After her conversation with Dr. Doorne about statistics and metrics, Betty Margrave was feeling a lot less reassured about the present situation. Which was why she had decided it was time to talk to Bill Hearne.
When she’d first contacted him, she was thinking in terms of meeting him in his office down at Flight Operations. However, he was concerned about holding a routine consultation down there. Yes, there was the concern about infectuous agents, whether on an object that had not been properly sterilized or by someone who had contact with an infected person. But there was also the problem of Flight Operations being somewhat in disarray right now, what with all the pilots having to be quarantined down here instead of going home to their families.
There had been a moment of awkwardness, given that Betty was married to a pilot-astronaut who was currently sitting down there in the BOQ. Sure, they could FaceTime each other, but they could do it when he was in any spaceport all over the Moon.
But Betty wasn’t going to make an issue of it. Bill was only able to go home to Alice every night right now because he’d reached mandatory retirement age for pilots, and had taken over the top job in Flight Ops so that Colonel Carlyle could be freed up to fly full-time again instead of squeezing in a minimum of flight time among ground duties.
So here they were in the Safety and Security conference room, which had been set up specifically so S&S personnel could meet with people who were not cleared to deal with private information. In many ways going the other way would’ve been easier for the reason that Flight Ops very rarely dealt with material that could not be generally disseminated, and what little they did have (some classified military projects and the occasional medical issue) could easily be sequestered from general meeting spaces.
They had been talking mostly about spacelift, and how both the raw numbers and the distribution of spaceflights had changed since the beginning of the diablovirus pandemic. Somehow the subject had drifted to transportation in general, and how much it was changing. Betty knew that the cruise ships and casual airline travel had been shut down almost as soon as it became clear that they were dealing with something deadly. She’d also heard anecdotal reports about varying levels of restriction on personal mobility, from “stay at home orders” that were on the level of polite requests to blockades and arrests, even one story of a person being shot for breaking quarantine.
Where had that been? Bill averred that he’d heard it, but couldn’t recall exactly where. He wanted to say Germany, but both of them agreed that it was unwise to let past history do their thinking for them, especially in the absence of solid facts. For all they knew, it was a hypothetical that got turned into a friend-of-a-friend story courtesy of social media.
But by the time they were finished, he had agreed that it was time to pull together as much transportation data they could find and see what Dr. Doorne’s number-crunchers could make of it.