still haven’t been able to get a line on Green, Charlesworth.”
The offices of Alive, flagship of the Alive-Space-Chance publishing squadron, were rocking. Hot on the heels of the disaster in Washington, a new cataclysm had just flashed in from their stringer in Coshocton, Ohio.
“Keep talking it!” yelled the editor to the stringer, switching him to a rewrite man. He yelled at the picture editor, “Standby squad to Coshocton, Ohio. Whole goddam bubble-
city fell apart!” The picture editor acknowledged and spoke a few quiet words into a phone. Overhead on the landing stage, a transport plane that stood with its engines just ticking over, quickened to a roar and took off, its paunch laden with six photographers and their gear. A klaxon screamed in the ready room next the landing stage; another standby squad put down their poker hands and climbed into a second plane, which taxied to the take-off line and stood waiting.
The editor snapped, “Morgue! Send up the file on. G.M.L. Home failures, collapses, service guarantees, and so on. Science! Put two writers on to whip it into a sidebar. Photoroom! Hold everything; stand by to remake the issue. Transmitter! Hold everything; stand by to remake; three pages of four-color transmission upcoming. Midwest! Midwest—what the hell held you up? Get a squad to Coshocton, Ohio; G.M.L. Bubble-City collapse. Art! Stand by for visualization—scene of collapsing bubble-houses——”
And so on. Until ———
The editor quite suddenly stopped what he was doing and softly said to his assistant, “Oh, Jesus. Take over, Manning. Policy.”
He got up, fixed his cravat, and walked up a flight of carpeted stairs. When he got past the publisher’s secretary, he said delicately:
“Of course, sir, it looks like big news to us. But we’d like the benefit of your judgment in a, well, sensitive area like this. I understand you hold some G.M.L. stock, sir, so naturally you’d have an insider’s slant. What I want to know is, do you consider it—uh—in the best public interest to splash the story?”
“Splash it,” the publisher said nobly, in the best tradition of no-fear-nor-favor journalism.
The editor, grateful but wondering, said, “Thank you, Mr. Hubble.”
He almost backed out of The Presence.
He said to his assistant, marvernq, “S^rtrHimes I think the old boy isn’t such a selfish louse after all.” He shrugged, and shook his head, and turned to his desk panel, yelling:
“Hasn’t anybody got through to G.M.L. yet?”
Chapter Twenty-One
norma lavin’s. office was more than comfortable; it was luxurious.
But Norma was not particularly happy in it. Ryan thought it would be better if she didn’t venture out of the suite. Her brother Donald, over his spree, was busily engaged in office-managing the hundred employees of Ryan & Mundin. Mundin was busy. There wasn’t much for Norma to do but sit and think.
She sat. And she thought.
She thought: G.M.L. Bankruptcy. Melt down the bubble-houses. Destroy Daddy’s memorial, tear everything apart. Does it have to be that way? Does everything have to be ripped to pieces and slimied up and all the goodness taken out of it?
She thought rebelliously, They treat me like some sort of degenerate because I’m a woman. Hubble with his crawly, girl-clutching hands. Coett with his fatherly, superior, shut-your-yap-little-girl look. Mundin with his—with his——
She thought wonderingly, Mundin, with his infuriating, aggravating way of treating me as if I were not a woman. . . .
She thought about that a great deal; after all, she hadn’t much to do but sit and think.
Until she saw the beat-cop in the lobby talking to his night* stick.
At first, Norma’s reaction was what anybody’s reaction would be if they saw someone talking into a nightstick. She thought he was nuts.
But he wasn’t being flamboyant about it; he was off in a corner, hidden from sight—except the sight of someone who happened to be staring idly out of a window directly above him, like Norma. Just a few murmured, unselfconicious words. x
She decided the cop was being whimsical, of course, (^absent-mindedly rehearsing a speech to the desk sergeant.
Or else he really was nuts. There was some perfectly rea-
sonable explanation; so she forgot about it and went back to sitting and thinking. She thought about the old days, with a touch of wistfulness—not the old old days, but the Belly Rave old days, when she and Mundin had had work to do together. When she was bankrupt and he was a pauper—instead of the way things were now, when she was well-to-do on the verge of billions, and he was busy.