“So, anyway, I told George—” the thin woman was saying in one of those big, too-full voices small people seemed to have or develop, when she saw the stranger and paused. “Oh! Hi! You must be Doctor Sutton!”
“Uh—yes. I—1 was beginning to think I was forgotten.”
The tiny woman sank into a chair. “Sorry about that. When stories happen this fast it’s always a mess, and this won’t be the last of it. I’m Theresa Perez—’Terry’ to all— and this is, believe it or not, Gustav Olafsson, always ‘Gus.’ I’m what they euphemistically call a ‘producer,’ which means I’m supposed to make sure everything’s there that needs to be there and that the story gets done and gets back. It sounds important, but in the news biz it’s a glorified executive secretary to the reporter. Gus is that peculiar breed of creature—we’re not sure if they’re human or not— known as the ‘news photographer.’ The kind of fanatic who’ll insist on taping his own execution if it’ll get a good picture.”
” ‘Lo,” said the taciturn photographer. “They tell us it’ll be five or ten minutes and then we’ll board, taxi out, and wait two hours to get out of this damned mess,” Perez continued. “The traffic in this place is abominable. You know the saying, ‘A wicked man died, and the devil came and took him straight to hell—after, of course, changing in Atlanta.’ ”
Lori smiled, although it was an old joke. “I know. Is that our plane out there?”
“Yeah. Don’t let it fool you. The boss has a real fancy one just for his own use. The rest of them are corporate jets. We almost always fly commercial, but if we took Varig down, with all the changes and schedule problems, we’d never be sure of getting where we need to get in time. When you have a schedule problem, the Powers That Be unfreeze their rusted-shut purses and spring for a special. You have bags?”
“Two. They’re still in the hangar over there—I hope.”
“We’ll get them.”
“I hope I’m going to be able to pick up something before we go into the bush,” Lori told her. “I’m not even sure my old stuff fits.”
“I know what you mean. Well, we’ve got about seventy hours total, and it’ll be tight, but we should have a little time in Manaus to get something, anyway. It’s a decent city for being out there in the middle of nowhere, particularly since it became a main port of entry for airplanes. I was down a year or so ago when we did a rain forest depletion story. One of these times I’m going to be able to see something of these places we get sent. It’s always hurry, hurry in this business, and after being ying-yanged around the world, when you get some time off, you want to spend it home in bed.”
Lori nodded and smiled, but deep down she envied somebody with that kind of life.
“She never stops talking,” Gus commented in a dry Minnesota accent that fit him well. “Ain’t gonna get no sleep at all on this trip.”
Perez looked up at him with a wry expression. “Gloomy Gus, always the soul of tact. No wonder you can’t keep a job.”
Lori looked puzzled, and Perez said, “Gus is a freelance. Half the foreign photographers, sound men, and technicians are, even for the broadcast networks. Nobody can afford to keep on a staff so large that it can be all the places with all the personnel it needs to cover the world. I have a list of hundreds in different categories. This time Gus was the first one I called who was available.”
“What she really means is that they don’t want to pay top dollar to the best in the business during the long times when there’s nothin’ happening,” Gus retorted.
“I gather you two have worked together before.”
Perez nodded. “Twice. Once on the Mexican earthquake and again on one of those stock ‘volcano blows its top’ stories from Hawaii. Beats me why folks still have houses around that thing to begin with. Gus specializes in natural disasters. That’s how he got tagged ‘Gloomy’ as much as his shining personality.”
The door opened again, and a middle-aged man in a pilot’s uniform came in. “We’re ready when you are,” he told Perez.
“Let’s go, then,” the producer responded, getting up, and they all filed out after the pilot.
“My bags!” Lori said suddenly.
“Need help?” the pilot asked her.
“No, not if they’re still there, thanks. Just bring them out to the plane?”
He nodded, and she dashed into the hangar. Somebody had moved them to one side, but they were still there and apparently otherwise untouched. She picked them both up and walked toward the jet. The pilot—actually the copilot as it turned out—took them and stowed them in an external baggage compartment, along with Perez’s overnight bag and Gus’s small suitcase and huge mass of formidable-looking cases containing, she supposed, his camera, lenses, and the like.
The Lear was the way to fly, she decided almost instantly. It was like the first-class cabin of the finest airliner but no coach section behind. Just four extralarge and comfortable swivel airline seats with extended backrests and two pairs of standard seats against the aft bulkhead between which was access to the rest room. There was a small table in the center of the four swivel chairs that looked like a junior version of a corporate boardroom conference table. There were compartments overhead and other places to stow gear. There were also ashtrays, something she hadn’t seen on many planes for a while. Not that she needed one, but clearly the regulations didn’t apply if one owned the plane.
“Turn forward and you’ll feel the seat lock into place,” the copilot instructed them. “Everybody fasten your belts and keep your seats in the forward locked position until we have altitude. Once we’re up, I’ll come back and show you the rest. We’ve got a window coming up, though, and we don’t want to miss it. You get bumped to the back of the line here, you may sit for hours.”
They still sat for a little while, but finally the small jet taxied out to the starting position and in a very short time was rolling down the runway at what seemed breakneck speed, although it probably wasn’t any faster than the 767 that had gone before them.
The flight was surprisingly smooth and comfortable once they were airborne; more so, she thought, than a bigger plane, although it had been much bumpier taxiing. She had been surprised to see the “Fasten Seat Belt” and “No Smoking” signs just like on a commercial jet. In a few minutes, the panorama of Atlanta at night was obscured by clouds and there was nothing to do but wait until those magic lights vanished, signaling freedom. Not that she wanted to get up right at the moment; the angle of climb was pretty steep and seemed to go on forever.
Finally they leveled off, and the seat belt lights went out. Almost immediately the copilot came back to the cabin. “Anybody hungry?” he asked.
“Starved,” Lori responded.
“We get our meals from the same caterer as the big boys on flights like this. The executives have their own food specially prepared, but this is cuisine a la Dobbs House, I’m afraid. No better or worse than the usual airline fare. I’ll stick them in the microwave, and we’ll at least be full up until breakfast.” The small kitchen was cleverly concealed and easy to manage. He put the dinners in, set the controls, then came back and pressed a large square button on one of the bulkheads. A section opened outward, cleverly revealing an impressive-looking bar.
“It’s more or less serve yourself,” the copilot told them. “Anything you might want is here. Hard stuff, soft stuff, beer, wine—good wine—as well as coffee, which I’ll start when we reach altitude. Ice is in the hopper there, glasses in the bin. Trash goes in here, and dirty glasses go in this other bin over here.”
A bell went off, and he went back to the small kitchen. “Let’s see … we’ve got Delta fish, United Salisbury steak, and USAir lasagna. I’ll just put them on the cold trays and set them on the table, and you can fight over which one you want.”
“What about you and the pilot?” Lori asked him.
“Oh, we have to eat yet different meals, but that’s later. Both of us ate before we came.”
He showed them how to unlock the seats so they would swivel once more and also demonstrated that they were nearly full recliners with a nice footrest emerging when the backrest was lowered. Pillows and blankets were above.
Lori didn’t care which meal she got and wound up with the Salisbury steak. She couldn’t help noticing that Terry had the fish and a diet Pepsi. Only the congenitally thin acted like they were obese all the time.
“So—is this it?” she asked the two newspeople. “I mean—no reporter?”
Terry chuckled. “Oh, there’ll be a reporter, all right. Himself.” She lowered her voice as deep as she could. “John Maklovitch, CNN news,” she intoned solemnly. “He’ll meet up with us in Manaus. Flying in from God Only Knows, as usual. In fact, he should beat us there if his connections work out right. We’ll use local free-lancers. I’ve already set up with my counterpart from TV Brasil. Right now they think it’s fifty-fifty that the meteor will come down before dawn, so we’re going to try and catch its act as it comes in, from the air. It would be neat if we could catch it hitting the earth, but they still can’t predict exactly where within a couple of hundred miles last I heard, and it’ll be traveling a lot faster than we can.”
“Might be for the best we’re not that close when it hits, if it hits land,” Lori noted. “A big one like this could have the force of a decent-sized atomic bomb, in which case you’d get everything you might expect from a bomb, maybe including radiation—the great mystery explosion at Tunguska in Siberia in 1908 was radioactive, although that might not have been a meteor. The estimates I saw in the papers I read today indicate that this might be the largest one in modern times. The shock wave alone will be enormous, and the crater will be fantastic, like a volcanic caldera, very hot and possibly molten.”
“Sounds like fun,” Gus commented. “No chance this thing isn’t a meteor, though, is there?”
“Huh? What do you mean? Little green men?”
“Well, I saw War of the Worlds on TBS last week. Good timing.”
She laughed. “I seriously doubt it. The only danger, and it’s very remote, is that this is going to be something like the Tunguska explosion I just talked about. Massive blast damage for hundreds of miles with no evidence of what caused it. Many people think it might have been antimatter.”
“Auntie what?”
“Antimatter. Matter just like regular matter only with opposite electrical charge and polarity. When antimatter hits matter, they both blow up. Cancel out. Don’t let that worry you, though. I never bought the antimatter Siberian explosion. Nobody ever explained to me why it didn’t cancel out when it hit the atmosphere if it was. Others say it was a comet, although there’s no sign of the meteorite fall that would accompany one. At least one major Russian physicist thinks it was a crashed alien spaceship, but I don’t think we have to take that one seriously. Don’t worry—it’ll be plenty big enough if it’s the size they predict even after losing the bulk of its mass in friction with the atmosphere. I hope it lands either in the jungle or in the sea. The track prediction I saw takes it over some fairly populous parts of Peru if it clears the Andes. There’s no way they could evacuate all that region, not in three days.”
“Don’t get Gus hoping,” Terry cautioned. “If it came down in downtown Lima, he’d be so ecstatic about the photo ops, he wouldn’t even think of the misery. And no matter what he says, he’d love it to be an invasion from Mars. As I said, news photographers aren’t quite human.”
Gus looked sheepish. “Well, it ain’t like this happens every day.”
“In fact, it does happen every day,” Lori told him. “Meteor strikes, that is. It’s just that the particles hitting the Earth are usually small enough that they burn up before they reach the ground and just give pretty shooting stars for folks to look at. The ones that do reach the ground are often the size of peas or so, and most land in the ocean, in any case. It’s just the size of this monster that makes it so unusual.”
“Well, wherever it hits and no matter what damage it does, we’ll be the first on the scene,” Gus told her. “That’s our job.”
“Actually, we’re praying for Brazil,” Terry added. “The other organizations will be forced to use our pool in that region. If it goes into Peru, well, there’s a ton of broadcast teams in there now from dozens of countries and more arriving every day. We want to be first and exclusive. If we’re not, we’re not doing our job.”
“If it does land up in the upper Amazon, at or near the Peruvian border, it’ll be hell to get to on the ground,” Lori pointed out. “No roads or airstrips up there, and what natives there are will be primitive and not very friendly. But I’m mostly worried about the idea of covering it from the air.”
“Huh? Why?”
“While it’s huge, it’s not going to come down in one piece. As it comes through the atmosphere, it’ll fragment. Some decent-sized chunks and a huge number of little ones will come off. Some will be large enough to fall on their own over a wide swath and cause enormous damage. Even so, on the ground you can take advantage of some cover, and the odds of being hit by a fragment in the open are still pretty low. In the atmosphere, though, it will be extremely turbulent, and if even a very tiny fragment hits the plane, it could be disaster. And when it hits, like I said, it’ll be like an atomic bomb.”
“It’s what we get paid for, Doc,” Gus commented, sounding singularly unconcerned. “Can’t cover a war without gettin’ in the line of fire once in a while.”
“I’m afraid he’s right,” Terry agreed. “Listen, Doctor, if you feel it’s ridiculous to risk your life being with us, we can rig up something on the ground for you to join in the comments, but we have to be where the action is, risk or not. In this business you have to develop a kind of insanity, sort of like being a permanent teenager, taking risks and never thinking about the consequences. If not, we might as well stay in Atlanta and just cover the aftermath. We’re good at what we do, which is why so few of us get killed, but reporters do get hurt sometimes, even killed sometimes, in the pursuit of a story, and this is a major one. I thought that was understood. We’ll have a ton of very famous scientists back in Atlanta and around the country feeding stuff to the anchors from their safe offices in the States. You’re the one who’ll be on site. You have to think about that, and now.”
It was a sobering thought she hadn’t considered up to that point. There was risk in this, not the career risks and romantic risks she’d thought about before—those suddenly seemed very minor—but real risk to life and limb. As the meteor came in over the coast of west Africa, it would begin to burn and shatter, and pieces would begin to break off. Most would fall in the Atlantic, but by the time it reached the Brazilian coast, it would be quite low and quite hot and coming in incredibly fast. Those pieces would be raining down over an area perhaps hundreds of miles wide. Parts of the country would look as if they had been bombed by an enemy air force. Fortunately, the region was in the main lightly populated, although there would be some towns that would suffer. But if it cleared the Andes, it would rain over populous portions of Peru like a carpet bomb attack. And there was nowhere that was totally unpopulated anymore except most of Antarctica.
This could be a major disaster, and she was being taken right into the middle of it, as dangerously close as possible to get the right pictures.
She could die.
My God! No wonder they passed the buck to me! That probably was unfair, she told herself, but she still wouldn’t put it past them.
Of course, a lot of science was achieved at great risk. The geomorphologists who worked with exploding volcanoes took risks as a matter of routine; medicine and biology since well before the days of Madame Curie took risks as well. It could be a dangerous business, but it usually wasn’t. The last astronomer to take a risk greater than pneumonia from spending a long, cold night at the telescope was probably Galileo before the ecclesiastical court in Rome.
Of course, it would be easier if she really were here doing science, but she wasn’t. There were teams of top scientists all over the region doing that kind of work; with the level of prediction achieved by the computers on this event, it would probably be the most studied and viewed happening in contemporary science. She had no equipment, no labs waiting back home for her findings and samplings, no support at all. She was a mouthpiece, a witness for the cable TV audience.
Terry was getting a bunch of papers out of her briefcase. “Unless you want to bug out in Manaus, you’ll have to sign these,” the producer told her, shoving the papers over. “I have to fax signed copies back when I arrive and then Fedex the originals. It’s mostly standard stuff.”
She took the papers and started to look through them. The first was the personal release—she agreed that she had been told there was risk to this job and that she accepted the risk and wouldn’t sue the company if something happened, in exchange for which they’d cover all medical expenses from on-the-assignment injuries. The second was the general waiver and promise to abide by the rules of the corporation and do what she was asked to do, etc., etc. The third covered her under the group lawsuit insurance policy in case she said something on the air that somebody else didn’t like. The usual.
The fourth, however, was of more positive interest. It was basically a set of rules for an expense account for a foreign assignment, how to prepare one, what they would and would not cover, and the like. The list of what they covered was pretty damned extensive, but the rule apparently was to receipt everything and give it to Terry before, a certain cutoff date. And finally, there was an agreement that she would work for up to seven days on this assignment as their exclusive agent and on-camera representative as a free-lance commentator, and licensed unlimited use of any and all footage and commentary given during that period for the onetime fee of—my heavens! That was hundreds of dollars per day!
“You look surprised,” Terry noted.
“I—I never expected to be paid for this.”
“You aren’t plugging a book, you haven’t got a forthcoming PBS series or whatever, so you’re hired as a freelancer. Just remember that your fee is based on doing satisfactory work and I’m the one who decides if you do.”
Lori sighed. She knew at that point that even if she wasn’t being paid a dime she’d have to see it through, grit her teeth and go through with the whole thing. Very dangerous or not, this was the chance of a lifetime, the potential turning point in her life she’d abandoned all hope of ever getting.
“I’m in,” she told the producer.
Amazonia: Rockfall Minus One
manaus lay so far into the amazonian interior of brazil that since its founding, its major connection to the rest of Brazil and the world as well had been just the Amazon River. Although now it was possible to reach the city by road, the river and the airplane were the primary twin connectors of the city to the rest of civilization.
Still, Manaus was a very large city, born during the boom in gold and other treasures of the Amazon discovered and developed in the nineteenth century. Great old houses and a magnificent if now rundown center city, with its old-world buildings defiant against the jungle, looking more like Lisbon at its finest, displayed Manaus’s past, and with the development of the interior in full swing, it was something of a boomtown again. Its airport, always vital since the founding of the national airline decades before, was as grand and modern as any in the western world and was the main port of entry for foreign airliners, almost as if Brazil were intent on reminding all its visitors that there was more to the country than Rio and Sao Paulo. There were first-class hotels here once more, with all the amenities of modern civilization, and in its bustling streets one could buy almost anything.
With a corporate credit card, it wasn’t hard for the two women to pick up what they needed, although it was a hardship to do so in the couple of hours allotted to the task. Terry had to be back at the hotel in a hurry; she’d been on the phone and fax in the hotel’s business center almost since arriving, and she still had much to do. By the time they returned, messages had piled up, and before heading back down to the business center, Terry told Lori to order from room service and unpack and repack as needed.
A bellman came up a few minutes later with a folder full of papers, and Lori looked them over after being told they were from Terry. They turned out to be faxes of the latest computer summaries, including maps and tracking data. It was now felt that the angle and velocity would not take the approaching meteor over the Andes, which was a relief to Peru and Ecuador, of course, but the projections also indicated it would track a bit north of the original estimates.
She grabbed a map of Brazil and did a plot. If the projections held up, it would luckily hit in one of the remotest and least populated areas left in the country, but that would also present new dangers. If anything happened and the news crew went down in that region, they might never be found.
She decided to talk to the concierge. He was an old man with more Indian in him than anything else, and it took little imagination to imagine him in the midst of the jungle in some primitive tribe.
“Si, senhora. The region, it is very, very wild. The natives there, they still live in the old ways and would not think too well of strangers. Strangers have cut, burned, destroyed much forest, many animals. Ruin the land and ways of the peoples. Those tribes, they will know of this. They will think anyone who come is come to steal their forest. Best you no go there.”
“We’ll try not to land if we can avoid it,” she assured him. “What do you think the effect will be of the meteor hitting there?” She knew he’d heard all about it. Everybody had, and it was all anybody was talking about.
“They will think it a god, or a demon, or both. They will be very afraid.”
She nodded. “Good. They will avoid the impact area, then. It might actually be safe to at least inspect the area afterward.”
“What you say is true of the natives, senhora, but I still would not land there or even fly a small plane there.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“Ah—how to put? There are certain people just over the border there who also do not like strangers.”
He would say no more, but she got the idea. What a place to be heading for! One of the wildest jungles left in the western hemisphere, with snakes and dangerous insects, fierce natives who would see any stranger as a despoiler of their land, and not far away revolutionaries, drug lords, or worse seeing strangers as spies or narcs.
She went on down to the business center to see if any new information had come through. Terry was on two phones at once but looked up when she saw the scientist walk in.
“Hold on a minute,” she said into both phones, then said to Lori, “Pick up that line over there—three, I think. You can get more than I can from him.”
She wanted to ask who “him” was, but the producer was back on the phones again, so she went over, punched line three, and said, “Hello, this is Dr. Sutton.”
“Ah! Somebody who speaks English, not telebabble!” responded a gruff voice at the other end, a voice with just a trace of a central European accent.
“And who am I speaking to?” she asked.
“Hendrik van Home.”
She knew him at once by reputation. Van Home was something of a living legend among near-object astronomers. “Dr. van Home! It’s an honor. Where are you? Chile?”
“Yes. Things are going quite crazy here. We’ve had to get the army up to protect us.”
“You’re under attack?”
“From the world press, yes! It’s insane! Those people— they think they own you! I am told you are going to try to track it down by air.”
“If we can, more or less. I doubt if we can be there when it hits, but we should be first over it after it does, I would think.”