CV

5

The perm section, Newland discovered, was very much different from the passenger area. Higpen met them at the entrance and walked beside Newland’s chair while Hal, silent as usual, walked behind. The corridors here were wider, and they were tiled, not carpeted; the apartments—they were not called staterooms—had draped windows looking out on the corridors; there were brass knockers on the doors. There was a fountain in the big central square—it was not called a lobby—and trees grew in tubs under the bright twenty-foot ceiling, and there was a playground with children in it. Higpen, obviously proud of his domain, showed them the church and the synagogue, the theater, the school, the dairy, the goat and pig farm. The animals were in neat enclosures; they came running to look at Newland and sniff his fingers. There were rabbits, too, and poultry.

There were many children, more than Newland had expected. There were Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and Sea Scouts; there was a 4-H Club. Everywhere they went, friendly people came up to talk to them.

Higpen took them to see the hydroponics farm, where endless rows of plants grew sturdy and green from tanks of nutrients: beans, peas, squash, tomatoes, onions, beets. There were long rooms full of dahlias, carnations, lilies of the valley. “We supply all the fresh vegetables and all the cut flowers for the restaurants in the passenger section,” Higpen said proudly. “All this green stuff helps with the air recycling when we’re submerged, too. We get four crops a year. No pests, no scale, no rust. Even the chemicals we use, a lot of them come straight out of the ocean.”

Next he took them to see the fishery. Newland could not go into the pressurized area because of his heart problem, but he was able to watch on television screens. He saw workers standing beside a vast trough surging with green water, from which nets brought up silvery flopping masses of fish, some bigger than a man.

“Those there are tunnies,” Higpen said. “Good eating. Those little ones, they’re trash fish, but we grind them up for fish meal and fertilizer. This is our big cash crop; we process and freeze about three hundred tons a year, over and above what we eat ourselves. We process krill, too, a kind of plankton, and make fish paste out of it. You may have heard that the Pacific is a desert; well, don’t believe it. You could make soup out of this sea water.”

From the fishery they went to Higpen’s neat apartment, where they met a friend of his, Yetta Bernstein, a stocky gray-haired woman. “What would you like?” she asked. “A glass of beer? Some wine?”

“I’d like a soft drink if you have one.”

She brought him a 7-Up; Hal accepted a beer. “Ben, and Yetta,” Newland asked, “how close is Sea Venture to being self-sustaining?”

Higpen shrugged. “Not very. It’s the passenger money that supports us—the profit from that is about twelve million dollars a year. Part of that goes into amortizing the investment, along with the government Subsidies, and the rest is paid to stockholders.”

“The perms are the stockholders?”

“Some of them are. Some just lease space here, and we’ve even got a few renters—people trying it out to see if they like it. If we didn’t have the passenger operation, no, we couldn’t come near paying our own way. We take in about six hundred thousand dollars a year from the fishery, and another five hundred thousand from the farms and gardens, but that’s a drop in the bucket.”

“How many people are employed in the fishery, farms, and gardens?”

“About four hundred, in the winter.”

“And you’ve got a permanent population of around two thousand? What do the rest of them do?”

Yetta Bernstein said, “They do all the things you’d expect people to do in a town of two thousand. We have a dentist, two lawyers, a bank and an insurance company. We have the people who own grocery stores and run the movie theater and so on. Ben owns a hardware store, and I run a book outlet.”

“But then you’re all taking in each other’s washing?”

“No, not altogether,” Higpen said patiently. “We have a lot of people here who are bringing in outside income. Several database firms, for instance. We’ve got a guy who writes novels—you probably never heard of him, but he makes a living at it, and that money comes into the economy. We’ve got a very successful investment advisory service. They do their business by satellite datalink, just like they would if they were ashore, and their people can stop off in Manila and Taipei and Tokyo to see for themselves what’s going on, and the travel doesn’t cost them anything.”

“Even so.”

Higpen nodded. “Even so, we’re not self-sustaining, let alone self-sufficient. Sea Venture is a prototype. To make it really work economically, we’d have to have a population of at least a million.”

“Do you think that will come?”

“Oh, I have mornings when I think it will. There are all kinds of plans and schemes. The one I like best is a flat construction that rides on the surface or just below it. It covers acres, it’s a flexible assembly of linked modules so it just rides along like a raft of seaweed. Solar cells covering all that area—there’s plenty of sunlight out here. It wouldn’t need the passenger service, it wouldn’t have to make any scheduled stops, it would just keep going around the gyre, around and around.”

“That’s a lovely word, gyre. It reminds me of Alice in Wonderland, or that poem of Yeats’—‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre. . . .’ ”

Higpen nodded soberly. “This is the big one we’re in, the North Pacific Gyre, but there are smaller ones you could get into if you wanted to. There’s one north of the Hawaiian Islands, for instance. Or you could ride back and forth on the North Equatorial Current and the Equatorial Countercurrent.”

Newland looked at him curiously.. “This is your dream, isn’t it?”

“Sure. Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, before I open my eyes. I've been dreaming about it and I think I’m there.”

Back in his room, Newland looked at the menu: there it was, an appetizer. Pâté de krill. He ordered it, and it was delicious.

How could any man discover his own motives, or confront them honestly if he did find them? Was it merely the fact that he was now too ill to go into space, the certain knowledge that he would never get there alive, that had made him begin to doubt the L-5 program to which he had given thirty years of his life? Or. to go farther back, was it the coincidence of his name that had turned him unconsciously toward thoughts of space colonization in the first place? He had known many such coincidences. Was it the fact that his own life seemed to him to have taken on a gentle descending arc, now in his seventh decade, that had made him wonder if, after all, there might be something to be done here on Earth?

He knew the arguments, for and against. He had used those arguments, in lectures and debates, too long and often to put any great value on them. He knew how easy it was, and how necessary, to convince oneself first in order to persuade other people. He had been a scientist long before he became an advocate, and he still had the habit of skepticism toward unproved ideas, his own most of all.

Then there was the logic of events. The first prototype ocean habitat was here; it had cost two billion dollars to build, less than three-tenths of a percent of the most optimistic estimate for the first L-5 colony: and that would have been only the beginning. Back and forth he went: yes. the benefits of a space colony would have paid back the original investment many times over by now. But there was no space colony, and Sea Venture was here.