Down on the freshly thawed plains of Planet One, five million miners were kneeling in the warm, sweet-smelling black mud, cheering at the top of their lungs.
“Pull! One, two, pull!”
Foreman Han Tie grabbed the thick emerald-green stalk of a newly ripened potato vine with both hands, planted his boots in the mud, and heaved backward.
POP!
Out of the steaming soil came a cluster of twelve golden-skinned Meat-Belly Giant Potatoes, each one the size of a winter melon and weighing a solid five pounds! Because the soil had been watered by the mineral-rich spring rain from the Solar Thermostat Array and heated from underneath by Ao Ming’s dragon-breath brass pipes, the potatoes had grown from seed-eyes to full harvest in less than forty minutes.
Even better, the warm skin of the raw potatoes was so thin and tender that when Foreman Han accidentally nicked one with his fingernail, rich, savory juices that smelled exactly like slow-roasted lamb leg with rosemary and garlic squirted out!
“We don’t even have to boil them!” little Xiaoxue gasped, hugging a five-pound potato that was bigger than her own head. “It’s already warm from the ground-pipes!”
Across all ten planets of Solar System No. 1, fifteen billion people—the eight billion original miners and the seven billion newly arrived space-refugees—were harvesting mountains of hot Meat-Potatoes right outside their cave doors. For the first time in three centuries, not a single child in the Frost-Rim Sector was crying from cold or hunger.
