David had said nothing about talking to Sheila immediately and I thought that we should consult her before we began anything new. I didn’t think she would object and Jason had made it pretty clear he had been taking the extra food. He didn’t admit it as such, but no one else offered any objection and I knew it wasn’t me.
I found Sheila in her sleeping area, sitting on a chair that was bolted to the deck. Her face was pale and her eyes wide and I knew that something had frightened her. I could guess what it was but I was determined not to talk about that. We had the food issue to divert our attention for the moment. Starvation was a problem for the future.
When I spoke to her she didn’t seem to hear me so I tried again, saying, “We had a brief meeting about the food.”
She looked at me as if I had spoken to her in a foreign language and then she seemed to shake herself free of her fear. She said, “A meeting without me?”
“Impromptu,” I said. “Dave noticed that someone seemed to be pilfering the food.”
“That was Jason,” she said.
I noticed that her color was coming back now. She had pushed her fright to the side so that she could concentrate on the immediate problem. If David had a conscious strategy of keeping us focused on the problems we could solve, it was working, at least right now.
“You knew?”
“I spend a lot of time with him. He told me that he didn’t think it fair that he couldn’t eat more than the rest of us because he needed more to survive. If he didn’t raise his caloric intake, he was going to starve a lot faster than the rest of us. He thought that might be the plan.”
“Gees, Sheila, you knew this and you didn’t say anything to the rest of us?”
She reached up and ran a hand through her hair. It was a light brown but looked dull and lifeless and I knew it was because we couldn’t waste water on showers as often as we might like. We were becoming a gamey crew, but then, what was a little body odor when you needed the water for drinking.
“He had a point,” she said. “He thought it was to eliminate him from the crew so that there would be more food for the rest of them . . .”
“You mean the rest of us. You’re part of the crew.”
She shrugged. “Rest of us. With him gone we could stretch our food even longer and the longer we stretched it, the better the chance for help.”
I wondered if it was time to tell her there would be no help. The space program was wrecked by the meteor that first took out the electronics and then killed the technicians. There was no one left to prepare the vehicle, get it fueled, program all the computers that were now nothing more than boat anchors with their fried electronics, and finally, no one to pilot it. We were on our own, fighting for just one more day.
But, if she could delude herself about help and it allowed her to cope with the situation, it wasn’t my place to take that away from her. So, I said, “Dave came up with a plan to base our food consumption on the nutritional requires of each individual. Jason will get a little more than the rest of us. That is, if you have no objections to that.”
“If he uses the computer program designed back home, I guess it’ll be fair,” she said.
She hesitated and then said, quietly, “What are we going to do?”
I knew that this was no time for a joke. She was truly scared because she could count the days just as well as I could. The food would last, at our current consumption, for about three hundred and twenty days. After that we might last a week. And that was it. Less than a year, if we were lucky. Maybe considerably less. I knew that soldiers, in Vietnam, had short-timers calendars. These were pictures divided into 365 squares to be colored in and when all were filled in, the soldier returned to the United States.
Here, we’d be counting the days as well, but not with the same positive results. When we reached zero, we’d be dead or very close to it.
So, I said, “We’re looking for the atmosphere to clear. Let all that dust and debris precipitate out so that we don’t have to deal with that. Then we figure a way to get back to Earth. I think we can do it.”
But, of course, I wasn’t sure that we could. We might just burn up in the atmosphere, if we figured out how to leave the station. That was a question that we really hadn’t thought about yet, or so I thought.
Sheila said, “Jason thinks that we can use the machinery pod. It has the thickest bulkheads and really was a specially built shuttle that was adapted once it docked.”
“Jason might be right,” I said.
“He’s been checking the hull integrity to be sure it hasn’t been compromised when it was plugged into the station.”
“That sounds like a good idea,” I said. It was something that had crossed my mind but I hadn’t really done anything about it. I had been more interested in the situation on earth, or more specifically the situation in Kansas. I couldn’t imagine what was going on down there in that perpetual darkness. I mean, no moon, no stars and certainly no sun. I wondered if they could even see the sun as we sometimes could through clouds. I doubted it. The blanket of debris would be too thick. It would be the blackest of nights.
“I wasn’t supposed to say anything about this,” said Sheila. “He wanted to work it out in secret but we really shouldn’t have secrets, should we?”
“No,” I said, “we shouldn’t have secrets. It doesn’t help the situation.”
“You won’t tell him that I said anything about it, will you?”
Now she sounded like a wife or girlfriend who had told the police that her boyfriend had been driving drunk or had been stealing money from friends. She wanted to do the right thing, but she was caught in the loyalty trap. She wasn’t quite sure if her loyalty outweighed her telling.
I said, “No, but we’re going to have to confront him about this. If he has a plan that will work, we all can help getting ready. If it won’t, we need to divert our efforts to something else. Something that might have some chance of working.”
She smiled at me, looking like a child who had won the approval of a parent and these changes in her mood and attitude worried me. She seemed to be slipping away from us, relying on us to reassure her, provide her with what she needed and to protect her from what she feared. If we said everything was going to be fine, she wasn’t going to ask any questions that would suggest otherwise. For her, this was the best way to cope with our situation.
I said, “I’ll tell Dave that you’re on board with us on this rationing thing.”
“Okay,” she said. But she made no move to stand up or to follow. She was going to remain where she was.