Earths eulogy, p.3
Earth's Eulogy, page 3
As soon as the crucial matters of building a bath was over, he began building his home. He has made log cabins before, and since they are relatively simple to make, he chose to make one for his new home. Once that was done, he made an outhouse and a shed for his equipment. Then he made a granary for each of the grains he had growing in the fields. He also made a root cellar for the fruits and vegetables, hoping it would help preserve them.
March had rolled into April, and April into May. At this point, the bugs were making their presence known! Its one thing to be irritated by bugs when your working in your field, but it is another thing to try to sleep at night and choking on a bug. It’s too hot to shut the windows at night, so John needed screens for his house. But to make screens, John needed to make string.
Fortunately, John was intimately familiar with how to make string. When John was eleven, he had gotten a hole in a shirt, and his mom sowed it up. He wanted a new shirt, not a patched shirt, so right in front of his mom, he ripped open the patch and made the hole worse, totally ruining the shirt. After his mom got done tanning his hide, she was still upset with him, so he was grounded until he made a new shirt from scratch.
He got to go into the woods, find flax, break it down, and spin flax into string, then weave that string into a shirt. IT TOOK AN ENTIRE MONTH! There was no tv, video games, books, or anything else until he made a new shirt from scratch! John never showed either of his parents a hint of a bad attitude after that.
John began looking for flax and found a good amount and began breaking it down. Next, he had to build a spinning wheel to turn the flax into string. He would power the spinning wheel with peddles just like the one his mom made him use, this gave him the excuse to go ahead and make a chair for himself, so he could sit down and peddle the spinning wheel. He only invented the spinning wheel a thousand years early, in America instead of the middle east.
Finally, once he had enough string, he made a nice window frame, put tons of nails around it, and made his first screen. It worked perfectly. He got the cool night breeze without the insects! Only eighteen hundred years early.
At this point, John started doing long term planning. Many of his fruits and vegetables are going to rot because the only way he knows how to preserve them is through canning. Sure the root cellar might help some, but canning is a long term solution. Canning isn’t that hard, just put whatever you want to preserve in a glass jar, put a lid on it and pressure cook it until no microbes could survive. But making glass is hard.
He will need to get sand up to an ungodly high temperature. He doesn’t know what temperature because he never made glass. He has turned iron ore into iron before as a science project. But he did the science project with a ready-made kiln that used electricity for its power. The only fuel available to him at this point is wood, and he knows he can make wood pellets into coal by hanging them over a fire, and turning them into pure carbon, but that will take time.
Furthermore, he will need to make a furnace that can withstand the heat of the fire, which means he will have to make a furnace out of the various clays and rocks in the area and hope they can handle the heat.
But to get the furnace hot enough, he must make bellows. To make bellows, he will need around twelve deer hides, but John is unwilling to slaughter deer just for their hides, which will lead carnivores to his area, and he doesn’t think he could deal with a bunch of them. At this point, he has been here for three months and has killed two deer. He stripped and tanned their hide, smoked their meat, and used their organs to chum some of the water in the area. Until all the smoked meat is eaten or rotten, there is no point in going hunting again. At this rate, it will take another year to have enough tanned hide to make the type of bellows he thinks he needs.
As for the buffalo in the area, he is unwilling to kill a thousand-pound animal that he would never be able to move. Killing and transporting a sixty-pound deer is easy, but killing a thousand-pound buffalo with his longbow is iffy, and there is no way he would be able to move it.
Over the next year, he plans to build several furnaces and figure out which one is the best once he has the bellows. Make lots and lots of coal, go through the iron mountain and bring back lots of iron ore, farm, and add a screened off deck to his log house.
Chapter 2 November AD 70 Mozambique Africa
Paul appeared on a hill in Africa with all the supplies he collected from the seed vault. His priority was making himself a shelter. He had spent a year in Mozambique when he first got his job as a biochemist designing pesticide for this region six years ago when he was 24. The rainy season was no joke.
He had chosen to be placed on top of a hill because he did not want to get drowned by a nearby runoff. He took out a fire ax he found at the vault and began cutting down the trees he would make for his shelter and dragging them to the top of the hill.
Paul had practiced martial arts since he was small, and he had black belts in three different styles. Each black belt test was more than six hours long. He thought he was in shape until the second hour of cutting down trees. Swinging the ax was wearing him out, so he decided to rest by dragging the logs up to where he planned to build his shelter, and when was worn out from that, he dug holes for the frame of the shelter.
His shelter consisted of digging holes for several pairs of skinny logs to stick straight out of the ground. These pairs of logs were what he called his frame. He cut down more skinny trees, placed them between the two logs, and then stacking the logs on one another kind of like a log house. Once he had all the logs high enough that it was over his head, he cut out a door, between two pairs of logs, and used a couple of steel barrels as barricades because he could not bother with a door at this point.
Then he built his roof with sticks, then took the lids off a lot of the plastic containers and used them for his shingles. Paul had no illusions about himself, he knew he did not have the knowledge that he needed to make a waterproof roof out of wood or thatch, so why not use the supplies he brought with him from the seed vault?
Once he looked at the strange-looking shelter, he had to admit he could never call such a weird building a house, but he had to admit it would fit right in a fallout game. That said, it was plenty sturdy enough to survive the rainy season, and just as importantly, it could protect him from lions and other carnivores. He just had to avoid upsetting elephants, and his shelter should be okay.
Now that he was protected from carnivores in the ugliest shelter in the world, he had to protect himself against all the nasty bugs in Africa. Paul made a makeshift hoe with some of the scraps from the seed vault and a long sturdy stick, hoed himself out a respectful size plot around his shelter, and began planting his herb garden.
He found out years ago that sometimes the pesticide business was as much about repelling insects as killing insects, so he planted himself a herb garden of basil, lemongrass, lemon thyme, mint, rosemary, and sage.
Then he took his hoe to the outside of his new herb garden and hoed out several plots for insect repelling flower garden. He planted Lavender, Alliums, Chrysanthemums, Marigolds, Nasturtiums, Petunias, Geraniums, and floss flowers.
Just in case those didn't work, he also planted Pitcher plants all around his shelter. Paul did not want to die from an insect bite, which is a real problem in Africa.
Once he was done with his bug repellent garden, which would take several weeks before it began protecting him, he started preparing the fields. He took out his makeshift hoe and began swinging.
He had been in the agriculture industry for a few years now, albeit as a pesticide guy, and he knew that it took about half an acre of land to feed one person a year assuming that half-acre produced a good amount of food. He had no idea what would grow well in this area. Unlike John, who had grown food in Texas all his life, Paul left the job of growing food to the experts, and now he had to become the expert. Paul was grateful that many of the totes, barrels, and wooden crates holding seeds said where they came from, so it did give Paul a big clue on what he should start growing.
To hedge his bet, Paul figured it would be best to grow on about five acres of land. An acre of land is 43,560 square feet. So he needed to hoe about 200,000 square feet of ground, or about four football fields worth of land, which he got to hoe by hand. One thing is for sure; Paul was going to get strong.
Paul hoed until he could not swing the hoe anymore, and then planted the various seeds. He made sure to plant in more insect-repelling herbs and flowers alongside the fruits, vegetables, and grains he was planting. More so to protect his tender flesh than to protect the plants, although he was very aware that it was good for his plants to have bugs repelled.
As December came, the rains came. Although he wanted to plant five acres of land, he only had time for four. Thankfully even though it rains a lot during the rainy season, it's not like it rains nonstop for months. When he had a chance, between the rain, he planted tea trees and rubber trees. Paul knew it would take a couple of years before he could harvest anything, but both sets of trees were critical. The tea to force people to boil water before they drink, and the rubber as a necessary industrial material.
Paul couldn't lay about just because of the constant rain, so he built himself a smithy alongside his shelter. He felt uncomfortable walking around Africa with a makeshift hoe, and a fire ax for protection. The hoe is rather weak, and the fire ax is unwieldy. The smithy also gave him a ready-made place to boil water as his bottled water supply from the seed vault was starting to get low, and he could also use the hot water to be used in a shower he had made.
Now he just had to make plenty of coal. He spent three days chopping down a tree, making it into smaller and smaller chunks, dragging it up the hill, cooking it in pots. As far as he could tell, he was cooking the water out of the wood, although he thought there was more to it than that.
He also knew enough from watching a couple of coal fire episodes of forged in fire that there has to be a way to force air into the furnace, or you will never get the coals hot enough, so he turned his parka into a bellows.
Paul had watched several episodes of forged in fire and was going to try to copy them in turning scrap metal into weapons. If there is one thing, Paul has plenty of it is scrap metal and metal kitchenware.
Paul took a small pot, and he crammed it full of screws, nails, and other small pieces of metal that he had collected all over the seed vault. When it was as full as he could get it, he took a hammer and pounded the metal together tight and added more until the pan was full with little to no air pockets.
Then Paul got a fire going in the furnace with the charcoal, and as the fire started getting hot, he started forcing air in the furnace with his bellows. When he figured it was hot enough, and honestly, he had no idea, he put the pan filled with scrap metal in the furnace. He kept watch until it turned from red to white, then he took it out with a pair of tongs and began beating on it with one of the many hammers he took from the seed vault.
From watching the show, he knew that air pockets were bad, so he planned to flatten it out and fold the metal over several times.
Eventually, he got a piece of metal he thought wouldn't have any air pockets in it, and he split it in half and began making two ax heads. In and out of the furnace, they went until he had the shape he wanted and had the hole in the ax head to put a handle through. He then covered everything but the edge in clay… or perhaps mud, well whatever it was, its what he had to work with, Then he heated the edge in the furnace one last time until it was white-hot and then quenched it in water for only a split second.
He lucked out there were not any cracks. He then took out a file and found that the blade on the ax head was harder than the file. SUCCESS!!!
The next thing he did was make a couple of ax handles and put some wedges into the water for a few hours. He put the ax heads on the handles with the wedges and waited for the wedges to swell up overnight. The next day he found out that his ax heads were solidly in place on his ax handles, and with a couple strikes to nearby trees was pleased to find out that his ax heads did not crumble.
Paul had his first set of weapons, two short axes, that would easily go through skull and bone if he had to defend himself. In all honesty, Paul was more worried about lions and hippos than people, and the axes might give him the power he needed to take one down if necessary.
The next thing he made was spearheads from the metal frames of the shelving units that held all the seed containers back at the seed vault. The frames were straightforward to work with as they all fit together. Paul imagined that these frames were designed that way, so when they were boxed up and shipped out, they took up less room in the box, but for his purpose that meant they were easier to forge together, and within a couple of weeks he had a couple of dozen spearheads.
It was time to go out between the rain, dig a couple of pits and see if he could trap any meat, as Paul had no idea how to shoot a bow. Oh, sure he had seen them in movies, but Paul had never been a hunter. As far as Paul was concerned, why hunt when you had grocery stores? Turns out when your planet gets wiped out by an alien probe, and you get sent back in time so that you can change history to stop that probe from killing everyone on the planet, it is best if you knew how to bow hunt. Paul laughed at that thought, bitterly.
Chapter 3 April AD 71 Africa
Paul spent the last several months of the rainy season practicing martial arts with his new weapons. The twin axes were not too different in function from Kamas, so he adjusted twin Kama fighting technique for the axes, and worked on some new katas for them. As for the spears, he learned basic spearman ship when he was in China.
The problem with all his practice was that he did not have an opponent to spar. It is easy to win a fight against air, but once a target can hit back, it's a different world.
As the crops grew and had ripe fruits, vegetables, and grains, he harvested. It is very clear to Paul that four acres of crops were way too much, and that he needed to make granaries during the dry season. Fortunately, there was plenty of room in the seed containers to put his harvest, at least as much as he needed to eat. The problem is that most still went to waste.
The good news about all this was that everything he planted grew well in the soil. The two thousand years people had spent breeding crops was not in vain. The crops not only survived but thrived in this part of the world, so even if he were to die, in a few generations of crops, there should be a large surplus of food.
At this point, Paul knows that he is a terrible hunter. It has been months since he has eaten meat, and that was in the last can of tuna he took from the seed vault. None of the pit traps worked. Maybe that was because they kept filling up with water due to the rainy season, and maybe that's because he's a terrible trapper. Paul hopes it's the former and not the later.
The thing is that whatever Paul does, he knows that pretty soon he is going to need more metal. He chose this spot in Africa because it is close to both iron and copper deposits. For Paul, this is the beginning of the dry season, he has plenty of food, although he misses meat at the moment, and he has more than enough seed for a thousand people. Why not go search for some iron deposits nearby?
Paul tucks his two axes into his belt loops, puts his shovel and one of his spears on his back, and carries his other spear. Then he goes to his herb and flower garden and grabs several of his best insect repellents and makes a corsage out of them, to keep the bugs away. Then he begins a survey of the local area.
Paul honestly has no idea where he is and does not want to get lost. If he got lost, there is a good chance he would never be able to find his way back. The problem is that an African forest surrounds the hill where he planted everything. Its not a rain forest, just Africa's version of what a forest is. So as Paul travels, he has to be careful to recognize what direction he is heading in.
Furthermore, this is Africa. Lions, snakes, elephants, hippos, and probably things he never heard of can kill him, so he has to be very aware of his surroundings. He is at the bottom of the food chain here, and he is traveling far from his shelter.
As he travels through the woods, hoping that he is not getting lost, he hears the chatter of what he thinks is monkeys, and the whistles of what he thinks are birds. He is clearly in what would be called an old-growth forest, and although it is not noon yet, it's rather dark in this forest.
As Paul moves through the woods, he occasionally uses his spear as a spade and digs up dirt. Most of the time, it is just that dirt, but as he travels, he comes across a stream that will likely be bone dry in a few days and digs into its temporary banks when he discovers pyrite.
Paul lifts up his hands and shouts, "YES!"
He digs a bit more with his spear, and it looks like there is plenty of pyrite in this area. Ironically throughout history, people have been happy to find pyrite because they thought it was gold, but Paul was happy to find pyrite because Paul is a chemist.
Pyrite is made up of one molecule of iron, and two molecules of sulfur. With enough pyrite, you can have a good iron industry, but to a degree, the sulfur was more important in the modern world that Paul came from than the iron that it is attached too. Sulfur was often turned into sulfuric acid, which built the 20 and 21st-century chemical industry. Granted right now, Paul is generations from having that type of use for sulfur. But sulfur is required to make rubber last a long time, in a process called vulcanization. As soon as his rubber trees mature, he will be able to start the rubber industry 1800 years early!
"ROAR"!
As soon as Paul heard the noise, he jumped to the side, turned his head to the roar, and pointed his spear at the creature with a two-handed grip. It was a lion.
Paul thought, "Crap, this is bad; lions rarely hunt alone." And Paul began looking around, always keeping his spear pointed at the lion roaring at him.
There it was, a bush moved, without hesitation, Paul held onto his spear with his right hand, but his left hand let go of the spear, reached for his ax, and he lifted to throw, as he did so a lion leaped from the bush that moved, as the lion was leaping through the air to end his life, Paul through the ax, bowing down his body to give the throw more force, and to roll under the lion's leap. The ax struck the lion's forehead and lodged there, but the lion was not dead yet, just stunned!
