Tag: Bill Hearne

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Narrative

A Touch of Home

Bill Hearne had just finished dropping off the two terabyte drives full of transportation data at the Astronomy Department office and was heading back to his office in Flight Operations when his phone chimed incoming text. He pulled it out and was astonished to find a text from his brother Frank on the lock screen.

Are you where you can talk?

I’m on the way back to my office. What’s going on?

We’ve been pretty much isolated for the last several weeks. Word from Madison is essential travel only, minimize contact with persons outside your household while making necessary trips. I don’t think I’ve even spoken to the feed truck or milk truck drivers when they do show up, so I’m not getting even that gossip.

Hardly surprising, from everything Bill had been hearing of late. Although that was getting more and more spotty, since his pilots were under similar restrictions. As much as possible, they were supposed to stay in their spacecraft and let the robots pick up any cargo. Since all radio circuits were monitored and recorded, it did put a damper on the sort of scuttlebutt that pilots engaged in while visiting other settlements or Luna Station.

So you’re wondering what I’m hearing about the rest of the three worlds.

I was hoping you’d know something. All I know is what we see on the news, and a lot of it feels pretty canned. Out here we just don’t have the bandwidth to stream Internet radio, or I’d tune in to your station.

Bill could appreciate that. When he was a kid growing up, the old home place was still on a party line. You always had to carefully pick up the phone and check to see if anyone else was on before you started dialing. His sister Kate had gotten in trouble a couple of times, getting home from school and being so eager to start calling all her friends that she didn’t notice one of the neighbors was already talking and just started dialing.

They’d gone to private lines some time after he graduated college, while he was on his first tour of duty. He’d gotten back to the States and came home on leave to discover the change the hard way. He’d needed to call one of the neighbors — he didn’t even remember why — and had automatically held down the flashhook while dialing, the way you had to on a party line, only to discover it wouldn’t go through.

Even after the Internet became a Thing for civilians, it had taken over a decade before the nearest dialup ISP number was a local call. Not that he was going to hook up any Air Force or NASA-issued laptop to an unsecured line, but being able to e-mail his family would’ve made keeping in touch a lot easier during the Energy Wars, at least while he wasn’t flying secret military missions like the one he’d been commanding the day of the NASA Massacre.

I don’t know if being able to stream our broadcasts would give you all that much more information than you’re getting on TV. Bill considered just how much he wanted to tell his brother. With everything in such a fragile state, the wrong information, or even just something out of context, could be worse than nothing. Especially considering that Frank needed to focus on keeping the family farms running, it wouldn’t do to go spilling his own concerns. Right now we’re pretty limited in our sources, or so the news director’s said.

Got it. Take care up there, big brother.

Will do. He put his phone back in his pocket and continued on his way. Right now neither of them could do anything to help the other’s situation, so perhaps it was best that they didn’t have much in the way of details. Enough that they each knew the other was reasonably all right.

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Narrative

A Worrisome Situation

After her conversation with Dr. Doorne about statistics and metrics, Betty Margrave was feeling a lot less reassured about the present situation. Which was why she had decided it was time to talk to Bill Hearne.

When she’d first contacted him, she was thinking in terms of meeting him in his office down at Flight Operations. However, he was concerned about holding a routine consultation down there. Yes, there was the concern about infectuous agents, whether on an object that had not been properly sterilized or by someone who had contact with an infected person. But there was also the problem of Flight Operations being somewhat in disarray right now, what with all the pilots having to be quarantined down here instead of going home to their families.

There had been a moment of awkwardness, given that Betty was married to a pilot-astronaut who was currently sitting down there in the BOQ. Sure, they could FaceTime each other, but they could do it when he was in any spaceport all over the Moon.

But Betty wasn’t going to make an issue of it. Bill was only able to go home to Alice every night right now because he’d reached mandatory retirement age for pilots, and had taken over the top job in Flight Ops so that Colonel Carlyle could be freed up to fly full-time again instead of squeezing in a minimum of flight time among ground duties.

So here they were in the Safety and Security conference room, which had been set up specifically so S&S personnel could meet with people who were not cleared to deal with private information. In many ways going the other way would’ve been easier for the reason that Flight Ops very rarely dealt with material that could not be generally disseminated, and what little they did have (some classified military projects and the occasional medical issue) could easily be sequestered from general meeting spaces.

They had been talking mostly about spacelift, and how both the raw numbers and the distribution of spaceflights had changed since the beginning of the diablovirus pandemic. Somehow the subject had drifted to transportation in general, and how much it was changing. Betty knew that the cruise ships and casual airline travel had been shut down almost as soon as it became clear that they were dealing with something deadly. She’d also heard anecdotal reports about varying levels of restriction on personal mobility, from “stay at home orders” that were on the level of polite requests to blockades and arrests, even one story of a person being shot for breaking quarantine.

Where had that been? Bill averred that he’d heard it, but couldn’t recall exactly where. He wanted to say Germany, but both of them agreed that it was unwise to let past history do their thinking for them, especially in the absence of solid facts. For all they knew, it was a hypothetical that got turned into a friend-of-a-friend story courtesy of social media.

But by the time they were finished, he had agreed that it was time to pull together as much transportation data they could find and see what Dr. Doorne’s number-crunchers could make of it.

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Narrative

Battening the Hatches

Spruance Del Curtin was winding up the day’s work for Dr. Doorne. Now that he knew what the data represented, and why certain types of data tended to move in tandem, what he was seeing was very worrisome.

If this goes on, what will even be left? Already some countries were no longer reporting data, and were having to be dropped from the analysis. Most of them were small countries in Africa, but there were some in South America and in Asia.

Others were hanging on in spite of taking a beating. The US was a big country, with lots of depth of field to absorb blows, but Japan and even Israel remained functional, albeit struggling under the weight of enormous losses.

Sprue recalled his conversation with Cindy Margrave — when had that been? — about Colonel Hearne’s discussion in class about trust, and about how levels of trust were so critical in determining how well a society would function, particularly when under strain. Of course the colonel was recalling the Energy Wars — although he was already a veteran astronaut by that time, he knew more than a few people who’d served in the Middle East during that time — but current events were certainly playing out that argument in real time.

Just as he was doing the final checks on the data, Dr. Doorne walked in. “Statistics class is canceled for today. I just got word that Engineering and IT are beginning a special effort to increase the hardening on our electronics in the upper levels against a worst-case solar storm.”

Not surprising when one considered she held an advanced degree in electrical engineering as well as astronomy — one of the big reasons she was up here, rather than down on Earth. “Do you really think we’ll have a storm bad enough to do that kind of damage?”

“It’s hard to say. However, we are clearly moving into a historic solar minimum, and there is strong evidence both from history and from studies of other G-class stars of similar age in the galactic neighborhood that the incidence of these sorts of events actually increase during these periods. There’s a lot of speculation about stellar dynamo magnetodynamics, but to put it in layman’s terms, we think that sunspots actually serve to relieve the strain, rather like small earthquakes on a fault line.”

Sprue recalled some things that Juss Forsythe and Spencer Dawes had said about studying in California. “And if there aren’t any for a long time, when the fault does move, it’s a big one.”

“Exactly. Although we have a much better grasp of the mechanics involved in earthquakes, for the simple reason that seismologists have a lot of faults to study, and we astronomers have only one Sun. Until recently, we simply didn’t have the technology to study other stars at the level of detail we needed to even make educated guesses at how their internal dynamics compared to that of our own.”

It sounded very much like she was about to launch into a story of the state of astronomy when she was working on her PhD. Sprue didn’t need to be told to know the technology she was talking about would be the radio and optical telescopes right here on Farside.

Not to mention that he couldn’t linger here. “Um, Doc, I’ve only got an hour to get down to the dining commons and grab lunch, and then get to the station and start my air shift.”

“Right, of course. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He could hear the unspoken assuming we don’t have further schedule changes as the situation develops. And given that his work with Engineering was now having him liaison with IT, there was a good probability he’d be roped into this task too.

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Document

A Note from Home

From: Fred Hearne <fthearne@sweetwaterfarms.com>

To: Bill Hearne <wrhearne@nasa.gov>

Thanks for the note. Alice has a right to be worried about the farm situation.

So far we’re doing fairly well. The boys are doing most of the farming these days, them and their kids, especially now that the schools are all closed down. It seems weird that most of the grandkids are the age we were when we started doing a man’s work around this old place. Of course that was back in the days when it was just the old home place, not six different farms and five thousand head of cattle, plus row crops and fodder.

The milk truck has been hit and miss, and we’ve had to dump milk as often as it gets picked up. But Janice figured out how to rig a home pasteurizer, so at least we’re able to salvage some of that milk. That’s a good thing, because the dairy case at the store is empty more often than not.

However, we have adequate fodder for the herd, although concentrates could get a little tight if the feed store doesn’t get deliveries. I’m glad Dad and Grandpa always insisted on keeping the silos and the old barns with the big haymows.

A few years ago, Dick McCall switched to the new style of dairy barns and contracting to have hay and silage trucked in every week. It let him run more cows on the same acreage. Now he’s looking at having to put his whole herd down if he can’t get fresh supplies. Not something a herdsman wants to do, but the alternative is slow starvation, and you just don’t do that to an animal.

We’ve agreed with him that, if the worst comes, we’ll buy his breeding stock, with the understanding that we’ll sell it back to him when he gets back on his feet. Bob’s uncertain about it, says it feels shady, but the lawyer says it’s legal, and Dick’s helped us through some rough patches.

As far as the sick itself, we’ve been lucky. But then we’re pretty isolated up here, and as soon as things started going bad, stores went to having delivery drivers drop off product without any contact, so that eliminates one channel of infection from the city folks. I’m hearing that Madison and Milwaukee are a complete disaster area, and the governor’s up at his summer residence up in Green Bay. We see him on TV, giving his daily briefings, but for us it’s all pretty abstract compared to the land and the crops and the cattle.

Sometimes I feel so helpless with all this going on. You were always the strong one of us, the smart one, the resourceful one. There are days when I wish you could’ve come back up here when you had to retire from flying. But then I think how at least you’re safe up there, and I’ll go out and look up at the Moon and think that maybe you’re looking back down at me. I know that’s silly, that you’re over there on the Far Side, but it’s still a comfort to know that one branch of our family is off this rock.

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Narrative

The Farm Report

Bill Hearne got home to find his wife hunched over a tablet, face pale and drawn. He sat down beside her. “What’s wrong, Alice?”

“The new USDA Farm Report just came in, and I don’t know which is worse, the statistical data or the verbal reports.” Alice tilted the tablet to let him see the columns of numbers, although he didn’t have enough context to really appreciate them.

Still, he made a show of skimming over them before admitting his own ignorance. “I’m not really all that current on agricultural matters, sweetheart. As busy as my own work keeps me these days…” He shook his head. “Although I thought this plague only affects humans.”

“Bill, you and I were both raised on farms. We know just what it takes to bring a crop in, to keep livestock.”

Now there was a truth. He’d been raised on a dairy farm north of Madison, while Alice had grown up on a wheat farm not far from Duluth. But while both of them had loved the wide-open country of their childhood, neither had been over-fond of the back-breaking work of farming, the white-knuckle vagaries of weather, and had sought careers that took them elsewhere: himself into the Air Force and then NASA, Alice into the life sciences and agronomy.

“Now consider what happens when a lot of the labor force starts falling sick. Crops don’t get planted or harvested, and worse, livestock isn’t getting taken care of. Sure, it’s a lot more automated than it was when we were kids growing up, going out every morning before breakfast to do our chores and still getting to school on time. But it still takes someone with a loader to fill up those automatic feeders, and if everyone on the farm is laid out flat with illness, what happens when those feeders run empty?”

Alice wasn’t a total stranger to livestock, even before she became Shepardsport’s Chief of Agriculture and unofficial county agent to all the outlying settlements with Zubrin hobby farms. Although her dad and uncle had raised wheat for sale, they’d always had a pig or two and a coop of chickens for the table. But it was a far cry from five hundred head of Holsteins waiting for their twice-daily milkings and concentrates feedings.

“That’s not good. I remember some winters we’d get snowed in so bad the milk truck couldn’t get out to us .We’d have to dump milk so we could keep milking. Otherwise the cows’d go dry on us.”

“Which means there are going to be whole herds of cattle all going dry at once. And that’s assuming they have access to pasture, like on your dad’s farm. A lot of the big dairy farms these days keep their cows inside and provide them with hay all the time. Even if they’re running robotic loaders, it’s only a matter of time before those things get wedged from one thing or another. If nobody’s around to reboot them, what happens then?”

She paused to let it sink in. “And then there’s the hog farms. I’ve got a report here from one of the big ones in Iowa. Ten thousand head of hogs, all in confinement buildings. Or there were when this started. By the time someone got out there, more than half the herd was dead of starvation. They’re not even sure how many died, because the stronger ones ate the weaker ones.”

Bill could believe it. He’d heard some horror stories when he was growing up, of neighbors savaged by an aggressive or hungry hog. And he’d hunted razorbacks with Braden Maitland, back in Texas before the Expulsions. “They’ll probably have to wipe that whole herd out. There’s no way it’ll be safe to try to fatten the survivors back up and try to take them to a slaughterhouse.”

“They might not have any choice. They may not have anything to feed them. Heck, from some of the things I’m reading, we may be looking at serious food shortages in the grocery stores.” She looked straight at him. “Not just like back in the Energy Wars, when you couldn’t always get fresh fruits from Chile in the winter. I’m talking the shelves being barren, without even the basics. And there’s not going to be a damned thing we can do about it up here. Sure, we’ve solved the problems we had right after the Expulsions, when our population doubled, and doubled again. But even with a surplus, it’s not going to be nearly enough to make up for all the food that’s been lost dirtside.”

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Narrative

The Watcher at the Window

The guinea pig habitats were quiet this early in the morning. Payton Shaw moved slowly and carefully in the half-light which was supposed to simulate early morning. Guinea pigs seemed to do better when the diurnal cycle imitated the slow increase and decrease of light at dawn and dusk, rather than the lights simply coming on and turning off.

There was a trick to checking the automatic feeders and waterers without having to shine a light directly on the animals and disrupting the regulation of their circadian rhythms and activity cycles. This was the third time this week that Agriculture had reported problems with the automatics, and both Alice Murchison and Ken Redmond were getting fed up.

Especially with everything that’s going on, right now it’s going to be just about impossible to get spare parts. Which means that either we have to machine our own replacements, or we have to kludge together some other solution.

Payton recalled Colonel Hearne’s remarks about logistics. Just what had he meant that day, down by the Wall of Honor?

Over the last several days, Payton had done some discreet inquiries, always careful to mix them in with more innocuous searches in order to obscure any pattern that might attract attention. He did know that the port facility was having trouble getting certain items in, especially certain biologicals for Medlab that they were having difficulty producing up here.

Which could be a real problem if we ran into a major medical crisis. He recalled Colonel Hearne’s comments about Johnson Space Center having trouble staffing even their critical operations. Since then, Payton had also heard that Japan had been forced to shut down most of their Earthside space operations and quarantine both Edo Settlement and their lunar ferry because of a lapse of biosecurity on the part of one of the nations they provided transport for.

Who can I talk to, that might actually know something, but won’t think I’m nosing into places I don’t belong? Payton recalled that his ur-brother had had some film confiscated and classified top secret after his Mercury mission, apparently because he’d unwittingly photographed some super-secret military installations. And when he’d asked President Johnson, he’d been told in no uncertain terms that he should ask no further questions.

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Narrative

A Matter of Trust

Cindy Margrave hadn’t wanted to leave her sister to go home alone, but for reasons known only to the Department of Training, she’d been stuck with Constitution class right after supper. And given that Constitution class was mandatory for getting one’s high school diploma, and it was invariably taught by one of the senior pilots, there could be no question of skipping it, or even being tardy.

Captain Waite taught it a lot of the time, but this term Colonel Hearne had drawn that teaching responsibility. However, just because he wasn’t family didn’t mean he wouldn’t notice her absence. He’d shown the class more than once that age had by no means dulled his perceptions — or his response times. Cindy still remembered the time he’d caught Eli Mallory playing a game in class by hiding his phone behind his laptop.

As the most senior pilot-astronaut in Shepardsport — he was already a veteran astronaut who’d commanded important missions when Reginald Waite was still at Annapolis — he possessed an unofficial authority in the pilot community such that no one would try to gainsay him. Even Captain Waite deferred to him.

The room was about half full by the time Cindy arrived. She took a seat and pulled out her laptop to review her notes from last session. Behind her, Eli was trying to hit on one of the other girls in the class. From the sound of it, he wasn’t getting much traction.

Colonel Hearne arrived exactly at the top of the hour, as precise as a DJ signing on and beginning an air shift. The moment he walked through the door, the buzz of conversation ceased and everyone turned their attention to him.

“Good evening, everyone. Tonight we’re going to do things a little differently. Up until now, we’ve been discussing the Constitution article by article, section by section. However, it’s come to my attention that we can end up losing sight of the whole amidst the minutia. Not seeing the forest for the trees, as the old saying goes.”

Cindy could feel the unease like a palpable thing around her. Why would he suddenly decide to depart from the normal course progression? Although Constitution class didn’t have a mandatory course structure like certain critical safety courses — she remembered when Uncle Carl had to re-up his oxygen delivery certification for EVA, and it had a syllabus that was mandated by the Federal government — the teacher still needed to cover the necessary material to ensure everyone could pass the test, and that was mandated, albeit by the state of Texas, since for legal purposes all off-Earth US facilities were treated as if they were a part of Johnson Space Center in Houston.

But there was no time to wonder, because Colonel Hearne was already cuing up a video on the big monitor at the front of the classroom. It looked like a lot of news footage — Cindy had already seen some of it just walking past the newsroom during her work shift this morning, especially the one of the people swarming a semi and literally tearing the trailer apart to get the pallets of food within, climbing over each other to grab a package of crackers. But there were also a lot of clips of people waiting calmly in lines that stretched as far as the eye could see, or helping one another rebuild a structure damaged in a storm. Most were non-descript enough settings that it was impossible to tell where or when they were happening in the absence of well-known landmarks, although she did see kanji and kata on some signs that placed one clip in Japan, and the Hangul on another sign placed that clip in Korea.

And then it was over, and Colonel Hearne was looking directly at them. “It’s said that people show their true faces when they’re under pressure. You’ve just seen how different cultures react to severe stress, what is often termed a breaking strain. Today we are going to talk about why this is, and how it relates to why the system of government set out in the US Constitution has worked so well for the American people, but does not necessarily transfer to other countries.”

“First, I want to introduce you to the concept of social trust.”

Where is he going with this one? Cindy was listening so closely that she no longer had any time to worry about her sister, or her sister’s friend down on Earth who hadn’t re-established connection after the Outage had been resolved.

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Narrative

Remembrances

The formal entrance to Shepardsport was quiet today. Not surprising given the current situation, but Payton Shaw wasn’t used to having such complete privacy for his annual observance. Of course there wasn’t complete silence — no shirtsleeve environment on the Moon was ever completely silent, although the various fans and other devices to keep the air breathable could be made extremely quiet.

On the other hand, the place was now clean, with nothing to distract from the significance of this place. Payton remembered when he first arrived up here, when it was still stacked with boxes and bins unless there were a formal ceremony. Now the floor remained clear and polished at all times, the squid emblem of Shepardsport on display for all to see.

Payton approached the Wall of Honor, the three slabs of polished basalt flanked by the US and NASA flags, which was the real focal point of the room. In another place and time, the fallen might be honored by elaborate monuments with sculptures of marble and bronze. Here there was nothing but columns of names engraved in stone, a memorial that reinforced the gravity of what was remembered here in the spartan severity of its presentation.

Often people would touch the names of friends or family members who had given their lives in the pursuit of spaceflight. Although the lunar basalt was regularly shined, Payton could see a few fingerprints, especially on particularly famous names.

However, the name he was looking for was relatively recent. Payton knelt to look more closely at it — his clone-brother, Gavin Etlund.

Sometimes it seemed like yesterday — the growing tension, the horrible row in the dining commons and Gavin racing out after his girlfriend, pleading with her not to do anything rash. Other times it seemed like another lifetime, standing vigil outside Medlab as Dr. Thuc desperately tried to save Gavin’s life, to stabilize him enough that he could survive being transported up to Gagarinsk, where Colonel Grigorenko had arranged for him to receive regeneration.

Gavin was honored here, but only by name. One simply did not speak of the young woman whose life he’d tried to save. Never mind that it was pretty well agreed that Clarissa Munroe had had a bad case of undiagnosed Earth Separation Anxiety Disorder, and that her desperation led her to believe that if she just screwed up badly enough, she could be sent back home, never mind the Writ of Expulsion against her. Her actions had endangered not only herself and Gavin, but potentially the entire settlement, and as a result no sympathy toward her could be tolerated, lest it appear to excuse her actions.

It was a harsh damnato memoria, but uncomfortable as Payton was about it, he knew better than try to buck it. Up here, the margins of survival were too thin.

As he rose, Payton realized he was not alone. He turned to face the gray-haired man with the craggy good looks of Deke Slayton, the “forgotten” Mercury astronaut.

Payton’s mind raced with questions he dared not air in this sacred space. Colonel Hearne? What’re you doing here?

Bill Hearne just gave Payton a stern look, an unmistakable Wait. I want to talk to you.

Payton gave him a polite nod and retreated to the corridor while the older man paid his own respects. He’d come all too close to having his name on that wall himself: the rescue of the crew of the Falcon had been a close-run thing, still talked about in awed tones three decades later.

The longer Payton waited, the more he wondered just what Bill Hearne wanted with him. Was he in trouble? After all, getting down here meant going through the port facilities, and that meant being seen by the pilot-astronauts. And Bill Hearne had been the one to lay down the law that terrible night, using his authority as the last commander of the Falcon.

On the other hand, the name Hearne was looking at was clearly much higher on the wall. Maybe one of his friends who’d died in the NASA Massacre, back in the Energy Wars? He’d been commanding American Eagle that day, doing repairs on a spy satellite, and it had always bothered him that he was above it all while terrorists were rampaging through Johnson Space Center, shooting up offices and murdering astronauts and support staff.

Finally Hearne completed whatever personal memorial he needed to perform and walked back out to join Payton in the corridor. “I’m rather surprised to see you down here tonight, Mr. Shaw. I thought you had quite a bit of work to do these days.”

Payton’s gut twisted in ill-ease. What was with the formal address? And why the indirection?

On the other hand, if he were in trouble, the last thing he wanted to do right now was say or do anything that could look defensive. Keep on his guard, but maintain the appearance that he was taking the greeting and question at face value, as politeness, not accusation.

He chose his words with care, hoping that it wouldn’t make him look deceitful. “I do, sir, but today I needed to honor someone’s memory.”

Hearne nodded, a curt movement of the chin up, then down. “We may soon have a lot more memories to honor.”

Something’s seriously wrong here. Payton studied Col. Hearne’s expression, seeking any hint of what was going on. He decided to take a risk, based on some things Autumn Belfontaine had said at the recent all-hands staff meeting at the station. “It’s pretty bad down there, isn’t it?”

“NASA’s trying to keep it quiet, but that damn bug’s gotten into Johnson, and I’m hearing scuttlebutt that they’re having trouble keeping critical operations staffed.”

Payton considered that information. Why would someone so senior be sharing it with someone as lowly as himself? Might it be a test, to see whether Payton could exercise discretion with a choice bit of RUMINT? “That’s not good.” He spoke those three words with deliberate care, hoping it would convey that he understood both the gravity of the situation being described and the significance of being given the information.

“No, it’s not. You work logistics, so I’ll leave the full implications as an exercise for your edification.”

There was a finality in those words that made it clear the conversation was at a close. Make it definite, this was some kind of test — and Payton had absolutely no idea what.

“Uh, thanks, sir.” Payton hoped he sounded reasonably enthusiastic about being handed this puzzle. He certainly didn’t feel like it.

Conversation completed, Col. Hearne made a sharp turn back to the pilot-astronauts’ offices, leaving Payton to make his own way back to Dunwich Sector and his apartment.

Something’s going on, and I need to find out what, without letting it get noised about that I know just how bad things are getting dirtside.

Damn. He almost wished that Col. Hearne had given his ears a blistering about Clarissa Munroe.