THE GOOD EARTH #2

THE GOOD EARTH

Saga #2 of the Planetary Roundtable

They built a home. Now they have to build enough for everyone.

The little community beneath the Glove is no longer struggling simply to survive.

The fields are producing. The dairy barn is busy. The sawmill sings through the day. Glass jars roll from the glassworks. The cannery waits for mountains of tomatoes, beans, corn, peas, beets, and carrots.

Earth has entered a season of abundance.

But abundance creates problems of its own.

Food must be harvested, preserved, bottled, boxed, stored, and moved. New families need homes. Craftsmen need materials. The pantry must grow. Every new success creates another job waiting to be done.

Samuel and Rebecca Yoder watch their community transform from a collection of survivors into something resembling a civilization again, but one built on a very different foundation.

There are no wages.

There is no money.

Everyone contributes what they know, learns what they don't, and shares in what the community produces.

Then Buck Rogers discovers something completely unexpected.

A forgotten carnival.

Its rides are silent. Its trucks have been sitting untouched. And among its abandoned machinery is Mike, a carnival worker with an unusual profession and some very large companions.

Elephants.

Suddenly the community has Ferris wheels, carnival rides, trucks, generators, a World War I Fokker triplane, and three enormous new residents with very definite opinions about cabbage.

Meanwhile, something beyond Earth is watching.

Alien spacecraft have appeared.

They aren't attacking.

They aren't communicating.

They're simply observing.

And as Earth's warehouses begin filling with things other worlds might desperately want, Samuel realizes their little farming community may soon become something nobody intended to build:

A marketplace for the planets.

THE GOOD EARTH: SAGA #2 OF THE PLANETARY ROUNDTABLE continues Robert Pummer's Earth Mover Universe, where rebuilding civilization isn't about restoring the world that disappeared.

It's about discovering what kind of world is worth building next.

And somewhere overhead, the customers are already waiting.