The newsroom was full of noise as usual. McGillicuddy vu in the copydesk slot chewing his way through a pile of dpatches due to be filed on the pressure dome split for A.M.
•ewscasts in four minutes by the big wall clock. He fed his copy, without looking, to an operator battering the keys of fte old-fashioned radioteletype that was good enough to serve
•or local clients.
“Two minutes short!” he yelled at one of the men on the “Gimme a brightener! Gimme a god-damned bright-‘P* The rim man raced to the receiving ethertypes from rCammadion, Betelgeuse, and the other Interstellar bureaus. Be yanked an item from one of the clicking machines and
•caJed it at McGillicuddy, who slashed at it with his pencil and passed it to the operator. The tape the operator was cooing started through the transmitter-distributor, and on all local clients’ radioteletypes appeared:
•Jto
“FIFTEEN-MINUTE INTERSTELLAR NEWSCAST AM MARS PRESSURE DOMES.”
Everybody leaned hack and lit up. McGillicuddy’s eye fell on me, and I cleared my throat
“Got a cold?” he asked genially.
“Nope. No cold.”
“Touch of indigestion? Flu, maybe? You’re tardy today.”
“I know it.”
“Bright boy,” He was smiling. That was bad.
“Spencer,” he told me. “I thought long and hard about you. I thought about you when you failed to show up for the nightside. I thought about you intermittently through the night as I took your shift. Along about 0300 I decided what to do with you. It was as though Providence had taken a hand. It was as though I prayed ‘Lord, what shall I do with a drunken, no-good son of a spacecook who ranks in my opinion with the boils of Job as an affliction to man?* Here’s i the answer, Spencer.”
He tossed me a piece-of ethertype paper, torn from one of i our interstellar-circuit machines. On it was the following dialogue:
ANYBODY TTHURE I MEAN THERE I
THIS MARSBUO ISN GA PLS
WOT TTHUT I MEAN WOT THAT MEAN PLEASE
THIS IS THE MARS BUREAU OF INTERSTELLAR NEWS. WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT ARE YOU DOING HORSING AROUND ON OUR KRUEGER 60-B CIRCUIT TELETYPE QUESTIONMARK. WHERE IS REGULAR STAFFER. GO AHEAD
THATK WOT I AM CALLING YOU ABBOUUT. KENNEDY DIED THIS MORNINGPNEUMONIA. I AM WEEMS EDITOR PHOENIX. U SENDING REPLLACE-MENT KENNEDY PLEAS
THIS MCGILLICUDDY, MARSBUO ISN CHIEF. SEND- ! ING REPLACEMENT KENNEDY SOONEST. HAVE IDEAL MAN FOR JOB. END. !
That was all. It was enough.
“Chief,” I said to McGillicuddy. “Chief, you can’t You wouldn’t—would you?”
“Better get packed,” he told me, busily marking up copy, i
“Better take plenty of nice, warm clothing. I understand Krueger 60-B is about one thousand times dimmer than the sun. That’s absolute magnitude, of course—Frostbite’s in quite close. A primitive community, I’m told. Kennedy, didn’t like it. But of course the poor old duffer wasn’t good enough to handle anything swifter than a one-man bureau on a one-planet split. Better take lots of warm clothing.”
“I quit,” I said.
“Sam,” said somebody, in a voice that always makes me turn to custard inside.
“Hello, EUie,” I said. “I was just telling Mr. McGillicuddy that he isn’t going to shoot me off to Frostbite to rot.”
“Freeze,” corrected McGillicuddy with relish. “Freeze. Good morning, Miss Masters. Did you want to say a few parting words to your friend?”
“I do,” she told him, and drew me aside to no man’s land where the ladies of the press prepared strange copy for the (coder sex. “Don’t quit, Sam,” she said in that voice. “I could
•ever love a quitter. Wh»t if it is a minor assignment?” “Minor,” I said. ”What a gem of understatement that isl” “It’ll be good for you,” she insisted. “You can show him
•tut you’ve got on the ball. You’ll be on your own except for the regular dispatches to the main circuit and your local ^tit You could dig up all sorts of cute feature stories that*d fet your name known.” And so on. It was partly her logic, partly that voice and partly her promise to kiss me good-by
• the port.
•TO take it,” I told McGillicuddy. He looked up with a pleased smile and murmured: “The power of prayer . . .”