director. Fowler turned, saw Wheeling, and grinned. Wheeling gave back the high sign and smiled in what he hoped was an encouraging manner.
Senator Vincente of Coahuila, Senator Kaiser of Oregon, Senator Brand of Maine, Senator Petterson of New Jersey, and Minister Stanislaus of Newfoundland,
^ Petterson opened the meeting in her usual no-nonsense, let’s-get-on-with-it tones,
“The Committee for Maritime Resources, Organic, is now in session. Let’s get cracking, gentlemen.”
To look at her you’d think Senator Diana Petterson was the favorite grandmother of some Midwest farming clan. And, indeed, she was. She also had a command of the English language that could bend nails, a relentless questing mind that had given more than one cocky freshman senator the holly-gobbles on the floor of Congress, and devotion to the basic needs of human beings that was sufficiently uncompromising to have put her in the Senate for her fifth consecutive term.
The lawyer-type on Fowler’s left stood, rustled a sheaf of forms and computer printouts. The paper sounded loud in the chamber. He cleared his throat and began dryly to recite facts and figures.
Production of pompano here, king crab fishery there, oyster take from Chesapeake off such and such percent, edible kelp harvest up so and so many tons …
Wheeling found himself looking elsewhere. The schoolchildren sat politely, storing material for the homework certain to come. The two reporters had turned on their recorders and gone to sleep. He found himself becoming engrossed in the antics of a fat bumblebee that had somehow .blundered into the building and was now popping against the windowpane, trying to regain the cleaner sunlight outside. How like some Congressmen, Wheeling reflected.