Two billion years without being colonized . . . and then the silent emptiness of the radioways . . . the philosophers of the twenty-first century called it the Great Silence. They hoped the starships would find the answer.
Engineers exploring the smallbodies excitedly declared that they could get the lifemachines left behind by the prior race to work. There was room for a billion colonists out there, straight from the start.
Ten Billion Days And One Hundred Billion Nights Epub
Oh, we could wait around for a few billion years, till that distant time when most of the shells have cracked, and the universe bustles with activity. But by then we would have changed. By necessity we would indeed have become an ElderRace . . .
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If you stretch out the days of creation to a thousand years each, you still only have six thousand years. This is still several orders of magnitude short of the billions of years required by evolution and the big bang. And if we stretch the days of creation into billions of years, we create an even worse problem. Now, you have plants (created on Day 3) growing for millions of years without the sun (created on Day 4).
Keep in mind that the motivation for adding millions of years into the biblical account is an attempt to reconcile the Bible with long ages. But stretching the creation days into billions of years, results in plants existing billions of years before the sun. This position is neither compatible with the Bible, nor with the big bang/old-earth view. The existence of days (i.e. evening and morning) before the sun is not a problem for the biblical creationist since God had already created a light source on Day 1 (but the actual sun, moon, and stars were not created until the fourth day), all you need is a rotating earth for there to be evening and morning.
Tortha Karf, Chief of Paratime Police, told himself to stopfretting. He was only three hundred years old, so by the barestlife-expectancy of his race he was good for another two centuries. Twohundred more days wouldn't matter. Then it would be Year-End Day, and,precisely at midnight, he would rise from this chair, and Verkan Vallwould sit down in it, and after that he would be free to raise grapesand lemons and wage guerrilla war against the rabbits on the island ofSicily, which he owned outright on one uninhabited Fifth Leveltime-line. He wondered how long it would take Vall to become as tired ofthe Chief's seat as he was now.
Of the next four days, he spent eighteen hours each in that room,talking to six or eight hundred people. Some of them he sufferedpatiently if not gladly; they were trying to do their best at somethingthey'd never been expected to do before. Some he had trouble with. Theartisans' guilds bickered with one another about jurisdiction, and theyall complained about peasants invading their crafts. The masterscomplained that the journeymen and apprentices were becomingintractable, meaning that they'd started thinking for themselves. Thepeasants objected to having their byres invaded and their dunghillsforked down, and to being put to unfamiliar work. The landlords objectedto having their peasants taken out of the fields, predicting that theyear's crop would be lost.
He shook his head obstinately. "On Year-End Day, that'll be a hundredand seventy four days, I'm going to be handcuffed to that chair you'resitting in. Until then, I'm going to do as much outtime work as Ipossibly can." He leaned over and turned a dial on the map-selector, gota large-scale map of Hos-Harphax and increased the magnification andlimited the field. He pointed. "I'm going in about there. In themountains in Sask, next door. I'll be a pack-trader--they go everywhereand don't have to account for themselves to anybody. I'll have asaddle-horse and three pack-horses loaded with wares. It'll take aboutfive or six days to collect and verify what I'll take with me. I'lltravel slowly, to let word seep ahead of me. It may be that I'll hearsomething about this Morrison before I enter Hostigos."
He had to grant that, and maybe the morale gain would offset theproduction loss. And they did have something to celebrate: a fullhundredweight of fireseed, fifty percent better than Styphon's Best, andhalf of it made in the last two days.
Verkan Vall, his story finished, relaxed in his chair and sipped histall drink. There was no direct light on the terrace, only asky-reflection of the city lights below, dim enough that the tip ofTortha Karf's cigarette glowed visibly. There were four of them aroundthe low table: the Chief of Paratime Police; the Director of theParatime Commission, who acted only on the Chief's suggestion; theChairman of the Paratemporal Trade Board, who did as the CommissionDirector told him; and himself, who, in a hundred and twenty-odd days,would have all Tortha Karf's power and authority--and all his headaches.
Artillery--there was the real bright spot. Four of the lightfour-pounders were finished and in service, gun-crews training withthem, and two more would be finished in another eight or ten days. Andthe old guns had been remounted; they were at least three hundredpercent better than anything Gormoth would have.
Everybody howled at that. There weren't that many, not uncommitted.Swords flashed over the map, indicating places where they only had halfenough now. Contradictions were shouted. One of these days somebody wasgoing to use a sword for something besides map-pointing in one of thesearguments. Finally, by robbing Peter and Paul both, they scraped up fivehundred for the Mobile Force.
As a child, he had heard his righteous Ulster Scots father speakscornfully of smoke-filled-room politics and boudoir diplomacy. The Rev.Alexander Morrison should have seen this--it was both, and for goodmeasure, two real idolatrous heathen priests were sitting in on it. Theywere in Rylla's bedroom because it was easier for the rest of PrincePtosphes' Privy Council to gather there than to carry her elsewhere,they were all smoking, and because the October nights were as chilly asthe days were hot, the windows were all closed.
"But what are we going to do, Vall? We have a population of ten billion,on a planet that was completely exhausted twelve thousand years ago. Idon't think more than a billion and a half are on Home Time Line at anyone time; the rest are scattered all over Fifth Level, and out atconveyer-heads all over Fourth, Third and Second. We can't cut themloose; there's a slight moral issue involved there, too. And we can'thaul them all in to starve after we stop paratiming. That littleAryan-Transpacific expression you picked up fits. We have a panther bythe tail."
You don't call a man a hated name, not when that man,behind his mask, is capable of revoking the minutes, the hours,the days and nights, the years of your life. He was called theMaster Timekeeper to his mask. It was safer that way."This is what he is," said the Ticktockman with genuinesoftness, "but not who he is? This time-card I'm holding in myleft hand has a name on it, but it is the name of what he is, notwho he is. This cardioplate here in my right hand is also named,but not whom named, merely what named. Before I canexercise proper revocation, I have to know who this what is."To his staff, all the ferrets, all the loggers, all the finks, all thecommex, even the mineez, he said, "Who is this Harlequin?"He was not purring smoothly. Timewise, it was jangle.However, it was the longest single speech they had everheard him utter at one time, the staff, the ferrets, the loggers,the finks, the commex, but not the mineez, who usually weren'taround to know, in any case. But even they scurried to find out.Who is the Harlequin?
Jelly beans! Millions and billions of purples and yellows andgreens and licorice and grape and raspberry and mint andround and smooth and crunchy outside and soft-mealy insideand sugary and bouncing jouncing tumbling clittering clatter-ing skittering fell on the heads and shoulders and hardhatsand carapaces of the Timkin workers, tinkling on the slidewalkand bouncing away and rolling about underfoot and filling thesky on their way down with all the colors of joy and childhoodand holidays, coming down in a steady rain, a solid wash, atorrent of color and sweetness out of the sky from above, andentering a universe of sanity and metronomic order with quite-mad coocoo newness. Jelly beans!
Companies were soon established to develop the Gulf Coast oil fields. Many of them became the industry giants of today: Gulf Oil; Sun Oil Company; Magnolia Petroleum Company; the Texas Company; and Humble Oil, which later affiliated with Standard Oil of New Jersey and became Esso, then today's Exxon. Refineries, pipelines and export facilities became the nucleus of the major industrial region that began to form along the Texas coast around Port Arthur and Beaumont. The New Handbook of Texassummarizes the effect of Spindletop in this way: "The discovery of the Spindletop oil field had an almost incalculable effect on world history, as well as Texas history. Eager to find similar deposits, investors spent billions of dollars throughout the Lone Star State in search of oil and natural gas. The cheap fuel they found helped to revolutionize American transportation and industry."
The Permanent University Fund, which receives all revenue from oil, gas, sulfur and water royalties; increases in investments; rent payments on mineral leases; and sales of university lands, is one of the largest university endowments in the world. The mineral income on University Lands from 1923 through fiscal 1998 has been $3.146 billion. Investment return in the same period has been $8.163 billion. 2ff7e9595c
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