DUDE, CHECK IT OUT.  SHE'S DEFINITELY DECIDED ON EVACUATING.

Helene sat in her room, stewing over the demise of the rat experiment.  On the one hand, she had never been very enthusiastic about it in any case.  On the other hand, it seemed to have caused a regression in the attitudes of some of the Colonists.  She felt moody and frustrated; everything seemed to conspire against her efforts on this planet.  Had she been a more easily discouraged person, she might have considered a change in plans, even a change of ultimate objective.  But Helene had not become the leader of the first crewed mission to Mars in almost two decades by being easily discouraged; once her mind was fixed on an objective, she would not give up on it.  She would, however, change her tactics.  She was, she decided, going to have to stop playing so nice.

"The rat experiment has had to be canceled," she wrote, using the voice dictation method because she was tired and it seemed easier, "due to structural flaws in the enclosures.  One was unusable by the time of the ship's landing; the other has proven incapable of performing adequately.  Not all the rats have been accounted for,"

She paused, wondering if that might seem deceitful, since in point of fact almost none of the rats had been accounted for.  It was one feature of the voice dictation method, however, that going back to re-'type' what you had already said, was not as convenient as when fingertyping.  She was also tired, and depressed.  She plunged on.

"and there is some legitimate concern that it may endanger the Colony food supply.  We are evaluating what can be done to mitigate, but this turn of events may cause hard choices to be made soon about the Colony's future."

Helene sent the file, dangled on the precipice of regret at doing so, and then pulled back onto the solid ground of her unshakeable self-confidence.  She didn't come here to do experiments, or enable the elaborate pretence that the Colony on Mars might be sustainable.  She came here to make sure that those who had been abandoned here were taken to safety.  The lunar colony was viable; if the colonists were unable to tolerate Earth gravity, they could be kept on the lunar colony instead, where they would be orders of magnitude closer to the Earth, and the support it could offer would be hours away, not months.  The colonists needed to be brought to the lunar colony, as soon as possible; further experiments to determine if they could ever live on Earth could happen there.

The entire problem was an example of why the original plans for the Mars colony had not permitted childbirth.  Olivia and Liam had been born illegally, counter to Command's rules on the matter; this was likely the root of their intransigent opposition to the reassertion of Earth's authority.  If it turned out that the colonists were not able to return to Earth, and had to stay on the lunar colony, it would be important to make sure that they never had children.

She pondered the impact of this, psychologically, on some of the younger colonists; Dorothy, or Harper, for example.  Perhaps it would be best not to spell this out in advance.

If she waited too much longer, of course, they might start to piece all this together themselves, and they might or might not understand the logical necessity of it.  She needed, she realized, to start accelerating the course of events.