Come In, Collins

by Bill Patterson

  “I will not tolerate any harassment of these women. They have continued to perform their duties from the time their conditions became apparent, have informed me promptly, and would have continued to perform their duties except for the stress today's drill put on their bodies. If I find out that anyone has harassed them, that person will be sorry they were ever born. Questions? Yes, Ms. Huertas, I suspected you had one.”

  “Are you the father?”

  “No. I am faithful to my wife of thirty-four years, and will never give her cause to doubt me. Next.”

  Irma shouted the next question. “Is the father going to be punished? Is anyone?”

  McCrary stared at her as the room gradually grew quiet. Irma felt his gaze as the glare of a spotlight. She finally dropped her eyes.

  “The details of this incident, the people involved, the punishments, and everything else about it, are covered by so many overlapping privacy statutes that I felt that I had to secure recorded permissions from everyone involved before I could even do this limited announcement.

  “You have asked me to detail the personnel actions in this incident. Would you like me to open your personnel file in the same way? No? You have no right to this information—nobody here does. Please stop asking.

  “Are there any other questions that do not revolve around the identity of the fathers or personnel actions taken or not? Yes, Mr. Cranston?”

  In Sick Bay, Peter Brinkley sat up straight so quickly that he actually left the surface of the bed by a couple of centimeters.

  “Are we done here? I've got a lot of stuff to do.”

  “Possibly. Anyone else? Thank you for your attention. Carry on.” McCrary left the cafeteria.

  ***

  Peter smiled down at his two wives. “That was a class act by McCrary—'fathers'. The place would erupt if they knew the truth.”

  “Just get out of here before anyone suspects,” said Ashley.

  “Yes, dear,” he said, but not before planting a tender kiss on the lips of each woman.

  On his way back to Ops, he grew thoughtful. Bubba was trying to send him a signal. Of what? The man, as well as that other one, Travis, had avoided Peter and his wives ever since rescuing them on the day after The Event. Was this blackmail of some kind? Happenstance? Did he say something just to signal Travis? Maybe it was time to talk to both of them, see if there was trouble coming from their direction.

  ***

  Bubba was easy to track down—the man was a watch stander out on Mighty Thor. The only difficulty lay in finding a plausible reason to go out there. Travis was even more difficult to cut out of the herd. He was a dozer driver cutting the trench for Nifty. Peter figured it would be easier to brace Bubba. Besides, maybe he could get Bubba to tell Travis to lay low without Peter having to do it personally.

  Bubba was completing the offload of xenon-135 from the salt sparger to the core shielding when a knock sounded on the door to the control room. He hit the camera circuit. Peter Brinker? He hit the admit button. There was no way he could say no to the number three officer in the Collins.

  “How can I help you, sir?” asked Bubba. He was momentarily at a loss as to why the man would want to visit him.

  Peter just stared at him, not saying anything.

  “Oh! Yeah, that. Frankly, sir, I had quite forgotten all about it. So much happening in the meantime. Congratulations, perhaps. None of my business. Excuse me for a minute,” Bubba said as he looked at the gauges. “This is pretty ticklish work, sir. If I don't do this just right, Mighty Thor here will start shooting neutrons all over, and that would be bad.” Gus slowly edged the salt pump rate up while he also increased the Xe-135 flow.

  “Got to match neutron production with absorption. What's weird is the 135 will catch a neutron, then become almost transparent to them. But if it doesn't get a neutron in something like three hours, then it starts changing into cesium, and that sucks almost as bad as the neutron in the first place.” He looked intently at the integrating recorder, then locked in the autofeed.

  “There. Now it will keep for about an hour.” Bubba stood back up. He hated to be seated while someone else was standing. “I've said nothing about it, and I am fairly sure that Travis has also kept his trap shut. I'll make sure I look him up as soon as I am off-shift and make sure he does. Way I look at it, you've got your hands full as it is without worrying about us.”

  Peter took a breath, but Bubba interrupted. “No, sir. Don't say a thing. I know nothing, and I will continue to know nothing. Same goes with Travis. I guess you getting raked over the coals by McCrary is bad enough without having to worry about us Moondogs laying into you. Now, sir, I think you've been here long enough. I'll take care of Travis. In the meantime, I've got this load of xenon to neutralize. Thank'ee kindly.”

  When Peter left, Bubba shook his head. “They might be cute and all, but I can't see myself pinned down by one woman, let alone two!” He shook himself, made a note to look up Travis off-shift, and got back to neutralizing the xenon.

  Burroughs

  UNSOC Lunar Colony Michael Collins, February 2, 2083, 1459 EDT

  Donovan racked the microphone and thought. Was this worth rousing the rest of cruise-phase crew, or should he wait for the Commander to wake up? The Mars expedition was made up of nearly one hundred experts in every field of science known to man. Their mission was to travel to Mars, land, explore it until the planets realigned, then return to Earth.

  The Event changed all of that. They were three months on their way to the Red Planet when they watched in horror as the South Polar region of the Moon erupted in blue-white fire. They received some radiation, but their ships were superbly shielded and they didn't suffer a single shed hair. They heard the evacuation of the Chaffee and the sudden silencing of the Collins. Roque Zacarías signed out for the final time, but left the microphone on, and they could hear the cannonade of the Chaffee's destruction and mourned the loss of such a fine man.

  In the end, there was a sudden cessation of UNSOC control, and the United States, as the largest crew contributor, reluctantly agreed to reassemble the old NASA Deep Space Network to keep the link with the Expedition functioning.

  Mrs. vanDeHoog, UNESCO Director-General and supervisor of the disgraced Subraman Venderchanergee, was in nominal command, but had little to offer any of the people that UNSOC left marooned in space. She reluctantly allowed the United States to resume control of space operations.

  But there was so little to say. The main crew of the Expedition, divided into twin spacecraft, slept unknowing through the system-wide disaster. The cruise-phase crew, six crewmen plus a Captain on each ship, were all that were awake and aware.

  UNSOC had chosen them well. The loss of their brethren on both the Chaffee and the Collins were body blows, but they still had a mission to perform, and they would be damned if that mission was a failure. So, they soldiered on; every hour brought them that much further away from Mother Earth.

  ***

  The effect of the pregnancies on the morale of the crew was sudden, intense, and long-lasting. Production of all kinds was up, the crew seemed happier than they had in ages, and a betting pool was set up for the genders and birth orders of the two children. It was all in good fun, of course.

  Doctor Kumar released Ashley and Lori from Sick Bay and they returned to their jobs. Lori shyly acknowledged the spontaneous applause from her coworkers, whereas Ashley walked into Ops and announced, “Ashley Boardman is here. Let's get this over with.” She bowed during the applause, then cut it short. “That's enough, I've got work to do!” The raucous laughter was longer than the applause had been, but she smiled anyway.

  Inevitably, though, someone tried to ask her about the father. She stared at them for a full minute until they dropped their eyes downward. “Go back and tell your friends that the next person who asks me gets reported to McCrary for harassment. Deal?”

  Lori was a tad more direct, though less vocal. After the onlookers gasped at the question, Lori stared dire
ctly at the questioner and gave them the finger and a look of fury until they left. The rest of the audience laughed uproariously.

  They were celebrities wherever they went, with both men and women unnecessarily 'helping' them out. Holding a hatch open was just common courtesy, but to be constantly badgered to see if they needed a drink or a snack grew old fast. As usual, it was Ashley who grabbed the bull by the horns.

  “Attention! ATTENTION!” she shouted, banging her spoon on the table until the cafeteria grew quiet. “Thank you. I want to tell everyone here, and tell everyone else you can, that we're perfectly capable of getting our own drinks, or opening a hatch, or getting a snack, all on our own. We know you want to help, and we really do thank you for showing how much you care. But really, folks, we get this something like fifty times a day. Can you just nod to us, or say hi, and let it go at that? If we need help, don't worry, we'll ask. Deal?”

  General laughter and a round of applause accompanied her as she sat down. Lori smiled her thanks to Ashley.

  ***

  “The Expedition can't come home, of course,” said the controller at JPL. Gone were the familiar voices of Fred Palowicz, Gayatri Vedya, and Gus Blukofski, the former UNSOC controllers. JPL was very closed-mouthed about their fate, but McCrary gathered that they were stuck at the UN until all of the various investigations were concluded, a process that could take years.

  “The Expedition?” asked McCrary. “Let me guess—debris?”

  “Same stuff that keeps you stuck on the Moon,” said the controller. “You should see some of the ideas folks have come up with to get you back.”

  McCrary nodded. “I can imagine. Still, I wonder how welcome we'd be. That impactor caught us by surprise. We should have figured out some way of warning you before we set off a nuke.”

  “Most of the people affected are already back to normal. The eye is a remarkable thing.”

  “But not all,” said McCrary. Some of the stories had leaked up to the Moon. In them was an autopsy photograph of a college student who had the misfortune of looking through a high-powered telescope at exactly the wrong instant. The intense light had burrowed through the student's eyeball and into her brain, killing her instantly. The family was suing the UN and McCrary.

  “Well, there's that,” said the controller. “We're in, well, a ticklish situation.”

  “Let me guess, we're not under your control, and the UN is, to put it delicately, not in the space business anymore.”

  “Correct. However, there's still the need to coordinate operations. There are a lot of people, both governments and citizens, who are extremely worried about a nuclear Moon.”

  McCrary recoiled from the speaker as if it had called him something rude. “A what kind of Moon?”

  “Nuclear. As in bomb. Lots of folks are worried that you're going to fling something bangy down this way if we don't send you stuff.”

  McCrary was left scratching his head. “You are all crazy, you know.”

  “Yes, we are. I have to have a police escort just to get into the building. We're petitioning the university to set up an exclusion zone for us. They're now starting to blame us for birth defects because of the nuke.”

  “Let me guess—these are the same protestors who call folks skeptical of climate change 'deniers', right?” McCrary stared upward in thought. “Look, there's no way I can convince the Earth that we not only don't have more bombs, but that even if we did, there's no way to transport them down to the homeworld.”

  There was silence on the other end of the circuit. McCrary listened to the odd static patterns of interplanetary space. “Hello, JPL, are you there?” No answer.

  “Comms! What's going on with JPL?”

  “No idea, sir. They're not transmitting. There's not even a carrier wave.”

  McCrary racked his headphones and mic. “Let me know when comms are back,” he said. “I've got work to do elsewhere.”

  ***

  “Remember the name of that woman who accused you of being gay?” asked Donovan from the Mars Expedition.

  “Thank you for bringing that up,” said McCrary. “I had almost forgotten that incident. The fact that I did not want to make out with her had a lot to do with my being married for fifteen years and about zero to do with her alleged 'assets'. Besides, I find a woman's intelligence her most appealing characteristic, and that woman was sorely lacking.”

  “Yes, well, do you remember her name? Don't say it! Just put in her real name as the encryption seed. Signing off this channel, going to encrypted stream.”

  McCrary punched in the woman's name, and the voice channel came alive again. “Now,” said Donovan, “ask me something obscure that only both of us, and nobody else, will know.”

  McCrary thought. “What was inside that rubber Twinkie of yours?”

  “Perfect! Signing out now.”

  McCrary typed Spanish Fly into his console.

  “Testing, testing,” he called into it.

  “OK, now that we've embarrassed each other enough, let's do some business,” said Donovan.

  ***

  “This is Roger Smithson, head of the Mars Expedition. I should be speaking to Commander Lee and Commander McCrary. Am I correct?”

  “Roger, you old soak,” said Lee quietly. “Jeng here. I've got McCrary, and he swears that the line is encrypted all the way up to the little module that's sitting at the end of my bed. We're on headphones, so you can speak freely. How are you?”

  “Scared shitless, of course,” said Roger. “Although I'd never tell the crew that. We're in deep trouble, Jeng. We're headed out to a mission that we can never successfully complete.”

  “Coming home, you mean,” said McCrary.

  “Right the first time,” said Roger. “None of my awake guys have the faintest idea how to survive that shooting gallery in between the Earth and the Moon. Yet, we must get through that to get home.”

  “Maybe you can make a go of it on Mars,” said McCrary. “There's oxygen in the sands, you've got a reactor with you. You've even got a full seed catalog, so you won't get scurvy.”

  “Sure, for a couple of years. Don't kid us, McCrary, we know what a horror show Mars is. Stay on the surface for two years, and you're dead of radiation poisoning. No magnetosphere, remember? One good solar flare, and you'll see everyone's bones in the daytime.

  “Sunlight's like Earth only dimmer—we'll be lucky if we get half the energy out of our solar panels that the dumbest lug gets on Earth. You might hate the lunar night, but you get a full fourteen days of non-stop sunshine where you are. On Mars, we've got to struggle with weeks-long sandstorms. Don't jolly us along.”

  McCrary sat back, troubled.

  “Roger, Jeng here. What do you plan to do?”

  “We can't do anything with what we have. One thing I can't do, though, is wake up the crew. There's nowhere to put everyone, plus, without hydroponics, I'm not quite sure how we're going to make enough food for a couple of hundred folks.”

  “Um, can we help?” asked McCrary.

  McCrary felt the smile of Roger Smithson from millions of miles away. “Absolutely.”

  ***

  The next Sunrise Meeting was consumed with three topics: political fallout from the use of the nuclear weapon atop Sandy, communications with Earth, and the fate of the Mars Expedition.

  The meeting was easily the longest that they have ever had, lasting into the early afternoon. McCrary led the meeting, but it was Commander Lee on the video screen from Sick Bay that was the main draw. McCrary deferred to him at all times, only to have Lee lob all the non-simple problems his way. McCrary waited for the Commander to flag, but Lee managed to hold up through the entire meeting. Marcel and Irma questioned him closely, looking for some kind of coercion or drug effect.

  Lee finally had enough of it. “Tell me, Mr. Bossenhagen and Ms. Huertas, when was the last time that Chief McCrary did something that deprived you of your freedom without consulting either one of you?”

  They stood ther
e, silently, going over the events of the past eight months. “He hasn't, sir,” said Marcel.

  “But only because we kept challenging him!” said Irma. “If we let up for a minute, he'll have us all in striped pajamas.”

  Lee shook his head. Foolishly, for he gasped in sudden pain and raised his hand.

  “No, my dear crew. Chief McCrary really does not want to rule. And that includes administer. Why? He'd rather work with machines and physical problems. Those problems can be solved. Human problems rarely admit to resolution. But he's doing a fine job of command. That's how you can tell a good leader—they're usually the ones who don't like it, but do it anyway.

  “So, everyone, I'd like you to think about the Mars Expedition. Imagine you are one of the eight awake, and not the ninety-two who are asleep. How would you come home and ensure your survival until you land on Earth? McCrary will fill you in on everything they know. 'Hundreds of heads are better than eight,' said Commander Smithson, 'and I'd like a chance to tap the collective genius of your crew.'

  “I want to accommodate him, people. So, if you can, please lay aside your intra-crew differences for now, and think of how to help your fellow humans on the Expedition. Thank you.” He reached for a control and faded from the screen.

  McCrary cleared his throat. “I see no reason we can't reuse the suggestion queue just like we did a few months ago,” he said. “In light of the importance of this problem, I recommend a six-week suggestion period. As usual, I will not participate in any form with the queue, nor back any particular proposal.”