Free Polymath by John Brunner Page B

herself. How could one reprimand one of the most useful people around? She hadn’t been assigned to her particular job. She had just seen that someone would have to make sure charged accumulators were in regular supply, so she had proceeded to coordinate the arrangements in an orderly and economical manner. And Naline, of course, had shadowed her.
    Would it serve any purpose to bring her onto the steering committee? J erode kept asking him that question; every time Lex returned the same answer. She and Ornelle would waste hours wrangling over personal differences, and Ornelle was coping usefully enough with the human problems she had been allotted. The register of intended pregnancies, for instance—that had been her idea. It would be open for another month at most. No winter births if humanly possible.
    But Delvia… In the end there had been no fuss over terminating her pregnancy. When she was told about it following the stocktaking assembly, she had meekly accepted Jerode’s rebuke and demanded a shot to get rid of it The idea wasn’t one to which he could bring many of the refugees around, but Lex was beginning to suspect that this involuntary colony could do with many more Delvias and far fewer Ornelles and Nalines.
    Dragging his sled, he made his way back toward the point where his gang of amateur salvagemen were checking equipment after the morning’s diving. Spacesuits, tough as they were, might tear on a sharp projection; hatchets—essential now that the summer life of the sea was teeming—were blunted and had to be reground; one helmet was cracked and would have to be patched somehow; the boat was lying bottom-up on the sand while one of the girls, her pink tonguetip between her teeth, was chipping away masses of hard-shelled sessile animals which had clung to the hull.
    He was lucky, Lex thought He had a keen team. The strong element of physical danger in this underwater work had sorted them out for him.
    Not to mention their willingness to work under a young leader….
    “Lex! Lex!”
    He spun around. Running toward him from the direction of the river was Cheffy, waving and shouting. One glance told him this was urgent. He left the sled where it was and ran to meet him.
    “What is it?” he called, thinking over a whole range of possible catastrophes. Cheffy was working on what they referred to, with a wry awareness of exaggeration, as the civil engineering projects of the town: water supply, sanitation, and heating for the inevitable winter.
    “Just you come and look!” Cheffy snapped, whirling around and making back the way he had come. Better built for running than he had been when he landed here, he still was going too fast to have breath to spare for talk.
    It was only a matter of moments before they came in sight of what had been yesterday a wide calm expanse of steadily flowing water, discolored by suspended silt and the larvae of some as-yet unidentified species of aquatic creature that metamorphosed to the adult stage when the river carried it into salt water.
    Yesterday? This morning, even, when Lex came down to start work!
    Now it was reduced to a trickle. Irregular curves of mud had been exposed; a few writhing creatures lay gasping in puddles, and water-weeds were already turning gray-yellow and deliquescing into a stinking mess from exposure to the full sun. The mouth of the estuary normally passed such a flow that the course of the fresh water could be traced a hundred feet from shore. Now the sea was trespassing into the riverbed.
    Lex halted, appalled. They had staked everything on the river! Cheffy was planning to draw water for drinking and washing via a sedimentation system a mile upstream, to replace the crude bucket-hoists they still depended on. They had decided to install piped water for every house and flush-sanitation for every twenty-five people. At the moment, since the sea was barred to them for swimming anyway and there was no tide to return the effluent, they were content