.”
Amalfi didn’t answer; he knew well enough that there was no answer. The Okie city would never go aloft again. This planet was home. There was no place else to go.
The voice of the woman, crooning as she plowed, dwindled behind them. Her song droned monotonously over unseen and starving children: a lullaby. Hazleton and Amalfi had fallen from the sky to rob her of everything but the stony and now unharvestable soil. It was Amalfi’s hope to return her something far more valuable.
It had been the spindizzy, of course, which had scooped up the cities of Earth—and later, of many other planets—and hurled them into space. Two other social factors, however, had made possible the roving, nomadic culture of the Okies, a culture which had lasted more than three thousand years, and which probably would take another five hundred to disintegrate completely.
One of these was personal immortality. The conquest of so-called “natural” death had been virtually complete by the time the technicians on the Jovian Bridge had confirmed the spindizzy principle, and the two went together like hand in spacemitt. Despite the fact that the spindizzy would drive a ship—or a city—at speeds enormously faster than that of light, interstellar flight still consumed finite time. The vastness of the galaxy was sufficient to make long flights consume lifetimes even at top spindizzy speed.
But when death yielded to the antiathapic drugs, there was no longer any such thing as a “lifetime” in the old sense.
The other factor was economic: the rise of the metal germanium as the jinni of electronics. Long before flight in deep space became a fact, the metal had assumed a fantastic value on Earth. The opening of the interstellar frontier drove its price down to a manageable level, and gradually it emerged as the basic, stable monetary standard of space trade. Coinage in conductor metals, whose value had always been largely a matter of pressure politics, became extinct; it became impossible to maintain, for instance, the fiction that silver was precious, when it lay about in such flagrant profusion in the rocks of every newly-discovered Earthlike planet. The semiconductor germanium became the coin of the star-man’s realm.
And after three thousand years, personal immortality and the germanium standard joined forces to destroy the Okies.
It had always been inevitable that the germanium standard would not last. The time was bound to come when the metal would be synthesized cheaply, or a substance even more versatile would be found, or some temporary center of trade would corner a significant fraction of the money in circulation. It was not even necessary to predict specifically how the crisis would occur, to be able to predict what it would do to the economy of the galaxy. Had it happened a little earlier, before the economies of thousands of star-systems had become grounded in the standard, the effect probably would have been only temporary.
But when the germanium standard finally collapsed, it took with it the substrate in which the Okies had been imbedded. The semiconductor base was relegated to the same limbo which had claimed the conductor-metal base. The most valuable nonconductors in the galaxy were the antiathapic drugs; the next currency was based on a drug standard.