Chapter 7

Our second child has arrived, and this time it is a boy. Eve wanted to name him after me, but I asked her to name him after my father, instead. I was very proud of my father, so I really wanted this. Eve bowed to my pleading and agreed to name him George. I was really pleased with George and loved him as much as Mary. We need as much genetic variety as we can get, so I would like to see our offspring alternate between girls and boys. Eventually, they were going to mate with each other, so we wanted the maximum randomness.

We now have a total of five children, three girls and two boys, and Eve insists that she is capable of some more. Mary is now nine years old and is a positive help to Eve in taking care of the younger children. George is beginning to be a significant help to me, so we have no doubt that our family will prosper after we are gone. The older children had assumed an attitude of responsibility and were doing everything that they could do to help us progress.

The girls, even Mary, are already looking to George as a leader, so I am doing everything I can think of to make him understand what a responsibility that is. George's brother, Joe, listens to what George has to say, and I have been concentrating on making sure that George does not take advantage of that situation. I hate bullies, and Eve and I are working on making sure that the kids agree with us—so far it is working.

Mary and George are learning to use the crossbow, though both of them still have trouble cocking them and holding them to aim. Both need a post or something else to rest them on, but each one is already a pretty accurate shooter. I have started making them their own personal crossbow. Fortunately, the parts for additional crossbows had been included in the stuff we brought from Auburn.

George is learning to make bolts, and he is making quite serviceable explosive bolts, as young as he is. Fortunately, the gunpowder is quite safe to handle with our current tools. We have no tools that will accidentally cause a spark, so there is no explosion hazard. George uses the surplus steel points we brought from Auburn to make the new pointed bolts, but he keeps the two bolt-making processes well separated, so there is no danger there.

As soon as George gets a little older, I plan to take him on an exploration tour to try to find some metallic ore deposits. All of the geology data that we have been able to find suggests strongly that more iron ore had to be brought to the surface from the Earth's core as the plates continued to move. "All we have to do" is to find where the volcanoes have been active and have left useful materials near the surface. In 50 million years, there must have been useful ores deposited somewhere. It's going to be hard to find with just two explorers wandering around, even on horseback, but we have to start somewhere.

Ten years and five more kids later, and would you believe, all of the new kids were female. That made for three males and seven females. The age of the children ran between 17 and virtually newborn. Eve still seemed to be in good shape, but I asked her to hold off on more children. She still had some birth control potion that had been preserved in the smallest stasis box, so she was able to abide by my wishes. Strangely, she was not happy about abstaining from pregnancy, but she went along with my wishes.

Well, we kept up the birth control for about six months before Eve announced that she was going off it again. She announced firmly that she wanted another baby, and she intended to have one! Hell, she finally wore me down, and I agreed to go along with her wishes.

We had not made any secret from the children how babies were made, so they all knew the rudiments of the process, though we insisted that they hold off practicing with that knowledge until they reached the age of 15. Frankly, we were concerned for the health of the girls, but we wanted the whole thing to be as "fair" as possible, so we used the same rule for the boys. To make up for the restriction, we showed them how to masturbate and practice oral sex. We got away with it because the kids didn't know what they were missing.

When Mary reached the age of 15, I was hoist on my own petard, so to speak. With Eve's blessing, I introduced Mary to the joys of vaginal sexual intercourse. Naturally, she loved it, and we had some difficulty keeping her from bragging to the younger kids, especially George. I wound up sleeping with Eve and Mary on alternate nights. Thank God for menstruation! That was the only time I got enough rest. Luckily, I was still young enough and physically active enough to enjoy the experience.

I got zapped again when George reached his 15^th birthday. Eve introduced George to the pleasures of coitus, and he was hooked like Mary was. Now, at least, I had a breake, since Mary claimed George for herself, and I had some rest during the week. On the other hand, George and Mary fucked like rabbits. It took about eight months for Mary to catch, but she was now knocked up. Not long after, Eve, too, became pregnant, so it would not be long before both George and I would be cut off for a few months. This was when we should make our first serious expedition to explore for metal ore.

We now had several horses, so we were able to have two horses for riding and a spare to use as a packhorse. We now had many dogs, so we chose four to go with us, all males so that we would not have the distraction of a bitch in heat at an inopportune time.

For weapons, we carried 2 RPGs with 30 rockets, 2 crossbows with 40 bolts with the larger explosive warheads (short range bolts) and 40 bolts with points, and 2 bowie knives. For tools, we carried two shovels, one ax, and two picks. We also carried a generous selection of camping equipment.

We planned to be gone for only six weeks so that we could get back before Mary's baby was born. We packed up the night before and left that morning at sunup. We made 20 klicks (kilometers) that first day and stopped at a rest station that had been built several years ago and maintained as an emergency rest point in case of necessity. We could have made at least five more klicks, but the next rest station was not for another 20 klicks, and there was no way we could get there before dark. This was the safer and saner plan, so that's what we chose.

The next day, we proceeded to the next rest station. From now own, we would be camping out in territory we were not familiar with. We were going to have to make sure that we left plenty of time every afternoon to make sure of the safety of our chosen camping place.

We were headed toward some mountains that might have had volcanic activity many years ago. That was not much of a promise of ore, but it was the best we could do this early in the game. From this point on, we were going to be on the lookout for any sort of useful minerals, since they would be needed eventually, even if they were not needed right now.

Personally, I was hoping for copper and tin, since they would be relatively easy to process, and bronze was actually more useful than steel at this point in our development. However, I was quite willing to take whatever we could get, since we were beginning to run short of some of the things we brought with us from Auburn.

While I was wishing for miracles, I hoped that we would find the copper and tin within the next few miles so that it would be practical to haul it back to the cave for processing. Otherwise, we would have to split our forces, and we simply did not have the headcount to do that yet.

Talk about undeserved luck! On the third day of our travels, we came to a cliff which George had a hunch about. We made a sharp right turn and began following the cliff. The cliff began to curve back toward our cave, and I almost ordered George to abandon his hunch and reverse direction. Thank God I didn't!