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Stories from the Verse
In Verse Proportion
Chapter 131: Slade 209
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Brown 238
Joe and Zeke’s home was finished before the first snow. The Slades gave them the bed from their spare room and the couch from their living room, Slade joking that with it gone Shella couldn’t make him sleep on it. They ordered new furniture for both residences, but Slade warned that it would take a while, as everything had to be custom made, furniture for giants. This time he ordered a convertible sofa bed, which turned out to be a new invention for the university to patent. Shella also ordered more linens while they were at it, and helped Joe figure out what furnishings they would need for a functional kitchen and the rest of the house.
As the cold encroached, they ignited the furnaces for the heat, making sure there was sufficient liquid in the radiators. Slade realized that he had overlooked a couple inventions--he should have created storm windows for insulation, and while at it screens would have been a good idea as well. Well, that wasn’t something they would install during the winter, so he probably had most of a year by his reckoning before it would be warm enough to be replacing windows. Still, he would have to mention it to engineering.
That got him thinking. Ultimately it was the little things that made the difference between the industrial age and the modern world. They had no washing machines or dryers here, no dishwashers, no garbage disposals--well, Slade had never had a garbage disposal, but he had seen them and understood what they did. In this world he had not seen overhead doors, or overhead door openers; electric locks; revolving doors; elevators and escalators.
Of course, a lot of that required residential electricity, and that in large quantities. He knew how to create turbines, generators that used the motion of water or wind to create electricity, but did not suppose they had anything here on campus which could be used for that. He could of course build a system that used his combustion engines for that, but the required amount of fuel would be staggering.
Maybe Joe would have some ideas.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with twenty other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #456: Versers Prepare. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
