Lou Corlin wondered whether he should ask Brenda whether the information had been useful. If he’d erred in his choice of files, he’d really want to know so he could put the matter to rights. At the same time, he knew that she might not be completely comfortable about discussing it, especially since he had gone to some sketchy websites to get those files.
Maybe it would be better if he just let her take the lead. He might be able to drop a hint or two about the matter, but pushing would be most definitely unwise right now.
When he arrived at the station to begin his air shift, the first thing he noticed was Spruance Del Curtin talking with the program director. Lou’s first thought was what did Sprue do this time? Even as the thought came to him, he knew that such a conversation would not take place just outside the door to the program director’s office. No, this was a more neutral conversation.
All the same, it would be bad form to show any interest in it. Best to keep his eyes front and walk purposefully past the station offices and into the studio areas.
Brenda was on the air with a listener right now. From the speed of the back-and-forth, that person was somewhere up here on the Moon, not down on Earth.
Not surprising, if Earth is as bad off as things are sounding.
As the implication hit, Lou stiffened and cast an awkward look around. He’d been in his teens when the Expulsions hit, so he’d been old enough to have made some friends at school who weren’t from the NASA clone creche.
And I never really tried to keep in contact with them after I came up here.
He’d told himself that he really wasn’t all that close with those kids, and a lot of them had parents who weren’t really comfortable with their children being close friends with astronaut clones. So it had been easy to drift apart once he was up here, busy getting oriented and up to speed.
But now he was wondering what had happened to some of those kids. Even if they hadn’t been close enough to borrow stuff from, they’d at least been friendly enough to give him the time of day. And he hadn’t even thought about what might be happening to them back in Houston.
On the air, Brenda was winding up her conversation with the caller. Of course she would need to — it was rapidly getting close to time for her to prepare the next set so they could hand off without creating any dead air.
Now that the ON AIR light had gone off, he needed to put aside his curiosity as to the situation on Earth, with people he’d lost contact with years ago. Right now he needed to concentrate on his professional duties as a DJ.
Brenda stepped out of the DJ booth, greeted him and began the standard rundown of where everything stood at the end of her show. And then, as she was about to hand it off to him, she leaned over to whisper into his ear, “I gave Autumn a copy of the files. I want her to look over them before I try to send them to Drew.”
Although it caught Lou by surprise, he was able to maintain enough control over his expression that he didn’t show it. He just gave her a quick nod as he acknowledged the hand-over.
Yet as he closed the door of the DJ booth behind him, her words still nagged at him. Of course Autumn would understand about protecting sources — she might not have even asked Brenda where or how she’d come about those files. But depending on how far Autumn took it, there would be a possibility that they would end up in the hands of someone who had the necessary expertise to track them back to him.
No use worrying about it. He had a show to run, and the seconds were ticking down to when he needed to do his first station identification.