Jodi hammered her desk again. “Get this on front screen! Get this out on the net!”
“Sorry,” I said. “We put Screen One to bed. We held it up long enough as it is, waiting for more meteorite stuff. Put it in tomorrow’s edition. Addy? Do we really have a date?”
“Only because you always look so spiffy I mean, you know, the last guy who asked me out dressed in women’s clothes, if you can believe that.”
“Tomorrow!” Jodi rolled her eyes. “Holy Jesus on a hot plate, Fogg! Our very own walking meteor hops in the head and commits hari-kari and you don’t want to stop the presses?”
“So should I leave the mess for now?” said Ed.
“Oh, and this Mr. Hock on the phone,” said Addy. “He wants his clothes back.”
“Kind of a mess now,” said Ed.
“You know, Jodi,” I said, “it’s pronounced hara-kiri. Or better yet, you should say seppuku, if you want the right word.”
“Wippett!” cried Jodi. “Get in here lickety-split! Here’s my headline, Fogg. ALIEN EXTWIZL SELF-SIZZLES! How’s that?”
“I’d be glad to clean it up for you folks,” said Ed, “if you just give the word.”
“There’s a word for that kind of headline,” I said to Jodi. “And you think it’s good enough leader to stop the presses?”
“Benny Fogg!”
The thickest newsroom babble could not block the stentorian voice of Jerome H. Wire, editor-in-chief of the Worcester County Daily Holograph.
He stalked to my desk preceded by the aromatic harbinger of martini, and led by the predatory beak of his hawklike visage.
He held the copy Addy and Jodi had prepared, shaking it as a dog shakes a sock.
“Am I to understand,” he said, “these events happened on your watch?”
“Yes,” I said, pleased at the recognition.
“Am I further to understand you planned to run nothing today? Nothing at all?”
I registered that Mr. Wire tempered his usual tenor of approval. In fact, I detected a baritone of opprobrium.
“Yes, sir,” I said, nearly audibly.
“And am I to understand that you, Fogg, have gone clear out of your mind? Fogg, I cannot understand how you can be so unaware of your own stupidity when you make it so perfectly clear to everyone else!”
I never saw a kettle go to it so quickly. One moment, calm, balmy Mr. Wire, gaily shaking our copy. The next moment, tea-time.
Indeed, substance overflowed from Mr. Wire’s censorious spigot worthy of steeping the most stubborn tea bag.
About Benny Fogg, now. I must note that when placed in piquantly hot water, hot enough that I notice its advanced degree, in other words when it becomes very nearly postgraduate, then I come to. I wake up, so to speak. I find blood in my brain. A few thoughts on this and that zip through the noggin, usually on their way somewhere else. Occasionally one stops. As now.
“But Mr. Wire,” I said in my calmest voice, “of course we wanted nothing in today’s edition—because this was so big a story it needed a Special Edition!”
“Special Edition?”
“Special Ed! Set it up in the Net! Sure cure for mid-summer, low-readership doldrums. Subscribers see hot headline, and pay an extra two bits to access. Invasion by alien vegetables, boss!”
Wire looked skeptical. “Then why didn’t you interview this thing?”
“It was carrying a weapon. Besides, there must be more of those guys. I mean, an interview’s a cinch.”
Wire’s look of doubt wavered—sure sign of trouble. Then his smile broke like a sunrise.
“Excellent, Fogg,” he said. “So get going! Wipp! Go along! Send chunks of copy on the way there!” He twisted his hands behind his back and stalked a circle. “We’ll patch it together, put in as many sidebars as we need to fill it, and we’ll be in business. Grand, Fogg. I’ll get the ad people going pronto. Brilliant!”
“But Mr. Wire?”
“Go to it!”
“Guns. They have—”
“You faced one down before! Go, Fogg!”
“But maybe if I had backup, maybe the County Regiment or the Kid-scouts, or—”
“And have word get out? And have our story scooped?”
“But Mr. Wire—”
“Fogg! Are you this moment not out the door and gone? Fogg? Fogg! I ask you!” He cried this out using full diapason and swell of his majestic pipe organ, reminding me of the fact—excuse the sidebar—that the Vikings used the rune for “Os” to describe the wisdom of their headsman. In reality, “Os” simply meant he was some loud-mouthed old bastard. A good leader needed to be heard, especially when a fierce, salt-encrusting gale swept the boards and tattered the sails. He needed to shoot the breeze, so to speak. Or raise a storm himself. Just so in the modem newsroom.
Thusly reminded of Wire’s qualifications, I answered his question with action rather than words, showing Wire and the newsroom my most sterling, not to speak of my back, side.
“Wipp, I am in the deep poop,” I said to the man once we found ourselves safely in the van. I wiped the sweat from my brow and waited for the air-conditioning to kick in. “Hot Days for Mid-July” had been one of our inspired headlines for today’s edition. “I believe I have never been deeper into the poop than I am right now.”
He nodded judiciously. “Yes,” he said in that relaxed way of his.
“I mean, will we come out alive? Who knows? These are beings from outer space, Wipp. Aliens. Extra read-all-about-it terrestrials, Wipp!”
“Ah. Yes,” he said, with feeling.
We spun out of the lot, with Wipp at the wheel and me at command-and-control. A map appeared on my fore-screen: the way to Hock Hoggery, at the edge of W. County, sent by A. Jones.
“And now look at this. Here at the bottom,” I said.
“Can’t. Driving”
“She says, ‘Hold on dinner plans till you make good with Wire.’ From Addy Jones. A cancellation of my date, Wipp!”
“You have a date?”
“It took all lunch hour finagling that.”
“Weren’t you dealing with an alien?”
“Well, yes, that, too.”
“You outdid yourself, Fogg.”
“I suppose I did,” I said, feeling better.
“And landed yourself in—”
“Don’t say it!”
If I have postponed describing Wippett Snoiligan, I have done so out of a sense of inadequacy. I am in awe of the man, his mind, and his abilities. His life spans larger than the page.
Turning a cold gaze upon him, however, reveals the salient facts, viz., that he is no taller than me, and I stand no taller than Addy, who I guess to be five-eight; of ruddy complexion, as though he loved a good, sleety wind rather than a shower in the morning; and of stouter build than mine, with more lumpishness about the arm from toting apparatus. A sound man all around.
“Wipp,” I said, “I need your brains. How do I get an interview out of these aliens? As soon as they discover I’m responsible for the death of their front scout, they’ll be tough subjects.”
“But the alien did himself in, I thought.”
“Yes, but I pushed the poor turnip into it, Wipp. I must have. I see that now. I had a little conversation with him. I must have been a bit strong. Manly words, you know, the way you might talk to a bowl of lettuce to crisp it up.”
“Then they must not have much spine for abuse.”
“If they’re vegetables they have no spine.”
“Why don’t you tell me what happened exactly, Fogg?”
I filled him in on the precise details of the noon-hour, fudging only in toning down my obvious heroism and nobility of carriage during the affair. Modesty pays, I have learned; and one might as well be paid, since sometimes one is paid immodestly.