April 8: It's Always Something

by Mackey Chandler

  "I'd think your hand has to be back to full strength by now," April commented.

  Gunny brought the blue ball up, like Hamlet examining Yorick's skull. "I want to keep my grip at its best in both hands. It's useful in my line of work. Anyway, it's relaxing."

  April frowned..."Wasn't it a red ball recently? Just a few days ago? What did you do, wear the other one out?"

  Gunny looked embarrassed for a fleeting moment. A rarity as he had no shame. "The blue is the next grade of resistance. I wasn't paying attention and stuck my thumb through the old red one."

  April tried to imagine how much force that took, and decided to drop it. Gunny was already embarrassed so it was only polite to drop it. It was nice that he didn't evade her with a 'little' lie.

  "You didn't get dessert," April observed. It wasn't a question, but Gunny knew that was her intent.

  "I picked up a few kilos. I know... I needed to," He added, before April could say it. He'd lost weight and stopped working out while they'd been on short rations. That was really bad for a security professional. "But I fear the last couple kilos weren't muscle," Gunny said, laying his hand on a flat stomach that looked hard and fit to April's eye. He also didn't have as many gene mods as April. The faster metabolism being one of them. The ones a security professional needed came first. But that was for him to decide and very personal. They weren't cheap either, and the ones that didn't involve aging...well, you could get them later on easy enough if you could spare the money and time.

  "I could stand to work out a little more," April admitted, rather than argue with him.

  "Yes, you could," Gunny agreed. "In your spare time," he added to soften it.

  They laughed together at that often shared phrase.

  Chapter 2

  Barak, coming off work from what they called the cabbage mines, regarded the posted work schedule with some annoyance. They had him set for twelve off and then a twelve hour shift to the rover garage. Alice was set for an eight hour shift to Central environmental, starting two hours after his start time, and Deloris started a lift to Home when Barak was getting off. That was all switched around from before, and they hadn't gotten a full off day together since they'd started. And there was no telling what things would be like in a week. Everything could easily be changed tomorrow. Every time they tried to create a reasonable schedule either something broke, or there was a delay getting supplies, or someone got sick. They ended up waving at each other in passing or needing to be carefully quiet in the apartment when one of them needed to sleep. There wasn't much of anywhere to go to if they left their apartment to avoid making noise. On the other hand, a couple times Barak had been there all alone and gone to the cafeteria just to be around some people and noise. He didn't care to be isolated for long at all.

  Neither his foreman Geraldo nor his boss Mo were being jerks about it, they went from crisis to crisis and if anything worked crazier hours than Barak or his roomies. He had to admit neither he nor the girls had been asked to report for work unsafe from lack of sleep.

  When the three of them returned from the second ice ball mission to Jupiter last year they'd expected to have a nice payout waiting for them. The plan had been for them to take a vacation all together before worrying about finding further employment. Their pay contract however, was in USNA dollars. When they'd left in 2087 that had been fine. But on their return there was all sorts of chaos in the banking systems. Several countries had gone to depreciating currencies, even the European group, and USNA dollars had been devalued. They found themselves near broke instead of flush.

  It wasn't the orderly devaluation like Gunny had described to them about going through when he was Barak's age. That had been ten to one and everything had been adjusted all at the same time. The numbers in your accounts had dropped 90% and there was a thirty day window to trade old currency for new. But almost all debt got devalued by the same amount.

  Just a few folks got caught in legal exclusions that left them holding full debts with no relief. Of course those few people were ruined. Most of them were people who were so wealthy there wasn't much public sympathy for them. By some coincidence they tended to be political enemies of the people in power. Gunny, back then, had been a lower rank sailor, who rarely had much money left by the next payday anyway. That made it a lot easier.

  Other people had found themselves with way too much cash to explain. There was a sudden but short term opportunity for a lot of poor people to launder money for cash holding friends. A lot of money in foreign countries never got converted, which quite a few people said was intended all along.

  The current devaluation was less orderly. The official rate dropped daily, sometimes by the hour at the end. The official exchange rates were defended, but when the black market rate and the central bank rate got too far apart, money just stopped flowing. Other countries had fought and lost this sort of a contest many times over the years, but to the United States of North America it was not just damaging, it was embarrassing. They'd thought themselves beyond such market forces.

  All three of them could have gotten other jobs. Alice as an environmental tech for Mitsubishi itself, a very desirable employer, but even though they offered a generous cash housing allowance there was simply no housing to be had on Home. That's probably why the position was still open. Alice was less than thrilled at the idea of sleeping on the deck in some stranger's living room every evening.

  Delores could have had an orbit to orbit pilot's position for FedEx. She'd have had to take a room on New Las Vegas when she docked there, or a hot slot on ISSII or The Turnip – the French hab. If she got stuck at Home with a layover the FedEx crews were reportedly sleeping on their shuttles for now. They got the per diem for a hot slot paid still, but there was rarely one open. They simply strung a tube hammock in the shuttle, and made use of one of the few public restrooms or a friend's shower to clean up.

  Jeff Singh offered Barak employment, but not on Home. Jeff already had a family in his apartment - in fact the wife and children of Barak's section boss, Mo Pennington. His wife was as resistant to moving to the moon as she had been to coming up from Earth. Barak wasn't holding his breath waiting to see her here so Jeff would regain his apartment. Jeff was living in his business office with another employee, and no room there for Barak either. The attraction of the moon job was not only that they had generous living cubic to offer at low cost, but that they also had a labor shortage and Deloris and Alice could easily find employment at decent pay too. Right now being broke together sounded better than scattering to the winds with no funds and no friends at hand they could count on. Being effectively broke, living pay to pay alone, invited disaster from the slightest mishap until they had funds built up again. Best to be safe.

  Barak likely could have found work on Home from someone besides Jeff. His mother had kept his room unchanged so he had a place to stay. Indeed when he got back his mother had been off to a lunar colony doing some commissioned art work, and the door had still been set to open to his palm. Even his personal items he'd left behind were still in the drawers and storage bins. His mother had a generous apartment, but enough income she had no desire to ruin her privacy by taking in roomers or subdividing the cubic like so many others were doing.

  Barak stayed at his old home ten days, and had his shipmates off the Yuki-onna with him as his guests. Finding his mom off on a commission, he hadn't asked her for permission to have house guests. When she announced her work on the moon was wrapping up and she'd be home in a few days he had to do something. There was no way he wanted to ask her to allow his friends to stay. Even one would have been presumptuous, two were impossible.

  He hadn't wanted to return to his mother's home and his old room in any case. He didn't really want to be the stereotypical young man still living at home. He got along fine with his mom, but he was enjoying his new independence. If he stayed he was pretty sure his mom would try to treat him more like an adult, she was pleased with his willingness to assert adult status, but it
was her cubic and her rules. He would feel stifled, and he really doubted she would've been indifferent to his having two young ladies as roommates. The fact they were both slightly older than him just aggravated it. She might assume they were taking advantage of his youth although neither were that much older.

  When he broke the news to them that his mom was returning Barak was relieved to find they both immediately understood the problem without a painfully detailed explanation. Neither asked why they couldn't stay or why that created a problem. It was one of the things he liked about them, that they were more experienced than him, and maybe a little smarter.

  Delores demonstrated that perceptiveness by cutting right to the heart of the matter.

  "OK, we're agreed it's much smarter and safer to stay together for support. If one of us gets sick or our new job doesn't work out, two can carry one for a few weeks on our immediate income until they recover. It looks like the moon is the only choice that lets us do that right now. I'm willing to go there if that's where we can stay together. I have no desire to travel as a permanent thing with no home base. Maybe later when we have a bankroll and the economy is a little better we can all find better opportunities. Are you in, Alice?"

  "I'm in," Alice agreed, and so they'd come to Central.

  Jeff wanted him to continue formulating hiring guides and crew structures for very long voyages. He was enthused at Barak's idea of researching the pertinent history of sailing crews in that age of exploration. Barak wasn't a quiet studious sort by nature, for research to occupy his full time. Jeff also wanted him to share his time helping other people for vacuum suit work and construction in tunnels and cubic. It would be a shame to waste his expertise and he'd get enough hours to keep his suit ratings current.

  But Barak's experience so far was that there was no trouble getting enough hours to stay certified. Rather, they seemed to need him to help out on pretty much a full time basis. To the point he wasn't making any progress on Jeff's project. It wasn't a problem yet, because Jeff didn't have a starship sitting waiting on a crew. He was candid that he didn't even have a workable drive or theory to make one yet, though it was a goal. If Jeff got unhappy about the lack of progress Barak had his time sheets archived. One look at them would explain what he'd been doing with all his hours.

  The truth was Barak was enjoying trying a variety of new things. He'd filled in with rover drivers as their backup driver until they reported him qualified as a primary driver. He'd been a helper to the boring machine mechanics, and helped service an airlock when that specialist needed a second set of hands. He'd aided in planting trays of onions, radishes and cabbages in clean room conditions, when he'd never before had any idea how one started crops. He'd even drawn a liter of aging whiskey one day to forward to Home for testing, and tasted it himself out of curiosity. It was awful.

  Barak's shipmates were experiencing less diversion from their primary jobs, but they still occasionally found themselves assigned to other duties. Alice worked on environmental systems, but also got called to work on the sealed systems for agriculture, which maintained very different conditions than inhabited cubic. Indeed, some of the growing tunnels had to be entered in suits or at least with a breathing mask. She even had occasion to service a shuttle that had a catastrophic environmental failure while sitting on their field loading freight.

  Deloris too had been diverted to fly other routes than the lunar shuttle runs she expected. On several occasions she had been loaned out to other carriers, and on one occasion she'd diverted the landing shuttle from a Home delivery to an orbit to orbit job. The cargo had been hot enough not to worry about the extra expense of using a landing shuttle in a different configuration.

  They all had to be flexible, but discussing it after every major disruption and crisis, they all concluded it was still a better decision than splitting up and going their own ways. They were being paid in Solars and most of their living expenses were covered or cheap. If they'd stayed on Home the majority of their income would have gone to rent. None of them even thought of owning their own housing instead of shared. That was an impossible dream for the indefinite future.

  * * *

  "Stuffed grape leaves, and Syrian rice?" April exclaimed. "I know you've gotten back to lifting a lot of common goods, but I'm surprised to see these even though they aren't very bulky. I'm still waiting for Ruby to get some big bell peppers to stuff. She does those so well I really miss them."

  "Good guess," Jeff allowed, "but those are zucchini leaves from the moon. You have to catch them early before they get tough, but they work just fine. The chopped stalks bulk out soups and I understand they even sneak a little bit of them in lasagna."

  "I didn't know anything but the squash was edible," April said. It didn't seem to put her off them.

  "We're finding out all sorts of edible plants, or parts of them, are wasted on Earth. But if you search for ethnic food recipes and really old cook books you find out the whole plant was often used before food was mass produced and centrally processed. We're not going back to wasting so much," Jeff promised. "If anything we will develop varieties that have better leaves and stalks as well as the fruit. The same with a lot of other things besides zukes. Seeing all the secondary products, I don't think it is going to be as many years as I previously thought, until we have rabbits and chickens, maybe even pigs."

  "Pigs stink," April said, wrinkling her nose up.

  "So do people," Jeff sort of agreed, "but we manage."

  For some reason April found that hilarious.

  * * *

  Dear Mr. Bowman,

  I'm replying to your expression of interest to me about job opportunities in your bank account message form. I've read your brief resume and checked with your references. Pending a face to face and a medical, you are exactly the sort of hire we'd like. As you mentioned, the problem is getting a lift to orbit. We are not providing transportation from our very limited lift capacity. We have one small Earth landing shuttle in operation and it is badly backlogged.

  I am aware some people have had success lifting from the Canary Islands. This would require traveling to Spain and securing a ticket there or on the islands themselves. There's an informal bidding process and it isn't assured of success or a set price. Europe is still in some disarray from the flu, but the Canaries have avoided the worst of it due to deliberate isolation.

  The other possibility is to contact your previous workmates and see if anyone will confide in you a plan to cease employment. If they quit without announcing their intent before departing for an Earth side visit or vacation they will be issued a return voucher. The travel vouchers are a bearer license and always have been, mostly because they are not redeemable for cash from Mitsubishi. There is however an informal market in them. You might be able to arrange to purchase one from the retiree. That imposes a small burden on Mitsubishi, but they are aware of this custom, and choose to allow this to continue as a perk. They have first call for seats on their own shuttles and trades seats with other lifting agencies on Earth. It will not leave them short needed personnel.

  If you can arrange a return I will offer you an interview and cover your medical exam. The clinic on Home will be told to take you as a walk in at my expense any time you are passing through to the moon. If I am not on Home at that time or on the moon when you arrive, a video interview is entirely acceptable once it can be conducted through our own net without any Earth relay.

  Be prepared to purchase transportation to Central quickly upon arriving at Home as accommodations are very difficult to obtain irrespective of price.

  If for any reason we can't come to an agreement I can steer you to other employment on the moon, however I can't guarantee anything for Home. Even my own project will involve extensive preparation on the moon before we create our own habitation near Home.

  Thank you for your interest. I await hearing from you.

  Sincerely, Jeffery Singh

  So...no guarantee of a job. Come take a medical and interview,
and we'll see. That was less than he'd hoped for but a whole lot more than he had before. But there were a couple other ways to get a lift voucher, of which Singh might not be aware. Some fellows took their leave and voucher but never boarded their last transfer to return to Earth. The down leg was cheaper than a lift, but just relatively.

  Most beam dogs wanting to do that arranged to transfer through New Las Vegas and cut their journey short there. Enough did it that standby passengers hoping for a discounted seat at final boarding were a common sight dockside. There were pleasures to be had on other habs, but NLV had the gambling and rowdy night life most sought. They also gained a couple days for fun and relaxation instead of spending it in transit. For most, doing the same things they'd have been doing on Earth, albeit for a much higher cost. But they got paid well and most of them were young risk takers. They'd blow their money in a glorious week and worry about making more on their next tour.

  Some sold their voucher on NLV before returning to Home. Especially if they lost badly in the casinos and didn't want to go home dead broke. Some hung on to it as a form of savings that they couldn't cash out too easily on a whim. They appreciated in value as lift costs rose. It never occurred to most that they might eventually decline in value. A few even sent the voucher to Earth for a loved one to come visit them, and then bought a cash return ticket. They never used it for the cheaper down leg even though you could. Or at least they never had before. Kurt suspected there was still a surplus of descending seats.