Forty Thousand in Gehenna by C. J. Cherryh

getting all the personnel into solid housing by tomorrow, even if we have to take crowded conditions. So we’ll be dry if it rains. And we’re putting a good graded road through the azi camp, to help them under the same conditions. We’re clearing and plowing tomorrow; looking at maybe getting the sets in the ground for the garden in three more days; maybe getting general plumbing out to the azi camp.”
    “That’s fine,” Conn said. “That’s way ahead of schedule.”
    “Subject to weather.”
    “Any—”
    “Hey!” someone exclaimed suddenly, down the table, and swore: people came off the benches at that end of the table. There was laughter and a man dived under the table and came up with a meter long green lizard. Conn stared at it in a daze, the struggling reptile, the grinning staffer and the rest of them—Gutierrez, of the bio section.
    “Is that,” Conn asked, “a resident?”
    “This, sir—this is an ariel. They’re quick: probably got past the door while we were coming into the hut.” He set it down a moment on the vacated section of the long table, and it rested there immobile, green and delicate, neck frills spread like feathers.
    “I think it better find its own supper,” Beaumont said. “Take it out, will you?”
    Gutierrez picked it up again. Someone held the door for him. He walked to it and, bending, gave it a gentle toss into the darkness outside.
    “Been back a dozen times,” Bilas said. Conn felt his nerves frayed at the thought of such persistence.
    Gutierrez took his seat again, and so did the others.
    “Any of the big ones?” Conn asked.
    “Just ariels,” Gutierrez said. “They get into the huts and tents and we just put them out. No one’s been hurt, us or them.”
    “We just live with them,” Conn said. “We knew that, didn’t we?” He felt shaky, and sat down again. “There are some things to do. Administrative things. I’d really like to get most of the programs launched in our tenure. The ships—leave in a few hours. And we don’t see them again until three years from now. Until they arrive with the technicians and the setup for the birthlabs, at which point this world really begins to grow. Everything we do really has to be toward that setup. The labs, when they arrive, will be turning out a thousand newborns every nine months; and in the meanwhile we’ll have young ones born here, with all of that to take care of. We’ve got azi who don’t know anything about bringing up children, which is something Education’s got to see to. We’ve got mapping to do, to lay out the pattern of development down to the last meter. We’ve got to locate all the hazards, because we can’t have kids running around falling into them. Three years isn’t such a long time for that. And long before then, we’re going to have births. You’ve all thought of that, I’m sure.” Nervous laughter from the assembly. “I think it’s going to go well. We’ve got everything in our favor. Seven thousand years in three days. We’ll come up another few millennia while we’re waiting, and take another big step again when the ships get those labs to us. And this place has to be safe by then. That’s all I’ve got to say.”
    A glass lifted: Ilya Burdette, down the table. “For the colonel!” All the glasses went up, and everyone echoed it. “For the captain!” someone else yelled; and they drank to Beaumont. It was a good feeling in the place. Noisy.
    “What about beer?” someone yelled from the second table. “How many days before beer?”
    Tired faces broke into grins. “Ag has a plan,” a civ yelled back. “You get us fields, you get your beer.”
    “To beer!” someone shouted, and everyone shouted, and Conn laughed along with the rest.
    “Civilization,” someone else yelled, and they drank down the drinks they did have, and the sweat and the exhaustion and the long hours seemed not to matter to them.
iii
    Venture log
    “Departure effected, 1213 hours 17 minutes