Chapter 34

The death of Cactus Flower had been almost as hard on Doug as had been the death of Evening Star. Doug's funk didn't last as long as his first time, but he still was incapacitated for over a week. Their children took the event much more calmly than Doug; they mourned, but they didn't collapse. Just before she died, Cactus Flower made Doug promise to find a replacement wife as soon as possible.

They now had a fleet of Zeppelins and Warthogs, so Doug was determined to try to set up a colony at Birmingham. He wanted that steel so bad he could almost taste it. Four Zeppelins and four attached Warthogs set off for Alabama in early spring, right after the winter weather calmed down. They traveled a steady 25 MPH both day and night. They made the trip in under three days, but it depended on Doug's unerring sense of direction to do it. Every time they started to drift off course because of a slight variation in wind direction, Doug was able to notice and point them in the proper direction to travel.

They arrived fairly early in the morning, just after a slight rain, so the leaf canopy was pressed down by rain water. It was impossible to see through it, so they didn't know how tall the trees were. They found a body of water at last, so they could see the tree height, they appeared to be on the order of 150 feet tall. Doug took off in the attached Warthog and flew around trying to draw a reaction from anyone in the vicinity. He got no reaction from the ground, so it seemed that the place was deserted.

He decided that the trees were wet enough that it would be safe to drop a bomb to try to clear some space for a Zeppelin to land. He found a place that looked appropriate and dropped his four bombs in as nearly a straight line as he could manage. The bombs weren't perfect at clearing the land, but they did a good enough job that it was possible to bring Doug's Zeppelin in to land after he had reboarded it from his plane.

When they landed, they found that the area was devoid of any ground cover—the trees simply were too good a light shield to allow grass or brush to get a foothold. This probably was the reason that there were no people in the area: there was no way to grow food. Doug did not find any sign of the minerals he was looking for, so they took off and flew about 20 miles east of the previous landing point. Another plane dropped bombs this time, but Doug's airship, Enterprise, landed and this time he found what he was looking for. He found a vein of coal breaking through the side of a hill near the landing point. They took off and planes bombed some more to clear enough room for all four of the Zeppelins to land. They did and took the opportunity to rearm and refuel the two airplanes.

Doug took some people with him and made a sweep of the area. He managed to find the iron ore and the limestone he was looking for, so, now, all he had to do was to decide where he wanted to put his town, which he wanted to call Irontown. Several of the engineers mapped out tracks for the roads they would use to haul raw materials. They were lucky, the trees grew far enough apart that they were no hindrance to truck traffic, so the roads could go almost anywhere.

They unloaded the sawmill and began cutting logs into useful boards, knowing that there would be terrible warpage, but they needed buildings now, not after the wood had a chance to season. Bad construction could be replaced later, if they really needed to. They had invested a lot of their precious metal in nails, but they looked at it as an investment in the future. The expected to have enough steel pretty soon that they could make as many more nails as they needed, along with whatever else they wanted.

Two of the Zeppelins had carried what was needed to make a small furnace and associated facilities for the first furnace. A portion of the people began working on setting this up while others began the mining operations. They hauled in a small stockpile of raw materials and waited for the furnace to be ready.

Doug went exploring, both by plane and on foot, while the furnace was being assembled. This was to be a modified blast furnace with the air supplied by a gigantic compressor that one of Charles' sons had designed. Big Ears had also assisted in the design of the furnace, so he was along to supervise the whole operation. His pregnant wife had come, too, and they were to be part of the permanent colony.

When everything was ready, and that took longer than Doug had hoped, but less time than Big Ears had expected, they fired up and waited for the first pouring. This was to be a test run, as nobody expected great things with their first try, but they were still ready for a big celebration. There were still some bugs in the operation, but everything went better than most had expected. There was a big celebration that night and several pregnancies were initiated; a grand time was had by all!

Pig iron was poured and two were saved as souvenirs, one for Doug's Town and the other for the Irontown museum. The rest were dumped back into the next batch of iron to be purified further before being shipped to Doug's Town. A few weeks later, two Zeppelins took off for Doug's Town with a full load of steel to be formed into nails and railroad rails.

Ten years later, the railroad had finally reached Irontown where Big Ears was the mayor of a bustling community. They were now manufacturing steel in several grades and getting ready to put in their first rolling mill. Now that the railroad was running a spur south into Florida, a number of people from there had moved north to Irontown to get jobs in the burgeoning steel industry.

Other people in Florida had jumped on the economic band wagon by supplying vegetables and fish to the growing nation. The railroad had made it easy and cheap to ship food anywhere it went. Many branches of the railroad were serving localities that did not even know that other people existed in the world until the railroad survey crews had shown up.

All people they contacted quickly became aware of the advantages of associating themselves with Doug's People. From medical to dietary to social advantages, even to games with improved prospects for gambling, a village was much better off practically from the moment it accepted and became associated with Doug's People.

Everybody quickly learned that Doug had no tolerance for cruelty nor treachery nor cheating, and he was very hard to fool. The legal system he set up rarely made a mistake, and, when it did, the mistake was corrected without a quibble. Doug usually did not concern himself with civil cases, but all criminal convictions were brought to his attention, and there were so few that he was able to review every one. He overturned a few convictions and increased a few penalties, but usually let a case stand on the decision of the lower court, which invariably was reached with a jury trial.

Five hundred years after Doug's arrival from the future, North America had changed remarkably. The ice was gone from the old United States and a lot of lower Canada. Sea level had risen almost to the level Doug had seen in the 21^st century, and the major rivers were flowing as he remembered them. One of the "advancements" he insisted on was that no one locate permanently in dangerous places like the Mississippi Delta, which meant that New Orleans and Mobile would never rise to be big cities, and most of the immediate coast line all over the Western Hemisphere was protected from development.

By now, very nearly all of the Western Hemisphere, which Doug started referring to, officially, as the West, was populated by people who were closely associated with Doug's People. In fact, by now, it was almost impossible to find anybody who did not claim descent from the original group and almost impossible to prove that a person was actually related to that group. In other words, by dint of hard work and perseverance, Doug had been able to unite the West into one people who spoke the simplified version of English and were almost 100% literate. There were approximately two million people in the West who were proud of their heritage and anxious to spread their culture to the rest of the world.

Doug discussed the situation and possibilities with his advisors and his wives, who also functioned as advisors (Doug refused to wed an airhead). There were three places to visit: Europe, Asia, or Africa. After kicking it around a while, they came to the conclusion that Asia had to most to offer and was the most likely to be at the stage of social development that they wanted to interact with. Doug was especially interested in India.