Such a swerve of interest from swords to plowshares was undoubtedly a social improvement, but, at the same time, it was a mistake for the optimistic to claim it as showing a change in the human spirit. The human spirit continued much as before—95 per cent of it wanting to live in peace, and the other 5 per cent considering its chances if it should risk starting anything. It was chiefly because no one’s chances looked too good that the lull continued.
Meanwhile, with something like twenty-five million new mouths bawling for food every year, the supply problem became steadily worse, and after years of ineffective propaganda a couple of atrocious harvests had at last made the people aware of its urgency.
The factor which had caused the militant 5 per cent to relax awhile from fomenting discord was the satellites. Sustained research in rocketry had at last succeeded in attaining one of its objectives. It had sent up a missile which stayed up. It was, in fact, possible to fire a rocket far enough up for it to fall into an orbit. Once there, it would continue to circle like a tiny moon, quite inactive and innocuous—until the pressure on a button should give it the impulse to drop back, with devastating effect.
Great as was the public concern which followed the triumphant announcement of the first nation to establish a satellite weapon satisfactorily, a still greater concern was felt over the failure of others to make any announcement at all, even when they were known to have had similar successes. It was by no means pleasant to realize that there was an unknown number of menaces up there over your head, quietly circling and circling until someone should arrange for them to drop—and that there was nothing to be done about them. Still, life has to go on—and novelty is a wonderfully short-lived thing. One became used to the idea perforce. From time to time there would be a panicky flare-up of expostulation when reports circulated that as well as satellites with atomic heads there were others with such things as crop diseases, cattle diseases, radioactive dusts, viruses, and infections not only of familiar kinds but brand-new sorts recently thought up in laboratories, all floating around up there. Whether such uncertain and potentially backfiring weapons had actually been placed is hard to say. But then the limits of folly itself—particularly of folly with fear on its heels—are not easy to define, either. A virulent organism, unstable enough to become harmless in the course of a few days （and who is to say that such could not be bred?）， could be considered to have strategic uses if dropped in suitable spots.
At least the United States Government took the suggestion seriously enough to deny emphatically that it controlled any satellites designed to conduct biological warfare directly upon human beings. One or two minor nations, whom no one suspected of controlling any satellites at all, hastened to make similar declarations. Other, and major, powers did not. In the face of this ominous reticence, the public began demanding to know why the United States had neglected to prepare for a form of warfare which others were ready to use—and just what did “directly” mean, anyway? At this point all parties tacitly gave up denying or confirming anything about satellites, and an intensified effort was made to divert the public interest to the no less important, but far less acrimonious, matter of food scarcity.
The laws of supply and demand should have enabled the more enterprising to organize commodity monopolies, but the world at large had become antagonistic to declared monopolies. The interlaced-company system, however, really worked very smoothly without anything so imputable as Articles of Federation. The general public heard scarcely anything of such little difficulties within the pattern as had to be unsnarled from time to time. Hardly anyone heard of even the existence of one Umberto Christoforo Palanguez, for instance. I heard of him myself only years later in the course of my work.
Umberto was of assorted Latin descent, and by profession a pilot. His first appearance as a possibly disruptive spanner in the neat machinery of the edible-oil interests occurred when he walked into the offices of the Arctic & European Fish Oil Company and produced a bottle of pale pink oil in which he proposed to interest them.
Arctic & European analyzed the sample. The first thing they discovered about it was that it was not a fish oil: it was vegetable, though they could not identify the source. The second revelation was that it made most of their best fish oils look like grease-box fillers.