Tag: Alice Murchison

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Narrative

Not Looking Good

Alice Murcheson liked to give at least half an hour every day to going over ag reports from Earth. However, with the news becoming progressively more grim with every passing day, she was finding it more and more difficult to read them. After all, there were so many things she needed to deal with right here in Shepardsport, things that she actually had some control over.

She’d gotten back to the apartment for the evening when she realized it had been almost a week since she’d last gone through those reports. While it might be easier to let them get crowded out by various tasks up here, it was not a good habit to let herself slip into.

Which meant it was time to sit down, grit her teeth, and deal with the bad news. The longer she put it off, the more likely it became that she’d get blindsided by something she should’ve picked up if she’d been on top of things.

Not that there’s a whole lot we can do about stuff on Earth. On the other hand, at least we’ll have some warning of interruptions of critical supplies.

As she’d expected, the ag reports made grim reading. The more intervention any given crop required, the more likely production was going to be disrupted for this growing season. At least most grain crops that were already in the fields would probably turn out well enough, although the big question might end up being whether there would be sufficient workers available to harvest in a timely manner.

Alice recalled her own childhood on a grain farm near Duluth. They’d raised a mixture of winter wheat, short-season corn and soybeans, and there had been times when getting the corn out in time was tricky. She recalled at least two years when early snows had caught them with corn still in the fields, and they’d lost a lot of it. There were tricks to recovering some, like running the combine only in one direction to pick up the fallen stalks, but it still didn’t get as much as they would’ve gotten in a timely harvest.

She’d become so deep in this grim news that she didn’t even notice the door opening or her husband walking in until he rested his hand on her shoulder. “Alice?”

Startled, she had to quick squelch a flinch as soon as she recognized him. “Sorry, Bill, I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

He pulled up a second chair beside her, set to working on the muscles of her neck with those big strong hands that were so deft with the controls of an airplane or a spacecraft. “You’ve got a lot of company right now, sweetheart. I just got an e-mail from Fred.”

An icy lump formed in Alice’s stomach. Her own parents had been pushed out of farming back in the 80’s, and all of her brothers and sisters had found employment in other fields. By contrast, Bill’s family had made the right choices to enable them to go big when the alternative was to get out, and now owned several dairy farms in addition to the old home place.

“How bad?”

“Not as bad as it could be. He hadn’t been writing because he didn’t want to worry me.”

Alice considered whether to remark upon that, decided to leave it alone. “So how bad is it?”

“So far they’re making do. But I know he’s said some of their neighbors aren’t, and I think he’s feeling really cut off because he can’t go anywhere. They haven’t had church in ages, restaurants are closed, and it sounds like the feed store is no place to hang out and chew the fat these days.”

“And isolation is almost harder on people than physical privation.” Although it had been years since she took that psychology course as part of her gen-ed requirements at U-Minn, she still remembered the studies on the effects of isolation on monkeys, the accounts of prisoners in Vietnam.

“It was one of the big things that either made or broke the early settlers, back the day.”

“True.” Alice closed one after another farm report. “And right now I really ought to write to my brothers and sisters. I’ve let myself get too busy with things up here.”

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Narrative

The Ice Grows Ever Thinner

News from home was getting increasingly more scarce, and Bill Hearne didn’t like it. Even all his work up here couldn’t keep his mind sufficiently busy to fend off his concerns about Fred and the rest of the family dirtside.

All the same, he didn’t want to deluge them with e-mails. If things were getting worse, all that would accomplish would be to increase their own anxiety levels.

And that assumed the e-mails would even go through. From some things he was hearing through the pilots’ grapevine, it sounded like even the backbone providers were starting to have trouble keeping their facilities running.

He had just gotten back to the apartment for the evening and was mulling over the question of whether to e-mail Frank when the door opened and in walked Alice. She was looking tired, although he wasn’t aware of any new problems down at Food and Nutrition.

Before he could ask her how her day had gone, she took the chair beside him and started working on his knotted shoulder muscles. “How are things going?”

“Average.” No, he didn’t want to talk about the autolathe that had broken down, or the problems they were having with the guidance on one of the older landers. There was a thin line between decompressing and going on a tear, especially when you were frustrated by an intractable problem.

“In other words, the usual supply of crap that comes with that line of work.” Alice paused for a moment, suggesting she was speaking from experience. “But it’s not work that’s really bothering you.” She looked at the laptop in front of him, the e-mail application opened on it. “I know, it’s hard not to worry about the people we left back on Earth. I try to tell myself that they’ve got their own worries and they’re probably spending most of their time and energy trying to keep things going.”

She didn’t exactly let the words trail off, but her tone suggested she was leaving the matter open-ended, even uncertain whether she wanted to put her thoughts into words. Of course she was getting all the USDA farm reports, so she’d have a lot better idea of just how bad things were getting on the agricultural front down there, quite possibly more information than either of their families still on the farm.

Might as well open the subject. “So how bad are the big brains in Washington saying the farm situation is?”

“Not good. There’s a lot of places that aren’t even reporting, which bothers me almost more than the ones they do have data on. Is it just communications breaking down, so field agents and farmers aren’t able to get the information in, or are we actually losing these people? Or at least enough of them that the ones who are left are too busy keeping things running to deal with reports.”

“Know about that kind of situation.” Bill didn’t like thinking back to those first few months after the Expulsions started in earnest, especially after the destruction of the old Luna Station and the Kitty Hawk Massacre. There were a lot of reports that got a lick and a promise, or just plain didn’t get done at all — and Flight Ops was still paying the price for the loss of data.

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Memories and Strategies

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.

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Narrative

Worse News from the Ground

Even in the office of the head of Agriculture, Jenn could hear the whir of pumps, the gurgle of fluids through pipes, the mechanical sounds of robots at work in a greenhouse just beyond the wall. But it was easy enough to block it out even as she and Alice were making small talk over coffee.

They had spent the bulk of their meeting going over figures — production and consumption, goods in stock, all the things that were essential for maintaining a settlement that was still more like a scientific research outpost crossed with a military base. At least things were looking a lot better than they had even a few days ago, when it was uncertain what would be happening with the damaged irrigation tubing in those planters. Yes, they’d lost some plants, which meant some production gone, but they were already replanting those trays, and it wouldn’t be long before the new plants were sprouting and growing.

As they talked, their conversation turned to more distant family still on Earth. It was a subject to be handled very delicately in this uncertain situation, but Jenn felt reasonably confident that it would not seem insensitive to mention a FaceTime call with one of Ken’s sisters. It had been something of a surprise, so there’d been no time to let Brenda know so she could bring the grandkids over, but the younger kids had loved seeing their aunt, even if only as a rather distorted image on the screen of a tablet.

Alice nodded, although her smile was a bit wan. “At least you know they’re safe, which has to be a comfort. Yesterday Bill got some more bad news from his brother Fred. Things are getting even worse down there. Apparently someone from one of the cities broke quarantine and decided to look for a place out in the country to hole up for the duration. Except they were already infected, and apparently they infected pretty much the whole town. The post office, the feed store, the grain elevator, the local FS distributor, you name it, it’s closed because everyone’s down sick. He’s starting to really wonder how they’ll keep things going.”

“That’s not good.”

“No, it’s not. Right now they’re dumping milk just to make sure the cows don’t go dry. But what happens if they get to the point they can’t keep the milking parlors going? Say they lose power, and they don’t have the backup power to run the milking machines. When Bill was a kid, their herd was small enough that they could hand-milk the cows in an emergency, even if they had to dump the milk because it wouldn’t meet FDA standards. But these days, they just don’t have enough people to get all the cows milked often enough to keep them from going dry. And once that happens, you’re stuck feeding dry cows until you can get them bred and the calves delivered.”

Jenn nodded in understanding. “I may be a city girl, but I’m also a member of La Leche League, so yes, I am acquainted with the physiology of lactation.”

Alice smiled. She might be just enough older to have had her kids when bottles were still the norm, but she was never the sort to be judgemental about other women’s choices on feeding their babies. “Now imagine that sort of situation playing out in farms all over the country as things start unraveling. They’ve got plenty of livestock, and crops are already in the fields, but what happens when they can’t bring the necessary resources to bear to get those livestock to slaughter and the crops harvested and binned? We could be looking at a situation like the old USSR used to have, where crops rotted in the fields for want of labor.”

“Which raises the question of how much longer it will be before even the US is looking at actual famine. Not just shortages of certain products, but literally not enough food to go around.”

“That’s what concerns me. So far, most of us have been lucky, and our families dirtside have been spared for the most part from the diablovirus. But have they been spared just to fall victim to starvation?”

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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

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

Following the Farm News

A lot of the kids who’d been assigned to work in Agriculture complained about it when the adults weren’t listening. Truth be told, Quinn Merton was just as happy to draw that job assignment, and had even asked about the possibility of taking course work or getting a teaching responsibility in that area. No doubt it ran in the blood, given that his ur-brother had become a farmer after leaving the astronaut corps in the wake of the Gemini VIII disaster.

However, he’d not expected to have the big boss pull him into her office for a private conversation. His initial response was concern that he was about to be reprimanded for some error. Quinn was all too aware that he was taking on responsibilities that usually would be given to older individuals, largely because the emptying of the NASA clone creches during the Expulsions had left Shepardsport with a disproportionately young population, and the jobs needed doing.

Alice Murcheson must’ve picked up his concern, since the first words out of her mouth were a reassurance that she was not calling him in here for a reprimand. Instead, she needed some help from him.

“How much access do you have to the wire services?”

The request caught Quinn by surprise, so much that it took him a moment to respond. “I’m a dj, not a reporter. I mean, it’s not like Autumn keeps the door to the newsroom locked or anything, but it’s not exactly somewhere I go poking around.”

“But you could take a look at things if you wanted to?”

“I suppose, but there are an awful lot of computers in there, and I wouldn’t want to mess anything up for the sake of my own curiosity.” He narrowed his eyes and studied his boss. “Do you need something off one of the news services? Is there a reason you don’t want the news director to know about it?”

Alice Murcheson didn’t take offense, although his response certainly could be considered impertinent, even downright insubordinate. “I hadn’t meant to imply that you should trespass. I just thought that you might be able to get some confirmation on what I’m getting on the USDA farm reports. Since your air shift is on Saturday evenings, when the news department is usually closed, I thought it would be easier if you just took a look at the wire service computers to see if there is anything on agriculture.”

“It would if I were familiar with the systems, but I wouldn’t even know which computer has the wire services. I’m under the impression that the station’s subscriptions cover only one machine, and I don’t know whether there’s a general login for all the news staff, or everyone has their own. Honestly, it’d be easier to just ask Autumn. I’m sure she’d give you the information.”

“That may be, but if she’s not there during your air shift, how will you see her?”

Quinn tried not to look amused by the question, since it could look insulting. “I do have some discretionary time during the hours she’s usually in. I can run by the station then and talk to her.”

That seemed to satisfy Alice, which was a good thing, considering that he had a class in ten minutes and he’d do well to get all the way to Miskatonic Sector in that time.

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From the Top

Reggie Waite usually ran Shepardsport with a relatively light hand. He picked division heads who knew their lines of work and trusted them to pick subordinates who were competent in their own areas, and to generally run their respective divisions without needing to be micromanaged.

However, there was always the occasional matter that really needed to be seen in person. And the news from Agriculture was just one of those kinds.

Alice Murcheson always made him think of some of the older women at church when he was growing up back in Salem. Not just the graying hair and the smile lines at the corners of her eyes, but also a certain maternal air about her that made a person feel at home.

Today those lines were downturned, and the atmosphere around her was filled with an uneasy tension. “We were lucky we discovered the problem at all. All the indicators were showing adequate flow, so we assumed everything was fine.”

Reggie looked from Alice to the image of the affected greenhouse, the people in breathing gear carrying buckets of water to the affected plantings. “And with the carbon dioxide levels you’re running in those greenhouses, there’s a big temptation to just trust your readouts.”

Alice nodded, her expression regretful. “We ought to be doing more frequent inspections of all the plantings, but until we can get a lot more people through oxygen-delivery training and able to use breathing rigs–” She left the sentence hanging.

Reggie understood the problem all too well. The Expulsions had enormously expanded the population of Shepardsport, primarily in the younger age cohorts. Although some of the kids were finally getting old enough to qualify for the necessary training, it still was behind the numbers they needed to properly inspect all the plantings necessary to feed the settlement’s population and keep up with their obligations to provide prepared meals to the various outposts scattered around Farside. The kids could teleoperate inspection robots, but even with spex and haptic feedback gloves, it was still far too easy to miss things.

Especially if it’s not something you’ve been trained to look for, which is what Ken Redmond thinks happened. Reggie had all too many memories of such situations back in the Energy Wars. The Navy — heck, the whole freaking Department of Defense — was pushing people through their training programs way too fast, which meant a lot of people with surface facility with the skills and techniques, but no deep understanding of the underlying principles. Even his own flight training had been horribly rushed by peacetime standards, and he’d learned a heck of a lot on the job.

But there was no use dwelling on how close things had been three decades ago. Right now, they needed to deal with the current problem, so they could get these highly-skilled people back to the jobs where they were really needed.

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Narrative

Nourishment for Body and Soul

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.

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Essential Matters

As Chief of Agriculture, Alice Murchison was well aware of the ultimate destination of the products of her department. However, she seldom “went backstage” to the industrial-grade kitchens that fed not only Shepardsport, but many of the smaller research outposts that didn’t have their own food production and preparation facilities.

However, today she needed to talk with the Chief of Food and Nutrition, and given the sensitive nature of what they needed to discuss, it was really best to talk face-to-face.

So Alice walked down the long corridor filled with the scents of food being cooked. Some for today’s meals in the dining commons or to be taken by deliverybot to people eating at their jobs or classes, but others to be dehydrated and vacuum-packed for shipment elsewhere. This place was a lot larger than it had been when she had first come up here and taken charge of the settlement’s greenhouse farms. But that had been right after the Kitty Hawk Massacre, when the settlement was undergoing a period of explosive growth as a result of the Expulsions. More than once she had come here to discuss priorities in expanding food production and been handed a chicken to strip or beans to snap while they talked.

Today Jennifer Redmond was alone in her office, looking over recipes on the monitor of her workstation while making notes on a tablet. Alice tapped at the doorframe, and Jen looked up. “Come in, sit down.” She pulled a folding chair out from a nook behind her desk.

Normally they might spend a little time in small talk, but today things were sufficiently urgent that they launched straight into the matter at hand without worrying about social niceties. “As if trying to keep a dirtside pandemic from getting up here to the Moon, Bill just told me that it looks like the Sun may be screwing up our spacelift capacity for as long as a month.”

“I heard.” Jen made a sidelong glance at her computer. “Ken’s been keeping me up to date on the situation. He’s been so busy down at Engineering with this situation that we hardly ever see each other, but we keep in touch, mostly texts but some e-mail. According to what he’s passed to me, Astronomy thinks that the folks dirtside may be overstating the case for an extended period of solar storms, but there is still a heightened possibility of additional CME’s, and until they actually happen, there’s no way to be sure which way they’ll be going.”

“Which means we’ll want to be prepared for the worst case. Both the loss of certain supplies from Earth that we can’t produce locally, and the possibility that sufficiently severe solar storms could affect local production.” Alice retrieved her tablet. “The greenhouse farms were built with sufficient shielding to stand an average-strength solar storm, but it’s still possible that being hit with an X-class CME could result in radiation levels that will negatively affect plant growth. Of course different plants have different levels of sensitivity to radiation, and domesticated plants tend to be more sensitive than their wild relatives, for the simple reason that we’ve compromised hardiness in search for more desirable characteristics for our tables.”

Jen gave her that smile that wasn’t quite bless your heart, but came close. “Oh, yes. I have raised a garden in my time, and I know all too well the relative hardiness of weeds and the plants you actually want.” She laughed. “At least we don’t have to worry about that up here. And as long as you’ve got a decent stockpile of seed against emergencies, we should be able to replant and get back to business soon enough. Unlike on Earth, where losing a crop at a key moment can mean losing the entire season’s production.”

She returned her attention to her computer, pulling up what looked like a database. “According to our records, right now we have sufficient supplies to provide minimum adequate nutrition for everyone in the settlement for two months. Of course that would mean some pretty bland and repetitive meals, and no treats. Everyone would get a little thinner, and I’d need to be careful to have enough variety that we don’t end up with appetite fatigue, but we’re not looking at a famine unless we completely lost all production for at least three months.”

Alice realized that she really hadn’t been keeping that close a watch on what was happening to food when it left her department. But then she had plenty on her plate already,, so it was easier to consider her job done when the harvest was delivered to Food and Nutrition’s processing and storage facilities.

At least they did have the advantage of an institutional culture that planned for anti-fragility. Just as mechanical systems were built with triple redundancies to make sure a single-point failure couldn’t become a catastrophe, supply systems were arranged with capacity for stockpiles, rather than being run just-in-time. From the beginning of long-term settlement of the Moon and in-situ resource utilization, everyone had known that a large community could not afford to be one problem away from running out of something vital. Of course it helped that they ran everything as closed to closed-cycle as possible, although there were always losses.

“OK, now let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of specific steps we’ll need to take to make sure that as much as possible of our food production capacity is protected. We’ll want to prioritize breeding stock and reserve seed supplies, but we need to plan for a variety of scenarios, best-case and worst-case.”