Free Polymath by John Brunner

Delvia who triggered off the clapping.
    Frustrated for the moment, the useless ones made no more trouble. But Lex was profoundly glad that the question of Delvia’s pregnancy hadn’t come up after all; Jerode simply didn’t mention it, and was wise not to in the heated atmosphere of this meeting.
    So they’d got away with it this time, at least.
    It wasn’t until the assembly ended just before dusk that Arbogast’s body was found among the rocks fringing the beach, with a spent energy gun clasped in the right hand which was now his only recognizable feature. He had opened the beam to widest spread and turned the weapon against himself.

VIII

    The shadow of Arbogast’s suicide lay chill across the hot bright days that followed. Towing a sled laden with scrap salvaged from the ship up the beach to where Aldric and his gang were working on the solar boilers and stills,
    Lex wondered how long their precarious balance was going to last. Twenty days had elapsed, then thirty, without disaster. But he had a fearful feeling that time was gnawing at their psychological props like termites, and eventually…
    Aldric raised a face half masked with dark glasses to acknowledge the delivery. Lex tipped the scrap to the ground with a clatter and stood back, wiping sweat from his forehead.
    “How are things with you, Aldric?” he said, low-voiced. “Going smoothly, by the look of all this.”
    Aldric hesitated. Then, pretending to examine the scrap piece by piece, he moved close enough to Lex to whisper.
    “No, Lex—not so smooth. Matter of fact, I’d been wanting a word with you, and now might be as good a time as any. Here, let’s stroll along the beach a bit.”
    “Sure.” Lex caught the handle of his sled in one hand and drew it behind as he fell in alongside. “These sleds are OK on the beach,” he muttered, “but we’ll need wheeled trucks some time soon…. Sorry. What were you going to say?”
    “Among other things, I’m wondering how hot it’s going to be in midsummer.” Aldric paused, judging they were out of earshot of his crew. “I’m getting a lot of complaints about noontide work, and not frivolous ones, either. I had a case of heatstroke yesterday. Cheffy says some hot-climate countries back on Earth used to have a period for sleep in the middle of the day. I’m not so sure that would be the answer; it’s easier to stretch to a day longer than Earth-basic, harder to cut down to a shorter one. And that would mean, in effect, having two short days. Halves of days.”
    “If Cheffy says people adjusted to it, he’s probably right,” Lex said. “Whether we’d be willing to is another matter. But surely if the heat does become unbearable…Well, what else could you do with the time you can’t work, except doze?”
    “I know what you mean,” Aldric grunted. “On or off the job!”
    Shading his eyes, Lex looked along the beach. In the near foreground was Aldric’s domain: in a weird spidery layout there were solar boilers that doubled as distillation equipment interspersed with crude turbine generators. The drive of the ship had been cannibalized for many of theparts, once everybody was convinced there was no but absolutely
no
hope of repairing it. Ornelle had held out for nearly a week.
    Beyond, fishing nets hung in the sun on racks, drying while girls checked the knots. Bendle had succeeded in preparing an antidote for the commonest allergens in the sea-life, and although they looked revolting even after they’d been cooked half a dozen species were now providing welcome and quite tasty variety in their diet. Back inland, ground was being cleared for planting—Bendle was up there with his team right now, studying the reproductive processes of their first standby, the salad-tree, in the hope of selecting for the strain with the best leaf-yield.
    In the other direction the solar collector sheets were all spread out. Accumulators were being charged continuously. He saw Delvia, burned brown now,