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hammers and an occasional shouted order reached his ears.
    He had already had his meal, wanting a little time to think before the steering committee assembled at dusk. It had consisted as usual of a damp mealy cake from a diet-synthesizer wrapped in two crisp leaflike growths from the salad-tree and a chunk of preserved allfruit about the size of his thumb. So far only the salad-tree and three other much less palatable native plants had been found both safe and nutritious. Most of the vegetation contained an allergen which had given him a bad time at the end of last summer until he discovered he had supplies of a suitable drug with which to treat itlike everybody else, when leaving Zarathustra he had simply grabbed what he could lay hands on, and wasn’t sure what he’d actually brought.
    That, though, was going to have to change. As a matter of urgency they would be compelled to tinker with que of the synthesizers so that it would secrete an antidote to the allergen. Dredged routinely on food, perhaps along with sea-salt, it would enable them to choose from a range of nearly thirty vegetables.
    And the traceelement hoppers on the synthesizers were almost empty—during the worst part of the winter they had had to subsist on nothing but synthesizer-cake—so another immediate job would be to set up extra salt-pans, fractionate the precipitate into appropriate submixtures, top the hoppers up…
    Jerode passed a tired hand over his face. There was no end to the list of essential tasks.
    There was a steady stream away from the kitchens as Well as toward them, which seemed odd; he saw people coining out directly they had entered. Then he realized they were taking their food to the riverbank, to sit there and eat in the last of the sunlight with their long shadows for company. Well, at least the evening sun wouldn’t cause much burning. And you couldn’t blame them. The equable, man-controlled climate of Zarathrustra had delivered warm summer evenings to order, and after the dragguig-long winter to be under a roof seemed like a waste.
    That river was a blessing, Jerode thought. It wasn’t very wide except at the mouth, and it was shallow enough for wading even now, when the snows must be melting around its source on the plateau inland. Of course, it had divided the settlement during the worst nights of winter, but they had just managed to rig a ropewalk across it before the fiercest gales, and that had been strong enough to hold out. Siting the town on both banks, though, had been a calculated risk. They didn’t want to drag timber too far, and there were two stands of trees they were drawing on, one either side of the valley.
    Most importantly of all, they had never lacked drinkable fresh water, even if they had sometimes had to bring it indoors as blocks of ice. Though it might be politic, once enough salt-pans had been set up, to use distilled water for drinking, reserve river-water only for bathing in…
    Yes, considering the circumstances of its foundation, this was quite a flourishing little town. Town? Well, it wasn’t such a grandiose word as “city,” at least. But for a mere fifteen buildings it was still a pious hope. At first they had slept in the ship, but the cramped quarters were inducing fearful tension among the refugees. He himself had insisted that an early start be made on housing. So they had found dense clay along the river, spread it to make floors, and set up long one-story buildings, using split-log planks on a frame of natural tree-posts, and Lex, who was clever at such things, had helped him doctor a diet-synthesizer to secrete a tough organic glue which had endured—most of it—through the winter. A barracks for single men, another for single women, five others divided crudely into screened-off cubicles for couples who had either been together when the evacuation started or linked up aboard ship for mutual comfort.
    There had been problems when new attachments formed during the winter, of