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Chapter 5

Camp Peterbilt


Camp Peterbilt


April 15, 1005 CE


While the three young natives had been talking, Alyssa listened to the language they were speaking as attentively as possible—which, of course, wasn’t saying much. None of the languages spoken by the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas had any close connection to the languages of Europe, Asia or Africa.

Theirs was a mellifluous language, at least to her ears. It had more vowels and fewer consonants than English, in that respect sounding a bit like a Romance language—Italian more than French or the two Iberian tongues. But the words would be completely different, as would the grammar and syntax.

It was going to be hard for the three American adults to learn the language, but they did have one great asset: her two children and, to a lesser extent, Shane. Kids under the age of ten could learn languages with amazing speed and once they did, spoke it with a native accent. The skill began to drop off in a child’s teenage years, and by the age of eighteen it wasn’t any better than that of an adult. Shane was still young enough that she could probably learn the natives’ language—or languages; there could well be more than one commonly spoken in the area—almost as quickly as Miriam and Norman. Just as quickly, if she had an aptitude for it.

It would help if they could figure out a way to have native children spending a lot of time with the people from the future. They’d pick up English just as fast as the American kids would learn their language. Having bilingual speakers on both sides of the equation would make a real difference.

That would especially be true when it came to a written language. The natives would not have one. No native language in North America had a written form until after Europeans arrived. The civilizations in Central America did, but whatever influence they might have had on native societies to their north did not extend to the development of any sort of writing.

She thought it would be easier to teach people with no written language to read English than to develop their own form of writing. All the more so if . . . 

She turned to Michael. “What do you folks have in the way of written texts in the truck?”

He frowned. “What exactly do you mean by ‘written texts’? Things written on paper? Not a whole lot. Most of what we have is on our laptop.”

He looked back at the truck, scratching his jaw. “Melanie and I are Episcopalians, so we do have a written copy of the Book of Common Prayer.”

“Not the Bible?”

“No.” He smiled and shook his head. “Melanie and I aren’t big fans of the Old Testament. We didn’t see any reason to haul around something neither of us would read. We do have the four gospels, though—but only in an audio edition. Other than that . . . ”

His smile got rather sly. “We do have a video of Jesus Christ Superstar on our laptop.”

Alyssa’s mind was starting to race. She herself wasn’t particularly religious and her husband Jerry was a straight-up agnostic. She’d been brought up in the African Methodist Episcopal church, but she’d drifted away from the church and stopped going to services once she started college.

Clearly, the Anderles were more devout than she was, but they didn’t strike her as being inclined toward either doctrinaire reasoning or religious intolerance. And if so . . . 

“We need to found a Christian church here. Or at least get something similar up and running.”

Michael stared at her. “Huh?”

“Michael, think. We’re going to be stranded here for the rest of our lives, in a world—and its societies—that are still Neolithic. Its religious beliefs and practices will be what for lack of a better term I’ll call pagan. And no matter what claims Wiccans make about Druids, I don’t know of any pagan religion that I’d want to belong to—or even be close to.”

She used her chin to point to the north. “Cahokia is up that way, not more than a hundred miles from here. A culture that, whatever its strengths and graces, practices human sacrifice. I’ll be the first to agree that Christianity—or Judaism, or Islam, or Buddhism, or any of the great world religions—have their faults and an historical track record that often stinks to high heaven. But they all developed a universal moral code, they all eventually accepted that all people are people, and so far as I know not one of them ever practiced human sacrifice.”

Michael grimaced. “Not as such, no. But plenty of religions—including Christianity—had no trouble burning other people at the stake or chopping off their heads. You name the cruelty and they all committed them, at one time or another.”

Alyssa started to say something, but he waved her down. “Look, I’m not arguing with your main point because I agree with you. So does Melanie. Because of her Swedish heritage, she studied some Scandinavian history. I remember her telling me that while there were things she admired about her ancestors she was sure glad she didn’t live among them. They practiced human sacrifice too—and their victims were also mostly young women. Not to mention—”

He broke off, because the three native youngsters seemed to have finished whatever discussion they’d been having. Some of it had sounded like an argument, although not a hot-tempered one. Now, the shorter of the two girls started walking down the slope.

“We’ll continue our discussion later, Alyssa,” said Michael. “Right now we’ve got to figure out what to do about these two who seem to be planning to stick around.”

“Yeah, sure. As for what they plan to do . . . ” She glanced at her watch. “We’re still in early afternoon. Whatever else, we’re going to need to feed them and figure out a place for them to sleep. Adding the two of them to the truck cab is going to get awfully crowded.”

“Why don’t we start by feeding them,” Melanie proposed. She pointed toward one of the ice cream coolers that they’d placed close to the tanker, where they were shaded for most of the day. The generator kept their interiors below freezing, but the shade helped.

“Ice cream?” said Michael. “What kind of lunch is that?”

“They’ve almost certainly never had any,” said Alyssa. “It’s bound to cheer them up and help them relax. We can make some actual food later. We’ll need to defrost something out of the coolers anyway.”

It seemed as good a plan as any. Melanie went over to one of the coolers and extracted two ice cream sandwiches. Then, after a moment’s consideration, took out six more. The native youngsters would probably be suspicious if offered something unfamiliar to eat unless they saw their hosts eating it as well.

Besides, she was in the mood for ice cream. The natives weren’t the only ones who’d been under tension.

She came back and passed them all out, including to Shane and the Jefferson children. Then, moving slowly so the natives could see what she was doing, unwrapped one end of the sandwich bar and started eating. Alyssa and Michael followed suit. Needless to say, the kids hadn’t waited for anybody.

After a few seconds’ hesitation, so did the teenagers. Melanie had to struggle a little to keep from laughing at the expressions that came to their faces after they took their first bites: surprise, astonishment and enthusiasm, in equal measure.

Once the ice cream was finished, which didn’t take long at all, Melanie went back to the coolers to decide what to prepare for dinner. That would still be several hours away, but at least some of the food would have to be defrosted. She could cook frozen vegetables straight out of the bag, but not meat.

Which meat? The coolers held frozen steaks, pork chops and chicken parts. After thinking about it, she decided on chicken legs and pork chops. She had no idea what, if any, eating implements the natives used. Eating steaks or chicken breasts without using a knife and a fork would be awkward—and for all she knew, they were completely unfamiliar with using them to eat food. They might very well never have seen a fork before.

Pork chops and chicken legs could be eaten easily with just fingers. So that’s what she pulled out.

They’d set up a grill whose heat was provided by a propane tank not far from the coolers, with an upended basin that they used as a place to defrost food. She placed the frozen chops and legs on it, still in their plastic wrapping.

Meanwhile, Michael had been trying to figure out what sort of sleeping arrangement they could set up for the boy and girl. He had no idea what customs they had which regulated whether and in what manner the two of them could share sleeping quarters, and he decided he wasn’t going to worry about it. They’d chosen to come of their own volition; or, if they had been pressured to do so, it had been done by their own people, not his. They could damn well take what they could get.

The starting point was obvious. The only thing they had which was mobile and large enough to form the basis for a shelter was the section of broken-off store wall that Michael had used as a travois. It had gotten pretty beaten up over the two days it had been used to haul stuff, but it was still intact and didn’t have any large holes or tears in it.

The travois was lying on the ground not far away. Gesturing for the boy to come with him, Michael went over and lifted the travois up on one edge. He started to indicate that the boy should lift the other end, but he’d figured it out for himself and was already doing so.

Smart kid. Michael pointed toward a pair of birch trees near the creek which were about five feet apart. The two of them lifted the travois and carried it over there. It wasn’t all that heavy but its size and shape made it a bit unwieldy. It didn’t take them more than a few minutes, though, before they had the travois leaning up against the trees at roughly a sixty-degree angle. That created a space between the bottom of the travois and the tree trunks that was about four feet wide, roughly the size of a double bed.

Michael made some gestures indicating that they now had to move the travois out of the way, so they propped it against another tree about ten feet away. He then went to the pickup bed and climbed into it, opened the big toolbox and removed a hammer, following which he began rummaging for nails. Soon enough he’d found a dozen that were the length he needed.

While he did so, the boy came within eight feet of the pickup and watched, fascinated. The girl came over and joined him. They spoke a few sentences, which Michael guessed were along the lines of:

You think it’s another demon? Maybe the big one’s cub?

I got no idea. At least it’s not wearing war paint.

Or maybe they were just guessing at what else might be in the toolbox. Not having any common language at all was frustrating.

He hopped out of the truck, placed the hammer and nails close to the birch trees, and headed toward the pile of lumber they’d brought back from the wrecked store. It wasn’t much of a pile, not more than twenty boards of various widths and lengths. Michael started with the bathroom door and then added two boards which were a foot wide and long enough. That would be enough to close at least most of the space between the two trees. There would still be open spaces at either end of the quasi-A-frame dwelling he was constructing, but it would be better than nothing. At least it would cut down any breeze and even at night the temperature this time of year didn’t drop below fifty degrees.

By the time he got the door and the boards nailed to the two birch trees, the boy and girl had figured out what came next and had brought the travois over to lean it back against the trees again. They made the angle somewhat wider than he had, closer to fifty degrees than sixty, which would give some more room.

He considered tying the top of the travois to the trees but decided that wasn’t necessary. Unless a really strong wind came up, it wouldn’t move. And the only way such a wind could develop would be if a storm was passing through—and in that event they’d have no choice but to bring the two youngsters into the truck.

Now. What to use for a mattress? And was there any way to seal off at least one of the ends of the structure?

He discovered that both problems were being addressed by the Neolithic youngsters. They had moved to the opposite bank of the creek, where the soil looked to be considerably wetter, cutting down rushes with short knives. He’d noticed that both of them had knives in sheaths attached to thin belts, but he hadn’t thought much about it. The blades weren’t more than three inches long, not really suitable to serve effectively as weapons. (And the boy had his quite ferocious looking spear anyway, so why bother fighting with a knife?)

Without thinking about it, he’d assumed the stone blades would be fairly dull. But watching the quick and efficient way the two natives were sawing off rushes, he realized they were razor sharp. How . . . ?

Alyssa happened to be standing next to him and must have spotted the frown of puzzlement on his face. “Don’t make the worst mistake any of us can make in our new here and now, Michael. These people have a far more limited technology than we do, but it’s not because they aren’t just as smart as we are. They simply haven’t had time yet to expand it as much as we have.”

She used her chin to point across the creek. “I haven’t gotten a close look at them yet, but now that I see them in action I’m willing to bet those blades are obsidian. If so, they must have obtained them through trade since there’s no source of obsidian that I can think of within hundreds of miles of here.”

“Can a stone knife really be that sharp?”

“Yes, both obsidian and flint can be sharper than steel. In fact, an obsidian blade is much sharper than even the best steel blades. Some surgeons still use them today, for certain procedures. The big problem with obsidian is that it’s very brittle, so it breaks much easier than any metal blade will.”

Again, she pointed with her chin. “They’ve grown up using them, so they’re very skilled and know the blades’ strengths and weaknesses. That’s why they can cut down so many rushes this quickly with such short knives.”

Both of the young people by now had their arms full. They waded back across the creek, dumped their loads inside the newly erected lean-to, and went back for more.

“They’re walking through the creek without taking their moccasins off,” said Michael. “That won’t damage them?”

“Not if it’s deerskin leather, which I’m sure it is.” Alyssa looked down at her own footwear, which was designed for streets and carpets, not wilderness. “We should look into whether we can get some moccasins ourselves. The boots you’re wearing look pretty sturdy but these shoes of mine . . . ” She made a face. “At least they’re not high heels. But they’re not going to last long in the Stone Age.”

The boy and girl had apparently decided they’d piled enough rushes on the area inside the lean-to to make a suitable mattress. Now they moved further down the creek and started cutting down what looked to be coarser and taller grasses. Or maybe they were sedges. Neither of the Americans was up on the fine distinctions between rushes, sedges and grasses. Michael asked Alyssa how much she knew, and her response was: “About all I know is that there are more than ten thousand species of grasses.”

Her tone of voice held a trace of exasperation. Dammit, I do not know everything. She relented after a couple of seconds and added with a smile, “You know, we’re always called omnivores but people are actually the world’s most prodigious grass-eaters.”

“What do you mean?”

“Cattle and sheep and bison and reindeer—even goats—have nothing on us. Wheat? That’s a grass. So is rice, maize, barley, oats, rye, millet, sorghum—and then there are grasses we Americans don’t eat but other people do. Teff is grown and eaten in East Africa, for instance. Oh, yeah—and sugar cane is a grass, too.”

The natives returned to the lean-to, each with their arms full of cut grass. They dumped these outside the lean-to, though, not in it. As the boy headed back to the creek to gather more, the girl started using the long grass to form what amounted to walls and windbreaks in areas that weren’t shielded by the travois or the nailed-up boards. She did the work very quickly. Clearly this was something she had plenty of experience in doing.

In the end, other than providing the travois and some boards, the only contribution the Americans made was donating an extra blanket Melanie found in the truck and a pair of brightly colored beach towels.

“We do pass by a beach now and then with some time to spare,” Michael explained, sounding a bit apologetic. Alyssa suspected that owner-operator truck drivers had a work ethic that was a tad excessive.

* * *

Late in the afternoon, Melanie had the dinner cooked: pork chops, chicken legs, rice and broccoli. She and the other two American adults were struck by the reaction of the two young natives to the meal. None of these foods was familiar to them. Apparently—so Alyssa said, anyway—there were no pigs in the New World until the Spanish brought them from Europe. The origin of chickens was murkier, since there was some evidence they’d arrived in South America in pre-Columbian times due to trade with Polynesian voyagers. But none had yet arrived in North America.

“Of course, all sorts of fowl have been hunted here for centuries—probably for millennia.” Alyssa paused long enough to finish off a drumstick, which she tossed into an empty can since they hadn’t decided yet how they wanted to dispose of uneaten food. Leaving such things as bird and animal bones with bits of meat still on them lying around was really not a good idea. But burying them seemed like a lot of work.

“If I remember right, at least some of the New World tribes and nations domesticated turkeys. Or kept them in captivity, at least. And some of the game birds are native to North America, I’m pretty sure.”

“I know grouses and quails are,” said Michael. He finished off a pork chop and disposed of the bone in the same can. “Doves, too, I think. I don’t know how easy they’d be to hunt with bows, though. I was using a 12-gauge shotgun.”

What the boy and girl seemed to find the strangest foods, though, were the rice and broccoli. The rice they clearly liked; the broccoli, they seemed dubious about. But they finished everything on their plates—and were fascinated with them as well.

But what fascinated them even more were the electric lights that Michael and Melanie set up while there was still enough daylight to see outdoors. The store had had plenty of light bulbs, fixtures and wiring, some on the surviving shelves and others being used in the store itself, to enable them to string lights all around the Peterbilt—and run a line into the lean-to as well, complete with a small portable lamp, so the boy and girl could have light through the night if they wanted it. Power was provided by the two generators they’d found in the store.

Once sundown came, Michael turned on all the lights. Except for the huge truck, nothing seemed to astonish, impress, flabbergast and excite the boy and the girl as much as the lights. And make them quite anxious, too, at first.

Shane settled their anxiety by leading them into the lean-to where they’d be sleeping and show them how to operate the lamp that had been hung in there. After turning it on and off a dozen times or so, the natives began exuding the confidence and savoir faire of well-traveled adventurers.

The three American adults had remained seated around the table they’d brought out of the store’s wreckage. Michael turned away from looking at the lean-to from whose innards a light kept coming on and going off.

“I’m glad they seem to be enjoying themselves,” he said, smiling, “but we’re going to have to start preparing for when the gasoline runs out in a few months.”

“Runs out?” asked his wife. She glanced at the enormous tanker trailer that was now hitched back up to the tractor. “Michael, there’s at least two thousand gallons of gasoline in that thing. We could drive back and forth coast to coast in the pickup half a dozen times before we ran low on gasoline; at least we could if there were any roads.”

“Closer to three thousand gallons.” Michael shook his head. “The problem is that gasoline doesn’t have a very long shelf life. Give it a few months and it’ll start going bad. The diesel will go bad too, although it’ll last about a year.”

Alyssa opened her mouth, then closed it. Michael noticed and gave her a squinty-eyed look.

“I think you want to correct me on this subject,” he said, “but you’re twitchy about being considered a goddamn know-it-all.” The smile came back. “Face it, lady. You are a goddamn know-it-all, but on the other hand I’m not a thin-skinned jerk. So spit it out. What’s wrong with what I said?”

“Nothing’s wrong with what you said, Michael. But your way of looking at it presupposes the world we came from. Diesel will go bad after a while and gasoline will go bad even faster, that’s true. But there are simple ways to prevent it. Or, at least forestall it—but you can forestall the problem for a long time.”

He gave his head an abrupt shake. “I never heard anyone say that.”

“That’s probably because they were practical fellows and in the modern world we came from, people ran through gasoline and diesel so quickly that few people worried about—or even thought about—what might happen to the fuels if you just let them sit around for months and years.” She smiled, now. “But I’m a chemist, remember? Chemists are like the illuminati of legend.”

She raised both hands and wiggled her fingers. “We knoooooow things. Secret things.”

Both Michael and Melanie laughed. So did Miriam and Norman, who’d stayed at the table and were following (sort of) the adults’ conversation. They didn’t really understand it, but they found their mother’s finger antics amusing.

“Here’s what happens,” Alyssa continued. “The reason diesel goes bad is because microbes grow in the diesel/water interface. All you have to do is add sulfur to the fuel to kill them. In a modern environment, there are good reasons to keep sulfur content in fuel low—which is why the government regulated it. But”—she spread her hands, indicating their current surroundings—“in the world we’re in now, pollution isn’t yet a big issue.”

“How much sulfur?” asked Melanie. “And where would we get it?”

“I don’t know how much we’ll need, but it can’t be much. A few thousand parts per million, would be my guess. We’ll have to experiment with test batches. Getting sulfur shouldn’t be too hard, since it’s one of the half dozen most common elements on the Earth—tenth most common in the whole universe. The natives may well already use it for some purposes such as medicine and fumigants. Since they’ve got obsidian, they already have some trade with people further west who live in volcanic areas. Sulfur’s easy to find in such areas. One way or another, though, I don’t think getting our hands on sulfur will be a big problem. It better not be, since we’ll want it to make gunpowder too.”

Both the Anderles stared at her. “I keep forgetting,” said Melanie. “You chemists are the world’s original greedy slavering weapons-makers, aren’t you?”

Alyssa flashed her grin. “Well, yes—but we also created the Nobel Prizes, one of which is a prize for peace.”

“What do you need to do to keep gasoline from going bad?” asked Michael.

“That’s even simpler. Just stir it around in the tanks regularly.”

“Huh?” Michael repeated.

“Gasoline is a homogenized distillate of oil. That means that gasoline isn’t one liquid, it’s several different liquids mixed. All those liquids are present in crude oil and a fractional distillation process is used to separate them out and mix back together only the ones you want. The mix determines the octane. What happens when gasoline ‘goes bad’ is that those different mixed-together liquids become unmixed. This is especially a problem if the gasoline includes alcohol as part of the mix because alcohol weighs more than gasoline. It also absorbs water from the air so you end up with lower proof alcohol in the bottom of your tank where you are getting your gas from. If this happens in your car’s gas tank you are pretty much screwed. But if this happens in a sealed storage tank like the one on your tanker truck, that’s another matter. You still have all the liquids, you just need to re-homogenize them. And that takes swirling the fuel around with a stick. That’s probably not going to restore your gas to perfect, but it’s going to turn it back into usable gasoline, and you can keep it up for a long time.”

She thought for a moment. “One last thing. We need to create shade for the tanker trailer. And figure out if there’s any other way to keep the fuel as cool as possible.”

Alyssa got a pensive look on her face. “We shouldn’t have any trouble getting as much sulfur as we need and we can make charcoal. So that just leaves the third and largest component of gunpowder to find, which is saltpeter. Probably the fastest and simplest way to get saltpeter is to just find out from the people who already live here where there’s a large cave used by bats. Where there’s bats, you’ll find guano, and lots of it.”

Michael whistled tunelessly for a few seconds. “I guess we should start calling you Mommy Warbucks.”

“Very funny. The much bigger problem is figuring out how to make guns to put the gunpowder in. Because there’s no tin worth talking about on this continent, we’ll have to skip over bronze and go straight to iron.” She pursed her lips and ran fingers through her hair. “Given the low technology in the here and now, bog iron’s probably our best bet. The natives won’t know how to make iron from it until we show them, but they’ll certainly know where it can be found.”

“Do you know how to make iron?”

“I’ve never actually done it myself, but there’s nothing too difficult about it theoretically.” An angelic smile came to her face. “Mommy Warbucks, remember?”

“What are ‘warbucks’?” asked Miriam.

* * *

Achanu and Oaka wound up leaving the lamp on throughout the night. Partly that was because they were so charmed by it, and partly because they had issues to discuss.

One issue in particular.

“Do you want to get married?” asked Achanu.

Oaka abruptly sat up. “No!” she said. “I’m too young. So are you. The women’s council would never agree—and you know it.”

Achanu waved his hand as if fending off an insect. “I didn’t mean now. I meant”—he waved his hand again, this time in a gesture which indicated the uncertainties of life—“sometime in the future. Next year, maybe.”

“I’d still be too young.” But she was smiling now. “Maybe the year after that.”

They then spent a goodly portion of the night engaged in activities which would have appalled any right-thinking Americans. The sexual mores of their people were a lot different in many ways from those of their continent’s future. Theirs was a matrilineal culture, for one thing. Men had a monopoly on what Americans would call the executive branch of government, especially anything involving war. But chiefs had to be approved by the women’s council, which also operated as the equivalent of a judiciary. It wasn’t an “egalitarian” society in the American sense of the term, but it was very far removed from a patriarchal one.

Just for starters, as was usually true in matrilineal cultures, “bastardy” was a meaningless term and there was no fetish concerning virginity. In fact, despite their youth, neither Achanu nor Oaka were virgins, although their sexual experience was still rather limited. Girls her age were careful to avoid getting pregnant, but that was simply for practical reasons. If they did miscalculate and wind up having a child, it was not viewed as any kind of catastrophe nor did it bring down social punishment. All children were brought up communally, anyway.

The “rights” of fathers were strictly limited. The male authority figures for children were their maternal uncles and, if still alive and alert, their grandfathers. Husbands were tolerated, and some of them were even well liked by their wife’s extended family. But gods help a man stupid enough to mistreat his wife, especially in any physical manner. Every one of his wife’s brothers and uncles—and, if still capable of it, grandfathers—would beat him within an inch of his life. And his own family wouldn’t take his side. Serve the bum right.

So, Achanu and Oaka enjoyed themselves that night. The fact that they could see what they were doing was an unforeseen benefit.


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