Chapter 14

"Well, is it clear down there, Dregg?" asked Tom as he, Bets and Tommy stood on the transporter deck.

Dregg looked down at the scanner screen, and noted there were no life signs in the immediate area of the human's new house. The closest signs of life that were roaming free, were over a mile away from the home.

"All is clear, my friend," Dregg said, smiling at the human.

Tom nodded back, "Well, then, let's get this show on the road, buddy. We have a hell of a lot of work to do."

Dregg smiled at him, and gave him the thumbs up sign he'd learned from Tommy.

"Transporting in five sectars, Tom," he said, initiating the transport beam.

Dregg quickly walked over and joined the humans and the two dogs. A few seconds later the green beam enveloped all of them, and then they were standing in front of a huge two-story log cabin.

"It's beautiful!" Bets whispered in awe as she looked at the log cabin in the clearing surrounded by tall pine trees.

The humans walked around the perimeter of the cabin and outbuildings inspecting the area from a security point of view. The clearing itself was the size of two football fields, and backed up against a sheer cliff that seemed as smooth as glass.

The top of the mesa was at least 300 feet above them and left very little doubt that nothing was going to sneak up on them, from above. A professional rock climber could not find enough snags to descend down the face of the cliff from above so good luck on any animal or Mag trying it.

The stone barn was a change in plans from what the humans had discussed with Dregg. It was easily the size of an airplane hanger, now, instead of a normal size barn. The huge double doors were each twenty feet wide and 30 feet tall. They looked like wooden slabs bolted together with massive steel rivets but when Tom touched one of the giant two-foot wide slabs, he felt metal. It was an imitation, made to look like wood.

"What's up with the change in the barn old buddy?" Tom asked, pointing at the massive stone structure.

Dregg smiled and as he pulled a steel loop hanging on one of the doors. The giant door opened soundlessly and he motioned them to follow him through the huge wooden doors.

"After I talked with you three, and learned what purpose you wanted to use this building for, I decided it would be more appropriate to make it from stone. As you will notice, I went ahead and cut another 400 feet into the cliff itself to give you more room inside," he said, flicking a switch beside the front door.

Lights came on all the way down the center isle letting the three humans see just how deep the structure truly was. And damn it was deep! At least two football fields long inside and over 100 feet wide!

Dregg pointed to the far end, "The smelter in the back, alone, generates so much heat that it would eventually turn a wooden structure into a giant kindling box, just waiting for a stray spark to set it off. That is why I decided on a totally stone structure. The cliff is part of the structure, also."

Tom looked around at the huge walls rising at least 30 feet above them. There were at least twenty stalls for horses on each side of the front portion of the building with a 30-foot space in the center for a clear isle.

Above their heads in the front of the building was the hay storage area already filled with at least a few hundred bales of hay. There was a huge indoor silo that fed down into a chute below for filling the burlap style feed bags of grain.

"Geeze, Dad, this place is bigger than my football stadium!" Tommy exclaimed excitedly, as he ran from area to area inside the massive building.

"Here's the tack room. There must be a hundred saddles in here!" he yelled, poking his head out the door.

Another room beside the end of the stalls opposite of them held a strange looking bin. Bets read the directions on the control panel and whooped. She clapped her hands gleefully as she went down the rows of machinery discovering how they each combined to make a self-sustaining world inside the building.

The floors of the stalls were made of a porous material that allowed the urine to filter through and into a piping system that ran back into the 'poo-room', as Bets called it. Once there, the urine was broken down and turned into basic chemicals, which were stored inside huge vats.

The same was done with the manure when it was mucked from the stalls and added into a huge compost bin. All the nutrients were purged from the compost and reformed into small pellet size fertilizer to be used on either the large grain fields they wanted to plant or the small truck garden that Bets had wanted to put in.

The remainder of the compost ran through a screening section, where all organic lifeforms were removed, and then it was washed with steam. From there it was formed under pressure into 2 inch squares that Dregg said could be used in the smelter, with or without coal.

"That's not possible! The poo-squares are made of hay and manure, they'll burn too fast and not produce enough heat at the same time," Tom stated as he remembered his younger years in his grandfather's workshop.

He had spent every summer at his grandfather's shop pumping that damn bellows while his grandfather recited his metallurgical beliefs in the purity of fine steel. Coal was like a god to the old man and achieving the perfect temperature for folding his steel was a sacred event for the two of them.

Whether it was a knife, sword, or a firearm the man was a master and people would wait for months for the old man to work his magic on a project for them. Now this skinny alien was close to beleaguering Tom's hero of steel, with pressed horse crap!

Without realizing it Tom had been broadcasting his thoughts to the other three around him. His memories were so vivid, that Tommy had tears in his eyes as he saw his great grandfather for the first time. He was a strong man, with huge forearms, but his gentle smile spoke volumes of understanding to an awkward young boy.

The boy focused on every word uttered, as he pumped the leather bellows. He listened to his hero recite words of the nearly lost art of steel. Tommy's tears ran down his face, as the love his dad had felt for that old wizard of metal flowed through all of them.

Dregg frowned as he realized just how powerful the feelings that came to his mind from his human friend were.

"It was not my intent to disparage your grandfather my friend. I am truly sorry for giving you that impression. However, what you have here is not a contradiction, but rather an improvement on a process that is available on your old homeworld even now. And I am sure if your grandfather were here right now, he would be ecstatic with the idea of horse crap being used instead of coal."

Bets smiled as she wiped the tears from her eyes and grabbed Tom's hand, "You know, old Sam would have loved the idea since he spent so much time working around those damned horses in his younger years."

Tom smiled too.

"Yeah, he would have loved the idea of getting something besides a nip on the ass from a damned horse. And he always bitched about the amount of destruction caused by the coal industry. 'Raping Mother Earth' he used to say when we talked about strip mining," Tom replied, shaking his head.

Turning to Dregg he grinned. " I'm sorry about my reaction, Dregg. It just caught me off-balance a little," Tom said, offering his hand to his skinny alien friend.

Dregg smiled and took the human's hand, "No worries my friend, although we really need to work on the mental broadcasting the three of you send. It can be a little overwhelming to an old alien like myself."

Bets smiled and looked at Dregg. "I know that it will take some time for the three of us to gain complete control over our mental powers, but this one is intentional, my friend," she said.

She sent a thought of pure love and friendship to the skinny alien who had saved her husband's life.

Dregg fell to his knees as the pure emotion of grateful feelings came washing over his mind from Bets. Seconds later it was soon followed by both Tom and Tommy's feeling of true friendship and appreciation.

Dregg's two hearts were filled and overflowing with an unfathomable love that he had never felt in his entire existence. Such power, such love and gratitude as he had never felt before, burst through the hard shell that kept him from becoming too close to another being. His teacher long ago had warned him that it was never good to allow himself to become close to anyone.

"Your very occupation requires your feelings and emotions be aloof from those you work with," his teacher had said to him.

But his teacher had been wrong. How can being so alone, benefit those you are trying to help. All those years of keeping a shell around his heart broke Dregg's two hearts, as he realized just how many opportunities he had missed through the years.

For the first time in his life the skinny gray alien wept as he discovered what love truly felt like.

'Never again will I allow my job to shape my existence, I have missed too many chances to share such beautiful feelings as these, ' he thought as he felt arms and hands encircling him with love and friendship.

Minutes passed as the wracking sobs slowly receded, leaving a shaken but happy alien hearing how much the three of them loved him and truly appreciated all that he had done for them.

Finally able to think clearly again, Dregg managed to stand up, with the help of Tom and Tommy.

"WOW. That was indeed a fantastic experience my friends, but let's not do that too often," he said, wiping the tears from his face and smiling.

Bets leaned up and kissed his wet gray cheek.

"We just wanted you to know how much we love and respect you my friend. It never occurred to us that no one had ever shown you that before," she said softly.

Tom cleared his throat, slapping the skinny alien on the back, "Well, now that everyone has had a good cry, can we continue the dang tour, partner?"

Dregg fought to suck air back into his lungs from the (gentle) slap on his back and nodded.

"Su ... sure thing, Tom. Let's go look at the steel shop, and see if it meets with your approval," Dregg wheezed out.

Rows and rows of raw steel sat in racks on either side of the shop. Everything from processed high-carbon steel ingots to blocks of gunmetal sat around the huge workbenches.

Benches set up with lathes and drill presses lined one side of the shop. Every conceivable tool Tom could think of, for making a firearm from scratch, was present.

The cutting area was a definite surprise to Tom. Dregg explained that part of the processing of the manure, for both the horse stalls and the cattle barn, was collecting the methane from both places. Then it was reconfigured into a gas. The controlled gas was used in the torches, for cutting steel.

The rest of the methane went into storage, to heat the kilns and other areas of the huge stone complex. Thus the entire barn was almost self-sufficient with only a little labor required to bring in the original manure from the different areas around the home and barns.

The four of them walked back towards the front door. Dregg showed them the side entrance to the milking barn that he had cut into the cliff.

"It leads to the smaller barn without you having to go outside just to walk 50 yards and go back inside the milking barn," he said proudly.

The adults were shocked, too, as they all walked down the twenty foot wide stone hallway, and into a good size barn. Along the wall beside them, were milking chutes with the squeeze guards that locked around the cow or in their case auroch's head. Of course there was a feed trough the entire length of the milking area so the aurochs would have nothing to complain about.

"We have cows?" Tommy asked, surprised at the idea.

Dregg smiled at the teenager, "Well, not like the ones you're used to. The aurochs are more like oxen then regular cattle and right now they are very wild and extremely dangerous. It will take a lot of time and effort to get them tame enough to stay in the cattle barn."