Chapter 26

Another ship showed up, and this one was a spectacular arrival, too. Several of our people had expressed some worry about the safety of locating our village in the middle of a landing site. I will admit that I had not thought of the specific problem, but the question was raised about whether or not one of our homes or other structures would be damaged by a ship landing on it. This latest arrival showed us that we didn't need to worry.

The whirlwind showed up in the middle of the day when everybody was up and about. It seemed to center right over our village, and we all got pretty damned worried pretty damned quick. The whirlwind tried to settle down on top of John's house, but bounced right back up as soon as it appeared to touch the structure. The whirlwind then retracted and seemed to cast around for another place to land. This time it was right on top of our wall, but it retracted and repeated its casting about. The third time, it set down in an empty space right behind the trimaran, and there was almost a sigh of relief from the whirlwind as it deposited another ship at our landing site. This bit of activity by a whirlwind eliminated all of our worries about being crushed by an arriving ship.

This ship presented us with a gift that we have long needed. There was a complete sawmill and planing mill, all driven by steam. This was a godsend! The mills were modern, late 20^th or early 21^st century, probably headed for someplace in Central or South America. I say that because all of the markings were in metric and the instruction books were in Spanish. It was a lifesaver that Ezra could read Spanish. Pedro couldn't read, but he could help with the translations when Ezra spoke the words. On top of all that, Ed Samuals had operated a sawmill, among his many other jobs. We were anxious to get the mills unpacked and set up.

Sawmills and planing mills were inclined to be very noisy, so we decided to set up the system at the site of the first stockade enclosure that Angie, Jean, and I built when we first landed here. Three of the walls were still up, and it would only take a few days to complete the structure after we had moved in the two mills. We would have to increase the size of the enclosure, but that would be no problem. Temporarily, we could run the mills from the steam engine, but we wanted to switch to electricity as soon as possible. Battery power was no problem, but we needed the motor or motors, depending on what we could find or build for ourselves. I thought we could steal one of the motors from a trimaran jetski, and Amy was looking into that. Amy was sharp, if anybody could get it to work, she could!

Until we could get the full set of walls, etc. erected, we would station a mobile big gun at the mills to fight off any adventurous carnivores. The gun crew could help with the construction, so they shouldn't get too bored. We were going to put up the double wall construction that I had envisioned that first time, so there was going to be quite a bit of work going on at the site. One problem was going to be what to do with the sawdust, since we didn't want to pile it close to the wall and let it be a ramp over the wall. Those little Velociraptors could easily use the pile of sawdust to get over the wall if we were not careful.

We already had a list of "customers" for the finished lumber. Almost everybody wanted to do something to their home to individualize it, and it could be most easily done with finished lumber. We were a long way from making plywood, so everything was going to have to be built the hard way. We also didn't have nails to spare, so there was going to be a lot of wooden pegs used, and that could be hard work.

We were getting to the point where we were going to need some form of money. We wanted people to buy the lumber they needed, so we could have some way of compensating the people who did the hard work at the mills. This, of course, raised the question of compensating all of the workers. Some jobs were physically taxing and others were physically easier, but required brainwork and experience. Bill's chemical work was invaluable, particularly in the supply of our smokeless powder. Amy's electrical engineering was also obvious every time somebody turned on a light. An so it went. Every one of the adults and some of the young ones were contributing to our wellbeing, and there needed to be some way to pay them for their efforts.

We had been operating in a kind of communistic economy, but that was going to fail as our community got larger. On the other hand, we were not ready for raw capitalism, yet. We needed a managed economy, right now, but we were going to need money more and more as we grew in size and complexity.

It looked like we would have to bite the bullet and bow to the historical truth, money had to be some form of metal, at least at first. We didn't have enough gold lying around and silver was used as a raw material, even though it was scarce. We finally settled on brass tokens, since we could make them without too much waste, but they were not something that could be easily counterfeited. Adel was asked to come up with a design and to work out how much to pay for each kind of job. She was to call on anybody she needed for help doing the job, but we would like to have something ready so that we could start manufacturing money during the next monsoon season.

Adel's initial reaction was, "Are you crazy? Do you really think that all of that can be done within three and a half months? Well, OK, I'll see what I can do." As we knew that she could, Adel came through for us.

Amos and Bill had taken over sections of the trimaran hull to use for their shops and laboratories. Both men had assistants and apprentices working and learning the respective crafts. Neither man was very old, but we wanted to push for people to take over when these two were no longer able to work at their critical crafts.

Fortunately, we had an indispensable library of CDs and DVDs for reference on just about any subject you could name, but the library was sorely lacking in the details for the manufacture of aspirin, for example. And, of course, to make aspirin, you had to make a lot of raw materials which had to be made from raw materials. The requirements were mind boggling when it came to the details of actually making something as "simple" as aspirin, and a real killer when it came to complex drugs and other stuff. Of course, we, or our descendants, would eventually be able to do it, but there were going to be a lot of real and even more metaphorical headaches before the problems were all solved.

The elementary and high schools were in operation and seeming to do their job very well. Our teachers were very conscientious and made every effort to be sure that all of the children learned what they had to know not only to survive, but to be happy and productive while they were doing it. Of course we had bitching about school, its a privilege implicit in growing up, but the teachers did not take it seriously. All of the classes were small right now, and the children got more individual attention and encouragement than they ever would have received in the schools "back home."

Not only did we teach the standard subjects like math and language skills, but every student was taught how to shoot and how to maintain the guns so that they would shoot reliably tomorrow. No matter what his or her nominal age, every child was taught to shoot as soon as his body was large enough to manage a gun. The carnivores had not yet learned to respect the Geneva Convention on the treatment of civilians, so we had to make sure that there were no civilians.

It must be gender related, but the boys enjoyed using the guns more than the girls did. Nevertheless, the girls could and did learn to shoot as accurately as the boys did. In fact, among this crop of students, a girl turned out to be the best shot, which made all of the boys very jealous. I was glad to see it, it made the boys try harder.

Angie was still in charge of the farm, but I was in charge of the hunting. Jean might well have made a better leader for the hunters, but she refused to take the responsibility. Therefore, I was "stuck" with the chore.

The biggest thing going right now was the annual pressure to stock up on meat before the monsoon hit. We could still hunt during the monsoon, but it was a pain in the ass to tromp through all that mud and rain. During monsoon season, we had to work at least three times as hard as during dry season to gather the same amount of meat, so we tried to stock up. Now that we had all those refrigerators delivered on the trimaran, we were able to have meat that had not just been smoked or salted. That was a refreshing change, let me tell you.