Grateful, Joshua wiped his face and neck with the paper towels, then took a long swig of Diet Pepsi to clean out his mouth. It landed in his stomach without incident, seeming content to stay there, and Joshua struggled to his feet, the trooper giving him a hand. “Thanks,” Joshua said. “Boy, I don’t know what that was.”
“You better check with your doctor,” the trooper told him.
“I will.”
“You’re looking awfully red-eyed.”
Terrific; a vampire for CNN. “I don’t know,” Joshua said, leaning one hand on the top of the Honda. “Maybe I ought to go home, call in. Maybe you could call in for me, the Press Office.”
“Sure,” said the trooper.
But then Joshua felt a stiffening of the spine — he actually felt it, a surge of toughness through his body — and he stood up straighter, taking his hand off the Honda as he said, “No, never mind, I’m all right now.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
Joshua got back behind the wheel, and glanced at himself in the rearview mirror, and by God his eyes were red-rimmed, as though he’d spent all last night in mad debauch. One of the secretaries would have Murine, Visine, one of those eyedrop things. He couldn’t face a news camera like this; he could barely face a print reporter like this.
So why don’t I go home? he asked himself, even as his body, following its own agenda, started the car, shifted into gear, and waved “so long” to the trooper, who called, “Take care now.”
The last half mile between police barrier and plant entrance was the most peaceful ride in the world. There were no houses or farms along here, nothing but regrowth woods (containing shreds of stone wall, the faint pencil marks of failed settlements) and overgrown fields, not yet reclaimed by forest. The road was reasonably smooth and reasonably straight, and he was alone on it, his Honda a magic carpet through a world called Serenity. If only all of driving could be like this.
(The local newspaper’s main news angle on the terrorist takeover at the nuclear plant was the fact of this road’s being closed to normal traffic. They were editorially outraged, and brought out all the usual heart-tuggers: school buses diverted onto dangerous truck-ravaged highways, senior citizens facing an extra thirty agonized minutes to reach their life-giving medicines, all of that. They came as close as they dared to claiming that local dairy farmers’ milk was curdling on its so-much-longer way to market, but if they followed that particular line much further the dairy farmers would surely rise up as one and burn the newspaper offices to the ground, so they were showing — some — restraint.)
Fortunately, the local weekly paper was not that high on the list of Joshua’s media problems. He was distantly polite to their chubby girl reporter, gave her the same handouts he gave everybody else, and let it go at that. And enjoyed the half mile of sequestered road. It was one of the few things in his life these days he could enjoy at all.
By the time he got to the command post — a series of trailers scattered like a Canadian mining town all over the road in the vicinity of the main gate — Joshua’s recent illness was completely gone, except for the red eyes. He left the Honda in its assigned space, walked to the Press Office trailer, and a steno there did have eyedrops for him. She paused in her endless work at the copying machine to root through her big horse-feeder-bag purse and find the little bottle, which he took to the men’s room and used on both eyes, to no effect. The red fringe was just there, in his eyes, as though behind them his brain were on fire.
Out again in the bullpen, after returning the eyedrops with thanks, Joshua was about to look at the thick stack of message memos already making a leaning tower on his desk when the new Anglo Dutch press rep introduced herself. “Hi, Karen Levine,” she said. She was thin, early thirties, ash-blond hair, clear level eyes, no-nonsense manner, hard bony handclasp. “I want you to know, from the get-go,” she said, “you’re the guy in charge. I’m just here to help out if I can, if any questions come up involving Anglo Dutch.”
“Thanks, Karen,” Joshua said, with his brightest and falsest smile, knowing he would have no more than two weeks of this one. “I appreciate all the help I can get,” he told her, as he told them all. “Glad to have you aboard.”
The fact was, Anglo Dutch had learned from Exxon’s experience with the Valdez. Never keep your information officer around long enough to establish any kind of personal rapport with the media; that way indiscretions and uncomfortable leakage lie. Every two weeks, whip into the slot another trim slim thirty-four-year-old, bland and smooth and bright, male or female (makes no difference), who will give the company line a nearly human face; but before that face becomes completely human get it out of there, and start with a new one.
It had worked for Exxon in Alaska, and it was working for Anglo Dutch at Green Meadow, and why not? Everybody likes to talk with a handsome person; so what if they aren’t saying anything?
Something about the encounter with A-D’s latest clone left Joshua too disheartened to look at his message mountain. “I’m going to walk the perimeter, Grace,” he told his secretary, a fiftyish civil service employee in whom the milk of human kindness had curdled long before the closing of any local roads.
She gave him a disapproving look. “What should I say to callers?”
“Hello,” Joshua suggested, and left the trailer.
The primary official presence was centered here at what had been the main gate back when ingress and egress were possibilities at Green Meadow, but guards of one sort or another, mostly state troopers and national guardsmen, were spotted all around the rim of what the more military among them persisted in calling “the facility”; as though anything about this were easy.
The citizen soldiers of the National Guard — mostly not the accountants and supermarket managers of song and story, but unskilled laborers who were grateful for the extra money they got being guardsmen (but not thrilled at having been called to active duty) — were positioned back in the woods, in pairs and trios, within sight of every inch offense. Idiots of various kinds kept trying to climb that fence — younger reporters, thrill-seekers, wannabe heroes, drunks (after dark), and jerks generally — so it had to be watched. There was no point having a group of nervous terrorists destroy themselves and several hundred thousand worthier people simply because two dumb kids, for instance, were playing dare-ya.
Still, Joshua thought, as he walked away from the command post along the fence, it would be nice to get in there. Interesting. And almost his job, really, to know what was going on. Not that he would try to be a hero, rescue anybody or stop anything that was going on at the plant, nothing like that. Just observe.
Not far along the road from the command post the fence angled away into the woods, and Joshua strolled along with it. There was almost a path bordering the fence on the outside, the result of heavy traffic a few years ago by the construction crews that had built the thing. The path was now somewhat overgrown, with tree branches intruding into the space every twenty feet or so.
Joshua made his slow way along this path, ducking leafy limbs as necessary, and every time he looked around there were at least two olive-drab-uniformed guardsmen in sight, rifles slung on backs. They paid no particular attention to Joshua, apart from marking his presence; the highly visible laminated ID clipped to his jacket lapel was bona fide enough, so long as he didn’t do anything stupid like try to climb the fence.