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A voice in the roar of water. Huh? Randall came out of the internal world and found Loretta smiling through the glass shower door. She mouthed, “Hi. How’d it go?”
He waved. Loretta took it as an invitation. Randall watched her undress slowly, lasciviously, and slide through the glass door quick so the water wouldn’t splash out… and it wasn’t Wednesday. Harvey folded her in his arms. The water beat down on them, and they kissed. And it wasn’t Wednesday.
She asked, “How’d it go?”
He had read her lips the first time, but she couldn’t guess that. Now he had to answer. “I think they’ll do it.”
“I don’t see why not. It doesn’t make sense. If they wait, CBS will take it.”
“Right.” The magic went out of the shower/orgy scene, poof.
“Isn’t there any way to tell them how silly they’re being?”
“No.” Harvey fiddled with the shower head. The water expanded to a fine spray.
“Why not?”
“Because they know. Because they’re not playing the same game we are.”
“It all depends on you. If you insist on doing it your way, just once…” Loretta’s hair darkened and dampened under the shower. She held him in her arms and looked up into his face, looked for the strengthening of purpose that would mean she’d convinced him: that he would stand by his principles and force his superiors to face the consequences of their mistakes.
“Yeah. It all depends on me. Which makes me the obvious target if anything goes wrong. Turn around and I’ll do your back.”
She turned her back. Harvey reached for the soap. His will loosed its hold on the muscles of his face. His soapy hands made patterns in the slippery contours of Loretta’s back… slowly, every move a caress… but he was thinking, Don’t you know what they’d do to me? They’d never fire me, but one day my office is an inside broom closet, the next day the rug is gone. Then my phone doesn’t work. By the time I quit, everyone in the industry has forgotten I exist. And we’re still spending every cent I make.
He had always loved Loretta’s back. He searched his mind for growing lust… but he felt nothing.
She was in on this from the begi
Loretta washed his back for him, and then they dried each other with the big towels. She was still trying to tell him how to handle the situation at the studio. She knew something was wrong, and as usual she probed at it, trying to understand, trying to help.
Myriads of orbits later, when true humans were spreading through a world held fast in the grip of an ice age, the black planet came again.
The comet was larger now. It had grown, snowflake by isolated snowflake, over a thousand million years, until it was four and a half miles across. But now its surface warmed in a bath of infrared heat. Within the comet’s tissues, pockets of hydrogen and helium vaporized and seeped through the crust. The tiny sun was eclipsed. The ringed black disk covered a third of the sky, leaking the heat of its birth.
Then it had passed, and calm returned.
The comet had healed from a previous pass. Centuries, mille
Slowly, urged by the faint tugging of the Sun’s gravity, it began to drop toward the maelstrom.
February: Two
It appears that the i
Although it was originally thought that Mars, because it was at the edge of the asteroid belt, experienced a higher rate of meteoric bombardment, examination of Mercury indicates that Mars is not exceptional, and the i
The TravelAll was crammed with equipment: cameras, tape recorders, lights and reflectors, battery belts; the myriad paraphernalia of the roving TV interview. Charlie Bascomb, cameraman, was in the back with the sound man, Manuel Arguilez; everything normal, except that Mark Czescu was in the front seat when Harvey came out of the NBS offices.
Harvey beckoned to Mark. They walked across the studio lot toward Mercedes Row, where the executives parked. “Look,” Harvey said, “your job title is Production Assistant. That theoretically makes you management. It has to be that way because of union rules.”
“Yeah — ” Mark said.
“But you aren’t management. You’re a gofer.”
“I’m hip.” Mark sounded hurt.
“Don’t get upset and don’t get huffy. Just understand. My crew has been with me a long time. They know the game. You don’t.”
“I know that, too.”
“Fine. You can be a big help. Just remember, what we don’t need is—”
“Is me telling everybody how to do their job.” He flashed a big grin. “I like working for you. I won’t blow it.”
“Good.” Harvey detected no signs of irony in Mark’s voice It made him feel better. He had been worried about this interview — it had to be said, but that didn’t make it easier. One of his associates had once remarked that Mark was like a jungle, all right but you had to chop him back every now and then or he’d grow all over you.
The TravelAII started instantly. It had been through a lot with Harvey Randall: from the Alaska pipeline to the lower tip of Baja, even into Central America. They were old friends, the TravelAII and Harvey: a big three-seat International Harvester four-wheel drive, truck motor, ugly as sin, and utterly reliable. He drove in silence to the Ventura Freeway and turned toward Pasadena. Traffic was light.
“You know,” Harvey said, “we’re always complaining how nothing works, but here we are going fifty miles for this interview, and we count on being there in less than an hour. When I was a kid a fifty-mile trip was something you packed lunches for and hoped you’d make it by dark.”
“What’d you have, a horse?” Charlie asked.
“No, just L.A. without the freeways.”
“Yuk.”
They drove through Glendale and turned north on Linda Vista to go past the Rose Bowl. Charlie and Manuel talked about bets they’d lost a few weeks before.
“I thought Cal Tech owned JPL,” Charlie said.
“They do,” Mark told him.
“Sure put it way the hell far from Pasadena.”
“Used to test jet engines there,” Mark said. “JPL. Jet Propulsion Laboratories, right? Everybody thought they’d blow up, so they made Cal Tech put the labs out in the Arroyo.” He waved to indicate the houses outside. “Then they built the most expensive suburb in this end of L.A. just around it.”
The guard was expecting them. He waved them into a lot near one of the large buildings. JPL nestled into its arroyo and filled it with office buildings. A big central steel and glass tower looked strangely out of place among the older Air-Force standard “temporary” structures erected twenty years before.
There was a PR flack waiting for them. She led them through the routine: Sign in, wear badges. Inside, it looked like any other office building, but not quite: There were stacks of IBM cards in the corridors, and almost no one wore coats or ties. They passed a ten-foot color globe of Mars gathering dust in a corner. No one paid any attention to Harvey and his people; it wasn’t unusual to see TV crews.