Alice Murchison had been busy all day, so much that she’d had meals sent down to her office in Agriculture. She didn’t like doing it — she understood how important community was — but after all their problems with the irrigation lines, and uncertainty as to whether they’d found all the bad ones, she had a lot of catching up to do.
So when she got back to the apartment, she just wanted to hit the sack and get enough sleep that she’d be ready to deal with tomorrow’s workload. As soon as she opened the door and saw her husband working on his laptop at the tiny desk which folded down into a nightstand, she knew she wouldn’t be getting straight to bed.
“What’s going on, Bill?”
“We’ve got a little problem.” Bill Hearne explained about his discussion with Captain Waite. “I know I spent most of the Energy Wars so busy with one mission or another that I didn’t see a whole lot of what was happening on the home front. But I was hoping that maybe you could remember some things that could help us get a handle on the rumors that are running wild around here right now.”
Alice recalled those days. “I’m going to have to think about that one. I spent a lot of my time at the Harris County Co-operative Extension Office, helping people get Victory Gardens going. After all, by the 1990’s there really wasn’t an Astronauts’ Wives’ Club like there was back in the days of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. The astronaut corps leaned a lot heavier toward the civilian, and even us military wives just didn’t have the same culture and expectations as there was in the old days. I mean, sure, we’d look after each other, and I did as much helping the astro families dig up their back yards to garden and set up chicken coops and rabbit hutches. But there weren’t the teas and the bridge games and the other formal stuff.”
She paused, pondering. “If anything, we’re even further from that ideal up here. Everyone up here has at least one job, and the science staff all have a secondary specialty helping to maintain the settlement. Then we’ve all got our teaching responsibilities, when we aren’t in training ourselves. We might be just as well off to talk to Deena over at Training, see if she can figure out a way to get the message through at people’s training classes.”
“At least that idea’s something I didn’t have five minutes ago.” No, Bill wasn’t exactly satisfied with what she’d been able to offer. But he understood the importance of doing what you could with what you had, letting it buy you time to figure out the next set of solutions. That skill was what kept him and the crew of the Falcon alive until Nekrasov could get Baikal up there to bring them back home.