A carefully beautiful woman walked in and gave her a familiar look: appraisal, hostility, neutrality. Blue cancer tattoo on her cheek, Dr. Whittier.
Deedee
"Oh, hi. You're in 101."
The beautiful girl nodded. "Gabrielle Campins."
She put the name and the face together. Pre-med, having trouble with the math. "See you there."
Trying to act normal just after learning you killed a man. Killed him by blackmailing him into illegal activity. Directed against a friend and colleague.
The door to Rory's office was open. On impulse, she tapped and stepped through the little entryway. Rory looked up from a journal.
"Hi, Rory. You ready for His Holiness?"
Aurora
"His ass-holiness. Ready as I'll ever be." They had a meeting with Reverend Kale and some of his minions tomorrow. "I heard about Ybor Lopez. I'm sorry."
Deedee trembled for a moment and a chill ran down her back.
Could there have been something between them? The phone chimed, saved by the bell.
"Gotta teach," Deedee said, voice quavering. "See you later."
" Hasta luego." She picked up the phone.
It was Marya Washington. Could they come by in twenty or thirty minutes? Rory said sure, and put the "Do Not Disturb the Bitch" sign on her office door. How much of an article could she read in twenty minutes?
She actually got through the first page of an Astrophysical Reviewarticle by a friend at Texas, who had found a consistent correlation between galactic latitude and duration of one class of short-term gamma-ray bursters. That could imply local origin; at least not extragalactic. Or hopeful mathematics, anyhow.
Security called up and she took the sign off her door, and ushered in the young woman and her "crew," one man shepherding three cameras. "So welcome to Gainesville, Marya. How's New York?"
"God, don't ask. It's a miracle we got out." A two-day blizzard had just stopped. "We were able to get an old chopper into JFK this morning. Otherwise we'd still be in traffic. If you can call something 'traffic' that doesn't move."
The cameraman suggested where to place the cameras and Marya nodded. "I know there aren't any revelations," she said, "but do you have anything new? Or that I can pretend is new?"
"Any time now," the cameraman said. "Just be natural, ma'am; we'll edit later."
"Well, Marya ... this isn't newexactly; it's from last week. But I'm not sure anybody got the whole story."
"You mean the bounce-back from the thing."
"Exactly." How to phrase this diplomatically? "You reported it, and so did others. But it was more important than you gave it credit for being."
She smiled. "Okay. Words of one syllable?"
"We sent them a message and they sent it back. Can I say 'message'?"
"So far so good.'
"It came back with absolutely no distortion. We couldn't do that. Period."
Marya shut her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Yeah, right. I remember." She waggled a hand in front of one of the cameras. "Off the record, Rory, we couldn't really punch that up."
"They intercepted a signal that was 'way blue-shifted, in a relativistically accelerated frame of reference. They recorded it and re-broadcast it with exactly compensating distortion. The signal we got back was absolutelythe same as the one we'd sent."
Marya laughed and shook her head. "Jesus, Rory. Would you come join the world for a minute? The real world?"
"Okay." Rory smiled, too. "So you couldn't 'punch it up.' "
"Look. It's worse than that. We have to think of counterstory. We run your version and three out of six tabloids are on us like clothes from Kmart. 'We got exactly the same signal.' So where do you think they'll say it came from? Outer space?"
"Of course it came from outer space."
"No way in hell. It came from you."
"What?"
"You're trying to stay in the spotlight. So you generate a story."
"God, can you fear yourself? That's so ridiculous."
"It's not, Dr. Bell," the cameraman said. "People want to think conspiracy. Want to be on the inside. You can sell any goddamn thing if it's against the establishment."
" I'mthe establishment?"
"You're authority," Marya said. "Bobby's right. Best way for you to get that story out would have been to let somebody else announce it and you hotly deny it."
Rory realized she was standing, and sat down. "It's so Alice in Wonderland.So what do we do?"
"Just what we've done here. We didn't punch it up, so when we repeat it next week, it's backstory. It's routine, so it must be true."
"That'swhen people point out how important it is," Bobby said. "Do it all the time, in politics."
"As if I, or we, didn't understand how important it was at the time."
"You don't have to go that far," Marya said. "Just don't punch it up for now, and later it'll look like you've been cautious. Conservative."
"Okay. You're the boss."
Marya smiled and nodded to the cameraman. "Good evening. It's exactly one month since the discovery of the Coming, and so we've left the blizzards of New York to revisit Dr. Aurora Bell at the University of Florida ... "
Marya
The interview went pretty well, though they had to ask Rory to repeat some things in simpler and simpler terms. They got out by ten, though; only fifteen minutes later than they'd expected.
And about two minutes late on the parking meter. Marya saw the big white tow truck from half a block away, checked her watch, and broke into a run.
It was a heavy-duty floater with a bed big enough to hold a large passenger car. It could park parallel to a car and, using a kind of built-in forklift, pick it straight up and haul it aboard in no time.
Marya got to him just as he was raising the car. He was a young black man. Her intuition weighed charm versus indignation as she ran up to the driver's-side window. "I'm sorry, mister. I got held up just a minute or two."
The man looked down at her wearily. "You're gonna get held up, you oughta park on campus. Park on the street and I get the call soon as your time's up, automatically. You didn't know that."
"No. I'm from New York."
"Well, enjoy the sunshine. You can pick up your car at the police lot anytime after twelve. Bring four hundred bucks and be prepared to spend a couple hours."
"Oh." She smiled. "The press card on the windshield doesn't ... "
He gave a little start of recognition. "No, Miz Washington. Nobody escapes the wrath of the Gainesville Police Department."
The cameraman had caught up with her. "Couldn't we just pay the fine here, and be on our way?"
"What, is that the way they do it in New York?"
"No," he said. "In New York we pay a little extra."
"Like five instead of four," Marya said. She folded up a single bill and offered it.
The driver looked up and down the street, and then pushed forward on a big lever between the seats, and the car eased back down to the ground. He took the bill and slipped it into his shirt pocket.
He picked up a wand from the dashboard. "Give me dispatch."