Echoes of the Well of Souls

Amazonia: Rockfall Minus One

Manaus lay so far into the Amazonian interior of Brazil that since its founding, its major connection to the rest of Brazil and the world as well had been just the Amazon River. Although now it was possible to reach the city by road, the river and the airplane were the primary twin connectors of the city to the rest of civilization.

Still, Manaus was a very large city, born during the boom in gold and other treasures of the Amazon discovered and developed in the nineteenth century. Great old houses and a magnificent if now rundown center city, with its old-world buildings defiant against the jungle, looking more like Lisbon at its finest, displayed Manaus’s past, and with the development of the interior in full swing, it was something of a boomtown again. Its airport, always vital since the founding of the national airline decades before, was as grand and modern as any in the western world and was the main port of entry for foreign airliners, almost as if Brazil were intent on reminding all its visitors that there was more to the country than Rio and Sao Paulo. There were first-class hotels here once more, with all the amenities of modern civilization, and in its bustling streets one could buy almost anything.

With a corporate credit card, it wasn’t hard for the two women to pick up what they needed, although it was a hardship to do so in the couple of hours allotted to the task. Terry had to be back at the hotel in a hurry; she’d been on the phone and fax in the hotel’s business center almost since arriving, and she still had much to do. By the time they returned, messages had piled up, and before heading back down to the business center, Terry told Lori to order from room service and unpack and repack as needed.

A bellman came up a few minutes later with a folder full of papers, and Lori looked them over after being told they were from Terry. They turned out to be faxes of the latest computer summaries, including maps and tracking data. It was now felt that the angle and velocity would not take the approaching meteor over the Andes, which was a relief to Peru and Ecuador, of course, but the projections also indicated it would track a bit north of the original estimates.

She grabbed a map of Brazil and did a plot. If the projections held up, it would luckily hit in one of the remotest and least populated areas left in the country, but that would also present new dangers. If anything happened and the news crew went down in that region, they might never be found.

She decided to talk to the concierge. He was an old man with more Indian in him than anything else, and it took little imagination to imagine him in the midst of the jungle in some primitive tribe.

“Si, senhora.The region, it is very, very wild. The natives there, they still live in the old ways and would not think too well of strangers. Strangers have cut, burned, destroyed much forest, many animals. Ruin the land and ways of the peoples. Those tribes, they will know of this. They will think anyone who come is come to steal their forest. Best you no go there.”

“We’ll try not to land if we can avoid it,” she assured him. “What do you think the effect will be of the meteor hitting there?” She knew he’d heard all about it. Everybody had, and it was all anybody was talking about.

“They will think it a god, or a demon, or both. They will be very afraid.”

She nodded. “Good. They will avoid the impact area, then. It might actually be safe to at least inspect the area afterward.”

“What you say is true of the natives, senhora, but I still would not land there or even fly a small plane there.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“Ah—how to put? There are certain people just over the border there who also do not like strangers.”

He would say no more, but she got the idea. What a place to be heading for! One of the wildest jungles left in the western hemisphere, with snakes and dangerous insects, fierce natives who would see any stranger as a despoiler of their land, and not far away revolutionaries, drug lords, or worse seeing strangers as spies or narcs.

She went on down to the business center to see if any new information had come through. Terry was on two phones at once but looked up when she saw the scientist walk in.

“Hold on a minute,” she said into both phones, then said to Lori, “Pick up that line over there—three, I think. You can get more than I can from him.”

She wanted to ask who “him” was, but the producer was back on the phones again, so she went over, punched line three, and said, “Hello, this is Dr. Sutton.”

“Ah! Somebody who speaks English, not telebabble!” responded a gruff voice at the other end, a voice with just a trace of a central European accent.

“And who am I speaking to?” she asked.

“Hendrik van Home.”

She knew him at once by reputation. Van Home was something of a living legend among near-object astronomers. “Dr. van Home! It’s an honor. Where are you? Chile?”

“Yes. Things are going quite crazy here. We’ve had to get the army up to protect us.”

“You’re under attack?”

“From the world press, yes! It’s insane! Those people— they think they own you! I am told you are going to try to track it down by air.”

“If we can, more or less. I doubt if we can be there when it hits, but we should be first over it after it does, I would think.”

“Ah! I envy you! No one in living memory has seen such a sight! Your account will be very important, Doctor, since you will be first on the scene. By the time that bureaucracy over there gets things set up, the trail will be days or weeks old. You must record everything— everything. Get a dictating recorder.”

She hadn’t thought of that. “I will. I think I can get one here in the hotel. But—I have no instruments. I’m with that same press, you know, and they’re only interested in the story for the television.”

“Yes, yes. They said they didn’t have room for such things since they had to have all their own equipment,” he responded with total disgust in his voice. “Nevertheless, the Institute for Advanced Science in Brazil is sending over a basic kit. Get it on board if you can and use it. Tell them it’s a condition of their permission to go. Lie, cheat, steal. They deserve it, anyway. Do whatever you can.”

“I will,” she promised. “Do you have any hard data on the meteor, so I can know a bit more what to expect?”

“Not a lot. It is crazy. The spectrum changes almost as you watch. Whatever it is made of defies any sort of remote analysis. It drives our instruments crazy! That is why we cannot even estimate its true mass. Assuming it is very hard mineral, though, we estimate that the object when it hits will be at least a hundred or more meters across. A hundred-plus meters!Think of it! There will be no doubt when this one strikes. It will shake every seismograph in the world. The impact site should be at least the size of Meteor Crater in Arizona, perhaps larger and deeper. There will be a tremendous mass expended into the atmosphere by its impact, so be very cautious. It will also be quite some time cooling, which is just as well. We are all dying to know what its composition is that can give these insane readings.”

“What do you mean by ‘insane readings’?” she asked him, curious.

“I mean that from scan to scan, from moment to moment, the instruments start acting like there are shorts in the systems. They’ll give you any result and any reading you want if you just wait. It is almost as if the object is, well, broadcasting interference along a tremendous range. Satellite photos, radar, and laser positioning seem to be the only reliable things we can use. We know what it looks like, more or less—and it’s unexceptional in that regard—and its size, speed, trajectory, and so on, but as to its composition—forget it.”

That was weird. “What’s the estimated impact time?”

“If it acts like a conventional meteor and stays true, and if our best guess on mass is correct, and if it remains relatively intact, it is likely to impact at about four-forty tomorrow morning.”

She nodded. Still in the darkness. If the sky was even partially clear, it should be one of the most spectacular sights in astronomy.

She thanked van Home and hung up, then turned to Terry. “What’s the weather supposed to be over that area in the early morning hours?”

“Hold on,” Terry said into the single phone she was now using. “What?”

“The weather over the region we’re going to. They say impact before dawn, about four-forty.”

“Scattered clouds, no solid overcast at that hour.”

“Good. Then we should be in for quite a show.”

Lori was really getting into it now, the excitement of the event overtaking her fear. This, after all, was the kind of thing that had brought her into the sciences to begin with. Unlike some of the small number of other women in her field who’d studied with her, she hadn’t gone into physics to prove any points. She had gone into it because, as a child, she’d stared up at the Milky Way on cloudless summer nights and imagined and wondered. She had glued herself to televisions during every space shot and had dreamed of becoming an astronaut. She had even applied for the program, but competition was very stiff, and so far NASA hadn’t called.

NASA and the U.S. Air Force, of course, were tracking the meteor with satellite monitors and airborne laboratories with all the most advanced instruments, but they wouldn’t be allowed in until well after the impact. Lori’s news crew was going to be close, the first ones in, and they would, as van Horne reminded her, have the all-important first impressions. A grandstand seat for the cosmic event of the century.

Terry hung up the last of the phones. “That’s it,” she said flatly. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

“We’re leaving now?”

“Take your smallest suitcase and just pack three days worth, including some tough clothes just in case we can get down near it.” She looked at her watch. “My God! Three o’clock! Let’s go! We’ve got to be in the air in an hour!”

They went back up to the room quickly. “What’s the rush? It’s still thirteen hours away,” Lori pointed out.

“We’re shifting our base for the evening to a private ranch closer to the fun. Took one hell of a lot of work to get permission from them, but they’ve got the only airstrip in the entire region.”

“I didn’t think anybody civilized lived up there.”

“Well, ‘civilized’ is a matter of opinion. Francisco Campos isn’t exactly a great humanitarian. More like a cross between the Mafia and the PLO.”

Lori gave a low whistle. “How’d you ever get him to agree to help us?”

Terry grinned. “You’d be surprised at the contacts you have to develop in this business. Truth is, he’s so afraid of the inevitable army of media and scientists and government officials, he’s allowed us to be the initial pool while he treads water and tries to figure out how to handle what might be coming. It’s one reason why we’re exclusive in the area. He’s been known to shoot down jet planes with surface-to-air missiles.”

“And they let him just stay there?”

“He’s inches over the border. He’s worth more than the entire Peruvian treasury and has better arms and maybe a larger army than the government. The Peruvians also have enough trouble with their own revolutionaries, the Shining Path. Sort of a Latin American version of the Khmer Rouge. Compared to them, Campos is a model citizen.”

In the lobby Lori met the man Terry always referred to as Himself for the first time. He looked tall and handsome and very much the network type; in his khaki outfit, tailored by Brooks Brothers, he looked as if he’d just stepped off a movie set.

“Hello, I’m John Maklovitch,” he said in a deep, resonant voice that made Terry’s parody seem right on target. “You must be Doctor Sutton.”

“Yes. Pleased to meet you at last.”

“Had a problem getting in,” he explained to them. “I wound up having to get here from Monrovia via England, Miami, and Caracas.” He turned to Terry. “Everything set with Campos?”

She nodded. “As much as can be.”

“Let’s get cracking, then. It’s going to be one of those long, sleepless nights, I’m afraid.”

Once up in the air, it was easy to see why the natives would hate strangers. What once had been a solid, nearly impenetrable jungle now had vast cleared areas, and other huge tracts were on fire, spilling smoke into the air like some gigantic forest fire. It was as if the jungle had leprosy, the healthy green skin peeling away, revealing huge ugly blotches that were growing steadily. It was hard to watch, and after a while she turned away.

Maklovitch was going over his game plan with Terry and working over some basic introductory script ideas. “The equipment already there?” he asked worriedly.

“They flew it in this morning before coming back for us,” Terry told him. “We have a couple of local technicians from RTB in place and checking it out. When we get there, we’ll do as many standups as they want us to, time permitting, but then we fly. We’ll tape from the plane if we can and do live commentary—audio is firm and direct, and they can pick up the NASA pictures until they get our feeds. It’s the best we could do with the equipment we had available. Plan is to take off about two and take a position on the track of the meteor about four hundred miles out—that’ll be sufficient for us to link via Manaus. Then we follow it in. Plan is, if it comes down anywhere in our area, we’ll find it, circle and shoot what we can, then get back to the ranch and raw feed whatever Gus has along with your standups. Then, if it’s within a couple of hundred miles, we’ll use one of Campos’s helicopters to get in to the site. If it flattens as much of the jungle as they say it will, we might be able to land for a standup. If not, we’ll be able to get some pretty spectacular close-in pictures.”

“I hope this won’t be like Matatowa,” the reporter sighed. “Everything set up for it to blow, half a million bucks spent, and the damned earthquake hits three hundred miles south. I’d hate like hell to have this thing drop into the lap of ABC.”

Their attitude was reassuring to the novice scientist. No talk of danger, no talk of risks, no reservations—just how to get the story. It may have been foolish to dismiss those thoughts, but it was also infectious. Maybe one did have to be crazy to do many of the things others took for granted; maybe those who took the risks were the ones who knew how to live, too.

“You’re going to have to be on your best behavior and bite your tongue at this ranch, Doc,” Terry said to her.

“Huh?”

“These are extremely dangerous guys,” she explained. “Nobody knows how many people they’ve killed or what they’re capable of, but no matter how macho or weird they are, go with the flow. I haven’t dealt with these guys face to face before, but I’ve dealt with their type in Colombia. The Nazis must have been like these guys—smart, articulate, well educated mostly, often charming and cultured, but nutty as fruitcakes in the most psychopathic way. No comments, questions, or moral judgments. We’re not here to do their story this time. Let’s just do our job, okay?”

She nodded. “I’ll try and just stay out of their way if I can. We won’t exactly have a lot of time, anyway.”

“We’ll probably have one of them with us,” Maklovitch noted. “I seriously doubt if they’re going to like a lot of low-level photography of that region without some controls on their part. They’ll have a man with us and another with the ground station just to make sure that nothing they don’t want seen gets out. Don’t worry too much about it, though; satellites can take better pictures of the region than Gus can.”

“Like hell,” the photographer growled. “Give me an altitude of just a few hundred feet and I’ll tell you what’s real and what’s camouflage. Besides, we don’t have a lot of satellite coverage in the southern hemisphere. They’ll be on their toes with us. Bet on it.”

“Yeah, well, don’t you go trying to get away with shots you know are taboo,” Maklovitch warned. “This thing’s dangerous enough as it is. It wouldn’t take much convincing if we were to wind up dead and burned from what they’ll say is a tragic accident with the debris from this meteor. There’re too many of these crackpots down here for us to cause trouble with Campos. Let the powers that be handle that. You just get the shots you’re being paid for and not the kind in the back of the head.”

The “Seat Belt” sign went on, and they heard the engines slowing; they were coming in on the Campos airstrip.

Darkness fell fast in the tropics, and it was difficult to see much. It was clear that the strip wasn’t commercial caliber; it was bumpy as hell, and they could hear cinders hitting the wings and underside of the plane as they taxied in and slowed to a stop.

It was almost seven-thirty; seven and a half hours to go.

The door opened, and the heat and humidity streamed in. If anything, it seemed far worse than even Manaus, although climatologically there wasn’t a lot of difference. A beat-up old station wagon, a full-sized American model not seen on U.S. roads in a decade, bounced up, and several men got out. They carried submachine guns and looked incredibly menacing.

One of the men shouted something to them in rapid Spanish, and Terry responded in kind. She turned to them and said, “Everybody’s supposed to get into the wagon and go up to the main house. Air crew, too. They say they’ll unload the rest of the gear and bring it along. I think they’re supposed to search the plane—and the gear— although they don’t say that.”

“No problem,” responded the voice of the pilot behind them. “They did this earlier today, although Joel and I just had to stand behind the wagon.”

Terry said something sharply to the men in Spanish, then explained, “I just told them not to touch the communications equipment and relays. If they get out of whack, we might as well not be here.”

The Americans all squeezed into the wagon, and the driver slid in, put his Uzi between his legs, and roared off. Lori was glad to see that she wasn’t the only one suddenly holding on for dear life.

The ride was mercifully short, and soon they were in front of an imposing Spanish-style structure that seemed out of place in the middle of nowhere. Three men were waiting, two of whom had weapons and looked like bodyguards; the third was a tall, dignified man who seemed to have stepped out of the pages of some Latin novel. White-haired, including a thick but extremely well-groomed mustache, his skin almost blackened by the tropical sun, he nonetheless was more Spanish than South American and a far cry from the Brazilians they’d been with the past day. He was also the sort of man who clearly had not only been handsome when young but had remanied so into advancing age.

So help me, he’s even wearing a white suit!Lori thought, somewhat amused in spite of her nervousness at being around so many guns.

John Maklovitch got out first, followed by the others. He approached the man in the white suit casually and nodded. “Buenas noches,” he said in a friendly and seemingly unconcerned tone.

“And good evening to you, my friend,” responded the older man in a deep, rich baritone with only a trace of an accent. “I am Francisco Campos, at your service. I must apologize for all the guns and procedures, but this is a very dangerous area. To the west, we have some of the most ruthless revolutionaries on this continent; to the east, some of the most savage tribes remaining on Earth. We have a rigid set of precautions, and although some really are not appropriate for your visit, it is easier for my men to maintain their routine. The sort of men who are willing to live out here are not always the most intelligent, but they are good people.”

“We understand perfectly,” the newsman responded smoothly. “We were a bit concerned that they might disturb our transmitting equipment. It’s delicate and needs to be calibrated as it was in Manaus this afternoon. If it’s thrown out of whack, we will have disturbed you for nothing.”

“They have been alerted by your technical staff here as to what to look for and what not to touch,” Campos responded. “Please be assured that none of my men will harm your equipment in any way. Of that I can assure you. But come, you will be eaten alive by the insects out here. Come inside and relax. I can get you drinks and perhaps a light supper.”

“Thank you. Your hospitality is most gracious. Uh—may I present my companions? The air crew you have seen, but this young lady is my producer, Theresa Perez, and this other lady is Doctor Lori Sutton, our science adviser for this story. The tall one here is Gus Olafsson, our cameraman.”

“Delighted to meet you all,” he responded, bowing slightly. “Perez?” he said quizzically. “You are from a Latin country?”

“Some say that,” she responded. “Miami, actually.”

“Cubano?”

“Partly. My father was—a Marielito. My mother was from Grenada. But I was born in Florida.” She paused. “I apologize and mean no insult, but we have to get set up and in communication with Atlanta. We’ll have to do one or two standups before we take off. They’re already running nearly continuous coverage, and they’ll be expecting us. Perhaps when we are done we can avail ourselves of your generous hospitality, but it is our job.”

He paused, and for a moment they weren’t sure if he was going to take this as an insult, but then he smiled and said, “Of course! I apologize for my stupidity! You see, we are very remote here, and schedules, time clocks, and such are as foreign as snow to us. Mariana is our watchword here, I fear. But there is but one meteor, sí? And it will not wait. I understand.” He turned to one of the other men and barked some crisp orders in Spanish quite different in tone from the one he was using with them, then turned back to them.

“I have asked Juan, my son, to accompany you. With him along, you will find few barriers. His English is fairly good, so you should not need the lovely Senorita Perez to translate, and Juan is a very good helicopter pilot who can assist when you need it.” He paused again and for the first time seemed slightly nervous. “This meteor—it is huge, yes?”

“Very large,” Maklovitch acknowledged. “Maybe the biggest thing to hit the Earth in thousands of years.”

“What will happen when it hits, if I may ask? Here, for example.”

Lori decided it was time to take over. “Senor, I don’t think we should mince words. Perhaps nothing, although the last track I saw takes it within 150 kilometers of here. There will be debris, some of it possibly as large as heavy rocks and some of it extremely hot. The explosion itself when it lands will be gigantic, like an exploding volcano or worse. How much of the effect you’ll get here, whether fallout of rocks or blast damage, will depend on how close it hits. Make no mistake—if it does not clear the Andes, and we do not believe it will, it will hit within a 150-kilometer radius of this estate. Within fifty, you will suffer some strong damage. Within a hundred, some minor damage analogous to an earthquake about that far away. I would certainly take some precautions to secure things, tie them down, get breakables off shelves, that sort of thing, but I wouldn’t panic. The odds are very good you won’t be in the direct path—but you will know when it comes.”

Campos seemed impressed by this. “I thank you. I will do what I can to ‘batten the hatches,’ as they say, then watch you and pray.”

“They hooked up a relay to the house?” Maklovitch asked, impressed.

“No, no. I will watch you on my satellite television. On CNN.”

The reporter seemed momentarily taken aback. “Good heavens!” he muttered, more to himself than to the others. “I wonder if the ratings people know about places like this?”

Just then a figure emerged from the house, summoned apparently by one of the bodyguards.

There was no question that Juan Campos was the son of Francisco, but there was a difference far greater between them. What was handsome and cultured on the older man seemed somehow raw and violent in the younger, almost as if the veneer of civilization had been stripped off with the years. His hair was long and black, his mustache was large and bushy, and the eyes were—well, mean. He wore green military fatigues that showed custom tailoring and combat boots, and the leather gun belt around his waist held a holster with a mean-looking automatic pistol sticking out of it.

Lori thought, but didn’t dare say, that the younger man looked almost like the generic poster of a Latin American revolutionary.

Francisco introduced them around, and the younger man nodded to each in turn, giving each of the news team a penetrating stare, as if he were trying to memorize every detail he could see about them.

Finally he said, in a voice both deeper and more gruff than his father’s as well as more heavily accented, “All right. We go.”

Terry gave Lori a sudden look that was understood almost instantly; this wasn’t their guide but their keeper, and no matter what kind of bastard he was, he was in charge.

They walked around the very large hacienda toward some large outbuildings in the rear, and almost instantly they could see where the crew had set up. A small area against a nondescript green-painted barn was being test lit by some very bright portable lights, and a generator rumbled to give the whole thing power. Gus was happy to see that they’d brought his gear around, and the crew, almost all Brazilians, had already unpacked some of it and set up for the spot.

Terry looked around in the darkness. “Too bad we couldn’t get a better backdrop,” she commented. “This could just as well be Macon County with that barn.”

“No photographs of the ranch,” Juan Campos growled. “Your plane or this barn only.”

She shrugged. “Too bad. John will have to carry the remoteness with his personality.”

The reporter chuckled, but then he turned to Juan Campos to get the other ground rules straight. “What do you want me to say about where we are?” he asked. “Just that we’re on a remote airstrip well inside the jungle, or can I say more?”

“You may mention my father and his hospitality,” the man in green responded. “In fact, we want you to do so. But do not mention me or what you have seen here.”

“Fair enough. Uh—for the record, what does your father officially grow and export from here?”

“Bananas,” Juan Campos responded flatly. Terry rolled her eyes, and Lori had a hard time not laughing in spite of the danger. It was all too, well, comic book, real as it might be.

“Doc, you and John stand over there against the barn,” Terry instructed. “We want to play with the lighting, and Gus wants a camera test. We’ll have to adjust to get rid of some of the shadows. John, I’m going to talk to base and see what they want and when.”

They were already getting bitten by all sorts of small insects—a medical crew had met them at the airport in Manaus and had filled them with shots, but in spite of that and liberal doses of industrial-strength bug repellent on the plane, Lori was still not sure what was biting her or how hard it would be to look into a camera and not keep scratching and swatting. Thoughts of assassin bugs and malaria mosquitoes came to her unbidden. Once in the lights, though, the little bastards seemed to gang up in swarms. It was going to be a very tough few minutes with those lights on.

Almost as surreal was the little Brazilian man with the pancake and small kit of makeup who actually came in and touched both of them up while Gus took his own sweet time doing his tests and also rearranging the lighting. Finally the main lights went off, leaving them with enough electric light to see but still giving an almost eerie sense of darkness after that brightness.

“Can’t do with available light and get a decent shot here,” Gus told them, “but I think we can manage with just the one portable light there.”

He seemed oblivious to the bugs. “Aren’t you getting eaten alive, Gus?” Lori asked him. “How can you keep that steady?”

“Aw, shucks, this ain’t no worse than a Minnesota lakes summer,” he responded casually. “Up there the bugs got to get in all their eating in a real short time. You catch ‘skeeters in little teeny bear traps.”

“Yeah. Sure.” She remembered an old boyfriend once saying that anybody who started something with the words “Aw, shucks” should be closely watched and never totally trusted. Gus wanted everybody to think of him as just a country hick from the Minnesota backwoods, but this was a man who made a living as a free-lance cameraman for foreign correspondents. She couldn’t help but wonder what that country hick act concealed. Perhaps he was the type of person nobody could ever really know.

It was amusing to watch Maklovitch at work. He’d stand there with his scribbled notes, lights on, camera running, and go through the shorthand script several times, often stopping and looking disgusted and then starting all over again. Occasionally he’d examine himself in the tiny monitor and call for somebody to adjust his hair or put a little makeup here or there, and then he’d also go back and forth with someone on the microphone as if he were on the telephone. It was a moment before she realized that he was sort of on the telephone; he had an earpiece connected to the large apparatus beneath the satellite dish just beyond and was clearly in direct communication with Atlanta.

Suddenly he looked around. “Doctor Sutton!” he called.

“Yes?”

“Get over here! We want to introduce you and go over the initial spot.”

She hurried over, suddenly as self-conscious of her appearance as Maklovitch was of his, but it was too late to do much about it.

Terry came up to her and handed her an earpiece similar to the reporter’s. She stuck it in her ear. A small microphone was clipped to the front of her blouse.

“Hello? Doctor Sutton? You reading us?” a man’s voice came to her.

She was suddenly panicked, unsure of how to reply.

Maklovitch was an old hand at this sort of thing and said, “Just talk. That little mike you have on will pick you up. Just use a normal tone. It’s pretty sensitive.”

“Uh—yes, I hear you fine,” she responded, feeling sudden panic and stage fright.

“All right. We’ll be coming to your location after the next commercial spot.”

“That can take twenty minutes,” Maklovitch commented dryly. Then he said to her, “It’s going to be easy. Just relax, I’ll make some introductory remarks, introduce you, then ask you the same kind of questions we’ve asked all along. They might have a few extra questions as well, but don’t expect anything complex or anything you might not be ready for. This isn’t brain surgery, and the audience aren’t physicists. Okay?”

She nodded nervously. Up until now this was the one thing she’d thought the least about; now, oddly, it was the thing that was making her the most nervous, and she tried desperately to calm down.

“All I want to do is not make a fool of myself,” she told him honestly.

“Don’t worry. You’ll do fine. The one problem is the audio. You’ll be hearing two channels at once sometimes— the director or supervising producer in Atlanta and the anchors. Just don’t let it confuse you.”

The next few minutes were something of a blur, but all thoughts of the discomfort, the lights, the bugs, and the heat and humidity faded. She remembered being asked, “Is there any danger that this asteroid is large enough to cause worldwide problems?” and answering reflexively.

“If you mean the sort of thing that wiped out the dinosaurs, a nuclear winter, no,” she told them. “At least not from the figures I’ve seen so far. We did have a near miss with an asteroid that might have done us in a few years back, but this isn’t in that league. Still, it is a very large object, relatively speaking, and there will be some very nasty aftereffects. We might well have some global cooling for a period of years, much as if a couple of very big volcanoes erupted at the same time, and, depending on the upper-level winds here, an even more dramatic effect on the South American and possibly African continents for some time. It will be impossible to say anything for sure until we see it hit.”

“Then we don’t have to find a survivalist with a fallout shelter,” one of the distant anchors said jokingly.

“No. Although if you’re living in the western Amazon basin and know somebody with one, it might not be a bad idea,” she responded.

There was more of that sort of question and answer, but considering she wasn’t even going on current data, there was, she reflected, nothing she could say that any nonscientist might not have said from somewhere in the States.

Still, when the light went down and somebody, probably Terry, said, “Okay, that’s enough for now,” Lori felt almost stunned, not quite remembering what had gone on. Almost everything—their questions, her replies, even her annoyances—seemed distant and unfocused, beyond remembering clearly. She was suddenly afraid that she’d just made an absolute fool of herself on national television.

Terry came up to her and asked, “Well, what do you think about the new data?”

“Huh? Oh—sorry. It’s all something of a blur. New data?”

“Yeah. Impact point ninety kilometers west southwest of here in—” She looked at her watch. “—about three hours, give or take.”

“They’re that certain? There are so many variables . …”

“NORAD’s computers are pretty good these days, I hear, since they got into such hot water over muffing even the continent Skylab was gonna hit some years back. If this asteroid hadn’t gone into unstable low Earth orbit, they might be guessing still, but it’s deteriorating now right on schedule. They fed in the wobble and decay characteristics, and their computers came up with the predicted mass, and that was the missing element. They say they’re ninety-plus percent sure. Didn’t you hear anything!”

“I—I heard it, but it just didn’t register. I guess I was just too nervous.”

The producer grinned. “You did fine. Look, we’ll keep getting data for the next hour or so, and if this prediction continues to hold, we’ll do one more standup and then it’s off to the plane. Take it easy, relax. Don Francisco’s men brought out some sandwiches and drinks. Take the coffee, go easy on the beer, and don’t touch that sangria—it’s like a hundred and fifty proof.”

She looked over at the small but elegant-looking spread. “I see Gus isn’t taking your advice on the sangria,” she noted.

“Aw! He’s a cameraman. He has a reputation to uphold.”

Lori was much too excited and nervous at that point to think about putting anything in her stomach, so she wandered over to where the technicians were monitoring the steady satellite feed and listened to the program.

It appeared that there would be no fewer than a dozen instrument-laden airplanes aloft at rockfall, after all, although Lori’s group would be the on-site news pool. If nothing else, this would be the most covered impact in history, witnessed and monitored by more people around the world than any other. And even though they would have a ringside seat, the best view would be from the big tracking telescopes in Chile, which could lock on to the meteor while it was still coming in. She only prayed this wouldn’t be another one of those overhyped duds astronomical science was famous for. If the thing did break up as it entered the atmosphere, or if the resistance was stronger and the angle less steep than projected, it might be nothing more than an anticlimatic meteor shower with very little reaching the ground. Still, this rock was so large that something would hit, and it would be bigger than a baseball, that was for sure.

If it did hit with real force, it would be very dangerous, but then they’d be in the perfect position to view the impact. The newspeople were concerned only with their pictures and an event opportunity which allowed them to build audience and sell diet plans and commemorative plates and such via commercials; she wanted to be in the neighborhood when a big one hit and see it just afterward. It was the chance of a lifetime.

Terry was preoccupied with her clipboard, which was constantly being updated to the point where it resembled the tracks of drunken worms more than a comprehensible schedule, listening to cues and the remote director’s queries and commands from the tiny transceiver she wore like a hearing aid in her left ear. Oblivious to anything beyond the moment, she was startled to the point of near shock when somebody grabbed her rump and squeezed.

“How dare you!” she spit, whirling around, only to see the leering grin of Juan Campos. He was obviously high, possibly from drink—he smelled like it, anyway—but also, possibly, from something more. “You touch me again and I will grab your balls and twist them off!” she snapped in Spanish.

He just grinned and gave a low chuckle. “Spirit. I like a pretty girl with spunk.”

“You are a pig!” she snapped. “Would you dishonor your father’s hospitality in his own home?”

“My father is an old man,” Juan Campos responded. “In his time he did as much and more, but now he remembers himself only as a gentleman. He sits here in his palace and acts the patron, Eton Francisco, the great benefactor of his people. It is I who now make it all possible, not him.”

“Shall we tell him that? He is not far.”

Campos stiffened. “You will not approach my father!”

“Then we will approach him together and ask him what he thinks of his son’s behavior to his guest!” She started toward the house, and he suddenly reached out, grabbed her arm, and pulled her violently back. High or not, there was a homicidal, lunatic look in his eyes and manner, the kind of dark malevolence that would give anyone chills.

“All right, bitch! For now! But you will not always be in this place and so— protected. You forget where you are and how long a journey you have to get anywhere else!”

And with that, he faded back into the shadows.

Terry put on a good, tough front, and she was tough after all she’d been through in her job, but she was badly shaken by the encounter. It was a sudden mental free-fall back to Earth, a reminder of just how dangerous this place and these people were and how vulnerable she and her people were, too.

She hoped that one of those damned meteors would strike the bastard or perhaps wipe out this whole sordid place, but she knew that there would be no such luck. Her father’s caution years ago, when she’d first gone out on her own, floated back to her. “Always remember that God reigns in heaven,” he’d told her, “but Satan rules the Earth.”

Perhaps, she thought sourly, she’d seen so much of the latter’s evil, she just took it for granted.

John Maklovitch came over to her. “We’ve got one quick standup in five minutes, then we’d better get to the plane,” he told her. “It’s coming in.” He was suddenly aware that she was hardly listening. “Something wrong?”

“The pig of a son just made a move on me and threatened me,” she told him.

The newsman nodded. “I figured as much. Think you can handle him?”

“Alone? Sure. I’ve got a black belt, remember? But against him and some cronies with their big guns—well, I’m not so sure. Besides, what would the old man do if I broke his son’s neck? We’ve got to get out of here, you know.”

He thought a moment. “Maybe, but I’ll report it in to the studio so they’ll know to check up if something happens after the story. Nobody is dumb enough to do anything until we’re breaking down. Tell you what… You remember the massacre in Chad? Why don’t we just try the same gimmick? I’ll have sound rig a trigger switch on the remote mike for me. Stick close to me, and if he pulls anything, at least he’ll be broadcasting it back to the studio. You can imagine what the old man would be like if he heard that on his satellite TV!”

She gave him a weak smile. “Thanks, John. Let’s get this show on the road!”

He hesitated a moment. “What about the doc? Think she’ll get the same treatment?”

“I dunno. Maybe. She’s kinda old and frumpy for Juan, but some of these other guys—you haven’t seen many women around here.” She sighed. “We’ll all stick close.”

The second spot went smoothly, and then everybody started to move fast. Gus and an assistant from the Brazilian network gathered their material and headed for the front of the big house; the sound man, also Brazilian, stuck with the newsman and the two women, his portable pack energized. Neither Maklovitch nor Terry said anything about Juan to Lori; no sense in alarming her unnecessarily and then possibly having to spill the backup plans where other ears could hear.

“We’ll be on almost continuously from about five or ten minutes before anything shows up right through the strike and aftermath,” the newsman warned the scientist. “Just comment on what you see and don’t worry about what’s going out. Just remember to watch your language.”

“I’ll try,” she assured him. “I’m getting used to it now. I think once I’m away from this place, well, it’ll be more relaxing.”

“I know what you mean. We have to return and drop off the backup tape and the like for uplink, but we’ll have to play it by ear from that point. If the main body hits anywhere within 150 or so miles of here, as it’s supposed to, we’ll probably have to use Don Francisco’s helicopter to get in close. I, for one, want to see it close up after it hits if conditions permit and before the military and scientific teams get in and start blocking everything off. Still, if the thing looks like a nuclear blast, it might be too dangerous.”

“It still depends on how much burns away and whether it fragments,” Lori told him. “But if it’s a good size, it’s going to be a very nasty sight.”

They took the station wagon back to the plane with guards and the technical crew riding in a truck behind. The pilot and copilot were there, looking a little uncomfortable and anxious to be off, but they helped the crew stow its gear.

“Wait a minute and let me and Hector here check the remote exterior cameras,” Gus asked them. He and his Brazilian associate climbed aboard, and in a couple of minutes Gus stuck his head back out and said, “Come on in! Gonna be kinda crowded, though.”

Terry walked up to the plane and went inside and saw immediately what Gus meant.

Sitting in the last row were Juan Campos and a big smelly bodyguard.

Campos grinned when he saw Terry. “Come in, come in! We are all one big happy family here, no?’?

It was fifty-nine minutes to rockfall.