The phone call ended up in Marianna hanging up on Keith.

It hurt him at first. But after a long coffee and a walk around the hallways he cooled down. She was right in some ways. That he was always making a big deal out of every little thing. That he'd been too long up in 

Spacecity

and that maybe it was time that he come back down.

She hadn't said the last part explicitly. Keith's interpretation based on the things she did point out. Like how he would obsess over subjects and make it seem like they were about to do something really big or dangerous. And how it had always turned out that they were just regular people doing boring stuff.

Keith had been too long in space. He couldn't think of a person who'd been here longer than him. Now he was the old timer. What had his life amounted to? Making up stories about people down on earth. Trying to stir some excitement into his boring life.

No. He was just a boring person. Living up in space. And he had wasted a decade here now when he could've been back down years ago.

"Keith. What's wrong?"

"Huh?"

"You look like. You look like you're sinking in quicksand. And you haven't realized it."

Instincts drove Keith to look down at his feet. No sand. Just clean smooth surfaces.

Cal didn't believe in all the crazy fairy tales and scifi stories Keith made out of his subjects. Cal still liked playing along though. It was fun. Better than treating the subjects like sterile agents. But the latest one kind of worried him. Now Keith was trying to intervene at a higher level than before. Calling people down on earth. Calling someone he knew up here. It was wrong. Cal didn't know what to do about it though.

Should he tell someone in management? Could he do that to Keith? Cal didn't know what what happen to him. I mean at worst they would just send him back to earth. That might be good for the guy? He sure as hell wasn't going to volunteer to return. Maybe getting Keith in trouble would be doing him a service.