The Year's Best Science Fiction 9

INTERVIEW Frank A. Javor

Looking at the woman, Lester V. Morrison felt deep inside himself the stirring of sympathy, familiar, rising to the sustained, heady rapport that made him know, with the certainty of long experience, that this was going to be another of his great interviews.

He smiled and loosened the fist he’d made unconsciously to emphasize the word “great” when it passed through his mind.

He felt a light touch on his arm and turning, bowed his head so that his lead technician could slip over it the video-audio headband. Its close-fitting temple pieces curved to touch the bone behind his ears and the twin stereo view-finder cameras came down over his eyes.

Lester rather liked to make the subdued bowing movement, the symbolic humbling, it pleased him to think, of his six-and-almost-a-half-foot tallness to receive the crownlike headgear of his craft. A crown heavy, not with the scant two ounces of transmitting metal and optical plastic, but heavy with his responsibility to the billions upon billions of viewers who would see what Lester looked upon, would hear what he turned his ear to; the center of their universe for those moments the spot upon which Lester stood, the signal spreading outward from it like the ripple pattern of a dropped stone. -

His technician pressed Lester’s arm twice and stepped back. Lester stood erect, his hands and fingers hovering over the twin-arced rows of buttons and rods set in the flat surface of the control console he wore high on his chest like an ancient breastplate. There was no speaking between Lester and his four-man crew, nor any testing of equipment. Lester wore his responsibility with what he considered a Suitable humility, but with a firm confidence. Let lesser men fiddle with their equipment, talk, blur the virgin spontaneity of the look that would flash into the woman’s eyes with the first impact of Lester’s equipment upon her. His men, like Lester, were the absolute best in their field; razor-honed by long close union and good pay until they responded almost symbiotically to Lester and each other.

A clear warning warble from his left earphone, heard only by Lester through the bones of his skull, readied him to begin his task. He stood firmly tall, silent, waiting ...

A musical bleat. The suddenly glowing red face of the timer in the upper corner of his left viewfinder. He was on the air.

The general view first. Eight seconds to set the scene, to let his viewers see for themselves the sordid slum he was standing in. To see the aged, crumbling buildings, some of them as much as twelve and even fourteen years old, engineered to have been torn down and replaced long ago. Long before a tragedy of this kind could strike. To form their own opinion of a council that could allow such a blight to exist on their planet.

Smoothly Lester pivoted his body, one shoulder leading, a counterbalance for the slightly trailing head, editorializing subtly by what he chose to look at, by what he chose to ignore. Flowingly, easily, compensating automatically for even the rise and fall of his own controlled breathing. A beautifully functioning, rock-steady camera vehicle Lester was. It was the least of his interviewing skills.

A closer shot. His thumb brushed a rod on his breastplate. The view in his finders grew larger. Armor-suited men, resting now, but still strapped in the seats of their half-track diggers. Orange-painted against the greening dust and the bright red glow of the police-erected crowd-control barrier force-field like a sheltering dome over them. Through it, visible above and around in all directions, a swirling, shifting mass upon mass of human beings. Some in fliers, others on skimmers. Some strapped in one-man jumpers and even on foot. A boiling, roiling swarm of the morbidly, humanly curious pressing all around, straining toward the little knot of blue-coverall-clad men and their pitifully small, broken burden.

Lester’s fingers and palms brushed the rods and buttons of his breastplate-console. Let the rattle and the clank and the sound of the crowd stay as they are. A shade more of the force field’s rasping hum to warm his viewer’s nerve endings ... to ready them ...

The woman’s sobbing. His thumb touched a stud. Let it start to come through now. Softly ... barely hearable ... subtly swelling.

The little knot of blue-coverall-clad men. A medium shot, then rapidly to a close-up of their burden, the dangling limbs half-hidden by their bodies and the merciful sagging of the blue-green plasti-sheet. A tight shot, but passing... the merest flicker. Nothing staring, nothing lingering, nothing in bad taste.

In Lester’s right ear was the sound of his own voice, recorded on his way to the scene and before he came upon it so that he would not need to break his silence until his selected moment. His voice giving the boy’s age, his group-affiliations, the routine details of his death. All quietly, all monotonously even, the greater to contrast with what was the meat of Lester’s program.

Nineteen seconds. The sobbing louder now and growing. The mother, kneeling, body sagged, hands clenched, dark head bowed.

Lester put a hand on her shoulder, letting it show in his finders, knowing that each of his viewers could see it as his own, extended, sympathetic, understanding ...

The woman did not respond to his touch. Unobtrusively Lester increased the pressure of his thumb, gouging. She stirred under his hand, shrinking, her head lifting.

Lester’s hand darted back to his console.

Her eyes. Dark, dulled, beseeching. Fine.

And now Lester spoke. He spoke with practiced hesitance, the gentle respecter, for his viewer, of her desire and right to her privacy at a time like this.

“How do you feel to have lost your only child?” His hands hovering, the woman looking at him ... now.

Her eyes widened, flickeringly. Sorrow surging and pain, deep and of the soul, opened to the finder. Raw, fresh.

Great. I’m right never to test, never to speak until this moment.

“Please try to control yourself. I’m your friend, we’re all your friends. Tell us.” And he repeated his question.

Her head bent sharply back, the eyes half closing now, her mouth open, the lips trembling, the intensity of her emotion visibly choking the sound in her throat, making of her attempt to speak a silent mouthing.

Easy . . . easy does it.

Her hands came up. Fists, pressing against each other and under her chin. “My baby, my baby,” and her voice was a moan.

Lester needed only the one hand, his left. The other he stretched toward the woman, touching her hair, his fingertips only, gently, benevolently, seeing it in his finder, looking deep into her upturned face.

In the corner of Lester’s finder the sweep second hand began to wipe the red glow from the timer’s face. When it came around to the twelve, except for the sponsor break and his verbal sign-off, he would be off the air. .

Sobs began to rock the kneeling woman. Lightly at first a mere staccato catching of the breath, but growing. Growing in a crescendo of violence that, peaking, made of her body a heaving, thrashing, straining animal thing.

Great racking, convulsive sounds rasped from her throat. A thread-thin trickle of blood started from one corner of her tortured mouth.

Enough.

Her head dropped, her whole body now bowed and shaking.

Lester watched his hand go out to her, stop in midair. He did not try to hide its trembling. His fingers closed, his hand came back, not having touched her. Leaving her, huddled, tremulous, to herself and her great sorrow.

Slow fade and ... go to black.

Ninety seconds. Exactly and on the dot and another of his human-interest segments for the intergalactic network was over; another moment in the life story of a little person had been made immortal.

Lester eased his headgear off, handed it to the waiting technician, stood rubbing the spots where the temple pieces had pressed. The woman had stopped trembling now and was looking dazed, uncomprehending. They always do, the subjects.

Swiftly, but not too roughly, Lester raised up her limp left arm, undid the cuff and stripped off the tiny receptor taped to the wrist. Another he took from her ankle and two more from the back of her skull, from under the concealing black hair. He could have left to one of his technicians this stripping off of the tiny receptors, that, obedient to the commands of his console, sent their impulses impinging upon the nerve streams of his subjects. But Lester felt that doing it himself, this body contact with his subjects, was just one more tiny factor that helped keep fresh his unmistakable feeling of rapport.

His lead technician touched his shoulder from behind, indicating they were about ready for his verbal signature and the one part of his program Lester found distasteful. A compliance with a regulation he felt was onerous and a little demeaning. Some day those who made these artistically pointless rulings would recognize the validity of his technique and perhaps eliminate this abhorrent note. Until then...

Lester leaned forward and spoke into the button mike his technician was holding out to him.

And at the end, “... The emotional response of the subject was technically augmented.”