Barbara Redmond still remembered trips to Indiana to visit her paternal grandparents. Sometimes they’d fly, but far more often they’d hit the road north through the Texas Piney Woods and across Arkansas and Tennessee to the other half of I-69.
By her teens, the trips were getting fewer and further between. Her dad was getting busier with NASA, and with Flannigan in the White. House, things were getting more and more tense for clones and their families. And her grandparents were getting older, and less eager to host rambunctious children for a weekend. The last couple of visits, her folks had rented a suite in a nearby hotel rather than impose upon Grandma and Grandpa Redmond.
Up here, taking her kids to visit Grandma and Grandpa was just three airlocks: the one out of the module her apartment was in, one intermediate airlock, and the airlock into the module where her parents’ apartment was. At least in theory, it should’ve been easy to visit on a regular basis — but with everything going on and her parents having such responsible positions, visits practically needed to be scheduled a week in advance. And even that was no guarantee, because an emergency in Engineering or Food and Nutrition could mean the visit was off.
Like tonight. The kids had been asking when their daddy would come home again. She’d offered to set up a FaceTime call with Drew, since she knew he was off the flight roster for a couple of days. But no, both of them were wailing they wanted to see Daddy, not just look at his image on a screen. And no, they didn’t want to go down to Flight Ops and talk to him through a pane of moonglass, hear his voice through a speaker. They wanted him here, in the apartment, to sit crosslegged on the floor and play with them like he used to.
They were still young enough that they really didn’t grasp why it wasn’t possible for Daddy to come home right now. They understood being sick, but only in the terms of the colds and stomach bugs that sometimes went through lunar settlements. They didn’t really grasp how dangerous the diablovirus could be, how it could endanger an entire settlement, and she didn’t want them having nightmares because of the way a child’s limited life-experience could misconstrue an explanation. So she’d just told them that it wasn’t possible right now, and no, she didn’t know when it would be. Not just because she had no real idea how long it might go on, but also because children that age had no real grasp of time. Even the few weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas seemed like an eternity at that age.
But she’d thought she could at least arrange a visit to Grandma and Grandpa’s apartment, if only for a half hour or so. Not just seeing them at the dining commons when everyone was concentrating on eating, or a quick hi-bye in the corridors, but a bit of time set aside just to go over and visit.
And now that wasn’t happening after all. Her father was busy with the ongoing solar situation, which might have seemed to calm down right now, but was still showing magnetic irregularities that suggested more CME’s and flares would be on the way soon. And now her mother had just texted her and said that she was in an emergency meeting with Alice Murcheson because they were having further problems. Apparently that one set of planters wasn’t all that had defective irrigation tubing, just the first one to actually have trouble.
At least you didn’t build up the visit too much with the kids, so the disappointment isn’t going to be quite so crashing as if it were all they were thinking about.
But it was still going to be a disappointment, and there was no way to get around it. The best she could do right now was give them something else to distract them. At least kids this young weren’t as likely to hang onto disappointments and let them turn into bitter resentments, as long as something else came along to capture their attention.
But what? Brenda took a half-hearted look through the contacts list on her phone, trying to think of someone who could offer something that would entrance them so well they’d forget about having to miss the visit with Grandma and Grandpa.
And then the module airlock cycled, and in came Lou Corlin, looking breathless. “Didn’t you get the text?”
“What text? The last text I got was from Mom, about the problem down at Agriculture.”
“We’ve got a problem at the station. We’re having trouble with the sound mixing board, and we’ve switched to the system for remote broadcasts.”
“Crap.” Brenda knew that most of the station’s equipment was jury-rigged, since they couldn’t very well have standard studio equipment shipped up here from Earth. “Let me see if Cindy can watch the kids, and then I’ll be ready.”
“No worries. I already asked Rand to come over.”
Even as he said that, the module airlock hatch opened again, and Rand Littleton walked in. “Here I am.”
“Good. Let’s get going.”