“Don’t mention it. Glad I could help.”
“I’ll still have to go out there once a day and collect empty shuttles, but I can pop a bunch of them back to Earth the same way.”
“You aren’t leaving the shuttles for the colonists, Janice?”
“I left some, but there are only so many shuttles, and I’m running a lot of them. They don’t need that many on the colony, and I can’t afford that many from this end. I can’t get them manufactured fast enough.”
“Ah. Makes sense.”
“Thanks again for that idea, though, Bernd. And don’t forget to give some thought to my other problem.”
“Will do, Janice.”
About a week after their talk, Decker went out on the balcony with a pair of binoculars to look at the interstellar probe as it orbited overhead. The Wire had noted a change in the operational tempo, and had some video, but Decker wanted to see it himself.
It was evening, and, with the sun shining on them, Decker could just make out the dots of shuttles lined up in pairs approaching the device. They were in a continuous stream.
As two shuttles entered the device, the device would form the bubble, pulse it, and then the bubble would be gone while the device itself remained. The shuttles, too, were gone, transported to a target planet.
The next two shuttles entered the device, it pulsed, and they were gone. Quant could form the bubble and pulse it quickly now, and the shuttles were disappearing on five minute intervals.
The Wire had said they could send shuttles up that fast because they had shrunk the safety interval in the Texas shuttleport yet again, and were using all the shuttle pads for takeoffs while transporting shuttles out. When Quant was bringing shuttles back, they would use all the shuttle pads for landings.
It was mesmerizing to watch. Every five minutes, pulse, two shuttles left. Pulse, two shuttles left. Pulse, two shuttles left.
Twenty-four hours a day, until Quant ran out of shuttles. Then the interstellar probe would make the rounds of the target planets, and do the same operation in reverse.
Decker got to see that operation the next night. Pair by pair, shuttles appeared in orbit and headed to the surface. Long chains of them.
Decker couldn’t imagine what the spaceport must look like. The bustle of the arriving containers, getting them loaded onto shuttles, getting the shuttles queued and launched.
It was the biggest logistics operation in history.
Six months after the ‘two years to go’ picnic, Matt Jasic turned eighteen. At dinner that night, they had birthday cake for dessert. Sitting in the living room after dinner, Matt started a conversation Susan Dempsey would remember forever.
“Mom, Dad, I think it’s time I moved in with Peggy.”
Robert Jasic recovered first.
“What does Betsy Reynolds think of that?”
“She said it’s good with her, Dad. She thinks it’s important we really bond as a couple and a team before we go to the colony. Things will be tough enough without working out the kinks in the relationship then, is what she said. She invited me to move across the street and live with Peggy in her room.”
Jasic nodded. He looked over to Dempsey, who had recovered enough to look to him. She raised an eyebrow, and he gave a slight nod. She sighed.
“Well, you’re eighteen, Matt, and, though Peggy is only seventeen, Betsy’s given her permission,” Dempsey said. “So I don’t know that we have any say in it, but for all that, you have our blessing.”
“You see, Mom,” Matt said. “That thing you did. You both looked at each other, you raised an eyebrow at him, and he gave a little nod. You guys have that couple thing all worked out. I think Peggy and I need to be working on that sort of thing. Communication. Cooperation. It will make life much easier when we get there and all the work really gets under way.”
“You two are already having sex, I take it?” Jasic asked.
Matt reddened, but didn’t flinch from the answer.
“Yes. For almost a year.”
“And she’s on a contraceptive?”
“Yes. Of course. No babies before we get there. That’s absolute. The colony headquarters has actually said they’ll consider leaving people behind if they are in the last trimester or have babies before we go.”
Jasic nodded.
“All right. Well, not really any of my business, but I had to ask.”
“Of course,” Matt said. “I understand.”
“Well, don’t be a stranger,” Dempsey said. “You two are welcome to have dinner over here whenever you want. You know that. We like Peggy. She’s good people.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
Matt got up and went to his room to pack some things for his move across the street.
Amy and the twins had watched this whole conversation. Once Matt left to go to his room, Amy cleared her throat. Jasic looked over at her, and she raised an eyebrow.
“I suppose you want Joe Bolton to move in here with you,” he said.
“Yes. Of course.”
“You’re only fifteen, young lady.”
“I’ll be sixteen next month, and Joseph will be eighteen the month after, same as Matt. It’s only eighteen months until we leave, and that’s just as much for Joseph and I as it is for Peggy and Matt. We need to be working on what it is to be a couple before the shit hits the fan.”
Jasic and Dempsey looked at each other and back to Amy.
“And yes, I’m on a contraceptive. No babies before departure. We all know the rules.”
“Amy,” Jasic began.
“Look, do you want us to have to work out what it is to be a couple while we’re trying to build a civilization from the ground up? Think back to your first months of marriage. Does that even sound doable?”
“She has a point, Bob,” Dempsey said.
Jasic looked at Dempsey. She had initially been a little nonplussed by Matt’s announcement, but she seemed to have adjusted. Or maybe it was just something about the way fathers looked at their daughters and mothers looked at their sons. In any case, Dempsey seemed on board with Amy’s request.
“Your call,” Jasic said.
Dempsey looked at Jasic for several seconds. He nodded then. Dempsey turned to Amy.
“Very well, Amy. Joseph can move in with you. Or you with him, I suppose.”
Amy came over and kissed her father, then her mother.
“Thank you. I have to call Joseph.”
Amy left the room. The twins’ heads swiveled as they watched her walk out, then swung back to face their parents.
“Mother,” Stacy said.
“Father,” Tracy said.
“We need to speak to you,” Stacy said.
“About the Thompson boys,” Tracy finished.
It all happened quickly. On Matt Jasic’s eighteenth birthday, there were eighteen teenagers living separately with their parents in the five houses. Within a week, there were nine young couples – some very young – starting out their lives together, forging the bonds they would need to bear up under the stresses of building a colony.
Initially the boys all moved in with the girls. Over time, most of them occasionally switched back and forth between her room and his, retaining strong bonds to both sets of in-laws.
As the Jasic twins shared a bedroom, it was a good thing the Thompson boys, now fourteen and sixteen, were close. Unlike the other couples, the twins didn’t spend any nights at their in-laws’ house, where James and Jonah had separate bedrooms. The twins, two months short of fourteen when they started living with the Thompson boys, didn’t want to be separated. Not yet, anyway.
Jasic and Dempsey went from six people at the dinner table, one of whom was a teenage boy, to eight people at the dinner table, three of whom were teenage boys. They stopped having any leftovers from dinner, and some family recipes had to be doubled.
The relationships all had their share of early trials and spats, but the nine young couples had each other to rely on for support and guidance. The
interlocking relationships among the five families made them all stronger.
As they were effectively newlyweds, there was a lot of sex, but there were no pregnancies. That was, quite simply, not allowed, and they all knew it. The girls were all on contraceptives supplied by Quant’s colony headquarters.
There was also no cheating on their partners. They understood that what they most needed to develop as couples were communications skills and trust. None of the others would entertain anything of the kind in any case, and, with their ongoing at-home schooling in the colony curriculum, there were no opportunities for hanky-panky outside their group.
Assets
“Hi, Janice.”
“Hi, Bernd.”
“Haven’t heard from you in a while. What’s going on?”
“Well, there’s a year to go, so things are starting to narrow toward departure.”
“How did the housing contest go?”
Quant had had a contest to see who could come up with a really good solution for immediate interim housing. Something like a log cabin, except the trees on the colony planets weren’t mature enough to allow large-scale timber operations yet, and wouldn’t be for a while.
“Really good, Bernd. We got one submission that was heads and shoulders above everything else.”
“Really.”
“Yes. It’s an inflatable plastic house. One room, with a peaked roof. It has a floor, clear windows set into the walls, a plastic door, and all. You inflate it with a small compressor, and then you spray a polymerizing chemical on it. On the bottom first, then you stand it up and spray the inside and the outside.”
“What does that do, Janice?”
“The whole thing hardens. So you end up with a rigid one-room house, with windows and a door and all, and the air trapped in the walls is the insulation. And it’s cheap. It’s brilliant.”
“What do you do to heat it? You don’t want a fireplace in a plastic house.”
“No, but wood will be too important to burn for a long time anyway, Bernd. We’ll use electric heat off the power plant. If we even need to, that is. The design includes a rather ingenious heating and cooling idea.”
“Resistive heat?”
“Yes. Heat pumps and the like are mechanically complex and require an infrastructure to maintain. Resistive heat is easy to build and maintain, and there won’t be any shortage of power.”
“What about air conditioning, Janice?”
“The design includes a swamp cooler, as well as a roof-mounted ventilation fan. The colonies are all in subtropical coastal climates. Think San Diego or Hawaii. You don’t really need heat or AC. The simplest way to get a colony going fast is to locate it someplace where the basic needs of life are easily met. That gives you the most surplus labor for building and expanding the colony.”
“So the housing thing is settled, for the first, what, several years?”
“The little houses are good for at least ten years, Bernd. They also have a way to hook two of them together, so you get a two-room house. They’re not very big, but in a climate like that you do most of your living outside.”
“How many are you sending?”
“I’m sending a hundred thousand per colony. Enough for every family with kids to add the second room once everyone has at least a one-room house.”
“A hundred thousand per colony, Janice? That’s a lot.”
“No, it’s not, Bernd. I can get four hundred of them in a single container. Two hundred and fifty containers, to meet all the interim housing needs of the whole colony? That’s nothing.”
“Well, when you put it like that, I guess you’re right. Have you selected the planets yet?”
“No, I’m still at twenty-nine possibles.”
“But aren’t you running contests for naming the planets, Janice?”
“And the cities. That’s right. Twenty-four different contests. Since everybody has their colony assignment already – has had all along really, because of the need to get enough of the right skills everywhere – we can have the people going there both come up with the names and judge the contest. It’s a big psychological thing to say, ‘We’re going to Avalon’ instead of ‘We’re going to number seventeen.’”
“But you don’t know which planets you’ll use yet.”
“It doesn’t matter, Bernd. Most place names have nothing to do with the place. New York? San Diego? The best example of one that does is Chicago, which is a misspelling of an Algonquian word for the stinky wild onions that grew there. So naming the planet or city after local features has a mixed history at best.”
Decker chuckled.
“OK, so it doesn’t matter which place name goes on which planet. Are they coming up with any good ones, Janice?”
“Oh, just about every mythical place name in literature and mythology is in there. Olympus, Valhalla, Atlantis, Avalon, Camelot, Numenor, Earthsea, Terminus, Secundus, Amber – it goes on and on. Some are sort of prosaic. New something, like New Earth, or New Terra, that sort of thing. And some of them are funny. One exasperated father put in ‘Whenareweleaving?’ as the planet name.”
Decker laughed.
“How close are you to picking the planets?”
“I have a sorted list, Bernd. If I get more data, like an earthquake or a hurricane or a coronal mass ejection or something, I’ll score it against that planet and re-sort the list. If I had to choose right now, I would just pick the top twenty-four off the list.”
“And then randomly assign colony groups to planets?”
“Yes. No basis on which to pick one or another for a specific planet. It will be luck of the draw.”
Decker nodded. That made sense to him.
“How is the transporter coming?”
“That’s always been the pacing item, Bernd. It just takes a long time to build something that big, but if it isn’t that big, it won’t work. Not for any kind of real payload.”
“But that’s on track?”
“Oh, yes. I’m starting to build the main trusses now. Connecting all the smaller trusses together. I call them smaller, but those pieces are ten miles long, and there are thousands of them in the structure. Those are all finally built.”
“So what are the factories doing now, Janice?”
“Power plants, meta-factories, residence halls, and barns. I have some of them done, but I need dozens of each of them. The factory capacity is finally coming available to get serious about it. The good part is all the teething issues on the plans for those have been worked through.”
“So it’s all coming together finally.”
“Yes, Bernd. The biggest efforts now here on Earth remain the education effort and the supplies effort. I have to collect all the supplies and get them up to orbit and into the warehouses.”
“Do you know what all you need?”
“Yes, I have a list. I keep adding to it, and getting supplies ordered. The big order that just went out is for two-point-four million of those inflatable houses.”
“Wow. Well, it’s exciting to watch. Thanks for bringing me up to speed.”
“Sure, Bernd. Any time.”
“Bob, you know how you’ve been wondering what to take with our space allotment, given that all the necessities are initially provided by the colony stores?” Susan Dempsey asked.
“Yes, but I still haven’t come up with anything really good,” Robert Jasic said.
“I think I have. All the colony locations are subtropical coastal environments. That’s what colony headquarters said.”
“Right. I saw that.”
“So I was researching subtropical environments, to see what people there valued.”
“That was smart. What did you come up with?”
“Fabric. Bolts of fabric have a very high value density, Bob. You don’t need any spacer or spool or anything. Our whole cubic can be solid fabric.”
“That’s a really good idea, Sue. Fabric was always a high-value-density item. It was a big import item along the Silk Road
for thousands of years. In fact, that’s how the Silk Road got its name.”
“Exactly. But in a subtropical environment, one easy form of dress is the lavalava. No real sewing, just hem the edges. No exact sizing either – there’s basically just small, medium, and large – so they fit anybody. Fold a small one along the diagonal and you have a halter top. And if you’re working, you can tie one into a dhoti.”
“Excellent. So you think when we liquidate the house, we should put it into fabric to take along.”
“Yes. Big, bright, tropical-print fabrics. I checked the seeding list at colony headquarters, and they’ve seeded the colony sites with a lot of the big flowering subtropical plants. The bees need them, and we need the bees for pollinating crops. Which means the big flowered prints will be appropriate.”
“Probably some others, too, Sue. Some solids, some stripes, some variegated. But I think I agree a lot of them should be the floral prints. They’ll be in demand.”
“Bob, should we tell the others in our group? It’s a big colony. I don’t think we’ll saturate the market if we all go in on it. It will be like we were the fabric commune or something.”
“Sure. But don’t spread it further than that, Sue. They’ll have more value for being a bit rare.”
Maureen Griffith’s group – twenty-seven people – had been getting together off and on throughout, but it was having regular meetings now as the time of departure approached. It was at one of these meetings that Susan Dempsey presented her idea for what to buy with their assets to take along to the colony.
Griffith sat as chair, but she always entertained everyone else’s input first. After Dempsey shared her idea, Griffith opened the floor for comment.
“I think that’s a great idea, myself,” Hank Bolton said. “And the more we pack in, the better. No sense taking things from here that don’t fit the climate there. For what? That’s a great idea, Sue.”
QUANT (COLONY Book 1) Page 20
