Three years had passed. Despite the difficulties, they had established their crops, found acceptable native food, and gone from primative shelters to a village of homes adapted to the decidedly alien climate.

The two astronomers in the group, despite the complete lack of telescopes or other 'civilized instruments' had determined several key factors about their new world.

First, they didn't need instruments to see that they were orbiting a gas giant. It sat in the same place in the sky, day or night. That meant that the planet's rotation was lock-stepped with its orbit around the gas giant. The orbital period was just a little longer than a Standard Day. It was rather novel to see the gas giant sit in one spot and go through its phases from full, to new, and back to full, all in one day.

What they had determined with the crude instruments they made, was that both the gas giant, and the planet's orbit around it, were inclined at 45 degrees from the the plane of the ecliptic. This had the effect of making the planet's tropic circles and arctic circles one and the same.

The location of their village was so close to the Southern Arc/Trop that it couldn't have been coincidence.

That made for cold Winters and hot Summers. Most Inhabited planets had a temperate zone between the tropics and arctics. This world's temperate zone was between the Northern and Southern Arc/Trops.

The nicest climate on this planet should be at the equator. (Though no one had actually travelled there yet to verify that.)

They had also determined that the gas giant was, as close as they could measure with their 'bones and stones' equipment, one Jupiter in size. Their world orbited it XXXXXXXXXXX away from its center. (They had explained to everyone else that, as the first gas giant explored by man, Jupiter had become the standard that other gas giants were compared to.)

The 45 degree inclination from the ecliptic of their new world's orbit was fortuitous in reducing the number of total solar eclipses. The gas giant was big enough and close enough to block the sun for hours, but that only happened for a few days around the Spring and Fall equinoxes.

Because the same side of their world always faced the gas giant, there were no tides in the normal sense. Occasionaly a steady onshore wind would raise the surf level and cause the freshwater creek to rise or even become brackish, but these only lasted as long as the wind.

The climate brought special challenges to their home designs. The group had decided early on to do everything as energy-efficient as possible since there was no easy energy source to plug into. They would have to cut wood or gather other fuels for heat, and that would take time and impact their environment.

After spending the first year in earth-bermed huts (essentially man-made caves), they had decided that they needed to allow every bit of seabreeze to flow through their homes for the warm half of the year, while sealing the homes from any drafts in the cooler half of the year.

They had settled on homes that more resembled earth mounds with air scoops than conventional houses on the outside. On the inside, they were comfortable homes without windows. They even had running water and skylights.

The skylights had been made possible through a serendipitous discovery. Early on, a plastic substance had been found in the ashes of a fireplace. The woman cleaning it out had recognized the significance immediately, and and three chemists had worked for days trying to determine how the plastic had been made.

They knew that the woman had burned web-covered Sasseich branches in the fireplace. But they quickly determined that the webs melted when heated, then burned with little or no residue. They had spent time exploring the contribution of the wood and wood ash before finally looking at the fireplace stones.

The stones were the most common ones in the area. They were nothing special, largely orange-red iron oxide. Essentially rusty rocks.

The 'rust' turned out to be the key. When a piece of the iron-oxide rock was dropped into the molten web material, it acted like a catalyst, separating the melted web into a clear liquid and a translucent solid. The solid could be further heated to it's own higher melting point and molded into practically any shape.

The plastic was hard like plexiglass, but was milky white in it's normal state. There had not been enough time yet to determine how long it lasted in the sun, but this sun was a little weak on the UV output anyway. To be on the safe side, no one was using it for load-bearing material, but everyone had skylights now.

The chemists had grand ideas for this plastic and had already found additives to make it somewhat flexible, and others to color it.

The clear liquid produced in the catalytic process burned as well as kerosene, without the smell. It was immediately put to use for cooking, lighting, and heating.

The creature responsible for the webs had turned out to be quite surprising to the biologists.

Caterpillar-like creatures made the webs, sometimes covering entire limbs of the Sasseich trees, in much the same way as tent caterpillars back on Earth.

They ate the leaves, then tented themselves in in preparation for metamorphosis.

Had they not carefully isolated several cocoons and watched the development process, they would have never have believed that a small mouselike rodent emerged.

The silkmouse, as it became known, was a true mammal, giving live birth and nursing their young, which resembled them not in the slightest. The grubs nursed for a couple of days before the mother placed them on the leaves of a Sasseich. Never any other leaves, only Sasseich. Grubs that the researchers placed on other leaves died before tenting and cocooning.

While the silkmice were true parasites, the Sasseich trees seemed to tolerate them well enough, as long as there were not too many grubs on one tree.

It became immediately apparent that it would be advantageous to cultivate Sasseich/silkmouse plantations.

Nathan walked between two rows of young Sasseich trees. They were not quite waist high. Nobody knew yet how long it took them to grow to size they could use for Web production.

Nathan was grubbing with his two best friends. Each walked an adjacent row and they talked while they worked.

"This is really stupid," Rolph said. "Why move them? The grubs are already on Sasseich trees. Why can't we leave them?" At 13, Rolph was the oldest of the group.

Like Nathan, Heinrich was 12, though a month younger than Nathan. "We've already talked about that. The grubs will slow the growth of the trees," he said.

"We don't know that," Rolph argued.

"If they have something eating their leaves when they're this young, then of course they will grow slower," Nathan said.

"You should know about growing slower Herr Acorn," Rolph teased.

Nathan had not grown a bit since his father had injected him with the virus just over three years before. He had finally gotten over his nausea and fever, and had actually been in excellent health, except for lack of growth and the tendency to tire easily from all but the mildest exertion.

As time had passed, he had discovered that his urine, sweat, and saliva were poisonous to plants and insects.

(When he had mentioned this to his father, he had told him that the toxin's molecular structure was compatible only with Nathan's genetic makeup. Essentially, Nathan was toxic to anything but himself.)

"Rolph, if you had that virus in you, you wouldn't grow either," Heinrich chided.

"At least my pee isn't poison," was all Rolph could think to say.

"Who cares?" Heinrich asked.

"I don't leave a trail of dead plants everywhere I go."

"You're just jealous that you can't mark your territory like I can," Nathan laughed.

Though he could laugh at it, it did bother Nathan to be walking poison.

His father had warned him in the strongest of terms to come straight home if he ever got the slightest cut or scrape, making sure he touched no one. All the children in the settlement were similarly warned not to engage in any rough physical activity with Nathan. Most simply avoided him altogether, except Rolph and Heinrich.

His father had explained how Nathan's treatment was supposed to have been followed by a second treatment to kill off the cancer-killing virus. Since everyone had been transported to this world naked as newborns, the follow-up treatment had been lost.

It had been months before he admitted to Nathan that he hadn't really expected him to survive without the follow up treatment. He had also told him it would be a decade or more before the infrastructure would exist to recreate the counter-virus.

Nathan had questioned the wisdom of trading one virus for another, but his father had assured him that, unlike the existing virus, his own immune system would eventually eliminate the new one.

Knowing he would be toxic till he was at least into his twenties was depressing. Besides the toxin, the active virus was present throughout his body. Nathan could literally kill with a kiss. That was a depressing thought, but Nathan was enough of an optimist not to give into that.

On the plus side, while Nathan had to do an extra share of work in the Sasseich groves, he was not allowed to work around food crops. That meant he was spared much of the dirtier, more arduous tasks like planting, hoeing, fertiling, harvesting, etc. Working with the Sasseich groves was mostly grubbing and pruning. There was fetilizing too, but he only had to spread it. He couldn't help prepare it since the same fertilizer was used on the trees as the food crops. By the time he worked with it, the manure was dry and nearly odorless.

Warm weather was a mixed blessing. It meant being able to go outside without being wrapped up like a silkmouse and trying to keep your back to the bitter cold wind and sleet (it rarely snowed here), but Summer also meant sweaty field work. Everyone knew the importance of pitching in, but that didn't stop the grumbling among adults or children.

Personally, Nathan preferred sweating in the grove over huddling in the cold. And anyway, by midday, there was always a nice seabreeze. Everyone had been grilled on the importance of drinking lots of water in the warm months. So far, they had only had one case of heat exhaustion.

Being naked helped in that regard. After having found out those first months how relaxed, comfortable, and natural it was living naked, the overwhelming majority of the group didn't bother with trying to wear anything during the warm months in the following years. That was good, since mouse silk was the only practical material for clothing that they had found so far, and nearly all they found now went into energy and plastic production. The groves wouldn't be ready for silk production for several years.

Having learned from experience that there was nothing inherently wrong with nudity, Nathan could no longer imagine wearing clothing all the time as he had for his first nine years. He now hoped that when the silk was more available, that people wouldn't waste it on silly things like summer clothing, or worse yet, bathing suits!

One of the universal ways of coping with the heat was to plunge in the surf periodically during the day. It was a normal part of all the work routines to take occasional 'water time'. They would go down to the water, dunk themselves fully, including the head, then walk back to resume their task. Children were required to go to the water in pairs so no one was alone in the surf.

There were no massive waves on this beach. Just wind-driven swells breaking in the rust-colored, shallow water.

The color of rust was nearly everywhere. One of the things Nathan enjoyed about working with the trees was their greeness. Of course, he wouldn't have minded if the grubs had been rust-colored. They were as green as the leaves they were on, and he really had to look close to find them.

The one thing that Nathan missed most from his past life was his eyeglasses. Of course, he was hardly unique there.

Those first few days they had found out that every man, woman, and child in the group were nearsighted. That couldn't have been coincidence. Nor could the fact that every adult in the group had worked in some scientific field, and had a genious-level I.Q.

Once they had determined all this, they realized that they had to be on one of the emporer's hairbrained experimental colony worlds. There had been rumors going around for years, along with some circumstantial evidence to support them, that the Emporer had planted a number of colonies of people with various hereditary diseases or defects to 'prove' his own theory of genetics. His theory was essentially that genetics don't count, but environment is all important. The results had been disastrous.

One of the physicists of the group had pointed out in those first days that if nearsightedness was the only common defect in this population, that they would get along well enough - especially once he set up an optics lab.

So far, they were still getting along without glasses. There had been a breakthrough recently with the silk plastic. A researcher had made the plastic transparent, which promised to sidestep the whole issue of making and grinding glass. There were hopes of eyeglasses for everyone by next spring.

Nathan and his friends had reached the seaward end of their rows. "Wasserzeit!" Nathan yelled, leading the way running to the rusty water.