Missile Gap

She and Bob have been assigned a small prefabricated house (not much more than a shack, although it has electricity and running water) on the edge of town. He's been drafted into residential works, put to work erecting more buildings: and this is the nearest thing to a success they've had, because after a carefully-controlled protest his status has been corrected, from just another set of unskilled hands to trainee surveyor. A promotion of which he is terribly proud, evidently taking it as confirmation that they've made the right move by coming here.

Maddy, meanwhile, has a harder time finding work. The district hospital is fully staffed. They don't need her, won't need her until the next shipload of settlers arrive, unless she wants to pack up her bags and go tramping around isolated ranch settlements in the outback. In a year's time the governor has decreed they'll establish another town-scale settlement, inland near the mining encampments on the edge of the Hoover Desert. Then they'll need medics to staff the new hospital: but for now, she's a spare wheel. Because Maddy is a city girl by upbringing and disposition, and not inclined to take a job tramping around the outback if she can avoid it.

She spends the first week and then much of the second mooching around town, trying to find out what she can do. She's not the only young woman in this predicament. While there's officially no unemployment, and the colony's dirigiste administration finds plenty of hard work for idle hands, there's also a lack of openings for ambulance crew, or indeed much of anything else she can do. Career-wise it's like a trip into the 1950's. Young, female, and ambitious? Lots of occupations simply don't exist out here on the fringe, and many others are closed or inaccessible. Everywhere she looks she sees mothers shepherding implausibly large flocks of toddlers their guardians pinch-faced from worry and exhaustion. Bob wants kids, although Maddy's not ready for that yet. But the alternatives on offer are limited.

Eventually Maddy takes to going through the "help wanted" ads on the bulletin board outside city hall. Some of them are legit: and at least a few are downright peculiar. One catches her eye: field assistant wanted for biological research. I wonder? she thinks, and goes in search of a door to bang on.

When she finds the door — raw wood, just beginning to bleach in the strong colonial sunlight — and bangs on it, John Martin opens it and blinks quizzically into the light. "Hello?" he asks.

"You were advertising for a field assistant?" She stares at him. He's the entomologist, right? She remembers his hands on the telescope on the deck of the ship. The voyage itself is already taking on the false patina of romance in her memories, compared to the dusty present it has delivered her to.

"I was? Oh — yes, yes. Do come in." He backs into the house — another of these identikit shacks, colonial, family, for the use of — and offers her a seat in what used to be the living room. It's almost completely filled by a work table and a desk and a tall wooden chest of sample drawers. There's an odd, musty smell, like old cobwebs and leaky demijohns of formalin. John shuffles around his den, vaguely disordered by the unexpected shock of company. There's something touchingly cute about him, like the subjects of his studies, Maddy thinks. "Sorry about the mess, I don't get many visitors. So, um, do you have any relevant experience?"

She doesn't hesitate: "None whatsoever, but I'd like to learn." She leans forward. "I qualified as a paramedic before we left. At college I was studying biology, but I had to drop out midway through my second year: I was thinking about going to medical school later, but I guess that's not going to happen here. Anyway, the hospital here has no vacancies, so I need to find something else to do. What exactly does a field assistant get up to?"

"Get sore feet." He grins lopsidedly. "Did you do any lab time? Field work?" Maddy nods hesitantly so he drags her meager college experiences out of her before he continues. "I've got a whole continent to explore and only one set of hands: we're spread thin out here. Luckily NSF budgeted to hire me an assistant. The assistant's job is to be my Man Friday; to help me cart equipment about, take samples, help with basic lab work — very basic — and so on. Oh, and if they're interested in entomology, botany, or anything else remotely relevant that's a plus. There aren't many unemployed life sciences people around here, funnily enough: have you had any chemistry?"

"Some," Maddy says cautiously; "I'm no biochemist." She glances round the crowded office curiously. "What are you meant to be doing?"