Chapter 23

Great Day in the Morning! as my mother would have said. How could we get so lucky? There were containers with plumbing supplies, including toilets, bidets, water pipe and sewer pipe. Wilbur was in plumber's heaven!

Current plans were to allot each family four containers, though others would be arranged to make the two-high wall. We were currently planning for 20 families, so we planned for a courtyard with containers arranged two-high and two-deep. This would give us a courtyard approximately 250 feet on a side. That was enough room for the horses and practically anything else we could think of. I think I saw the materials we would need for a swimming pool, if we could dig the damned hole for it.

Would you believe, some people are already complaining because we didn't get everything we could possibly want. Who was the asshole who forgot to include a powered ditch digger among the items on the ship? And that was just one item that was missing. Oh, well, you can't win them all.

There was a welding set in the trimaran's repair shop, so we were in good shape with that. Wilbur had some welding experience, so we had somebody who knew the basics of welding, and the instruction manual filled in the details that he didn't already know. Wilbur cut some of the partitions out of the steel hull and used them to reinforce the roof of each of the corner houses so that we could mount the big guns on them. The one big drawback of Village #1 was that there were carnivores of all types that used this area for part of their hunting territory, so we were sure to need the big guns at one time or another.

With John's help, Amos had adapted the big guns to use hand wheels for both elevation and azimuth for aiming. This replaced a heave and shift armstrong aiming system that had been used previously. The women appreciated the change and they all gave Amos a big hug and kiss for his efforts.

Angie had already made grandiose plans for a major farm, but I managed to get her to scale back her dreams until we had more hands to work on the farm. As it was, I wondered how well we would be able to cope with what she had "settled" for. For one thing, we didn't have any bees to do the pollination for us, and I wondered how the current insects would work out. We would be in trouble if we had to hand-pollinate the crops. At least, we would be able to salvage the wire and barriers from the old fence for a new one. Which brought up a question, I wondered if Angie had checked the manifest to see if there was any fence wire on board. It sure would make life easier if there was some.

We had not finished the assembly of our wall when the first carnivores showed up. I guess that they smelled the horses, though it may have been something else that attracted them. Whatever it was, four adult T. Rexes and five juveniles showed up as a group. Damn! It was a good thing that all six big guns were on hand when that happened. The big guns went for the adults and the shotguns were used on the juveniles.

Swift Rat and I each directed a group of shotgunners and John directed the big guns and gave us general directions about where there was about to be a breakthrough. Thank God for the radios! We might not have been able to fight off that much single-minded ferocity without one person being able to coordinate the defense. The dinosaurs continued to attack even though they were missing great pieces of their bodies. Either they were too dumb to know that they were mortally wounded or their nervous system was so decentralized that one part of the body didn't know about the monstrous damage to some other part. Eventually, they died, but they were hell-on-wheels until they did!

We only had two walls up, so we were completely exposed on two sides, and the dinosaurs made for that breech in our defenses without hesitation. I am not sure how they knew, but they knew exactly how to hit us in our weakest place. One thing we learned from this battle was that we were vulnerable close to the wall. It was simply impossible to depress the rooftop guns enough to fire close to the wall. Fortunately, the dinosaurs were not smart to tumble to the fact that we simply could not shoot wall huggers. If they could have known that, we might not have defeated them.

As it was, we were in an exposed position and had to fight off wounded dinosaurs not yet out of the fight with weapons that were not up to the job. Fortunately, we had the two big guns that were on the mobile mounts. We had a problem with them in that they were not designed to shoot as much as they were being forced to do. The barrels were overheating badly, and we could not be sure how much longer they were going to last. Undoubtedly, we would need new barrels when this fight was over.

On top of that, we needed a better way to reload a spent magazine. It just takes too long to reload a tubular magazine in the heat of battle. Janice, the loader on big gun #2, was painfully burned when she touched the barrel with her shoulder while she was trying to reload the magazine. She continued to fight, but she was laid up for two days afterwards recovering from the burn.

Eventually, we killed all of the attacking dinosaurs, but it was a close thing that no humans were killed. We did lose two dogs that could not be restrained soon enough, and we were distressed by that, but we got off lucky, and we knew it. As soon as the dead dinosaurs could be cleared from near our town, we started moving more containers into place. We quit taking the time to worry about which container went where for later convenient unloading. Instead, we just got containers in place on a first come-first served basis. We all knew that this was going to cause some aggravation later, but we were worried about saving lives right now.

Until we could get better organized, we went with only one gate into the courtyard—to hell with the inconvenience of that! That dinosaur attack had shaken some of the complacency out of us and made us pay closer attention to our defense.

John and Amos got busy right away in trying to solve the three basic problems with the big guns. The obvious thing to do with the problem of over heating was to go with water cooling. The problem with doing that was that it would require a big cylinder placed around the barrel to contain the water. It would also take more water than was conveniently available. The better solution was to change from a bronze barrel to a steel one. By searching around on the trimaran, they were able to find usable steel, but they still didn't have a way to cast it. It took nearly a year of experimenting and false starts to find a way to cast a steel barrel. Fortunately, the oil well rig machine shop was up to machining the barrel once it was cast. Temporarily, we just had to live with the limitations of the bronze barrels until the steel ones were ready. I didn't understand what the problem was, but John explained that the bronze softened at a temperature much lower than the steel, so it was safe to get a steel barrel so hot the same temperature would blow up a bronze barrel. QED: we needed steel barrels!

The second problem was in not being able to shoot close to the walls. John said that there was no direct solution to that. We just needed more big guns in pill boxes next to the outside of the walls. There just was no other solution to the problem.

The third problem was with the tubular magazine. We needed some way to clip feed the big guns from the top. This was a tricky problem, but they finally worked it out. However, weight considerations forced the down sizing to a four-shot clip magazine system so that women could lift the clips and load the weapon.