Echoes of the Well of Souls (4 page)

Suddenly she heard voices approaching. The door opened, and two people walked in. The first was maybe the thinnest woman she'd ever seen short of Ethiopian famine pictures on TV; the woman almost redefined the term "tiny." Maybe five feet tall, weighing less than some people's birth weights, dressed in jeans and a matching denim jacket, she was perhaps in her mid-thirties, although it was hard to tell for sure, with a creamy brown complexion and one of those Afro-American hairstyles that looked like the hair was exploding around the head.

The other was a tall, lanky man in jeans and cowboy boots with disheveled sandy brown hair and a ruddy complexion who needed only a stalk of wheat in his hand to be the perfect picture of somebody who'd just stepped off the farm.

"So, anyway, I told George—" the thin woman was saying in one of those big, too-full voices small people seemed to have or develop, when she saw the stranger and paused. "Oh! Hi! You must be Doctor Sutton!"

"Uh—yes. I—1 was beginning to think I was forgotten."

The tiny woman sank into a chair. "Sorry about that. When stories happen this fast it's always a mess, and this won't be the last of it. I'm Theresa Perez—'Terry' to all— and this is, believe it or not, Gustav Olafsson, always 'Gus.' I'm what they euphemistically call a 'producer,' which means I'm supposed to make sure everything's there that needs to be there and that the story gets done and gets back. It sounds important, but in the news biz it's a glorified executive secretary to the reporter. Gus is that peculiar breed of creature—we're not sure if they're human or not— known as the 'news photographer.' The kind of fanatic who'll insist on taping his own execution if it'll get a good picture."

" 'Lo," said the taciturn photographer. "They tell us it'll be five or ten minutes and then we'll board, taxi out, and wait two hours to get out of this damned mess," Perez continued. "The traffic in this place is abominable. You know the saying, 'A wicked man died, and the devil came and took him straight to hell—after, of course, changing in Atlanta.' "

Lori smiled, although it was an old joke. "I know. Is that our plane out there?"

"Yeah. Don't let it fool you. The boss has a
real
fancy one just for his own use. The rest of them are corporate jets. We almost always fly commercial, but if we took Varig down, with all the changes and schedule problems, we'd never be sure of getting where we need to get in time. When you have a schedule problem, the Powers That Be unfreeze their rusted-shut purses and spring for a special. You have bags?"

"Two. They're still in the hangar over there—I hope."

"We'll get them."

"I hope I'm going to be able to pick up something before we go into the bush," Lori told her. "I'm not even sure my old stuff fits."

"I know what you mean. Well, we've got about seventy hours total, and it'll be tight, but we should have a little time in Manaus to get
something,
anyway. It's a decent city for being out there in the middle of nowhere, particularly since it became a main port of entry for airplanes. I was down a year or so ago when we did a rain forest depletion story. One of these times I'm going to be able to see something of these places we get sent. It's always hurry, hurry in this business, and after being ying-yanged around the world, when you get some time off, you want to spend it home in bed."

Lori nodded and smiled, but deep down she envied somebody with that kind of life.

"She never stops talking," Gus commented in a dry Minnesota accent that fit him well. "Ain't gonna get no sleep at all on this trip."

Perez looked up at him with a wry expression. "Gloomy Gus, always the soul of tact. No wonder you can't keep a job."

Lori looked puzzled, and Perez said, "Gus is a freelance. Half the foreign photographers, sound men, and technicians are, even for the broadcast networks. Nobody can afford to keep on a staff so large that it can be all the places with all the personnel it needs to cover the world. I have a list of hundreds in different categories. This time Gus was the first one I called who was available."

"What she really means is that they don't want to pay top dollar to the best in the business during the long times when there's nothin' happening," Gus retorted.

"I gather you two have worked together before."

Perez nodded. "Twice. Once on the Mexican earthquake and again on one of those stock 'volcano blows its top' stories from Hawaii. Beats me why folks still have houses around that thing to begin with. Gus specializes in natural disasters. That's how he got tagged 'Gloomy' as much as his shining personality."

The door opened again, and a middle-aged man in a pilot's uniform came in. "We're ready when you are," he told Perez.

"Let's go, then," the producer responded, getting up, and they all filed out after the pilot.

"My bags!" Lori said suddenly.

"Need help?" the pilot asked her.

"No, not if they're still there, thanks. Just bring them out to the plane?"

He nodded, and she dashed into the hangar. Somebody had moved them to one side, but they were still there and apparently otherwise untouched. She picked them both up and walked toward the jet. The pilot—actually the copilot as it turned out—took them and stowed them in an external baggage compartment, along with Perez's overnight bag and Gus's small suitcase and huge mass of formidable-looking cases containing, she supposed, his camera, lenses, and the like.

The Lear
was
the way to fly, she decided almost instantly. It was like the first-class cabin of the finest airliner but no coach section behind. Just four extralarge and comfortable swivel airline seats with extended backrests and two pairs of standard seats against the aft bulkhead between which was access to the rest room. There was a small table in the center of the four swivel chairs that looked like a junior version of a corporate boardroom conference table. There were compartments overhead and other places to stow gear. There were also ashtrays, something she hadn't seen on many planes for a while. Not that she needed one, but clearly the regulations didn't apply if one owned the plane.

"Turn forward and you'll feel the seat lock into place," the copilot instructed them. "Everybody fasten your belts and keep your seats in the forward locked position until we have altitude. Once we're up, I'll come back and show you the rest. We've got a window coming up, though, and we don't want to miss it. You get bumped to the back of the line here, you may sit for hours."

They still sat for a little while, but finally the small jet taxied out to the starting position and in a very short time was rolling down the runway at what seemed breakneck speed, although it probably wasn't any faster than the 767 that had gone before them.

The flight was surprisingly smooth and comfortable once they were airborne; more so, she thought, than a bigger plane, although it had been much bumpier taxiing. She had been surprised to see the "Fasten Seat Belt" and "No Smoking" signs just like on a commercial jet. In a few minutes, the panorama of Atlanta at night was obscured by clouds and there was nothing to do but wait until those magic lights vanished, signaling freedom. Not that she wanted to get up right at the moment; the angle of climb was pretty steep and seemed to go on forever.

Finally they leveled off, and the seat belt lights went out. Almost immediately the copilot came back to the cabin. "Anybody hungry?" he asked.

"Starved," Lori responded.

"We get our meals from the same caterer as the big boys on flights like this. The executives have their own food specially prepared, but this is cuisine a la Dobbs House, I'm afraid. No better or worse than the usual airline fare. I'll stick them in the microwave, and we'll at least be full up until breakfast." The small kitchen was cleverly concealed and easy to manage. He put the dinners in, set the controls, then came back and pressed a large square button on one of the bulkheads. A section opened outward, cleverly revealing an impressive-looking bar.

"It's more or less serve yourself," the copilot told them. "Anything you might want is here. Hard stuff, soft stuff, beer, wine—good wine—as well as coffee, which I'll start when we reach altitude. Ice is in the hopper there, glasses in the bin. Trash goes in here, and dirty glasses go in this other bin over here."

A bell went off, and he went back to the small kitchen. "Let's see ... we've got Delta fish, United Salisbury steak, and USAir lasagna. I'll just put them on the cold trays and set them on the table, and you can fight over which one you want."

"What about you and the pilot?" Lori asked him.

"Oh, we have to eat yet different meals, but that's later. Both of us ate before we came."

He showed them how to unlock the seats so they would swivel once more and also demonstrated that they were nearly full recliners with a nice footrest emerging when the backrest was lowered. Pillows and blankets were above.

Lori didn't care which meal she got and wound up with the Salisbury steak. She couldn't help noticing that Terry had the fish and a diet Pepsi. Only the congenitally thin acted like they were obese all the time.

"So—is this it?" she asked the two newspeople. "I mean—no reporter?"

Terry chuckled. "Oh, there'll be a reporter, all right. Himself." She lowered her voice as deep as she could. "John Maklovitch, CNN news," she intoned solemnly. "He'll meet up with us in Manaus. Flying in from God Only Knows, as usual. In fact, he should beat us there if his connections work out right. We'll use local free-lancers. I've already set up with my counterpart from TV Brasil. Right now they think it's fifty-fifty that the meteor will come down before dawn, so we're going to try and catch its act as it comes in, from the air. It would be neat if we could catch it hitting the earth, but they still can't predict exactly where within a couple of hundred miles last I heard, and it'll be traveling a lot faster than we can."

"Might be for the best we're not that close when it hits, if it hits land," Lori noted. "A big one like this could have the force of a decent-sized atomic bomb, in which case you'd get everything you might expect from a bomb, maybe including radiation—the great mystery explosion at Tunguska in Siberia in 1908 was radioactive, although that might not have been a meteor. The estimates I saw in the papers I read today indicate that this might be the largest one in modern times. The shock wave alone will be enormous, and the crater will be fantastic, like a volcanic caldera, very hot and possibly molten."

"Sounds like fun," Gus commented. "No chance this thing isn't a meteor, though, is there?"

"Huh? What do you mean? Little green men?"

"Well, I saw
War of the Worlds
on TBS last week. Good timing."

She laughed. "I seriously doubt it. The only danger, and it's very remote, is that this is going to be something like the Tunguska explosion I just talked about. Massive blast damage for hundreds of miles with no evidence of what caused it. Many people think it might have been antimatter."

"Auntie what?"

"Antimatter. Matter just like regular matter only with opposite electrical charge and polarity. When antimatter hits matter, they both blow up. Cancel out. Don't let that worry you, though. I never bought the antimatter Siberian explosion. Nobody ever explained to me why it didn't cancel out when it hit the atmosphere if it was. Others say it was a comet, although there's no sign of the meteorite fall that would accompany one. At least one major Russian physicist thinks it was a crashed alien spaceship, but I don't think we have to take that one seriously. Don't worry—it'll be plenty big enough if it's the size they predict even after losing the bulk of its mass in friction with the atmosphere. I
hope
it lands either in the jungle or in the sea. The track prediction I saw takes it over some fairly populous parts of Peru if it clears the Andes. There's no way they could evacuate all that region, not in three days."

"Don't get Gus hoping," Terry cautioned. "If it came down in downtown Lima, he'd be so ecstatic about the photo ops, he wouldn't even
think
of the misery. And no matter what he says, he'd
love
it to be an invasion from Mars. As I said, news photographers aren't quite human."

Gus looked sheepish. "Well, it ain't like this happens every day."

"In fact, it
does
happen every day," Lori told him. "Meteor strikes, that is. It's just that the particles hitting the Earth are usually small enough that they burn up before they reach the ground and just give pretty shooting stars for folks to look at. The ones that
do
reach the ground are often the size of peas or so, and most land in the ocean, in any case. It's just the size of this monster that makes it so unusual."

"Well, wherever it hits and no matter what damage it does, we'll be the first on the scene," Gus told her. "That's our job."

"Actually, we're praying for Brazil," Terry added. "The other organizations will be forced to use our pool in that region. If it goes into Peru, well, there's a ton of broadcast teams in there now from dozens of countries and more arriving every day. We want to be first and exclusive. If we're not, we're not doing our job."

"If it
does
land up in the upper Amazon, at or near the Peruvian border, it'll be hell to get to on the ground," Lori pointed out. "No roads or airstrips up there, and what natives there are will be primitive and not very friendly. But I'm mostly worried about the idea of covering it from the air."