Month: November 2020

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Narrative

The Sun that Warms

Ursula Doorne had known when she accepted the much-sought-after astronomy position up here on the Moon that she would not get to spend all her time on her specialty. She’d need to apply some significant amount of her time to using her EE degree to deal with the more mundane aspects of the settlement and of the various outposts where the radio telescopes were located.

But it always felt good to be able to return to her primary specialty, to analyze the reams and reams of data pouring in from the various radio telescopes under her purview, to determine what new observations would be needed in the light of what they were learning from the latest. And that was just the deep-space work that had always been her primary area of interest. Now, with the Sun in an unsettled state, she had an even greater reason to want to get back to her office quickly.

True, she was well aware that many of her colleagues on the ground were specialists in solar astronomy and knew far better how to read the reams of data she was dealing with. However, she also knew that a number of them had ceased communicating since the current crisis began. Some of them were just in areas where modern digital communication systems were thin on the ground, and were lucky if they could even manage to check in with other people on Earth once a week or so. But far too many of them were in the US, in Europe, in Israel, in Japan and South Korea, places where communications infrastructure was pretty much presupposed. People who should’ve been able to keep in touch, even if they weren’t able to go in to their offices at the various universities and other research institutions where they worked.

Ursula tried not to worry about them, reminding herself that there was nothing she could do on their behalf — even trying to contact their local police departments for a welfare check was an iffy proposition when law enforcement agencies had more important things to do than allay the fears of a colleague in a distant city. But it still concerned her, especially given that several of them were older, even in frail health.

But she was still glad to be back in her office, to pull up the latest data and look through it. Most of it was just more of the usual, but as she was looking at the magnetic field data, she noticed a number of anomalies.

Either we’ve got a problem with our sensors, or we’re looking at a serious new development. Time to get as many eyes looking at it as possible.

As soon as she’d set up a mailing to send the relevant segment of the data to the people best able to deal with it — more complete datasets could be put on hard drives and sent down via the lunar ferry — she retrieved her phone to text Tanner. Even if the situation was still uncertain, it was best if he and the other pilots were aware that changeable space weather was on its way.

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Narrative

A Change of Program

Being called in to someone’s office on no notice was never fun. It felt too much like being in trouble.

Which was probably why Autumn Belfontaine’s stomach was knotted up so tight right now. She figured she was probably dealing with it better than a lot of people would, thanks to her experience in broadcast journalism. The techniques for dealing with stage fright went a long way to handling this kind of situation too.

As she approached the office of the Director of Training, she wondered whether she might be made to sit and wait. She really didn’t think Deena was the sort of person who’d do it as an exercise in power, like a couple of bosses she’d worked under many years ago.

But truth be told, most of her associations with Deena had been casual, social. They were both members of the Shepard lineage, so there’d been plenty of opportunity to interact in a family setting, which by agreement would almost always mean avoiding discussion of anything that could be considered business. So Autumn really didn’t have a good handle on how Deena ran her office.

Not to mention that the trip over here had presented plenty of time for Autumn to rack her memory for anything that could have merited a reprimand. The fact that she couldn’t think of anything obvious was even worse than realizing a major lapse — might there be something she hadn’t even considered that had become a problem?

And then she arrived, and Deena came right out to welcome her. “Please come in, have a seat.”

Why should her pleasant greeting, her willingness to make small talk, raise even more alarm? Was it just an echo of the particularly clumsy use of the “praise sandwich” technique by a long-ago teacher who never seemed to actually praise you for anything?

And finally Deena reached the substance of this meeting. “Autumn, we’re going to take you off the testing center.”

Autumn must’ve tensed up, because Deena smiled. “No, this is not a disciplinary action. Reggie and I both agree that you’re working way too many hours as it is. So we’re going to switch you to planning a full broadcasting curriculum, to pull together the courses we currently have into some kind of cohesive program of study.”

“OK.” Autumn tried to understand how this was supposed to be lightening her load.

“This isn’t something that has to be done next week. We’re looking at it as a long-term project to examine the existing courses we’ve put together on the fly since the establishment of Shepardsport Pirate Radio, so we can determine the gaps we need to fill. Maybe they’ll require new courses, but it’s equally possible that we just need to adjust the material and presentation of our existing courses. This is supposed to be something you can do as the time is available, rather than in a specific slot in your schedule.”

“That’s helpful, but I’ve seen too many of these open-ended projects become never-ending ones.” Autumn recalled one she’d gotten sucked into at a previous employer. “Or worse, ones that never get off the ground because there’s always something more urgent.”

“If you’re really worried about that thing, how about we make plans to touch base weekly on your progress. It’ll also help make sure you’re not overlooking something important that’s outside your regular bailiwick.”

“Thanks. That makes a lot of sense.”

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Narrative

It Don’t Come Easy

After such a long and difficult day, Spruance Del Curtin didn’t even feel like hanging out with his clone-brothers and scoping girls at the dining commons. Right now he just headed to the table where Brenda Redmond and Lou Corlin were eating supper.

As he approached, both of them looked up. “So what are you doing here?”

“Just wanted to find a quiet place to eat, maybe talk shop a little.”

Lou narrowed his eyes and studied Sprue. “That’s unusual for you. Are you sure you’re feeling OK?”

“No, I’m not coming down with anything, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Sprue slid into an empty seat and checked himself in. “It’s just been a really long day. First, Dr. Doorne pulls me in on the problems with the main mixing board, never mind I don’t know that much about it. And I only get off that job because I’ve got an air shift to do. I mean, they even ordered my lunch delivered to the station.”

Lou wiped up the last bit of gravy on his plate with a piece of bread. “So how are things coming on it?”

“Apparently some time while I was on the air, she decided that the problems were so complicated we were better off tearing it down all the way and rebuilding it from scratch. So now Ken’s sent it off to someone in Engineering, I’m not sure exactly who’s handling it. But assuming they don’t have any major problems with parts, and there’s not other weirdness in that thing, we should have it back on the air in a couple of days.”

That got a wry grin from Brenda. “Yeah, all we’d need is a case of Moon gremlins.”

Except it wasn’t really a laughing matter. More than once there’d been weird things up here, of the sort that left people wondering about the possibility of incorporeal intelligences, whether mischievous or malicious. And given the very thin margins by which humans survived up here on a world utterly inimical to biological life, those thoughts were not reassuring.

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Narrative

Lonely at the Top

Instead of taking section reports at a general meeting, rather like a corporate board meeting, Reggie Waite had decided to meat with each of his section heads privately. It meant fewer schedules to co-ordinate, and he could be more flexible about the time he allowed for each report. With things in such an odd state, he’d found that a lot of times one department had little or nothing to report while another had a lengthy report.

Right now he was talking with Alice Murchison from Agriculture. She’d reported on the ongoing repairs to the irrigation systems that had been compromised by defective tubing, and given her projections on the next cycle of harvests.

However, he also knew that she had some strong connections with the agricultural reporting system back on Earth, as well as more personal connections to the land. No doubt she did not see them as relevant to her work up here, so she’d not included them in her report. So he asked her directly what she knew.

Yes, the question caught her more than a little by surprise. It took her a fumbling moment to pull her thoughts together and relate what she had been reading from various agricultural reporting services she subscribed to. She openly admitted that the information had to be incomplete, for the simple reason that a lot of county offices and local grain elevators were shuttered as a result of the pandemic.

“In fact, I’d be just as ready to trust the anecdotal evidence I’m getting from our family dirtside. Bill and I both grew up on farms, and members of our families still own and operate them. Nephews and nieces for the most part, since our siblings have gotten to that age where they’ve pretty much retired from the day-to-day operations. But from what I’m hearing, they’ve all been able to maintain production as long as they can keep their equipment in good repair, but there’s a lot of question about getting the food to market. According to Bill’s brother, they’ve had to dump milk as often as they’ve been able to get the milk truck out there to pick it up. Apparently there’s been a quiet sort of exchange with the neighbors, but strictly speaking, they could lose their Grade A certification if anyone official were to find out.”

“Understood.” Reggie considered some of the stopgaps they’d used in the first weeks and months after the Expulsions began, when they had to find some way to absorb all the new people and keep them breathing. “What about your family?”

“We were always grain farmers. Winter wheat, mostly, with a side of short-season soybeans to maintain soil nitrogen levels. So it’s not quite the same issue as a dairy farm has, but my niece and her husband have apparently been having trouble getting fuel deliveries. There’s some real question of what’s going to happen if they can’t get the crops harvested for want of diesel fuel to run the combines and the tractors to pull the grain wagons. Thankfully we never got quite to the point where we switched to custom harvesting, because I’ve heard a lot of farmers are discovering they can’t line up anybody, and they just don’t have the equipment to do it themselves. We could be looking at a situation where there’s ample food in the fields, but it rots for want of the wherewithal to harvest it.”

“Like something out of the old Soviet Union.” Reggie recalled some of the things he’d heard, of the problems that lingered even a decade or more after the end of central planning, simply because access to resources remained so uneven. “And we’re going to have a ringside seat to the consequences, and not a damned thing we can do about it up here at the top of the gravity well.”

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Narrative

Those Uneasy Thoughts

Ever since she’d gotten off her air shift, Brenda Redmond had struggled to keep her mind on her work, whether it was teaching or studying or even just her mandatory daily exercise down at the gym. Especially since she’d drawn the weight machine today, which meant needing to count her reps instead of just doing time. Several times she’s lost track of where she was and had to guess and hope.

As she was leaving the gym, she heard a familiar voice calling her name. She turned to find Lou Corlin coming up behind her.

“I didn’t know you had the same gym hours as me.”

“I don’t normally, but tonight I’ve got something I have to deal with, so I swapped with Dave.”

Given how many special projects were always in progress around this place, Brenda decided not to ask any further. If Lou felt comfortable about sharing, he would. If not, prying would be exceedingly unwelcome.

So she went with a more neutral response instead. “Probably wise, if you’re thinking the time will be tight.”

They continued for a few moments in companionable silence. As they waited for the airlock to cycle, Lou finally brought up what was actually on his mind. “I’ve been hearing some really wild rumors lately. I’ve been wondering if I should talk to Autumn about this stuff, or if that would only be wasting her time when she has plenty of stuff already on her plate.”

“What kind of rumors?”

“Stuff like food shipments being stolen by the guards who are supposed to protect them, and then trying to use them to set up their own private fiefdoms.”

Brenda considered some of the stuff she’d heard. “You hear all kinds of things, and it’s just believable enough that it would happen somewhere out there. Especially in societies that are still heavily tribal and there’s not a lot of trust beyond the family and clan, I could completely believe it. Now if you’re talking someplace in the US, or Japan, or Australia, I’d want a heck of a lot of proof before I’d even consider taking it seriously.”

“That’s the problem. I’m hearing stories about some of the inner cities…’

“Which have been going to hell in a handbasket and one food stamps cycle away from riots since I was a little kid.” Brenda pulled her phone out. “How about I text Drew and see what he knows. Even if he’s not that tightly hooked into the Air Force grapevine, I’m sure he knows some guys over there at the Roosa Barracks who are. Heck, my dad always said that if you want to know something like that for sure, the best way to find out is to ask a non-com.”

Lou laughed, and he didn’t sound forced. Yes, he was well aware of the sergeants’ and petty officers’ interpersonal networks too.

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Paying the Bills

Level 7 is the diary of Officer X-127, who is assigned to stand guard at the “Push Buttons,” a machine devised to activate the atomic destruction of the enemy, in the country’s deepest bomb shelter. Four thousand feet underground, Level 7 has been built to withstand the most devastating attack and to be self-sufficient for five hundred years. Selected according to a psychological profile that assures their willingness to destroy all life on Earth, those who are sent down may never return.

Originally published in 1959, and with over 400,000 copies sold,this powerful dystopian novel remains a horrific vision of where the nuclear arms race may lead and is an affirmation of human life and love. Level 7 merits comparison to Huxley’s A Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 and should be considered a must-read by all science fiction fans.

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Narrative

Know When to Hold ’em

Although Spruance Del Curtin was a reasonably decent assistant in the process of troubleshooting the main mixing board, his skills really weren’t to the point that it made sense to have someone else cover his air shift so he could continue helping. Ken had told him to go ahead and sign on, since the Timeline Brothers both had other obligations in the afternoon.

However, the process of tracing and testing the circuits was not going nearly as well as she would’ve liked, even with a couple of the younger kids. They were good about handing up tools upon request, but they really didn’t know electronics well enough to interpret what they were seeing and offer any insight.

Ursula Doorne wasn’t exactly sure where it became clear the problem was much larger than any single component. By mid-afternoon, it was becoming increasingly clear that continuing to trace the circuitry in hope of isolating the problem was a hopeless task.

Ken had just come back to see how things were going, and it was clear he’d been dealing with some other issues somewhere else in the settlement. No, he was not going to like the news.

But there was no point wasting further time just to spare his temper. Especially since she had projects on her desk back in the Astronomy Department, and not just the more abstract and abstruse ones involved with using dishes on both the Moon and Mars to create an array on a baseline that dwarfed all previous efforts.

“Whatever’s wrong with this, it’s not just one component. We’re going to have to completely tear it down and rebuild it.”

Ken muttered a word he didn’t ordinarily use in the presence of civilians. “That’s going to be a lot of work.” He met her eyes directly. “But if you’re right, it’ll save us a lot more work in the long run. However, we are going to have to make sure that the remote rig gets a complete maintenance cycle as soon as we get a working main mixing board. That thing was never designed for the level of use we’re putting it through, and we cannot afford to have it give out on us.”

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Narrative

Forward Motion

“These robots are actually turning out to be even more useful than we’d expected.” Alice Murcheson cast a significant look at the robot now threading tubing through the structure of the planter towers, replacing the tubing that had failed. “Quite honestly, I had expected that we’d end up having to find enough techs with both oxygen delivery certifications and the skills to set up that tubing.”

Harlan Lemont’s lips quirked upward into a smile. Not a big grin like a Shep might have given her, but a quiet expression that matched his personality. “Actually, we’d learned quite a bit just from all the work we’d done with the watering bots. Of course that was a lot simpler, which was why we could put kids on the job, but it gave us a lot of expertise in the issues of teleoperation.”

“Which allows us to use someone who understands the structure of the planter towers and the irrigation system, but doesn’t necessarily have oxygen delivery certification.”

“Teleoperation technology’s getting better all the time. Back in the early days, everything was clunky joysticks that might or might not work properly. A lot of the kids were telling me that they’d put the spex and haptic feedback gloves on and it was like they were right there inside the robot. A couple of them said they even had some vertigo when they took their control gear back off.”

Alice considered that information. “Did you have them tell Medlab?”

“I suppose I should’ve thought about it, but at the time it didn’t seem that concerning. I’ve heard of really heavy gamers reporting that kind of experience, and they came out of it in a minute or two, so it didn’t seem like anything too dangerous.” Harlan paused, looked back at the robot hard at work. “But if you think I ought to, I can tell the kids to drop by Medlab and let them know it might be an issue.”

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Narrative

More Disturbing News

Cindy’s shift as receptionist at Shepardsport Pirate Radio had not been an easy one, mostly because of all the commotion. At least they were getting fewer listener complaints about the sudden decrease in broadcast quality, which was a relief. But right now she was just as happy that there wasn’t any secretarial work to be done, because there was no way she could’ve managed to maintain her concentration with everyone coming and going. Quite honestly, it seemed like half of Engineering had been in here over the course of her shift.

And with so many people coming and going, not to mention the continual possibility that Ken Redmond might come back in, she didn’t want to check her e-mails or her texts or anything else that might be considered “personal.” Which made the shift all the harder to get through. Finally she’d gone on the computer, checking some news websites and hoping she could make it look like something Autumn had assigned her for the news department. Except most of what she was seeing only made her feel even worse.

At least Mars and the Moon are holding together so far, assuming the command structure hasn’t lowered a cone of silence over the problems. Cindy was aware that Autumn sent sensitive stories past Captain Waite before airing them, although as far as she knew, he’d never outright silenced anything.

By the time Cindy’s shift was over and she could leave the station, she was very glad to be out of there. She didn’t have the technical expertise to help with the broadcast equipment issues — although she wasn’t sure how much more Spruance Del Curtin could bring to the table. And after spending most of the shift trying to look as if she was doing a project for the news department, she was pretty sure that no, she did not want to go into journalism as a career.

As she was walking down the main corridor of Engineering toward her first airlock, she checked her phone, was surprised to find several new texts waiting for them. Among them was one from Shelly Walstrand.

Curious, she swiped the flag on the lock screen to open the text. As it turned out, there were actually a whole string of texts. Apparently the food at the place Shelly was holed up had run out. They’d all brought the food from their own houses when they’d gathered there, so that was no longer an option. So the friend’s big sister had gone off to look for a store that still had food. One of the guys had insisted on going with her, even though he was just fifteen and pretty skinny.

Apparently it was a good thing, for the simple reason of having a second pair of eyes watching. The convenience store at the corner gas station was empty, whether because it had sold out or had been looted, neither of them could determine because it was abandoned, the door swinging loose but not showing any obvious signs of having been forced.

They’d continued onward to a small community grocery store, where they’d found the door locked, but with the window boarded over in a way that created a narrow slot through which one could pass money and products could be pushed out.

Not surprising, considering how a pandemic would make people want to minimize contact. More surprising was the prices for what little the store had on offer. A single loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter would take all the money they had brought. Not to mention none of them had any more cash, and it was a long way to her bank, assuming her paycheck had even deposited, given her workplace had been closed.

But with the younger kids scraping crumbs from the bottoms of the remaining jars, there wasn’t much choice. They had to bring something home, so they bought it and started heading home.

They hadn’t gotten far before they realized they were being followed. They ended up running the last several blocks back home, got through the door and then had to barricade all the entrances against several very desperate looking people who were now trying to force their way in.

All over a loaf of bread and a tiny jar of peanut butter. Cindy’s gut clenched, hard. And here we were worrying about losing those big planters down at Agriculture because of the irrigation breakdown.

Although Uncle Carl and Aunt Betty did belong to the Christian Science Church, the denomination Alan Shepard had been raised in, they’d never been very active members. And now Cindy felt a very strong urge to pray for her old friend down on Earth, and she wasn’t sure how.

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Document

The Lifeblood of a Nation

There’s a saying in military circles: “Amateurs talk tactics, armchair generals talk strategy, but professionals study logistics.” At Annapolis our instructors credited it to General Robert H Barrow of the Marine Corps, but since then I’ve also heard it ascribed to Omar Bradley and several other historical figures going back at least to the Civil War.

During the Energy Wars I was aware of our CBG’s resupply operations, but my direct involvement was quite limited. My duty as a pilot of a F-18 Hornet was to take the war to the enemy, not to track gallons of JP-8 loaded and consumed.

Had I remained active Navy, I probably would’ve dealt more extensively with logistics as I rose through the ranks and took on responsibility for larger units. However, NASA chose to exercise their option, and I accepted their invitation to become an astronaut.

It was when I took command of Shepardsport that I truly became aware of the importance of logistical issues. Even before the Expulsions vastly increased our population, I had to deal with the maintenance of our vital supply lines and the management of our consumables. Obviously, the sudden influx of additional population made those balances all the more critical.

When the diablovirus outbreak began, there were the usual hiccups of any time supply lines are disrupted by an unexpected event, whether it be natural or human-caused. As the crisis progressed, our focus necessarily narrowed to our own situation on the Moon, and it became easy to let our view of things on Earth slip out of focus.

As a result, when I received the news of severe issues in the US trucking industry, I knew that we were looking at a major humanitarian crisis in the making — and there was very little that we on the Moon would be able to do about it.

—- Reginald T. Waite, Capt. USN. Oral history record, “Shepardsport During the Diablovirus Pandemic,” Kennedy University Tycho.