Cold War

“Senator Palmer, I’d like you to meet our head of corporate security, Pete Nimec… Pete, I’m sure you recognize Senator Todd Palmer… Senator Wertz, it’s a great pleasure… Chairman Raines, we feel so deeply privileged… Annie, I know you and Pete don’t need any introduction… ”

Nimec stared as she came close. Hooded, bundled up, Annie nevertheless managed to look fantastic. Fresh. She might have arrived after a half hour’s drive from her home in Houston rather than a long tossing helicopter ride out of South Pole station.

He hesitated.

“Annie, hello—”

“Nice to see you again, Pete,” she said with an entirely pleasant, equally impersonal smile. Then she turned to Raines, escorting him on toward a waiting shuttle. “Sir, I’m sure you’ll be interested in seeing our scientific facilities… ”

And that was that. They were gone in a flash.

Nimec watched them climb aboard the balloon-tired vehicle. He didn’t know what he’d expected from Annie. But being left to feel inconsequential wasn’t it.

Confused, he waited as the second chopper made its descent, its skids gently alighting on the plowed, tamped snowfield.

Moments later the pilot jumped from his cockpit and crossed the landing area to where Megan, Wertz, and Palmer were about to start for the shuttle. Megan briefly freed herself from the DVs and led him toward Nimec.

“Pete, this is our friend Russ Granger from MacTown,” she told him. Then she turned to the pilot. “Come on, let’s scoot you out of the cold. Pete’s anxious to discuss a few things about our current search plans. We’re hoping you can fly him into the Valleys as soon as possible.”

Granger smiled and tapped Nimec’s shoulder with a gloved hand. At least he seemed interested in talking to him.

“Whatever I can do to help,” Granger said.

New York City

Of all the types of on-air interviews Rick Woods had to conduct, the scientific stuff was his biggest pain. And these geniuses from NASA, Ketchum and Frye, whom he was guessing might be a little fruity, and whom he knew were duller than Sunday morning sermons, talking about solar flames in endless multisyllabic strings…

Flares, Woods thought. The correct term was solar flares. As his twit of a director, Todd Bennett, had already reminded him a dozen times from his seat back in the control room…

These space brains on the remote feed from Goddard were making him work his balls off trying to keep things from tanking. The only bigger duds Woods could recall having as guests were the mathematicians who’d come on to discuss chaos theory; their incomprehensible rambling had gotten him dizzy. A flying ant gets gulped by a toad in Guangdong, China, and somehow that causes a gondola with two lovers in it to capsize in Venice, which eventually leads to a fucking earthquake in San Francisco. And then the quarks, leptons, muons, and gluons enter the picture, zipping around in ways that make it impossible to predict whether New Year’s Day would follow Christmas next year. Ridiculous.

“Ketchum’s losing us with the jargon, Rick.” Bennett’s voice was in his earpiece again. “Get him to explain what he means by an X-class flare.”

Woods cleared his throat. Maybe adding some humor to their discussion would pick up the pace.

“Uh, Doctor,” he said. “For average minds like myself, would you explain the difference between X-class and business-class?”

Ketchum nodded from the Maryland sister station’s newsroom, seeming to miss the pun.

“The X classification system measures a flare’s power, and aids our ability to forecast how it will impact on our planet,” he said. “We use a simple numerical table based on X-ray emissions from the region of the sun where the flare occurs.”

Simple my ass, Woods thought. “And this latest one you’ve detected, can you help us understand why we should be concerned about it?”

“Yes,” Ketchum said. “I should first emphasize that we haven’t actually observed a flare, but unusual sunspots and other indicators on the far side of the sun that are distinctive signs of impending flare activity. It would roughly correspond to tracking tropical hurricane seedlings on radar… ”

Woods tried to keep his mind from wandering. Even school shootings were easier than this. Distraught as the interviewees might be, you came to know which questions to ask by rote. Can you recall Timmy displaying hostile or antisocial behavior before the tragedy? Resentment toward his classmates? An ethnic group? Is it true none of your school’s teachers or guidance counselors ever asked him about that swastika tattoo on his forehead? And what about reports that he had a habit of firing an illegal M- 16 at neighborhood dogs and cats from his front porch?

Woods suddenly felt indecent, but things got to him. It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate his good luck. This was major-market cable TV, twenty-four-hour news, and he co-anchored the afternoon weekday slot. He would be the first guy to say there weren’t many more enviable gigs in the business. Before landing it, he’d hosted a live entertainment segment for the network, thirty minutes daily right before prime time. Some of that was fun. Meeting famous actors, actresses, and film directors. The Oscars and Grammys. Those awards presentations always gave him a kick. But six years at it was much too long. No one took Hollywood beat reporters seriously. Hard-news people considered you one step above a gossip monger, a paparazzi. The glamor wore thin after a while. The beautiful people started looking uglier and uglier. And when boob-job-and-baby-fat teenaged pop singers treated you like a microphone sock, it could be the absolute pits.

Woods had grown tired of it.

Getting offered the co-anchor post had been a break. A huge break. His predecessor had been old-school, started out his career in print journalism, spent almost twenty years as a political field correspondent. With their cable channel’s daytime numbers trailing CNN, Fox, and MSNBC by several percentage points, its programming executives had studied the audience comp and decided they wanted new blood, a face with youth appeal, someone more comfortable engaging in peppy cross talk with Marsie Randall, the female half of their anchor team. Woods was offered the spot on a trial basis, given an ironclad contractual guarantee that he could return to star-chasing if things didn’t work out. Shit, never mind huge, it was the break of a lifetime. He had jumped at it, relocated from the left to right coast. And at the request of his producers, he’d started wearing a pair of glasses with plain lenses over his 20/20 peepers for a brainier look. Now, six months later, ratings for the time period had almost doubled, and he’d re-upped for two more years with a substantial pay increase and built-in elevator clauses that would continue to boost his salary if the Nielsens kept improving.

Overall Rick Woods was pleased. He felt appreciated, gratified, financially stable. But nothing was ever perfect. On this network, one to five P.M. weekdays was early fringe. The demographic was mainly post-boomer housewives with at least a couple of years of college — the ones who stayed away from Mountain Dew and pink polyester stretch pants, and who wanted an alternative to the soaps, courtroom reality shows, and trailer-trash clown antics. They were a tricky audience. Moving targets. You had to strike just the right balance with content, give them something that was not quite a morning magazine format, and not quite Jim Lehrer. Give them infotainment. That meant filling the spaces between lead and breaking stories with background pieces, analysis, talk, a little fluffy human interest to round out the blend.

The science stuff worked its way into the lineup maybe once, twice a week. Woods found it endurable when the stories related to ordinary people’s lives. Child-development studies, medical breakthroughs, home computing, these things he understood. But he hated when his producers got too smart for their own good, booked guests who’d start running off at the mouth with complicated theories… or when they bought into one of the stunts NASA regularly pulled to grab attention and justify its existence to taxpayers, such as the big load of crap it was currently dishing out—

“Rick, pay attention!” Bennett yipped over their IFB line. “Ketchum’s got a bad case of eye bounce, makes him look evasive. Bring in the young one, try to nail him down on the flare’s severity. Ask what consequences it will have for earth.”

None, Woods felt like telling him. Nugatory, Todd. This segment’s not