Spruance Del Curtin would’ve liked to continue his text conversation with Chandler Armitage. However, there’d been no way to prolong it when he had an air shift to do.
And there was also the problem of broaching the subject he really wanted to discuss. Especially now that he’d been moved into a position where he actually knew what those data sets represented, Dr. Doorne had reiterated even more strenuously the absolute importance of information security.
Which was a completely reasonable requirement if her concern was that he’d go blabbing to all his buddies so that they’d be suitably impressed with the Important Work he was doing. He was no statistician, but he could see some very dangerous trends in those numbers. Implications that could very well create the very panic they were working to forestall.
On the other hand, it was a very different matter to be discussing it with Chandler, who was a naval aviator and a pilot-astronaut with enough background to actually understand what he was looking at, instead of just getting scared by those numbers and freaking out. But if someone were to gain access to his text records, they’d just see that he’d broken security and never notice or care about the qualifications of the person on the other end of the connection.
Which meant he needed to sit tight for the next three and a half hours, doing his air shift as if nothing were at all out of the ordinary — well, other than the fact that they were trying to keep a pandemic off the Moon. Once he got off shift, he could head down to Innsmouth Sector and talk to Chandler face to face — or at least as close to it as was possible with a sheet of moonglass between them and separate air circulation systems.
Maybe he’d better check and make sure whatever system transmitted their words didn’t have a record function. Damn, but it would be embarrassing to have a long talk with Chandler, and then discover every word of it was recorded and could be used to hang him out to dry.
Hadn’t one of the really early space station crews gotten into trouble because a conversation they’d assumed to be private was captured by the on-board recorders and was subsequently transmitted back to JSC for examination?