It was a good, efficient job of the kind that turns a working newsman’s stomach while he admires the technique.
“Well, what do you think of it?” asked Chenery proudly.
I was saved from answering by a brrp from the ethertype.
“GPM FRB GA PLS” it said. “Good-afternoon, Frostbite Bureau—go ahead, please.” What with? I hunted around and found a typed schedule on the wall-that Kennedy had evidently once drawn up in a spasm of activity.
“MIN PLS” I punched out on the ethertype, and studied ftesked.
It was quite a document.
0900-1030: BREAKFAST
1030-1100: PHONE WEEMS FOR BITCHES RE SVS
1100-1200: NOTE MARSBUO RE BITCHES
1200-1330: LUNCH
1330-1530: RUN DROPS TO WEEMS: GAB WrTH
CHENERY 1530-1700: CLIP PHOENIX, REWRITE PUNCH & FILE
SUNDAYS 0900-1700: WRITE AND FILE ENTERPRISERS.
Chenery spared my blushes by looking out the window as I read the awful thing. I hadn’t quite realized how low I’d sunk until then.
“Think it’s funny?” I asked him—unfairly, I knew. He was being decent. It was decent of him not to spit in my eye and shove me off the sidewalk for that matter. I had hit bottom.
He’ didn’t answer. He was embarrassed, and in the damn-fool way people have of finding a scapegoat I tried to make him/ feel worse. Maybe if I rubbed it in real hard he’d begin to feel almost as bad as I did. “I see,” I told him, “that I’ve wasted a morning. Do you or Weems have any bitches for rate to messenger-boy to Mars?”
“Nothing special,” he said. “The way I said, we always like low-temperature and high-altitude agriculture stuff. And good f arm-and-home material.”
“You’ll get it,” I told him. “And now I see I’m behind clipping and rewriting and filing stories from your paper.”
“Don’t take it so hard,” he said unhappily. “It’s not such a bad place. 111 have them take your personal stuff to the Hamilton House and the bureau stuff here. It’s the only decent hotel in town except the Phoenix and that’s kind of high—” He saw that I didn’t like him jumping to such accurate conclusions about my pay check and beat it with an apologetic grimace of a smile.
The ethertype went brrp again and said “GB FRB CU LTR” “Good-by, Frostbite. See you later.” There must have been many days when old Kennedy was too sick or too sick at heart to rewrite pieces from the lone client. Then the machine began beating out news items which I’d tear off eventually and run over to the Phoenix.
“Okay, sweetheart,” I told the clattering printer. “You’ll get copy from Frostbite. You’ll get copy that’ll make the whole damned ISN sit up and take notice—” and I went on kidding myself in that vein for a couple of minutes but it went dry very soon.
Good God, but they’ve got me! I thought. If I’m no good on the job they’ll keep me here because there’s nothing lower. And if I’m good on the job they’ll keep me here because I’m good at it Not a chance in a trillion to do anything that’ll
get noticed—just plain stuck on a crummy planet with a crummy political machine that’ll never make news in a million years!
I yanked down Kennedy’s library—”YOUR FUTURE ON FROSTBITE,” which was a C. of C. recruiting pamphlet, “MANUAL OF ETHERTYPE MAINTENANCE AND REPAIR,” an ISN house handbook and “THE UNITED PLANETS ORGANIZATION SECRETARIAT COMMITTEE INTERIM REPORT ON HABIT-FORMING DRUGS IN INTERPLANETARY COMMERCE,” a grey-backed UP monograph that got to Frostbite God knew how. Maybe Kennedy had planned to switch from home brew to something that would kill him quicker.
• The Chamber of Commerce job gave a thumbnail sketch of my new home. Frostbite had been colonized about five generations ago for the usual reason. Somebody had smelled money. A trading company planted a power reactor—still going strong—at the South Pole in exchange for choice tracts of land which they!d sold off to homesteaders, all from Earth and Earth-colonized planets. In fine print the pamphlet gave lip service to the UP ideal of interspecific brotherhood, but— So Frostbite, in typical hick fashion, thought only genus homo was good enough for its sacred soil and that all non-human species were more or less alarming monsters.