“Of course,” MingWei said.
MingWei looked out across the barn. Water was starting to trickle into the water channels, and the runners with the feed buckets were walking on the wide upper surface of the end walls of the pens. They had not had such walkways in China. One had to work one’s way among the cows to get to the feed troughs in their small barn. Carefully, so as not to be injured by the large animals.
“This is not so hard,” he said to Sorensen as they unstrapped another cow. “Go pretty fast, I think.”
“With you Chinese guys it will. You’re not afraid to work, and you fellows are setting the example for the others. Nice job.”
MingWei nodded.
“Thank you. But at home was harder.”
It took the rest of the day to feed and water all the cows and the bulls, get them all unstrapped, and see them all up on their feet. By that time, the inner stock pen fences were strung, but Sorensen made the call to keep them all in the barn overnight.
He and MingWei were standing in the entrance to the barn, waiting for the bus as Sorensen explained his thinking.
“People saw a tiger lurking last night, and I don’t think we want to put out a smorgasbord for him. We’ll have to have armed guards out here, but the cattle seem happy enough right now to leave them in the barn.”
MingWei nodded.
“I saw this tiger last night, and it is a big one. Discouraging it from its range will be difficult.”
MingWei turned back toward the inside of the barn. Almost all of the cows were up now, most eating or drinking from the feed troughs and water channels in front of them. There was a soft lowing from the animals.
MingWei pointed to his ear, then waved his hand toward the animals.
“Happy sound. They will be fine inside tonight.”
Sorensen and MingWei latched the door on the barn, and got on the bus with the others for the trip back to the hospital.
Jessica Murphy was the only Chen-Jasic group member on the bus to the powerplant that morning. She was also the only woman. It was a familiar situation, and she thought nothing of it. She could verbally spar with the best of them, and she actually liked men, as friends, though, not lovers.
When they got to the powerplant, they had a quick orientation. While it was called ‘the powerplant,’ it was much more. Yes, it contained a fusion powerplant that would generate the electricity the colony needed. But it also included a desalination plant, and would generate all their fresh water as well. And it contained a wastewater treatment plant and a hydrogen electrolysis plant.
Part of this just made sense. The fusion powerplant portion required water for itself, for shedding excess heat. Once you had to have clean water for that, why not make enough more for the colony? And treating wastewater from the colony was all part of the same water handling facility. Finally, hydrogen was needed for the fusion reactor, but they could also use it to operate heavy machinery.
When the Interstellar transport had placed the powerplant, it had also placed two huge stainless steel pipes out into the ocean, radiating from the powerplant at an angle so their ocean ends were widely separated. One was the water input, the other the water output, for the facility.
With those pipes in place, the first job was to splice them into the powerplant. The other big job was getting electricity, fresh water, and wastewater pipes to the four main buildings on an immediate basis. These would later be replaced with buried infrastructure, but for right now the job was to get them connected.
Given that Murphy was pregnant, and there wasn’t a truck made that she couldn’t drive, she had been assigned to drive one of the trucks laying the temporary surface connections to the buildings. There would actually be four separate sets of lines, running alongside each other until they fanned out as they approached the ‘downtown’ of the colony site.
Murphy’s assignment would also keep her clear of the fusion reactor building. Not that there was any danger of a serious radiation release with the fusion reactor design, but people were still twitchy about that sort of thing.
Murphy inched the truck along as the big spools on the back paid out the umbilicus behind her. One was high-voltage electric cable and the other two were pipe, flat coming off the spool, which would inflate under the pressure of fresh water pumps on one end and septic grinder-pumps on the other.
Normally, electric, water, and wastewater would be laid in widely separated trenches. That was for permanent installations. For this temporary expedient, running along the ground where it could be inspected regularly, they were run side-by-side.
Progress was pretty fast until they hit the edge of the residential area. Murphy still had two miles to go to the hospital building, but they were now crossing what would be the streets of the residential area. In that two miles, there were twenty streets to cross. At each, the cable and pipes had to be laid slightly below grade, then covered over with steel plates to protect them against the cross-traffic.
The colony’s heavy machinery was diesel and hydrogen dual-powered, but they had limited supplies of diesel and no hydrogen until the powerplant was operating. On the other hand, they had lots of manpower. For this easy job, it was all shovel work. Murphy had to wait at each street until the shallow trench was dug before she could cross the street and proceed another block to the next cross street.
Murphy could see diggers working the next two cross streets in front of her, but they were hopscotching from having done the ones behind her, so she always got to the next street before they
