Interstellar travel -- Fiction; Science fiction; Television programs -- Fiction
"That's not right, Jed! I don't mind making money, but there are things
that are more important! Millions of people back home--hundreds of
millions of poor devils--spend their lives scared to death of losing
their jobs, not daring to hope for more than bare subsistence! I want to
do something for them! People need hope, Jed, simply to be healthy!
Maybe I'm a fool, but the human race needs hope more than I need money!"
Cochrane looked patient.
"What would you suggest?"
"I think," said Holden heavily, "that we ought to give what we've got to
the world. Let the governments of the world take over and assist
emigration. There's not one but will be glad to do it ..."
"Unfortunately," said Cochrane, "you are perfectly right. They would!
There have been resettlement projects and such stuff for generations.
I'm very much afraid that just what you propose will be done to some
degree somewhere or other on other planets as they're turned up. But on
the glacier planet there will be hotels. The rich will want to go there
to stay, to sight-see, to ride, to hunt, to ski, and to fly in
helicopters over volcanoes. The hotels will need to be staffed. There
will be guides and foresters and hunters. It will cost too much to bring
food from Earth, so farms will be started. It will be cheaper to buy
food from independent farmers than to raise it with hired help. So the
farmers will be independent. There will have to be stores to supply them
with what they need, and tourists with what they don't need but want.
From the minute the glacier planet starts up as a tourist resort, there
will be jobs for hundreds of people. It won't be long before there are
jobs for thousands. There'll be a man-shortage there. Anybody who wants
to can go there to work, and if he doesn't go there expecting a
certified, psychologically conditioned environment, but just a good job
with possible or probable advancement ... That's the environment we
humans want! Presently the hotels won't even be tourist hotels. They'll
just be the normal hotels that exist everywhere that there are cities
and people moving about among them! Then it won't be a tourist-planet,
and tourists will be a nuisance. It'll be home for one hell of a lot of
people! And they'll have made every bit of it themselves!"
Holden said uncomfortably:
"It'll be slow ..."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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