“Very well, Mr. Roberts,” said Skillen. “See that it doesn’t happen again.”
She swept out of The Bakery. O’Donnell looked at Roberts. The tech smiled as if to say, You owe me one.
“Millions of you are sitting in kitchens across the United States, stirring no-cal sweetener into your instant coffee and listening to your soy sausages and cholesterol-free eggs sizzling in your microwave ovens. You watch me during breakfast as I babble incessantly about different aspects of our two-year Mars Project. You must wonder exactly how the manned exploration of such a distant world would affect you, if at all. Today, I plan to tell you.”
“Cut!” shouted the meteorology payload specialist who doubled as camera and sound man for the weekly broadcasts to “Good Morning, World.”
Kurt Jaeckle, suspended against a backdrop of full-color photographs of
Mars taken from the Hubble Space Telescope, looked over the top of his reading glasses.
“The sound from the boom mike is weak,” said the cameraman.
Jaeckle floated to the elbow of the aluminum boom, loosened a large wing nut, and tapped the arm with the heel of his hand.
“I don’t want the mike in the picture,” he said. “I want nothing distracting attention from me—and Mars.”
“Don’t worry,” said the cameraman.
Jaeckle returned to his position and ran through the opening lines of his script, this time from memory. The cameraman gave him a thumbs-up. Audio and video were perfect.
Jaeckle noticed a rustling in the black curtain that covered the rumpus room’s entry hatch during broadcasts. A hand parted the curtain and Carla Sue Gamble sailed through, her blond hair floating freely like a globe of light. Jaeckle immediately resumed reciting his lines. He concentrated solely on the camera lens, but he could see Carla Sue in the background. With her slightly crouched micro-gee posture and skinny limbs wrapped in black exercise tights, she reminded him of a wingless four-legged mosquito flitting at the edge of his vision. Just as much a nuisance, too, he feared. He stopped his recitation and drew his finger across his neck.
“Take a break,” he said. The cameraman shut off the equipment and knifed through the curtained hatch.
“You don’t give me a script and now you’re rehearsing by yourself.” Carla Sue lurched forward, but stopped herself with a handhold before butting Jaeckle’s chest with her head. “Am I supposed to draw my own conclusion?”
“Now, Carla.” Jaeckle unhooked his reading glasses from behind his ears and slowly folded them into his pocket, all the while trying to remember exactly what he had told her. Two deep lines ran down the corners of her mouth, and for a moment he thought of her not as a mosquito but as a ventriloquist’s dummy. “I meant to explain everything.”
“What’s there to explain? You’re cutting me out. I understand. I just wish you had the balls to tell me.”
“Carla, you misinterpret—”
“I haven’t seen you in four days. Four nights, to be more precise. I’m no fool.”
“The final decision wasn’t made until last night,” said Jaeckle. “Jared Lewis called me this morning to tell me. A marketing survey showed that ratings would improve if I went on alone.”
“Alone?”
“Don’t take it personally, Carla. Neither of us are media personalities, thank God. We don’t need these cameras to put bread on our tables. We have Mars.”
“Alone, you said.”
“That’s right,” said Jaeckle. “I can’t fathom how they arrive at these decisions.”
Carla Sue’s dummy jaw clamped shut. The two buttonholes that were her nostrils flared.
“If you don’t need an assistant, why is Lorraine Renoir reading a script? Explain that unfathomable mystery to me, Professor Jaeckle. And don’t give me any of your guff about it being a network idea to put Miss Florence Nightingale on television.”
“She is a physician,” said Jaeckle. “The next show is devoted to the problems of administering medical treatment in micro-gee. She is the only person on board qualified to discuss the subject.”
“What else is she qualified for?”
“I resent your implication.”
“You resent me hitting the nail square on the head,” said Carla Sue. “But let me tell you something right now. I’m not one of your starry-eyed grad students who took a tumble with you for a grade. I never expected us to last. But I do expect to land on Mars someday. And if I don’t, you can be damn sure that you won’t either.”