The guinea pig habitats were quiet this early in the morning. Payton Shaw moved slowly and carefully in the half-light which was supposed to simulate early morning. Guinea pigs seemed to do better when the diurnal cycle imitated the slow increase and decrease of light at dawn and dusk, rather than the lights simply coming on and turning off.
There was a trick to checking the automatic feeders and waterers without having to shine a light directly on the animals and disrupting the regulation of their circadian rhythms and activity cycles. This was the third time this week that Agriculture had reported problems with the automatics, and both Alice Murchison and Ken Redmond were getting fed up.
Especially with everything that’s going on, right now it’s going to be just about impossible to get spare parts. Which means that either we have to machine our own replacements, or we have to kludge together some other solution.
Payton recalled Colonel Hearne’s remarks about logistics. Just what had he meant that day, down by the Wall of Honor?
Over the last several days, Payton had done some discreet inquiries, always careful to mix them in with more innocuous searches in order to obscure any pattern that might attract attention. He did know that the port facility was having trouble getting certain items in, especially certain biologicals for Medlab that they were having difficulty producing up here.
Which could be a real problem if we ran into a major medical crisis. He recalled Colonel Hearne’s comments about Johnson Space Center having trouble staffing even their critical operations. Since then, Payton had also heard that Japan had been forced to shut down most of their Earthside space operations and quarantine both Edo Settlement and their lunar ferry because of a lapse of biosecurity on the part of one of the nations they provided transport for.
Who can I talk to, that might actually know something, but won’t think I’m nosing into places I don’t belong? Payton recalled that his ur-brother had had some film confiscated and classified top secret after his Mercury mission, apparently because he’d unwittingly photographed some super-secret military installations. And when he’d asked President Johnson, he’d been told in no uncertain terms that he should ask no further questions.