The Project Manager

by Terry Connolly

  #

  John waited patiently by the airlock, the shuttle was half an hour early, some bad weather was heading towards Florida so mission control decided to move forward the launch slightly. It didn’t make much of a difference, this was a routine job; arrive, log, transport to storage. As he stood there waiting for everyone to get to their places he had one of his now familiar feelings of déjà vu about his role in the project coming to an end. The big challenges were over and done with and now he had notified Alex of his intentions, John was becoming emotionally comfortable with moving on to something else. He was jolted back to reality by the sound of the electric motor on the forklift trundling down the corridor. While bicycles were perfect for getting around, they weren’t much use for transporting heavy goods. There was already about two tons of recyclable waste on it which the driver left aside; it would be loaded on the shuttle once it was emptied. All waste annoyed John, but not everything could be recycled aboard. A couple of minutes later there was a loud clunking noise as the shuttle airlock connected to the Zheng He’s airlock.

  The shuttle commander, like most, was ex air-corps, in this case the British air corps. There were substantial differences between flying a fighter jet and a space shuttle, but both required excellent spatial awareness, dexterity and judgement. It was thanks to these people that space flight was as safe air travel. The shuttle was firmly docked outside. Once rotation had begun it was necessary for all shuttles to be carefully guided in as they matched their heading and speed to that of the Zheng He and rather than land they were grabbed by clamps that they slowly coupled with. Without these clamps the shuttle would simply be flung back out to space. Of course this was just a temporary arrangement, the internal docking bays were being fitted out. They would eventually hold ten shuttles and the fuel they would need to take the colonists to and from the Zheng He upon arrival at Amrita. This was a constant source of worry for John. He hoped the shuttles would work upon arrival, after at least a hundred years mothballed, things would have a habit of breaking down, even when stored under vacuum.

  The unloading of the shuttle was a bizarre event. On Earth the cargo was loaded and tied down for lift off, in zero gravity it was all untied and attached to the ceiling. Before clamping to the Zheng He the ceiling of the shuttle was the ceiling and the floor was the floor, without any frame of reference the crew assumed this. When clamped, down became the Zheng He’s down, with the result that john reached through the airlock to shake hands with the commander who was standing on the reinforced ceiling of the shuttle. The first time they had received a delivery like this the shuttle had to try docking twice, now though, like everything else it was becoming routine.

  #

  Alex felt calm. There was something comforting about the secrecy that the darkness provided him with. It was a necessity since he had already flicked the trip switch for this room. He always felt a sense of peace when doing God’s work, it was a time for simple contemplation and concentration, every hand movement was an act of purpose and of pure devotion. To Alex he felt as though he was watching some else’s hands at work illuminated by the flashlight, as though the moment itself had control of him and he was a simple tool like the pliers in his hand stripping the cladding from the copper wiring he had pulled from the wall. He knew the shuttle was half an hour early but it didn’t upset his timeline, he had at least another thirty minutes before the general friendly chit-chat and the obligatory filling-in of transfer forms would be completed. He had supervised his fair share of supply shipments too. As he worked he whispered to himself, the litany of saints, just as Father Juan had taught him as a child. Its repetitive nature helped him focus. Using a strip of plastic from one of the torn fertilizer bags he tied the exposed wires together and plunged them into the special solution he prepared the day before. He stood up and admired what he had done, so simple, and everything made from things already in the room. Following the explosion no one would know it was anything more than faulty wiring. He cut open another bag of fertilizer and used its contents to partially bury his creation. A thrill went through him, a mixture of excitement and pleasure, the sort of thrill that only his divine work could give him. It was his reward. He took a deep breath to calm himself and remembered the next steps of the plan; get to the fuse box, wait, and once it was all over he needed to hide for about fifteen minutes and arrive at the scene long after anyone else, from the direction of his quarters. He was supposed to be in his room asleep.

  He placed the pliers in his top pocket, took one last look around the room and walked towards the door, shining the flashlight at his feet so he wouldn’t fall over one of the empty pallets that had been left there since the planting of the forest in the garden. He cursed the lazy labourer who left them lying around like this, it was so untidy. Not that it would matter soon enough. Alex could feel the anticipation building inside him again. He reached the door which he had locked behind himself for privacy. As he searched through his bundle of keys the lights came on.

  #

  John and the commander of the Olympus were verifying the mass of a palate of sacks while catching up on some current affairs. The US elections were coming up and as always the world was gripped by the drama and near twenty four hour news coverage which had been going on for months. Both candidates had pledged to keep US funding up for the Zheng He and the new lunar colony with China.

  “Have you heard the latest John? About Mars?” asked the commander.

  “You mean the Chinese joint colony with Russia? Why not I guess, they both have the capability.”

  “There are rumours you know. A lot of people here might find gainful employment there, maybe even you?”

  “Definitely not me, no. At my age I’ve decided I want some time with my family, someone younger with more energy than me can take care of Mars.”

  “Well, I’m going,” said the commander forthrightly, “I’ve already had an interview. They want crews to bring the equipment there to begin tunnelling out an underground base, a lot like this place really. Much has been learned here.”

  “Well, good luck with that, even with fusion engines you’re looking at a three month trip there.”

  “So you’ve been looking at the figures then?”

  John laughed, “I was asked about them. They’re looking at about ten years to just make the place ready for the first colonists, it can be done, but it will take a while. It is inter…..”

  The rest of John’s sentence was drowned out by an almighty rumble. The walls shook, the doors slammed, and both men swayed on their feet momentarily. They stared at the reading on the mass balance as it readjusted itself following the wild fluctuations. The commander turned to John with a pale look of terror on his face; “what was that?”

  #

  Nikolai pulled his head out from under the control panel as the lights blinked on one by one. He stretched his arms up in victory and shouted in Russian, “Works first time! Nikolai scores again.”

  He looked around, but no one was there, “well, at least pay is better than Grozny.” Nikolai’s work load was at its peak. Every few minutes there was something that needed to be wired up or connected or moved or tied back. He looked at his to-do list. There were a few jobs in the storage area, not urgent and could be left until tomorrow, but tomorrow he knew there would be more, so he climbed on his bike and headed in that direction. As he cycled his radio crackled, it was Nikola, his apprentice who would take over this job once the ship got under way. A bright young man but the Nikola/Nikolai confusion was a bit much sometimes, why couldn’t he be called Peter, or Ivan or something? They had set up a simple display unit in main engineering, if any fuses blew or bulbs were faulty they could tell where by monitoring whether current was flowing or not. Nikolai and Nikola had spent a week installing meters and were now testing it. So far it was performing pretty well and had substantially increased their efficiency.

  “If anyone is near section K it looks like there’s a blown fuse to be replaced. I think they’re lo
ading stuff there today. Over.”

  Nikolai stopped his bike and pulled out the handset; “Nikolai here. I am heading in that direction anyway, I’ll take care of it. Over.”

  “Ok Chief. If you need me I’ll be here.”

  He was there within two minutes and was surprised to see the fuse box wasn’t locked. When he opened it one of the trip-switches was down. Easiest repair of the day, he thought, as he flicked it back up.

  Chapter 18: 2053

  It was the five year anniversary of Alex’s death. Somehow John still managed to feel sorry for him, though only briefly. At first it was assumed it to be a terrible tragedy, but the investigation had found that the door was locked with Alex inside. It turned into a murder investigation with everyone on board the Zheng He questioned in depth. Once the background checks were done on Alex the situation became clearer, the Bavarian police had a file on him in relation to some suspicious deaths while was in college, somehow it was mislabelled and took them a while to find. Since Alex was so close to Ephrem resources, in particular to its only remaining chairman, questions were asked whether it was a breach of their contract that the chairman’s son should be selected by Ephrem to work aboard the Zheng He, especially without a proper background check. It turns out the UN committee thought that it was. Ephrem’s contract went to an Asian competitor, a conglomerate of smaller Human Resources companies which already held nearly thirty percent of Ephrem’s shares.

  John had a hard time of it too. Didn’t he notice what Alex was like? Were there any hints that he might be violent? Bin had met with John on Earth a few times before the enquiry into the explosion and managed to keep him calm and prepare him for the questioning. John felt like such a fool. He knew more than anyone what Ephrem was capable of and yet he had managed to convince himself that Alex wasn’t like them, to the point that we was willing to let him take over some of his work. Maybe, in the back of his mind he knew what a bad decision that had been. Hindsight might provide clarity, but can you live life afraid to trust anyone? What kind of life would that be?

  John came out unscathed from the enquiry but he didn’t get to retire early; he had to complete his mission, ordering parts and supplies, arranging deliveries, scheduling work. He managed to hold middle age spread at bay, but his thinning hair had gradually turned grey. His new assistant and apprentice was very good, a young woman called Sally who was originally working at the other end of the supply chain on Earth. She impressed him with her conscientiousness, the personality trait he valued above all others. Since the main tasks now were stocking the labyrinth of storage areas aboard, he was able to hand this largely over to her, which allowed John to make two important changes to his lifestyle. Firstly and most importantly he now worked two months on the job with one month off, this gave him more time with Abby: maybe not all the time he wanted, but better than before. Secondly it allowed him to focus his energy on more important tasks, in particular the stocking of the libraries, a task that was aided by his new rota.

  In the corridor and stairwell of his parents’ house, John had returned to the old fashioned method of project management, the type that Graham would have used in his youth, but with his own twist. All along the walls were spreadsheets, divided into columns, each one a mini project in itself. While he was there, Abby would stay with him and together they would argue with each other every day about a different project. Hong would help out too when she was with them during her leave, though she left the arguing to father and daughter. Abby, being a student, played the part of the student in these arguments while John played the teacher. The libraries on the Zheng He would contain books for leisure, books for study, encyclopaedias, user manuals, as much printed and electronic media as possible would be crammed in there, but most importantly the libraries and by extension the schools would contain teachers and professors. The spreadsheets in the Peeter’s household were designed by John to make sure that no piece of necessary information would be missed. Knowledge needed to be preserved and transferred from one generation to the next. It was vital to their survival.

  He had requested this project himself and after much deliberation he was given the green light to coordinate, though he had to provide semi-annual updates to various committees on his progress and he had to work closely with several national ministries for education. This meant he had a team of twenty staff working under him, constantly gathering information and processing it. The final goal was simple, to design a system that could educate three or four generations of crew aboard the Zheng He so that they could actually get to Amrita. The Chief Engineer aboard had the benefit of an MIT education in pure and applied physics. There would be no MIT aboard the Zheng He, indeed, in one or two generations would there be someone who could be a Chief Engineer? John wasn’t the only person this question kept awake at night. Abby became engrossed in the project too. He realised he was probably helping her indirectly to increase her chances to become a colonist if she wanted, very few people would have this insight into the social structure on the ship.

  Each column of spreadsheets on the wall of the Peeters home represented a section of the ship. One column was for maintenance, one for life support, one for supplies, one for navigation etc. Each column was then subdivided into specific roles; maintenance was subdivided into electrician, plumber, waste management etc. The entire range of job specs had been completed by Ephrem before its dissolution. John, and everyone else working on the curriculum were also thankful that Ephrem had solved the other great problem; how to divide all the hundreds of jobs between five hundred initial crew, about one thousand crew in the second generation and almost two thousand colonists by the third generation. In the initial planning they had calculated the number of final colonists that would be needed by the time the ship would arrive at Amrita, they had also calculated the initial minimum number of crew members required to run the ship and some extra to be trained to cover maternity leave once the crew began to have children. What Ephrem had failed to do, and because of their religious connections it was clear why they were reluctant to approach the subject, was to work out just how population numbers needed to be controlled on route. The new Human Resources suppliers had been tasked with this job and had come up with some controversial though workable figures. The first of which was to increase the initial crew number from two hundred and fifty to five hundred. This had been greeted with huge enthusiasm by the media and the general public, not so by Hong who found herself having to get the garden ready a full year earlier so it could reach maturity on time to feed the extra mouths. Since the garden was being designed to feed over two thousand people anyway it didn’t make a huge difference, but it did make both John and Hong a little nervous. They both believed in large margins of error and all the supplies on board had been calculated with this in mind. There would still be good margins of error but they would be a little tighter.

  The population projections made John uneasy when he thought about them, but if Abby became a crew member she too would be governed by these rules. It made him nervous, but he saw the necessity. Like the Earth itself, the Zheng He had only so many resources and they needed to be preserved for the most important generation, the one that would arrive at Amrita. If Abby became a crew member she would be required to have a minimum of three children. One could be with another crew member if she happened to fall in love but her two other children, via artificial insemination, would have biological fathers who still lived on Earth. The blushes and giggles about freezing semen all those years ago had become reality, and there was no shortage of volunteer donors. As John would stand there of an evening looking at the spreadsheets on the wall, with Abby beside him, he would envisage his grandchildren, maybe his great grandchildren receiving the education he and others were planning for them. It made the work seem almost more important than the ship itself, to that rock in the sky he had devoted his life to. He more than anyone understood that the ship and her crew were not separate from each other; they were symbiotic, connected like a body and a
soul. The ship was the pinnacle of human achievement but it required people to build her and shape her and pilot her to her final destination. In return for carrying them, the crew needed to abide by her rules, to eat the food she could provide, breathe the air she contained, and to maintain her and care for her. John wondered if he was becoming spiritual as he aged, but when he looked at Abby he saw a future, one full of potential.