Chapter 15

A lot of progress was made in the next ten years. They were now maintaining a large herd of camels, and they had found a way to process the dung into a useful compost that was being spread around into the ground in appropriate places. Doug wanted them to have some decent topsoil by the time the warm weather returned. Agriculture was high on his to-do list, and he wanted his people to be ready when the warm weather finally returned.

A byproduct of the composting operation was the production of vast quantities of methane gas. This was trapped and compressed using a modified heat pump design. The compressed gas was stored in a large tank lined with the casein plastic. They had worked out a way to make pipe from the casein plastic and were piping the gas among the apartments and anywhere else it was needed to provide light by burning it in special light fixtures.

The burning gas in a light fixture was surrounded by a wire cage, exactly as had been used in the 19^th century and beyond in the Davy safety lamp. This prevented the accidental escape of flaming gas to cause a fire where it was not wanted. The burning gas heated a ceramic structure which glowed white-hot and gave off enough light for any need.

They had even managed a safety switch so that if the fire ever went out, the gas was cut off to that light fixture and no unburned methane was allowed to escape into the room. Doug's first son, Charles, turned out to be an inventive genius and was responsible for many of the advances they had made in the last few years. He still was not experienced or knowledgeable enough to come up with many original ideas, but he was unbelievable in the way he could turn an idea into a working device. He was so good at it that his name entered the language, to charles something was to make it work.

Mary, Doug's first daughter, was a genius, too, but in a different direction. She had a capacity for learning, both in grasp and speed, that continued to astound all of her contemporaries. But, not only could she learn, but she could teach! Learning from Mary was easy, she knew just how to present a concept or idea so that it made perfect sense. She had the best luck in teaching the concept of zero and negative numbers. Once she was assigned that task, the whole school made rapid advances in learning arithmetic.

Mist was particularly adept with language. She was assigned the job of teaching English to the new students, and they learned very quickly. Some of the English sounds were difficult for the average person to utter—the "r" and "l" really gave them trouble, but Mist was able to get everybody to handle the sounds well enough in short order.

Doug spent most of his time after the first couple of years in working on his books. He lived in constant fear of leaving out something important or not doing a good job of explaining a concept. Evening Star and Cactus Flower helped him with this by being the guinea pigs. If they could read and understand what he had written, he went on to something else, but, if they had trouble, Doug sweated blood until they could understand what he had written. Some pages were rewritten a dozen times until they made sense to his two editors. The political essays were the most difficult to get across, especially the idea of remote people having an interest in how you lived. Doug most wanted the people to climb from the Stone Age idea that "my life and desires are the only important ones" to the advanced concept that "every life is important, and it is my responsibility to do what I can to help other people be happy."

Everybody, including Doug, was wondering when the cold would happen. There was even some muttering about how Doug had been mistaken about the message from the spirit world. That probably meant that he was wrong about everything else, too. There was no way for Doug to counteract these thoughts, since he had no way to prove a future event until it happened. Finally, Doug was vindicated!

One day the town was involved in its usual daily business when a boy came running in to tell Doug of the strange light in the sky. Doug and everyone else rushed outside to see this strange object, and Doug immediately recognized it as the impact asteroid that he had been waiting for. He knew how fast it had to be traveling, yet it seemed to hang in the sky. It was visible for over 15 minutes, bright enough to be clearly visible in the bright sunlight. The falling body was so bright that it could have been seen as a visible glow through even the densest clouds.

The object finally disappeared over the horizon, but Doug encouraged his people to remain outside and watch in the direction it disappeared. Many people had gotten bored and gone on to other pursuits when a mighty flash of light was seen coming from a little north of east. The asteroid had struck the ground. Doug announced, "That's all there will be to see for some time, but there may be a loud noise in about 2½-3 hours and the ground will shake. That was the event that the spirits forecast, and the cold will start in a few months. We probably have time for at least one more trip for iron, copper, and tin before the weather becomes too bad."

About two hours later, the ground began to shake and a few things fell off of shelves, but it was not really a very bad earthquake. Nevertheless, many people were frightened, so Doug called a meeting of the whole town so that he could reassure them that the mountain was not going to fall on their heads.

Doug had just finished answering questions when there was a monstrous rumbling crashing noise heard. Doug said, "That was the loud noise I had warned you to expect. We may hear a similar noise tomorrow as the shock wave passes us again on its way around the world. We might even hear it a third time, but I doubt it. In any case, it cannot hurt us, so just ignore it." More questions started flying, but Doug was able to calm everybody down in less than an hour. The meeting broke up, but there was still a lot of conversation among the people, mostly around the fact that they had never doubted Doug or the spirits.

Expeditions were organized to leave the next day to pick up more of the three main metals, and Copper Man and Tin Man were told to renew the invitations to the people to return with him to Doug's Town. Meanwhile, other traders were sent out to visit their other trading partners and to offer them the hospitality of Doug's Town. Doug didn't expect many people to take him up on the offer, but Doug's Town had room for about 1,500 more people if they wanted to come.

The sky had started to get dark, and Doug expected debris to fall over the next few weeks. These falling rocks and the dark sky might scare some people into joining them, but he was pretty sure that he would not see many immigrants until the weather got much colder.

The added room resulted from the additional caverns found as more tunneling was done over the last 10 years. Doug had wanted to be sure that they did not run out of space, so he had kept up the search for more rooms. His guess had been correct: the mountain was riddled with caves that they could use.

One of the caverns had a river of hot water running through it. It was situated high enough above the river pools in the main cave that they could build an aqueduct to feed it with warm water if they needed to. There was a slight possibility of the water freezing before it got to their main cavern, so the hot water was insurance against that.

They had long since run out of space for a camel stable in the old section of Doug's Town, so Doug had his men blast a large opening into a convenient cavern which was to be used as a new stable. The tunnel into the new stable was only large enough to pass a wagon carrying food into the stable and compost out. They built a door to seal this passage that they were sure was strong enough to resist the efforts of the largest predator. The door was actually a double door-air lock arrangement which would better serve to keep out the cold air as well as unwanted visitors. This new camel stable was build in a cavern even larger than the one the humans were living in, so there was room for up to 1,500-2,000 camels, if they were willing to be crowded. However, considering the foul temper of most camels, they were likely never to have more than about 1,000 camels in residence at one time. Nevertheless, there was room for more camels if necessity called.