There was one thing that Mariya hadn't considered. He had grown, matured and seasoned up since the last time that she had spent any amount of time with him. He was involved in the space race, and of course had to have a wealth of specialized technical knowledge that most others didn't.<br/><br/>However, she completely underestimated how lonely a space capsule could be.<br/><br/>Even if it were only for ten days, being in space caused a feeling of total isolation and made one realize how small and insignificant that they really are in the grand scheme of things. It helps to put things in perspective and make a person realize just how important everything is to them.<br/><br/>Likewise, it makes people realize how important everyone else is to them as well.<br/><br/>She was wrong if she was thinking that he had turned into a naive person. That wasn't quite right. Rather, he had turned into someone who was rethinking the importance of personal relationships, and therefore it might very well have seemed this way to her.<br/><br/>However, she didn't quite his frame of reference.<br/><br/>On the other hand, that didn't mean that she couldn't have easily misused this to her advantage. Taking advantage of a good situation didn't seem, of course, like something that Mariya was above any more.<br/><br/>"Sick inside of a boat? Well, have you heard about the spacecraft that the Americans have been launching from the eastern coastline of Florida? Here in the USSR our capsules return to Earth over dry land. In America, they land in the water and they bob around until someone comes and picks them up. I hear that American space travelers can get quite seasick in the process since a spaceship is not a terrestrial boat!"<br/><br/>Vitali laughed, though at this point he wasn't telling her anything that she couldn't have easily found out listening to the radio or checking out a newspaper.<br/><br/>"Of course, would you have liked to pay a visit here?"<br/><br/>Naturally if she shared a meal with him, then it might have been easier for her to convince him that she was just being friendly and then get him to say something compromising. The more casual she acted, the more easily he might have been able to give something up.<br/><br/>"For what it's worth, I should be here a while. I told you about radiation and how they don't want us exposed to too much at one time, right...umm...orbital spacecraft are pumped full of them."<br/><br/>Again, though, he wasn't saying anything new.<br/><br/>Maybe, though, with time she could have really started to wheedle things out of him that would have perhaps been a little more interesting. It was surely those things that would have been more interesting to whatever superiors that she was serving unbeknownst to Vitali for the time being.