Jamie’s tape took less than ten minutes. When it ended the TV set automatically returned to the all-news channel.
Her boss muted the sound and turned his sleepy eyes toward her. Edith thought he looked like a drugged rat.
“Not much, is it?” he said lazily.
She felt genuinely surprised. “Not much? He’s told us more about that meteor hit than Kaliningrad and Houston did, put together. And he showed us what’s going on around their base. He’s told us about what they’ve discovered…”
“The official reports have given us most of that. And better footage, too.”
“Okay, but Jamie’s telling us that he wants to go back to the Grand Canyon. That’s not on the mission schedule. I checked.”
He pulled himself up into a more erect sitting position. “Possible conflict with the mission controllers?”
“You bet!”
His eyes opened wider. “Maverick scientist battling against the brass. Russian brass, too. Maybe there’s something there.”
Edith smiled. “It’s more than anybody else’s got.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t want us to stick our necks out and get them chopped off. We need more than just this one guy’s word.”
“I can check with some of the people at Houston. And I can always get to Brumado…”
“I’ll bet you can,” he said, with a leering grin.
Edith jumped to her feet. “I ought to get on this right away.”
“Tomorrow morning,” he said, reaching out a hand to pull her down onto the sofa.
She avoided it. “Brumado’s in Washington now, but not for long. I better get down there right away.”
He frowned at her. “There’s no planes this time of night, for Chrissake. Relax. Have some wine.”
“You’re paying me for making news,” Edith said, keeping her smile in place. “Let me earn my living.”
“You can earn your living…”
But she was heading for the door. “I’ll rent a car and phone you from Washington with an exclusive interview with Brumado. And maybe even the Vice-President!”
Edith was out the door before he could pull himself up from the sofa. It never fails, she thought. Men always think with their balls.
Years earlier she had learned, the hard way, the first rule of survival: Don’t go to bed with a man until you’ve gotten what you want from him. He wants sex. I want a permanent job, not this little consultant arrangement. He could bounce me out on my behind any time he wants to. Let me break the story about Jamie fighting the project directors. Then I’ll get a full-time job and he can have sex to cement the deal. Maybe.
DOSSIER: JAMES FOX WATERMAN
It was a neurotic assistant professor and a state police officer who made a student leader out of young James Waterman. The episode still haunted his dreams.
It had happened during Jamie’s sophomore year at Albuquerque. He was a quiet student, a loner who attended his classes and did his work without socializing much with the other students. Most of his teachers, if they remembered him at all, recalled an intense young man with the coppery broad-cheeked face of an Indian who hardly ever said a word in class yet turned in quality papers. Jamie got very high grades in most of his classes, but no recognition from either his peers or the faculty.
He lived off campus with friends of his grandfather’s, a Navaho family that ran a fashionable clothing shop on Albuquerque’s Old Town plaza. Jamie drove back and forth on a secondhand motor scooter and earned a few dollars by helping out in the shop on weekends.
With hardly anyone noticing it, Jamie was almost a straight-A student. The almost was his sophomore-level course in Shakespeare.
Jamie had done well in his freshman English survey course; he had enjoyed his first encounters with the rich literature that began with Beowulf and extended across the centuries to Eliot and Ballard. He had balked at Kipling, at first, with his freight of “white man’s burden.” But the sheer marvelous adventure of the man’s poems and stories had won Jamie over.
The sophomore course in Shakespeare was another matter. Assistant Professor Ferraro’s idea of teaching was to stand atop his desk and read all the roles of the Bard’s plays aloud to the class, declaiming dramatically and sawing the air with his gestures. It took only a week for Jamie to realize that the diminutive, middle-aged Ferraro was a frustrated actor who made all his classes into his personal stage.