You can't get much out of them, Haddock thought. What they're giving now is about the maximum expected. It's foolish to hope for more. So we'll have to find out for ourselves. Not wait for the plague to come for him. Strange as it may seem, that possibility didn't seem impossible to him either.
And now he had three files on his desk: Henry Thunder, Savannah Blaze, Reagan Shadow. Two men and one woman. And the most horrifying was the woman's — the camera footage showed her slashing her left breast in an attempt to cut out her mammary gland, then stabbing her left thigh
near an artery. Thunder was fundamentally different from Shadow in that Shadow also pierced her own eye. And in the end, this satanic way of injuring themselves to death was one of the few facts that tied them all together — they all destroyed their left side with a sharp object in their right hand. All of them did it systematically and as if they felt no pain.
The first, Henry Thunder, did it more than five months ago, in his apartment, having a good dinner and watching a movie. The movie was a comedy, Twins, starring Arnold Schwarzenneger and Danny De Vito. After that, he slashed himself with a kitchen knife, finishing the job by sticking it in his neck. There was absolutely nothing to it. He was well regarded in the service and was even up for promotion.
The second, Savannah Blaze, killed herself on the job. She, like Shadow, was studying the blueprints for various models of nuclear reactors, on a mission to build back-up nuclear power plants in case the main ones failed. She hadn't been away from her desk for nearly an hour and a half before she'd started chopping herself up with the penknife that had been in her personal purse, and she hadn't been able to see anything that might have motivated her to do so, simply because it wasn't there. It was worth noting that she hadn't been able to forge something out of her chest with all her efforts. This suggested that the action was more spontaneous than deliberate — if she felt no pain, and her mind was lost, then the decision to do it must have succeeded, since she'd started it.
This peculiarity gave rise in Heddock's mind to the idea that all their actions of self-mutilation of their left side carried more symbolic than any practical meaning — they didn't want to do anything fundamental to their left side of the body other than torture it. And, apparently, the answer to everything lay in this.
The third, Reagan Shadow, merely repeated the actions of the previous ones: doing something calmly and casually, and then killing himself with a sharp object just as casually. The only difference was the pierced eye, which once again suggested that all this was just a prelude, a kind of demonstration before taking his own life. Apparently, the eye was as unimportant to Reagan as breasts are to Savannah. He probably could have left it alone, but by some random chance the lot fell on him.
Heddock put the files aside, leaned back in his chair, and looked around his office: although the office was clearly the largest of its kind on the entire station, and the panoramic window the bulkiest of any window installed anywhere, there was no luxury in his office. Absolutely nothing that could be called art or frills. Everything was strict and to the point. It was the elders who liked to make statues of pressed regolith or purple robes over their overalls. He didn't need any of that stuff
— it was just trinkets that could only attract children. Or fools like the Elders. The main thing is power, and now there is a process at the station, which is not controlled by this power at all.
Heddock rose and walked slowly to the glass: before his eyes stretched a view of the Sea of Moscow, which everyone called no other than the Atlantic Ocean. That it was the Sea of Moscow, one of the largest depressions on the surface of the dark side of the moon, he had learned a few weeks after he had learned that it was the moon at all. Not fast, he couldn't say, but given that time was irrelevant now, enough to consider that everything was working correctly.
The view was beautiful. He had grown so accustomed to his natural position as the shadow ruler of the station that he was already treating the surrounding areas as his property, and as he watched the surface, he had already outlined the boundaries of some new buildings that he was planning for the near future. And there would be separate routes to these constructions, where people would also work, follow his instructions and consider themselves to be under the control of the Council of Elders. In this way he can develop endlessly, and who knows, maybe he will be able to create a whole empire, occupying the entire space of the moon. And this work will be continued by his descendants….
By the way, I should have taken care of the offspring. He'd had a few fleeting liaisons that hadn't led to anything. And though he didn't often try to knock someone up, he had doubts that it might not work out. It had been twenty-four years since he'd started his new life. At that point, he'd certainly been in his thirties, if not forty. So now he was at least fifty. Might as well be sixty. Before you know it, nothing will be working between his legs…..
He got seriously flustered and walked back over to the desk. Then he pressed the call button. He wanted to see the one he thought was healthy enough to carry his child, Sierra Ravenwood. She looked to be in her forties, was now in charge of the administrative section, and was certain that Heddock had some very considerable influence over the Council of Elders. She had been informed of this in passing by Heddock himself as she hurried off to some meeting. "Don't worry, a word from me is enough to keep anyone from saying a word to you for any tardiness," Heddock had said then.
As soon as he heard her sweet voice call out to him, he thought at the same moment that maybe the problem with the pregnancy wasn't coming from him at all. He frankly hadn't cared much about these issues before, and from the materials he had (and no one else), he'd never probed the ground about the age of pregnancy. There is sex, orgasm leads to ejaculation, and that semen fertilizes the woman's egg. According to all the tests, Sierra had eggs. It worked for him, too. So it should have worked, but it didn't. Shouldn't we at least try someone else?
He had a number of very young girls working under him. Some of them were quite attractive. But strangely enough, he didn't want to change Sierra for someone else, especially since he didn't want to get a blowjob, which he liked especially from her. It felt to him as if he'd be trading her for someone else. And although he could definitely say that he didn't have any deep feelings for her, he certainly didn't want to lose her.
And the next thought that arose in his brain was that very few people got pregnant on the station at all. If only five thousand people woke up, there were now seven thousand, that is, only two thousand children. And this despite the fact that there were no prohibitions or restrictions on this yet.
Heddock had seen several reports from the United Nations that said that the Earth was overpopulated and that some countries were not controlling their birth rates, which meant that the problem was acute. Given that they had no contraceptives, which were used on Earth, it was logical to ask why the number of children born was so low. And Heddock was finally beginning to link those reasons to himself.
He's not the only one who can't do it. Maybe it's Sierra. Maybe it's him. But it's not as simple a process as one might think. And it's strange that he hasn't thought about it before. Very strange to himself…