“Ray, what was going on out there?” she said, sitting down at her desk.
Jerome took off his steel-rimmed glasses and began to polish the already brilliant lenses. “Who’s to know what goes on in the mind of a juvenile? I simply mentioned to Hugh that he had misused a word and he…”
“That juvenile, as you call him, is a good reporter,” Anne cut in. “He’s quick to get hold of the facts and quick to get them into print.”
Jerome recalled, belatedly, that Cordwell was in the same age group as the men in whose company Anne liked to go water-skiing and hang-gliding at weekends. It had been undiplomatic to describe him as a child, but there was such a thing as sticking to one’s guns.
“But what about the language?” he said. “Doesn’t that come into it?”
“I’ve been over this with you before. Any slips in grammar or usage are picked up by the Leximat. Why do you think we installed it in the first place?”
The computer should be an adjunct to the human brain, not a replacement for it, Jerome replied inwardly, then decided there was such a thing as sticking to one’s guns too long. “I promise not to bother Hugh again. He’s only got a university degree in journalism—it isn’t fair to expect him to know the meanings of words.”
“Drop it, Ray.”
“Sorry. Sorry.” Jerome was about to leave the office when he noticed that Anne had not given her customary dismissive flick of the head. “Was there anything else?”
“Yes. You’re always telling me how good you’d be as a science correspondent—so I’m going to give you the chance to prove it.” Anne handed him a scrap of paper on which she had written an address in a residential swath on the town’s south side. “Contact a woman called Maeve Starzynski. There was a fire at the house last week and her father got burned to death.”
“I saw the…” Jerome paused, gripped by an uneasy premonition. “What kind of a science story is that?”
“I’ve just been talking to a friend in the coroner’s office and he tells me there were some very unusual aspects to this particular fire. It sounds to me like spontaneous human combustion.”
“Oh, no!” Jerome gave a scornful laugh, deliberately making it as explosive as possible to signal the strength of his feelings. “Don’t do this to me, Anne. Don’t do it to the paper. In the last few months we’ve been up to here in phony spiritualists, UFO nuts, telepathic twins and characters who foresaw airliner crashes but kept their mouths shut till afterwards. We’re going to lose all credibility with our readers.”
“There’s a great deal of evidence…”
“There’s no evidence! None at all! People who babble on about astrology and thought photographs and spoon-bending and telekinesis and card-guessing don’t even know what the word evidence means.”
“If you call up our ‘Unexplained’ file you’ll he able to find…”
“Nothing that hasn’t been explained.”
“Do you mind letting me finish just one sentence?” Anne’s face darkened with aristocratic anger and for a moment Jerome could almost see it framed by a flat black sombrero. “If you look in the file you’ll find that people sometimes do burst into flames for no reason, and you’ll also find that the details are quite odd.”
“No doubt I will,” Jerome said sarcastically. “The human body has a built-in fire extinguisher which is otherwise known as blood. Four or five litres of it. Those people who combusted must have been a touch anaemic, or—better still—perhaps they had two strange punctures in their necks…”
“If you would rather try earning your living as a comedian instead of reporting for this newspaper I’m sure I can arrange a quick release for you.”
A hard brightness in Anne’s eyes told Jerome she was in a dangerous mood and that he was not going to evade the unwelcome assignment. He clamped his lips and nodded as she gave her end-of-interview wave, a limp-fingered flick of the hand which might have been directed against a bothersome gnat. Ignoring the amused looks from the other journalists, he returned to his desk and pressed the REF key on terminal. He called up the “Unexplained’ file and ran his gaze down the list of headings which appeared on the screen. The list was extensive, reflecting the editor’s personal interest in the subject, but there was no mention of spontaneous human combustion.
Jerome’s sudden flickering of hope was doused as he backtracked and found “Auto-incendiarism’, a word to which he took a dislike on sight, classifying it as one of the pretentious labels which abound on the lunatic fringes of science. He stared at the screen in distaste, fingers hovering over the keys, experiencing a broody reluctance to involve himself any further with Anne Kruger’s foibles.
“Did old Randy Kruger work you over?” The question came from Julie Thornback, a petite and doll-like blonde who, in spite of being less than half Jerome’s age, had a couple more years experience in journalism and liked to give him advice as from an old hand.
“No. We were having a nice little chat.”
Julie nodded in casual disbelief. “Don’t let her wind you up, Ray. You’ll never guess what she had the nerve to say to Hugh and I.”
“Hugh and me,” Jerome said, hoping the correction would be enough to show he did not want to be disturbed.
“What?”
“You should have said ‘to Hugh and me’.”
Julie’s lips moved silently as she tried the phrase out. “It doesn’t sound right.”
Jerome sighed. “Look at it this way—if Hugh hadn’t been there, if Anne had been talking to you alone, would you have said she was talking to ‘I’?”
“No.”
“That’s your answer then. Excellent fellow though Hugh undoubtedly is, we don’t change the rules of English simply because he appears on the scene.”
Hugh Cordwell, who had been deep in his gang war report, raised his head. “Are you sniping at me again, professor?”
Before Jerome could reply Anne Kruger came out of her office, instantly detected the charge in the atmosphere and accused him with a luminous stare. He blanked his VDU screen, stood up and walked out of the room, suddenly deciding that any kind of outdoor assignment was preferable to being in a psychological autoclave. Why should he elevate his blood pressure over the fact that youngsters whose job was communication cared little for the tools of their trade? What was it to him if the chief editor of an influential paper enthusiastically promoted belief in the paranormal? It was ironic that the first and only woman to stir any feelings in him since the death of his wife had to be Anne Kruger—the least compatible and least attainable of all—but that too was something he had to accept. To do otherwise was to invite hypertension.
Wincing a little from the arthritis in his left knee, Jerome went down the stairs and out past the front office. In the street he blinked to adjust his eyes to the morning sunlight, then crossed to where his car was parked in the shade of the trees lining Mayflower Square. He opened the trunk, took out a detergent spray and some paper towels and spent a few minutes cleaning bird droppings from the car’s paintwork. When it had been restored to a satisfactory condition he placed the towels in a litter bin, got into the car and edged it into the traffic flow.
The address he had been given was almost ten minutes away and he used the time to listen for news of the Mercury expedition which had been slung out of Earth orbit a week earlier. The three-man ship, Quicksilver, was the first ever to have been designed, built and launched by a private corporation, and coverage of its progress was the sort of thing Jerome had had in mind when pressing for the post of science correspondent. All he got on the radio, however, were reports of the Argentine-Chile war and of the Philippines continuing with atmospheric H-bomb tests in defiance of the UN injunction. Vietnam and Western Malaysia, the countries suffering most from Philippine fall-out, were gathering a joint invasion force in spite of having been warned off by every major power which had an interest in that theatre.