“All right. So there’s a map for your block you can get to with a link from your Work Assignment page. You’re going to put up sixty houses in the block, matching the map of what people want for where the houses go. We got some stakes and string and measuring wheels and spray paint in the containers so you can lay it out.
“There’s also a couple small air compressors there. They’re pedal-cranked, but we don’t have power yet and gas is too precious for the moment, so it is what it is. There’s also a spray setup, and containers with the plasticizer. You all took the training, so you should know what you’re doing, right?”
There were nods and ‘yes’s from the workers, and the bus driver nodded.
“One more thing. You’re starting on your own block, so do a good job, ‘cause this first bunch you’re going to be living in.
“All right. Stanton group, this is you, there on the right.”
In the block on the right of the bus, a container sat roughly in the middle of the block. The Stanton group people got off and the bus moved on.
Chen-Jasic group had selected a block on the northern edge of the site, so they were the last off the bus.
Bob Jasic took charge when they got there.
“OK, let’s start pulling materials out of the container. Get a couple houses being inflated right away, because inflating them is probably going to be our pacing item. Then let’s get a couple two-man teams on the measuring wheels and some spray cans marking locations. Mark the building lines first, measuring off the survey stakes for the street.”
“Dad, looking at the map, that near row of stakes is the building line,” Matt said.
“All right. Even easier. So let’s mark our fifteen-foot setback on the east side for the Uptown Market, and then start marking house locations.”
Their crew was thirteen, the original thirteen from the Carolina administrative region. The four fathers – Bob Jasic, Hank Bolton, Bill Thompson, and Jack Peterson – and their seven sons, all now in their late teens – Matthew Jasic, Joseph and Paul Bolton, James and Jonah Thompson, Tom and David Peterson – as well as Richard and Carl Reynolds, whose father, Harold Munson, had stayed on Earth. Like their sisters Peggy and Sally, Rick and Carl had taken their mother’s last name, disowning the abusive Munson.
They set to it in earnest now. The equipment all came out of the container first, and Hank Bolton and his youngest, Paul, and Bill Thompson and Betsy Reynolds’ youngest, Carl, took measuring wheels, string, stakes, and paint cans and started marking out the block, beginning by finding the north-south centerline that would divide their own compound from their neighbors on the other half of the block.
The bigger young guys – Matt, Joe, James, and Tom – started pulling out houses. These were cubes of nearly solid plastic and took two guys to handle them. They just started plopping them out on the grassland in no particular order.
Bob Jasic, Jack Peterson, Jonah, David, and Rick unfolded the first two houses. Wrapped up with them were the two ‘wings,’ the solar heater/swamp cooler combinations that would look like fences sticking out from the house. They set those aside for the moment. They also had to unfold the frame of the single door, which was a dutch door, with an upper and lower half.
“Hey, guys,” Jasic said to the unloaders. “Let’s get two of you on the compressors now.”
The compressors were simplicity itself, a double-bellows design not unlike a stair climber exercise machine. One shifted one’s weight back and forth between two pedals, which had bellows and one-way valves under them. They were simple, but they moved a lot of air, at least for small pressures, and it wouldn’t take very much pressure to inflate the houses. What it would take was air. Lots of it.
Matt and Tom got on the compressors while Joe and James continued to unload and the others continued to unfold the houses. It got to be hot work as the sun rose in the sky, then clouds moved in off the ocean to the east and gave them some relief.
Everybody took turns on the compressors. They continued to unload and inflate houses. When the measuring teams came back, the pace picked up, and Hank Bolton, who had done a stint on a spray painting job in college, started spraying the houses with plasticizer. There was a hand-pumped weed sprayer in the container – one of the first things out – and a dozen or more two-gallon bottles of the chemical. There were also spray-painting masks and goggles.
The unfolding crew took a break to tip half a dozen inflated houses on their sides. Bolton then sprayed their bottom surfaces one at a time, wetting them thoroughly. Given the bottom was fifteen-foot square, he went as high as he could reach, and then they had to rotate the house halfway around so he could get the other half of the underside. By the time he had done the sixth house, the first was pretty well set up.
“Tip ‘em back,” Jasic asked.
“I think it’s early,” Bolton said. “Let’s do the other half-dozen first.”
Jasic nodded, and the unfolding crew tipped the other half-dozen inflated houses on their sides.
“This is going pretty fast,” Joseph said from the compressor.
“There’s sixty on this block alone, don’t forget,” Jasic said.
“Forget I said anything. All of them today?”
“No, it’s gonna take three or four days, I think.”
When Bolton had finished spraying the underside of the second half-dozen houses, the unfolding crew stood the first three back upright, and Bolton moved to the insides, then the outsides of those three
