When Trevor Hicks told Shelly Terhune, his publicist, that the morning interview with KGB was on, she paused, snickered, and said, “Vicky won’t like you turning traitor.” Vicky Jackson was his editor at Knopf.
“Tell her it’s FM, Shelly. I’m going to be squeezed between the surf report and the morning news.”
“The KGB do a surf report?”
“Look, it was on your list of stations,” he said, mock-exasperated. “I’m not responsible.”
“All right, let me look,” Shelly said. “KGB-FM. You’re right. You’ve confirmed the slot?”
“The news manager says ten or fifteen minutes, but I’m sure it’ll end up about thirty seconds.”
“At least you’ll reach the surfers. Maybe they haven’t heard of you.”
“If they haven’t, it’s not for want of your trying.” He tried to put on a petulant tone. He was in fact quite tired; he was sixty-eight years old, after all, and while comparatively hale and hearty, Hicks was not used to such a schedule anymore. Ten years ago, he could have done it standing on his head.
“Now, now. Tomorrow we have you set up for that morning TV talk show.”
“Confirmed, tomorrow morning. Live so they can’t edit.”
“Don’t say anything rude,” Shelly admonished him. This was hardly necessary. Trevor Hicks gave some of the most polite and erudite interviews imaginable. His public image was bright and stylishly rumpled; he resembled both Albert Einstein and a middle-aged Bertrand Russell; what he had to say was consensus technocracy, hardly controversial and always good for a short news item. He had founded the British chapter of the Trojans Society, devoted to space exploration and the construction of huge orbiting space habitats; he was a forty-seven-year member of the British Interplanetary Society; he had written twenty-three books, the most recent being Starhome, a novel about first contact; and last but not least, he was the most public spokesman in the so-called “civilian sector” for manned exploration of space. His was not quite a household name, but he was one of the most respected science journalists in the world. Despite spending twelve years in the United States, he had not lost his English accent. In short, for both radio and television he was a natural. Shelly had taken advantage of this by booking him on a generic “whirlwind” tour of seventeen cities in four weeks.
This week, he was in San Diego. He had not been in San Diego since 1954, when he had covered the flight trials of the first jet fighter seaplane, the Sea Dart, in San Diego Bay. The city had changed greatly since then; it was no longer a sleepy Navy town. He had been booked in the new and stylish Hotel Inter-Continental, on the harbor, and from his tenth-story window could see the entire bay.
In those years, he had been a wire service reporter with Reuters, concentrating on science stories whenever possible. The world, however, had seemed to fall into a deep and troubled sleep in the 1950s. Few of his science stories had received much attention. Science was equated with H-bombs; politics was the sexier and more easily encompassed subject of the time. Then he had flown to Moscow to cover an agricultural conference, as part of the background for a planned book on the Russian biologist Lysenko and the Stalinist cult of Lysenkoism. That had been in late September.
The conference had dragged on for five excruciatingly dull days, with no meat for his book and worse, no stories to convince Reuters he even had a clue as to why he was there, On the last day of the conference, news of the launch of the world’s first artificial moon, a 184-pound silvery metal ball called Sputnik, had come just in time to save his career. Sputnik had returned science to the forefront of world journalism. Trevor Hicks had suddenly found his focus: space. He had buried his book on Lysenkoism and forged ahead without a backward glance.
He had shed a wife — there really was no kinder word for it — in 1965, and had lived with and broken up with three women since. Currently, he was a confirmed bachelor, though he had fancied the reporter from National Geographic he had met at the Galileo flyby celebration in Pasadena last year. She had not fancied him.
Trevor Hicks was not just accumulating a greater store of historical memories; he was growing old. His hair was solidly gray. He kept in shape as best he could, but…
He drew the draperies on the bay and the glittering, Disneylandish conglomeration of shops and restaurants called Seaport Village.
His portable computer sat silent on the room’s maple-veneer desk, its unfolded screen filled with black characters on a cream background. The screen looked remarkably like a framed sheet of typing paper. Hicks sat on the chair and gnawed a callus on the first knuckle of his middle finger. He had gained that callus, he thought idly, from thousands of hours with pencil in hand, taking notes that he could now just as easily type on the lap-sized computer. Many younger reporters did not have calluses on their middle fingers.
“That’s it,” he said, turning the machine off and pushing the chair back. “Nothing for it. Chuck it.” He closed the screen and put on his shoes. The evening before, he had seen an old sailing ship and a maritime museum on the wharf, just a short hike.
Whistling, he locked the hotel room behind him and walked on powerful short legs down the hallway.
“What do you expect mankind to find in space, Mr. Hicks?” asked the news manager, a young, bushy-haired man in his late twenties. The microphone on its tilting arm and spring suspension poked up under Hicks’s nose, forcing him to lift his chin slightly to speak. Hicks dared not adjust it now; it was live. The interview was being taped on an ancient black and gray reel-to-reel deck behind the news manager.
“The war for resources is hotting up,” Hicks said. More romance than that. “The sky is full of metals, iron and nickel and even platinum and gold…Flying mountains called asteroids. We can bring those mountains to Earth and mine them in orbit. Some of them are almost pure metal.”
“But what would convince, say, a teenage boy or girl to study for a career in space?”
“They have a choice,” Hicks said, still cold to the microphone and the interviewer, his mind elsewhere. Call it a reporter’s instinct, but he had been feeling uneasy for days. “They can elect to stay on Earth and live an existence, a life, very little different from the lives their parents led, or they can try their wings on the high frontier. I don’t need to convince the young folks out there who are really going into space in the next ten or twenty years. They know already.”
“Preaching to the choir?” the news manager asked.
“Rather,” Hicks said. Space was no longer controversial. Hardly the sort of topic likely to get much air time on a rock-and-surf radio station.
“Did fears of ‘preaching to the choir’ lead you to write your novel, perhaps in hopes of finding a wider audience?”
“I beg pardon?”
“An audience beyond science books. Dabbling in science fiction.”
“Not dabbling. I’ve read science fiction since I was a lad in Somerset. Arthur Clarke was born in Somerset, you know. But to answer your question: no. My novel is not written for the masses, more’s the pity. Anyone who enjoys a solid novel should enjoy mine, but I must warn them” — oh, Lord, Hicks thought — not just cold; bloody well frozen — “it’s technical. No ignoramuses admitted. Dust jacket locks tight on their approach.”
The manager laughed politely. “I enjoyed it,” he said, ‘and I suppose that means I’m not an ignoramus.”