While she was thinking that it would have been good to keep in touch for her nefarious reasons, Vitali had actually been thinking that it would have been good to keep in touch for more kind ones. Naturally he had missed his old friend, and would have liked to have at least kept in touch somehow.<br/><br/>Calling her would have been prohibitively expensive, but he could have at least written.<br/><br/>"Well, over time exposure to radiation...they think that it could increase the chance of leukemia. Remember that everything is radioactive somewhat, so they want me to be careful until the increased dose evens out or drops beneath what a normal person would have gotten sitting on Earth. That means that they don't want me around certain things, and I was given plenty of rest."<br/><br/>After he had said this, rather thoughtfully, he paused a moment to focus on it.<br/><br/>"While that might be the case, I mean...I do take care of myself. Most important is not to smoke. Some cosmonauts smoke, and I could only imagine what it must be like up there. You are in the middle of a locked cabin and then all of a sudden you need to light up. You can't though, since you have to wait to return to Earth." That caused a shake of his head to pop up.<br/><br/>Vitali laughed as he started to move toward the door in front of them.<br/><br/>"That being said, I'm of course permitted to be here no matter what. I trust that you would still like to join me for some real food."<br/><br/>Since the concern was real enough, this might have been the angle to press in order to make him actually share something decent.<br/><br/>While they say that loose lips sink ships, Vitali was carefully skirting anything too probing at this point. Nevertheless, she might have found the place where he would have been quite disarmed in a short period of time.<br/><br/>Disarming him, it might have seemed, was perhaps the most important thing when it came to getting him to talk about his position.