BOUNDARY(92)

"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.