The area around the container began to look like a very crowded little subdivision as they worked.
At one point, the clouds that were moderating the heat of the day let loose with a quick shower, and they all took refuge in two of the earliest houses, which had set up hard already. They sat and listened to the tropical rain pound on the roof for twenty minutes until the cloudburst moved on. They used the time to eat their lunches.
“Moving along,” James said.
Jasic nodded.
“We still need to move them to their final locations, stake them down, and then do the wings,” he said.
James shrugged.
“It’s still going good, though.”
Where wrestling the densely packed cubes of plastic that were the house kits out of the container required two of the stronger of them, moving a finished house to its final location was easy. One guy on each corner, pick it up and go. The houses had straps on the corners just for that purpose.
As houses continued to be unloaded, unfolded, inflated, and hardened, Jasic, Thompson, Jonah, and Rick started moving houses to their final locations. For their own compound, they would be around the outer edge of the property, so it was a couple hundred feet to carry them to the location. It needed to be done, though, to open up work room around the container.
With half a dozen houses moved, Thompson looked at them for a moment.
“You know, Bob, if we run one wing out sideways from the back of each house, that will close the gap between houses like a fence. And we can put one straight out from the front of each house and make a little private yard for each one. That will still meet the requirement for one east-west wing and one north-south wing, like in the instructions.”
Jasic looked at the houses and nodded.
“I like it. Let’s start staking them down with the one on the corner then, so we get the spacing right.”
Thompson nodded.
“Got it.”
The wings were water tanks, thirty-five feet long and four feet high and only eight inches thick. They flared to two feet wide toward the bottom so they would be stable. They were kept full by small gutters on the eaves of the roofs of the houses. They had an overflow that kept the upper six inches empty.
A cloth mesh hung down from the top center of the tank eight inches, running along the tank’s length, putting the bottom two inches of the mesh in the water. In the main body of the tank, under the water level, an air tube ran through the thick wider portion of the tank.
During the day, in the sun, the water in the tanks would warm up, and at night it would cool down.
In the center of the roof of every house was a vent cap, about a foot and a half on a side. The top of the cap was a solar panel that charged a battery. During the heat of the day, the hot air in the house would rise out of the roof vent, pulling in cool air through the upper six inches of the tank. The air would be cooled by evaporation while passing along the wet mesh hanging in that void – a swamp cooler.
At night, a slowly rotating electric fan in the vent, running off the battery, would pull air up out of the house. The upper connection to the tank – the swamp cooler – was closed with a sliding shutter at night, and the lower tube – the air tube through the water – was opened with its own sliding shutter. The air drawn through this dry tube would be warmed by passing through the tank of water that had been heated by the sun during the day.
The wings were arranged at ninety degrees to each other, from corners of the house, so that the warmth of the sunlight could be captured by the water all day long. All four corners of the house had the air tube connections and shutters for the wings, and where the wings went was up to the homeowner.
Thus were the houses warmed and cooled without energy expense. These methods wouldn’t work in a more severe climate, but in the near-idyllic conditions at the location of the initial colony settlement, they would be all that was needed.
“How are we going to handle the corners?” Jasic asked.
Thompson thought about it.
“We could have two wings into the corner, one from each house,” he said.
“But then the wings on the two ends are going opposite ways, so we’re stuck for the next corner.”
“No, we’ll just put the other wing from one house on the other side and keep going. They don’t have a privacy wall in the front between them is all. Probably put your twins and my boys in a corner, for instance. They’re not going to want a privacy wing.”
Jasic nodded.
“Let’s try it and see what we get.”
They staked the two corner houses down, each thirty five feet from the corner, then ran wings into the corner of the lot from the back corners of the houses. They inflated the wings with one of the compressors, and Bolton sprayed them down on the bottom and both sides with plasticizer.
“OK, looks good,” Jasic said. “Let’s get the rest of them staked down.”
He looked at the sun, then consulted his heads-up display.
“Bus won’t be here for another hour, anyway. I think we have time to get all these staked down.”
That first day, they got twenty-one houses of the Chen-Jasic group’s compound in place, almost three-quarters of its perimeter. Chen LiQiang’s vision for the space
