“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 Review article 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 new exactly; 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 rebroadcast it with exactly compensating distortion. The signal we got back was absolutely the 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 counter story. 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 hear 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’m the 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’s when 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.…”