All through his air shift, Spruance Del Curtin’s thoughts kept going back to Autumn’s offer. Did he want to formally become a reporter? He liked being a DJ, and he doubted that they’d let him do both.
But it wasn’t really possible to have a conversation about the subject right now, since even a long set wouldn’t necessarily be enough to cover this sort of discussion. And once he handed it over to the Tea Time crew, he needed to get straight to the classroom for his teaching responsibility. It wasn’t quite as bad as when he had a basic geology class right before his air shift, but it still made things cramped and put dinner later than he would’ve liked.
As it turned out, it wouldn’t have mattered if he hadn’t had somewhere he needed to get to. Autumn had already left for the day and the newsroom was dark.
As he was making his way to Miskatonic Sector and the classroom where his students and senior instructor were waiting for him, his cell phone chimed incoming text.
Dang, what was it this time? Dr. Courland knew that he was coming straight off his air shift, and it took time to get between the station offices and the classrooms.
Sprue pulled out his phone to discover a message from Drew Reinholt: Have you heard anything solid about the situation down in Schirrasburg? We’re getting conflicting information. Some people say the guy’s recovered and never had the diablovirus in the first place, and other people are saying that he died and NASA’s covering it up to prevent panic.
Not something I’ve heard about right now. I’m on my way to a class I teach right now, but I could ask Autumn tomorrow. Or maybe you can ask her yourself.
As soon as he hit send, Sprue realized that might not be the best tone to take with a pilot-astronaut, especially not the husband of one of his colleagues at the station. But it was too late to recall it now, and probably Drew would understand that people get short when they’re being interrupted on the way to something they need to get to.
On the other hand, maybe it would be profitable to sound out Dr. Courland. Maybe he’d heard something through a different channel than the one the pilots used. After all, scientists had to communicate their findings to one another, and it was likely they’d talk about other stuff too.