In all this work everybody had to lend a hand, kids included. Kids also had to go to Mr. Feldhouse’s school (if they were twelve to fourteen biological Earth years; there were other schools for younger and older ones). For three hours a day they used the teaching machines and drilled each other in grammar and trigonometry and Earth history and music and drawing, under Feldhouse’s short-tempered and sketchy supervision. The good part of the school was that Viktor had other children of his own age for company, even if one of them was the bratty Reesa McGann the teacher had forced on him the first day. The bad part was that almost all of the kids were strangers. And a lot of them—the children from the first ship, that was—were really stuck up.
Because he and Reesa were “buddies” they shared a seat in the crowded school hut, and she was the one who had the privilege of pointing out to him how little he knew about how to live on Newmanhome. Every time he complained about shared books or heavy labor, she was sure to tell him how very much worse it had been six years before, when they landed. Their Ark hadn’t been designed for disassembly, like the Mayflower. All the first colonists could do was strip it of its cargo and most of its moveables. Then, reluctantly, they abandoned it. It was still up there in orbit, drive almost dead except for the trickle of power that fed its freezer units, otherwise just a hulk. With all its precious steel.
“If you’d been a little smarter,” Viktor told the girl in a superior tone as he was trying to make a fire in the fireplace outside their tent, “you’d at least have fixed the drive so it could beam power down, like our ship.”
“If we were smarter,” she answered, “we’d have come in the second ship like you, so somebody else would have done all the hard work for us before we got here.” And then she added, “Pull out all that wood and start over. You’ve got the heavy chunks on the bottom and all the kindling on top. Don’t you know anything?” And then she pushed him out of the way and did it herself. The girl was so physical.
If Viktor had really looked at Theresa McGann he would have discovered that she wasn’t such a bad girl after all. True, she kept reminding him of his immense areas of ignorance (but he was grimly repairing them as fast as he could). True, she had scabby knees. True, she was several centimeters taller than he, but that was only because fourteen-year-old girls are generally taller than fourteen-year-old boys. He didn’t look at her that way, though. It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested in the opposite sex, even such a touchy-squeezy physical specimen of it as Reesa McGann. He was often obsessed with the opposite sex, like any healthy, horny male teenager, but the focus of his interest hadn’t changed. It remained the beautiful (and now widowed) Marie-Claude Stockbridge.
Marie-Claude remained widowed, too. Suffering, Viktor observed that she often “saw” other men, but he took some comfort in noting that she seemed to have no intention of marrying one of them.
Apart from his schoolwork Viktor’s contribution to the community was officially defined as “scutwork”—meaning the kinds of low-skilled jobs other people didn’t have time for. When he possibly could, he tried to get into a work party with Marie-Claude, but most of the time he possibly couldn’t. There was too much work, of too many kinds. Up on the rapidly emptying Mayflower the cleanup crews were emptying the cargo holds and launching the contents to the surface. The most precious and fragile of the new supplies came down in one or another of the three-winged, rocket-driven landing craft Mayflower had carried in its hold, but there wasn’t enough fuel made yet to use them for more than one trip each. Sturdier shipments, including passengers, came down in the big pods.
There were all kinds of things in those pods—tractors, stills, hand tools, lathes, stores, drilling equipment, rifles, flashlights, cooking utensils, plates, surgical instruments, coils of copper wire, coils of fencing, coils of light-conducting tube, coils of flexible pipe; then there were cows, sheep, pigs, chickens, dogs, cats, carp, tilapia, trout, bees, dung beetles, earthworms, kelp, algae, catfish—each fresh out of the freezer, wrapped in protective foam or immobilized in a plastic bag. The living things didn’t all come down at first; many of them (and many, many tubes of ova and sperm and seeds and spores) stayed frozen on the ship against a future need.
The pods kept coming. Almost every time Mayflower came around in orbit in the right position—only about one orbit in twenty was right, because of the planet’s rotation—the orbital crews launched clusters of twelve or fourteen separate loads, linked until the retrofire rockets slowed them, then shaking apart, popping their light-sail-parachutes, coming down in fleets of bright gold film canopies, with the gray metal pods hanging underneath. Those were smart parachutes. Each one had sensors that kept it posted on where it was drifting and shroud controls that could maneuver it toward its planned drop point—fairly well, anyway—at least, well enough, provided the linked pods had been ejected at just the right moment and the retrofire burn had been precise.
But even with everything going right, the chutes could land anywhere within a ten-kilometer radius of the drop point, inshore of the colony on the shore of what they were calling Great Ocean.
It would have been nice if the drop point could have been right on the little town itself. But that would have meant that half the pods would surely have fallen into Great Ocean, and that meant a whole different order of difficulty in getting them back. It was easier to send people like Viktor out to drag them back on tractor-drawn sledges. So that was what he did—half a dozen times a week.
The most urgent cargoes to reclaim were the living ones. They had to be put in pens, tanks, barns, or breeding ponds at once (sometimes when their new homes were still being built for them by other sweating, hurrying laborers). Then the next priority was the machines that were needed ASAP, so the colony could live and grow—the plows, the tractors, the helicopters, the outboard motors for the colony’s growing little fleet, and the spare parts to keep them all going. Fortunately fuel was not a problem after the first few weeks. The fuel wasn’t liquid gases of the kind the rockets used—that would have to wait a while yet—nor was it diesel fuel or gasoline. There was oil on Newmanhome, everyone knew that, but there hadn’t been time to drill much of it out. So, instead, the first-ship people had filled huge ponds with Newmanhome flora of all kinds, chopped up and drenched, making a kind of sour beer mash that they distilled into vats of alcohol fuel. That drove the tractors that brought in the goods, and Viktor helped. Almost every waking hour of the day when he wasn’t in school, and every day of every week.
It was, at least, certainly good exercise.
As though Viktor didn’t have anything else to do, he was assigned care of the baby when his parents were at work. He even had to bring the brat to school with him sometimes. Luckily, the thing slept a lot, in a basket behind his desk, but when it woke and began to cry he had to take it outside to shut it up. Sometimes it only needed to be fed, but when it—no, she—when she had wet herself, or worse, he had to face the disgusting job of changing the damned thing.
The only saving graces were that he wasn’t the only kid with a baby sister or brother, and he didn’t always have to do it alone. Theresa McGann took her buddying seriously. “You don’t know diddly-shit about babies,” she told him, watching critically as he tried to stretch one leghole of the rubber pants to fit around Edwina’s waist.
“I suppose you do,” he snarled.
“Ought to. I’ve had the practice.” And she proved it by shoving him out of the way and taking over.
Reesa not only did not seem to mind changing little Edwina’s filthy messes, it appeared she could even put up with the Stockbridge boys. In her free time she showed them things to do in the little town. When they were standing by, thumbs in their mouths, watching the older kids square dancing in an exercise period, she was the one who invited them in and taught them some steps. (She even taught Viktor a few.) She even once, when everyone was miraculously free at the same time, took Viktor and the boys to picnic in the hills north of the settlement.
Viktor had reservations about all that. Her taking care of Billy and Freddy deprived him of one more chance to keep a high profile in the eyes of Marie-Claude, but then he didn’t really have the time to do much of that, anyway. And the picnic was fun. Reesa’s very best quality, in Viktor’s opinion, was that like himself she was planning to be a space pilot. Or if there weren’t any openings along that line, as there was every reason to think there would not, at least an air pilot. There was plenty of flying to be done in the air of Newmanhome—whole continents to explore, and shoals of islands; the orbiting Mayflower kept sending down photographs taken along its orbit, but there was more to see than an orbiting hulk could cover. And then, someday . . .