“President Magsaysay, since you ask the question so bluntly, I will answer it bluntly: What are our chances of survival using our current supply of foodstuffs? The answer is none. Zero. No chance whatsoever. It is a simple calculation—anybody can see it.”
He stopped and stared around at the faces stunned into silence. His blue eyes looked very cold. Magsaysay struggled to his feet and opened his mouth to speak, but Sandovaal waved him into silence.
“Dobo, display the data. Show them.”
Dobo touched the controls. A set of graphs appeared in the giant holotank. The curves rotated, then the window zoomed in on a chart labeled ASSETS—CURRENT CROP PRODUCTION.
Dr. Sandovaal spoke over a growing murmur in the crowd.
“The blue line is our current population. The red curve is our crop surplus, decreasing as we consume more than we produce.” He waited a beat, then continued. “As you can see, these two curves intersect at a point not three months in the future. That is when we start getting hungry. Shortly after that, I expect fighting and widespread killing. From that point, we cannot calculate accurately how long the survivors can last—it depends on how many there are after the riots.”
A shout rang out from the back. The hall’s sergeant-at-arms scuffled with the person and ejected him. Ramis felt a surge of despair ripple through the gathered people. After watching the War on Earth, this was too much in one day. Ramis no longer felt proud to think of the part his parents had had in Sandovaal’s work. Dobo looked up, frowning at Sandovaal’s attitude.
Magsaysay looked beaten. He held up his hands. His low voice barely projected over the rising din. “Quiet! Please allow Dr. Sandovaal to continue.” When the sounds ceased, the dato turned to his chief scientist. “Luis, are your numbers correct?”
“The calculations are simple—you will find no errors. But I was talking about something much more important when you interrupted me. Several years ago we succeeded in producing a highly efficient feed substitute.
“When you tasked me this morning with projecting the Aguinaldo’s food supply, you placed ridiculous restrictions on what we are capable of doing. You said ‘using our current supply of foodstuff and allowed for nothing else.’ That is nonsense. The answer is staring you in the face. Maybe a few hunger pangs will improve your intellect.” He cracked his knuckles in front of the microphone pad, making a sound like muffled gunshots.
“Now, this second set of charts is also correct.” Dobo quickly changed graphs in the holotank.
Sandovaal allowed the people to study the new curves in silence. He seemed to be forcing down a smug smile. The red and blue lines in the holotank held an uneasy balance, but never intersected. The supply of food remained above the consumption level.
Magsaysay stared and frowned. “What does this show?”
“What do you think? It is certainly not a new idea. A few minutes ago I tried to explain our only way to survive, but you were not interested. You wanted only the bottom line, so I gave it to you. By continuing our present course, wasting too much time and too many resources on inefficient crops, we will starve in a few months.
“We must act immediately if we are going to save the Aguinaldo. As you can see from the curves, we have little margin for hesitation or error. If we decide quickly, we can survive—we can all survive.”
“What is it we have to do?” Magsaysay asked. “Make it plain for those of us who are stupid.”
Sandovaal turned to stare at him. He didn’t seem to notice the slight sarcasm in the dato’s tone. “Just look at the data! What do the curves tell you?
“We must grow wall-kelp on a massive scale. Use all our available space. Cover the viewport end, the athletic fields, the grazing lands.”
The senator from Cebu interrupted. Her accent was heavily Americanized, since she had grown up near the bases. “But wall-kelp tastes like water buffalo manure. And it damn well looks like it, too.”
Ramis thought Dr. Sandovaal was going to jump over the table and strangle her. “I presume you have tasted both?” he asked.
Over the snickers, the chief scientist shook his fist at the statistics displayed in the holotank. “We have the means to survive—for all people on the Aguinaldo. But we must act now. So what if the wall-kelp’s original purpose was animal feed? Will that make you lose sleep at night when you are starving? So what if it tastes worse than tofu or taro? It is protein, and we can produce it fast enough to meet our needs.”
The chamber erupted into scattered shouting. Ramis found himself realizing with a half-smile that Dr. Sandovaal had done it again: shocked his audience, then rubbed their noses in the only possible answer.
Chapter 4
ORBITECH 1—Day 1
Fifteen minutes! Duncan McLaris fought with himself not to call up the time again. He sat in the plush viewing chair in the Orbitech 1 observation alcove. His five-year-old daughter Jessie squirmed and tugged her hand from his grip.
“Not so hard, Diddy!”
He had turned all the lights down so that the reddish glow did not interfere with the panorama of stars. Normally the ocean of space filled him with awe, made him forget all the trivial problems of being Production Division leader. Now, those “trivial problems” outweighed anything he had ever endured before.
The first scattered reports implied that a good portion of Earth’s population had survived the War, but most communications were wiped out from the electromagnetic pulse. As McLaris had guessed, they were utterly incapable of sending any more supply ships, probably for years. That didn’t surprise him: when only one of the early NASA shuttles had exploded, the entire nation’s space program was grounded for three years. This disaster was much more extensive than a single explosion. Their entire industrial base had probably been knocked to its knees.
As Orbitech 1 rotated, the great shining ball of the Moon swung into view. It seemed so bright, like a bowl filled with hope. Clavius Base lay on the Moon’s surface. The oldest of the space settlements, it had been set up as a stepping-stone for the Lagrange colonies. And since supply shuttles had a vastly more difficult job entering and leaving the Moon’s deep gravity well, Clavius Base had been forced to become self-sufficient much sooner than the other colonies.
“Diddy, what star is that?” Jessie’s voice interrupted his thoughts.
McLaris looked where his daughter pointed. Her little finger smeared against the crystal, but he had learned to sight along her arm. “That’s called Fomalhaut, honey.” He wasn’t certain, but he knew she’d be disappointed if he didn’t come up with some answer for her. “The Arabs named it.” She giggled at the strange-sounding name, but seemed satisfied.
She wore her reddish-brown hair in braids. McLaris had never been able to decide if Jessie really preferred her hair that way, or if she just wanted her father to spend the time braiding it.
The first time he had tried it, back when his wife was still on Orbitech 1, McLaris had done nothing more than make a tangled mess of Jessie’s hair. Taking it upon himself as a father’s duty, he sat up late by the light of a small glow-lamp, toying with strings in his hand, studying the diagrams and instructions he had called up on the big screen of his terminal, practicing how to braid hair. Diane slept restlessly in their bed beside him, probably dreaming about hills and trees and fresh air.
McLaris glanced at his watch again in the observation alcove. Close enough. “Ready to go, Jessie?” He tried to sound cheerful, to keep the quaver out of his voice. “Take a last look.”