Algis Budrys - Michaelmas

All Sakal was doing was introducing Limberg, and waiting until the old man was well advanced from the wings before circling around the table and taking one of the three chairs. Everyone was so knowledgeable on playing for the media these days. They kept it short, they broke it to allow time for comment, they didn’t upstage each other. Even when they were in a snit, they built these things like actors re-creating psychodramas from a transcript. It was not they who had pushed the switch, nodded the head, closed the door, written the voucher. Someone else— someone wild, someone devious, someone unpredictable — had done that. No such persons would be thrust upon the audience today. Or ever. Such persons and their deeds were represented here today. And each day. There is a reality. We will tell you about it.

Of course, these people here on Limberg’s stage were the survivors of the selection process. The ones who didn’t begin learning it early were the ones you never heard of.

“Dr. Limberg naturally needs no introduction,” Michaelmas said to a great many millions of people—few of them, it seemed, buried deep in the evening hours. Prime Time was advancing slothfully out in the Pacific wasteland. Why was that? “What he appears to deserve is the world’s gratitude.”

Unlock. The great man stands there like a graven saint. The kind, knowing eyes sweep both the live and the electronic audience. The podium light, which had cast the juts and hollows of Sakal’s face into harsh no-nonsense relief, seemed now to be more diffuse, and perhaps a more flattering shade. Michaelmas sighed. Well, we all do it one way or another.

“Welcome to my house,” Limberg said in German. Michaelmas thought about it for a moment, then put a translator output in his ear. He could speak and understand it, especially the western dialects, but there might be some nuance, either direct from Limberg or unconsciously created by the translator. In that latter case, what the translator made of Limberg would be more official among whatever ethnic group heard it that way. Eventually the Michaelmases and Horse Watsons of the world would have to track down the distortion if they could or if they cared, and set it right in one corner without disturbing another. Not for the first time, Michaelmas wished Esperanto had taken hold. But recalling the nightmare of America’s attempt to force metrication on itself, he did not wish it quite enough.

Limberg was smiling and twinkling, his hands out, the genial host. “My associates and I are deeply honoured. I can report to you that we did not fail our responsibilities towards the miracle that conveyed Colonel Norwood in such distress to us.” Now the visage was solemn, but the stance of his shoulders and slightly bowed head indicated quiet pride.

Over-weening, Michaelmas thought. The man radiates goodness and wisdom like a rich uncle in a nephew’s eyes.

And so it is with the world; those who claim mankind knows nothing of justice, restraint, modesty, or altruism are all wrong. In every generation, we have several individuals singled out to represent them to us.

Disquieting. To sit here suddenly suspecting the old man’s pedigree. What to think of the witnesses to his parents' marriage? Is there sanctity in the baptismal register? If Uncle’s birth certificate is an enigma, what does that do to Nephew’s claim of kinship when probate time comes round? Better not whisper such suppositions in the world’s lent ear just yet. But how, then, for the straight, inquiring professional newsman to look at him just now?

No man can be a hero to his media. The old man’s ego and his gesturings were common stock in after-hours conversation. But they all played along, seeing it harmless when compared to his majesty of mind — assuming he had some. They let him be the man in the white coat, and he gave them stitches of newsworthy words to suture up fistulas of dead air, the recipient not only of two Nobel awards but of two crashes…

If Domino were here, Michaelmas thought, oppressed, he would have pulled me up for persiflage long before now. What is it? he thought. What in the world are they doing to me and mine? Who are they?

Limberg, meanwhile, was spieling out all the improbables of Norwood’s crash so near the sanatorium, so far from the world’s attention. If it weren’t Limberg, and if they weren’t all so certain Norwood was waiting alive and seamless in the wings, how many of them here in this room would have been willing to swallow it? But when he looked around him now, Michaelmas could see it going down whole, glutinously.

And maybe it’s really that way? he thought, finally. Ah, no, no, they are using the mails to defraud somehow. And most important I think they have killed Horse Watson, probably because he frightened them with how swiftly he could move.

When he thought of that, he felt more confident. If they were really monolithically masterly, they’d have had the wreckage all dressed and propped as required. More, they would have been icy sure of it, come Nineveh, come Iron Darius and all his chariots against them. But they hadn’t liked Watson’s directness. They’d panicked a little. Someone on the crew had said, “Wait — no, let’s take one more look at it before we put it on exhibit.” And so they had knocked Watson down not only to forestall him but to distract the crowd while they sidled out and made assurance doubly sure.

It was good to think they could be nervous.

It was bad to think nevertheless how capable they were.

Now Limberg was into orthopaedics, immunology, tissue cloning; it was all believable. It was years since they’d announced being able to grow a new heart from a snippet of a bad one; what was apparently new was being able to grow it in time to do the patient any good.

Keying in, Michaelmas said a few words about that to his audience, just as if he believed it. Meanwhile, he admired the way Limberg was teasing the time away, letting the press corps wind up tighter and tighter just as if they were ordinary rubes awaiting the star turn at the snake oil show, instead of the dukes and duchesses of world opinion.

“— but the details of these things,” Limberg was finally concluding, “are of course best left for later consideration. I am privileged now to reintroduce to you the United States of North America astronaut Colonel Doctor of Engineering Walter Norwood.”

And there he was, striding out of the wings, suddenly washed in light, grinning and raising one hand boyishly in a wave of greeting. Every lens in the room sucked him in, every heart beat louder in that mesmerized crowd, and the media punched him direct into the world’s gut. But not on prime time. Of all the scheduling they could have set up, this was just about the worst. Not that there was any way to take much of the edge on this one. Nevertheless, when this news arrived at Mr and Mrs America’s breakfast table, it would be hours cold —warmed over, blurred by subsequent events of whatever kind. A bathing beauty might give birth and name a dolphin as the father. Professional terrorists, hired by Corsican investors in the Carlsbad radium spa, might bomb President Fefre’s palace. General Motors might announce there would be no new models for the year 2001, since the world was coming to an end.

It suddenly occurred to Michaelmas that if he were UNAC, he’d have had Papashvilly here to shake Norwood’s hand at this moment and throw a comradely arm around his shoulders, and thus emphasize just who it was that was being welcomed home and who it was that had drawn the water and hewn the wood meanwhile.

But they had retreated from that opportunity. Why? No time to wonder. Norwood was standing alone at the podium. Limberg had drifted back to join Sakal at the table, Frontiere was blended into the walls somewhere until Q and A time, and the American colonel had the attention. He had it pretty well, too. Limberg’s lighting electricians were doing a masterful job on him.