Three
He went down through the building security systems and to the taxi dock. The dock was ribbed in pale brownish concrete, lit by blue overheads. Technically, the air was totally self-contained, screened, and filtered. But the quality was not to apartment standards; the dock represented a large, unbroken volume that had needed more ducts and fans than the construction budget could reasonably allow. There was a sense of echoing desolation, and of distant hot winds.
He saw the taxi stopped at the portal. Because the driver had his eyes on him, he actually took out his phone and established ID between the cab, himself, and the building. Putting the phone away, he shook his head. “We ought to be able to do better than this,” he said to Domino.
“One step at a time,” his companion replied. “We do what we can with the projects we can find to push. Do you remember what this neighbourhood used to be like?”
“Livelier,” Michaelmas said with a trace of wistfulness.
The driver recognized him on the way out to the airport and said : “S’pose you’re on your way over to find out if Walt Norwood’s really okay?” The airline gate chief said: “I’m looking forward to your interviews with Colonel Norwood and Dr. Limberg. I never trust any of your competitors, Mr Michaelmas.” The stewardess who seated him was a lovely young lady whose eyes misted as she wondered if it was true about Norwood. For each of them, and for those fellow passengers who got up the courage to speak to him, he had disarming smiles and interested replies which somehow took away some of the intrusion of his holding up his machine to catch their faces and words. As they spoke to him, knowing that they might be part of a programme, he admired them.
For him, it didn’t seem an easy thing for a human being to react naturally when his most fleeting response was being captured like a dragonfly in amber. When he had first decided that the thing to do was to be a newsman, he had also clearly seen an essential indecency in freezing a smile forever or preventing the effacement of a tear. He had been a long time getting sufficiently over that feeling to be good at his work. Gradually he had come to understand that they trusted him enough not to mind his borrowing little bits of their souls. From this, he got a wordless feeling that somehow prevented him from botching them up.
He reflected, too, that the gate chief had blown his chance to see himself on network time by confining his remarks to compliments. This touched the part of him that could not leave irony alone.
So for Michaelmas his excursion out through the night-bare streets, and on board the rather small transatlantic aircraft with its short passenger list, was a plunge into refreshment. Although he recognized his shortcomings and unrealized accomplishments every step of the way.
He settled into the lounge with a smile of well-being. His tapering fingers curled pleasurably around a Negroni soon after the plane had completed its initial bound into the thinner reaches of the sky. He gazed around him as if he expected something new and wonderful to pop into his ken at any moment. He behaved as if a cruising speed of twenty-five hundred miles per hour in a thin-skinned pressurized device were exactly what Man had always been yearning for.
Down among the tail seats were two men in New York tailored suits who had come running aboard at the last moment. One of them was flashing press credentials and a broad masculine smile at the stewardess guarding the tourist-class barrier. Even at the length of the plane’s cabin, Michaelmas could recognize both a press-card holder and the old dodge of paying cheap but riding high. Now the two men were coming towards him, sure enough. One of them was Melvin Watson, who had undoubtedly picked up one of the two offers Michaelmas had turned down. The other was a younger stranger.
Each of them was carrying a standard comm unit painted royal blue and marked with a network decal. Watson was grinning widely in Michaelmas’s direction and back over his shoulder at his companions, while he was already extending a bricklayer’s hand towards Michaelmas and forging up the aisle. Michaelmas rose in greeting.
His machine was turned towards the two men. Domino’s voice said through the conductor in his mastoid : “The other one is Douglas Campion. New in the East. Good Chicago reputation. Top of the commentator staff on WKMM-TV; did a lot of his own legwork on local matter. Went freelance about a year ago. NBC’s been carrying a lot of his matter daytime; some night exposure lately.” Michaelmas was glad the rundown had been short; there seemed to be no way for him to avoid sinus resonance from bone conduction devices.
“I could have told you, Doug,” Watson was saying to Campion as they reached Michaelmas. “If you want to catch Larry Michaelmas, you better look in first class.” His hand closed around Michaelmas’s. “How are you, Larry?” he rumbled. “Europe on a shoestring? Going to visit a sick relative? Avoiding someone’s angry boy-friend?” When he spoke longer lines, even though he grinned and winked, his voice acquired the portentous pauses and nasal overtones that were his professional legacy from Army Announcers' School. But combined with his seamed face, his rawhide tan, and his eyes so pale blue that their pupils seemed much deeper than the whites, the technique was very effective with the audience. Michaelmas had seen him scrambling forward over ripped sandbags in a bloodied shirt, and liked him.
“Good evening, Horse,” he said laughing, tilting his head up to study Watson, whom he hadn’t seen personally in some time, and who seemed flushed and a little weary.
“Damn near morning,” Watson snorted. “Lousy racket. Meet Doug Campion.”
Campion was very taut and handsome. There was an indefinable cohesiveness about him, as though he were one solid thing from the surface of his skin on through—mahogany, for instance, or some other close-grained substance which could be nicked but not easily splintered. From those depths, his black eyes stood out. Even the crisp, short, tightly curled reddish hair on his well-shaped skull looked as if it would take a very sharp blade to trim. He was no more than five-foot-nine and probably weighed less than one hundred fifty pounds. He might readily have been an astronaut himself.
“Very pleased to meet you, sir,” he said briskly. “It’s an honour and a privilege.” He shook Michaelmas’s hand with the quick, economical technique of a man who has done platform introductions at fund-raising events. His eyes took in Michaelmas’s face and form, and put them away some place. “I’ve been looking forward to this ever since I got into the trade.”
“Won’t you please sit down?” Michaelmas said, not because Watson wasn’t already halfway into the chair beside him but because Campion put him in mind of the politesse of policy meetings and boardrooms. He decided that Campion must be very self-confident to have abandoned his safer and inevitably rapid progress up the network corporate ladder. And he remembered that Domino had been impressed by him.
“Thank you, Larry,” Campion was murmuring. Watson was settling into his seat as if trampling hay, and tilting his fist up to his mouth as he caught the eye of the first- class stewardess. “Well, Larry,” Watson said. “Looks like we’re going to be climbing the Alps together, right?”
“I guess so, Horse,” Michaelmas smiled.
There was a pleasant chime simultaneously from Watson’s and Campion’s comm units. Watson grunted, pulled the earplug out of its take-up, and inserted it in place. On Michaelmas’s other side, Campion did the same. The two of them listened intently, faces blank, mouths slightly open, as Michaelmas smiled from one to the other. After a moment, Watson held his unit up to his mouth and said: “Got it. Out,” and let the earplug rewind. “AP bulletin,” he explained to Michaelmas. “One of their people got a No Comment out of UNAC about some of their people having flown to Limberg’s place. Jesus, I wish that girl would get here with that damned cart; I’m tapering off my daughter’s engagement party. Looks like there’s something happening over there after all.”