Edith kept her smile glowing for him. She was wearing her best silk blouse, creamy white, the top four buttons undone. Her skirt was short enough to show plenty of knee as she sat in the chair before his desk.
“Washington,” said the network vice-president from behind his massive desk. “That’s where the cover-up is going on-if there is a cover-up.”
“Maybe I can get to somebody on the Space Council,” Edith suggested.
“The Vice-President? Fat chance!”
“No, not her. But some of my contacts in Houston are pretty close to a couple of the men on the Space Council. I think I could get one or two of them to talk to me-prob’ly off the record, though.”
“That’d be a start.”
“Let me try that route. If it doesn’t work I can go out to Santa Fe and talk to Jamie’s grandfather.”
The man nodded, his eyes on her blouse.
Edith decided to play her trump card. “And I could always contact Jamie on a personal basis. The project allows personal calls, and I’m sure he’d accept one from me. The officials don’t have to know I’m a newswomen.”
“The personal calls are private.”
“Not if I tape it at my end,” Edith said, turning her smile sly.
The man chewed his lower lip, face twitching furiously. Finally he jumped to his feet and stuck his hand out over the desk.
“Okay. Do it.”
“I’m hired?”
“As a consultant. Per diem fee and expenses. If this works out, then you’ll be hired. Fair enough?”
Edith rose from her chair and took his extended hand in hers. “You won’t regret it,” she said.
Howard Francis grinned at her. “I better not.” Then he added, “Come on, let’s get a bite to eat.”
Edith agreed with a nod, remembering the old adage about not trusting a man who carried two first names.
IN TRANSIT: STORM CELLAR
Halfway to Mars the sun suddenly turned deadly.
The mission to Mars had been timed for a period of low solar activity. Still, there was only the slimmest of chances that the spacecraft could carry their human crews through nine months in interplanetary space without running into a magnetic storm spawned by a solar flare.
Both on Earth and at the underground base on the moon, solar forecasters watched the sun in cramped narrow workrooms crowded with humming computers and video monitors. They saw a set of blotches take form on the shining surface of the sun, each of them bigger than the Earth itself. Their instruments detected weak radio emissions and bursts of soft X-rays from the sunspot group. Completely normal.
Then the flare erupted. Nothing spectacular, to the eye. Just a brief flash of light. But the incoming radiation grew swiftly, ominously, its intensity rising a hundred times above normal, a thousand, ten thousand, in the span of a few minutes. Ultraviolet and X-ray sensors aboard monitoring satellites went into overload. An intense burst of radio noise sizzled in astronomers’ receivers all around the Earth and shut down the radio telescope at the lunar base. It was a completely ordinary solar flare, no more powerful than a hundred billion hydrogen bombs all going off at once. Its total energy was less than a quarter second of the sun’s normal output.
But the cloud of subatomic particles it blew into space could kill unprotected humans in seconds.
The solar forecasters’ instruments automatically radioed a warning to the Mars spacecraft, more than seventy million kilometers away from Earth. The electromagnetic radiation from the flare, traveling at the speed of light just as the astronomers’ radio signals did, hit the spacecraft at the same instant that the warnings arrived.
Alarms hooted down the length of both ships, startling the men and women at their tasks, jolting those asleep into a terrified waking. The first moment of adrenaline-drenched shock gave way to the reactions drilled into the Mars teams by years of training. Every man and woman on each of the two spacecraft dashed, sprinted, raced for the radiation shelters.
For the first wave of electromagnetic energy from the flare was merely the precursor, the flash of lightning that warns of an approaching storm. Following it by a few minutes or perhaps even a few hours would be a vast expanding cloud of energetic protons and electrons, particles that could slice right through the skin of the ship and fry human flesh in seconds.