Michaelmas (16 page)

"Oh?"

"Here. This is ten minutes ago. Campion's interview technique has been to calmly move from point to point of the Norwood story, collecting answers which will be edited for sequence and time.

Norwood is doing the normal amount of lip-licking, and from time to time he looks side-ward to Frontiere. There's no question that any editing programme worthy of the name could turn him into a semi-invalid gamely concealing his doubts. On the other hand, it could cut all that and make him sharp as the end of a pin."

"Colonel Norwood," Campion's voice said, "I'd like to follow up on that for just a moment. Now, you've just told us your flight was essentially routine until just before the explosion. But obviously you had some warning. Even an astronaut's reflexes need a little time to get him into escape mode. Could you expand on that a little? What sort of warning did you have, and how much before the explosion did it come ?"

Frontiere's voice broke in. "I think perhaps that is not something you should go into at this time, Mr Campion."

"Why not?"

"It is simply something we ought not to discuss at this time."

"I'd have to know more about that before I decided to drop the question."

"Mr Campion, with all respect, I must insist. Now, please back up your recording and erase that question."

There was a brief silence. Campion came in speaking slowly. "Or else our arrangement is at an end?"

Frontiere paused. "I wish you had not brought our dis-cussion to such a juncture."

Campion abruptly said : "Some day you'll have to explain this to me. All right. Okay, crew, let's roll it back to where I asked Walt about his flight path and the last word of his answer was "sea", I figure a reaction shot of me, and then I frame my next question and the out-take is completely tracked over, right? That seem good to you, Clementine? Okay, Luis, we rolling back?"

Clementine's voice came in on the director trade. "Roll to "eee". Synch. Head Campion. Roll.

And."

"That's it," Domino said.

"That's what?" Michaelmas said. "Frontiere hasn't chosen to let in Campion on the telemetry sender story. Can you blame him?"

"Not my point. The unit they're using does not simply feed the director's tracking tape. It also sends direct to the EVM editing computer in Paris. No erasure took place there. The segment is already edited into the rough cut of the final broadcast. Including Norwood's sudden side glance to Frontiere, Frontiere's upset manner, and all."

Michaelmas turned his head sharply toward the window, hiding his expression in the sky. Far ahead on the right forward quarter he could see
C
ap Bon sliding very slowly toward the wingtip, and Tunis a white speck stabbing at his eyes in the early afternoon sun.

"He's young. It's possible he doesn't fully understand the equipment. Perhaps he thinks he did erase. It's not neces-sary for . . . for any of them to know the exact nature of the equipment."

"Possibly. But Campion's contract with EVM specifies copy for simultaneous editing. He relinquished pre-editorial rights. In return for minimizing their production lag, he retains fact rights; he can use the same material as the basis for his own editions of byline book, cartridge, disc, or any other single-user package form known or to be developed during the term of copyright. And I assure you he went over every clause with EVM. He has a head for business."

"You're absolutely sure?"

"I went over it right behind him. I like to keep up with what sort of contracts are being written in our field."

"So there's no doubt he was deliberately lying to Getulio."

"None at all, Mr Michaelmas. I'd say Campion's inten-tion all along was to provoke something like this. He's a newsman. He smelled it out that UNAC was hiding some-thing. He went fishing for it, and found it. When the programme runs tonight, the world will know UNAC is attempting to conceal something about the shuttle accident. And of course they'll know the name of enterprising Douglas Campion."

Michaelmas put his left fist inside his cupped right hand and stared sightlessly. He patted his knuckles into his palm.

"Did EVM come to him?"

"No. They were his last shot. He shopped around the US networks first. But all he'd tell anyone before signing a contract was that he thought he could get a Norwood exclusive and that he wanted to retain most of the ancil-lary rights. The responses he got were pretty low compared to his asking price. Then EVM picked him up. Gervaise filed an advisory to Paris. She said they'd had a conversa-tion, and he was a good bet."

"What time was that?"

"Twelve-twenty. She'd dropped you at your hotel and apparently went straight back to hers to check out. He was waiting in the hotel, hoping she'd talk to him. He'd left a message about it for her at the desk. Obviously she and he talked. She called Paris, and then EVM's legal people called him to thrash out the contract. Everything on record is just straight business regarding quote an interview with Walter Norwood endquote."

"There was no prior agreement on slant?"

"Why should there be one? Gervaise vouched for him, and she's respected. They take what he gives them, splice in supporting matter as it comes, and the slant develops itself. It's a hot subject, a good crew on it, as of a few minutes ago, no doubt in the world that they're on to something that could become notorious as hell. It's a world-class performance - a sure Pulitzer for Campion plus a dozen industry awards for the crew. It's a Nobel Laureate contender for EVM.

A likely winner if the year stays slow for news."

"Well," Michaelmas said, "I suppose a man could lie to his contact for all that."

He had once seen a Chinese acrobat stack straight chairs one atop the other, balancing the rear two legs of each chair atop the backrest of the one below. The bottom chair had rested on four overturned water tumblers. The acrobat had built the stack chair by chair, while standing on each topmost chair. When the stack was twelve chairs high, the acrobat did a one-hand stand on the back of the topmost chair while rotating hoops at his ankles and free wrist. Michaelmas thought of the acrobat now, seeing him with the face of Douglas Campion.

"Voila
Hanrassy."

The plane slid along. "What is it, Domino?" Michaelmas palmed the bones of his face. His fingertips massaged his eyes. His thumbs pressed into his ears, trying to break some of the blockage in his eustachian tubes.

"She's placed a call to Allen Shell. She wants a scenario for telemetry- and voice-communication skewing in Nor-wood's shuttle."

"Ah." Shell was at MIT's Research Laboratory of Elec-tronics. "How soon does she want it?"

"Within the hour."

"It sounds more and more as if someone's told her a tale and she's attempting to verify it."

"Exactly."

"Yes." The corners of Michaelmas's mouth pulled back into his cheeks. He pictured Shell: a short, wiry man with a long fringe of hair and a little paunch, stumbling about his apartment and making breakfast coffee. He would probably make capuccino, assembling the ingredients and the coffee-maker clumsily, and he would take the second cup into the bathroom. Sitting on the stool with his eyes closed, sipping, he would mutter to himself in short hums through his partially compressed lips, and when he was done he would get up, find his phone where he'd left it, tell Viola Hanrassy two or three ways it might have been done undetectably, punch off, carry the empty cup and saucer to the dishwasher and very possibly drop them. Michaelmas and Shell had been classmates once. Shell had been one of the Illinois Institute of Technology students who intercepted and decoded Chicago police messages in the late 1960s, but time had passed.

"Well." Michaelmas looked downward. Tunis was much larger, dimmer, and off to the right. The African coastline was falling away toward Libya, so that they would still be over water for some distance, but Cité d'Afrique was not too far ahead in time. He glanced at his wrist. They'd land at about 1400 hours local time, he judged.

"The Norwood interview's over," Domino said. "Campion did roughly the same thing a few more times. It'll be vicious when it hits."

"Yes," Michaelmas said ruminatively. "Yes, I suppose it could be." He watched the office cabin door open. The camera operator and Clementine came out. She walked with her head down, her mouth wryly twisted. She took a vacant forward seat beside her crewman and did not once glance farther up the aisle. Campion and Frontiere were lingering in the cabin doorway. Campion was thanking Frontiere, and Norwood over Frontiere's shoulder. Fron-tiere did not look entirely easy. When Campion turned away to come up the aisle, Frontiere firmly closed the door without letting Norwood out.

Michaelmas realized Campion was deliberately heading straight for him. Campion's features had a fine sheen on them; that faint dew was the only immediate token of his past half hour's labour. But he dropped rather hard into the seat beside Michaelmas, saying, "I hope you don't mind," and then sighed. He loosened his collar and arched his throat, stroking his neck momentarily between his thumb and fingers. "Welcome to the big time, Douglas," he said in a fatigued voice.

Michaelmas smiled softly. "You're doing well, I hear."

Campion turned to him. "Coming from you, that's a real compliment." He shook his head. "I graduated today." He shook his head again, leaned back, and stretched his legs out in front of him, the heels coming down audibly. He clasped his hands at the back of his head. "It's hard, doing what we do," he reminisced, looking up at the ceiling. "I never really understood that. I used to think that doing what you did was going to be easy for me. I'd grown up with you. I knew every mannerism you have. I can do perfect imitations of you at parties." He rolled his face sideward and smiled companionably. "We all do. You know that, don't you? All us young punks."

Michaelmas shrugged with an embarrassed smile.

Campion grinned. "There must be ten thousand young Campions out there, still thinking that's all there is to it."

"There is more," Michaelmas said.

"Of course there is." Campion nodded to the ceiling. "There is," he said with his right elbow just brushing the shoulder of Michaelmas's jacket. "We're the last free people in the world, aren't we?"

"How do you mean that?"

"When I got a little older in this business, I wondered what had attracted me to it. The sophomore blahs, you know? You remember what it's like, being junior staff. Just face front and read what they give you. I used to think I was never going to get out of that. I used to think the whole world had gone to Jell-O and I was right there in the middle of it. Nothing ever happened; you'd see some movement starting up, something acting like it was going to change things
in
the world, then it would peter out. Somebody'd start looking good, and then it would turn out he had more in the bank than he'd admit to, and he was allowed to graduate from his college after his father built a new gym. Or you'd want to know more about this new government programme for making jobs in the city, and it would turn out to be a real estate deal.

"You began to realize the world had gotten too sophisti-cated for anything clear-cut to ever happen. And you know it's only the simple things that make heroes. Give you something to understand in a few words; let you admire something without holding back. Right? How are you going to feel that, when you're stuck in Jell-O and it's obviously just going to get thicker and thicker as time passes? If it wasn't for the hurricanes and the mining disasters, as a matter of fact, you might never know the difference between one day and the next.

"I almost got out of it then. Had an offer to go into PR on the governor's staff. Said no, finally.

Once you're in that, you can't ever go back into news, you know? And I wasn't ready to cut it all the way off. I thought about how, when I was a kid, I thought Laurent Michaelmas
made
the news, because you were always where it was happening And I said to myself, I'd give it one last all-the-way shot; I'd get up there where you were, so I wasn't just stuck in some studio or on some payroll. Be cool, Douggie, I said to myself. Act like you're on top, aim to get on top. Get up there - get out to where they have to scurry when they see you coming, and they open the doors, and they let you see what's behind them. Get out where you rub elbows and get flown places in private equipment." Campion's eyes fastened on Michaelmas's. "That's it," he said softly. "It's not getting at the news. The news doesn't mean any-thing. It's being a newsman. It's getting out of the Jell-O. And now we both know that."

Michaelmas looked at him closely. "And that's what you've come to tell me," he said softly. "To get my approval."

Campion blinked. "Well, yes, if you want to put it that way." Then he smiled. "Sure! Why not? I could have a worse father figure, I guess."

"I wouldn't know about that, Douggie. But you don't need me any more. You're a big boy now."

Campion began to smile, then frowned a little and looked sidelong at Michaelmas. He bit his lip like a man wondering if his fly had been open all along, interwove his fingers tightly before him, stiffened his arms, turned his wrists, and cracked his knuckles. He began to say some-thing else, then frowned again and sat staring at his out-thrust hands. He stood up quickly. "I have to cover a few things with those UNAC people," he said, and walked over to the bar, where he asked for Perrier water and stood drinking it through white lips.

Domino said : "Allen Shell has called Hanrassy and given her a few alternatives. One of them requires live voice from Kosmgorod and a telemetry simulating component. The hardware cannot be assembled from off-the-shelf modules. It would have to be hand-built from bin parts. I imagine a knowledgeable engineer examining one could decide where its builder had gotten his technical training and done his shopping."

Which would be good enough for all practical political purposes. Michaelmas grunted. "And then what happened ?"

"She put in a call for Frank Daugerd of McDonnell-Douglas. He's on a fishing vacation at the Lake of the Ozarks and has his phone holding calls, but his next check-in is due at seven am.