Chapter 32

The Jimmy W. did not have any design flaws that caused us any real trouble. A few minor items were corrected when we got home. We now were able to settle on a basic design. We did need to know just how big we could go, so the John W. was built with the dimensions scaled up by 50%.

John was so pleased with his ship that we went for broke and scaled the Wilbur H. to be double the size of the Jimmy W. Wilbur reported that his ship had a tendency to be a bit ungainly, so we decided to scale the next ship back to the size of the John W. when we got around to building it.

The size of John W. seemed to be close to ideal. It was large enough that we could hang a single-seater ultralight from a trapeze at the stern of the gondola. The plane could be launched and retrieved while the mother ship was in flight, so we had a very good combination for scouting and general mapping.

We now had so many people that Village #1 had just gotten too big. We needed to split into two villages, but the first question was who would go and who would stay. To answer that, we held a kind of balloting where each family unit voted to stay or move. It turned out that about 26% of our population was willing to move to a new village, depending somewhat on where the new village was located.

We didn't want to get so far apart that we grew away from each other; on the other hand, we needed enough separation to have room for farming and herding. The obvious place for the new village was at LS3 so that power could be drawn from the trimaran located there. There was adequate water and available farmland, once we got the carnivores under control. It was only about 15 minutes away from LS1 by ultralight or LTAC, or 2-3 hours by golf cart. This seemed like a reasonable compromise, so that's where we decided to put Village #2.

Everybody who had initially offered to move agreed to this location, and several more families were willing to move, now that they knew that they would have electricity and running water.

John and I were going to be moving around a lot with our airships, so there needed to be new managers appointed for both villages. Adel and Jean agreed to stay to manage Village #1, and Zack Jakobs and Beautiful Flower accepted the management of Village #2.

Zack and Beautiful Flower assembled a committee to design the layout of Village #2, though this should be fairly easy, since the houses would be identical to the ones at Village #1. The main decisions revolved around the exact number of houses to be planned for and the location of the various public buildings, such as the school. They also had to decide where the village and its wall would be placed relative to the trimaran which would power it. There were other questions to be settled, such as the sewer system, and Wilbur was consulted on that.

There were still a sufficient number of shipping containers available that could be used for the town wall, so that part of the problem was easily solved. They also decided that some of the empty containers could be used for school rooms, and those containers could be ones incorporated into the town wall.

It took less than two weeks to design the major features of the town, though it took another week to get everybody who would move to agree on these features. Finally, the design was fixed and construction would begin at the end of the next monsoon season. We were now sufficiently mechanized that construction and relocation would be quick and easy. Meanwhile, ultralights were flying over LS3 killing every carnivore that they could find.

Well, now that Village #2 was "finished" and occupied, the first thing the residents wanted to do was come up with a name. They couldn't stand the confusion of Village #2 being located at Landing Site #3, so they had a contest to select a name for their town. They selected "Newton," short for New Town.

We all agreed that the name made the place seem more attractive, so the residents of Village #1 wanted to do the same thing. We finally settled on "Prime" for our name, since it was the place from which all of our maps were scaled.

Now that we had two towns, we seemed to grow at an accelerated rate. We didn't get any more new people via being transported, but we had a bumper crop of babies. It looked like we were well on our way to building up the population to force us into even more towns.

We started to specialize our talents and products. Prime became more of an academic and agricultural community, and Newton pushed itself more toward the physical and manufacturing aspects of our life. The containers comprising the wall around Prime were left in place, but were converted into university class rooms and the trimaran was used for laboratories and small workshops.

On the other hand, the trimaran at Newton was completely gutted, except for the necessary power source, and converted into manufacturing shops. They really were not big enough, yet, to be called full-scale factories, but we thought of them as such.

With money now commonly in use for all but the simplest personal barter, the economy took off as the more ambitious of us looked for ways to become wealthier. No one suffered for lack of goods and services, but some of us were just more entrepreneurial. For example, John became a shipping tycoon because he figured out a way to increase the carrying capacity of his airship, the John W. He was awarded the franchise for hauling food products from Prime to Newton, and he picked up return freight in various manufactured items. In fact, business became so good that he was able to buy the airship from Prime and to construct another one with his own finances; the second airship was named Janice W., after John's wife and captain of the new airship.