“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.
SOL 38: MORNING
Jamie awoke well before dawn. The wind had stopped! He lay flat on his bunk, listening. The storm must be over. There was no sound of the wind, no sounds in the darkened rover at all except Connors’s fitful snoring and the faint rustling of Joanna turning on her bunk just above him. And the ever-present background hum of electrical power and air fans.
Slowly, silently, he slid out of the bunk and padded in his socks and coveralls to the cockpit. He pulled back the thermal shroud. Still black night outside. There was no discernible moonlight on Mars; its two satellites were too tiny to shed much light on the planet’s surface. Jamie switched on the rover’s headlamps. The air was clear. He could see the cliff wall out there standing gray and rugged like the ghost of some ancient grandfather.
Quickly he turned the headlamps off, closed the shroud, and crept back to his bunk, satisfied that the storm had indeed ended. He crawled beneath the thin blanket and soon fell back to sleep.
He dreamed of Joanna, the two of them walking across the desert wearing ordinary street clothes. He could not tell if the desert was on Earth or Mars. A city shone on the horizon, white and sparkling in the hot sun. But no matter how long they walked the city came no closer. They trudged along for hours, tired, thirsty, sweaty, but the gleaming towers remained nothing more than a hope in the distance. They became weaker and weaker. Joanna collapsed in his arms, suddenly naked. They both sank to the burning sand, dying, too weak to go any farther.
Jamie had his fetish in his hand, but the little stone bear melted beneath the awful heat and flowed between his fingers.
He was reaching for it, scrabbling in the sand to recover it, when he awoke and realized he was pawing at the sheet that had become tangled between his legs.
Sheepishly Jamie got out of his bunk and headed for the lavatory before any of the others awoke. For the first time since they had left the dome, he shaved. The razor seemed to be slicing flesh, oven though it drew no blood. No blood left in me, Jamie thought wearily. The lotion stung when he splashed it on, but the sharpness of the pain was almost welcome after days of the dull, sullen, glowering ache that had been dogging him.