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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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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.

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Narrative

Keeping On Keeping On

With technical people coming and going pretty much constantly, Autumn Belfontaine was glad that she’d learned early in her broadcast career how to work in chaotic circumstances. Some lines of work, you could count on a nice quiet office to retreat into, but broadcast journalism wasn’t exactly one of them.

At least this set of problems hadn’t disrupted Shepardsport’s connections with Earth. She could still do her usual checks of various TV and radio stations’ websites, searching for patterns of events that someone seemed to be trying to put a cone of silence on at the national and international level.

Not to mention the help that her old colleague Dan was giving her. He seemed to be pretty well plugged into the rumor mill wherever he was, and had picked up some really interesting bits of information. In particular, he’d been a bit of a CB enthusiast long before he decided on radio as a profession, and he still kept a base station at home, albeit only to listen to the truckers on nearby highways.

Autumn had to agree that listening to radio chatter could be interesting — more than a few times she’d gone to websites that allowed a person to listen in on air traffic and space traffic control channels. If nothing else, the jargon was fascinating.

However, Dan’s interest was less in the lingo that had developed over the decades since CB had originally become popular. Instead, he was more interested in what the truckers had to say to one another about travel conditions. These men and women drove thousands of miles every week, crossing the country to deliver critical goods, something that couldn’t be suspended.

Everywhere they were reporting a eerie pall over the cities and towns through which they passed. Stores were closed, even many that should’ve been essential like gas stations and grocery stores. Even where businesses were open, people would keep their distance, as if afraid to get too close to a stranger. Shipments had to be dropped on loading docks and left, and all bills of lading had to be handled in digital format.

The latter was reminiscent of the protocols that had been developed up here to supply the various outlying settlements, especially the small research habitats. The biggest difference was the simple fact that most terresetrial businesses couldn’t just send out a robot to collect what the pilots had dropped off, typically using one of the lander’s robots.

But then again, terrestrial businesses wouldn’t have the additional layer of protection that was provided by the lunar surface environment. If the diablovirus could survive on surfaces, packages dropped off on a loading dock could remain a source of contagion for hours, even days.

Even more concerning was the increasing difficulty truckers were reporting in meeting their basic hygiene needs. Truck stops might be open for them to pump gas, since pay-at-the-pump had been common back when Autumn was still a girl. But more than a few had closed their stores, and with them access to restrooms and showers.

If the truckers were having to resort to makeshift hygiene solutions, how long would it be before those took a toll on their health? Even if they could avoid the diablovirus, getting ill from fecal-borne illnesses or succumbing to skin infections from being unable to shower could take them off the road just as thoroughly. And if too many truckers began falling ill, what would happen to supply chains already strained to the breaking point from the closure of the production facilities?

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Narrative

A Change of Plans

Spruance Del Curtin was on his way to the Astronomy Department when his phone chimed incoming text. What would it be now?

It was Dr. Doorne: Meet me at the station.

So whatever was going on with broadcast quality, she was involved in it. On second thought, he probably shouldn’t have been surprised, given that signals processing was her engineering specialty.

He wasn’t sure whether to be happy or disappointed that he wasn’t going to be going through data today. Quite honestly, it was getting tedious, even if he did like being someone’s special student, trusted with actual research material.

All the same, he knew he was going to get some questions when he turned around and headed back the other way. There were enough people up here in Miskatonic Sector who knew he was doing data work for Dr. Doorne every morning, and would want to know why he was heading the “wrong” way.

Except that, given most people around here did listen to Shepardsport Pirate Radio at least some, even if only on their alarm clock, they’d be aware that something was wrong down there.

As it turned out, he actually managed to arrive at the station offices before his mentor. Then again, she might not know some of the back ways through the service passages that he did. He’d worked for Engineering long enough that he’d learned quite a few shortcuts that weren’t strictly approved, but could shave off a few minutes when seconds counted.

As he’d expected, the place was already crowded. Not just the usual station staff, but half a dozen people from Engineering, including the big boss himself. And no, Ken Redmond did not look pleased today.

Make that double when he looked at Sprue. “So what brings you down’ here today?”

“Sir, Dr. Doorne just texted me to come down here.”

Ken narrowed his eyes. “How convenient–“

At that moment a familiar voice joined the fray. “Major Redmond, if you will listen to me for a moment.”

Dr. Doorne spoke with sufficient authority that Ken Redmond turned to face her. She continued in the same firm tone. “I requested Mr. Del Curtin to meet me here because I believe the skills he’s learned with me will be of use in this problem. Now, if we can take a look at the equipment we are dealing with.”

With that settled, Ken Redmond led them back to the main mixing board. Dr. Doorne set out a bag of equipment and they set to work.

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Narrative

The Many-Talented

Ursula Doorne went over the latest solar activity data, seeking the patterns that warned of imminent instability in the Sun’s magnetic fields. Normally she’d be reasonably confident of her ability to scan through the data and pick out those patterns, although it wasn’t her specialty. After having been surprised twice now, she was no longer feeling so confident.

In fact, she was feeling very much like a rank beginner all over again. A whole lot of stuff she had assumed about the way in which the Sun — and by extension main-sequence stars of that size in general — operated was now very much in question once again. Theories that had been considered pretty much standard when she was doing her undergraduate work were now having to be reconsidered.

When she’d been a student, she’d thought it would be so exciting to be a scientist during such a major paradigm shift. And quite honestly, it might well have been, if the science she was dealing with were something in distant galaxies, so far away as to effectively be abstract. But this was stuff that could mean the difference between life and death for thousands of people up here on the Moon, millions down on Earth. And not just faceless masses, but her own family, her colleagues, her neighbors. Her own husband was a pilot-astronaut, and while spacecraft shielding was a hell of a lot better than in the early days of Apollo and Zond, it still provided only sufficient protection for ordinary solar storms. For the big X-class ones, the astronauts depended in getting sufficient warning that they could get to shelter, whether in one of the larger orbital facilities or on the surface.

And if the Sun isn’t behaving the way our theories say it should, our forecasts are going to be just as unreliable.

Maybe that was why she felt as much at sea as right after the Expulsions began, when she got a message from the training department that she was being assigned an intro to astronomy class. And not even an undergraduate-level one. This one was going to be aimed at middle-school kids, at a time when she wasn’t even sure how to talk to kids that age, let alone describe the discipline she’d spent a lifetime mastering in words they could understand.

And you went back to first principles. Started with the story of early humans looking up at the sky and seeing the lights in them, and realizing over time that there were patterns to their movements. There’s got to be a new set of patterns in the data, but we just don’t know how to see them yet. Best case, it’ll turn out that our current theories are a special case, and we just haven’t seen the conditions that are leading to what we’re observing. Let’s hope we don’t have to throw out everything we thought we knew and start all over.

And then her phone rang. She’d halfway expected it to be one of her colleagues with a new insight on the data. Instead it was Ken Redmond from Engineering.

“Dr. Doorne, we’ve got a problem down here at the station. You’re our best signals processing person who isn’t tied up in one kind of quarantine or another. Can you get down here and take a look at it?”

In this context “the station” would refer to Shepardsport Pirate Radio. For the most part she’d viewed it as something on the order of the underground newspaper that had been circulated at her high school, albeit a little more approved by the authorities than those photocopied sheets that passed from hand to hand every morning. But given that the head of Engineering was specifically requesting her skills, there wasn’t much way of saying no.

“I’ll be on my way.”