“So?”
“I’ve got a story. I’ve got to get on the air from the Washington office here. Top priority.”
“What’s this all about?”
“It’s the biggest news break in the history of the business, honey!”
“Really?” The woman’s voice dripped suspicion.
Suddenly Edith hesitated. They’ll take it away from me, she realized. I’ll tip them off and they’ll call in the managing editor and the evening news anchor bastard and I’ll wind up in the cold.
“Can you give me the news director’s home number?” she asked.
“No.” Flatly.
“This is important, dammit!”
“If it’s that important you’d better tell me what it is.”
Edith took a deep breath. “Okay,” she said sweetly. “Just remember this call tomorrow when they fire y’all.”
She hung up the phone and turned to Brumado. “Is the taxi here? Do I have a minute to go to the bathroom?”
In the hour and a half between their arrival at NASA’s headquarters building and the official start of the news conference, Edith used up four spools on her miniaturized tape recorder, talking to the men who had gathered together to drink champagne and smoke cigars. She was not the only woman at the impromptu party, but she was the only member of the media among the Mars Project people.
The news conference filled the building’s largest auditorium, even at midnight. Television crews elbowed one another for choice spots up front. The lights were blindingly bright, but nobody seemed to mind. Phalanxes of microphones and tape recorders were propped up on the long table at which the grinning NASA people assembled, shaking hands with one another, glowing with self-vindication. They sat Alberto Brumado in their midst.
Edith took a folding chair set up by the side wall, next to an emergency exit. She smiled to herself. She had her story, and she would continue to gather in all the details of the human side of this fantastic night. Even if she had to finish the job in bed with Brumado. That might not be such a bad way to end a night like this, she thought.
Although stodgy gray-haired NASA administrators officially broke the news to the goggle-eyed reporters, it was Alberto Brumado who ended up doing most of the talking. The soul of the Mars Project had his hour in the limelight. His smiling, triumphant face and voice were broadcast all across the world.
Life on Mars.
While Brumado answered the reporters’ myriad of questions and bantered happily with them, no one noticed that the physician in charge of the medical section sat at the very end of the table of NASA officials, looking tired and grim. No one asked him a question. No one paid him any attention at all. Which was just as well, because he had made up his mind to remain absolutely silent, no matter what. He was not the kind of man to rain on the organization’s parade.
SOL 37: EVENING
Dr. Yang Meilin gave a disdainful snort at the data on her display screen. Pushing her chair away from the tiny desk, she got to her feet and opened the accordion-fold door of her infirmary.
Dr. Li was up in the command section, of course, in the middle of a three-way conversation with the excursion team down at Tithonium Chasma and the mission controllers at Kaliningrad.
So they have found life on Mars, Dr. Yang said to herself. And they are all sick, perhaps even dying. Could there be a connection? No, that cannot be, she said to herself.
The passageway was empty, silent except for the hum of machinery. Everyone in the craft is packed into the command module, Yang realized. No one is paying any attention to this medical emergency. No one is paying any attention to me.
When she reached the command module, Dr. Li was at the comm console. Every one of the display screens was lit up. Alberto Brumado himself was beaming happily from the main display, while the other screens showed bigwigs in Kaliningrad, Houston, and what appeared to be Tokyo. Men, all of them. The TV link to the excursion team was out due to the storm, but Joanna Brumado was on the radio, trying to answer the volleys of questions.