Chen nodded.
“And thirty houses?” Chen asked.
“Yes. One for every two people, then an extra room on each later. So how do we arrange the houses, LiQiang? In America, they would be set back from the road, facing it, with a yard in the front and one behind.”
“Can I propose an alternative, Robert?”
“Of course.”
“Put all houses close to road, facing in. One big yard, in the center. We are one clan. We close in our space. We garden this space. With teas, with herbs, with spices. We brought the seeds and the cuttings and the tools.”
This was the first mention of what the Chen family had used their cubic for, and it made great sense to Jasic. He looked to Maureen Griffith, standing to one side and watching. Griffith gave him a small nod.
“Very well, LiQiang. We will do as you say. And where do we request our space?”
“Not close to big buildings. We want sun all day. So not close unless south. Anywhere south, or out from the center on north, east, or west.”
“We probably shouldn’t be close to the buildings anyway. As the downtown expands, we will be displaced, and our investment in these gardens will be lost.”
“Toward the barns, I would think,” Griffith said. “That will be one place of employment. Animal husbandry is always manpower intensive, and the Chen are good with animals.”
Chen nodded.
“Yes. I agree with this,” he said. “It will be a shorter walk home from work.”
Jasic had to get his directions straight. The ocean was to the east, the mountains to the north. The prevailing wind here seemed to be onshore, to the west, based on the morning rain they had watched from the roof, moving off to the west. So the barns and fields were north of town. They could locate on the north edge of the residential area around the downtown, and not be downwind of the barns or in the shade of the bigger buildings.
Jasic picked a block on a line between the downtown buildings and the barns. It was on the edge of town, a mile and a half or so from the downtown buildings.
“How about here, LiQiang?” he asked.
“Yes, Robert. Very good.”
Jasic selected the north half of the block, and began placing houses, but LiQiang held up a hand.
“The south half, please, Robert. We will have neighbors, and we want the sun all day. They may raise something that casts a shadow. And on one shorter side, move the houses back from the street fifteen feet.”
“Move them back on one side?”
“Yes. For a market. We will sell teas and herbs and spices. East side is sunny in the morning. Bright. Cheerful. We put umbrellas for shade, but sunny for market is good.”
“We can sell lavalavas there, too,” Griffith said.
Jasic turned to Chen.
“Our family brought fabrics. All our cubic is fabric. For making lavalavas.”
Chen looked to his daughter PingLi, standing nearby.
“Hanfu qun,” she said. “I think.”
Chen nodded.
“Very good,” Chen said. “We will sell teas and herbs and spices and fabrics.”
“The Uptown Market,” Griffith said. “I like it.”
“But will people come so far to our market?” Jasic asked.
Chen just nodded.
“They will come. You will see.”
Jasic rearranged the request on screen, making it the southern half of a block on the north edge of the initial town map. He marked house locations evenly around the perimeter of the space, about fifty feet apart. All the houses faced into the space, and the row of houses across the eastern edge were set fifteen feet back from the building line.
Jasic raised an eyebrow to Chen.
“Very good, Robert. That is very good. Submit that, please.”
The Basics
The Chen-Jasic work crew got to the hospital’s loading dock as the electric truck was backing to the dock. It had a container on it, a twelve-foot by twelve-foot by eighty-foot monster. On the dock were four two-seat electric carts with bins on the back.
“Chen-Jasic crew reporting, sir,” Matt said to the fellow who seemed to be supervising.
“Excellent. Can any of you guys drive a golf cart?”
Matt took inventory of hands quickly.
“I guess we have three, sir.”
“All right. I can take the other one. We need to deliver mattresses to everybody throughout the hospital so they have someplace to sleep tonight.”
“How many containers will that be, sir?”
“Just this one, believe it or not. Thirty-four thousand mattresses.”
James Faletti walked over to the container and unlatched the rear doors. Inside, stacked six across and maybe a hundred or a hundred-and-fifty high were plastic vacuum packages. They were two feet square and an inch thick.
“Let’s start filling the first couple carts,” Faletti said.
“That’s a mattress, sir?”
“Yeah. Air mattress with foam on one side, scrunched down and vacuum packed. You open one of these, it unfolds and starts expanding like crazy. Then you blow it up the rest of the way. Saves cubic.”
“Yes, sir. All right, guys. Let’s get on it.”
They loaded a hundred and twenty or so mattress packages onto each of the first two carts, then Jonah and James Thompson got into the carts.
“Don’t worry about allotting them out or anything. There’s thousands more than we got beds, but if some people wanna sleep on the floor so they can sleep alone, that’s OK,” Faletti said.
“Got it,” Jonah said.
James and Jonah drove off into the hospital, driving right down the corridor. At the first cross-corridor, one turned left and one right. Faletti and Joseph Bolton backed up the next two carts and the remaining crew loaded them up. By the time that was done, Jonah and James were back.
“They go fast,” James said. “Four rooms and you’re empty.”
“Yeah, but it’s gonna take longer as you go
