Zarathustra's day had run about twenty-two and a half hours Earth-basic time and, as was customary on colonized planets, had been cut into an arbitrary standard twenty hours.  Here on the other hand noon-to-noon ran about twenty-eight Earth basic hours.  Some attempt had been made to modify one of the clocks from the ship, but there had been more demanding tasks.  Now clocks and natural time were totally out of gear, though a record was being kept of the number of days elapsed.

Was it a matter of mere convenience that people were suddenly thinking in terms of daylight and dark, or the first sign of reversion to actual primitivism?  Jerode pondered the question as he looked out over their ramshackle little town from the crude verandah of the headquarters office.  Most people were coming for evening chow, walking slowly and wearily back from their work, although Fritch's team was still busy patching the roof of the single men's house the other side of the valley.  The thud of hammers and an occasional shouted order reached his ears.

He had already had his meal, wanting a little time to think before the steering committee assembled at dusk.  It had consisted as usual of a damp mealy cake from a diet-synthesizer wrapped in two crisp leaflike growths from the salad-tree and a chunk of preserved alifruit about the size of his thumb.  So far only the salad-free and three other much less palatable native plants had been found both safe and nutritious.  Most of the vegetation contained an allergen which had given him a bad time at the end of last summer until he discovered he had supplies of a suitable drug with which to treat it.  Like everybody else, when leaving Zarathustra he had simply grabbed what he could lay hands on, and wasn't sure what he'd actually brought.

That, though, was going to have to change.  As a matter of urgency they would be compelled to tinker with one of the synthesizers so that it would secrete an antidote to the allergen.  Dredged routinely on food, perhaps along with sea-salt, it would enable them to choose from a range of nearly thirty vegetables.

And the trace-element hoppers on the synthesizers were almost empty - during the worst part of the winter they had had to subsist on nothing but synthesizer-cake - so another immediate job would be to set up extra salt-pans, fractionate the precipitate into appropriate sub-mixtures, top the hoppers up...

Jerode passed a tired hand over his face.  There was no end to the list of essential tasks.

There was a steady stream away from the kitchens as well as toward them, which seemed odd; he saw people coming out directly they had entered.  Then he realized they were taking their food to the riverbank, to sit there and eat in the last of the sunlight with their long shadows for company.  Well, at least the evening sun wouldn't cause much burning.  And you couldn't blame them.  The equable, man-controlled climate of Zarathrustra had delivered warm summer evenings to order, and after the dragging-long winter to be under a roof seemed like a waste.

That river was a blessing, Jerode thought.  It wasn't very wide except at the mouth, and it was shallow enough for wading even now, when the snows must be melting around its source on the plateau inland.  Of course, it had divided the settlement during the worst nights of winter, but they had just managed to rig a ropewalk across it before the fiercest gales, and that had been strong enough to hold out.  Siting the town on both banks, though, had been a calculated risk.  They didn't want to drag timber too far, and there were two stands of trees they were drawing on, one either side of the valley.