"Ken Jenks - Vectors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jenks Ken)

He swallowed, miserable. The jerk. "I love you."

"This is a hell of a way to show it, you creep!"

"I spent the last six weeks thinking about you and little else. I can't get you out of my head. I keep reliving our night together, and planning how to make it happen again. How can I run a space station if I can't keep my mind on the job?"

"I don't know why NASA picked you to begin with! I don't know why I did, either!"

"I just wanted to keep our relationship separate from this job," he said. "I didn't want to be your boss, with all the baggage that carries. I wanted to ask you out, to court you properly, to treat you as a human being . . ."

"Instead of treating me as an astronaut and a woman? Dammit, Trent, I am an astronaut, and a damned good one, too. If you can't deal with that, you can't deal with me."

He slumped, cowed. I squared my shoulders and looked at him, feeling flushed, feeling victorious, feeling lost. "All right, Trent," I said. "Call Houston and tell them I'll thump down with Kathy." He looked at me again, puzzled. "Someone needs to go with her, and I'm the best damned astronaut for the job."

He was speechless. I pried him loose from his handhold and tossed him lightly down the length of the hab module. He caught a hand hold and turned back to me, but I interrupted again. "Trent, there's one more thing."

"What is it?" He sounded amazingly meek.

"I love you, too, you jerk." I pushed off for the limited privacy of my bunk, trailing cookie crumbs as I flew.

Inside my cubicle, I started to close the door, watching the teardrops and crumbs float away from me. Suddenly, my mouth flew open and I shrieked.

"What happened?" yelled Trent from the other end of the module.

"The vector!" I scrambled out of my cubicle, down to the hab module's life support rack and opened it. Trent came up behind me. There were cookie crumbs on the air filters, and as I watched, a tiny, fractured teardrop drifted off the filter and into the humidity separator. I moved aside slightly to show Trent. "Look! Explosive diarrhea in space makes tiny droplets of semisolid fecal material. I remember smelling Bear's soiled diaper, which means there were particles in the air. Some of it drifted through the air system, only to be trapped on the filter. A little of the liquid probably got through, and I'll bet the water in the humidity separator is swarming with cholerae. It's not transmitted via air on earth, but in space, contaminated water particles can be ingested or inspired much more easily."

Trent nodded pensively. "That's the best explanation yet." He paused. "But even if that checks out, and you're not an infection vector, we still have to send someone back to earth with Kathy."

I nodded. "And I'm still the best one for that job. But it sure would be nice to solve this thing before I leave." I closed the life support rack and checked the latches.

Trent checked his watch. "You have less than an hour before you have to be in that Soyuz."

I kissed him and scurried back to work.
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The Soyuz capsule thumped down within 100 meters of the Russian recovery team. Kathy gave me a weak thumbs-up as her stretcher slid into the waiting ambulance. After a brief, multilingual argument with the Russians, I declined the proffered stretcher and walked from the capsule to the recovery van.
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That sums up the story of cholera on Calypso, the story I told the official NASA investigative panel. The decontamination of the space station was relatively simple. Disinfectant in the humidity separator killed all of the V. cholerae. We were lucky more people didn't get infected.

The U.N. World Health Organization reports that cholera is down worldwide, in part due to better sanitation and medical care, and in part due to increased public awareness. After my presentation to the General Assembly in New York, I received a nice note from the Secretary General thanking me for my contribution.

There is one more personal matter I'd like to relate . . ..
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"Calypso, Houston, for Trent," I called from the control center. Now, I had plenty of reasons to use the air-to-ground loops. Trent and I had been using the comm loops and the satellite telephone quite a lot lately. It's really hard having a love affair with an astronaut. Real-time video downlink from the station was on the big screen at the front of the busy room. Trent looked good, as usual.

"Go ahead, Houston. Sounds like a familiar voice down there." Trent's voice was distorted by the archaic digital audio loop.

I smiled. "Roger, Calypso. I have some words on the infection vector. Bear mentioned that he pricked his thumb while fixing crawfish. The best guess down here is that he put his thumb in his mouth."

"We copy, Houston," was Trent's terse reply. Typical.