Chapter 5

The corridor was finished on May 15^th, and we decided to take a one-week break before starting the new building. That was one of our luckiest decisions. Sue and I had been volunteered to train the newbies in the use of the armor and the assault rifle. None of them had any shooting experience, so we were training 11 people to shoot from essentially scratch.

As a training aid, we started out with the paint-guns. We had a shooting range set up in the basement of the first building, and that was where we practiced. All of the people were old enough to understand the importance of what we were trying to teach, so they paid attention to what we had to say. Of course, we started off with a lecture on gun safety and made sure that the people knew where to find the gun’s safety switch. These paint-guns were identical to the real assault rifles except for the ammunition fired, so it was easy to transfer the practice with the paint-guns to the assault rifles.

We spent half a day with the paint-guns, and then switched to the assault rifles. Everybody had seen at least one chapter of the Star Wars saga, so they had some idea of what the assault rifles could do. We split up the students into two groups with Sue taking six people and I took five. There were 12 positions on the shooting range, so we had room for everybody, and that was a great help.

By the end of a week of training, all of the students were acceptable marksmen and ready to be used if and when a fight started. Our youngest shooter was a boy of 14 and our oldest was a woman of 53. I gauged our training on those two, and I decided that there was nothing to choose one over the other—they both were plenty good enough. The final test was when it came to shooting at a human being. I wasn’t going to guess which would turn out better at that time.

It was a Monday morning when the survey crew went out to lay out the foundation for the new building. As a final exercise, Sue and I had our class dress in their full armor and assault rifles and take on the job of guards for the surveying crew. As far as the students were concerned, this was their final exam, and we would be evaluating them for combat positions based on what we saw today.

The military commander, Ezra Jones, a former Marine captain, knew what we were doing, but everybody else just assumed that these were a regular guard unit on a practice mission. They certainly could not recognize anybody behind the combat armor, so there was no tip off there.

We had hardly gotten into position when six trucks drove up and disgorged 12 men from the back of each truck. These men were all carrying repeating rifles, but I could only assume that they were military grade. We were all startled when they started shooting at us. Fortunately, Sue, who was acting as commander of our group, reacted properly and sounded the warning horn that she was carrying.

Let me tell you, there was no mistaking the sound made by that special horn, and it was loud enough to be heard all over our compound. Everybody not in armor cut and ran for the buildings or the corridor. Fortunately, the attackers did what was the proper thing for them to do and aimed their fire in our direction, since we were the only ones in any sort of military dress.

Everyone of us was hit by bullets more than once, but the replicator had lived up to its promise: not a single bullet penetrated our battle armor. Sue used the combat radio to order our people to shoot back, and to shoot to kill. Well, as one would expect, some of the light beams went one way and some went another, but a few did hit the people shooting at us. In only moments, those who were shooting wildly got their nerves under control and begin to register hits on the attackers.

Every attacker who was hit was killed, there just were no lightly wounded enemy. If one of our people was aiming at an invader, he or she kept the beam on the target until that person obviously fell over dead. That made it take longer to eliminate a shooter, but it did make the elimination permanent.

We also got a demonstration of just how powerful the light beam was. I am not sure how it happened, but one of the light beams from our assault rifles hit one of the trucks. There was no discernible delay before that truck exploded in a great shower of glowing pieces and smoke. We had no use for the trucks, so we did not order our people not to shoot at them.

In less than a minute, we had reduced the attacking force to half of its original number, and people were now beginning to shoot from the rifle ports scattered around both buildings. It took less than five minutes more to eliminate totally the attacking force. I was glad to see that everybody else was taking part in the fight, but I was especially happy to see that our little group could have done the job all by ourselves if we had not had the help. Dammit, I was very proud of all of our citizens, but I was especially proud of our newest members!

Why did these people attack us? Who knows? Our best guess was that they wanted to move into the well developed property we had made for ourselves. Possibly, it was part of a campaign to take over territory by defeating someone who looked to be an important entity. In any case, it set us up as the most important and secure enclave in our part of the old city.

We had become something like a separate country within the city with delegations coming to us for advice on all sorts of topics. These ranged from how to organize a defense force to how to get an operation like ours started. Of course, we also continually received requests from people who wanted to join us. That was the most difficult request to honor.

We were almost out of free space until we could get our new building constructed. We even had people show up to help based on the small chance to be allowed to move in once the building was ready. We accepted all of the help that we could get, and that pushed up the construction rate very nearly a whole year. The building was ready for occupancy in only two years, instead of the originally projected three.

Oh, Man, we were now on a downhill slide that nobody could see the end of. It was decided to build more apartment buildings around the open parking lot, and to leave it open so that the children would have an open, but protected, place to play. It was decided to put up a total of four more buildings, each six stories tall, and each containing 30 apartments per floor. That would give us a total of 30 x 6 x 4 new apartments capable of accepting 720 new families. If we figured an average of four people per family, that would give us an increase of 2,880 people.

The planning stopped there, because we did not know what we would do with about 3,000 people living in Double Os. Without a doubt, we needed time to digest that many people and to work out ways to co-exist. That was a lot of people to keep employed and entertained. Frankly, George and John were unsure how to go about it. It was a cinch that they needed a staff to support them.

Maintenance was already becoming a problem. For example, some of the corridors already had so much traffic that the floors were showing wear. The replicators were saving us on that score by providing new carpets about every three months. Several women’s groups had formed and were competing with each other to be selected to design the pattern for the next carpet. By the time we had all of the buildings built and occupied, this carpet business had become a full time occupation for a lot of women. Dammit, something had to be found to satisfy the men before we had an emotional breakdown.

Sports teams were organized, and there was even a summer ice-hockey league. One of the basements had been converted into a hockey rink with a seating capacity of 2,500. Things were a little cramped, but there were usually four hockey matches going throughout the day, every day of the week. Basketball was the other sport that ran throughout the year, but we managed to squeeze in tennis, gymnastics, and track and field. Soccer was played every day that the weather permitted, and people were trying to figure out ways to cover the playing field so that it could be used in the winter. A lot of people had high hopes for baseball and American football, but there was still a lot of planning associated with that.