Endgame approaches.
The Call of the Moon-Beasts
Heinlein Station
American Administrative Zone
Luna
2104 AD
By now Commander Tobias Mather felt vaguely uncomfortable if a weekly meeting didn’t have a looming disaster or deadly peril featured in it. Even now, with the Lifeboat almost ready to go. Especially now, actually. He was morbidly certain that people were going to start getting stupid, now that it looked like everybody might actually leave this leaky Lunar frying pan, and take their chances with the funeral pyres of Earth. For one thing, people were understandably worried about the ‘everybody’ thing. For another…
Tobias pushed that thought down, because Doctor Ward was giving his report. He knew what was going to be in it, but he listened anyway. This was no time to take things lightly.
“It took us a week to get people to talk about the dreams.” Ward was one of the people who weirdly looked better under the not-technically-starvation rations they were all on now. Or maybe he looked more like himself. “You know how it is. Everybody still alive wakes up every so often, screaming. That’s normal. We give them a pill from the medical pharms, they sleep off the nightmares, then they’re good for a couple of weeks. We can manage it, as long as the cultures hold out.”