There were some definite advantages to being a pilot-astronaut, Chandler Armitage decided. He liked being able to get around, in more ways than one.
However, right now a big chunk of that was pretty well negated by the current quarantine rules. In normal times he always looked forward to getting assigned a flight to Grissom City. Although pilot-astronauts were supposed to stay in the Roosa Barracks, the external habitat on Slayton Field, he could usually finagle a pass to the main settlement, enjoy at least a little of the night life.
Not all of it, because he sure as heck couldn’t pay tourist prices on a Navy officer’s budget. And while he was a silent partner in several business ventures, none of them were overwhelmingly lucrative, and being seen as too free a spender could result in awkward questions. But in general he could count on being able to pick up a pretty girl and show her a good time.
Not now, that was for certain. Heck, he couldn’t even go meet some of his old friends here in the Roosa Barracks. Nope, the rule now was if you weren’t in your lander, you were to stay in your assigned transit quarters. Meals would be brought by robot, and unless physical interaction was essential, all meetings were via teleconference.
Another guy might’ve taken a look around the Internet to see just how far Rule 34 would stretch. Chandler had discovered sometime in his teens that, once the allure of the forbidden wore off, smut got boring. For him, the thrill lay in the chase, in the winning rather than the having.
Pretty faces were a dime a dozen up here, especially in Tourist-Town, and there were a lot of women who seemed to think it was some kind of attainment to get laid by a pilot-astronaut. Sometimes he wondered how many of them would have guessed that they would’ve stood a far better chance of actually interesting him if they’d been a little stand-offish instead of throwing themselves at him like he were a water fountain in the middle of the Mojave.
But right now every last one of them was out of reach. The tourist trade was shut down — no tour operator was going to take the risk of launching, no matter how good their pre-flight quarantine procedures might be. The Indian Space Agency mess showed just how easy it was for a single commuting worker to transmit this virus, whether directly to one of the astronauts or via an intermediary contact with a support staff member who was staying on-site. And while some of the tourists who’d made it up here were stuck until return flights could be arranged for them, all those people were being confined to their transit quarters for the duration.
Which left him with damned little to do. There was only so long you could stare at stuff on a screen before you got sick and tired of it. And what exercise was possible in the confines of this tiny room got tedious too.
The ding of his phone’s text chime pulled him out of his thoughts. He retrieved his phone, read the lock screen. What was Spruance Del Curtin doing sending him a text right now? Not that the kid didn’t have lineage right, but what was so important that he should be the first person Sprue would contact?