Jenn Redmond had spent most of the morning going through inventories in preparation for her touch-base meeting with Alice Murchison. At least now she knew all the things she needed to ask the head of Agriculture, but she had very mixed feelings.
This time she was going down to Alice’s office for the meeting, which made sense. They both needed to actually see what the other was doing.
However, when she arrived, she discovered that Alice was already in a meeting with someone else. From the sound of it, something had gone seriously wrong with the drip irrigation system in one of the greenhouses, and they were having to hand-water some five hundred square meters worth of tiered vegetable plantings. Just to make it complicated, it would be in one of the high-carbon-dioxide intensive vegetable production greenhouses, which restricted who they could press into service. No one without oxygen-delivery certification could wear the self-contained breathing apparatus that was necessary to work in that atmosphere, which meant she was having to pay highly-skilled technical personnel to haul buckets of water.
But if those plants go into permanent wilt and die, people are going to be going hungry. Even as that thought came to her, Jenn recalled her experience in victory gardening back during the Energy Wars. In fact, depending on exactly what they are, even if they do come back, the yields are going to take enough of a hit that meals could get a lot smaller.
Apparently whoever was talking with Alice was on the technical side of things, because he said he’d take a look at it just as soon as he could retrieve his breathing rig from Engineering. Alice thanked him, and then the door slid open and a tall, muscular young man stepped out.
“Hello, Miz Jennifer.” Juss Forsythe was a clone of Ed White, and Ken’s all-around troubleshooter and fix-it man. “I hope I didn’t cause you any trouble.”
“No, not at all.” The words came out awkwardly, in a rush. “You obviously are dealing with a critical matter, and a routine meeting can wait.”
“Thanks. I’d better be going now.” With that, Juss hurried away to complete his errand.
At that point Alice gestured for her to come in and take a seat. “Sorry to keep you waiting, but we have a problem.”
As Alice explained the problem, Jenn listened attentively, although she was already aware of the situation. “Do you think you can save those plantings?”
“We hope so. That’s why we’ve been working so hard to hand-water them while Juss works on the irrigation system. That kid’s sharp, and it really helps that he’s finally old enough to get his oxygen-delivery certification so he can work in those greenhouses.”
“That’s good to hear. Right now, we have enough food that we can keep everyone fed a diet that meets NASA nutritional standards for the next three months. It’s going to be monotonous and not necessarily very filling, but nobody’s going to starve..”
“Which is good to hear. There are some things I can do to help make things better, but there are some foods that simply require too narrow of growing conditions for us to be able to produce them in a lunar greenhouse farm, or at least produce them in the quantities we need to feed the entire community.”
Jenn had a fairly good idea of what those were. She’d talked with her husband about whether the chemistry people down at Engineering might be able to synthesize some of the flavors of certain spices that had to be brought up from Earth. But even those would take time to work out, particularly if there wasn’t that much to work on.
We may just have to focus on keeping everyone fed, even if it isn’t the tastiest food.