Month: July 2020

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Narrative

A New Lead

It was really too early to turn in for the night when Lou Corlin got back to the residential module. So he sat down in the lounge and got out his laptop. Some people might’ve played games or got on social media, but he decided to take a look at some of the upcoming materials for his current class. Study ahead a little and he wouldn’t be left scrambling if things got busy elsewhere.

And they could, especially at the radio station. DJ’s might not get as much extra work as the news team, but it wouldn’t be inconceivable for Autumn to pull them into the newsroom if something really major happened.

Lou had just opened his coursework when his phone chimed incoming text. He halfway expected it to be Autumn, or maybe someone else from the station. Instead, he saw the name “Hargreaves” and immediately thought it was Cather — until he looked closer and realized it was Toni.

What was she doing texting him directly? So far, she’d let her husband pass the word back and forth.

Unless he was busy with the situation over in Grissom City. He was the deputy chief of Safety and Security over there, focusing on the health and life safety side of things, while his boss dealt with the policing side of things.

In any case, Toni was asking him Can you talk? Realtime?

Sure. Go ahead and call.

Moments later the phone rang. He tapped accept and put his ear bug in. “Hello.”

“Lou, I just got an idea. If we can’t figure out any other way to find out where Brenda’s friend is, contact Medstaff. If you can convince them her home isn’t a safe place to be, they have some options that wouldn’t be open otherwise. And your Medlab’s still small enough that they can be a lot less formal about stuff–“

“But Dr. Thuc’s Vietnamese-American. I know she’s Catholic, but their culture’s still steeped in that whole Confucian tradition of filial piety.”

“And she’s a doctor, and therefore a mandatory reporter. When Cather was an EMT and a paramedic, he was always a mandatory reporter, so I know some stuff about that. In fact, everyone in Medlab who deals with patients should be a mandatory reporter, so you could talk with someone else.”

“That’s good to know. But before I get the big guns involved, I think I’d better touch base with Brenda, make sure she hasn’t heard anything new in the meantime. I’d hate to cause a huge ruckuss and it turns out she’s safe at a friend’s place, but Brenda just didn’t think to pass the word to me.”

“Good point. Keep me posted.”

“Will do.”

A quick exchange of parting pleasantries, and they ended the conversation. Lou looked at his phone’s clock display. Should he text Brenda now, or wait until tomorrow?

SMS was asynchronous, and if she had her phone set on Do Not Disturb for the night, it shouldn’t even chime. So he could go ahead and send the text, and she could deal with it whenever. If things had reached the point of being an emergency, Brenda would’ve contacted him already.

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Narrative

An Unexpected Summons

Autumn Belfontaine had planned to head back to her apartment and turn in for the night when she got finished with her shift at the Testing Center. It had been an easy night, not surprising when one considered they were at the beginning of the current training cycle. Within a couple of weeks that would change, but this evening she’d been able to catch up on a lot of other responsibilities, including a refresher course she was taking on broadcast practices and procedures.

So she was more than a little surprised when her phone chimed incoming text and she found a message from Stephanie Roderick down in IT. We’ve got a problem. I think we should meet in the newsroom.

Unease tingled in Autumn’s nervous system. Why not down in IT? They had a perfectly adequate meeting room, and it was normal for a department head to host the meeting in her own area.

But now was not the time to ask questions. Those could wait until they were face to face. OK. Right now I’m still working at the Testing Center. My relief should be here in five minutes.

Good. We’ll meet you there.

Autumn considered that information — “we,” not “I,” which suggested this problem involved other people. Someone else in IT? Someone in another department? Was that why Steffi wanted the meeting held in the newsroom — because the radio station was neutral territory?

All of it would be answered in due time. Right now she needed to get things wound up so she could leave as soon as her relief showed up — and hope he wasn’t late.

Although lunar culture ran on the military attitude that early was on time, on time was late, and late was unacceptable, it didn’t always work like it was supposed to. People got held over in one obligation when they had another responsibility immediately afterward, creating a domino effect. Usually they’d text to allow the other person to make alternative arrangements, but there were times even that was impossible.

The clock was counting down the seconds when Ted burst in, looking harried for all he was trying to present a professional appearance. “Chem lab had a spill, and I had to stay over to clean up. I tried to get here as fast as I could, but it just took too long.”

Autumn recalled that he had managed to draw an unusually late chemistry class, which had created awkwardness before. She was going to have to talk to Deena and see if they could get him shifted to a different shift — and herself shifted to a different work responsibility, one that gave her greater flexibility when things like this came up.

Right now she needed to hand off the Testing Center, not that she even had anyone taking practice tests, let alone actual exams. But the formalities had to be completed before she headed off to the station to meet with Steffi and whoever else was involved in this problem.

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Narrative

Some Awkward Questions

Steffi Roderick was just getting ready for bed when she heard her phone’s incoming text chime. Curious, she picked it up and was surprised to see a note from Toni Hargreaves: Cather’s got a computer problem. Are you where you can talk?

What’s wrong?

One of his clone-brothers is worried about the safety of a young woman dirtside who was sent back home from college. Apparently she had some kind of breach with her parents and they weren’t on speaking terms, and he has reason to worry that home is not a good place for her to go right now.

Steffi was unsurprised that Toni would be willing to help someone in that kind of situation. She had some painful history, which had been exacerbated by the destruction of her home town when the Chinese government completely botched the deorbit of the Flying Junkyard.

What kind of help are you looking for?

He’s trying to locate her, find out whether she is actually at her folks’ place or she’s found some other place to stay. If her parents are as controlling as they sound like, it may not be safe for any of us up here to try to communicate with her. But he can’t get metadata from her phone without a warrant.

Steffi considered the problem. So you want some suggestions on what other ways we could determine whether she’s in a safe place, or if she’s stuck in a seriously dysfunctional family?

Especially ones that don’t require jumping through legal hoops. If she were from the LA Basin, Cather and I know a bunch of people who don’t have awkward ties and could contact her to make sure she’s OK. But she’s in the Houston area. I know you were at Johnson for several years before they sent you up here, so I was hoping you’d still be in contact with some of your old friends and neighbors dirtside.

Steffi hated to disappoint her old friend from her JPL days, but it had been over a decade since the Angry Astronaut Affair. As busy as she was with family and the IT department, there hadn’t been a lot of time to maintain friendships with people she’d never see again. The occasional note when someone hit a major life milestone, e-cards at various holidays, but that was about it.

It’s been a long time, so I don’t want to promise anything, but I’ll see what I can manage.

Just as she was winding up the conversation, the door opened. She looked up just as Reggie walked in, looking unutterably weary.

“What’s wrong, sweetheart?”

Reggie retrieved a slingback chair and sank into it, looking completely unmilitary. “They’re trying to keep it quiet, so don’t go spreading the news around, but Dr. Thuc just reported to me that they’ve got someone ill over at Schirrasburg. Right now there’s still a possibility that it’s just an ordinary bug, maybe a cold or a norovirus, but they’re concerned enough they’ve completely shut down their spaceport and quarantined the entire settlement. No one goes in or out until they’re sure they’re in the clear.”

A cold lump of dread formed in Steffi’s stomach. If the diablovirus had gotten up here to the Moon, it would’ve had to have passed through Luna Station. Which meant that everyone’s pilots would be exposed.

And trying to keep it quiet was like shutting the barn door after the horse was down the road, and the cattle and the pigs running after him. She knew several people here in Shepardsport who had family in Schirrasburg, who’d be in regular communication with them.

Maybe it was time to have a talk with Autumn Belfontaine, try to decide whether they should go ahead and break the news, or run some “don’t repeat gossip” PSA’s first.

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Narrative

Widening the Net

Cather Hargreaves sat hunched over his computer, typing in yet another request. Right now he wished he could have Toni helping him, but he was working in databases of sensitive information, and privacy regulations made it impossible for him to bring Toni in unless she were actually assigned to deal with a technical problem in access to it.

Even searching them without a work-related reason could be risky, since it could be construed as a breach of privacy. But he was fairly confident that, given the situation, he could justify it in the interest of this young woman’s safety. Already he’d heard some unsettling stories of the unintended consequences of sending everyone home when not all homes were safe havens. Of course he was working on third-hand information — he hadn’t actually talked to Brenda about her friend — but he had no reason to believe that Lou would deliberately exaggerate the risk level of this young woman’s situation in hope of motivating him.

Unlike some people I’ve known, who’d ratchet up the emotional content of their request because they thought it would get me to treat their lack of forethought as my emergency.

So far, he’d largely drawn blanks. He’d verified the locale in which this young woman’s phone was registered, but could not get into the databases that would give location metadata for calls and texts. Apparently that required a warrant issued by a judge, unless one could make the case that the person was in such immediate danger of life and limb that there was no time to go through the normal procedures.

Which I don’t know. Brenda’s afraid she could be in an emotional pressure-cooker that could drive her to self-harm, but we have no actual proof. Until I can get actual location metadata for where her phone is now, the only thing we have to go on is her parents’ past history of ordering her to dump a friend solely on the basis of that friend’s father being a clone, and one admittedly panicky e-mail. For all we know, she may have been able to arrange a safe place to stay, but that situation is not conducive to her being able to casually text or e-mail friends to reassure them of her safety.

Back in his San Bernadino days, he knew a couple of judges who’d tend to be sympathetic to intervention in family-law cases like this. But up here on the Moon, everyone was carefully screened, so you just didn’t have the sort of dysfunctional families that produced the cases that made you cringe just to think about them. So while there were a couple of judges, since human beings being human, they did from time to time need recourse to a court of law, neither of them were apt to see the facts Cather could produce as evidence this young woman could be in danger under her own parents’ roof. If anything, they’d probably see her as the problem, and make remarks about adolescent angst.

And I was really hoping to give Lou something solid, at least enough to tell him whether Brenda should go ahead and e-mail her friend, see if she needed some bucking up, or if any contact would merit extreme caution, perhaps even the mediation of someone who had no obvious connections with any clones.

It would’ve been so much easier if the young woman in question had been from somewhere in Southern California. He still had enough connections in the EMS community down there that he could’ve put out some discreet feelers, at least find out whether she was with her parents or elsewhere.

Instead, he was left trying to figure out what his next step would be. And while Toni was a world-class hacker, she was supposed to be a white-hat hacker — and right now he simply didn’t have enough solid information to put her on the case.

On the other hand, she could give her some pointers. He’d have to ask her tonight, see if there were any angles he’d overlooked.

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Narrative

A Risky Venture

At this hour, the offices of Shepardsport Pirate Radio were quiet, and that was exactly the way Spruance Del Curtin liked it. He could have his pick of computers to use, and no one would ask him any awkward questions. Even if Spencer Dawes were to come out of the DJ booth for one or another reason, he was a clone of Alan Shepard’s Lunar Module Pilot, so lineage obligation would keep him from making an aggravation of himself.

Sprue briefly glanced at the receptionist’s desk, but decided against using it. If he did raise any red flags, it could rebound on Cindy Margrave, and she was family. Only she and the afternoon receptionist used that computer, so they would be far more likely to get called in for questioning, if not a disciplinary hearing.

He briefly glanced at the offices of the program director and sales director, but decided against using either of their computers. Although both of them did have assistants, neither of those assistants regularly did work on the computer.

On the other hand, the newsroom had several computers that were used by pretty much everyone on the news team. Heck, some of the DJ’s used those computers, especially if they were looking for filler between sets, or before a group of ads. So many people used those computers that no one would ever be able to trace a particular search to any given individual.

Sprue started to turn on the newsroom lights, then decided it was too likely to attract attention to himself. All he’d need would be Ken Redmond coming down here to check on something and wondering why lights were on in the newsroom. There was enough light from the hallway that he could find his way through, and computer screens were backlit.

According to NASA Data At Rest rules, all computers were supposed to wake to lock screens that required passwords to pass. In theory, each person who used a computer like these was supposed to have a separate password, so that all use could be tracked. Given how many people used them, Autumn had her own password, but all the reporters shared a single password — which was helpfully written on a sticky note adhered to the frame of the monitor.

Not that it wasn’t difficult to remember — the initials of Big Al’s famous first words on the lunar surface and the date. Sprue grinned as he typed it in, imagining what his ur-brother would think to know.

From there, it was just a matter of doing the necessary searches. He’d intended to just use the browser and do a search: Google, Yandex, maybe the Japanese or Israeli sites, although he didn’t know all that much Japanese or Hebrew. But as he looked for the browser icon, he realized one of the advantages of using a newsroom computer: he had access to all the news services, including NASA’s internal ones. From there, it was just a matter of getting on the appropriate one and seeing what he could find out about the situation at Schirrasburg.

He’d expected to find news on some kind of accident, maybe in a lab, or someone doing an EVA. Even after all these years, Schirrasburg was still very much a scientific research station, more like one of the Antarctic bases than Grissom City or Coopersville. Sprue had heard Drew Reinholt tell plenty of tales of his time there, right after he’d been exiled to the Moon for his role in the Angry Astronaut Affair.

Instead, Sprue found a report marked as being for medical personnel only, but for immediate dissemination to all medical facilities off Earth. When he tried to open it, a security notice came up requesting authentication, and warning that all attempts would be logged.

Maybe he’d better not try to guess what passwords Dr. Thuc used, especially since it would be unlikely in the extreme that she would use this computer when she had plenty in Medlab. Especially if it dealt with sensitive patient data, NASA would take any data breaches, successful or attempted, very seriously.

Would there be any way he could get into Medlab and take a whack at one of the computers up there? Sprue tried to think of anyone who worked in Medlab, even as support staff, that he might have enough of a connection to that he could convince them to take a peek.

Even if he couldn’t see the actual document, its very existence was significant. Something had happened over there at Schirrasburg, something significant enough that NASA would be alarmed enough to want their medical personnel everywhere to know about it.

No wonder Dr. Doorne was so upset. Even if Tanner was safe at the moment, that place was small enough that he might well have had some connection with whoever was affected.

And if it was the diablovirus, it meant that the diablovirus was now on the Moon — which raised the question of the mechanism of transmission.

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Narrative

An Unexpected Response

After dropping off the computer for Jack to look over, Lou Corlin had figured he’d heard the last of it. After all, it was Autumn’s computer, not his, so if there were any issues that required user input, Jack would call her, not him.

So he’d figured he could shoot a quick message off to Toni Hargreaves, then get to work on his actual job down here. He certainly had plenty of stuff here to keep him busy.

When his phone chimed incoming text, he was a little surprised to hear back from Toni so quickly. He’d expected it to take her a while to do some research.

But when he pulled out his phone, he was surprised to see a message from her husband instead. We need to talk.

An oddly curt message from family. Lou recalled that Cather Hargreaves was Grissom City’s deputy chief of security. No, it wouldn’t be wise to blow him off. Even pleading work hours would be risky. What do you want to know?

I think it’s time for some analog telecom.

In other words, a phone call. No, there was no use pointing out that any modern phone was a handheld computer with a broadband modem and a VoIP app, which meant voice calling was still digital. That would just get him told off for being pedantic, or cheeky.

OK, do you want to call me, or for me to call you?

Moments after Lou sent that text, the phone rang right in his hand. He tapped the Accept button and stuck the phone to his ear. “Hello?”

“Hello, Lou. I’m concerned about the text you sent Toni earlier today. Is this just a hypothetical question for a research project, or are you looking into things that could get people into a lot of trouble?”

No, Cather did not sound pleased. Maybe it was just as well they were on opposite sides of the Moon right now.

Lou recalled that Toni Hargreaves had been in some trouble back in the early years of this century, something about an experimental spacecraft Chaffee Associates had designed for McHenery Aerospace. Whatever it had been, it had been put under wraps at the highest levels, with a strong suggestion that if it didn’t remain secret, the Federal government could make life very unpleasant for certain people. And that some kind of slip had resulted in the Hargreaves family suddenly being transferred up here to the Moon a few years before the Expulsions.

Maybe he better just go ahead and come clean. “Actually, I was trying to find a way to avoid a whole bunch of trouble. You know Brenda Redmond, don’t you?”

“At least by name. She’s married to one of our pilots, a Shep if I remember correctly.”

“Yeah, Drew Reinholt. Anyway, an old friend of Brenda’s from high school contacted her a while back. Apparently there were some serious issues between this young woman and her parents, and she was very upset at being compelled to move out of her college dorm room and back home. Since then, Brenda hasn’t heard anything further, so she’s getting worried that things could be getting desperate for her friend. But at the same time, she’s worried that trying to contact this friend could make things even worse.”

Cather was silent for a moment that seemed to stretch into eternity. “That is a nasty little Schroedinger’s box she’s handed you. Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.”

At least he didn’t sound angry now. Nothing to do but ask the question and hope it wouldn’t make things worse.

“So what can we do about it? If we could be sure that either she found a friend to stay with, or that she has some form of communication that her parents aren’t monitoring, I’d tell Brenda to go ahead and try to reconnect with her, buck her up if she needs it. But if she’s being spied on by parents who have an animus against clones, getting a message from Brenda might just make her situation even worse.”

“Let me see what I can find out. I do have some resources, although as chaotic as things are down there, I can’t make any promises. In the meantime, I need you to keep your nose clean and try not to ask any awkward questions. Understood?”

Lou promised that he would stay out of the matter. He did get the go-ahead to reassure Brenda that someone was working on the problem, so that she could stop worrying. Otherwise, there was nothing to do but wait.

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Narrative

New Alarms

Spruance Del Curtin didn’t like getting caught by surprise. And he certainly didn’t expect to get caught by surprise by his boss.

On reflection, he knew he’d made a mistake when he’d assumed that Dr. Doorne was talking with someone else in the Astronomy department, but the other person just wasn’t speaking loudly enough for him to hear. So he’d assumed that, as long as he could hear her talking, he didn’t have to worry about her popping in on him.

And then she came walking in, still talking on the phone. And no, things did not sound good.

Sprue realized he was looking up from his computer and very deliberately returned his gaze to the monitor. One of the the most important bits of lunar courtesy was maintaining the pretense that one was not hearing conversations that one was not a part of. Even if he could hear, even if he was listening, he mustn’t be obvious about it. And he was not to acknowledge what he’d heard in any way.

Yes, there were gossips — it was something that could never be completely eradicated from the human psyche — but they tended to be on the margins, not in the center of cliques like back on Earth. And the more successful ones tended to be more discrete about what information they passed around, and how they claimed to have come by it.

From the sound of what he had overheard, Dr. Doorne was talking to her husband. Tanner was a pilot, although Air Force rather than Navy like Sprue’s ur-brother. He was currently based over in Schirrasburg, although before the outbreak he’d flown in to Shepardsport pretty regularly to visit his family here.

From the sound of her halfalogue, something had gone bad over there. An accident? Some kind of a breach, but it could be a pressure breach or a security breach.

Realizing Dr. Doorne was looking his way, Sprue determinedly readdressed himself to his work. However, he resolved to do a little research of his own once he was on his own time again. He’d picked up a few tricks for getting information feeds from the other settlements, above and beyond what was publicly available.

In the meantime, he needed to look like a good and diligent worker. Give Dr. Doorne nothing to complain about, nothing to make her think he might be up to something.

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Paying the Bills

An imminent threat. A city in the dark.

When a fellow hacker clues Midge Sinclair into an impending terror attack, every second matters. She must alert her sister, find her mother, and make it out of Chicago before a nuclear bomb tears the city apart. The only problem? She’s 30,000 feet in the air careening toward O’Hare in a powerless plane.

Could you drop everything to save yourself?

Danny Olsen spends his days learning to be a doctor and ignoring his father’s disapproval. When he flies back to college via a layover in Chicago, he never expects to meet a girl like Midge. She’s smart, quick on her feet, and the only person who can get him out of the airport alive.

Strangers on the run against impossible odds.

With an EMP destroying the grid in Chicago, Midge and Danny race the clock to escape the city before a nuclear bomb turns downtown to ash. They’ll have to learn to trust each other if they want to make it out alive.

The attack is only the beginning.

Take the Hit is book one in Nuclear Survival: Northern Exposure, a post-apocalyptic thriller series following ordinary people struggling to survive after a nuclear attack on the Unites States plunges the nation into chaos.

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Narrative

That Uneasy Feeling

Cather Hargreaves had spent most of the afternoon on a video conference call with the senior security staff of the other major American lunar settlements. A guy from NASA headquarters in Washington was supposed to have joined them. However, he’d failed to call, leaving the Lunans to talk among themselves.

It had been particularly uncomfortable when he’d realized that he and Betty Margrave were having one discussion while everyone else was carrying on their own conversation. It was almost as if the others viewed him and Betty as tainted, people it was best to have as little to do with as possible.

On the other hand, one only had to look at him to know he was a clone. Sure, everyone remembered his ur-brother with the famous scars, but no one could fail to recognize the distinctive dark eyebrows that made their faces almost top-heavy, and make the connection. And everyone knew Shepardsport was the settlement NASA was using as a depository for the inmates of their clone creches, so Betty was suspect even for those who didn’t realize she was married to a clone of Alan Shepard.

Maybe we ought to be grateful that we haven’t had our asses packed over to Farside.

Still, the experience had put him in a despondent mood as he returned home. Their apartment was actually closer to Grissom City’s IT facilities than the main security office, which made it pretty plain how the Housing Bureau regarded his and Toni’s respective lines of work.

Cather entered their apartment to find it quiet. Unusual, since Toni usually was home by this time. Could something have come up with the computers, that she had to stay late?

Or maybe she got a message from JPL that they were having trouble with Dispater? Although she was no longer officially on the Dispater team since being sent up here, she had been one of the key programmers of the probe’s AI — and four light-hours away from Earth, it needed sophisticated AI to carry out complex experiments and maneuvers.

And from what she’d been saying, the Los Angeles Basin was getting particularly hard by that stuff, and JPL wasn’t getting spared. If a lot of their on-site programmers were calling in sick, they’d be casting the net wide to find anyone who’d ever worked with that software.

Jase and Ronnie usually got home a little later, so at least their absence was no cause for worry. Worst case, he could activate the parental tracking apps on their phones and make sure they were indeed where he expected them to be. The kids were a study in how the straight-arrow Chaffee temparament mixed with Toni’s more headstrong disposition, which tended to view “no” as a challenge.

As Cather checked the fridge to see what he could throw together for supper, the door opened. Toni set her briefcase on the table, but didn’t extract her laptop. “Cather, how well do you know Lou Corlin?”

“About as well as the rest of my clone-brothers from the NASA clone creches.” Cather mentally went through the list of them. “He’s Emiko’s boyfriend, he does the Rising Sun J-pop show on Shepardsport Pirate Radio, and if I remember correctly, he works in IT over there. I’ve met him a few times when business took me over there, but I haven’t really had the time to cultivate relationships with those kids.”

It stung to have to admit that lapse. He should’ve figured out some way to step into the breach after Braden Maitland’s death, but it had never seemed all that urgent. That was a level-headed bunch of kids, and Ken Redmond and Sid Abernathy were both taking an interest in everyone in the Grissom lineage. Heck, Ken had sent him e-mails making sure all was well.

Toni just nodded. “Lou sent me a rather odd text right after lunch. Something about just how hard it would be to pinpoint the location of a person without breaking any privacy laws.”

“That’s an interesting question.” Cather considered the implications. “It would depend on what information you had on that person, not to mention your relationship to them. A parent of a minor child has a lot more resources available than, say, a friend or a distant relative. If you’d like, I can contact Lou and see what’s raised the question. For all we know, it could be a completely theoretical matter. Maybe he’s taking a class in crime and mystery literature and wanted your take on the plausibility of something he read.”

“Or it could be someone spoofing his e-mail in hopes of entrapping me for one reason or another.” Toni moved her briefcase, then sat down at the table. “Which is why it may be best for you to contact him. It’s much less likely that they would’ve also compromised my phone.”

Cather promised he’d send Lou a text as soon as they were done eating. Right now he had a supper to fix, and the kids would be home soon.

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Document

A Note from Home

From: Fred Hearne <fthearne@sweetwaterfarms.com>

To: Bill Hearne <wrhearne@nasa.gov>

Thanks for the note. Alice has a right to be worried about the farm situation.

So far we’re doing fairly well. The boys are doing most of the farming these days, them and their kids, especially now that the schools are all closed down. It seems weird that most of the grandkids are the age we were when we started doing a man’s work around this old place. Of course that was back in the days when it was just the old home place, not six different farms and five thousand head of cattle, plus row crops and fodder.

The milk truck has been hit and miss, and we’ve had to dump milk as often as it gets picked up. But Janice figured out how to rig a home pasteurizer, so at least we’re able to salvage some of that milk. That’s a good thing, because the dairy case at the store is empty more often than not.

However, we have adequate fodder for the herd, although concentrates could get a little tight if the feed store doesn’t get deliveries. I’m glad Dad and Grandpa always insisted on keeping the silos and the old barns with the big haymows.

A few years ago, Dick McCall switched to the new style of dairy barns and contracting to have hay and silage trucked in every week. It let him run more cows on the same acreage. Now he’s looking at having to put his whole herd down if he can’t get fresh supplies. Not something a herdsman wants to do, but the alternative is slow starvation, and you just don’t do that to an animal.

We’ve agreed with him that, if the worst comes, we’ll buy his breeding stock, with the understanding that we’ll sell it back to him when he gets back on his feet. Bob’s uncertain about it, says it feels shady, but the lawyer says it’s legal, and Dick’s helped us through some rough patches.

As far as the sick itself, we’ve been lucky. But then we’re pretty isolated up here, and as soon as things started going bad, stores went to having delivery drivers drop off product without any contact, so that eliminates one channel of infection from the city folks. I’m hearing that Madison and Milwaukee are a complete disaster area, and the governor’s up at his summer residence up in Green Bay. We see him on TV, giving his daily briefings, but for us it’s all pretty abstract compared to the land and the crops and the cattle.

Sometimes I feel so helpless with all this going on. You were always the strong one of us, the smart one, the resourceful one. There are days when I wish you could’ve come back up here when you had to retire from flying. But then I think how at least you’re safe up there, and I’ll go out and look up at the Moon and think that maybe you’re looking back down at me. I know that’s silly, that you’re over there on the Far Side, but it’s still a comfort to know that one branch of our family is off this rock.