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Chapter 30

"Gee," A.J. said, fighting to keep his face straight. "That's tough."

"I appreciate your attempt at diplomacy, A.J." Dr. Wu took another deep breath. The paleness of his skin didn't decrease, but the sheen of sweat seemed to be fading. "Even though the attempt is feeble and ineffective."

"It is kinda funny, though. After everything we went through, and now we're on our way and you—the doctor—are getting spacesick?"

Wen Hsien Wu grimaced, holding down his lunch apparently by force of pride. "I suppose if I were in your position I might find it amusing. As it is, I have a very hard time taking it that way."

"Seriously, anything I can do for you? I mean, this is really just a scratch, I'll take care of it myself."

"A bit more than a scratch, judging by the bleeding. Yes, get me one of the blue pills from the container on the top right, marked 'Stabilese.'"

A.J. glanced in the indicated direction and floated himself over to the cabinet. "That's the antinausea drug?"

"One of them. This one works after the fact, unlike most. If I can keep it down for a few minutes."

A.J. got one of the pills out and handed it to the doctor. "Here you go. Look on the bright side. In a few more hours we'll be going to rotation mode. After that, we'll have about one-third gravity to work with."

"Yes." Wu swallowed the pill, seemed to turn slightly paler. Sweat broke out across his face again. Grimly he closed his eyes, then opened them quickly again to stare into the distance. A.J. said nothing, but handed the doctor one of the catcher bags in case his stomach won out.

Several more minutes went by. Slowly, color crept back into Wu's face, and he sighed with relief. "Well, I believe it is working. I still feel terrible, but not as badly as I did." He reached out. "Let me see that cut. Good lord, A.J., how did you manage to do that?"

"My reflexes are still on Earth. I was moving some of the equipment around in micrograv, got distracted, realized something was getting away from me, grabbed it, and lever action sorta whipped me around. Caught my arm on a bracket."

Wu shook his head. His hands shook slightly, too, but the instrument they held was still steady. "I think I can glue it together. I'd rather not have to go with stitches."

"Okay by me, Doc. I don't like needles myself."

A.J. noticed something about Wu as he carefully cleaned the wound and prepared to glue it together. To check on what he noticed, he flipped a bit of Fairy Dust onto the Nike's doctor.

"There we go. Yes, that will do."

"You know the old saying, 'Physician, heal thyself'?" A.J. asked.

"Yes, of course. Why?"

"You'd better practice it. You aren't spacesick, or at least that's not all of your problems. You're running three degrees of fever."

Wu stared at him, then put his hand against A.J.'s forehead. "Yes, you feel cold. How stupid of me. I felt exactly the same as I had in the earlier training flights, so I just assumed . . . Well, stupid, as I said."

He frowned. "This isn't good, at all. We have a very confined population here. If a large proportion of us gets sick, operations will be severely curtailed."

"It's probably just a cold or a touch of flu, Doc. What's the big deal?"

"Flu still kills people on occasion, A.J. And when you have only fifty people and relatively little redundancy, even minor illnesses can have a major effect. I will have to issue an immediate warning." Wu shook his head. "At the very least, unless we're so fortunate as to have this be a strain that only I am vulnerable to, there will be an awful lot of miserable people here, for a while. And you don't even want to contemplate what could happen to someone who suddenly becomes sick while on EVA."

Picturing what would happen to someone who vomited while inside a spacesuit, A.J. was no longer amused.

Jackie stared, bleary-eyed, at the screen. She really didn't feel up to this, but Dr. Gupta was worse off. The deep voice was barely a whisper, and Dr. Wu—still looking rather dragged out from his own experience—had Gupta on IVs.

He wasn't the only one, either; by now over sixty percent of Nike's crew had come down with the flu, and a few were in very bad shape. A.J. was the worst off. The infection had a respiratory phase as well as a gastrointestinal one, and the respiratory irritation had caused a violent sympathetic reaction from his already damaged lungs. The sensor specialist was in the small medical bay under constant observation. Wu thought A.J. was out of the woods, but it would be weeks before he'd be back to full strength. He barely had the energy to smile and exchange a few words with Helen when she visited.

Enough musing. Edwards was waiting for Jackie's instructions. "Okay. You'll have to unbolt the cover plate in front of you. It's held by four locking bolts with latches. The latches you can pop off with your screwdriver. Use a fifteen millimeter socket on the bolt heads."

"Understood. Fifteen millimeter. They all secured on the shaft?"

"Yes. Once you loosen them enough, you can swing all four out of the way. And they'll stay out of the way—there's a spring-loaded mechanism to keep them from flopping around."

"Roger that."

She closed her eyes and tried to convince herself the room wasn’t really spinning. As the room really was spinning, at about two revolutions per minute, that was easier said than done. Tim Edwards was a good guy with a toolkit, but he wasn't an engineer. She'd have felt better about doing this job herself, if she'd been able to. But she still didn't dare get into a suit; and, unfortunately, all the other people who might have tried doing maintenance on the nuclear rocket engines were laid up.

Number Five engine had started having problems. The diagnostics pinpointed one of the valves involved in feeding reaction mass to the chamber. Fortunately, it was in a well-shielded area, because both she and Gupta wanted to replace the valve immediately and examine the old one to see what had gone wrong. If it was simply a defective part, fine. What they didn't want was to discover at the end of the trip that there was some underlying problem that had caused it to malfunction. By then, it might be too late to fix—and they'd need that engine for the braking maneuver.

"All bolts off, Jackie."

"Good." She forced her eyes to focus on the scene in front of her. "Okay, that panel was designed to swing up and out. It's on hinges, and there's a clip on the wall behind it which should keep it out of the way. Open her up."

Tim complied, slowly opening the access panel and locking it to the clip on the wall. "Got it."

"You should be seeing . . ." She trailed off, fighting to focus her memory. "There'll be three pipes in there. One has a bright red stripe on it, one a bright yellow, and one bright white."

"Yeah, you got it. Red, yellow, white."

"There should be two shutoff valve handles on each pipe. In between these shutoff valves are the control valve units."

"The shutoff valve handles are sort of like door handles, not like round spigot things, right?"

"Yes, that's right. They're open if they're in line with the pipe and closed if they're at right angles to the pipe. All of them should be open right now."

"They are," Tim verified, after a short pause. "You want me to close them?"

"Just the ones for the feeder line. That's the white-painted pipe."

"Gotcha." A few seconds went by. "Damn, this bugger is— whoa!"

Tim Edwards flailed a bit on the screen and started floating away from Nike. Jackie reflexively gasped before common sense caught up with her reaction. Just at that point, Edwards' safety line brought him to a mostly-cushioned halt and he began a very slow drift back.

"I'm okay, I'm okay! Don't worry. The one valve was sticky and I had to push pretty hard. When it gave I overcompensated."

Jackie's heart was pounding and her stomach roiled. "Ugh. Don't do that again, please. When I worry I get sicker."

"I'll try. Okay, both of these are now at right angles to the pipe. You're sure I'm not going to end up glowing in the dark?"

"You've got a rad meter on you now. Your major danger is from space radiation, not from our engines. The quicker we get this done, the better off we'll be."

"Roger that. I have the valves shut off on the white-painted pipe. What do I do next?"

"Now we have to remove—"

She stopped, appalled. "Did you say white-painted?"

"Yes. That was the one you told me to shut off."

"Jesus, I'm completely out of it. Please reopen those valves. That's not the feeder for the reaction mass, it's the coolant."

"That's bad, isn't it?"

"Not under these circumstances, actually. We've already got it shut down. But it would have been in other circumstances, and in this case it would've meant you'd have wasted your trip out there. The one you want is the yellow pipe. I did say 'yellow' this time, didn’t I?"

"Yellow, as in yellow-bellied. Um. Perhaps a poor choice of words, given the way I'm feeling right now. That's the one we want. Are you sure this time?"

"Yes. I'm sure. Yellow. Put the ones on the white pipe back in line, then turn off the ones on the yellow pipe."

"Roger." A few seconds passed. "All right, Jackie, the yellow pipe now has both valves in shutoff position, at right angles to the pipe. The white pipe's valves are both in line with the pipe."

"Very good." She focused on the situation at hand. "All right. That boxy-looking affair between the two shutoff valves is the control valve we're interested in. Please do a visual verification that the two units—the one you have with you, and the one we are about to remove—look the same."

"Confirmed," Tim's voice said shortly. "Allowing for the fact that I can't see all of the one that's currently in there."

"Don't worry. We'll have a couple of other checkpoints along the way. How are you holding up?"

"It's a little warm, but I can always duck a bit down to cool off. There's shade handy, and the suits are pretty good at keeping us cool."

"Just let me know if you start feeling even a little bit off. I don't want you getting sick out there in the middle of this. We can always leave Number Five shut down for a while, if we have to. It's not like we really need nuclear drive right now anyway."

"Don't worry, Jackie. I don't want to find myself spewing in my suit. Or just passing out from heat exhaustion, for that matter."

Jackie smiled wearily. "Okay, then. Let's go on to the next part. On the four corners facing you, there are bolts . . ."

"I think we're finally getting back to normal," Hathaway said. "A.J.'s moving around and trying to catch up on his work, and no one else seems in any danger. We're down to only twenty percent of the crew being ill, and all of them are in the recovery stage."

The time delay was quite noticeable now, with millions of miles separating the Nike from Earth after a couple of weeks spent en route. Finally, however, the image of Glendale smiled.

"That's good to hear, Ken. Everyone was very worried. So you don't think anything major has been impacted by the epidemic?"

"No, Nick. The only real problem was the need to replace the control valve on Number Five, and that was really more of an annoyance than a major issue. Tim Edwards performed admirably even though this wasn't at all his usual line of work, and Number Five has been tested and works just fine now. After taking apart the original valve, it appears that some of the bearings had suffered minor damage, possibly during manufacture, and after a short period of use the wear started to cause it to stick. We're testing all the others now and looking for signs indicating whether or not we might need to do other replacements, but so far it's all negative. The integrated distributed sensors are working fine."

After another long pause, Glendale nodded. "Good. The medical people are looking forward to your data. This is the first significant epidemic of any kind in space, so naturally it's of great interest. And all the other recent readings—radiation and so on—should accompany those."

"Don't worry, we've got tons of data to send and it's all been carefully arranged. Madeline—Ms. Fathom—has gone through the material and approved it, too."

"Well, then, we'll let you get back to work, Captain. Our best wishes to you and your people, and please let us know if there is anything we can do for you."

"Thanks much. I'll pass it on, though aside from the moral support you're already giving I don't think there's really much you could do. Nike out."

Ken sank back into a chair, feeling heavy despite the one-third gravity. The last two weeks had taught him the full meaning of the old phrase "weight of command." It had seemed that everything rested on his shoulders. He'd been sick himself, but had refused to impose on the heavily embattled medical staff—which consisted of Wu, Janice Ortega, Madeline Fathom and Helen Sutter. The last two were not officially part of the medical staff but they were the only two on board who had never caught the bug and had a pretty good knowledge of field medicine. That turned out to be especially true of Fathom. In fact, she'd volunteered to remain a regular assistant in the medical department, since her own duties as security officer wouldn’t really take up much of her time until they arrived at Phobos.

Ken couldn't afford to be sick. As his staff dropped like flies, he was the one who had to decide which of the increasingly small pool of healthy people filled which positions. No one else could really take the responsibility, and he wouldn't have given it up anyway. Even under these conditions . . . it was still his dream.

But a tiring dream. "System notification."

"Recording," the Nike's automatics replied.

"Captain is resting. Do not disturb except for emergencies."

"Notification posted. Expiration time?"

"Ten hours from now. Give me a wake-up call in eight hours."

"Wake-up call in eight hours. Understood."

"Thank you," he said reflexively as he moved towards his bunk..

"You are welcome, sir," Nike replied.

It may not really understand anything, Ken thought, as he lay down and closed his eyes. But whoever did the programming understands very well.

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Framed