Nikolai put away his coffee cup and leaned back in the chair. He had made one of the rooms next to the communication-center to his own private office. Sure, it went against the idea that they would have no private spheres on the colony, besides the housing modules. But the situation was a little different now, and no one had objected when he presented the proposal during the last meeting with the board. To cope with the difficult task of ruling an entire planet, you have to be able to have some privacy sometimes, especially when this damn headache strikes, he thought and slowly massaged his temples with his fingertips. I’ll have to make sure to get to the infirmary room later today and see if André has some medication that can alleviate it a bit. He obviously understood that the headache was a result of far too much work and far too little sleep. But what could he do? Everybody else worked like hell to make the colony operational and, as the colony’s supreme leader, he obviously had to work twice as hard. There was no other choice, as he saw it.
Nikolai sighed heavily, reached for the laptop, placed it in his lap and put his feet on the desk. He had to convene the board members to yet another meeting. They had to go through the guidelines and rules that would apply in the colony and it was important to get these done before the first spaceship arrived. It had now been almost six months since the disaster and the more time that had passed since it happened, the more obvious it had become how incredibly vulnerable they were after all.
Even though it was officially assumed that the colony would be completely self-sufficient, it wasn’t really true in practice. No one had expected them to be totally isolated from Earth. Besides the most basic problems regarding food and energy, they would also run out of consumables such as medicines and clothes. And not to mention all the damn components that were constantly needed to be replaced in order for solar panels, nuclear power plants, heat supply, air purification and computers to function.
Just everything in the colony was controlled by computers. What would they do when the computers stopped working? Manufacture new? It was impossible. So, when these spare parts ran out, they were more or less fucked. Could they maybe try to keep the colony going with some sort of Stone Age technology? Not likely. But on the other hand, what would they do? Somehow, they had to solve the problems they encountered. There was no other choice if they were to survive.
Well, these problems lay far into the future. There were several problems that they had to solve right now, otherwise it didn’t matter whether the computers worked or not.
One of the most imminent problems was that they only had one functioning greenhouse. The second greenhouse was almost operational, but the question was if they would ever be able to complete it? Probably not. They never received many of the necessary components, as they were intended to be shipped with the last spaceships. But these ships never made it to the colony, and now they didn’t have essential components such as heat lamps, fans and irrigation devices.
The only good thing about the fact that only two spaceships would arrive to the colony, was that they would have fewer mouths to feed. Only two ships made an addition to the population of just over three hundred people. It gave a total population of about five hundred and fifty people. Would they be able to support such a population with only one greenhouse? Yes, probably. But they would have no margins whatsoever if something unforeseen happened. And if it was something he had learned over the years; it was just that. Something unexpected almost always happened.
If they were to survive, they had to prepare for the worst and build up food stocks for harsh times, so to speak. At the moment they had a well filled food stock, as the greenhouse so far overproduced in relation to the population. But that would change quickly. When everyone was in place, it would be difficult to store any food at all.
Due to that, he was now making a draft for a regulatory framework for the colony. To a large extent it was about rules regarding food. The idea was that everyone would be allocated exactly the number of calories that were needed based on age, gender and work tasks. Those who had a physically demanding work would of course need more calories. Men would need more calories compared to women and adults more than children. It was actually quite obvious. But there were also other areas that needed to be regulated. The board had concluded that extremely strict rules were needed regarding everything that had to do with the greenhouse. In order not to risk anything, it was necessary that no unauthorized persons had access to it. He had discussed it with Chen many times and they had both agreed to give as few people as possible access to it.
They had even considered placing guards outside the facility. But it was perhaps a bit too extreme? He had to think about it. The fact that they had to have guards outside the food stores was at least an obvious measure to avoid theft. When he thought about it, it was probably best to make everything of value inaccessible to the common citizens.
No medicines, electrical components or other equipment could be used without first getting a clearance from the top manager in each area. Which in the end meant that the board was given full control over virtually everything that had to do with the colony's assets. It would certainly be a lot of complaints, especially from the newcomers as they were hardly used to such strict rules. But what could he do? Everything had to be controlled if they would have a chance of survival. With such limited assets on such a small surface, there was no other way to go.
Nikolai reached for his cup and took a sip of the now lukewarm coffee. This taste will soon be like a fading dream, he thought bitterly, and took another sip. Even if they introduced hard rationing, the stocks of coffee, tea and chocolate would soon run out. Chen had jokingly suggested that perhaps only the board would have access to these coveted things. That we actually should have something extra for the heavy burden that the board assignment entailed. Such a proposal would obviously not be particularly popular, but at the same time there was actually a point with it. Why would the population get used to drinking coffee and eating chocolate for maybe eight months and then one day never be able to do it again? Maybe it was best that they got used to the new tough conditions right away? Yes, he would actually think about it. Although not morally right, maybe he should overlook moral values for the good of the…
His thoughts were suddenly interrupted by someone knocking at the door.
"Come in, it’s open!" he shouted, while quickly removing his feet from the desk.
Elvira who worked in the communication-center entered and said with a nervous smile on her face, "Hi boss. Excuse me for disturbing, but I thought you might want to check this out."
"Okay, what’s it about?" He said annoyed. "As you see, I’m a bit busy right now. Can’t you discuss the matter with John or Ali instead?"
It felt like everyone asked for his opinion for the smallest things nowadays, and he didn’t want to waste his time and energy on something that someone else could solve. However, Elvira didn’t back down.
"I don’t know if it can wait. I have already talked to John and Ali and they were the ones who thought I should come and get you. It’s about the lunar-base and the space-wheel."
"Okay Elvira," Nikolai sighed. "Just give me a few minutes."
Elvira disappeared and Nikolai began to put away his things.
Damn, I must get a hold of myself, he thought. I start to groan and bark at everyone at the slightest hardship. Lack of sleep, blasting headaches and ten thousand things that needed to be done is devastating to my patience.
Nikolai sighed. Well, I don’t care if they think I’m moody, only they do what I tell them, he thought while locking the computer in the safe. Then he buttoned the top button of his shirt and slightly adjusted his tie. He had, since the disaster occurred, decided to wear his uniform all the time. Even though the uniform was more uncomfortable compared to the soft working clothes, it gave an impression of respect and power.
He walked up to the small mirror by the door and looked at himself. Sure, he looked impeccable with his well-cut dark hair and clean-shaven face. But the dark shadows under his eyes revealed him. I have to see if I can find something that can hide these, otherwise people will start to think that I can’t handle the pressure.
He scratched his chin. Even though he had shaved this morning, the beard stump had already begun to penetrate. Maybe I should grow myself a full beard, he thought and smiled a bit. But that would soon not be a choice, as they eventually would run out of razor blades anyway. He came to think of his grandfather who had a large beard and recalled that he always thought he looked so kind, almost like Santa Claus. He tried to imagine how he would look like in a full beard and immediately started to laugh.
"No, I don’t think so!" he said out loud. "I simply have to solve this thing with the razors."
Then he took a deep breath, straightened his screen cap and rushed out into the corridor.
*
When he arrived at the communication-center, he found Elvira, John and Ali sitting around one of the screens at the far end of the room. Nikolai noted that they froze slightly as soon as they noticed his presence.
John immediately turned to him and said in a servile tone, "Hi boss! Sorry to interrupt you. But we thought you might want to get the latest information about the lunar base and the space wheel. You always want to get important information as soon as possible, right?"
Nikolai answered in a calm voice, "Yes, you’re absolutely right about that John."
And then he walked up to them and put his hand on Elvira's shoulder.
"Elvira, I apologize if I sounded a bit annoyed before, I just have a lot on my mind nowadays as you know."
"I am okay boss, I understand."
Nikolai noticed how Elvira's shoulders dropped slightly after his apology. A few kind words and everything was fine again, he thought happily and continued.
"Okay, what was so important it couldn’t wait?"
Ali pushed back his chair a bit and then turned to Nikolai.
"As you know, both the lunar base and the space wheel have had major problems in the past months. As for the lunar base we knew from the beginning that they were doomed. And now it seems that our worst fears have come true, since we haven’t heard anything from them in over a week. It was probably just what we could expect, as they have been without food for over a month now. If they are not dead yet, they are probably so weak that they hardly can stand up on their feet, so we will unfortunately not hear from them anymore."
Ali sighed heavily, and waited for some sort of reaction from Nikolai, but since he didn’t say anything, he continued a bit hesitant.
"Horrible fate, starving to death... Poor bastards... Well, anyway… The people on the space wheel seemed to have better prerequisites to survive, as they had some sort of functioning plan to produce food. You know, they started growing crops on every available area and introduced hard food rationing. And it looked rather promising at first. But a few weeks ago, we started to receive messages that made us a bit worried that something maybe was wrong. It was no longer Gascon who performed the transmissions, instead different people showed up every time. And no one wanted to answer our questions about Gascon’s disappearance."
Nikolai froze when he heard Gascon’s name. Gascon, who had the same position as himself, but on the space wheel, was one of the few people he considered as a friend. They had come to know each other as fresh students at the Nairobi Space Center, and he had never felt threatened by Gascon’s somewhat cynical humor and his easy-going manner. It was as if he knew from the beginning that Gascon was no threat to him, and they had been close friends all the way throughout the five-year long education. When they parted, they decided that they would stay in touch, and even though it was a long time ago that they had met in person, they always kept each other updated on the latest news in each other's worlds. Gascon was of course the only person who should handle the transmissions to them, and now he seemed to be out of play or maybe even dead.
"Okay Ali. You should have told me about this right away," he said and tried not to raise his voice, "what else do you know?"
Ali continued now noticeably nervous.
"It is better that you watch the latest transmission yourself Nikolai, then you won’t miss anything. It’s a bit hard for me to determine what information you consider as relevant."
Yes, you’re absolutely right about that, Ali, Nikolai thought as he fetched a chair and sat down in front of the screen.
"Turn it on!"
"It arrived just an hour ago," Ali mumbled.
He turned it on, then magnified the video to full-screen-mode, and then backed away with his chair so Nikolai could see properly.
A rather young man appeared on the screen. He looked a bit stressed and Nikolai noted that he had a wound on his cheek that was partly hidden by his black shaggy beard. The man looked nervously over his shoulders a few times and then began to speak with a quick and slightly stressed voice:
"Hello Mars! Basir Yadav speaking. Here is a quick update about our current situation. We may have been a bit vague on previous transmissions, but our situation has been, to say the least, chaotic the last few weeks. I will try to summarize it as best as I can… As soon as the disaster was a fact and we understood that we were left to our fate here on the 'wheel' we worked our asses off to somehow survive. Yes, you know of course what I’m talking about. We have, just like you, tried to maximize the output of our crops and control the utilization of our scarce resources. But we haven’t really had the same good conditions for large-scale cultivation as you over there on Mars, and everyone knew that we wouldn’t have a chance in the long run. Or maybe not everyone. Gascon and his gang insisted that…"
He paused and looked back over his shoulder where several people were passing by. He exchanged some quick inaudible words with them and then turned back and continued in the same stressed voice as before:
"Sorry about that… Well, Gascon and his followers insisted that we should continue to fight to the end in this damn 'wheel'. They meant that we, after all, had the greatest chance of surviving up here. But more and more people advocated a different plan... And what plan was that, you might wonder?"
He tried on a half-hearted smile and paused as if waiting for an answer, then continued:
"Earth! The plan is of course to go back to Earth," he said, with a big grin that showed his dirty teeth.
"You probably think we completely lost our minds. That no one would choose to voluntary go down to a possible inferno of war, starvation, disease and death. And sure, we haven't discovered any signs of human life since the catastrophe, but how bad can it be down there? Everything can't be dead? And we have now seen some positive changes in the conditions down there, as the heavy dark clouds that have been covering the planet for months now seem to have disappeared. Maybe you can live there now? At least that's what most of us think, or at least hope. So, our plan is to take our chance and fill the rescue capsules with people and bring along as much food as we can... But as you can figure out, Gascon and his followers were against this idea, which led to a very unpleasant situation. It got a bit messy so to speak… We had to persuade them that our plan was the only rational plan. But many of them were not so easily persuaded and unfortunately…"
He stroked his hand gently over the wound on his cheek and then continued in a lower tone, almost as if he was speaking to himself.
"Yes, you understand of course. It was an inevitable consequence of the whole situation. In fact, I don’t know how we could have done it differently ... Yes, I know... it sounds absurd, but Gascon didn’t want to listen... Why didn’t he just swallow his pride? He could have saved this situation from totally getting out of control…"
He was interrupted again by some people in the background and this time Nikolai could hear him shout back to them.
"Yes, yes, I will hurry! Just give me a minute or two to finish this recording."
He turned to the camera again and continued:
"Anyway… There is nothing to do about it now. As you can see in the background, we are quite busy. We are filling up the rescue capsules with food and other necessities and the idea is that we will return to our dear old mother earth within six hours or something. She may not be in the best shape and maybe we make a fatal mistake going down there, but we would rather take our chance back on Earth than starve to death up here…"
He sighed and looked noticeably relieved.
"Okay, that's all. Now you know what we are going to do. We choose to go back to Earth and hopefully it’s the right decision. We hope, of course, the best for you and I'm pretty sure you're going to manage better than we did. So... I don’t know what more to say… good luck and may God be with you, or something like that... bye, bye..."
Basir bent forward and reached for a button and stopped the recording. It was completely silent in the room. No one dared to meet Nikolai's eyes and finally he said in a harsh low voice.
"Okay, and you thought you could wait to inform me about this? There are several messages coming in over the last few weeks that they are in trouble over there, and you chose to not inform me!?"
From somewhere deep inside of him a rage was building up. He tried to control himself, but it was impossible to hold it back and he shouted.
"How the hell could you withhold this information from me?! I don’t get it! Have you completely lost your minds?"
He stared at them with black eyes.
"Well, don’t just sit there and look like a bunch of imbeciles. Answer me!"
None of them seemed willing to speak. Elvira looked like she was going to cry, and Ali's face was completely white while he was staring down at the floor.
Finally, John said with a trembling voice, "You're so busy, boss. Working long hours to make the colony work. We didn’t want to disturb you with things that had nothing to do with us. After all, it was impossible for us to know if you would regard these first messages as high priority information."
"You should have informed me!" Nikolai hissed.
"Yes, you are of course right. But I don’t see how it could have changed anything. We can’t help them, and their situation cannot possibly affect us, right?"
John smiled nervously and Nikolai had to hold back the impulse to knock out his teeth. He couldn't think clearly and just wanted to get away from the whole situation. If he stayed, the risk of losing control was high, and he couldn’t afford that. He rose quickly from the chair, turned around and walked out of the room without a word.
Those fucking idiots, he thought, as he walked through the corridor with quick steps. How the hell am I supposed to be able to get anything done when half the population on this planet behaves like they are mentally retarded.
When he arrived at his office he immediately sank into the chair in front of his desk. His thoughts spun back and forth, and he played out different scenarios that may have happened to his only real friend. He didn’t want to think about it, but he couldn’t push away the thoughts. In one moment, he imagined how an aggressive mob more or less tore Gascon to pieces, and then in the next moment, he imagined how his enemies sent him out through the air lock to suffocate in the vacuum of space. It was horrifying scenes, and he hoped he was wrong and that Gascon got a quick merciful death.
He was feeling dizzy and quickly got up to his feet. It felt like something was blocking his throat. He tried to fill his lungs, but it felt like he was breathing in a vacuum. He quickly eased the tie, unbuttoned the top buttons of the shirt and started gasping with short quick breaths. After a while, it felt a little better and he began to wander back and forth in the middle of the room. Somewhere deep inside he knew John was right. After all, there was nothing that they could have done to influence the situation on the space-wheel. They were two worlds forever separated from each other. But why had he become so angry then?
Or was he really angry?
He took a few deep breaths and walked up to the mirror and stared into his dark eyes. It wasn’t an angry man who stared back at him. It was a terrified man, and as soon as he realized it, he decided what he had to do. This would never happen on his planet. He would never share Gascon's terrible fate and he would do everything in his power to prevent it. And as soon as he understood what needed to be done, the anxiety eased. He picked up the laptop, settled down at the desk again, and began almost aggressively hammering the keys as he wrote the headline: Terra Nova. 03-30-2064. Laws, guidelines and regulations. First edition.