They had to get a Hawvin company in to clean up the radiation around Denver– they did it with flying magnetic sweeps. Then the Chatovarians rebuilt that whole area, including even Jonnie's village.
There were no populations, so when they would finish a city, they would just seal up the doors and windows, put a caretaker crew in, and leave it.
Oh, well, Jonnie thought, when he saw all these empty cities going up, maybe somebody would live in them someday.
Ker took charge of the mine school in Edinburgh and the Psychlos that were left alive moved there and gave lectures and demonstrations. Absolute hordes of extraterrestrials were pouring in to learn how to mine their own planets and get the metals moving again. Ker pictographed all the lectures so the technology wouldn't be lost. He used Cornwall and Victoria for practical training and it kept him pretty busy, tearing around with Chirk who had the job of building up the libraries. Ker had a trick of wearing breathe-masks with the face of the race he was training painted on it. It made for friendlier relations, he said.
There was an awful lot of ex-Psychlo planets that had slave populations or people withdrawn to mountains, and the Coordinators were very busy running their Coordinator College in Edinburgh, showing former subject races how to get organized and prosper. Their enrollment was greatly assisted by the fact that the Galactic Bank gave much more favorable interest rates to such planets when they had Coordinators trained in Edinburgh.
The new Earth government claimed that Chief of Clanfearghus was King, probably due to the influence of Mr. Tsung's brother. This made Dunneldeen the Crown Prince, but from all Jonnie could see, neither the Chief nor Dunneldeen took his elevation very seriously. The government was very reluctant to pass laws and generally left things up to tribal chiefs in their own areas, intervening only when there was no other way to end a dispute among them. They were very popular.
Colonel Ivan, with the title of “The Democratic Valiant-red-army People's Colonel,” ruled Russia. Jonnie's village people helped him, and then some of the younger ones went back to America to try to get it started again.
Chief Chong-won and the North Chinese tribe made an alliance and began to build up China. Handicraft and silk for export handled their economic needs. They also had a cooking school that became widely attended, for the Selachees, spread all over the galaxies even farther due to their “neighborhood banks,” swore it was the best cooking anywhere, particularly for fish dishes, and were quick to finance any extraterrestrial who wanted to start a Chinese restaurant in his area providing he sent some cook trainees to learn how. There were usually more cook trainees in China than Chinese. They not only had to learn to cook but also had to learn how to grow much of the food. The extra labor and machinery boomed Chinese agriculture and fisheries, and, as Chief Chong-won remarked every time he saw Jonnie, which was often, starvation was no longer the main product of the Chinese. Jonnie often wondered how an extraterrestrial, who ate quite another diet, could learn to cook food he would never eat. But the power of the bank and the appetites of the Selachees were similarly wonderful.
Pursuant to wide galactic conversion to the decimal system, the bank distributed new issues of money. These upset Chrissie considerably: the coins and bank notes looked even less like Jonnie. She went on for some days about how they looked even more like a Selachee and even less like Jonnie. But Jonnie didn't tell her he had carefully maneuvered things in that direction: these days he could walk right down a street and hardly anybody pointed. A couple more issues and no stranger would know him on sight at all.
The bank in Snautch never did return their gold. When they built the huge new bank complex there, they put the gold behind armor glass in the main lobby with a multilanguage sign on it: “This gold was mined personally by Jonnie Goodboy Tyler and some Scots. He has left it with us because he TRUSTS us. So can you. If you start your new account today, you can reach through a slot and touch it!”
When Jonnie wanted some gold to plate the inaugural display model of a new teleport car Desperation Defense was now converting to build in Chatovaria, Dwight had to go to the Andes with a team of the old crew and open up a mine there to get it.
After the surveys on what people wanted were done by the bank as Jonnie suggested, the conversion of ex-arms companies to consumer products went very swiftly. Few of the Intergalactic patents were in any demand for a while. They found the people on civilized planets wanted pots and pans and such like, all of which were easily made and quite profitable.
The original emissaries were now becoming very wealthy and powerful and backed Jonnie's measures to the limit, even guiding their countries toward social democracy. Jonnie seldom attended their conferences, but they often rushed dispatch boxes to him to get his opinion on something. As they often told each other, antiwar was the most profitable venture they had ever heard of.
The Hawvin Commercial Intelligence Service circulated a secret report on the twenty-eight platforms without knowing it had been planted on them by the Galactic Bank. They had been chosen for the “leak” because they were the most infiltrated intelligence service in any universe. The report was rapidly and secretly relayed all over the galaxies.
It alleged that the original twenty-eight had been increased to fifty-three to allow for new nations and that the platforms were actually located in the seventeenth universe.
The report created a new flurry of antiwar. But it also created astrographic turmoil as it upset the stable datum that, as the number four when squared made sixteen, there could only be sixteen universes.
Immediate action resulted. Several scientific bodies began searching, not necessarily to find the firing platforms but to see whether there was a seventeenth universe.
The Democratic Royal Institute of Chatovaria did find an additional universe, but since it was just forming and had no evidence of sentient life in it, and since there was no trace of anything to put platforms on, it concluded it must be the eighteenth universe.
The seventeenth universe, containing the platforms, remains undiscovered to this day. And as Jonnie sometimes told himself, this was not hard to understand. It was in his head. He never built the platforms.
MacAdam had told Jonnie that quite a few of the old Intergalactic Mining Company reserve planets, even though habitable and currently uninhabited, were a drag on the market. So Jonnie, by special Selachee couriers from his own staff, secretly informed the original emissaries of different groups of planets on the list. They promptly made deals with the company and then rushed the planets into the real estate market with the slogan, “Enjoy peaceful, untargeted, suburban living,” and they made even vaster fortunes for themselves and their friends. They swore by Jonnie. Peace was one of the most profitable discoveries ever made!
During that period the only sour bit of news that came Jonnie's way was brought to him by his accounts staff. It had increased to two hundred
Selachees to keep track of his income. They told him that the Earth division of Buildstrong, Inc., was now the only company he had that was running in the red. All the rest were way up in the black. Jonnie said he'd have a word with its general manager and he did. He found that they had added to their payroll another two hundred thousand Chatovarian workers. The general manager explained they were not just building the burned Earth cities now but had branched out and were rebuilding all the others and had a two-hundred-year construction program they had all planned out and didn't want interrupted. Jonnie told him– and his six assistant general managers– that he was building cities for which no populations existed nor would exist in the next several centuries, and that they better start figuring out how to show a profit. They said they would. But in return, he insisted they keep on with their program. No, they didn't have any plans to settle Earth with Chatovarians; they knew that would engulf Man. It was just that when they got going doing some thing they built up an awfully big momentum. Jonnie thought it didn't much matter anyway so he forgot about it.