There was a main street called Main Street with clothing ibops and restaurants, gambling houses, and more or less fancy saloons, a couple of vaudeville theaters, and dance bafls. At the unfashionable end of Main Street were some Cum implement shops, places to buy surveying instruments and geologic detectors and the building that housed the Inter-MeQar News Service Frostbite Bureau. It was a couple of front rooms on the second floor, with a mechanical dentist. Wow, an osteopath above, and a 'ride-up-and-save' parka emporium to the rear.
Chenery let me in, and it was easy to see at once why Kennedy had died of pneumonia. Bottles. The air conditioning must have carried away every last sniff of liquor, but it seemed to me that I could smell the rancid, homebrew stuff he'd been drinking. They were everywhere, the relics of a shameless, hopeless alcoholic who'd been good for nothing better than Frostbite. Sticky glasses and bottles everywhere told the story.
I slid open the hatch of the incinerator and started tossing down bottles and glasses from the copy desk, the morgue, the ethertype. Chenery helped, and decently kept his mouth shut. When we'd got the place kind of cleaned up I wanted to know what the daily routine was like.
Chenery shrugged. 'Anything you make it, I guess. I used to push Kennedy to get more low-temperature agriculture stories for us. And those yaks that landed with you started as a civic-betterment stunt the Phoenix ran. It was all tractors until our farm editor had a brainstorm and brought in a pair. It's a hell of a good idea—you can't get milk, butter and meat out of a tractor. Kennedy helped us get advice from some Earthside agronomy station to set it up and helped get clearance for the first pair too. I don't have much idea of what copy he filed back to ISN. Frankly, we used him mostly as a contact man.'
I asked miserably: 'What the hell kind of copy can you file from a hole like this?' He laughed and cheerfully agreed that things were pretty slow.
'Here's today's Phoenix,' he said, as the faxer began to hum. A neat, 16-page tabloid, stapled, pushed its way out in a couple of seconds. I flipped through it and asked: 'No color at all?'
Chenery gave me a wink. 'What the subscribers and advertisers don't know won't hurt them. Sometimes we break down and give them a page-one color pic.'
I studied the Phoenix. Very conservative layout—naturally. It's competition that leads to circus makeup, and the Phoenix was the only sheet on the planet. The number-one story under a modest two-column head was an ISN farm piece on fertilizers for high-altitude agriculture, virtually unedited. The number-two story was an ISN piece on the current United Planets assembly.
'Is Frostbite in the UP, by the way?' I asked. 'No. It's the big political question here. The Phoenix is against applying. We figure the planet can't afford the assessment in die first place, and if it could there wouldn't be anything to gain by joining.'
'Um.' I studied the ISN piece closer and saw that the Phoenix was very much opposed indeed. The paper had doctored our story plenty. I hadn't seen the original, but ISN is—in fact and according to its charter—as impartial as it's humanly possible to be. But our story, as it emerged in the Phoenix, consisted of: a paragraph about an undignified, wrangling debate over the Mars-excavation question; a fist-fight between a Titanian and an Earth delegate in a corridor; a Sirian's red-hot denunciation of the UP as a power-politics instrument of the old planets; and a report of UP administrative expenses—without a corresponding report of achievements.
'I suppose,' I supposed, 'that the majority of the planet is stringing along with the Phoenix?'
'Eight to one, the last time a plebiscite was run off,' said Chenery proudly.
'You amaze me.' I went on through the paper. It was about 70 percent ads, most of them from the Main Street stores we'd passed. The editorial page had an anti-UP cartoon showing the secretary-general of the UP as the greasy, affable conductor of a jetbus jammed to the roof with passengers. A sign on the bus said* 'Fare, $15,000,000 and up per year.' A road sign pointing in the direction the bus was heading said,
'To Nowhere.' The conductor was saying to a small, worried-looking man in a parka labeled 'New Agricultural Planets' that, 'There's always room for one morel!' The outline said: 'But is there—and is it worth it?'
The top editorial was 'a glowing tribute from the Phoenix to the Phoenix for its pioneering work in yaks, pinned on the shipment that arrived today. The second editorial was anti-UP, echoing the cartoon and quoting from the Sirian in the page-one ISN piece.
It was a good, efficient job of the kind that turns a working newsman's stomach while he admires the technique.
'Well, what do you think of it?' asked Chenery proudly.
I was saved from answering by a brrp from the ethertype.
'GPM FRB GA PLS' it said. 'Good-afternoon, Frostbite Bureau—go ahead, please.' What with? I hunted around and found a typed schedule on the wall-that Kennedy had evidently once drawn up in a spasm of activity.
'MIN PLS' I punched out on the ethertype, and studied the sked.
It was quite a document.
0900-1030: BREAKFAST
1030-1100: PHONE WEEMS FOR BITCHES RE SVS
1100-1200: NOTE MARSBUO RE BITCHES
1200-1330: LUNCH
1330-1530: RUN DROPS TO WEEMS: GAB WrTH
CHENERY 1530-1700: CLIP PHOENIX, REWRITE PUNCH & FILE
SUNDAYS 0900-1700: WRITE AND FILE ENTERPRISERS.
Chenery spared my blushes by looking out the window as I read the awful thing. I hadn't quite realized how low I'd sunk until then.
'Think it's funny?' I asked him—unfairly, I knew. He was being decent.
It was decent of him not to spit in my eye and shove me off the sidewalk for that matter. I had hit bottom.
He' didn't answer. He was embarrassed, and in the damn-fool way people have of finding a scapegoat I tried to make him/ feel worse.
Maybe if I rubbed it in real hard he'd begin to feel almost as bad as I did. 'I see,' I told him, 'that I've wasted a morning. Do you or Weems have any bitches for rate to messenger-boy to Mars?'
'Nothing special,' he said. 'The way I said, we always like low-temperature and high-altitude agriculture stuff. And good f arm-and-home material.'
'You'll get it,' I told him. 'And now I see I'm behind clipping and rewriting and filing stories from your paper.'
'Don't take it so hard,' he said unhappily. 'It's not such a bad place. I'll have them take your personal stuff to the Hamilton House and the bureau stuff here. It's the only decent hotel in town except the Phoenix and that's kind of high—' He saw that I didn't like him jumping to such accurate conclusions about my pay check and beat it with an apologetic grimace of a smile.
The ethertype went brrp again and said 'GB FRB CU LTR' 'Good-by, Frostbite. See you later.' There must have been many days when old Kennedy was too sick or too sick at heart to rewrite pieces from the lone client. Then the machine began beating out news items which I'd tear off eventually and run over to the Phoenix.
'Okay, sweetheart,' I told the clattering printer. 'You'll get copy from Frostbite. You'll get copy that'll make the whole damned ISN sit up and take notice—' and I went on kidding myself in that vein for a couple of minutes but it went dry very soon.
Good God, but they've got me! I thought. If I'm no good on the job they'll keep me here because there's nothing lower. And if I'm good on the job they'll keep me here because I'm good at it Not a chance in a trillion to do anything that'll get noticed—just plain stuck on a crummy planet with a crummy political machine that'll never make news in a million years!
I yanked down Kennedy's library—'YOUR FUTURE ON FROSTBITE,'
which was a C. of C. recruiting pamphlet, 'MANUAL OF ETHERTYPE
MAINTENANCE AND REPAIR,' an ISN house handbook and 'THE
UNITED PLANETS ORGANIZATION SECRETARIAT COMMITTEE
INTERIM REPORT ON HABIT-FORMING DRUGS IN INTERPLANETARY
COMMERCE,' a grey-backed UP monograph that got to Frostbite God knew how. Maybe Kennedy had planned to switch from home brew to something that would kill him quicker.
The Chamber of Commerce job gave a thumbnail sketch of my new home. Frostbite had been colonized about five generations ago for the usual reason. Somebody had smelled money. A trading company planted a power
