There was a trick to chatting up girls without crossing the line to actually hitting on them. It had taken Sprue some time to learn it, mostly because in his younger days he’d rarely had any need of the skill. If he was interested in a girl, he was going to want to hit on her, not just chat her up.
But right now the last thing he wanted was to have anyone thinking he was trying to hit on Cindy Margrave. Technically she was Betty Margrave and Carl Dalton’s niece, not their daughter, and had inherited none of the Shepard geneset. But Betty had taken in Cindy and her sister Kitty after their parents died in a freak accident, rather like Alan and Louise Shepard had taken in a niece, Alice. Because the girls had come up here as a part of Carl Dalton’s household, everyone was treating Cindy and Kitty as if they were members of the Shepard lineage, just like their cousins.
The first thing he had to have solid was his pretext for being at the station offices so early. It would’ve been so much easier if he could’ve switched air shifts with Brenda Redmond or Lou Corlin. However, neither of them had pressing business any time in the near future that would necessitate such a trade, and neither did he.
So here he was, getting copies of some logs, supposedly for his statistics class. “I don’t know why they’ve got Dr. Doorne teaching it, especially considering that she’s a radio astronomer and electrical engineer. You’d think they’d have her teaching actual astronomy, or maybe signal processing.”
Cindy set her tablet back down. “A lot of astronomy these days involves statistical analysis. Especially radio astronomy, since it’s almost entirely sorting through massive amounts of data and picking out the significant signals from a metric butt-ton of random noise. Or at least that’s what I learned in the astronomy overview class I took a few training cycles back. And down in IT we do a lot of work with astronomical data.”
Sprue considered how to steer the conversation towards a broader discussion of data, and then medical data in particular. Or at least interesting bits of data coming in from Earth, stuff that didn’t seem to fit with the pattern.
“Good morning, Mr. Del Curtin.” The deep, gruff voice could only belong to Ken Redmond, Chief of Engineering.
Sprue turned to face the older man. “Um, good morning.”
Ken stayed just far enough back that he didn’t obviously have to look up at Sprue’s greater height. “I believe you have some other place to be this early in the morning.”
Sprue recognized the warning in those words. Although Ken Redmond was not their direct supervisor, the station was considered to be part of Engineering for administrative purposes, and thus he had disciplinary authority over all its personnel. And Sprue had not forgotten what had happened when he ran afoul of Redmond in the past.
“As it happens, I really need to get this data sorted through in time for class tomorrow.” He turned back to Cindy. “I guess I’ll have to talk to you later.”