Chenery let me in, and it was easy to see at once why Kennedy had died of pneumonia. Bottles. The air conditioning must have carried away every last sniff of liquor, but k itUl seemed to me that I could smell the rancid, homebrew stuff he’d been drinking. They were everywhere, the rdics of a shameless, hopeless alcoholic who’d been good for nothing better than Frostbite. Sticky glasses and bottles werywhere told the story.
I slid open the hatch of the incinerator and started tossing down bottles and glasses from the copy desk, the morgue, the Mbertype. Chenery helped, and decently kept his mouth
shut. When we’d got the place kind of cleaned up I wanted to know what the daily routine was like.
Chenery shrugged. “Anything you make ft, 1 guess. 1 used to push Kennedy to get more low-temperature agriculture stories for us. And those yaks that landed with you started as a civic-betterment stunt the Phoenix ran. It was all tractors until our farm editor had a brainstorm and brought in a pair. It’s a hell of a good idea—you can’t get milk, butter and meat out of a tractor. Kennedy helped us get advice from some Earthside agronomy station to set it up and helped get clearance for the first pair too. I don’t have much idea of what copy he filed back to ISN. Frankly, we used him mostly as a contact man.”
I asked miserably: “What the hell kind of copy can you file from a hole like this?” He laughed and cheerfully agreed that things were pretty slow.
“Here’s today’s Phoenix,” he said, as the faxer began to hum. A neat, 16-page tabloid, stapled, pushed its way out in a couple of seconds. I flipped through it and asked: “No color at all?”
Chenery gave me a wink. “What the subscribers and advertisers don’t know won’t hurt them. Sometimes we break down and give them a page-one color pic.”
I studied the Phoenix. Very conservative layout—naturally. It’s competition that leads to circus makeup, and the Phoenix was the only sheet on the planet. The number-one story under a modest two-column head was an ISN farm piece on fertilizers for high-altitude agriculture, virtually unedited. The number-two story was an ISN piece on the current United Planets assembly.
“Is Frostbite in the UP, by the way?” I asked. “No. It’s the big political question here. The Phoenix is against applying. We figure the planet can’t afford the assessment in die first place, and if it could there wouldn’t be anything to gain by joining.”
“Urn.” I studied the ISN piece closer and saw that the Phoenix was very much opposed indeed. The paper had doctored our story plenty. I hadn’t seen the original, but ISN is—in fact and according to its charter—as impartial as it’s humanly possible to be. But our story, as it emerged in the Phoenix, consisted of: a paragraph about an undignified, wrangling debate over the Mars-excavation question; a fist-fight between a Titanian and an Earth delegate in a corridor;
a Sirian’s red-hot denunciation of the UP as a power-politics instrument of the old planets; and a report of UP administrative expenses—without a corresponding report of achievements.
“1 suppose,” I supposed, “that the majority of the planet is stringing along with the Phoenix?”
“Eight to one, the last time a plebiscite was run off,” said Chenery proudly.
“You amaze me.” I went on through the paper. It was about 70 per cent ads, most of them from the Main Street stores we’d passed. The editorial page had an anti-UP cartoon showing the secretary-general of the UP as the greasy, affable conductor of a jetbus jammed to the roof with passengers. A sign on the bus said* “Fare, $15,000,000 and up per year.” A road sign pointing in the direction the bus was heading said, “To Nowhere.” The conductor was saying to • small, worried-looking man in a parka labeled “New Agricultural Planets” that, “There’s always room for one morel!” The outline said: “But is there—and is it worth it?”
The top editorial was “a glowing tribute from the Phoenix to the Phoenix for its pioneering work in yaks, pinned on the shipment that arrived today. The second editorial was anti-UP, echoing the cartoon and quoting from the Sirian in the page-one ISN piece.