Chapter 21

Since discovering that he was not aging and apparently invulnerable, Doug was busy reformulating his plans. He still wanted to complete his books of memories, as he had no assurance that his memories would not start to fade, but he was not in quite so much of a hurry to get everything written down. He was especially cautious in his political writings and anything he wrote touching on religion. In fact, he destroyed some of his earlier writings on both subjects, now that he would be around to see how they were interpreted.

Doug wanted people to follow his teachings, but he wanted them to do it based on an agreement with his logic, not based on his dogma. One of the things he feared most was being considered all knowing and infallible. Doug wanted people to disagree with him when they were intellectually sure that he had made a mistake, or even a minor misjudgment. The potential for infallibility particularly scared him!

Doug had to admit to himself that his political aims were somewhat muddled. He wanted a democracy, but he wanted an absolute veto power over a majority that leaned too far in one direction or the other. Doug was sure that for the next 5,000 years, at least, he knew better than anybody else which way the people should go in getting ready to govern themselves.

He finally settled on an absolute monarchy, with himself as the king, but with an elected advisory council based on a one man-one vote rule. After a sufficient length of time, he would gradually turn over the government to the council and see how things went from there. That would still give him time to fix things before the Europeans arrived if his people began to wander too far away from a happy medium of government.

His second biggest worry was the possibility of a corrupt bureaucracy, since there was no way he could micromanage a whole country, much less the hemisphere he eventually hoped to govern. It was certainly possible to put in enough checks to make sure that nobody cheated, but such a thing would be so cumbersome and slow moving that it might not work beyond a small community. Well, he would just have to experiment until he found the happy medium. However, punishment would have to be extreme for any bureaucrats who tried to cheat, up to a death sentence for the worst offenses.

Charles had taken over a cavern for use as a workshop and development plant. He had a number of young men and women working as engineers and laboratory assistants. Charles was a hard taskmaster, not because he refused to accept failure, but he did refuse to accept halfway measures. He insisted that a project was not complete until a fully functional prototype was operating to specifications. This could bring an engineer, male or female, to tears in the struggle to meet an overblown promise. Sure, there were some plodders who got by with being mere lab assistants, but there were some great minds that had to be reined in because their dreams, while theoretically possible, were far beyond what was currently physically possible. These dreams were never canceled, they were just put on hold until technology had caught up with theory.

People were continually pouring through Doug's writings looking for things that he had said were possible that they might reproduce for their own use. The marvels of electricity were very high, if not foremost, on the list of things the engineers wanted to do. Generators were the primary target of development work along this line at the moment. To get there, they had to have powerful magnets, so metallurgy was a promising field of study. Flower of Spring, because of her interest in chemistry, was leading that line of development.

To get there, they had to have a high-temperature furnace. They were able to produce hydrogen and oxygen by electrolyzing water and use that as fuel for their furnace. It was lousy for energy efficiency, but it worked well enough to get them the temperatures they needed for experiments with various iron alloys. Doug did not know enough about the details of the alloys used for magnets, but he was able to suggest enough ideas to follow. They finally came up with a useful alloy which let them make some very powerful DC generators, but five years of work was required to do it.

They also worked with AC electricity and came up with motors in a range of sizes. Getting enough copper and purifying it was a problem, but Flower of Spring worked that out in less than a year. She had become a real master of electrochemical processing.

Flower of Spring also had her own crew of "acolytes" who virtually worshiped the ground she walked on. Women and some men were actively pursuing the facets of organic and inorganic chemistry open to them. Doug knew some of the basics, but they had to learn a lot on their own. Flower of Spring worked out a course of study and experimentation which she hoped would lead them past the early pitfalls and errors of the investigators in Doug's old world and move them more quickly into the fields that would be the most productive in enabling a better life for everybody.

The modified English that Doug had worked out had taken over as the standard language of Doug's Town. Once the children learned it, they had started using it at home because their parents couldn't understand it. This forced the parents, in self defense, to learn enough English to know what the kids were saying. Over a period of about 10 years, most people could understand enough English to get by, especially after the pronunciation was modified some to fit within the range of sounds the people already were comfortable with.

The schools were now going well, as all of the parents supported the concept. If nothing more, it provided the parents with a babysitting service that the women, especially, appreciated. At this point, the schools were rather basic in what they taught. Emphasis was placed on reading, writing, and arithmetic, but political science, at least Doug's version of it, was also taught. Doug called the class "civics," but its main thrust was to bring everyone out of the Stone Age mindset and to teach them that they were responsible for the happiness of the whole community, not just their own. Public health and hygiene were taught in the civics classes, since they affected the happiness and well being of everybody.

Nearly 200 children from other towns were now studying in Doug's Town's school system. It took a while, but the neighboring towns finally realized the advantages of sending their more intelligent children to study there. These children were scheduled to remain in school for 7 years at a minimum, but those who wanted to study some specialty were welcome to stay at Doug's Town for as long as they wanted. Some of Doug's Town's best engineers and chemists came from this group of children.

The most difficult specialty to sell to children was mathematics. The reason was obvious, since there were no concrete results that one could hold in his hand and exult over. However, a few children were persuaded to give math a try, and fewer still, stayed with it long enough to make a real contribution. Doug and Screams Loudly made a big deal of anyone who contributed to the fund of mathematical knowledge, so there were enough to keep the art progressing.

Counting the children, there were now approximately 2,500 people living in the various caverns of Doug's Town. The town might accept another 500 people if they had to, but Doug hoped that it would not be necessary. A few people occasionally showed up and asked to be taken in. So far, nobody had been turned away, but each new arrival went through a set of interviews to determine if that person was compatible with those already in Doug's Town.

A sufficient quantity of the dust had finally fallen from the upper atmosphere to allow enough light through to make it possible to resume Doug's efforts in agriculture. The growing season was still very short, but, at least, there now was a growing season. The greenhouse had expanded enough to allow the growing of an adequate number of the tubers to supply the needs of Doug's Town, but Doug wanted to expand away from the greenhouse as soon as possible. He transplanted a few of the tubers outside to the "garden" area where they had been dumping the compost from the sewage plant.

Charles had come up with a design for a plow with multiple tilling tools that could be dragged behind a tractor. It only took an hour to plow enough ground for the first experimental plantings. Several of the women took a strong interest in the new garden, so Doug put them in charge of it. Besides transplanting some of the tubers from the greenhouse, they tried a few other things just to see how well they would do. They were especially interested in trying out the plant they used as a substitute for lettuce; Doug wished them luck.