"Golden Trabant" (1960/r1965/1966)
- Jon Nelson
- 2 hours ago
- 7 min read
If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity. Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, “What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.” — Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, Book IV, Chapter 4
Things came back to normal in about three years. The shrews had killed each other, and the wise rats once more ran the warren. The new fortunes tottered and fell back into the bags of the old.
“There’s a couple angles to pursue here, for those with the inclination.” — Andrew Ferguson
Another angle.
It is 1965 and Lafferty revises an earlier story for the sf market that has opened to him. It is a story about a powerful, shadowy circle of international financiers and a small commission of currency authorities. They identify a systemic threat to global financial stability. The threat is a disrupted gold supply. The disruption comes from the clandestine release of extraterrestrial gold. The Commonwealth of San Simeon, a small nation, is liquidating high-purity metal mined from the asteroid Golden Trabant. The influx undermines gold’s scarcity. That scarcity underpins monetary control. Its erosion threatens established credit systems by which the financiers control ordinary people. To keep control, the group strikes! They radiologically contaminate the asteroid. The contamination ends its commercial viability. The asteroid is reclassified as hazardous and is now called Venenatus. Lafferty describes the intervention:
It was time for oblique measures, and they were found. The effect of the gold on the world had not really been bad. The effect on most people had been marvelous. But there was a small group that had always borne the burden of currency decisions. They were made nervous by this unbridled activity. Their hold was slipping. They took measures . . . They killed Trabant.
No one reads “Golden Trabant” this way, yet it is what happens in the story. There is a “dog that didn’t bark” to all this: "Golden Trabant" contains little antisemitic coding, yet it advances a conspiratorial plot about international finance—the conspiracy tradition in which global finance is imagined through tropes historically associated with Jews, and it uses the imagery of high finance and vermin. Of course, there is nothing new about calling Jews parasites. Martin Luther's On the Jews and Their Lies (Von den Jüden und iren Lügen) is one of the seminal statements. Luther wrote, "Such a despairing, evil, poisonous thing it is with these Jews who these 1400 years have been and still are our plague, pestilence, and all misfortune."
Hilaire Belloc’s The Jews largely avoids the question of the gold supply, but nonetheless expresses anxiety about Jews’ alleged manipulation of silver. Regarding gold, it points readers to Henry Ford. “It is enough to say,” Belloc writes, “that there is behind the reaction against the Jew in that country a growing intensity of feeling with which we, as yet, in Western Europe, for all the advance we have made in the matter, are unfamiliar. If a test be required, contrast the silence about the Jews in ’96, during Bryan’s great attack upon the gold standard, with the work of Mr. Ford and all that he stands for to-day!”
Belloc is here referring to Henry Ford's notorious Dearborn Independent articles. They were later collected as The International Jew (1920) and became an anti-semitic classic. Ford argues, amongst much else, that Jews control and manipulate the gold supply and, through it, manage international finance and, by extension, the credit system. Ford is unambiguous that gold is a major part of the power structure of international Jewry:
When the Jews were free in Spain, there was the world’s gold center. When Spain drove out the Jews, Spain lost her financial leadership and has never regained it. Students of the economic history of Europe have always been puzzled to discover why the center of trade should have shifted from Spain, Portugal and Italy, up to the northern countries of Holland, Germany and England. They have sought for the cause in many things, but none seemed to be completely explanatory. When it is shown that the change was coincident with the expulsion of the Jews from the South and their flight to the North, when it is known that upon the Jews’ arrival the northern countries began a commercial life which has flourished to our day, the explanation does not seem difficult. Time and again it has been proved to be the fact that when the Jews were forced to move, the center of the world’s precious metals moved with them.
In this context, “Golden Trabant” draws on Spanish and New World imaginaries of gold inherited from the Age of Exploration.
When "Golden Trabant" refers to international financiers as "the wise rats," one ought to ask, why rats? Lafferty gives the reader an extended parable about it. A shrew put into a warren of rats is smaller than any of the rats and outnumbered by hundreds, but it will eat them alive. Given time, the shrew will eat them all. But if the warren is big enough, the shrew can be contained. Some of the rats will know and be politically savvy enough to go out and hire shrews of their own. The hired shrews kill the first shrew. The warren survives. After this, the wise rats are still in charge. They were never in danger from the shrews. Daniel Otto Jack Petersen has pointed out that some of Lafferty's ideas lie beneath the surface in ways that are difficult to discuss. In my mind, "Golden Trabant" is a great case study for how this works.
With that in place, the plot.
The main character in “Golden Trabant” is an Irishman operating under the false Hungarian name Arpad Szild, an allusion to the physicist Leo Szilard. Patrick T. K., a specialized gold dealer, acquires from Szild a 120-pound lump of unusual green-tinted gold. Patrick is a sly merchant, and he immediately recognizes that the metal is extraterrestrial. This is soon recognized by financial publications, despite the absence of any authorized mining.
We learn that the gold comes from an asteroid known as the Golden Trabant. It was discovered by a four-man partnership consisting of Robert Fountain, George Grinder, Carlos Trevino, and Szild. Using a surplus spacecraft, the group reaches the asteroid and secures an initial cargo. To preserve secrecy, Szild murders the twelve technicians who accompany them.
The partners then create the Commonwealth of San Simeon on Trevino’s ancestral land, which becomes a sovereign front for gold distribution. Over several years, the operation expanded from a single vessel to a fleet of twelve. The group floods international markets with gold coins known as San Simeon Duros. The resulting influx destabilizes global currencies by threatening the value of credit-based monetary systems:
Gold had gotten out of the habit of showing itself in society. For years it had sat at home in vaults, and a multiplier had been used to equate it with credit money. Nobody knew what to make of naked gold returning to the market . . . Token shrivels before the thing itself. It could not stand up to free and growing gold.
The real antagonists intervene: a commission of currency regulators renders the asteroid lethal by making it radioactive and renaming it Venenatus. This crashes the gold market and strips San Simeon of independence. This is how most readers are likely to remember the plot, if they remember the financiers at all. One could read the financial manipulation as satire aimed at Woodrow Wilson’s Federal Reserve and at monetary policy more generally. At some level, that reading fits. But the conspiracy here is not national; it is international. In that respect, it resembles Belloc’s hostility to international finance and Ford’s paranoid constructions more closely than it does domestic monetary critique.
“Golden Trabant” is not a story I would describe as antisemitic. What makes it especially interesting is that it works through conspiratorial shapes historically associated with antisemitism without assigning them to Jewish characters or coding:
If one small shrew is put into a warren of mice or rats, it causes panic. The shrew is smaller than any of them and it may be one against hundreds. But it will eat them; it will eat them alive. And given time, it will eat them all. . . But if the warren is big enough, the shrew can be contained. There will be some of the rats knowing and political enough to go out and hire shrews of their own.
In my interpretation of how conspiracy works in Lafferty, "Golden Trabant" is about a material front:
"Golden Trabant" belongs to an area of the Ghost Story in which Lafferty explores financial power through inherited conspiratorial forms. Only by seeing those larger shapes across the Ghost Story does “Golden Trabant” come into view. Years later, Szild returns to Patrick T. K.’s shop, physically ruined and skeletal, his body ravaged by radiation. He continues to scavenge small amounts of contaminated gold from the poisoned asteroid and sells it to Patrick for almost nothing:
But when Szild passed the heavy small package to Patrick, he did it with a hand that was stark splintered bones with only a little black flesh around the heel of it.
