Chapter 17

An examination of the wounds in the side of the tank showed that the new design for bolt points did have superior penetrating power as compared to the flint points on the conventional bolts. However, it looked like the spider venom was not any more effective than the scorpion venom had been. It also was doubtful that concentrating the venom made any real difference.

In fact, it looked like what had really killed the tank were the two bolts that had penetrated its eyes. The special points had broken through the bone plate behind the beast's eye sockets and had penetrated its brain. That was when the poison had really worked. Apparently, they still needed poison for a quick kill, but they also needed the new bronze points to penetrate the bony layer so that the poison could be delivered directly to the beast's brain.

It was still impossible to retrieve the bolts from the beast's body, and those that had missed were long gone, so they just wrote the bolts off to the learning curve and resumed their trip to the cave. As a kind of joke, Julie had started to call their new home Cavopolis, and the name was already starting to stick.

They arrived in Cavopolis in mid-afternoon and were greeted by the people already in residence. Jeff, Jr. pointed out the chamber that had been reserved for Jeff's family. It was the best of the nearby chambers, though there was really nothing wrong with any of the others, but somehow it seemed to have a certain air about it, and it should belong to the leader of the community. Jeff and Julie said that they did appreciate the thought behind the selection.

That evening, after supper and everybody had retired to bed, Julie commented to Jeff, "Something has dawned on me. I have been wondering what happened to us to give us the special healing ability or the memory inheritance, and I may have thought of the factor that did it.

"You remember that when we first got here, we were pretty normal in our abilities, except that we did feel better due to the increased oxygen level in the air. You had that accident and took the normal amount of time to recover from your injury, so it was after that event that we started to have these improved abilities.

"Well, I just remembered that was when we found the unusual cattails and started eating them. I'll bet that was what gave us our special abilities. There was something in the cattails, sort of like a super vitamin, that changed us."

"OK, I can understand that, but what about the children that started out with the abilities without ever eating any of the cattails. Jeff, Jr. was healing fast long before he ate any of the cattails."

"Yes, you have a point, but suppose that the 'something' in the cattails affected our genes so that the abilities became permanent, and we passed them along to our children through our genes. We know that is possible from experiments done on animals in the 21^st Century."

"Yeah, I remember a TV program on that, but I don't remember the channel. OK, does that mean that we have to eat the cattail on a continuing basis to keep these new abilities?"

"I hope not, since we are not going to have an easy time finding any in this dryer climate, and we are going to have a hard time raising any of our own. I know that it can be done, but putting in a special garden for the cattails is not going to be easy."

They spent the next few weeks getting Cavopolis organized. A chamber was set aside for the chemistry lab, one was set aside for the blacksmithing and foundry, and one was set aside for woodworking, though the sawmill was still planned for operation outside.

Suitable sand was found, and Ann started making light bulbs, using carbonized plant fiber for the filament. Meanwhile, Jeff made a wire-drawing rig from bronze to be used for the power lines. The only source of electricity they had was the alternator from the old car, but it still put out 13.5 volts DC, so it could light a few light bulbs. The voltage was so low that they didn't want to run the wires any farther than they had to.

Jeff build another small steam engine solely to be used for powering this alternator until they could come up with a setup to make a higher voltage and higher current. The more powerful unit would probably have to be set up with a waterwheel over at the waterfall, and wires run from there. Therefore, they were going to need a lot of copper for the generator and for the transmission of the electricity.

Some copper and copper sulfide ore was left at their original home. South of there was the source of the copper and ore. They were going to need a lot of copper for the many jobs that needed to be done, so they needed to set up a regular system for bringing in the copper and ore. It was decided that the larger wagon would be converted into an ore hauler, since it had a higher capacity than the other wagon. A tandem connection was made to see if the larger tractor had enough power to pull both trailers at the same time.

Both trailers at the same time could be pulled by the tractor, but steering and general handling were a little tricky. The combination they settled on was to have the smaller trailer between the tractor and the larger trailer. The machine gun was left installed on the smaller trailer, but the machine gun was removed from the larger trailer to provide more room for payload.

Alice, Henry, Connie, and Shirley had made such an effective team for the previous runs that they were given the more-or-less permanent job of crewing the larger tractor. Other people would be assigned to work specific jobs, such as the one to fetch copper from the old site. Dolly and Helen were sent along to provide extra hands for the work party.

Jeff had already made bronze shovels, spades, scoops, and picks, so they had the tools they needed to work the open pit copper mine. More of the special bronze points were made for the machine gun bolts, so they were delayed a few days in leaving while these were being prepared. Sarah was to be setting up a refining and purification production line for the copper while they were gone. The operation was going to be pretty crude until they had a substantial quantity of copper, but they planned to purify the copper by electrical means as soon as they could work their way up to that.

The party of six left as soon as they were ready, and made a quick trip to the bridge. They had found a route which bypassed the swamp, so they made very good time. It only took two days to get as far as their old home, where they planned to stay while they gathered the copper still on that site. When they got there, they found that there was not as much copper and ore lying around as they had expected, so they went on to the mine the next day without bothering to load up any of the metal or ore on hand.

It only took a few hours to reach the copper mine, and they got to work as soon as they had eaten. The first day, they concentrated on finding and loading as much raw copper as they could. Once they had picked up all of the nodules there were, they would start digging out the copper pyrites that formed the ore they were planning to use. It turned out that they were able to find so many copper nodules that there was little call for ore on this run. It still took two days of work to collect a full load, so they had to spend one night on location at the mine.

They had built special skirts for the wagons so that the underside of the wagons could be protected by four wooden walls that gave them the equivalent of two small cabins with low ceilings. As a result, they were well protected from any sort of bug or lizard that might want a taste of human flesh. They mostly used the space for sleeping, though with one man and five women, Henry was kept pretty busy servicing all of the women; of course, he was in hog heaven.