They piled them up on one of the electric golf carts and then made their way through the hospital. One to a bed. Plop, plop, plop. Most of the rooms were empty, as everyone was out working.
An older woman drove the cart. She gave them a ride back to the dock on the back to reload when they were empty. Talking to her, her voice seemed familiar somehow to Peggy.
“I’m sorry. I should have introduced myself. I’m Peggy Reynolds, and these are my sisters-in-law, Stacy and Tracy Jasic.”
“Pleased to meet you, everybody. My name’s Meghana Khatri.”
Then it hit Stacy and Tracy.
“You’re the council member for health,” Stacy said.
“And the administrator of the hospital,” Tracy said.
“Yes.”
“But–“
“Everybody works. Nobody sits around behind a desk. Besides, this is the best way to know what’s really going on. Just like you, I’ve never been in this building before, but I’m learning where everything is driving around.”
Janice Quant had chosen the council members – the heads of departments in the colony government – with great care. They were go-getters and workers all, without a shirker among them. They set the example for everyone else. Across the whole colony, everybody was working.
It’s incredible what a hundred thousand people can accomplish when they all work.
When the workers out in the field came in that evening, they were amazed to find the mess tents set up outside the hospital. They were even more amazed to find the cafeteria and the mess tents open for dinner. It was all food served at room temperature, but it was real food for the first time since they had left their homes on Earth.
Then all the dishes came back, piling up in tubs.
“Just keep filling tubs and set them aside,” Lamb said. “We may even have water to wash them in tomorrow.”
And when everybody finally headed up to bed, they had sheets, blankets, and pillows waiting.
Second Day
The second day went much as the first, with some big exceptions.
The Chen-Jasic housing crew – all the men from the original five families in Carolina – finished the houses of the Chen-Jasic compound and finished a dozen of the remaining thirty houses for the other half of the block. These were set out, per the requests, more in the American fashion. They faced the street, with one wing straight out the back to separate back yards and the second wing off the back corner of the house parallel to the street.
The Chen younger generation serviced the chickens and cattle again. This time, though, they let the cattle out into the inner stock pens first, and could fill the feed troughs without climbing up onto the walkways between rows of stalls. The work went faster, and they took a leisurely lunch and still finished early. There would be armed guards on the barns tonight to deal with that big tiger if it came around, so the cattle were left out in the pens, but could meander into the barn for food and water if they wished.
The elder Chen generation spent another day setting portable toilet stalls on street corners in the residential area, filling in between the units placed yesterday. They and the other crews made good progress, and by the end of the second day, you were never more than two blocks from a portable toilet anywhere in the nine hundred city blocks of the residential area.
Jessica Murphy ran a second set of power cable and freshwater and wastewater pipes to the administration building. The second cable crew had done the school yesterday and did the office building today, so the end of the second day saw all four buildings with lines in place. Meanwhile, the connections crew were making connections to the two buildings done yesterday. As Murphy was inching toward the administration building in her truck, paying out cable and pipes and waiting as before at the street crossings, the hospital suddenly lit up. All the windows glowing with interior lights at normal power made the building seem alive.
Peggy, Stacy, and Tracy were part of the crew unloading a container of coveralls – two to a package – to give everyone two changes of clothes. They stacked boxes in piles sorted by size on the dock so they would be easier to pass out. Also in this container was a second set of sheets for everyone, and they stacked those by the exits from the dock so people could grab a set of those as well on the way out.
The huge kitchen crew, including Rita Lamb, Maureen Griffith, Betsy Reynolds, and Chen PingLi, had gotten cold breakfast together for all the field workers first. English muffins with pre-cooked bacon and cheese. When all the buses had left, they fed all the people working in and around the hospital. They didn’t have any lunch together, but everyone still had MREs from their supply kits.
The water and sewer went live around noon, and it was all hands on deck cleaning all the dishes from the last night and that morning. They did it the old fashioned way, with soap and water by hand. They were making good headway when the power came on at two o’clock, and they loaded dishwashers and shifted their attention to dinner for the thirty thousand people in the hospital.
With power, they also had refrigeration. All of the food in the warehouse had to be things that could survive without refrigeration for four days, but some would last longer for being refrigerated. Workers
