If she didn’t feel so queasy it would almost have been funny. The reporter who broke the story of finding life on Mars, the woman who had parlayed a Texas cheerleader’s looks and a lot of smarts into prime-time news stardom, sitting strapped into a bucket seat, stomach churning, sinuses throbbing, feeling woozy every time she moved her head the slightest bit. And there’s more than four days of this to go. Sooner or later I’ll have to get up and go to the toilet. She did not look forward to the prospect.
At least nobody’s upchucked for a while, Edith told herself gratefully. The sound of people vomiting had almost broken her when they had first gone into zero gee. Fortunately the Clippership’s air circulation system had been strong enough to keep most of the stench away from her row. Still, the acrid scent of vomit made the cabin smell like a New York alley.
It had been neither simple nor easy to win this assignment to accompany the Peacekeepers to the renegade base on the Moon. The network was all for it, of course, but the U.N. bureaucracy wanted nothing to do with a reporter aboard their spacecraft. Edith had to use every bit of her blonde smiling charm and corporate infighter’s savvy to get past whole phalanxes of administrators and directors and their petty, close-minded assistants. All the way up to Georges Faure himself she had battled.
‘My dear Miss Elgin,’ Faure had said, with his smarmy smile, ‘this is a military expedition, not a camping trip.’
‘This is news,’ Edith had countered, ‘and the public demands to know what’s going on, first-hand.’
She had been brought to Faure’s presence in the Secretariat building. Not to his office, though. The secretary-general chose to meet her in a small quiet lounge on the building’s top floor. The lounge was plush: thick beige carpeting, comfortable armchairs and curved little sofas. Even the walls were covered with woven tapestries of muted browns and greens. The decor seemed to absorb sound; it was a room that gave no echoes, a room to share whispered secrets.
Edith had chosen to wear a clinging knee-length dress of bright red, accented with gold bracelets and necklace to compliment her sunshine yellow hair. Once it had been truly that happy color; for years now she had helped it along with tint.
Faure had let her wait for almost ten minutes before he showed up, a dapper little man in a precisely-cut suit of elegant dark blue set off perfectly by a necktie of deep maroon.
He took her hand so daintily that Edith thought he was going to kiss it. Instead, Faure led her to one of the plush armchairs and sat in the one facing hers. As she sat down, Edith looked past Faure’s smiling figure to the ceiling-high windows that faced uptown, northward, along the East River. She could see the Fifty-ninth Street bridge and well past it, all the way up to the Triboro and beyond.
‘What a sparkling day,’ she said.
Faure took it as a personal compliment. ‘You see how the electric automobile has already improved the air quality,’ he said, beaming. It made his tiny eyes almost disappear.
Edith wasn’t willing to let him take all the credit. ‘I thought the electric cars were mandated by the U.S. government. The Environmental Protection Agency, wasn’t it?’
‘Ah yes,’ said Faure quickly. ‘But only after our own efforts had proven successful in reducing the pollution in Tokyo and Mexico City. Now all the major cities are following our lead.’ Again the smile that almost swallowed his eyes.
Edith wondered silently, Is he using the editorial ‘we’ or the imperial?
But she smiled back at the secretary-general and said sweetly, ‘You know that a big chunk of the American public doesn’t agree with what you’re doing to Moonbase.’
Faure’s expression turned hard for a moment, then he shrugged and put on a sad face. ‘Yes, I know. It is very unfortunate. But one cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs, can one?’
Now he’s saying ‘one’ instead of ‘we’, Edith realized.
‘Most of the inhabitants of Moonbase are Americans,’ she said.
‘They are violating the treaty that Americans themselves drafted. The very treaty that the American delegation originally proposed to the General Assembly and fought so hard to have passed.’