Chapter 4

I couldn't tell when it had happened, but sometime in the past, this vacation spot had gone fully commercial. There was a ticket booth, now virtually demolished by vandals, and a turnstile in front of a large door. The door was still in place, but the lock had long since been broken off. Well, that just made it easier for us.

We pushed the heavy steel door open and looked inside. This had once been a waiting area for the guided tours. The furniture was all destroyed, but one could see that the waiting area could have accommodated up to about 50 people. There were lights in the ceiling, but they were broken and would not turn on. We had come prepared for that with flashlights, so we were ready to take a look inside.

We pushed the door open and found a long walkway which led to a platform that must have been used for loading the tour buses or carts or whatever they might have been. None of those vehicles were to be seen with a cursory sweep from the flashlights, so we stepped off the platform and looked for them. After a few minutes, Cathy called out, "OVER HERE, GUYS! I FOUND SOMETHING!"

She had found what looked to me something like an electric tractor hooked to a string of open carts with seats. She sat down and pushed a button in the middle of the steering wheel. We were all startled out of our skins by a blast from a loud horn. Damn! The battery still had some juice left in it. I have no idea how that battery was made, but there was nothing on the current market that would hold a charge that long. There was room in the tractor seat for a driver and one other person, probably the tour guide.

We unhooked all but one of the carts and decided to take a short tour. We didn't want to go very far, but this was a golden opportunity to look around the immediate area in reasonable comfort. I had left word not to expect us back for about 90 minutes, so we still had a little over an hour before we needed to return to the rest of the group.

I climbed into the seat beside Cathy, and Mark and Cindy sat in the trailer. Cathy had earned the right to be the driver by right of conquest—after all, she had been the one to find the vehicle. It took her a few moments to find the accelerator pedal, but that was about all the tractor had for controls. There was a toggle switch that turned on some headlights, so we were soon ready to go.

Cathy drove us around a large open area that must have been used as the jump-off point for a series of tours. The large open area would have been needed to accommodate several tour trains at the same time. Off to our right was a storage area for the tour trains, and I asked Cathy to take us over there for a quick look. I hoped to find more of the tractors in a usable condition. If we found some, we could rip the seats off the carts and use the tourist trains to move our stuff into the cave the easy way.

Hooray! There were 20 tractors that we could see from our little vehicle. That would make life a whole lot simpler if most of them would run. The next problem was to be getting electricity to the battery chargers. There were no signs of electric power lines running to the cave, which probably meant that the electricity was generated locally. We would have to give a high priority to finding the generator and getting it back into operation. None of us were electrical engineers, so I hoped for some very good instruction manuals.

We found a cafeteria and kitchen with electric stoves and refrigerators. That was great! Now, we really had to find that generator and get it into operation. We walked into what must have been the storeroom for this kitchen, and, purely by force of habit, I flicked the light switch. THE LIGHTS CAME ON!!!

What the hell! The generator for the cave must still be working. It appears that the last person out followed the old adage about turning off the lights. None of us knew how this was possible, but we were ready to take advantage of our good fortune. We ran around flipping all of the light switches we could find and soon had the "lobby" lit up to its full capacity. Mark went out and called in everybody to enjoy the cool, but stuffy, air of our new home.

Everybody trooped in and exclaimed over the luxury they found once they got beyond the trashed entrance. The intruders must have been intimidated by the darkness and never got even this far into the cave, so most of the immediate area was in good shape.

Mark and I organized exploration parties from the more responsible people and put the rest to work carefully removing the seats from the tourist carts. We needed to unload the semis first, because that was where our food was stored. After we had done that, we could bring in the rest of the stuff. Initially, we just left the items from the trucks on the carts until we could decide where it should go. That depended on what we heard from the exploration parties.

The first of the exploration parties came back with reports before the trucks were completely unloaded. One party had found sleeping quarters for over 1,000 people. Some of it was in apartments and some was in barracks. We decided that rank had its privileges, so Mark and I took apartments for our families. Cindy was assigned the job of getting everybody else parceled out to the spaces that were available. I don't know how she did it, but there were very few complaints. As far as I was concerned, it was her problem. I had other things to worry about.

My main interest was in the offices that were found. I headed for the fanciest office, figuring that would be the one that the big boss used. I didn't expect to find much direct knowledge in that office, but I did hope to find an organization chart that would tell me where to look for the information I really wanted. It took about half an hour of searching through the desk and files, but I finally came up with what I wanted.

As a sidelight, I found out that the cave attraction had been run by an outfit called the NRC (National Recreation Corp). At the moment, I had no further information on them, but they sure had money to spend. I found the organization chart and went looking for the maintenance office. That was a veritable gold mine of data, both on paper and stored on computers. That's when I found out why the electricity still worked.

Electricity was generated by a nuclear pile heating a huge mass of thermocouples. Each heated thermocouple put out a small amount of electric current as DC. However, there were enough thermocouples hooked together to supply all of the electricity needed by this facility. The DC from the thermocouples went through some sort of converter which I made no pretense of understanding and was converted to the usual 125 VAC that we were all familiar with. The other good news was that the manufacturer's warranty said that the power supply was good for another 500-600 years. I hoped that we would not need it that long. The thermocouples were sealed and would never wear out, but the nuclear fuel would eventually need replacing, and the model number of the replacement unit was provided. The problem there was that the company was no longer in business! It was some outfit named Hughes Electric Corp.

I had also found a map of the cave, or at least as much as had been explored. There were great sections of the cave that were marked as undeveloped and other sections that were marked as unexplored. Whoever made up the map was sure that there were significant areas of the cave yet to be found. One very useful set of notations on the map were other entrances to the cave from the surface. These had all been blocked with screens. This meant that there were a number of sources of ventilation besides the main entrance that we had used, but they were not generally known to the public. I had visions of how we could use those entrances, but that was for the future.

Our biggest problem right now was a source of food. We had enough of the special lights for an extensive farm, but we had to find a place where we could put our farm. The other half of that problem was that none of us were farmers. Some person had quipped that there was nothing to being a farmer because the plants did all of the work. I knew that was a joke, but I wondered how many of our new citizens were aware of that fact?

Cindy was set the new task of finding what skills we had among our people. We needed people who knew anything at all about farming, but we needed people who could read and write. Computer literacy could be taught once we needed the skill.

Several of the women from the ghetto had run small gardens to feed their sisters in need, so they were our new source of farm managers. They were recruited to gather a troop of unskilled farm workers to be the grunts. They also were instructed to find a place deep within the cave for our farm. The tractors and trains of carts would cover the transportation problem.

I also had Cindy search for a school teacher to start a class for school teachers. My goal was 100% literacy, instead of the 2-3% that we had. It turned out that Cathy had some training as a teacher, though she had been thrown out of her job because the Church had decided that literacy was not important. Besides, she was a woman and neglecting her most important job of being a wife and mother. Cathy had no say in the decision, and that's how she wound up on the list of women to be issued as brides.

Several women who were literate were willing to help Cathy, so she was able to set up a school with classes for the children and separate ones for the adults. Everybody liked the idea of the schools for the children, since that kept them from being underfoot all day. Cathy and her helpers dove headfirst into the job and had the schools organized within a week.

Food preparation was done in that kitchen we found. A lot of the stored food that was not in cans had spoiled, so that had to be discarded. However, we had brought enough with us to carry us for about six months. Fortunately, a number of the women enjoyed cooking, so there was plenty of kitchen staff. The electric dishwashers went a long way toward convincing some of the women to join in.