Tag: Bill Hearne

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Narrative

An Unpleasant Summons

Spruance Del Curtin had just finished breakfast and was intending to head over to Science to do some preparations before his teaching responsibility. As he headed down the escalator from the dining commons, his phone chimed incoming text.

Surprised, he reached for his phone, then realized the last thing he wanted was to be engrossed in reading when he reached the bottom of the escalator and needed to step off smoothly. Surely it was something that could wait the minute or so to make sure he didn’t fall. While it was true one didn’t fall nearly as hard here on the Moon as on Earth, falling onto a running escalator could still be a very dangerous thing.

Safely on a stationary surface again, Sprue pulled out his phone. To his astonishment, the message was from Colonel Hearne down in Flight Ops. My office, ASAP. I need to talk to you.

Sprue’s guts went cold. Why was the head of Flight Ops contacting him? Not to mention the choice of words, which suggested a bawling-out, not a conversation.

Which meant there was no telling how long he might be tied up. Better to give Training a heads-up, let them know he might be late.

He hadn’t even gotten to the inter-sector airlock before the response came: we have it under control.

Not exactly the most reassuring response right now. It suggested Colonel Hearne had gone to Deena ahead of time to arrange things.

By the time Sprue got to Innsmouth Sector and Flight Ops, he was sick with dread. At least Colonel Hearne wasn’t busy, and wasn’t the sort of person who kept people waiting as a power play.

The older man was brusque and direct. “Sit down.”

As soon as Sprue was seated, Colonel Hearne launched straight into business, without any small talk or other preliminaries. “Since you don’t seem to understand a polite request to stop nosing into matters that we have very good reasons not to want publicly discussed, Captain Waite asked me to make some things plain to you. Number one: we have a very good reason to keep specific numbers relating to the pandemic quiet. This is not just to thwart your curiosity for the pleasure of exercising authority. Right now, we are looking at the very real possibility that the diablovirus will keep spreading until it runs out of susceptible individuals. To put it in very plain terms, we’re talking about losing thirty to forty percent of the global population on Earth. Depending upon exactly what parts of the population those losses are concentrated in, that’s dangerously close to the level at which it becomes difficult to maintain a technological civilization. At the moment we have hope that there will be enough to rebuild.

“However, if these sorts of figures get out in the general population, or worse, a distorted version of them gets out, we have the very real possibility of a panic. Frightened people do irrational things, and that could very well include destroying the very things they will need to sustain and rebuild technological civilization on Earth. Or worse, lead to a panic in one or more lunar settlements, if enough of the population comes to believe that Earth is effectively lost.”

He paused, letting those words sink in. “Have you even considered that your determined efforts to gain access to this sort of information might have such consequences?”

Sprue swallowed hard against the lump forming in his throat. He’d never considered that this sort of information could be dangerous. “No, sir.”

“And that brings us to Number Two. We thought that by bringing you into a privileged position and allowing you to work with some of the data, you would come to an understanding of the significance of what you were working with. Since this clearly is not the case, we are going to have to take a second look at the responsibilities with which you are entrusted, and evaluate where we may need to reduce or remove them.

“In particular, your work as a DJ with Shepardsport Pirate Radio puts you in a position that enables you to present information to the general public. As a result, we have decided to remove you from your air shift until we see clear indications that you understand the importance of these restrictions. In the meantime, Payton Shaw will be covering your air shifts. Therefore, you will be taking over some of his responsibilities to compensate. Do you understand?”

Sprue’s guts clenched, making him feel nauseous. But there was no satisfactory answer except a meek and subdued, “Yes, sir.”

“Good. Then the third and final point should come as no surprise. Because we need to be confident that you are truly taking responsibility, and not just giving us surface obedience to game the system, you will be working under very close supervision during this period. Yes, it will involve some adjustments, but given the current situation, we cannot take any further chances on you until we are confident that you understand the importance of this situation.”

This is gonna suck, hard.

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Making Do

Getting the go-ahead to fabricate low-temperature bearings had proven easier than Ken had expected. After all, they were dealing with parts for landers, which meant all kinds of very technical FAA regulations. Quite honestly, he’d expected Reggie to balk hard, to say no way in hell was this project going through on his watch.

On the other hand, this was an emergency situation, and a lot of slack got cut when your back was against the wall. Although Ken had spent the Energy Wars stateside, overseeing maintenance operations at one or another airbase, he’d heard plenty of war stories from the guys who’d been in the sandbox. Guys who’d been downed in a hot landing zone and had to make emergency repairs with whatever they could cobble together — stuff that would put a plane out of spec if it had been done in a peacetime situation, let alone a civilian aircraft. But when the enemy was breathing down your neck, you did what it took to let you get back to friendly territory, and sorted things out afterward.

Up here the enemy wasn’t religious fanatics who believed God wanted them to kill infidels. The natural world could be far more relentless than any terrorist, and just as deadly. In normal times, specifications and procedures kept you safe. But in an emergency, blindly following procedures could become a case of following a rule straight over a cliff.

And Reggie was a combat veteran. He’d spent most of the Energy Wars flying off carriers, and he’d had all the training those guys got to prepare them for the possibility of being downed in enemy territory, of being captured and held prisoner, all things that required more than a cookbook approach.

Now that they were beginning the production process — he couldn’t really call it a line, because it was going to be a small-batch process — he needed to convince Bill Hearne down at Flight Ops to actually test their product. He’d been an astronaut for decades, plenty of time to grow set in his ways — but he was also the last commander of the Falcon, and keeping his crew alive until Nekrasov and the Baikal could rescue them had taken some incredible feats of improvisation.

As it turned out, Bill was already waiting for Ken when he arrived at Flight Ops. Yes, it had been a good idea to send all the documentation down for review ahead of time.

“You’ve got some pretty ambitious plans here, Ken. I know your guys do good work, but this isn’t exactly the thing you can spitball together with chewing gum and baling wire like we used to do the chiller in the milkhouse back on the farm. This stuff’s running a hell of a lot colder than any Freon setup.”

“True, but if we wait until we completely run out of spares, what do we do when half the lander fleet is grounded? We may not be making as many orbital runs to Luna Station these days, but we’re still making all those suborbital hops to the outlying settlements that don’t have their own greenhouse farms or manufacturing, or a whole laundry list of things that work a lot better at scale.”

When he got Bill’s agreement on that front, he pressed home his real ask. “So what we’ll do is set all the existing spare parts aside for the actual landers, and start testing the ones we’re manufacturing here on ground-based applications. Start with the stationary cryo-pumps. I know there are plenty around here. Then we start using them on the crawlers, since they have cryo-pumps in their fuel cell systems. If they hold up to those uses, we can start judiciously using them in the landers.”

“In which case I’ll have to find volunteers to test-fly every one that we put a non-standard low-temperature bearing in, before they can be re-certified for routine operations. Just like Slayton Field had to re-certify every goddamn lander after the cyber-attack.”

“Of course.” Ken had learned those requirements back when he was a second lieutenant overseeing maintenance back in his Air Force days. “Now we have a procedure to go by, and we can evaluate it as we proceed.”

Right now, even a small victory was a welcome one. And he had a bad feeling that the shortage of spare low-temperature bearings was just the first of many chokepoints that was coming down the pike.

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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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Thoughts and Implications

Constitution class seemed unusually subdued today. On the other hand, they were rapidly approaching the end of the course, at which point they had to take the test. So of course everyone would be paying close attention for a change.

Today Colonel Hearne was doing another of his “big picture” lessons, in which he pulled back from the minutia of articles and clauses and amendments to see how they all worked together. However, this one was a little different from the earlier ones because he was also trying to put the entire Constitution into the context of the Revolutionary War and the Framers’ concerns about putting too much power in the hands of any one person.

Cindy Margrave listened raptly, realizing that none of her American history classes back in Houston had drawn the connections between the colonists’ quarrel with King George III and the flaws of the Articles of Confederation. In retrospect it was obvious, once someone connected the dots, so why had none of her teachers ever done so?

As class wore on, she realized that Colonel Hearne was holding back. Although he was talking about the weaknesses and failure points of the Constitution, particularly as related to the Civil War and Watergate, he was very carefully avoiding the issues that had led up to the Sharp Wars and the Expulsions.

It’s not just the issues of human cloning and genetic engineering. If those were the real issue, he could just point out that the questions could’ve been resolved with an amendment any time after the revelations of the Lanakhidzist Revolution. And he’s talked about the issues of technological change as they relate to Constitutional law multiple times, especially when we were talking about the Twenty-fifth Amendment and its relationship to improvements in medical technology.

It must have something to do with President Flannigan that he doesn’t want to come out and say. Cindy recalled talks with her Uncle Carl, about a military officer’s obligations of respect to the Commander-in-Chief, and how it related to the peculiar situation that had obtained since the disastrous 2012 elections

So he has to walk around the edges, and trust our training in independent thinking to lead us to the conclusions he’s trying to point us toward. Presumably related to the way the Framers wouldn’t have been able to anticipate the disastrous 2012 elections, balanced against the dangers of specific language allowing for emergency powers, given how so many other countries have seen tyrants use them as vehicles for assuming absolute power.

Yes, she’d have to talk with Aunt Betty tonight. Unlike Uncle Carl, she was civil service, so she didn’t have the issue of not appearing to speak disrespectfully of the Commander-in-Chief. If she needed to say hard words about President Flannigan, she could.

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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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Damage Control

Given the ever-increasing precariousness of the situation, Reggie Waite had started having his various section chiefs check in with him on a daily basis. Nothing in-depth, just touching base on anything that had changed, but the last thing he wanted to have happen now was to get blindsided by something because the early signs were overlooked. He remembered too many times that sort of thing happened during the Energy Wars.

Hell, they even had reasonably good intel that a terrorist attack on a NASA facility was in the works. They were just so certain that it was going to be the Space Shuttle that was launching for a secret DOD satellite repair mission that no one stopped to think that an attack on Johnson would be just as disruptive to the mission as an attack on Kennedy.

Right now he was talking with Bill Hearne. Mostly about the situation at Schirrasburg, or at least as much as anyone could find out with the settlement completely quarantined, its spaceport shut down and even overland deliveries such as the Ice Train prohibited. But Bill was also in regular communication with family on the old home place, which provided a line of information on just what was happening on Earth.

“Of course you have to remember that Fred and the rest of the family are pretty much staying on their farms as much as they can. It’s not like they’re going into town and chatting up the clerk at the feed store who talks to the truckers who get the gossip on the CB or at the truck stops.”

“Completely understood.” The last Reggie had heard from his family, they were all hunkering down too. He just wished they could get some messages up here, but given Chris was career Air Force, contact with someone at odds with the Administration might not be a wise move. “And quite honestly, gossip and rumint can be as much trouble as benefit in uncertain times like this. I’m receiving multiple reports of wild rumors going through the settlement right now, and a number of the kids getting frightened, having nightmares, the whole works.”

Bill started to laugh, turned it into a cough. “I think you can count Flight Ops out on that front, Captain. With all the pilots isolated from the rest of the settlement population while they’re in, and under minimal-contact orders while they’re on missions, it pretty much cuts them off as a source of gossip.”

“True, but I’m thinking more on getting some ideas about what we can do to keep this stuff under control. I spent most of the Energy Wars either at the Academy, which was buttoned up tight for security reasons, or at sea, where shore leave was pretty damned rare for the same reason. But you were already an astronaut, so you would’ve seen more of the way rumors go through a civilian population.”

“It’s been a long time, and I was pretty busy with training when I wasn’t actually on a mission or doing support work for someone else’s mission. But I’ll talk to Alice and see what she can remember.”

“Thanks. Let me know tomorrow what you can come up with. We need to get this situation under control, and soon.”

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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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Ripples

At the receptionist’s desk, Cindy Margrave tried not to pay too much attention as Autumn Belfontaine walked Colonel Hearne to the door. It was a gesture of courtesy — he certainly knew how to get back out of the station offices by himself. But honor was due to the commander of the last flight of the Falcon, who’d kept the crippled orbiter’s crew alive until the Incomparable Nekrasov could rescue them with Baikal.

Right now they were just making small talk, pleasantries that offered no clue about why the chief of Flight Operations should need to talk to the station’s news director. Cindy caught something about University of Minnesota, from which both of them had graduated, albeit decades apart. Probably just a reminiscence of some feature of the campus that loomed large in both their memories.

It’s probably just as well he didn’t come up here during Spruance Del Curtain’s shift. Sprue’s the sort of guy who sees something like this as a challenge to get around social conventions to find out what’s gong on.

And he’d gotten in trouble over those antics more than once. It probably didn’t help that he tended to view himself as the smartest guy in the room, and figure he could find a way around restrictions. It was an attitude that had probably put the kibosh on any chance of his ever being selected for pilot training, and it was a wonder he hadn’t been kicked off the station staff.

Although he had been more subdued lately, ever since he started doing that project for Dr. Doorne. Which reminded Cindy that she had a project of her own to finish. The sales director wanted her to do a research project for him, and she still had a lot of work to do. With less than an hour left on her shift, she needed to buckle down and get focused.

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In the Shadow of Uncertainty

Autumn Belfontaine had not expected to get a visit from the head of Flight Operations. She knew that Bill Hearne had been a friend of her father’s, but her father had died before she was even born.

And there’s a lot of survivor guilt there. Colonel Hearne was commanding American Eagle during the NASA Massacre.

But here he was, visiting in person rather than just texting or e-mailing his questions. Autumn was getting the impression that it was a personal matter and he didn’t want records of it to be on any official NASA systems.

Which made her wish she could give him some better information. “Unfortunately, we’re not getting a whole lot of information either. A lot of the wire services have gone down, especially the Web-based ones. Even the AP and Reuters have been spotty, and I’m thinking they’ve lost a lot of their correspondents. Quite honestly, I’m getting better information from the websites of the various local radio and TV stations, especially if I’m trying to move beyond the big cities.”

That got her a nod. “Alice has been following the radio stations in the area she grew up, checking their farm reports to try to get an idea of what’s going on up there.”

Autumn recalled that Colonel Hearne’s wife had grown up on a wheat farm near Duluth. The age difference between them had imposed a distance that their both being Minnesotans and graduates of U of Minnesota couldn’t quite bridge. “I’d been following Radio K, at least until they switched to some kind of automated format after the university sent everyone home. Some of the on-air personalities have been updating their blogs, but even that’s gotten hit-and-miss.”

She paused, realized she was hesitating because what she wanted to say was a shift from reporting to editorializing. Even in a private communication like this, the distinction’s too deeply ingrained. “To be very honest, I’m concerned about just how spotty news coverage has become, and what it bodes for the future. Eventually the pandemic will have to burn itself out for the simple reason that it can no longer spread rapidly enough to sustain itself. But what will even be left by that point?”

“That’s what we’ve been thinking about too. So far NASA’s been able to hold itself together, but I’m hearing a lot of rumint from people I know down there that the cities have gotten pretty hard hit, and they’re concerned about the situation with critical infrastructure and manufacturing. I don’t know how familiar you are with industrial processes, but there are a lot of them that you can’t just turn off and back on like a light switch.”

“I covered some blackouts when I was still on Earth, so yes, I have some idea of what kinds of problems can happen when backup systems fail. Down there, they just don’t build in the redundancy we have up here, and it looks like it’s going to be biting a lot of people in the butt.” Autumn paused. “However, we’re speculating here, trying to extrapolate from way too little data. Which is a dangerous thing for news people to do.”

“Understood.” Bill Hearne pulled himself back to his feet. “Given those limitations, I won’t use up any more of your time. Thank you for letting me know what you do have.”

“And I’ll make sure to let you know if I get anything new.”