Three more steps and he was in at the side of the auditorium. It was a medical lecture hall during the normal day, and a place where the patients could come to watch entertainment in the evening. Nevertheless, it made a very nice two-hundred-seat facility for a press conference, and the steep balcony was ideal for cameras, with the necessary power outlets and sound system outputs placed appropriately. To either side of the moderately thrust stage, lenticular reflectors were set at a variety of angles, so that an over-the-shoulder shot could be shifted into a tele close-up of anyone in the main floor audience.
The brown plush seats were filling quickly. There was the usual assortment of skin colours, sexes, and modes of dress. They were much more reserved now, these permitted few, than the hustling mob at the airport.
Michaelmas stopped at Douglas Campion. He held out his hand. “I’d like to express my sympathies. And wish you good luck at this opportunity.” It seemed a sentiment the man would respond to.
The eyes moved. “Yeah. Thanks.”
“Are you planning an obituary feature?”
“Can’t now.” They were looking over his shoulder at the curtain. “Got to stay with the main story. That’s what he’d want.”
“Of course.” He moved on. The pale tan fabric panels of the acoustic draperies made an attractive wall decor. They gave back almost none of the sound of feet shuffling, seats tilting, and cleared throats.
And out there in Tokyo and Sydney they were putting down their preprandial Suntory, switching off the cassettes, punching up the channels. In Peking they were standing in the big square and watching the huge projection from the government building; in Moscow they were jammed up against the sets in the little apartments; in Los Angeles they were elbowing each other for a better line of sight in the saloons — here and there they were shouting at each other and striking out passionately. In Chicago and New York, presumably they slept; in Washington, presumably they could not.
Michaelmas slipped towards his seat, nodding and waving to acquaintances. He found his name badge pinned to the fabric, looked at it, and put it in his pocket. He glanced up at the balcony; Clementine put her finger to her ear, cocked her thumb, and dropped it. He pulled the earplug out of its recess in Domino’s terminal and inserted it. A staff announcer on Clementine’s network was doing a lead-in built on the man-in-the-street clips Domino had edited for them in Michaelmas’s name, splicing in reaction shots of Michaelmas’s face from stock. Then he apparently went to a voice-over of the whole-shot of the auditorium from a pool camera; he did a meticulous job of garnishing what the world was seeing as a room full of people staring at a closed curtain.
There was a faint pop and Clementine’s voice on the crew channel replaced the network feed. “We’re going to a tight three-quarter right of your head, Laurent,” she said. “I like the light best that way, with a little tilt-up, please, of the chin. Coming up on mark.”
He raised a hand to acknowledge and adopted an expression learned from observing youthful statesmen.
“Mark.”
“Must cut,” Domino’s Voice said suddenly. “Meet you Berne.”
Michaelmas involuntarily stared down at the comm unit, then remembered where he was and restored his expression.
“—ere we go!” Clementine’s voice was back in.
The curtains were opening. Getulio Frontiere was standing there at a lighted podium. A table with three empty forward-facing chairs was sited behind him, under the proscenium arch.
Frontiere introduced himself and said:
“Ladies and Gentlemen, on behalf of the Astronautics Commission of the United Nations of the World, and as guests with you here of Dr. Nils Hannes Limberg, we bid you welcome.” As always, the smile dawning on the Borgia face might have convinced anyone that everything was easily explained and had always been under control.
“I would now like to present to you Mr Ossip Sakal, Eastern Administrative Director for the UNAC. He will make a brief opening statement and will be followed to the podium by Dr. Limberg. Dr. Limberg will speak, again briefly, and then he will present to you Colonel Norwood. A question-and-answer period—”
A rising volume of wordless pandemonium took the play away from him, compounded of indrawn breaths, hands slapping down on chair arms, bodies shifting forward, shoes scraping.
Michaelmas’s neighbour—a nattily dressed Oriental from New China Service—said: “That’s it, then. UNAC has officially granted that it’s all as announced.”
Michaelmas nodded absently. He found himself with nothing more in his hands than a limited comm unit on automatic, most of its bulk taken up by nearly infinite layers of meticulously microcrafted dead circuitry, and by odd little Rube Goldberg things that flickered lights and made noises to impress the impressionable.
Frontiere had waited out the commotion, leaning easily against the podium. Now he resumed : “— a question-and-answer period will follow Colonel Norwood’s statement. I will moderate. And now, Mr Sakal.”
There was something about the way Sakal stepped forward. Michaelmas stayed still in his seat. Oz the Bird, as press parties and rosy-fingered poker games had revealed him over the years, would show his hole card any time after you’d overpaid for it. But there was a relaxed Oz Sakal and there was a murderously angry Oz Sakal who looked and acted almost precisely like the former. This was the latter.
Michaelmas took a look around. The remainder of the press corps was simply sitting here waiting for the customary sort of opening remark to be poured over the world’s head. But then perhaps they had never seen the Bird with a successfully drawn straight losing to a flush.
Michaelmas keyed the Transmit button of his comm unit once, to let Clementine know he was about to feed. Then he locked it down, faced into the nearest reflector, and smiled. “Ladies and gentlemen, good day,” he said warmly. “Laurent Michaelmas here. The man who is about to speak” — this lily I am about to paint—“has a well-established reputation for quickness of mind, responsible decisions, and an unfailing devotion to UNAC’s best interests.” As well as a tendency to snap drink stirrers whenever he feels himself losing control of the betting.
With his peripheral vision, Michaelmas had been watching Sakal stand mute while most of the people in the room did essentially what Michaelmas was doing. When Sakal put his hands on the podium, Michaelmas said: “Here is Mr Sakal.” He unlocked.
“How do you do.” Sakal looked straight out into the pool camera. He was a wiry man with huge cheekbones and thick black hair combed straight back from the peak of his scalp. There was skilfully applied matte make-up on his forehead. “On behalf of the Astronautics Commission of the United Nations of the World, I am here to express our admiration and delight.” Michaelmas found it noteworthy that Sakal continued to address himself only to the world beyond the blandest camera.
“The miracle of Colonel Norwood’s return is one for which we had very much given up hope. To have him with us again is also a personal joy to those of us who have long esteemed his friendship. Walter Norwood, as one might expect of any space-faring individual, is a remarkable person. We who are privileged to work for peaceful expansion of mankind in space are also privileged by many friendships with such individuals from many nations. To have one of them return whom we had thought lost is to find our hearts swelling with great emotion.”
He was off and winging now. Whatever Frontiere had written and drilled into him was now nothing more than an outline for spontaneous creative rhetoric. That was all right, too, so far, because Frontiere in turn had based the words on guidelines first articulated to him by Sakal. But so much for the skills of prose communication.