“OK, I confess—” Ordner began.
Ellen pounced. “I knew it! What’s her name?”
“Roberta Lith.”
“The Roberta Lith?”
He nodded.
“Ye gods, now we’re in for it. We’ve got two celebrities going head to head.” Ellen beamed and rubbed her hands together. “This is going to be good.”
Ron had been watching this exchange, his head swiveling back and forth like a spectator at a tennis match. “Um, Ellen, Mike might not need you as a back seat driver.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Back seat driver? What’s that?”
“Oh, uh… crap. It’s an expression I picked up from Mike. It’s someone who sits in the back seat and tells the driver what to do.”
“The back seat of what?”
Helplessly, Ron shrugged. “Never mind. Just don’t try to run his life for him, OK?”
Ellen looked exasperated. She sat back, crossed her arms, and glared at them. “Men are boring!”
Days followed nights followed days followed nights. Anne Lister, unelected, served out the final months of her husband’s term in office. No one challenged her authority to do so, in spite of the fact that there were no formal guidelines for transfer of power to a successor in the event of the death of the incumbent. Campaigns were under way for the regularly scheduled elections in late December, but Anne paid scant attention to them. She had no intention of remaining in power past the end of the year. She neither endorsed nor condemned the candidates running for her seat. Her one and only goal was to hold her government together for a few more months, have the baby, and leave Luna.
Roberta Lith called Samuel Watts. The next day, a new picture was found. It was the Moon again, with a face, but this time the face was Anne’s, with hand on chin and a raised eyebrow, contemplating Mars, which had been painted across the corridor on the opposing wall. By slow and subtle degrees, the pressure began to build. Onwards to Mars.
Edgar Rice did his part to help both women. For Anne, he began to slant his editorials. It was a small thing, but he was determined to help give her the ground swell of support she would need to bring Alan’s scheme to completion.
For Roberta, whose identity he had learned from Watts, he gave her the one slight push she needed to take her from a purely local phenomenon to a more global one. Acting on behalf of The Crisium Observer, he had begun giving her regular full-color reproductions on the editorial page. It had not taken long before The New London Times and The Besselton Herald picked them up. A few of the more progressive papers on Earth had followed suit. Virtually overnight, she was in syndication… for something that had started as graffiti.
Roberta, whose identity was still being held secret from the public, was frantically working eighteen-hour days, and had never been happier. Her job at Lunar Magnetics, working under Jennifer Holmes, gave her daily contact with the Door project. Her free time was spent with Mike Ordner. He had not put up even token resistance when she proposed moving to Mars. His only comment had been, “Just tell me when to pack.” He had never truly felt a part of the Crisium community and was hoping to find his niche on Mars.
Trevor York, for his part, discovered that trying to discredit a dead man was harder than he had thought. True, among certain segments of the population, there was an attitude that the human race was better off without Lister. A surprising number of people, however, considered him a martyr. York pitched his Lunar segment to those who had hated Lister and set it to air. Too late, he discovered that every advertising slot during the show had been bought by Lunar Magnetics, acting as a thinly disguised front for the Crisium government, meaning Lister’s widow.
No commercials had been shown. Instead, the signal, beamed live from Crisium, had consisted of outtakes from his conversation with Lister. When he had asked Bob to switch off so that he and Alan Lister might have a few words off the record, Lister’s clandestine cameras had kept right on recording. A kind of electronic judo resulted, with Anne Lister using his own words to throw him. The strength of the reaction caught him off guard. He was condemned by many, particularly the religious right, for being so callous about the fate of Emily Starnes.
It had been cleverly arranged. After the fact, he had demanded that advertisers be more carefully screened, but the damage was done. Anne Lister had succeeded in making a fool out of him. York’s viewers wanted scandal and slander. She had known that and used it against him, aware that his viewers didn’t really care who was the victim. They were just as happy to see him at the sharp end of the stick as anyone else.
He heard through the grapevine that she considered him, like Lewis Cantner, to be a symptom of all that was wrong with Earth. He considered doing a show on her, then thought better of it. She had already shown herself to be a capable adversary.
Lewis Cantner was executed without fanfare. No press sensationalizing of his crime was allowed. He died with only the minimum of information being released: Three shots to the chest, just as he had killed his victim. Whenever possible, Lunar law stipulated that a murderer be executed in the same manner as his victim.
Many on Earth were outraged, proclaiming that Cantner’s rights had been violated. Some however, watched as Earth’s convicted murderers were released to roam the streets again and wondered if there might not be something to the Lunar legal system.
“When are you leaving?” Edgar Rice asked.
Anne Lister had circles under her eyes from driving herself ruthlessly, but she was beginning to laugh once in a great while. She was slowly beginning to find joy in life again, in part due to the sleeping child in her arms. “Not yet, Edgar, not yet, but soon. You can count on that. I want my son to grow up in Mars’s gravity field, not Luna’s.”
“We’re going to miss you, Anne.”
“Come with us,” she countered.
He shook his head sadly. “I can’t. At my age, I don’t care to face a gravity double what I’m used to here. Going from this gravity to a lesser one I could handle, but not an increase, not of that magnitude.”
She smiled kindly. “Aren’t you just being lazy?”
He took it without offense. “Probably. Coming to Luna from Earth cured my wanderlust. With luck, I’ll control the Observer in another year or two. That’s my dream, and I’m nearly there. If I were to pull up stakes now, I’d have to give that up.”
“Don’t. If that’s your goal, stick to it.” Her mouth twisted into a sly grin. “Besides, you’ll need the experience before you start The Mars Observer. After all, owning one paper won’t be enough.”
His eyes widened. “Why, you impertinent imp! I do believe you’re trying to put ideas into my head.”
“Oh? You noticed?” she teased.
“All right, all right. I’ll think about it.”
“The place just won’t feel right until you get there.”
“Anne, that’s the thing that you’ve yet to fully realize about the Door. If distance is reduced to nothing, then who cares where we live? I’ll be able to visit you on Mars almost as easily as I do now. There are no barriers where there are Doors.”
“Don’t wait too long, Edgar. We’ll be closing the Door once we’re self-sufficient.”