It was too much for Jamie. Reed and his slightly sneering way of looking at the world was more than he wanted to deal with at the end of this long, exciting, exhausting day. He hauled himself to his feet and headed for his privacy cubicle where he could strip off the rest of his clothes and then maybe go take a shower.
Before he got halfway there, though, Paul Abell intercepted him.
“Your turn before the cameras, friend.” The American astronaut’s frog eyes were wide and bulging, his smile curved almost from ear to ear.
“What do you mean?” Jamie asked.
“The media back on Earth. Looks like you’re a very popular guy. They want to interview you, and mission control has set it up.” Abell pointed. “The comm console awaits your pleasure.”
Each of the explorers was expected to respond to the news media’s demands for interviews “live, from the planet Mars.”
With the distance from Earth growing larger every hour, it took nearly ten minutes for a radio or TV transmission to travel from one world to the other, so truly “live” interviews were out of the question.
How could you conduct an interview with a twenty-minute wait between each question and its answer?
The media producers had their solution: each explorer would receive a list of questions. The explorer would then answer those questions before the camera, one after the other. On Earth, the answers would be snipped apart so that a questioning reporter could be inserted into the appropriate spots. The result looked as if the reporter and the explorer on Mars were indeed talking to one another “live.” Almost. There was little of the spontaneity of a truly face-to-face interview. But the world’s audiences were accustomed to wooden performances from scientists and astronauts, or so the TV producers assured their executives.
Besides, these people were speaking from Mars!
Wearily, Jamie slid into the creaking plastic chair in front of the main communications screen, still in his thermal undergarment, like white longjohns covered with tubing. Abell sat off to one side, monitoring the equipment and grinning as if he enjoyed watching a scientist trying to field questions from the media.
It surprised Jamie when the screen lit up to show, not Li Chengdu up in the orbiting command spacecraft or even one of the mission controllers at Kaliningrad. He found himself looking into the sad gray eyes of Alberto Brumado.
Brumado had flown to Washington the morning after the tumultuous celebration in Rio. There was a public relations furor brewing in the States and no less than the Vice-President herself was making outrageous demands that one of the scientists be removed from the team of explorers on the surface of Mars.
He had spent two days calming the politicians, but he could not deny that the American media was in a hot-breathed frenzy over the fact that a Native American was among the Martian explorers and he had refused to speak the speech that the space agency public relations officers had written for him.
Brumado had met with the media as well as the politicians and discovered that, like sharks attracted by the scent of blood, the media were circling around the figure of James Waterman, ready to close in for the kill.
Brumado had one goal and one only: to make such a success of this first mission to Mars that the people of the world would demand further exploration of the red planet. He was not going to allow one man- foolish or stubborn or simply a victim of circumstances-to wreck what he had fought for thirty years to accomplish. He would not permit one man-red, yellow, white, or green-to turn public opinion against Mars.
Now he sat before a display screen in an office in Washington. Through the half-drawn blinds he could see the modernistic square facade of the Air and Space Museum, with thousands of people streaming through its front doors.
“Ready to transmit to Mars, sir,” said the young woman sitting across the office. She had a headset clamped across her curly dark hair and a jumble of electronic gray boxes piled on the desk in front of her.
Brumado saw on the screen a man in white coveralls with a smiling frog’s face. The NASA patch on his chest identified him as the astronaut Abell. He looked relaxed, perfectly at ease; his lips were moving. Brumado realized this transmission had taken place more than ten minutes ago, and the technicians had turned off the sound so that he would not be confused. They wanted him to begin speaking now, knowing that it would take almost ten minutes for his words and image to reach Mars. By then James Waterman should be sitting where the astronaut was.