Blame Charlie
Copyright© 2012 by dotB
Chapter 9
When I returned to the ranch after my temper tantrum, I headed for the kitchen where Angie was bustling around preparing lunch, only to have Chen walk over to face me and put her hands on my shoulders.
“Will I be permitted to give orders to your cook and have her please me in the same way that I instructed our family’s servants when we lived back on Earth?” she asked quietly.
I didn’t have a chance to say anything before Angie decided to answer her question, quickly moving closer until she was pressing her body against Chen’s back. As Chen’s eyes grew wide, Angie slid her hands under Chen’s blouse and around her belly, then shifted her hands upward before gently flexing her fingers as she cupped Chen’s breasts.
Then Angie sent a tiny whisper of thought. “You probably had to order your servants at home because they couldn’t read your mind to learn what you really wanted, but I can,” then she grinned and winked at me over Chen’s shoulder. “This one will not be yours alone, Patrón. You will need to share her with me since she wants to belong to both of us and yearns to become our mutual concubine.”
To say that I was astonished by the actions of either one of them is an understatement, but I knew better than to argue with them and as a result, our lunch was very late that day. The results of our dalliances that day and over the next few weeks were somewhat predictable, yet quite surprising to me. Chen hadn’t been living with us for two months when both women showed up in my den one afternoon and both of them were holding a bright blue ‘pee stick’ in their hands. What had taken six months for Angie to accomplish took Chen only six weeks.
That was the moment that I realised I was really going to be a family man in my own home. You see, for six months, the only permanent partner I’d had in my home had been Angie, and although she and Chen were both pregnant now, neither had any intention of moving to a house of her own. I think they were surprised that I felt that raising their children in our home was a good idea, but by then I felt Angie had earned the right to live with me on a permanent basis. As for Chen, she had been spoiled in her former home, so she was almost a pet of Angie’s, yet in a way, she became the glue that held us together.
The next few months were a very busy time for me, both on a personal front and business-wise, and surprisingly much of that started because Chen couldn’t cook. In fact, she didn’t seem to be able to boil water without burning the bottom of the pan she had tried to boil the water in. All right, I’ll admit that’s a slight exaggeration; she only did that once, and even then she had a valid excuse, but that’s a fairly long and involved tale in itself.
You see, Donna and her daughters decided they wanted a dog, and they found one that looked quite similar to my old mutt, Shep. Now, my dog answered to the name Shep when I got it, but Shep is actually a female, and of course, Donna had found a male dog. Now, I’d had Shep for a good twelve years back on Earth, and I considered her to be an old dog and well past breeding age. Not only that, but she had been neutered, and I had never even considered the fact that Shep had also been cloned when we came to Terratoo or that all her organs were now functional. So to make a longish story quite short, it didn’t take very long before Shep was going to have little Sheps.
And to tie that to the story about Chen’s burnt pot, Shep decided to sneak into the house and drop her litter on the little rug under the kitchen table, which sat in the middle of the kitchen floor. Attending to Shep as she gave birth was the reason Chen wasn’t paying attention and let the pot of water boil dry, which resulted in a scorched bottom on one of Angie’s favourite pots.
Angie wasn’t about to let Chen forget it though, so after about a week of being teased about not being able to boil water without burning the bottom of the pan, Chen called her Mama. Since I have absolutely no understanding of Chinese in any form, I thought she was just looking for sympathy, but I couldn’t have been more wrong if I’d tried.
Four days later, two young women and a middle-aged man came up the driveway, but they weren’t in a car. They were each peddling a bicycle, and each bicycle was pulling a small two-wheel trailer, which was packed high with their worldly goods. They had peddled all the way from Lee Ming’s factory to my ranch in four days - nearly two hundred miles, just on the off chance that I would hire them. It turns out the two girls were excellent cooks who were there to teach Chen how to cook, so I decided they were a definite go for a job.
Meanwhile, the guy had an extremely varied background, but one of the jobs he’d held was as a charge hand at an LNG plant, that’s right, liquid natural gas. Song Woo had been in charge of repairing the main compressors at the plant, and when he had explained that to Lee Ming, he’d been told to come ask me for a job. That put me in between a rock and a hard place because I wasn’t ready to start developing the gas well, let alone build a compressor plant for LNG, yet this guy had experience that I would definitely need in the future. I had to hire him, but I didn’t really have a job for him to do, at least not right then.
So I did what a smart rancher would do: I invited the guy into my office, grabbed the phone, and called my foreman. Then I asked José to come up to the house to meet Song Woo. That was the smartest thing I did that day. Ten minutes after José had arrived, the two of them were discussing various mechanical problems we were having with various pieces of equipment. Before I knew it, Song Woo was on his bicycle and pedaling off toward the main ranch. Then José was telling me he’d hired the man as a mechanic and quoted a wage that I thought was ridiculously low.
“José, if he knows what he’s doing and is any good, double that wage.”
“You sure of that, Patrón?”
“Yeah, we won’t keep him long if you don’t, and we’re going to need him when we get around to opening up that gas well.”
“Actually, I was going to talk to you about that, Jefé. I was at the vet’s the other day, and on the way home, I stopped at a Soda John’s for a beer. Then I got talking to a guy at the bar. He used to make conversion kits for converting gasoline-burning engines so they’d run on propane, but was bitching that we’re running just as short of propane as we are gasoline. I gave him your number and address here, then said he should talk to you. He’s good with his hands and knows a bit about horses, so if you want to, we could hire him as well because we can certainly afford to have another handyman around here.”
“Did you get his number?”
“Yep, got it down at the house. Want me to call him?”
“Yep, call him and tell him we’ve got work for him to do. Then when he gets here, you might put him together with the other new guy, Song Woo. Just see if they can work together and mention that we have a gas well down the valley. We might be surprised at what the two of them come up with.”
“Okay, Patrón, I’ll plan on doing that right now. You got anything else for me?”
“No, except that if you take off and don’t talk to Angie before you go, she’s gonna be pissed with you.” I grinned. “She’s got news that she’ll want you to hear.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, and if I say anything more, she’ll kill me. So go see her before I get myself in deep horse pucky.”
José gave me a wink and a thumbs-up sign before walking out of my office and closing the door behind him.
I was left with a major problem. I’d originally promised Lee Ming that I wouldn’t open the gas well or the gas plant for at least two years. Only now did I have hired a man who could probably build and operate an LNG plant and another man who could do the conversions on engines to run on natural gas. Wait a minute, Ming had sent the first guy to me, so he knew about that much, but I still needed to talk to him about it. So I went to the office door and called Chen to ask her if her father had a phone at his factory. Since he did, I asked her what his phone number was. She just laughed and came into the office and dialled the phone, then rattled off a string of Chinese before handing me the phone. A minute later, I was talking to Lee Ming.
It seems his oldest son was just as ambitious as his old man, so by the time Lee Ming had returned home, his son had not only started turning out bicycles, but he’d also bought the next-door business in order to expand. That business had originally been a supplier of parts and repairs for motorcycles, so along with the addition of square footage for the bicycle business, they’d also inherited a ton of designs for lightweight engines, transmissions, and the like.
Not only that, but the local authorities had decided that they were wasting an economic gold mine by flushing their sewage into the ocean, and since they had a surplus of labour, they’d built a sewage composting facility. Not only was that facility going to produce tons of fertilizer, but one of its byproducts was methane gas, which they could use for heating the local homes and offices. As a result, Ming and his son Choo had hired a designer to come up with an engine and fuel system that used either methane or natural gas, then they’d gotten into the motorcycle business as well. He knew darn well that there wasn’t going to be much spare methane produced by the local plant, so his new engines were going to need fuel, and he knew that with a little help, I could be a supplier. That’s why Ming had sent Song Woo to see me as something of a gentle hint to get off my duff and develop that stupid natural gas well.
Needless to say, I took that hint and ran with it. I didn’t realise it at the time, but by stirring my stumps and getting involved, I changed the future of my life and the lives of all of my family and all the people on the ranch. Not only that, but I think that might have been the point where I became much more active in the future of every human living on Terratoo.
Behind the ranch and stretching up into the hills was a plot of thousands of acres of forest, land that on Earth had been leased by a logging company. Before I went too far with that, though, I took a look through my old files and found a copy of an old seismic survey that had been done during Granddad’s lifetime. What I saw on that survey made me grin and get off my duff all right, even more than Lee Ming had done. I took a gamble and mortgaged the ranch, then purchased almost a hundred thousand hectares of second-growth timber from the government, but included the rider that it had to include the mineral rights. Most of that land had been logged over, then replanted, so it wasn’t worth much, but the mineral rights on that land might be worth a bundle, at least those rights might be worth a lot if that old seismic survey was worth the paper it had been printed on.
Then I set my crew to work on developing that natural gas well, but also set them to rigging out a full LNG plant, complete with scrubbers, compressors, and storage tanks. Everyone thought it was strange that I went to the expense of having the gas from the original well piped six miles into the hills and beyond a ridge, so it wasn’t in view of the ranch. Not only that, but prevalent winds beyond that ridge would blow any odours out to sea and not toward the ranch. It was bad enough to get the occasional whiff of the stench that plant produced. When we did smell it and if one of the womenfolk would complain, I’d draw a deep breath, then grin and say, “Smells like money to me!”
The only problem with that odour was that it meant we were releasing hydrogen sulphide into the atmosphere, and hydrogen sulphide is poisonous. I didn’t like the idea of causing pollution of that sort, and mentioned it to the crew working at the plant. I’m not sure exactly who developed the idea or how they did it, but they improved on the original ‘scrubber’ design and inside a few months the smell disappeared, but the scrubber plant was now producing a few extra products as well. The scrubbers managed to produce some oils and heavier lubricants, along with a few other products, but best of all, the hydrogen sulphide was now being converted into sulphuric acid, which is one of the basic acids used by other industries. As well as that, the LNG which we sell is almost pure methane, which produces little more than water when it is burned in a well-designed engine, so Lee Ming’s engine designs had to be improved to include cylinder lubrication. Danged if one of his young engineers didn’t develop a way to produce ceramic liners for the engines they had begun to produce because ceramics could be lubricated by the water that burning methane produced. The exhaust emissions on those engines were astoundingly clean with 96% water vapour, a little under 3% carbon dioxide, and less than 1% of either nitrous oxide or carbon monoxide.
Inside of two years, we had five more gas wells in production, so the plant was in full operation all day, every day. That meant we were able to sell LNG and other products in bulk, so the money was simply rolling in. Between the money made by the LNG plant, the bicycle works, the motorcycle sales, and the music residuals that I held, I was able to pay off the mortgage on the ranch within five years. That’s when I approached Lee Ming with the idea of starting a tractor manufacturing plant, but thankfully, someone else had already made a start in that business. Not only that, but there was a high-compression alcohol engine being built that produced very few pollutants. There was even a small car manufacturing plant which was building electric cars. In fact, there were a ton of inventions being developed, but I managed to keep my nose clean and stayed as a silent partner and financial backer on some of the more lucrative developments.
It’s probably a good thing that I didn’t get physically involved in another business development about then, because about that time, all the babies I had sired were growing up and becoming old enough that they needed some ‘Daddy time.’ Oh boy, did I ever have my hands full for the next twenty years, but by that time, all eighty-four of my initial progeny had reached the age of eighteen, which meant that almost all of them were either in a university or a college. Any that didn’t feel the need to have a ‘higher’ education were apprenticing toward a trade or attending a trade school, so it wasn’t long before I and my women were left with a lot more time on our hands.
Thankfully, I’d been smart enough to encourage our government into setting up a scholarship fund for any child wanting to take advantage of an advanced education. The idea was eventually implemented worldwide and was sandwiched into the universal taxation program which covered all government services, including roads, bridges, and other infrastructure, as well as education, health care, pensions, etc. We had several people at first who called the idea “Cradle to Grave Coddling,” but although I’m not a socialist or even a liberal, I disagreed with them and was willing to argue. I felt that while I and many others who were doing well could afford to send our kids to get a higher education, there were many young people who would be left out because their parents couldn’t afford the costs, so I felt I should get involved. Luckily, the Eritol and the Maminai agreed with me, but insisted that I step back. Then, they took over the battle and defeated the naysayers using logic and advertising. (Actually, for all I know, they might have cheated and used telepathy to change the minds of those who didn’t feel strongly and waffled when the universal vote was conducted. I wasn’t broadcasting that suspicion though, not since the “Common Care” party won the vote! )
What that political decision did was to allow me to give each and every one of my kids a few thousand bucks as a head start after they finished their schooling. Besides that, I was able to provide low-interest loans to many more young people who needed a boost to be able to enter the business world in one way or another. Indeed, almost all of those young men and women have spread out into our new world and are doing quite well at a variety of jobs. Meanwhile, I believe my kids’ individual successes might be because each and every one of the children born from my multiple encounters was quite intelligent and also a strong telepath. Not only were those children successful, but most of them soon settled down with partners, and many of them began having children of their own.
On reading back through what I’ve already written, I notice that I haven’t mentioned one pertinent fact. That extreme ‘sexual charisma’ that I had suffered through when we had first been awakened eased off after three or four years. Then, I was no longer sought out for ‘stud service’ or whatever you might want to call it. That meant the ‘biff, bam, thank you ma’am’ sessions with various, cute and cuddly ‘visiting’ gals have long since died out - THANK GOODNESS!
As a result, life became much easier for me. I was able to devote more time to the ranch’s needs and other details of life, rather than spending as much time caring for the needs of a plethora of ‘wives’ and a multitude of children. Once all the resultant kids were involved in getting an education, I’m astounded how relaxed life became for almost everyone associated with the ranch - especially for me.