The most urgent cargoes to reclaim were the living ones. They had to be put in pens, tanks, barns, or breeding ponds at once (sometimes when their new homes were still being built for them by other sweating, hurrying laborers). Then the next priority was the machines that were needed ASAP, so the colony could live and grow—the plows, the tractors, the helicopters, the outboard motors for the colony's growing little fleet, and the spare parts to keep them all going. Fortunately fuel was not a problem after the first few weeks. The fuel wasn't liquid gases of the kind the rockets used—that would have to wait a while yet—nor was it diesel fuel or gasoline. There was oil on Newmanhome, everyone knew that, but there hadn't been time to drill much of it out. So, instead, the first-ship people had filled huge ponds with Newmanhome flora of all kinds, chopped up and drenched, making a kind of sour beer mash that they distilled into vats of alcohol fuel. That drove the tractors that brought in the goods, and Viktor helped. Almost every waking hour of the day when he wasn't in school, and every day of every week.
It was, at least, certainly good exercise.
As though Viktor didn't have anything else to do, he was assigned care of the baby when his parents were at work. He even had to bring the brat to school with him sometimes. Luckily, the thing slept a lot, in a basket behind his desk, but when it woke and began to cry he had to take it outside to shut it up. Sometimes it only needed to be fed, but when it—no, she—when she had wet herself, or worse, he had to face the disgusting job of changing the damned thing.
The only saving graces were that he wasn't the only kid with a baby sister or brother, and he didn't always have to do it alone. Theresa McGann took her buddying seriously. "You don't know diddly-shit about babies," she told him, watching critically as he tried to stretch one leghole of the rubber pants to fit around Edwina's waist.
"I suppose you do," he snarled.
"Ought to. I've had the practice." And she proved it by shoving him out of the way and taking over.
Reesa not only did not seem to mind changing little Edwina's filthy messes, it appeared she could even put up with the Stockbridge boys. In her free time she showed them things to do in the little town. When they were standing by, thumbs in their mouths, watching the older kids square dancing in an exercise period, she was the one who invited them in and taught them some steps. (She even taught Viktor a few.) She even once, when everyone was miraculously free at the same time, took Viktor and the boys to picnic in the hills north of the settlement.
Viktor had reservations about all that. Her taking care of Billy and Freddy deprived him of one more chance to keep a high profile in the eyes of Marie-Claude, but then he didn't really have the time to do much of that, anyway. And the picnic was fun. Reesa's very best quality, in Viktor's opinion, was that like himself she was planning to be a space pilot. Or if there weren't any openings along that line, as there was every reason to think there would not, at least an air pilot. There was plenty of flying to be done in the air of Newmanhome—whole continents to explore, and shoals of islands; the orbiting Mayflower kept sending down photographs taken along its orbit, but there was more to see than an orbiting hulk could cover. And then, someday …
"Someday," Reesa said, gazing up at the emerging stars, and she didn't have to say someday what. They both knew.
The sun had set. The campfire had been stomped out, and the Stockbridge boys sent grumbling off to haul water to pour on the coals. Overhead were the stars and planets of the Newmanhome sky.
"Someday," Viktor agreed confidently, "I'll be up there again. We will," he amended, to avoid a fight. Then he craned his neck toward where the boys had disappeared into the scrubby Newmanhome woods and lost a little of his confidence. Viktor had never lived on the edge of the unknown before.
He saw that Reesa was grinning at him and reddened; one of the things that he hated about Reesa was that she always seemed to know what he was thinking. "The kids are okay," she reassured him, with another of those friendly pats. "There's nothing out there to hurt them. They can't even get lost, because they can see the town lights."
He didn't dignify the remark with an answer. He said firmly. "After Argosy gets here there'll be spaceships again. Have to be. We're not going to be stuck on one lousy little planet all our lives."
"And we'll be just about the right age," Reesa agreed. "Where do you want to go? First, I mean?"
Then, of course, there was an argument. Neither of them wanted to bother with Ishtar: it was big—Jupiter-sized—but that meant no one was ever going to land on it, because it didn't have any more of a surface to land on than Jupiter did. It didn't even have Jupiter's interesting retinue of moons, because gravitational interaction with giant Nergal seemed to have stolen them all away. Nergal was Viktor's choice. "All those moons!" he said. "Some of them have to be decent, and anyway it's a brown dwarf—nobody's ever got near a brown dwarf before!"
"That's what Tiss Khadek says," Reesa said.
"Well, she's right."
"She's always right," Reesa told him, "or anyway says she is. She thinks she owns this place."
Viktor snickered. The Iraqi astronomer from Ark, Ibtissam Khadek, was the granddaughter of the man who had run the first robot probe and named the planets after his "ancestral" Babylonian gods, as was his privilege. "The fact that you don't like her doesn't mean she's wrong," he told Reesa. "Where would you go?"
"I want to go to Nebo," Reesa declared.
"Nebo!"
"Captain Rodericks thinks so, too. He says we ought to establish an outpost somewhere, and that's the best place."
Viktor said pityingly, "There are moons bigger than Nebo!"
But she was insistent. Nebo was the nearest planet to their new sun, the size of Mars but hotter than Mercury. "It's got an atmosphere, Vik. Why does it have an atmosphere?"
"Who cares?" Viktor asked.
"I care. I want to know why…" And the argument continued until the Stockbridge boys were back and they were nearly home. It was a fun argument. It made it seem as though they really were going to have the chance to get back into space, though both knew that the day when that would be possible would not come until they were a great deal older.
Funnily, one of the worst spats between Viktor and Reesa McGann came over the question of getting old—or, anyway, over just how old they were.
It started when they were sprawled on the spiky Newmanhome grass in the schoolyard, panting, just after finishing the morning's calisthenics. What they all usually wore when they exercised was the plain white jockey shorts that were standard issue for all colonists as underwear; what was annoying Viktor that particular day was that Reesa had done ten more pushups than he had, and so he looked at what she was wearing and sneered, "Why are you wearing a top?"
She looked at him with understanding contempt. "I'm a girl," she informed him.
She wasn't the only female teenager to wear a shirt, but there weren't many others. "You've got nothing to hide," he pointed out.
She said, adult to child, "That's not why I wear the top. I wear the top to show what I will have. Anyway," she added, "I'm older than you are."
It began with that. The argument went on for days. They had both been six when her ship, the New Ark, moved out of orbit. When Viktor's Mayflower landed, they were both twelve—so Viktor insisted, because they had each spent the same length of time frozen, just about, and the same number of Earth years growing.
But, Reesa said with that superior old-timer sneer that made Viktor's blood boil, he hadn't calculated right. Mayflower was a tad faster than Ark, being a generation later, so she had spent less time in the freezer and more growing up.