Echoes of the Well of Souls

A Small Town In Georgia

It had been a shock opening the door to the apartment and seeing just how much was missing.

Have I accumulated so little in my life as this? she wondered, oddly disturbed as much by the thought as by the emptiness.

Even most of the furniture had been his. He’d been nice, of course, offering to leave some of it, but she wanted everything of his, everything that might bring her back into contact with him, removed.

The effect was as if thieves had broken in and stolen anything that could be carried but had gotten scared off just before finishing the job. The drapes were hers, and the small stereo, the TV and its cheap stand, the six bookcases made of screw-it-together-yourself particleboard that sagged and groaned under the weight of her books, and the plants in the window. But only the big beanbag chair with the half dozen patches afforded a place to sit.

She went over to the sliding glass door that led to the tiny balcony and saw that the two cheap aluminum and plastic patio chairs and the little table she’d picked up at a garage sale were still there. So, too, were the worn chairs at the built-in kitchenette. He’d been sparing of the cutlery and glassware and had taken nothing save his abominable Cap’n Crunch cereal.

Feeling hollow and empty yet still distanced from the emotional shock, she put the small kettle on for tea and continued the inventory.

All her clothes were still there, of course, but even though they took up the vast majority of the closet space, there was an emptiness. The dresser and makeup table were just where they always were, but the room looked grotesque without the water bed, just the impression of where it had rested on the discolored and dirty carpet. She would have to tend to that right off the bat. She wondered if she could get a bed in four hours and doubted it; she’d have to either go to a motel tonight or sleep on the floor with just a pillow and sheets until it was delivered. There was no way in heaven that she could get as much as a twin mattress in the little Colt she was driving.

A sudden wave of insecurity washed over her, almost overwhelming her, and she dashed into the bathroom and then grabbed the sink as if to steady herself.

Funny how the bathroom had a calming effect. Maybe it was because, other than being minus his toiletries, it was intact. Then she looked at herself in the mirror, and some of the fear, the emptiness, returned.

She was thirty-six years old and, thanks to the two years she’d spent working at various odd jobs while waiting for an assistantship to open up so she could afford grad school, only seven years out of college. All that time she’d been a single-minded workaholic—push, push, push, drive, drive, drive. Two years teaching gut courses at junior college because even in an age when they were crying for scientists to teach, she’d discovered, there was a lot of resistance from the older male-dominated science faculties to hiring a young woman. All the research and academic excellence counted for little. Oh, they’d never come right out and said anything, but she knew the routine by now; at first she had been merely frustrated but was quickly clued in by her female colleagues at the junior college. “They never take you serious unless you’re well over forty because they think you’re going to teach for a while and then quit and have babies” and “They still believe deep down that old saw about women not being as good as men in math and science.”

But they also, she had to admit, credited experience. Not that she hadn’t tried that route, but the big openings for her were in the oil industry, and that meant both swallowing a lot of her principles and old ideals and also facing the probability of going off to Third World countries where women had no rights at all and trying to do a job there.

Finally she got this job, one she really loved, thanks to an old professor of hers who had become department head. As an instructor, teaching undergrads basic courses, it hadn’t been the fun it should have been, but it allowed her to work as an assistant on the real research, even if it wasn’t her grant and wouldn’t merit more than a “thanks” in the articles that might be published out of it. Still, she’d done more work in the lab than the professors who would get the credit, trying to show them, prove to them that she was in their league and on their level.

And now she was thirty-six going on thirty-seven, not yet tenured, teaching elementary courses to humanities students who didn’t give a damn but needed these few basic science courses so they could get B.S. instead of B.A. degrees. And she was alone in this mostly stripped apartment, going nowhere as usual and doing it alone.

Not that he’d dropped her. She had been the one to break it off, the one to give the ultimatum. It was always understood that they had an “open” relationship, that they were free to see others and not be tied down. They even laughed at the start about making sure they both had safe sex and got regular tests for any nasties that might be picked up. And she’d meant it at the time. The problem was she’d never fooled around with anybody else after he’d moved in, even though she’d had the chance. She simply didn’t need anybody else. But he’d kept doing it and kept doing it and kept doing it until he’d done it with a regularity that finally showed that he was not about to slow down or become monogamous.

She felt guilty, even now, for being jealous. Worse, it wasn’t based on morality but on her ego. She’d never expected to be so wounded, and it bothered her. What do they have that I don’t? What do they give him that 1 can’t? Am I that bad in bed?

Best not to dwell on it now. Best to pick up the pieces and go on to something else. She was good at that, she thought ruefully. It seemed like all her life she was picking up the pieces and going on to something else.

She slipped out of her clothes, removed her glasses, grabbed some towels, and went in to take a shower. The mirror on the shower wall reflected her back to herself with no illusions. She stepped very close to the glass so that she could see it clearly, her vision without the glasses being perfectly clear for only a foot or so in front of her, then stared at the reflection as if it were someone else, someone she hardly knew.

Her black hair was cut very short, in a boyish cut; it was easy to wash and easy to manage, and it had fewer gray hairs to pluck that way. Her face was a basic oval shape with brown eyes, thin lashes, a somewhat too large nose, and a mouth maybe a bit too wide, but not much. Not an unattractive face, neither cute nor beautiful, but with maturity creeping into its features, hardening them a bit—or was that her imagination?

Average. That’s what she was: average. Not a bad figure but no bathing beauty type, either. Breasts a little too small, hips too wide. With the right clothes she could be very attractive, but this way, unadorned, her body would win no prizes, no envious gazes, no second looks. She looked like a million other women. Generic, that’s me, she thought glumly. I ought to have a little black bar code tattooed on my forehead.

That was the trouble, really, in academia as well. There were women at the top of most scientific disciplines, including hers, none of whom would have any problems being wooed from one major chair to another, writing their own tickets their own way, but they were very few in number because the deck was still stacked. Those women were the geniuses, the intellects who could not be denied. As “attractive” was to “knockout,” so “smart” was to “brilliant.” Intellectually, she knew that the vast majority of people, male or female, could not have attained a doctorate in a field like hers, but it just wasn’t quite enough. Enough to finally teach at a great university, but only as “Instructor in the Physical Sciences”—not just Physics 101, which was bad enough, but, God help her, “Introduction to the Sciences for Humanities Students”—and a lowly assistant on research projects whose grants and control were held by middle-aged male professors.

The shower helped a little, but not much, since it left time for more brooding. Was it the fates that struck her where she was, or was it rather lapses in herself? Was she demanding too much of a guy and maybe too much of herself? With people starving around the world and the working poor standing with their families in soup kitchen lines, did she have any right to complain about a dead-end life if it was such a comfortable, yuppified dead end? Was she being just daddy’s spoiled little girl, in a situation many would envy, depressed because she couldn’t have it all?

A line from one of her undergraduate seminars came to her, fairly or not, and tried to give her some relief from those hard questions. The professor had been a leading feminist and sociologist, and she’d said, “It’s not tough enough being a woman in this day and age, we also have to be saddled with some kind of constant guilt trip, too.”

She was, she knew, at a crisis point in her own life, no matter how miserable other lives might be. She was at an age when biological clocks ticked loudly, at an age when ease of career change was fading fast with each passing page on the calendar, when any move that could be made had to be made or the status quo would become unbreakable. At some point in nearly everybody’s life there came the time when one came to a cliff’s edge and saw a monstrous gap between oneself and the other side, a side that was nearly impossible to make out. She was up for tenure and possible promotion next year, and she’d not heard anything to indicate she wouldn’t get it, although one could never be sure. It was something she wanted, yet it also meant being here, on this side of the chasm, for the rest of her life.

Or she could break away and take real risks and, like most people who did so, fall into the chasm. But all the people who got what and where they wanted, the satisfied movers and shakers, had taken that same risk and made it to the other side. Not all of those people were happier than they’d been before, but many were. The trouble was, she was on the old side for making that leap. She was, after all, in this situation now because she craved stability, not earthquakes. Taking a risk in her personal life would mean saying yes to the first guy who proposed who wasn’t a geek or a pervert. And professionally, to take a risk would mean first having someplace to jump to, and the offers weren’t exactly pouring in, nor did risky opportunity just fall from the sky.

The vortex was never black; rather, it revealed the underside, the sinews, the crisscrossing lines of mathematical force that sustained and essentially stabilized the relevant parts of the universe. The Kraang examined those lines, noted the symmetry and precision, and, this time, noted the relay and junction points. Now, after all those millennia, the slight deviation the Kraang had been able to induce in the last reset had paid off; a line was being followed, not avoided as always before. The Watchman’s line, the focal point for probability itself, the emergency signal and warning beacon for the physics of the governable portions of the cosmos.

The emergence, as always, was like suddenly being catapulted out of a great tunnel; there, ahead, a solar system, a governed construct in a pattern the Kraang understood well, although it had no knowledge of what sort of creatures might live there or their current stage of development. It did not matter. The Kraang was not supposed to be in this sort of proximity, and already the signal of an aberration would be flowing back to Control, but it was a very long way, and even at the sort of speed such messages could travel Underside, it would be several seconds before it reached Control, and then Control would react.

By now the Kraang knew how it would react.

Control was not self-aware, for if it were, it would be a living god of the universe with no limits and no governor. Automatic maintenance meant automatic response; the experiments were supposed to be controlled, not supervised.

The Kraang’s great mind searched frantically for the now-invisible termination of the force line. Great Shia!

Where was it? A world incredibly ancient, a world with an artificial yet living core…

For a moment the Kraang experienced panic. No such world existed in this system! The nine planets and dozens of assorted larger moons were all dead save the experiment itself! A billion years the lords of chance had made the Kraang wait for this moment! A billion years, and now to be faced with failure…! It would be too much for even the Kraang to bear.

And then, suddenly, it found what it was looking for. A planet once but no more, pulled apart by the strains of gravity and catastrophe, broken into impossibly small fragments that still worked together, trapped into sufficient cohesion by Control’s grasp of the energy of probability. Although in a million million pieces, the living heart still somehow functioned in what remained, two tiny steering moons and a vast additional ring…

Its mind reached out. Success! Connection! I give a small part of myself to you!

A sudden and violent bump, a wrenching jar—its container had been struck head on! An asteroid, small yet effective, had slammed into the container, altering its trajectory. It began to move quickly away, toward the still-distant inner gas giant. The Kraang relaxed and understood. Control was correcting. At this speed and trajectory the Kraang would rush headlong toward the giant world beyond, well away from the active matrix, and the giant’s great gravity would slingshot the container around, accelerate it to tremendous speed, sufficient to generate a space-time ripple, to take it out of this system, perhaps out of this entire galaxy.

But it would take two years, as time was counted here, for it to reach the giant and the better part of a third to achieve the desired effect. Out here, in the real universe. Control was constrained by its own laws and the basic laws of physics. Corruption of the system had now occurred; the experiment was now invalidated. It would have no choice but to use whatever mechanism it created to call the Watchman, down there, somewhere, on the experiment itself, the blue and white world third from the sun…

“Lori, could you step into my office for a minute?”

It was symptomatic of the problems in her professional life and of her feelings of hitting brick walls. Whiz kid Roger Samms, Ph.D. at twenty-four, was always “Dr. Samms,” but Lori Sutton, Ph.D., age thirty-six, was almost always “Lori” to Professor George Virdon Hicks, the department head and her boss. Hicks was basically a nice guy, but he belonged to a far older generation and was beyond even comprehending the problem.

She entered, somewhat puzzled. “Yes, sir?”

“Sit down, sit down!” He sighed and sank into his own chair. “I’ve got an interesting and fast-developing situation here that’s causing us some problems and may be opening up some opportunities for you. Uh—pardon me for asking, but I’m given to understand that you’re living alone here now, no particular personal ties or local family?”

She was puzzled and a little irritated at the speed of campus gossip. “That’s true.”

“And you did some of your doctoral research at the big observatories in Chile?”

She nodded. “Yes, under Don Mankowicz and Jorje Paz. It was the most fun I’ve had in science to date.”

“Did you get over the mountains and into the Amazon basin at all?”

It was hard to see where this was going. “Yes, I took a kind of back-country trip into the rain forests with the Salazars—they finance their fight against the destruction of the rain forest and its cultures by taking folks like me on such trips. It was fascinating but a little rugged.”

Hicks leaned forward a little and picked up a packet in a folder on his desk and shoved it toward her. She opened it up and saw it was full of faxes, some showing grainy photographs, others trajectory charts, star charts, and the like. She looked them over and read the covering letter from the MIT team down in Chile who’d sent them. And she was suddenly very interested.

“About nine days ago, during some routine calibration sweeps for the eighty-incher that’s just been overhauled, they picked this up. We’re not sure, but we think it’s a known asteroid—at least, a small one discovered about a dozen years ago should have been in that vicinity at about that time. It should have cleared the orbit of the moon by a good two hundred thousand kilometers, but something, some collision or force unknown, seems to have jarred it just so. It’s big—maybe as big as eight hundred meters— and it’s just brushing by the moon right now.”

She shrugged. “Fascinating, but we’ve had ones as big or bigger than this come in between us and the moon.”

“Yes, but they missed.”

She felt a cold, eerie chill go through her, and she looked at the computer readouts again. “It’s going to hit? This is— this could be Meteor Crater or Tunguska!”

He nodded. “Yes, on page three, there, you see that the current estimate based on angle, trajectory, and spectrum analysis of the composition estimates that possibly a third of it will survive to impact, possibly as a single unit. The explosion and crater are going to be enormous.”

“And it’s going to hit land? In South America?”

“We can’t be completely certain, not for another ten to twelve hours, maybe not even then. There are a lot of questions as to the exact angle of entry, how much true mass it represents, whether it will fragment, and so on. They’re now giving better than even odds that it’ll impact off the Chilean or Ecuadorian coast in the Pacific, but if it’s very heavy and hard inside and if the mass is great enough, it’ll come down short, possibly in the Andes, more likely in the Brazilian rain forest short of there. Fortunes are being wagered in every observatory and physics department in the world, or will be. It’ll hit the news shortly; there’s much debate, I understand, on how early to release it, since we’ll inevitably get special media coverage with experts talking about global warming and a new ice age from the dust and you name it and people living in both the wrong hemispheres panicking anyway. It’ll be out regardless by the evening news tonight.”

She nodded, fascinated but still puzzled. “So what has this to do with me?”

“There’ll be scientists from all over and news organizations as well gearing up to go in, but the Brazilian government is very concerned about possible injuries or deaths and wants nobody in the area. They have troops already up there trying to get the few settlements evacuated in time, and that, plus the usual red tape, is putting the brakes on most efforts. The exception is Cable News, which has some contacts there and a good relationship with the Brazilian press and government. They’ve used us before for science pieces and are mounting a team to cover it. To the frustration of the others, they’ll probably be the pool. They need somebody with them to tell them what the devil it is they’re seeing, or not seeing, and they’ve called us.”

She sat for a moment, not quite wanting to believe the implications of the conversation. Finally, worried that she had misunderstood, she asked, “Are you asking if I would go?”

He nodded. “Very short notice.” He looked at his watch. “You’d have to leave for home now. Pack in an hour or so. Your passport is current?”

“Yes, but—”

“Don’t forget it. They’ve got the visas. They’ll send a helicopter here for you and your stuff. You’ll be on a private charter with their team leaving Hartsfield at seven tonight.”

“But—but… Why me?”

He looked almost apologetic. “Grad assistants can cover your courses with no sweat, but Doctor Samms is in a rush to get his research organized for a presentation at the AAS next week, and both Kelly and I are, frankly, too old for this sort of thing, as much as I’d love to see that sucker come down—pardon the expression. Nobody else is qualified to observe the event and free enough to go who also wouldn’t be stiff as a board and look like an ass on television. So it’s either you or they call another university. And I’m afraid I have to call them back in less than ten minutes or they’re going to do that anyway.”

“I—I hardly know what to say. Yes, of course I’ll go. I—oh, my God! I better get packing!” The fact that he was being fairly left-handed about it all, that she’d gotten the job only because she was the only one so unimportant that she could be easily spared, didn’t bother her. This was the kind of luck she dreamed about, the one break upon which she might be able to stake out a scientific position that would be so unique that it would ensure her stature and prominence.

“We’ll make sure you’re covered,” Hicks assured her. “Five o’clock this afternoon they’ll land to pick you up at the medical center heliport. Don’t forget your passport!”

She wanted to kiss the old boy, who now could call her “Lori” any time he wanted, but she was in too much of a hurry. Jeez—she’d have to get the suitcases out of the storage locker, haul them up. What to take? She had little clothing or equipment for this kind of trip. And makeup— this was television! And the laptop, of course, and… How the hell was she going to pack and make it in just three hours?

It was tough, but she managed, knowing she’d forgotten many vital things and hoping that she would have a chance to pick them up in Brazil before going into the wild. The mere hauling of the suitcases and the packing had her gasping for breath, and she began to wonder if she was up to the coming job. She began to feel both her age and the effects of letting the spa membership lapse about a year earlier. She also worried about how much of that clothing, particularly the jeans, would fit. In the months since she’d thrown Harry out, she’d found solace for her dark mood in large quantities of chocolate and other sugary things and generally letting herself go.

Well, the hell with it. If they were going to give her this kind of notice, they could damned well buy her appropriate jungle clothing.

She locked up and hauled the suitcases to the car, discovering for the first time that one wheel on the big suitcase was missing. She just wasn’t ready for this, not with this kind of deadline—but she knew she needed it, needed it bad.

The helicopter was just about on time. It was, she saw, amused, the one Atlanta’s pop radio station used for traffic reports and had that big logo on the side. She wondered how the commuters were going to get home tonight.

The pilot got out, bending slightly under the rotors, and put out his hand. “Hello! I’m Jim Syzmanski,” he said in a shouted Georgia-accented voice. “You’re Doctor Sutton?”

“Yes. I’m sorry for the bulk, but they didn’t give me much notice on this.”

He looked at the two suitcases. “No sweat. You ought to see what some of ‘em take to a mere accident.” He picked them up as if they weighed nothing and stored them in back of the seats. “Get in, and we’ll get you goin’.”

Although not new to helicopters, she’d never been in one of these small, light types with two seats and a bubble, and it was a little unnerving for a while. Still, the pilot knew his business; it was smooth and comfortable, and they were approaching the airport in a mere twenty minutes, about two hours less than it would have taken to drive and park.

“Sorry to rush you here so you could wait,” the pilot told her, “but they need the chopper back over the highways, and this was the only slot I had to get you. Your bags will be okay here. Not many facilities in this area, but unless you want to hike a bunch to the terminal and back, I’d say just head for that waiting room over there. It’s pretty basic, but it’ll do. I’ll radio in once I’m up and tell them that you’re here and waiting. It shouldn’t be long.”

She thanked him, and he was off as soon as he got clearance, leaving her alone in the hangar area. There was a sleek-looking twin-engine Learjet just beyond the barrier with the news organization’s corporate logo; she assumed that it was the plane they were going to use.

She turned and walked toward the indicated lounge area, which wasn’t much more than a prefabricated unit sitting on the tarmac. A few official-looking people were around beyond the fence, but she suddenly felt nervous about being there without some kind of pass or badge. What if she got arrested for possible hijacking or something?

The lounge proved to have a few padded seats, one of those portable desks so common at airport check-ins, a single rest room, a soft drink machine, two candy machines, a dollar changer, and an empty coffee service. Suddenly conscious that she hadn’t taken the time to eat anything since breakfast, she looked at the machines and sighed. The cuisine in this place wasn’t exactly what she needed, but it would have to do. Hartsfield was such an enormous airport that getting to a point where she could even catch a shuttle to a terminal was beyond her current energy level, and she was afraid to leave. If they showed up and didn’t find her here, they might just leave without her. One of Murphy’s ancient laws—if you stay, they’ll be late. If you go, they’ll show up almost immediately. This wasn’t exactly scheduled service, and any rules beyond that weren’t very clear.

She fumbled through her bag. At least she had some ones and what felt like a ton of change at the bottom.

Nothing brought on depression faster or made time crawl more than having rushed like mad only to wind up stuck in an empty building, she reflected. The adrenaline rush was wearing off, replaced by a sense of weariness. If the pace had continued, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but to be dropped suddenly into lonely silence was murder.

It also gave her time to worry. Had she packed everything that she needed? Was she dressed right for this? Thinking of utility, she’d pulled on some stretch pants, a Hubble telescope T-shirt because it was the only thing she could find that would mark her as perhaps a scientist, and some low-top sneakers. Her old hiking boots were packed, at least, but she doubted that she had a pair of jeans that still fit. Prescription sunglasses, check. But her spare pair of regular glasses were still in her desk in her office. Damn! That’s one, she thought glumly. The pair she had on and the sunglasses would have to do.

She also hadn’t stopped the mail or papers or arranged for her car to be picked up. It was too late to call anybody who could do much tonight; she’d have to call Hester, the department secretary, from Brazil tomorrow.

She went over to the window and looked out on the field. The sun was getting low, and the tinted windows reflected her image back through the view. God! I look awful! she thought, worried now about first impressions. She hadn’t really realized how much she’d let herself go. She was becoming a real chubette, even in the face, and the very short haircut that had proved so convenient and would also be best for the tropics somehow looked very masculine against that face. I look like a middle-aged bull dyke, she thought unhappily. She was supposed to go on TV looking like this!

She was suddenly struck with a twinge of panic. What if the television people saw her and decided that there was no way somebody looking like her could go on? What if they told her at the last minute that they were getting somebody from the observatories in Chile? There had to be quite a scientific team assembling there for this event.

It was the deserted civil aviation terminal, she told herself. Rushing around from a standing start and then being dropped into this lonely silence. She wasn’t very convincing, however. She was getting old and fat and unattractive at an accelerating rate, and it scared the living hell out of her.

She kept going to the windows and peering out at the Learjet, wondering if she shouldn’t be outside, even in the dark. They might miss her, might not even know she was there.

Suddenly she heard voices approaching. The door opened, and two people walked in. The first was maybe the thinnest woman she’d ever seen short of Ethiopian famine pictures on TV; the woman almost redefined the term “tiny.” Maybe five feet tall, weighing less than some people’s birth weights, dressed in jeans and a matching denim jacket, she was perhaps in her mid-thirties, although it was hard to tell for sure, with a creamy brown complexion and one of those Afro-American hairstyles that looked like the hair was exploding around the head.

The other was a tall, lanky man in jeans and cowboy boots with disheveled sandy brown hair and a ruddy complexion who needed only a stalk of wheat in his hand to be the perfect picture of somebody who’d just stepped off the farm.

“So, anyway, I told George—” the thin woman was saying in one of those big, too-full voices small people seemed to have or develop, when she saw the stranger and paused. “Oh! Hi! You must be Doctor Sutton!”

“Uh—yes. I—1 was beginning to think I was forgotten.”

The tiny woman sank into a chair. “Sorry about that. When stories happen this fast it’s always a mess, and this won’t be the last of it. I’m Theresa Perez—‘Terry’ to all— and this is, believe it or not, Gustav Olafsson, always ‘Gus.’ I’m what they euphemistically call a ‘producer,’ which means I’m supposed to make sure everything’s there that needs to be there and that the story gets done and gets back. It sounds important, but in the news biz it’s a glorified executive secretary to the reporter. Gus is that peculiar breed of creature—we’re not sure if they’re human or not— known as the ‘news photographer.’ The kind of fanatic who’ll insist on taping his own execution if it’ll get a good picture.”

“ ’Lo,” said the taciturn photographer. “They tell us it’ll be five or ten minutes and then we’ll board, taxi out, and wait two hours to get out of this damned mess,” Perez continued. “The traffic in this place is abominable. You know the saying, ‘A wicked man died, and the devil came and took him straight to hell—after, of course, changing in Atlanta.’ ”

Lori smiled, although it was an old joke. “I know. Is that our plane out there?”

“Yeah. Don’t let it fool you. The boss has a real fancy one just for his own use. The rest of them are corporate jets. We almost always fly commercial, but if we took Varig down, with all the changes and schedule problems, we’d never be sure of getting where we need to get in time. When you have a schedule problem, the Powers That Be unfreeze their rusted-shut purses and spring for a special. You have bags?”

“Two. They’re still in the hangar over there—I hope.”

“We’ll get them.”

“I hope I’m going to be able to pick up something before we go into the bush,” Lori told her. “I’m not even sure my old stuff fits.”

“I know what you mean. Well, we’ve got about seventy hours total, and it’ll be tight, but we should have a little time in Manaus to get something, anyway. It’s a decent city for being out there in the middle of nowhere, particularly since it became a main port of entry for airplanes. I was down a year or so ago when we did a rain forest depletion story. One of these times I’m going to be able to see something of these places we get sent. It’s always hurry, hurry in this business, and after being ying-yanged around the world, when you get some time off, you want to spend it home in bed.”

Lori nodded and smiled, but deep down she envied somebody with that kind of life.

“She never stops talking,” Gus commented in a dry Minnesota accent that fit him well. “Ain’t gonna get no sleep at all on this trip.”

Perez looked up at him with a wry expression. “Gloomy Gus, always the soul of tact. No wonder you can’t keep a job.”

Lori looked puzzled, and Perez said, “Gus is a freelance. Half the foreign photographers, sound men, and technicians are, even for the broadcast networks. Nobody can afford to keep on a staff so large that it can be all the places with all the personnel it needs to cover the world. I have a list of hundreds in different categories. This time Gus was the first one I called who was available.”

“What she really means is that they don’t want to pay top dollar to the best in the business during the long times when there’s nothin’ happening,” Gus retorted.

“I gather you two have worked together before.”

Perez nodded. “Twice. Once on the Mexican earthquake and again on one of those stock ‘volcano blows its top’ stories from Hawaii. Beats me why folks still have houses around that thing to begin with. Gus specializes in natural disasters. That’s how he got tagged ‘Gloomy’ as much as his shining personality.”

The door opened again, and a middle-aged man in a pilot’s uniform came in. “We’re ready when you are,” he told Perez.

“Let’s go, then,” the producer responded, getting up, and they all filed out after the pilot.

“My bags!” Lori said suddenly.

“Need help?” the pilot asked her.

“No, not if they’re still there, thanks. Just bring them out to the plane?”

He nodded, and she dashed into the hangar. Somebody had moved them to one side, but they were still there and apparently otherwise untouched. She picked them both up and walked toward the jet. The pilot—actually the copilot as it turned out—took them and stowed them in an external baggage compartment, along with Perez’s overnight bag and Gus’s small suitcase and huge mass of formidable-looking cases containing, she supposed, his camera, lenses, and the like.

The Lear was the way to fly, she decided almost instantly. It was like the first-class cabin of the finest airliner but no coach section behind. Just four extralarge and comfortable swivel airline seats with extended backrests and two pairs of standard seats against the aft bulkhead between which was access to the rest room. There was a small table in the center of the four swivel chairs that looked like a junior version of a corporate boardroom conference table. There were compartments overhead and other places to stow gear. There were also ashtrays, something she hadn’t seen on many planes for a while. Not that she needed one, but clearly the regulations didn’t apply if one owned the plane.

“Turn forward and you’ll feel the seat lock into place,” the copilot instructed them. “Everybody fasten your belts and keep your seats in the forward locked position until we have altitude. Once we’re up, I’ll come back and show you the rest. We’ve got a window coming up, though, and we don’t want to miss it. You get bumped to the back of the line here, you may sit for hours.”

They still sat for a little while, but finally the small jet taxied out to the starting position and in a very short time was rolling down the runway at what seemed breakneck speed, although it probably wasn’t any faster than the 767 that had gone before them.

The flight was surprisingly smooth and comfortable once they were airborne; more so, she thought, than a bigger plane, although it had been much bumpier taxiing. She had been surprised to see the “Fasten Seat Belt” and “No Smoking” signs just like on a commercial jet. In a few minutes, the panorama of Atlanta at night was obscured by clouds and there was nothing to do but wait until those magic lights vanished, signaling freedom. Not that she wanted to get up right at the moment; the angle of climb was pretty steep and seemed to go on forever.

Finally they leveled off, and the seat belt lights went out. Almost immediately the copilot came back to the cabin. “Anybody hungry?” he asked.

“Starved,” Lori responded.

“We get our meals from the same caterer as the big boys on flights like this. The executives have their own food specially prepared, but this is cuisine a la Dobbs House, I’m afraid. No better or worse than the usual airline fare. I’ll stick them in the microwave, and we’ll at least be full up until breakfast.” The small kitchen was cleverly concealed and easy to manage. He put the dinners in, set the controls, then came back and pressed a large square button on one of the bulkheads. A section opened outward, cleverly revealing an impressive-looking bar.

“It’s more or less serve yourself,” the copilot told them. “Anything you might want is here. Hard stuff, soft stuff, beer, wine—good wine—as well as coffee, which I’ll start when we reach altitude. Ice is in the hopper there, glasses in the bin. Trash goes in here, and dirty glasses go in this other bin over here.”

A bell went off, and he went back to the small kitchen. “Let’s see … we’ve got Delta fish, United Salisbury steak, and USAir lasagna. I’ll just put them on the cold trays and set them on the table, and you can fight over which one you want.”

“What about you and the pilot?” Lori asked him.

“Oh, we have to eat yet different meals, but that’s later. Both of us ate before we came.”

He showed them how to unlock the seats so they would swivel once more and also demonstrated that they were nearly full recliners with a nice footrest emerging when the backrest was lowered. Pillows and blankets were above.

Lori didn’t care which meal she got and wound up with the Salisbury steak. She couldn’t help noticing that Terry had the fish and a diet Pepsi. Only the congenitally thin acted like they were obese all the time.

“So—is this it?” she asked the two newspeople. “I mean—no reporter?”

Terry chuckled. “Oh, there’ll be a reporter, all right. Himself.” She lowered her voice as deep as she could. “John Maklovitch, CNN news,” she intoned solemnly. “He’ll meet up with us in Manaus. Flying in from God Only Knows, as usual. In fact, he should beat us there if his connections work out right. We’ll use local free-lancers. I’ve already set up with my counterpart from TV Brasil. Right now they think it’s fifty-fifty that the meteor will come down before dawn, so we’re going to try and catch its act as it comes in, from the air. It would be neat if we could catch it hitting the earth, but they still can’t predict exactly where within a couple of hundred miles last I heard, and it’ll be traveling a lot faster than we can.”

“Might be for the best we’re not that close when it hits, if it hits land,” Lori noted. “A big one like this could have the force of a decent-sized atomic bomb, in which case you’d get everything you might expect from a bomb, maybe including radiation—the great mystery explosion at Tunguska in Siberia in 1908 was radioactive, although that might not have been a meteor. The estimates I saw in the papers I read today indicate that this might be the largest one in modern times. The shock wave alone will be enormous, and the crater will be fantastic, like a volcanic caldera, very hot and possibly molten.”

“Sounds like fun,” Gus commented. “No chance this thing isn’t a meteor, though, is there?”

“Huh? What do you mean? Little green men?”

“Well, I saw War of the Worlds on TBS last week. Good timing.”

She laughed. “I seriously doubt it. The only danger, and it’s very remote, is that this is going to be something like the Tunguska explosion I just talked about. Massive blast damage for hundreds of miles with no evidence of what caused it. Many people think it might have been antimatter.”

“Auntie what?”

“Antimatter. Matter just like regular matter only with opposite electrical charge and polarity. When antimatter hits matter, they both blow up. Cancel out. Don’t let that worry you, though. I never bought the antimatter Siberian explosion. Nobody ever explained to me why it didn’t cancel out when it hit the atmosphere if it was. Others say it was a comet, although there’s no sign of the meteorite fall that would accompany one. At least one major Russian physicist thinks it was a crashed alien spaceship, but I don’t think we have to take that one seriously. Don’t worry—it’ll be plenty big enough if it’s the size they predict even after losing the bulk of its mass in friction with the atmosphere. I hope it lands either in the jungle or in the sea. The track prediction I saw takes it over some fairly populous parts of Peru if it clears the Andes. There’s no way they could evacuate all that region, not in three days.”

“Don’t get Gus hoping,” Terry cautioned. “If it came down in downtown Lima, he’d be so ecstatic about the photo ops, he wouldn’t even think of the misery. And no matter what he says, he’d love it to be an invasion from Mars. As I said, news photographers aren’t quite human.”

Gus looked sheepish. “Well, it ain’t like this happens every day.”

“In fact, it does happen every day,” Lori told him. “Meteor strikes, that is. It’s just that the particles hitting the Earth are usually small enough that they burn up before they reach the ground and just give pretty shooting stars for folks to look at. The ones that do reach the ground are often the size of peas or so, and most land in the ocean, in any case. It’s just the size of this monster that makes it so unusual.”

“Well, wherever it hits and no matter what damage it does, we’ll be the first on the scene,” Gus told her. “That’s our job.”

“Actually, we’re praying for Brazil,” Terry added. “The other organizations will be forced to use our pool in that region. If it goes into Peru, well, there’s a ton of broadcast teams in there now from dozens of countries and more arriving every day. We want to be first and exclusive. If we’re not, we’re not doing our job.”

“If it does land up in the upper Amazon, at or near the Peruvian border, it’ll be hell to get to on the ground,” Lori pointed out. “No roads or airstrips up there, and what natives there are will be primitive and not very friendly. But I’m mostly worried about the idea of covering it from the air.”

“Huh? Why?”

“While it’s huge, it’s not going to come down in one piece. As it comes through the atmosphere, it’ll fragment. Some decent-sized chunks and a huge number of little ones will come off. Some will be large enough to fall on their own over a wide swath and cause enormous damage. Even so, on the ground you can take advantage of some cover, and the odds of being hit by a fragment in the open are still pretty low. In the atmosphere, though, it will be extremely turbulent, and if even a very tiny fragment hits the plane, it could be disaster. And when it hits, like I said, it’ll be like an atomic bomb.”

“It’s what we get paid for, Doc,” Gus commented, sounding singularly unconcerned. “Can’t cover a war without gettin’ in the line of fire once in a while.”

“I’m afraid he’s right,” Terry agreed. “Listen, Doctor, if you feel it’s ridiculous to risk your life being with us, we can rig up something on the ground for you to join in the comments, but we have to be where the action is, risk or not. In this business you have to develop a kind of insanity, sort of like being a permanent teenager, taking risks and never thinking about the consequences. If not, we might as well stay in Atlanta and just cover the aftermath. We’re good at what we do, which is why so few of us get killed, but reporters do get hurt sometimes, even killed sometimes, in the pursuit of a story, and this is a major one. I thought that was understood. We’ll have a ton of very famous scientists back in Atlanta and around the country feeding stuff to the anchors from their safe offices in the States. You’re the one who’ll be on site. You have to think about that, and now.”

It was a sobering thought she hadn’t considered up to that point. There was risk in this, not the career risks and romantic risks she’d thought about before—those suddenly seemed very minor—but real risk to life and limb. As the meteor came in over the coast of west Africa, it would begin to burn and shatter, and pieces would begin to break off. Most would fall in the Atlantic, but by the time it reached the Brazilian coast, it would be quite low and quite hot and coming in incredibly fast. Those pieces would be raining down over an area perhaps hundreds of miles wide. Parts of the country would look as if they had been bombed by an enemy air force. Fortunately, the region was in the main lightly populated, although there would be some towns that would suffer. But if it cleared the Andes, it would rain over populous portions of Peru like a carpet bomb attack. And there was nowhere that was totally unpopulated anymore except most of Antarctica.

This could be a major disaster, and she was being taken right into the middle of it, as dangerously close as possible to get the right pictures.

She could die.

My God! No wonder they passed the buck to me!That probably was unfair, she told herself, but she still wouldn’t put it past them.

Of course, a lot of science was achieved at great risk. The geomorphologists who worked with exploding volcanoes took risks as a matter of routine; medicine and biology since well before the days of Madame Curie took risks as well. It could be a dangerous business, but it usually wasn’t. The last astronomer to take a risk greater than pneumonia from spending a long, cold night at the telescope was probably Galileo before the ecclesiastical court in Rome.

Of course, it would be easier if she really were here doing science, but she wasn’t. There were teams of top scientists all over the region doing that kind of work; with the level of prediction achieved by the computers on this event, it would probably be the most studied and viewed happening in contemporary science. She had no equipment, no labs waiting back home for her findings and samplings, no support at all. She was a mouthpiece, a witness for the cable TV audience.

Terry was getting a bunch of papers out of her briefcase. “Unless you want to bug out in Manaus, you’ll have to sign these,” the producer told her, shoving the papers over. “I have to fax signed copies back when I arrive and then Fedex the originals. It’s mostly standard stuff.”

She took the papers and started to look through them. The first was the personal release—she agreed that she had been told there was risk to this job and that she accepted the risk and wouldn’t sue the company if something happened, in exchange for which they’d cover all medical expenses from on-the-assignment injuries. The second was the general waiver and promise to abide by the rules of the corporation and do what she was asked to do, etc., etc. The third covered her under the group lawsuit insurance policy in case she said something on the air that somebody else didn’t like. The usual.

The fourth, however, was of more positive interest. It was basically a set of rules for an expense account for a foreign assignment, how to prepare one, what they would and would not cover, and the like. The list of what they covered was pretty damned extensive, but the rule apparently was to receipt everything and give it to Terry before, a certain cutoff date. And finally, there was an agreement that she would work for up to seven days on this assignment as their exclusive agent and on-camera representative as a free-lance commentator, and licensed unlimited use of any and all footage and commentary given during that period for the onetime fee of—my heavens! That was hundreds of dollars per day!

“You look surprised,” Terry noted.

“I—I never expected to be paid for this.”

“You aren’t plugging a book, you haven’t got a forthcoming PBS series or whatever, so you’re hired as a freelancer. Just remember that your fee is based on doing satisfactory work and I’m the one who decides if you do.”

Lori sighed. She knew at that point that even if she wasn’t being paid a dime she’d have to see it through, grit her teeth and go through with the whole thing. Very dangerous or not, this was the chance of a lifetime, the potential turning point in her life she’d abandoned all hope of ever getting.

“I’m in,” she told the producer.