Mars

EARTH

WASHINGTON: Staring out her hotel room window, Edith held the phone tightly against her ear.

“You’re fired, Edie,” said Howard Francis’s angry, rasping voice.

The first thought that went through her mind was, There goes the expense account.

“But why me?” Edith asked. “I tried to get you…”

Francis’s voice screeched, “You had the fuckin’ story an hour and a half before anybody else and you just sat on it! We could’ve been on the air before all the other networks, even before CNN, if you had done your job right!”

“I tried to get y’all. I tried to get through to the news director, but some shitty little tramp wouldn’t let me.”

“She was the assistant news director, for Chrissakes! You Shoulda told her!”

“She would have cut my throat.”

“So what? The network would have been first on the air with the biggest story of all time!”

Fuck the network, Edith thought. Aloud, she said, “I tried to tell her how important it was. She just wouldn’t believe me. I bet even if I told her what it was, she would have thought I was just some nut.”

“Oh, my god, Edie, my own ass is in a sling around here. I’ll be lucky if they don’t fire me!”

“That’d be too bad,” Edith said, her voice brittle with anger. I hope they fire all you assholes, she added silently as she hung up.

Later that morning, when Alberto Brumado picked her up on his way to NASA headquarters, Edith told him her sad news.

“Well,” he said, glancing around the quietly opulent hotel lobby, “I suppose you could move in with me.”

Edith felt her brows go up.

Brumado smiled his boyish smile. “There is a guest suite on the top floor of the house. You can have complete privacy. I did not mean to suggest anything more.”

Edith gave him a smile in return. “I appreciate it, Alberto. I sure need a place—until I can find a job.”

“Perhaps I can help you there, too. I have many acquaintances among the media people.”

Edith marveled at how smart Brumado really was, understanding that the media people he knew were acquaintances, not friends.