Tag: Rand Littleton

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Narrative

As Our Fears Take Shape

Right now Lou Corlin was counting himself lucky to actually have some study time before he needed to turn in for the night. He really didn’t like to have to decide between sleep and essential studying, unless he was dealing with a genuine emergency, given how sleep deprivation messed with good judgement in ways that caffeine couldn’t completely undo.

Thus he was a little annoyed when he heard someone tiptoeing up beside him, not quite sitting down in the sofa beside him, but standing right at the edge of it. Then he looked over to see Rand Littleton, looking very nervous, and squelched that annoyance.

“Hi, Rand, sit down.” Lou patted the cushion beside him. “What’s wrong?”

“How bad is it going to get? I mean, Eli’s saying that Schirrasburg is under a complete lockdown because someone there came down with the diablovirus.”

“Eli’s a Shep.” Lou quick scanned the module lounge, just in case any Sheps were hanging around to take offense. “You’ve got to keep that in mind when you listen to him bullshooting around.”

“Oh.” Rand lowered his gaze, looking very awkward. “So he’s just making stuff up?”

Put me on the spot. Given some things he’d heard at the station and down in IT, Lou didn’t want to dismiss the story as a complete fabrication. However, he was pretty sure it was not yet cleared for general consumption. “You know what they’ve been telling us about the dangers of spreading rumors. Even if I did know something, it wouldn’t be wise for me to go telling everyone about it.”

Even as he said that, he realized the specific rumor might not be the real issue. Rand was one of the kids who’d survived the ordeal in the lander. Although he would’ve been under deep sedation during most of the time he and the other kids had been trapped under the wreckage of old Luna Station, it had still left its scars. A heightened awareness of the slender margins of survival, an inability to relax and trust that tomorrow would actually come.

“And right now there’s not a lot we can do about whatever may be going on over at Schirrasburg. Let’s take a look at whatever you need to be studying right now. At least that’s something we have at least a little control over.

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Narrative

The Children’s Hour

The classroom was a clamor of children’s voices, fairly bouncing off every surface. Once again Spruance Del Curtin wondered how he’d managed to get roped into this particular duty.

He knew all too well why — the kids were supposed to be going to the observatory for a basic science class. And kids this young were going to need more than just one or even two adults to keep them in good order on the trip up and back. So as Dr. Doorne’s special protege, he’d gotten roped into the task — and he sure couldn’t very well refuse, not when he really needed to keep on her good side.

However, the observatory was a geodesic dome of moonglass — one of the few surface features of the settlement to be part of its pressurized volume. With the Sun in such an unsettled state, even the solar filters were rather flimsy protection from radiation, especially for young children who were still growing.

So they were going to have a planetarium lesson instead, in the biggest room the science department had. Except for one big problem — the projector was still somewhere in the Astronomy Department’s storage rooms, thanks to a miscommunication, probably related to the change of plans.

It would’ve been so much easier if the teacher had just sent him up to the departmental offices to retrieve it. He actually knew his way around the Astronomy Department, unlike Ms. Cartwright, who just had some general science background and had been assigned the class because she was good with kids.

So here he was, stuck minding a bunch of little kids who were bored out of their minds. Worse, he’d had to arrange for one of the other guys to cover his air shift, and he was really missing it right now.

Especially considering that he was having to do this job with Rand Littleton. That kid was such an apple-polisher, and everyone favored him because he was a survivor of the ordeal in the downed lander. Never mind that it had been how many years now since the destruction of the old Luna Station, those kids always got cut slack on everything.

And Rand had been “one of the little kids” back then. The biggest reason he’d gotten so much responsibility was that one of the geologists had made him her protege.

And I don’t dare complain too much about it because her husband’s one of my clone-brothers. Sprue still remembered how Doyle had dressed him down. No, he had no desire for a repetition, and just because the pilots were all quarantined down at Flight Ops for now didn’t mean they would be forever.

And we Sheps have long memories.

At least keeping the kids corralled didn’t leave much time for anything else, so he didn’t have to make conversation with Rand. And quite honestly, Rand was a whole lot better with kids than he was. Rand always had that knack for finding ways to amuse little kids.

And here came Ms. Cartwright, projector in hand. At least she had a good idea that Sprue would know how to set it up, so he didn’t have to sit there trying to keep the kids quiet while she fumbled her way through the process.

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Narrative

Of Linear and Geometric Growth

Even after all this time up here on the Moon, Spruance Del Curtin still found it difficult to get used to the idea that most of his instructors were not teachers in the way the ones back in Houston had been. Instead, they were people who happened to have sufficient background in a subject to teach it at the relevant level, whether or not they had any formal training in teaching.

Which was how he had a radio astronomer teaching his statistics class. Not that Dr. Doorne was a bad teacher — she certainly knew her stats, and was introducing the to professional-grade stats packages and real data — but it was sure clear that astronomy was the woman’s real interest. All it took to get the class off on a tangent was to have someone bring up one of her particular interests, especially the ones that had to do with signal processing.

He’d done it himself, a couple of times when the station was having weird difficulties that neither Engineering nor IT could hash out. As soon as he’d laid out the problem, that woman just ran with it, and damn if she wasn’t cute when she had a problem that captivated her. People talked about someone’s eyes lighting up when they got an idea, but her whole face took on this glow of excitement.

Today wasn’t going to be one of those days. She’d brought in a bunch of data sets from the rodent labs, passed out the USB sticks and told everyone to copy the data onto their laptops and proceeded to talk about exponential growth curves.

Sprue knew the theory — start with a single pair of mice and watch the population explode in a a few generations. Of course in the wild you never got anything like that except on isolated islands where they had no natural predators. But in the artificial environment of a laboratory, with complete safety and effectively limitless food, they could just keep breeding, and breeding, and breeding. And the data in front of him was bearing that out.

“However, it’s also important to remember that it is very difficult to distinguish between an exponential growth curve and the early parts of an S-curve without further data. Eventually, some forms of growth will reach a limit and level off.” Dr. Doorne looked around the room. “A population of rapidly reproducing animals will eventually reach the limits of even the most generous habitat, even if it is only because the researchers operating the laboratory take measures to limit their growth. What other forms of growth will start by looking like an exponential curve, and then level off into an S-curve?”

Trust a Chaffee to always be the first one with his hand up. Sprue still remembered taking intro to geology with one. The kid was practically the teacher’s pet within the first week of class.

“How about pyramid schemes and Ponzi schemes. Eventually they run out of suckers, for the simple reason that the human population was finite.”

Sprue was a bit taken aback. Usually that geneset was such a bunch of goody-two-shoes that you’d think they didn’t even know the concept of confidence games.

However, Dr. Doorne seemed to find it utterly unremarkable. “Who else can provide an example?”

This time Sprue made sure he got her nod. “The expansion of a virgin-field epidemic.”

Dr. Doorne’s eyes went wide. “Where did you hear about that?”

Sprue held his ground in the face of the implication that he had overstepped a boundary. “I do work at the radio station. A lot of stuff goes past the news desk.”

“That’s enough.” Dr. Doorne’s voice went hard, a tone Sprue had never heard her use. “Now, let’s turn our attention to the data sets in folder two.”

Make it definite, she knew something that wasn’t for general circulation, and did not like discovering that he was aware of it. Now the big question was whether she’d go complaining to Captain Waite too. Sprue didn’t think the big boss would be so easy-going a second time.