“The job doesn’t pay overtime, you know.” Anne Kruger spoke from the doorway of her office, startling Jerome. He looked about him and saw that it was past seven in the evening. He had been distantly aware of the other reporters locking their desks and going home, but he had not noticed being on his own for three hours. His eyes were smarting from the protracted sessions with the VDU and there was an ominous pain in his lower back which suggested he had made himself overtired.
“I guess I got absorbed,” he said. “There’s no harm in knowing the background.”
“Don’t be defensive, Ray—I approve of my staff being thorough.” Anne came towards him, vivid and gleaming, freshly made up for going out, and he felt a pang of jealousy towards some unknown youngster in tennis shorts. “How are you getting on with it?”
“I know practically everything there is to know about spontaneous human combustion.”
“I’ll bet you do—I’d give anything for a memory like yours.” Her brown eyes were sympathetic. “Have you thought about stopping for a bite to eat?”
Jerome indulged a reckless impulse. “No. Where shall we go?”
“I know where I’m going,” Anne replied, at once resuming the boss–employee relationship. “And I suggest that you eat something soon before you win yourself an ulcer.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He smiled, concealing his self-disgust over making the gaffe, and watched her walk to the elevator. She looked youthful, self-sufficient and confident, the sort of person who would have achieved success even if her father had not owned a newspaper. Jerome imagined himself as her partner for an idealized evening…the excellent food and wine…the dancing…the return to a plushy apartment…the scented waxy taste of lipstick, which he was close to forgetting…
Swearing at himself for having opened mental doors which were best left closed, he surveyed the office with tired eyes. The red-gold sunlight slanting in from the windows made the desks and equipment seem irrelevant to anything, artifacts which people had long ago put into storage when they had gone off to attend to the real business of life. This was no place for him to be on a fine August evening, but what was the alternative? His home on the north side would be just as lonely, the more so because Carla had loved this time of year, and it was too late to consider driving out to the old chalet at Parson’s Lake.
Jerome took off his glasses and polished the lenses while he weighed the matter. He intended to keep on working until at least midnight, thus guaranteeing that sleep would come easily, and the research could be done almost as efficiently at home. The main difference, he decided abruptly, was that at home he could sit in a more comfortable chair and ease the tiredness in his lower back. And his own tea was marginally better than what came out of the office machine.
That’s it, he thought, gathering up his notebook and pencils. There’s nothing like having clearly defined goals in life.
A few minutes of bathing his eyes had such a soothing effect that he decided he could watch television for a short while before resuming work. He cleared away the remains of the Waldorf salad he had picked up at Harpo’s on the way home, and eased himself into his best armchair, carefully balancing a glass of iced tea. When he remotely activated the television set, the news channel he usually watched was preoccupied with the Argentine-Chile conflict and the breakdown of the chemical warfare talks in Paris.
Jerome, who had been seeking information about the Mercury shot, listened to the reports with growing unease. He had been born the year after World War II had ended, and had grown up through various phases of the Cold War with an instinctive belief in the race’s ability to muddle through any crisis. As was the case with most ordinary citizens, sheer practice had made him adept at preserving his natural optimism, at disregarding the prophets of doom, but lately he had begun to feel afraid. It might have been a psychological reaction to the death of his wife, but now it seemed entirely possible to him that the politicians and generals were on the verge of ending all human life.
Jerome had a theory that it was the prospect of racial extinction which on a subconscious level was fuelling the public’s interest in the Quicksilver’s mission to Mercury. Until the previous year the arid little planet, so uncomfortably close to the sun, had been a low-priority target for any kind of mission, let alone one carrying three men. Then a space-borne telescope had picked up a curious reflection. Studies of the enhanced images suggested that they showed a bus-sized area of highly machined metal lying on the surface of Mercury at the northern pole.
As soon as all members of the space club had denied knowledge of the object the speculations about a contact from Outside had begun, and within days there was a widespread semi-religious belief that an interstellar ship had landed or crashed on Mercury. At one end of the credulity spectrum this was proof that help was on the way, that a benign intervention was going to save humanity from itself; at the other, it was the thin consolation of knowing that Man had at least been noticed and his self-immolation would be an object lesson for others. Either way, the mysterious object lying on the pitted surface of Mercury represented a stake in eternity, and public interest in a space flight was higher than at any time since the first lunar landings.
Tiring of the news broadcast, Jerome switched over to computer mode, keyed in to the Examiner’s central processor and began a more careful reading of the pages which had suggested causes for SHC. He found portentous references to involuntary reorganization of muscle cells which changed people into million-volt batteries, to Elijah and the divine fire, to botulinus-poisoning patients developing bioluminescence, to neutron weapons, to da Vinci’s belief that the chief function of the heart was to develop heat, to the Earth’s magnetic field, to incendiary ghosts, to undetected atomic particles called pyrotons…
In Jerome’s opinion the wordage was nothing more than semantic floundering, and a two-hour exposure to it confirmed his original view that nobody had ever come near a reasonable explanation for the fire death. He tried a different approach and looked for statements on the subject by qualified scientists, only to find that all those listed flatly denied the existence of the phenomenon. He was not too disappointed, remembering that he had been equally dogmatic about it only twelve hours earlier, but at the same time it would have been useful from the point of view of the article to have some kind of authoritative comment. Get plenty of quotes, Anne was always urging him, apparently in the belief that a reporter’s unsupported word did not carry much weight. He considered the problem for a moment, then remembered having been impressed by the sound thinking and dry humour of one writer, John Sladek, who in 1994 had published a no-nonsense study of the paranormal in a book called Psychic Superstars.
Jerome had consulted the work in the afternoon and had found no references to SHC, but that did not necessarily mean that Sladek had no thoughts on the subject. On the spur of the moment Jerome used the computer to get an address and phone number for Sladek, and discovered he was living in New York. Without hesitating, in case he lost momentum, he picked up the extension phone from beside his chair and put a call through. It was answered immediately.