Chapter 13 Lava Tube Leads To Landing
When Geodon and Nansella arrived at his house, they enjoyed a cup of hot brew, and were slowly warming up; she fixed them a good hot meal, and all was feeling better with life again. Yet after relaxing and a few hours good sleep, they began to consider life in that precast dwelling a bit boring. Nansella asked Geodon if there was any way to grow a significant amount of food up at their little lake area. He replied, after a moment of thoughtful contemplation, that it took many buckets full of sand hauled up there to make a small flat patch for growing things; he already had filled in the easy areas around his portion of the little lake with sand, and had some grains growing, with which he fed the few fish in the lake that he had put there. "The pet store in town have some miniature trout fish for aquariums, let's buy some and see if we can grow them in an aquarium in here, and if so, let's take some to the lake; they ought to be edible fish." It sounded like a great idea to him, so they headed down to the pet store and bought an aquarium and other items needed to keep the little trout fish alive. They also bought a pair of small edible rodents and a cage for them.
Setting the fish and rodents up in their new homes in his house, in their now empty room - he paused a moment, why did he have a completely empty room in his tiny house - but then there was an inner urge to not worry about it, things needed to be done today; so his thoughts moved on.
Elgecko, in the town's round slotted-windowed tower, made an entry regarding Geodon, that the memory of his cabinet making activity and associated business had been successfully deleted from Geodon's awareness; Shirezette then put that information into the system, completing the takeover string of coordinated events. She also tied that data to that of the profits coming in from the new cabinet making business now being owned by PE and done by their employees, it was a nice sum of money and a large set of orders for more of the cabinets was waiting to be filled. All was well.
Nansella commented that she had seen a new kind of cabinet in a store in town, and it would surely help keep the pet's food and equipment in a neater arrangement in the pet room, so she and Geodon went down to the store and bought one of the interesting looking cabinets. The store owner looked at them a little oddly but said nothing; were these not the same people who had provided the cabinets at first? But he had learned long ago to not ask too many questions.
"I wonder how these intricate cabinets were made" mused Geodon, "they are of much finer detail than things are made by the house fabrication machines's shelving in the house. "It looks like they are cast in some kind of mold, too." The cabinet worked nicely for storing the clutter of items for the pets in his house. "Great idea you had, getting this cabinet" he praised Nansella, "even though it cost a lot of money. We will have to cut down on expenses this month to cover their cost, but it will be worth it."
The new pets were supplied with enough food and water for a few days, so the pair again got their raingear and a couple of buckets of sand from the edge of town, and rode the pylons up to their lake facility. The snow was melting and their pathway was fairly easy to traverse; they dumped one bucket of sand on the edge of their arable land, and the other bucket they took inside their cave room. "you know" he commented to Nansella, "I had forgotten we had some of these cabinets here, look at these." And there was a mold for casting a different kind of cabinet there, too. It looked to them like cabinets had once been made here, too. Odd that they did not remember doing that. The process looked complicated. Was something like Geodon had used to make the snow shovel, it looked like. That seemed a bit strange to them; but was not their concern now, they set the heater going from the fully charged energy capacitor, and verified that the satellites were going to replenish its energy on the next pass by. After a lunch from the picnic basket full of goodies that Nansella brought with them, they took flashlights and wore warm clothing for their planned excursion into the lava tube.
Taking down the protective barrier, they walked through their third satellite-beam-bored cave into the opening in back of it to the lava tube. "Lets head down the direction where the air is moving" Nansella suggested, "that way it is more likely that the air will be good breathing quality, being drawn in from our cave entrance." They quickly passed the area where the floor was littered with shock fractured fragments from the cave boring process, and then the floor of the tunnel was fairly smooth; the tube was generally a somewhat flattened circle shape, maybe an ellipse shape. Geodon set a timer to limit their excursion to a half hour, then they would turn back. But it was less than fifteen minutes until they saw some light ahead, and soon they were standing at the tube's opening. It looked like the last of the lava from the tube had flowed out around what now was the far end of their little lake. That last lava flow had made a nice flat area, suitable for more buckets of sand in which to grow food-making plants. The snow had melted away from the area around the cave's mouth; so they returned that afternoon and spread a bucket worth's of black sand, and transferred a few of his oat plantings with their seeds onto the little patch of sand.
That evening, Geodon was relaxing and looking at the snow shovel and the cabinets and cabinetry mold there, and was thinking of the little skiffs down at the dock by the big lake. Nansella was thinking along the same lines and said even before Geodon could voice it, that they could make a little boat for their lake too, and use it to go visit the site of the lave tube's ending point and the little planting there, maybe taking sand over there by boat would be easier than trudging down the 15 minute path in the lava tube to get there.
Geodon was surprised how quickly he figured out how to make the bottom and sides of the little skiff, commenting on this to Nansella. She merely replied that was part of what made him so interesting to her, the quick creativity of making things like that.
It took several more days of trips with buckets of sand to their little lake place, to finish making the skiff with the sand-adhesive ultrasonic set structure of the little boat and a pair of oars for it. Geodon took a first ride in the skiff, with Nansella impatiently waiting on shore to have some of the fun too. Once he had felt he had mastered the movement and guidance of the little boat, he went back and got Nansella, and they both made a trip to the far end of the lake, where they had put their little patch of sand and a few plants with their seeds. Realizing that they now needed to make a dock there with a place to tie the little boat up so it would not drift away, they paddled back to their home area, and nudged the skiff partly up into the sandy area to keep it there.
The next morning Nansella was browsing through their relationship photo diary. "Look at these pictures, Geodon" she invited. "Isn't this our little cave home here, and somebody is making cabinets like the one we bought in town for your house." Geodon took the time to go look to see what she was chattering about. He looked at the pictures, and said, that the guy looked a lot like himself, wondering who the person was. And how he got up here and why was he there in their little vacation home without their permission. "That is you" declared nansella, pointing out the motions and many characteristics unique to Geodon. "Then why don't I remember doing that" he asked. "And why did I have to pay a lot of money for a cabinet for my house, when I was making them myself?" By then she had looked further back in their album, to where it showed both of them building cabinets in what looked like Geodon's vacant room, only when the photos were taken, it was a cluttered work room. Deciding this all was not making any sense, they dropped the subject and set out with another couple of buckets half full of sand from their planted area, and carried them down to the end of the tunnel, planting them beside the little patch they already had started.
The next trip to the end of the lava tube, they also carried a tie-down for their little boat, and two buckets of fractured lava from the cave borings, which they dumped into the shallow area of the lake next to where they were to moor their boat, to make a place on which to disembark from the boat onto dry land.
Geodon was looking thoughtfully at the little heap of shards brought from the cave boring. "I wonder what would happen if we set the solar concentrators to repeatedly shock a pile of such raw lava shards, would it create something like sand, so that we would not have to haul so much of it up here each trip." Nansella looked at the pile of shards, and said that there would not be so much of a thermal difference across the small pieces as compared to the thermal mass of the face of a lave fold; but it seemed an easy experiment to try and see what happens. They headed back down the lava tube, eager to try bringing a sample bucket of shards over in their little boat.
They scooped up a bucket full of lava shards, and both climbed into the little skiff; Geodon rowed them down to the far end of the lake, where he jumped out and tied the boat to their little landing area, then climbed back in and dumped the bucket full of shards to expand the dock area a little bit. Then they both got out and looked around the area a little bit, before heading back in the skiff.
Geodon put in a request to do repeated half-second-long thermal solar blasts at a patch of cave boring shards off to the side, and set up a protective barrier to prevent wandering into that zone while the experiment was going on. Nansella pointed out that they had only one more meal left in the picnic basket, so they moved the protective barrier to also block access to the third cave's entrance, and then they headed back to the pylon transportation system for the long trip home.