The clearing presented a curious blend, he thought; the small domes constructed with plastic and fiber, damaged in the blizzard and repaired with tougher local woods; the mixed piles of complex machinery, tended and guarded by uniformed crewmen with Chief Engineer Patrick in charge; the people from the New Hebrides Commune working--by their own choice, MacAran understood--in the garden and woods.
He held in his hand two slips of paper--the old habit of posting memoranda still held; he imagined that eventually dwindling paper supplies would phase it out. What would they substitute? Systems of bells coded to each person, as was done in some large department stores
to attract the attention of a particular person? Word of mouth messages? Or would they manage to discover some way to make paper of local products and continue their centuries-long reliance on written memoranda? One of the slips he held told him to check in at the hospital for what was called routine examination; the other asked him to report to Moray's office for work analysis and assignment.
By and large, the announcement that the computer was useless and the ship perforce abandoned had been greeted without much outcry. One or two crewmen had been heard to mutter that whoever did it should be lynched, but there was at the moment no way of discovering either who had wiped the Navigation tapes from the computer, nor of finding out who had dynamited one of the inner drive chambers with an improvised bomb. Suspicion for the latter fell by default on a crewmember who had recently asked admission into the New Hebrides Commune and whose mangled body had been found inside the ship near the explosion site; and everyone was content to let it stay there.
MacAran suspected that the quiet was temporary, the result of shock, and that sooner or later there would be fresh storms, but for the moment everyone had simply accepted the urgent necessity to join together to repair damages and assure survival against the unguessed harshness of the unknown winter. MacAran himself was not sure how he felt about it, but he had in any case been ready for a colony, and secretly it seemed to him that it might be more interesting to colonize a "wild" planet than one extensively terraformed and worked over by Earth Expeditionary. But he hadn't been prepared to be cut off from the mainstream of Earth--no starships, no contact or communication with the rest of the Galaxy, perhaps for generations, perhaps forever. That hurt. He hadn't accepted it yet; he knew he might never accept it.
He went into the building where Moray's office was located, read the sign on the door (DON'T KNOCK, COME IN) and went in to find Moray talking to an unknown girl who must be, from her dress, one of the New Hebrides people.
"Yes, yes, dear, I know you want a work assignment to the garden, but your history shows you worked in art and ceramics and we're going to need you there. Do you realize that the first craft developed in almost every civilization is pottery? In any case, didn't I see a report that you were pregnant?"
"Yes, the Annunciation Ceremony for me was yesterday. But our kind of people always work right up to delivery."
Moray smiled faintly. "I'm glad you feel well enough to go on working. But women in colonies are never permitted to do manual work."
"Article four--"
"Article four," said Moray, and his face was grim, "was developed for Earth, Earth conditions. Get wise to the facts of life on planets with alien gravity, light and oxygen content, Alanna. This planet is one of the lucky ones; oxygen on the high side, light gravity, no anoxic or crush-syndrome babies. But even on the best planets, just the change does it, and it's a grim statistic for a population as low as ours. Half the women are sterile for five to ten years, half the fertile women miscarry for five to ten years. And half the live births die before they're a month old for five to ten years. Colony women have to be pampered, Alanna. Co-operate, or you'll be sedated and hospitalized. If you want to be one of the lucky ones with a live baby instead of a messed-up dead one, co-operate, and start doing it now."
When she had gone away with a slip for the hospital, looking dazed and shocked, MacAran took her place before the cluttered desk, and Moray grimaced up at him. "I take it you heard that. How'd you like my job--scaring the hell out of young pregnant girls?"
"Not much." MacAran was thinking of Camilla, also carrying a child. So she was not sterile. But one chance in two that she would miscarry--and then a fifty-fifty chance that her child would die. Grim statistics, and they sent a clutch of horror through him. Had she been advised of this? Did she know? Was she co-operating? He didn't know; she had been locked up with the Captain, hovering over the computer, for half the last tenday.
Moray said, frowning slightly, "Come out of the clouds. You're one of the lucky ones, MacAran--you're not technologically unemployed."
"Huh?"
"You're a geologist and we need you doing what you were trained for. You heard me tell Alanna that one of the first industries we need,
in a hurry, at that, is pottery. For pottery, you need china clay, or a good substitute for it. We also need reliable building stone--we need concrete or cement of some sort--we need limestone, or something with the same properties; and we need silicates for glass, various ores… in fact, what we need is a geological assay of this part of the planet, and we need it before the winter sets in. You aren't priority one, Mac--but you're in category two or three. Can you draw up a plan for an assay and exploration in the next day or two, and tell me roughly how many men you'll need for sampling and testing?"
"Yes, I can do that easy enough. But I thought you said we couldn't go in for a technological civilization…"
"We can't," Moray told him, "not as Engineer Patrick uses the word. No heavy industry. No mechanized transport. But there's no such thing as a non-technological civilization. Even the cave men had technology--they manufactured flints, or didn't you ever see one of their factory sites? Man is a tool-user--a technician. I never had any notion of starting us out as savages. The question is, which technologies can we manage, especially during the first three or four generations?"
"You plan that far ahead?"
"I have to."
"You said my job wasn't priority one. What's priority one?"
"Food," Moray said realistically. "Again, we're lucky. The soil's arable here--although I suspect marginally, so we're going to have to use fertilizers and composts--and agriculture is possible. I've known planets where the food-securing priority would have taken up so much time that even minimal crafts might have to be postponed for two or three generations. Earth doesn't colonize them, but we could have been marooned on one. There may even be domesticable animals here; MacLeod's on that now. Priority two is shelter--and by the way, when you make that 'survey, check some lower slopes for caves. They may be warmer than anything we can build, at least during the winter. After food and shelter come simple crafts--the amenities of life; weaving, pottery, fuel and lights, clothing, music, garden tools, furniture. You get the idea. Go draw up your survey, MacAran, and I'll assign you enough men to carry it out." He gave another of those grim smiles. "Like I say; you're one of the lucky ones. This morning I've got to tell a deep--space communications expert with absolutely no other skills, that his job is completely obsolete for at least ten generations, and offer him a choice of agriculture, carpentry, or blacksmithing!"
As MacAran left the office, his thoughts flew again, compulsively, to Camilla. Was this what lay in store for her? No, certainly not, any civilized group of people must have some use for a computer library of information! But would Moray, with his grim priorities, see it that way?