The Visitors (v1.0)

38. MINNEAPOLIS

The editors sat at the news huddle in the conference room. The sound of clacking typewriters and the hum of conversation came through the halfway-open door.

"We have the Black Hills-Indian story that Jones wrote," said

Garrison. "We should be getting that in the paper soon."

"I thought you were saving that for the Sunday edition," said Lathrop.

"So I was, but it kept getting crowded out. Keep it too long and it could get dated. There is, as well, a piece that Jamison has been working on for weeks, an analysis of what a real energy crunch could do to this area. It's a good job. He talked with a lot of people. He really dug into it. It's long, but it looks as if we have the space today. There isn't much other news. I'd say we could strip it across the top of the front page."

"Haven't we a good story on the visitors?"

Garrison looked at Gold. The assistant city editor shrugged.

"Nothing to get excited about. It's beginning to level off."

"As a matter of fact," said Garrison, "I'm beginning to have the feeling that the visitors haven't as much impact as they had a week ago. The edge is beginning to wear off the story. The readers may be getting a little weary of it. We've played the story hard. That was fine so long as the readers were avid for it. But if we keep on cramming it down their throats

"How about Kathy? She's still up at Lone Pine, isn't she?"

"She is, ~ said Gold, "for all the good it does. There's nothing

coming out of there. No one's getting anything, either from there

or Washington. I've never seen the lid clamped down so hard."

"It sounds," said Garrison, "as if something fairly big is going

on. Otherwise, why all the secrecy? But, apparently, we aren't going to get anything until someone is willing to talk."

"What about the Washington bureau?"

Hal Russell, the wire editor, said, "They're not getting any-thing, either. I talked with Matthews just a couple of hours ago. Nothing, he said. Absolutely nothing. Either no one knows anything or they are clamming up. Some rumors, but nothing that can be pinned down. Chances are, if anyone knows anything, it's only a few. In Washington, if more than a dozen people know something, one of them is sure to be talking about it. The news leaks out."

"So why are we keeping Kathy up at Lone Pine?" asked Lathrop. "If Washington is tight-lipped, what chance does she have?"

"Kathy is one damn fine reporter," said Garrison. "She has as much chance to dig out something as the Washington bureau."

"I think we ought to get her back here," said Lathrop. "With vacations and one thing and another, we are running shorthanded. We could use her here."

"If you wish," said Garrison, grim with a sudden anger.

"If you're still looking for a backgrounder on the visitors," said Gold, "Jay has an idea. He was talking the other day with someone at the university, a man in the native American affairs department. This man was drawing a parallel between us and the visitors and the Indians and the white men when the whites first showed up in America. He said the reason the Indians finally lost out was that their technology was upset by the white man and that, as a result of this, they lost their culture. Their defeat dated from the day when an Indian wanted an iron hatchet, to replace his stone tomahawk, so badly that he was willing to sell his natural resources, to enter into trade arrangements that were unfair to him, to get it."

"A story like that would be oblique propaganda," said Lathrop, "and both Jay and you should know it."

"Jay wasn't about to write it from the Indian view alone," said Gold. "He was going to talk to economists and historians and a lot of other people.

Lathrop shook his head. "With the Black Hills-Indian situation, I think we should keep away from it. No matter how well the story was written, no matter how objectively, we would be accused of bias."

"Oh, well," said Gold, "it was only an idea."