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Alston shrugged. "What happens when you squeeze a drop of ink into a glass of milk and shake, Cadet? It mixes in and pretty soon it's gone." Alston spread her hands. "From now on, you'd do best to think of this island as home and everyone who lives here as your people. We really don't have much choice."
Seahaven Engineering was getting more crowded by the day, even though Martins and his forge had been moved out to their own quarters, and the sound of metal on metal was deafening.
Ronald Leaton and Cofflin stood in one corner, looking at the latest development, and occasionally moving aside as someone went through with a handcart of materials or parts. Sweat ran down their faces; the sun was bad enough, beating down on the sheet-metal roof, and the steam engines turning shafts and pumping compressors added to the heat and noise. The machine shop stank of hot metal, hot whale oil, sweat, and smoke. The big doors to the water were open, giving an occasional draft of welcome cool air, and you could see smudges of black woodsmoke drifting out over the smaragdine brightness of the harbor. Sails speckled it, and the ocean beyond; closer too a Guard officer was overseeing the loading of a large handcart, yelling out his checklist to the Seahaven clerk:
"Breastplates, twenty-five, size All"
"Check!"
"Helmets, twenty-five, size All"
"Check!"
Cofflin shook his hea'd. Busy as bees, he thought. There was just so much to do, before winter set in-and never enough time or hands.
"It's a blow-drier for fish," Leaton explained, kicking the frame and handing over a sample. "Desiccator, if you want to get technical. I figure it'll cut down the spoilage rate to nearly nothing."
Cofflin nodded, turning the slab of dusty-white, rock-hard cod in his hands and looking at the wood-and-iron… thingumabob, he decided. The rack for the fish wasn't much different from the improvised ones they'd been using, looking a little like a giant bedstead, except that it had a mesh cover over the top to keep the flies off… and they'd lost far more cod than he liked to think about to maggots.
Off to one side of it was a contraption of sheet metal and wood, with a flat covered steel pan, a round metal chimney, and a shaft ru
"See, you light the fire in the pan here-ordinary wood fire, and there's this grating underneath for the ashes."
Cofflin nodded solemnly. Wood ash was prime fertilizer, and it had half a dozen other major uses-you needed it to make soap, for instance, which wasn't something he'd suspected before. There was a Town ordinance now that everyone had to keep ashes for collection.
"Then some of the hot air goes up the chimney and turns this fan. That turns this metal shaft ru
A ton of fish sounded like a lot, until you remembered how much seventy-two hundred people ate in a day. Every pound counted, and this would save a lot of spoilage.
"Good work," he said sincerely. "How many, how fast, and what do you need?"
"Well, we can make up the metal parts here. Thornton's can do the carpentry"-another new industry, working with the hand and simple power tools Seahaven turned out, and Macy's shipments of timber from the mainland-"and I thought we'd take over another boathouse or something for the assembly work. It gets in the way here."
"Say another forty, maybe sixty people all up," Cofflin said. "Damn, we're ru
"It'll save in the long run," Leaton said earnestly. "You don't need nearly so many watching the drying racks."
"A lot of those are kids," Cofflin mused. "But yeah, I think so. Okay, go for it."
"And you can use it to make jerky, any kind, and dried sausage as well, or dry vegetables for keeping-"
"Ayup. You've struck oil, Ron, you can stop drilling," Cofflin said dryly.
The problem with being the one who can bind or loose is that everyone keeps trying to convince you of things, he thought wryly.
"Ah… thanks, Chief."
"Thank you, Ron. What's next?"
"Well, the barrel-stave machine is working now, and the one for the hoops." Cofflin grunted satisfaction; barrels for storage were a big bottleneck. "And we've got something here that'll make us all a lot more comfortable," the engineer went on.
He led Cofflin over to where two more samples rested against the wall. One was a simple steel box with a hinged front door and a section of sheet-metal piping coming out the back.
"Heating stove," Leaton said, taking a rag out of the back pocket of his overalls and wiping his hands-futile, since grease and dirt were ground into the knuckles. "An outer box, an i
"Excellent," Cofflin said. They'd all been chilly in the tag end of early spring. "We can start on these later in the year, though-after harvest."
Leaton nodded. "And there's this." The other stove was much larger, standing on legs. The top held what looked like solid-metal equivalents of heating elements on a normal stove, and there was a big oval tank welded to one side.
"Wood-fired cooking stove," he went on proudly. "We modeled it on the old style, with some improvements. That thing on the side is a hot-water tank-the exhaust flue goes right through it."
"Oh, that's going to be popular!" Cofflin said.
Not least with those who had to do dishes. People who couldn't do anything else had taken to filling in with housework, for those who were otherwise occupied. It let them earn Town chits of their own, and freed up the able-bodied for essential tasks.
"Wait a minute-you should put in a heating tray at the back. That done, you can put those into production right away, say twenty a week to start with?" he said.
"Can do, but I'll need more assembly space. They bolt together, and the parts are standardized."
"I'll get you the people, at least until the harvest," Cofflin said. "The Council will go along with it. Speaking of which, is the reaper working yet?"
"Ah-" Leaton's eyes shifted. "Well, we're still getting some of the bugs out, Chief."
"Goddammit, Ron, we were counting on that…"
"God," Ian Arnstein wheezed, straightening up and rubbing at his back. "Now I know what 'stoop labor' really means."
Everyone had toughened up considerably since the spring, but reaping grain with a sickle and bagging hook evidently took muscles and degrees of flexibility they'd never called on before. Swindapa was proof positive, two people down from him in the row. She moved with an economical rhythm: stoop with leg advanced, sweep the wooden hook with the left hand to gather in a swatch of grain, bring the sickle up sharply head-high and slice downward and back, tip the hook to spill the cut rye in a neat row, step forward, stoop… despite the T-shirt and cutoff jeans, moving like that she didn't look at all American. She was well ahead of Alston and Doreen, and stopped occasionally to let them catch up, putting a better edge on her sickle now and then with a pull-through sharpener. Others were doing the same, punctuated with the odd yelp or curse as someone cut a hand. Ian had already, twice, and sweat stung like fire as it ran into the superficial gashes.
The rye stretched before him, waving in the sun with an evil brown-gold beauty, starred here and there with wild-flowers; he'd have admired those more if he hadn't learned by painful, personal experience how much harder weeds made the work. It was a hot August day, su