Reggie Waite had become accustomed to the daily meetings in Medlab with Dr. Thuc. Sometimes Dr. Doorne would attend and present the latest prognostications of her statistical team, but she did not attend unless she had something new. Not surprising, given that statistical modeling was at best her third specialty, after radio astronomy and signals processing. She had a lot on her plate, especially for a woman with a young child, who’d come to motherhood later in life.
But the meat of their discussion was always the information Barbie Thuc was getting both through NASA and through her various medical sources, both official and unofficial. Again and again their discussion would go back to the curious gaps between the official and unofficial sources, the lacunae in the official accounts.
“They’re trying to keep it quiet, but we’ve had a really close call.” Dr. Thuc’s voice was calm and professional as always, but Reggie knew her well enough to pick up that hint of tension.
“What happened?”
“Apparently one of the tour companies had a client come down sick with this thing, they’re taking to calling it the diablovirus because those two big protein structures resemble a devil’s horns.” Dr. Thuc inclined her head toward the scanning electron micrograph that had become so familiar in these past weeks. “Just someone who was beginning training for spaceflight, not anyone who was set up for a flight. But they’re concerned enough about the possibility of contagion via their own staff that they’ve suspended all their flights for the next month, even the people who are in pre-flight quarantine.”
Reggie could imagine the consternation among those wealthy tourist types, discovering that the vacation they’d spent the last year or two training for was going to be delayed, perhaps indefinitely. But there could be no question of taking the risk, not when lunar settlements were places where a disease would spread like wildfire. Even the common cold, which could never be eradicated for the simple reason that the immune system needed something to keep it busy or it got into trouble, had a tendency to sweep through whole habitats every time it mutated enough that people’s antibodies no longer reacted to it.
“Damn. This mess is making me think of a book I read when I was a kid.” Reggie closed his eyes and could see the red-bound volume in the library at Witchcraft Heights Elementary School, the illustrations within it. “The family was on its way to Mars — it was one of the books that really started my excitement about space, back when America’s cloning program was still a burn-before-reading Cold War secret — and there’d been some kind of problem with the spaceship’s reactor. All the passengers had to huddle in this shelter that was a storeroom at the far end of the ship while the crew took care of the problem. There were these special lights that would turn red in the presence of radiation, and there was a whole row of them in the corridor outside of the shelter. One by one each turns red, and everyone’s starting to watch the one inside their shelter. And then, just as the last one outside is turning red, there’s an announcement that the reactor has been repaired, and the crew is coming to sweep the area of radiation.”
He paused, trying to get his mind back in the headspace of a youngster reading a book that must’ve come out in the 50’s, before the launch of Sputnik, when a lot was believable which had now become so encrusted in Zeerust that it was well-nigh impossible to suspend disbelief. “Of course the description of how radiation works was completely ridiculous, but for me as a kid, it was so scary, and then such a relief when the crewmen in their protective suits showed up with their radiation vacuum cleaners and the lamps stopped glowing read. I loved that book so much I must’ve checked it out and re-read it a dozen times before I left for junior high. And then I’ve never been able to find it again. When my brother Chris was going to school there, we went to parents’ night one time and I slipped into the library to look for it, but I couldn’t find it. And the title never stuck with. me, so I haven’t been able to look it up online, so I’m not even sure if it actually existed, or I’m confusing multiple books into one.”
Dr. Thuc gave him a sympathetic nod on that one. “Isn’t it interesting, how the strangest things will stick with us.”
Just as Reggie was about to say let’s hope this business doesn’t end up being one of them when his phone’s messenger app chimed. He pulled out his phone, and on the lock screen was a notification from his wife: We’ve got a major problem donw here.