Chapter 13

There were now 17 females and 4 males of an age to be sexually active. It was decided among the women that assignments of husbands would be made so that they could have a semblance of family life. These assignments were not permanent, but could be changed as the situation warranted. The women felt better about having a semi-permanent relationship, though the boys were quite willing to fuck anybody and everybody who was available.

Each of the males were assigned four females as wives, but Jeff got five in his allotment, because Julie was intent on staying with him before the divisions were made. Beyond that, the partnerships were up for grabs, except that mother/son relationships were avoided. The reason was to try to have an adequate gene mix, considering what they had to start with.

Julie led the choosing with all of the males absent from the discussion. It took about four hours to get all of the details worked out, and some of the girls swapped back and forth until everybody was happy with the distribution. The people too young to be included in this distribution would be accounted for on a case-by-case basis when they got old enough.

The house was already getting crowded, so a community meeting was held and it was decided to build three more wings to the house. That way, everybody was conscious that he or she was still a member of the overall family, but was able to have some small family privacy at the same time.

Further discussion led to the design of a long corridor with apartments branching off from the corridor. It was decided to build six three-room apartments branching off from this major corridor. That would give room for expansion when it was required and would provide for apartments for the families to be created in the near future. Up until then, the empty apartments could be used as store rooms or whatever else that might be required. The roofs were to be made sturdy enough that a second storey could be added over the new construction without too much trouble.

In preparation for all of this building, Jeff, in his position as blacksmith, fabricated a bronze crosscut saw for the fine cutting of the timber and a bronze circular saw blade for a portable sawmill powered by the power takeoff from the steam engine used on the tractor.

They planned to use logs for the exterior walls, just as had been used in the original construction, but the floors and interior walls would be made from planks cut by the sawmill. In fact, in a fit of enthusiasm, they voted to cover the whole set of floors throughout the house with quarter sawn planks. With everybody working on the project, it was completed three months after the tools were ready.

The new "families" moved into their new apartments and the celebrations began. Several new babies were started on that night.

Can memories be inherited? You would think not, but it certainly seemed like they were. For example, Sarah seemed to have an uncanny knowledge and feel for chemistry. She did not know everything that Jeff and Julie remembered, but she was a wonder in what she could do with her primitive laboratory. Sarah's mother, Ann, had a corresponding ability to make and work glass. She was limited to what was known in the 21^st Century as "soft glass," which meant that it was not heat resistant, but Sarah did not need that for the vast majority of her experiments. The result was that Sarah had a reasonably complete chemistry lab with all of the flasks, condensers, etc. that she needed.

Ann was kept busy with fabricating all of the glass objects they needed for a comfortable life. Most of the kitchen utensils were made of glass, and Ann even worked out a way to make very high quality window glass by floating the glass on a sheet of molten tin. Thus, the whole house was retrofitted with glazed windows, though they still used wooden shutters to protect the glass from inclement weather and attacking bugs.

Jeff, Jr. turned out to be an armament expert. He had an idea for a repeating crossbow that would act like a machine gun. His version was too large to be carried by one person, but it could be mounted in place at home or it could be mounted in the wagon to be towed into battle behind the tractor. Bolts dropped from a hopper on top into a receiver where they were picked up by the bowstring. The mechanism was cocked and fired by rotating a crank with gearing so that there was a significant mechanical advantage applied to the machine. This was necessary because a leaf spring from the car was used for the bow, and it took nearly 450 pounds of force to cock the bow.

Vigorous cranking could produce between four and six shots per minute of a very high velocity bolt. This weapon was designed to fight flying insects like wasps that were very nimble in the air and hard to hit on the wing until almost too late. Two of these special crossbows were built and mounted on the roof at opposite ends of the house. These weapons should provide some protection out to 250 yards, and very good protection within 100 yards. The one problem was that they went through bolts at an atrocious rate, and the bolts were sometimes hard to find after being shot at maximum range. It was also believed that these machine gun-like crossbows would be deadly against ants, a bug they still had sporadic trouble with.

Jeff had been working on a lathe to work bronze, but he was still at least a year away from that. His first project would be to construct a diesel engine to replace the steam engine powering the tractor, and Julie was working with Sarah to accumulate enough bug fat for fuel. They found that wasps were an especially good source of this fuel, so wasps were now hunted at every opportunity.

Hunting, now, was going farther afield, since they were hunting minerals as well as food on every trip. Mary, Sue, and Tricia were the principle hunters, but others sometimes went along to provide extra hands or extra eyes. Henry usually went along as the driver of the tractor and the geologist. One of the women acted as the fireman when they were in motion, but that job was swapped around quite often to keep it from being too tiring. The steam engine went through wood fuel at a stupendous rate.

The hunters had found a wasps' nest about 12 miles from home. That was uncomfortably close, so they had decided to eliminate it and both remove the menace and gather a large supply of fuel for the future diesel engine at the same time. Jeff, Jr. and Connie had brought one of the new machine guns along to give it its baptism of fire, so to speak.

They were ignored by the wasps until they got quite close to the nest. At that time, the wasps decided to drive them away. Their shape did not fit any of the instinctive templates for the usual enemies or prey, so the wasps were unsure how to deal with the humans.

A couple of wasp scouts flew around the strange smoke belching machine but did not attack. Once the humans were within about 60 yards, Connie let fly with a burst from her crossbow at several wasps congregated close to the nest. She hit three, and this got the wasps' immediate attention.

So many wasps tried to attack at once that it was impossible to get an accurate count if there had been time for that sort of thing. Jeff, Jr. was busy dumping bolts into the hopper as Connie fired off at them. The other humans were shooting their own crossbows at any wasps that got very close. The machine gun was so effective that the visible wasps were wiped out in about 15 minutes. Connie had gone through 63 bolts in that time, but everybody agreed that the results were awesome! They gathered up the dead wasps and spent two hours hunting for stray bolts. They found most of them, but not all. Oh, well, they would just have to make some more of the things.

The supply of wasps was just not going to be able to keep up with the demand for diesel fuel. They had wiped out all of the wasps that they could find within 20 miles of home, and they still had collected less than 200 gallons of fat for fuel. Unless they could find a convenient source of fuel, they would have to stick to the steam engine. They knew that virtually any flammable liquid would serve as diesel fuel, they just had to find a reliable source.