Townsend

2029 October 21
Test Year 3, Day 14
Tau, MIT

It had taken Townsend and the reactor techs two hundred days of careful scanning and much delicate probing with long grabby tools through the water of the reactor pool to dislodge and pull up the control rods in the appropriate sequence and construction of a radiation-hardened robot to fix up the internal connections. By then, the first set of crops from the newly replanted fields was in and the civilians were no longer at the mercy of the militia’s hunting parties.

But the War had caused permanent changes in Techer culture. Marriner and Townsend could see them before and as they happened. The cadets, the militia, and the oligarchs themselves had fought for their own survival, the survival of the civilian population, the abstract ideal of passing the Test, and even the lives of the Failures. So they partially wanted a return to the way MIT had operated before the coup, but they also were driven by the need to pass, now that they had sacrificed so much for it. That could be good or bad. Certainly the oligarchs carried more guilt than the militia.

The remnants of the Failures were demoralized and beaten. Very few even had any desire for vengeance. Most saw the evil they had done in the name of a holy cause, and repented. Several were on suicide watch. When it came time for their parole, they’d need to be watched for their own protection as much as any danger to others. Right now, the civilian population was in shock and merely glad to be alive. They were tied much more closely to campus and Tau now than most realized, even those that could not bear the dorms anymore. The memories would be slow to fade, and paroled Failures would be at hazard then.

More obvious immediately were the changes in where people lived. Several hundred people moved to the White Towers permanently, more moved to dispersed settlements across southern Massachusetts. And when the Eagle had left for California again, two more ships, carrying ninety immigrants, had accompanied it. The population of campus was now only forty-nine hundred, including the chain gang. Townsend had stayed behind when the flotilla left again. He saw that with only two oligarchs left, and a severe shortage of medics, he was needed here.

Now there was a slowly spreading general sense of long-term progress. When there is peace, there is commerce and deliberate building and quiet art. In a conversation with Will over how to teach the children – Amy and a few others at Caltech were reaching the age of where they could be taught full time – Townsend explained that he also saw that there were no pediatricians and very few educational specialists who still lived in the trained of MIT. Those were his other official reasons for staying. Privately, there was another reason.