Collingdale hadn’t come in yet, so she left a message, describing the chief engineer’s concerns. She told him reluctantly that it should add some spice to the flight. Then she sighed and headed for the commissioner’s office to assume her new duties.
HER FIRST APPOINTMENT was with Melanie Toll of Thrillseekers, Inc.
Despite the capabilities of existing technology to create images that could not be distinguished from the originals, allowing virtual face-to-face conversations between people thousands of kilometers apart, people with business propositions still found the personal touch indispensable. Making the effort to cross some geography at personal inconvenience sent a message about how serious one was.
Serious. And here came Ms. Toll of Thrillseekers.
Hutch gazed at her over the vast expanse of Asquith’s desk. (The commissioner insisted she use his office when exercising his function.) She was young, attractive, tall, quite sure of herself. She wore a gold necklace and a matching bracelet, both of which acquired additional sparkle in the sheen of her auburn hair.
“Nice to meet you, Dr. Hutchins,” she said.
“You’re giving me more credit than I deserve.” Hutch shook her hand, listened to the light tinkle of the gold, and led her to a seat by the coffee table.
They talked briefly about weather, traffic, and how lovely the Academy grounds were. Then Hutch asked what she could do for her visitor.
Toll leaned forward, took a projector from her purse, and activated it. An image appeared of a young couple happily climbing the side of a mountain. Below them, the cliff fell away five hundred meters. Hutch could see a river sparkling in the sunlight.
Thrillseekers, Inc., took people on actual and virtual tours around the world and let them indulge their fantasies. Aside from dangling from cliffs, they rode golly balls along treacherous rivers, rescued beautiful women (or attractive men) from alligators, mounted horses and fought mock battles with bandits in the Sahara.
The projector displayed all this in enhanced colors, accompanied by an enthusiastic score, and over-charged titles. Danger for the Connoisseur. The Ultimate Thrill-Ride. The latter was a wild chase in a damaged flyer pursued by a man-eating cloud.
Moments later Hutch was racing down a ski slope, approaching a jump that seemed to have no bottom. “Hold on to Your Socks!” read the streamer. She couldn’t help pushing back into her chair and gripping the arms.
“Well,” said Toll, snapping off the image just before Hutch would have soared out into space, “that’s what we do. Although, of course, you knew that.”
She smirked at Hutch, who, despite herself, was breathing hard. “Of course, Ms. Toll.” Steady yourself. “That’s quite a show.”
“Thank you. I’m glad you liked it.”
“How can I help you?”
“We’re interested in Lookout. The place where the Goompahs are.”
“Really. In what way?”
“We’d like to put it on our inventory.” She crossed one leg over the other. The woman oozed sex. Even with no male in the room.
Marla, the commissioner’s secretary, came in with a coffee service and pastries. She glanced at Hutch to see if she could proceed. Hutch nodded, and the woman filled two fine china cups and asked if there was anything else. There wasn’t, so she withdrew. (Asquith didn’t use an AI for secretarial duties because having a human signified his elite status within the organization. Very few people other than CEOs and heads of state had them. But there was no question that Marla added to the ambience.)
“How do you mean,” Hutch asked, “put it on your ‘inventory’?”
“We’d like to make the experience available to our customers. We’d like them to be on the ground when the cloud comes in, watch the assault, feel what it’s like.”
“Ms. Toll, Lookout is three thousand light-years away. Your customers would be gone for almost two years. Maybe gone permanently.”
“No, no, no. We don’t mean we’d literally ship them out. What we’d like to do is send a couple of our technicians to Lookout to record the attack, get the sense of what really happens. Then we’d construct an artificial experience.” She tried the coffee and nodded. It met with her approval. “We think an omega program would do quite nicely.”
“And you’d like permission from me?” She wondered about that detail. Any world shown to have sentient life automatically came under the purview of the World Council, but its agent in such matters was the Academy.
“Permission and transportation,” said Toll.
Her instincts pushed her to say no, but she couldn’t see a reason to refuse. “Thrillseekers would have to pay their share of expenses.”
“Of course.”
“You’d have to agree not to make contact with the natives. But that shouldn’t be a problem. We’d simply set you down on the other side of the globe.”
She shook her head. “No, Ms. Hutchins. I don’t think you understand. The natives and their cities are the critical part of the equation. We’ll want to record them up close. But I can promise we’ll stay out of the way. They won’t see us.”
Representatives from two of the major news organizations had appointments with her during the afternoon, and she suddenly realized why they were there. There was going to be more of this. Let’s get good shots of the Goompahs running for their lives.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Toll, but I don’t think we can do it.”
Her pretty brow furrowed and Hutch saw that she had a vindictive streak. “Why not?” she asked, carefully keeping her voice level.
Common decency, you blockhead. “It puts the Protocol at risk.”
“I beg your pardon.” She tried to look baffled. “They won’t see us.”
“You can’t guarantee that.”
She tried to debate the point. “We’ll keep out of the way. No way they’ll know we’re there. Our people will be in the woods.”
“There’s also a liability problem,” Hutch said. “I assume you expect these people to stay during the bombardment.”
“Well, of course. They’d have to stay.”
“That makes us liable for their safety.”
“We’ll give you a release.”
“Releases have limited value in this kind of case. One of your people doesn’t come back, his family sues you, and then sues us. The piece of paper isn’t worth a damn in court if it can be shown we willingly transported him into an obviously dangerous situation.”
“Ms. Hutchins, I would be grateful if you could be reasonable.”
“I’m trying to be.”
Toll quibbled a bit longer, decided maybe she needed to talk with the commissioner, the real commissioner. Then she shook her head at Hutch’s perversity, shook hands politely, and left.
SHE HAD A brief conversation with maintenance over contracts with suppliers, then went down to the conference room for the commissioner’s weekly meeting. That was usually a scattershot affair, attended by the six department heads. Asquith was neither a good planner nor a good listener. There was never an agenda, although he’d left one for her this time. It was all pretty routine stuff, though, and she got through it in twenty minutes.
It didn’t mention the Goompahs. “Before I let you go,” she concluded, “you all know what the situation is at Lookout.”
“The Goompahs?” said the director of personnel, struggling to keep a straight face.
She didn’t see the humor. “Frank,” she said, “in December, a lot of them are going to die. Maybe their civilization with them. If anybody has an idea how we might prevent that, I’d like to hear it.”
“If we had a little more time,” said Life Sciences, Lydia Wu-Chen, “we could set up a base on their moon. Evacuate them. At least get some of them out of harm’s way.”