Cindy Margrave hadn’t wanted to leave her sister to go home alone, but for reasons known only to the Department of Training, she’d been stuck with Constitution class right after supper. And given that Constitution class was mandatory for getting one’s high school diploma, and it was invariably taught by one of the senior pilots, there could be no question of skipping it, or even being tardy.
Captain Waite taught it a lot of the time, but this term Colonel Hearne had drawn that teaching responsibility. However, just because he wasn’t family didn’t mean he wouldn’t notice her absence. He’d shown the class more than once that age had by no means dulled his perceptions — or his response times. Cindy still remembered the time he’d caught Eli Mallory playing a game in class by hiding his phone behind his laptop.
As the most senior pilot-astronaut in Shepardsport — he was already a veteran astronaut who’d commanded important missions when Reginald Waite was still at Annapolis — he possessed an unofficial authority in the pilot community such that no one would try to gainsay him. Even Captain Waite deferred to him.
The room was about half full by the time Cindy arrived. She took a seat and pulled out her laptop to review her notes from last session. Behind her, Eli was trying to hit on one of the other girls in the class. From the sound of it, he wasn’t getting much traction.
Colonel Hearne arrived exactly at the top of the hour, as precise as a DJ signing on and beginning an air shift. The moment he walked through the door, the buzz of conversation ceased and everyone turned their attention to him.
“Good evening, everyone. Tonight we’re going to do things a little differently. Up until now, we’ve been discussing the Constitution article by article, section by section. However, it’s come to my attention that we can end up losing sight of the whole amidst the minutia. Not seeing the forest for the trees, as the old saying goes.”
Cindy could feel the unease like a palpable thing around her. Why would he suddenly decide to depart from the normal course progression? Although Constitution class didn’t have a mandatory course structure like certain critical safety courses — she remembered when Uncle Carl had to re-up his oxygen delivery certification for EVA, and it had a syllabus that was mandated by the Federal government — the teacher still needed to cover the necessary material to ensure everyone could pass the test, and that was mandated, albeit by the state of Texas, since for legal purposes all off-Earth US facilities were treated as if they were a part of Johnson Space Center in Houston.
But there was no time to wonder, because Colonel Hearne was already cuing up a video on the big monitor at the front of the classroom. It looked like a lot of news footage — Cindy had already seen some of it just walking past the newsroom during her work shift this morning, especially the one of the people swarming a semi and literally tearing the trailer apart to get the pallets of food within, climbing over each other to grab a package of crackers. But there were also a lot of clips of people waiting calmly in lines that stretched as far as the eye could see, or helping one another rebuild a structure damaged in a storm. Most were non-descript enough settings that it was impossible to tell where or when they were happening in the absence of well-known landmarks, although she did see kanji and kata on some signs that placed one clip in Japan, and the Hangul on another sign placed that clip in Korea.
And then it was over, and Colonel Hearne was looking directly at them. “It’s said that people show their true faces when they’re under pressure. You’ve just seen how different cultures react to severe stress, what is often termed a breaking strain. Today we are going to talk about why this is, and how it relates to why the system of government set out in the US Constitution has worked so well for the American people, but does not necessarily transfer to other countries.”
“First, I want to introduce you to the concept of social trust.”
Where is he going with this one? Cindy was listening so closely that she no longer had any time to worry about her sister, or her sister’s friend down on Earth who hadn’t re-established connection after the Outage had been resolved.