Chapter 25

I lost a wife and child, John lost a wife, Liz and three of her children moved in with Pedro's family, and one of Swift Rat's children moved in with the Jakobs family. This was quite a traumatic blow for our whole community, but I think that it was most difficult for John, Liz, and me. I don't know what to say about the children.

We had to wait a few days before returning to LS2 to repair the container door and to recover what we could from the pirates' shredded boat. It's amazing, but the machine gun and 12 of the AK-47s were salvageable. I didn't know what we could do with the AK-47s, they would probably go into storage with the AR-15s. On the other hand, the .50 caliber machine gun was worth having. There was a lot of ammunition for it, somewhat scattered by the destruction of the boat, but recoverable. We also picked up all of the spent brass that we could find for Bill to reload. I had hopes of him being able to adapt his explosive warhead to the large bullet. We found some usable stuff, like a ship-to-shore radio we could adapt for use on a golf cart, but not as much stuff as we expected. The big gun had destroyed most of what had been on the boat.

I looked at the shards of fiberglass and wished that we had a diamond-tipped saw. That's what it takes to cut the fiberglass panels into useful shapes and sizes, but we did not have such a tool, so the panels had to be scrapped. Maybe one day such a saw would turn up, but I had my doubts.

We had brought some repair materials along with us, so Wilbur used the welder to repair the door on the safety container. Except for some scratches and dents, the door was back into service, not as good as new, but usable.

The monsoon was upon us. Fortunately, we had been able to get everybody moved into their new homes before the rains came. Wilbur had been busy with his plumbing expertise and had equipped every home with a fully operating bathroom, complete with bidet. That eliminated our need for so much toilet paper and made life easier for everybody.

Meals were still communal. Three containers had been sacrificed for a large dining room and a kitchen. Harriet O'Brien had shown a superior talent for cooking the food that we had available and also had some supervisory ability, so she became the supervising community cook, with a number of other women to assist her as they were available. She was such a pleasant person that she never had a problem finding women to help her.

Her husband, Sam O'Brien, had worked in a meat market, so he became our butcher. He also had some knowledge of operating a smoke house, so he was truly appreciated for the quality of the "bacon" and "ham" that he was able to produce from Triceratops meat. Jean and I still led the hunting teams, but Sam had shown us how to field dress the meat so that it was easier for him to butcher into Harriet's raw material.

We had rigged a continuous veranda around the inside of our living wall so that it was possible to reach the dining room and kitchen from the farthermost apartment during even the worst of the monsoon. That way, nobody was inconvenienced to any great extent by the rain. It never got cold enough to be a problem; Ezra said that it looked to him like the Earth was not leaning so far to one side as it did in the uptime that we all came from, so there was as not as much of a change in the temperature as the Earth went around the Sun. For whatever the reason, the weather was reasonably pleasant for the whole year and we never suffered for our lack of clothes.

The time had come which we had all been looking forward to: our oldest children were ready to form families. Many of them had been practicing their sexual skills when they thought that the adults were not looking. None of the girls had become pregnant yet, but I would have bet that there was not a virgin among them, male or female. There were 15 children old enough to mate, and all of them had already paired up, or, in one case, formed a triplet family. We had a big celebration to make it official, and the kids moved in together in their own apartments. In this case, we were a little pressed for room, so each "family" got only one container until the end of the monsoon when we could expand our housing commitment.

There were now 30 families to house, and, if we had stuck to our original plan, that would have consumed half of the containers. That was just not feasible, we were going to have to return to some housing built of native materials, namely, wood. The houses that we had built just outside the cave had been so successful, that we decided to duplicate them as a part of Village #1.

We now planned to rearrange Village #1 so that it had a wall of containers, two-high and one-wide. This would let us enclose much more area than we had in the original Village #1. People who wanted to live in the containers could still do so, and other people could move into the wooden houses. The advantage of the wooden houses was that they could be customized much more easily than the containers could, and that was an attractive idea to most of us.

We arranged an enclosed square 10 containers on a side, using mostly containers that were still full. We decided to leave the presently occupied containers where they were to act a temporary housing while we built the wooden houses that it looked like everybody now wanted to move into. We had a square approximately 450 feet on a side, with a gateway on one side. We plan to put in a gate 20 feet wide and 20 feet tall. There would be a door in the gate large enough for a single person so that the main gate would not have to be opened just for a person to go in or out. The main gate would be opened and closed by an electric motor salvaged from the trimaran.

To conserve space, time, and materials, the houses would be built against each other with a common wall. The houses would be two-storey with four bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. Downstairs, there would be one bedroom, a half-bath, and a monster open room for the residents to arrange any way they liked. Each house would be 40 feet by 40 feet. We planned on several streets, but they would be added as needed. The first row of eight houses would be built with the rear of the houses 60 feet from the wall. There would be a 30-foot clearance to the street, which would be 20 feet wide. Then the lots would be duplicated on the other side of the street and another row of houses put in facing the first row. When we needed them, a third row of houses would be built, and so on. There would be a 20-foot-wide street at the base of the wall running along all four sides of the wall. Construction would start as soon as possible after the farm work following the end of the monsoon.

Lots were assigned by lottery, and the whole set of houses would be built before anybody moved in. That would give each family plenty of time to decide how their personal house would be furnished and decorated. Everybody agreed to work on the project, so we had plenty of manpower this time.

We managed to scrounge up enough wire to electrify a fence around the entire farm. We had saved the forms I had made for the concrete fence barriers, so I started casting more barriers as soon as the monsoon stopped. I had enough ready by the time the farm needed protecting, so they were put in under the electrified wire along with the barriers that we already had. If I could figure out a way to cut up the fiberglass boat hulls, we could use them as barriers for our farm.

It took a whole growing season for us to build the houses, and there was another great celebration when we moved in. We kept the communal dining room and kitchen, and Harriet continued to run it. The method of construction and the layout of the houses allowed us to use the same veranda idea to provide a covered walkway to the dining room that we could use when it rained. Every one of us was proud of our new town, and we wished that we had somebody to show it off to.

This year, only two more boats showed up, and neither one had people on board. Both boats appeared to have come from the era of the clipper ships, and both were cargo freighters. Both had some useful things on board, but neither one was the cornucopia that the trimaran had been. Oh, well, we were still grateful for what we received.

Before the year was over, five of the seven new families had children pop out into our pseudo Garden of Eden. Yes, things were really looking up for the continued success of our colony.

We only had one big scare from carnivores this year. A group of 11 Utahraptors showed up while a crew was working on the farm. Normally, the carnivores avoided the electrified fence if no one was working in the cultivated area. However, there were 17 humans working at various tasks, and some of them were children. This had to look like a banquet opportunity for the Utahraptors, so they came charging in with no regard for the electric fence. Most of them simply jumped over it.