Greed

 

It can be said with more than a little truth that a society is lost when it loses its greed, for without hunger as a whip—for power, money or fame—man sinks into a blind sloth and, contented or not, is gone.

 

There were three distinct classes of men who made up the early vanguard into space—and they were all greedy.

 

First were the explorers, the keen-eyed, eager and dauntless few who wrenched knowledge from the dark and unwilling depths of the universe.

 

Next were the rangers, called variously the “space tramps,” “space nuts” and “star hobos,” who wandered aimlessly, looking, prospecting, seeing what was to be seen and wandering on.

 

And last were the exploiters, the hardheaded, quick-eyed and dangerous few who accomplished, according to a standard and learned work of the times, the “rape of space.”

 

Each had his hunger. The explorer wanted knowledge and fame and he often laid down his life in an effort to attain them. The space tramp wanted novelty, change, adventure and sojourns in the exotic humanoid societies or solitudes in the wastes. The exploiter wanted gems and gold.

 

Hard words have been used against these last and it has been charged that their depredations in the first days of conquest committed ravages upon new planets which hundreds of generations could not repair.

 

George Marquis Lorrilard, sometime lieutenant in the United Continents Space Navy—that pitiful handful of space guards—was an exploiter. The savage libels leveled at him in his days are leveled even now. In the kindest histories, he is “not quite nice.” And yet this man broke an impasse of Earth nations which threatened the future of all space conquest and planted the first successful colony in the stars.

 

He wanted wealth and he made no secret of it. A lean, hardy, ice-eyed man, Lorrilard knew his own desires and he attained them. Lesser men were afraid of him and yet, when one reviews the evidence, he never gave his own kind reason.

 

Often savage, always decisive and abrupt, George Marquis Lorrilard looms like a giant among his kind. He attained his goals. His fortune, wrested from brutal and inhospitable worlds, at one time amounted to twice the entire national debt of the United Continents and when it was at last dispersed in the reading of his will, it nearly wrecked Earth’s economy.

 

But if one seeks to envision him as a palm-rubbing skinflint, cowering behind underlings, one is wrong. Even if that is the impression vengeful historians seek to give, nothing could be further from truth. He commanded his own ships. He fought his own fights. And he died in the act of personal conquest in the stars.

 

Not too long after exploration had begun in earnest, men found that there was wealth to be had amongst the alien worlds. All they saw, then, was the portable wealth, the fabulous jewels and precious metals and elements, which lay either already mined in the hands of hapless humanoids or was to be had by the merest skimming of the virgin ground. Some of the tales told in these times are not exaggerations. It is actually true that there was an entire mountain of solid gold on Durak and that there was a ruby measuring eighty feet in diameter on Psycho. The humanoids of Darwin of Mizar used solid silver for paving. And into a thousand worlds went the exploiters, close behind the explorers, to extract their due with pick and gun. They fought animals, humanoids, men and absolute zero—some died and some received their pay.

 

Few had thought of colonies at this time. Overpopulation on Earth was serious, but the first efforts with Mars had proven so pale that thoughts of new human worlds were few. Earth, as always, was too engrossed in her own travails to think much, as an entire society, about the stars.

 

An invention had disrupted affairs entirely. And it was a sudden and stopping thing. Heretofore, nearly all research had aided space conquest but now, abruptly, the problems of the Universe had to wait. The Asian government had triumphed.

 

For many a long year there had been a single Earth, all properly patrolled and controlled by a single government. And the researches had become private affairs. Long sleep had lulled the salons, and the armor of their army and navy was almost sunk to rust. In the last year before the political cataclysm, the total United Nations appropriation for defense was less than one-tenth its expenditure for education, a thing which, while pretty, is not practical. And for a long, long while, the Asiatic races had slept.

 

Earth had, as we all know, several human races. But her most energetic were the Oriental and the Occidental. And the Occidental ruled and the Oriental endured. A country which had been called Russia had almost triumphed once. And then it had failed. Although ostensibly white, it was actually Oriental. Sunk into what it considered a trying servitude to the Occidental races, Asia struggled behind her hands and at length, with the One-Earth government grown feeble, struck with suddenness.

 

The wounds of a forgotten war had festered into a new invention. It was privately done. And it outstripped all the means of offense which could be employed against it.

 

It was a simple contrivance. We would call it very elementary now. But to Earth it came as a stunning reversal of affairs. It was a “cohesion projector.” By using the force which keeps electrons and atoms together, rather than the force which blows them apart, space itself could be made into a solid wall. In an instant then, from a single generator, a column several hundred feet in diameter could be projected upwards for several thousand miles. It was not an elementary force screen such as those in early use to repel missile rockets. It was a solid, if invisible, wall. With a slightly greater frequency, it could have made matter, but they did not know that then and, indeed, did not find it out for another five hundred years.

 

With cunning handicraft, the Asian races, under the direction of the ex-federation of Russia, constructed their thousands of generators, passed them secretly to proper points for installation and suddenly announced, with the murder of all the United Nations garrisons within the boundaries of Asia, that they were free from the remainder of the world.

 

A dozen violent attacks against the rebels ended in defeat for the United Nations. The remaining political entities outside this barrier formed the United Continents under the direction of a major country in North America.

 

At first no one supposed that any great harm would come of this. The Asians knew better than to attack such excellent missile weapons as the United Continents had, and the United Continents had learned with cost not to attack the cohesion barriers of the Asians. Earth was in a fine state of deadlock and consequent intrigue, and stayed that way for many years.

 

It was into this strange situation that George Marquis Lorrilard was born. He went to the United Continents Naval Academy, was graduated in the center of his class, was given a minor warship assignment and was forgotten about as a cog in the machinery of government. In due time, unnoticed in general but always admired by his divisions for his athletic skill and competence, he became a lieutenant and was placed in command of an outer-space patrol vessel, the State Sahara.

 

Only then did he astonish anyone.