Chapter 8

What in the merry hell is going on!?! One of Lucy's offspring from her second litter has just died of old age. That got me to thinking about some weird observations that I have made. Namely, none of us, Eve, Lucy, Linda, or I, have shown any signs of aging. Could it be that the stasis field has had more subtle effects on our genes than we ever imagined?

I remember that the ridiculously thorough physical that Eve and I underwent after that first five-day stay in the stasis field showed some changes in our DNA, but nobody could figure out what the changes meant. Anyway, this has led me to speculate that we have all had our life spans extended, who knows for how long.

Belinda and Lucy's first litter have not shown any signs of aging, either. They were exposed to the stasis field before they were born, so their ages could not have been frozen at the age they were when they were exposed to the field, but continued to develop until they became adults. That raises the question of whether or not we should expose our children to the stasis field in order to prolong their lives. Dammit, I have to get Eve's input on this before I go crazy from worrying about it.

I talked to Eve about my suspicions of increased longevity, and she is as intrigued about it as I am. The problem is that we cannot conveniently run any experiments because we don't have any experimental animals except for the dogs. We want an answer soon, not 15 or 20 years from now!

Aha! I've got it. Billy is 14 years old and can barely get around. He would be an ideal candidate for the test. If he comes out of the stasis field dead, no harm is done since he is near death, anyway. However, if Billy comes out of the test and lives about six months or so, which is my estimate of how long he naturally has, then the field probably had no effect on him. The third possibility is that he could come out of the field and grow "younger;" that would show the field's effect that I am looking for. I'll tell Eve what I have in mind and get her opinion.

It was like a miracle! Billy came out of the field looking exactly as he did when he went in five days earlier. That's what we expected. However, over the next two weeks, he started to perk up, and by the end of the month, he was acting like a young dog, again. His missing teeth were growing back in, and his fur was taking on the sheen he had when he was two or three years old.

Everybody noticed the change in the dog, even the youngest children. Once the effect appeared to be certain, Eve and I explained to Mary and George what I had done. We asked if they wanted to try a trip through the stasis field to see if it would be equally as good for them, and they both jumped at the chance. We carefully made sure that they understood that bad things could happen to them as well as good things, but we were 95% sure that they would be all right when the treatment was over.

Both Mary and George were eager to test the hypothesis, so we ran them through the field for five days. Why five days? That was the time Eve and I first spent in the field, and that was the amount of time that Billy was exposed to the field. So, why not? It made absolutely no difference to the people within the field, since, to them, no time passed at all, so we settled onto five days as the exposure time. Personally, I figured that only a few seconds were plenty, but I had nothing more than a hunch to go on. Anyway, Mary and George were in the field for five days and felt fine when they came out. Now, time would tell.

Now, the question came up of what to do about the rest of the kids. Eve and I both were in favor of giving them the advantages of the stasis field, but we were unsure of the best time. We figured that the kids would like to make a big deal out of it if they fully understood what was going on, so we decided to make it an event on their 16^th birthday. By then, they would be old enough to understand what it meant to have the treatment, and they should fully appreciate it. Anyway, Joe would be the next one in line: sex for his 15^th birthday and longevity for his 16^th. That struck me as a rite of passage a hell of a lot better than circumcision!

We had assigned one of the rooms of the cave as a foundry. We didn't do much with copper or tin by themselves, but we went in heavily for making bronze. Aerial, our fourth child was already interested in metalwork, so she was sure to become our new Vulcan (Roman god of the forge).

Aerial took as her first challenge to learn how to make bronze points for our crossbow bolts. She fooled around with that for a while and finally admitted to herself that she still needed to learn more before she could do that job to meet her own demanding specifications. Actually, what we really needed was a grindstone, so she made some tools for shaping the stone once we found some suitable raw material.

We, that is, George, Joe, Aerial, and I, put together a little expedition to fetch some stone suitable for a grindstone. George and I had found some near the copper mine. That was a short trip and ideal for getting the kids out of the cave and looking at our surroundings. We took five horses, counting those we were riding, and four dogs from Lucy's original litter, plus Lucy. In other words, we had quite a caravan by the time we were ready to leave.

Everybody had a crossbow, and George and I carried some hand grenades and an RPG. We weren't expecting a lot of trouble, but it was always a good idea to go prepared. We could never tell when we might run afoul of a land shark or an octopus.

We were a little slow to get started, so we planned to spend the night at the rest station we used when we were transporting the metal billets. With five dogs, I did not see how anything could sneak up on us. We had plenty of supplies along with us, so we didn't have to do much to have a decent supper. Joe did the cooking, and he had the makings of a master chef. Joe did most of the cooking that Eve did not do, and he claimed that he enjoyed it.

It was pushing 4:00 AM when the dogs put up a tremendous uproar. We didn't know what was going on, but we didn't take any chances. We rolled out of our bedrolls and were ready to fight in seconds. I pitched some dried grass on the coals of our campfire so that we could get a flare of light. In only a few moments we saw that we were facing a pack of animals that we had never seen before. They looked pretty much like land sharks, but not hammerheads, except that they were about 1.5 m long and dappled gray and black.

They were probably the current equivalent of hyenas, so that's what we decided to call them. The animals were damned hard to see with their camouflage coloration, but they sure were easy to smell! We were obviously going to need a lot of light if we were going to get into a fight, so I had Joe put some wood on the fire to build it up to a respectable light source.

The hyenas started circling us, and the dogs were keeping themselves between us and the hyenas. This began to look serious, so I sent the dogs to guard the horses, figuring that we could take care of ourselves. Lucy and the other dogs had no trouble understanding what I wanted them to do; their intelligence was remarkable.

Meanwhile, we had our own problems. There looked to be about 20-25 of the hyenas, so we were going to have our hands full if we just waited for them to attack. I warned everybody what I was about to do and then threw a hand grenade toward where three of the hyenas were standing. My purpose was to disorient them as much as it was to kill a few of the stinking animals.

The hand grenade went off almost under the feet of one of the hyenas. Naturally, that animal disappeared in a cloud of smoke, flesh, and blood. The other two hyenas had their gills damaged severely, so I did not expect much difficulty with them. I think that it must have been less the sound of the explosion and more the smell of blood, but whatever it was, it was quickly obvious that I had stirred up a hornets' nest. Most of the other animals charged us immediately, and George and I were busy tossing more of the grenades.