Balance of Power Read Online Free Page B

probability, we had been charged with the task of finding out why. We knew that it wouldn’t be a simple answer.
    Before we had set sail, Nathan had warned me not to underestimate the importance of Attica in our series of scheduled stops. If we were to present a good case for the resumption of the space program, then we would have to take into account all six of the worlds at which we were supposed to call. Some of the situations we’d found looked very bad, some looked passably good. But each of the first four, he reminded me, was a unique case. Each of them might be set aside as atypical if the argument got very tight. But not Attica. Attica was typical. There were a lot of colonies like this one. If the debate were to come anywhere near deadlock—if the vote ran close—then our performance on Attica might well be the deciding factor. Here, our findings could be generalized.
    Our joint brief was to discover whether the failure of such colonies as this one was accountable to biological or sociological reasons. And whichever it was, we were supposed to come up with some plan of action which might avert future difficulties of the same kind.
    It was easy enough to obtain a historical map of the failure. The first few good years had brought in a good supply of food—enough to support more than half the colony in work that was not primarily productive—like building houses and locating resources: coal, iron, copper, oil, salt, etc., etc. All these things were accessible, and the colonists even knew where to look, thanks to the survey reports. But resources can’t be exploited with bare hands. To secure each supply the others were necessary. To get at the coal you have to have the iron, and to work the iron ore you have to have the coal. You have to work your way into the feedback loop, a little at a time. To begin with, everything is difficult—even making soap and brick and glass and cloth. It all has to be done the hard way. It continues to be difficult for many years, but with every small triumph it gets a little easier, and then easier, and then easier still...and then progress lifts off along an exponential curve.
    In theory.
    It had happened that way on Floria. It was happening on Wildeblood. But in both cases the process had received some kind of boost—unforeseen and with hidden snags. So far we had not found a single case where the takeoff had happened without some kind of extra assistance.
    The basic needs of a colony are simple: machines and power. Iron and fuel. With these, you can make everything else you need. But to begin with you have just one kind of machine—body machines, human and animal. Muscle power is the only significant energy reserve you can exploit, with what aid you can co-opt from wind, water and burning wood. The extent to which muscle power can be devoted to the difficult business of making the first machines and finding the first supplies of fuel is controlled by a simple equation: the amount of manpower required to produce enough food to maintain each man. If every man has to work full-time just to supply his own needs there can never be progress. If one man’s efforts can supply the food needed by a thousand, it doesn’t take long to reach takeoff.
    In the beginning, the colony’s food-making was efficient. Efficient enough. But after ten years it began to decline, and it continued to decline, as the local life-system reacted against the invasion. At a time when more and more manpower should have been liberated year by year in the cause of progress, year by year more and more manpower had to be returned to the farms and the fields, to clear and plant new land because the land already cleared was failing in its yield, to fight a long, long battle on the land already under cultivation. Insecticides became more important than iron; the selection of crops to find strains which could cope with the responses of the local life-system became more important than coal. The fight for survival