Jack Chalker - Echoes of the Well of Souls

Terry looked around in the darkness. “Too bad we couldn’t get a better backdrop,” she commented. “This could just as well be Macon County with that barn.”

“No photographs of the ranch,” Juan Campos growled. “Your plane or this barn only.”

She shrugged. “Too bad. John will have to carry the remoteness with his personality.”

The reporter chuckled, but then he turned to Juan Campos to get the other ground rules straight. “What do you want me to say about where we are?” he asked. “Just that we’re on a remote airstrip well inside the jungle, or can I say more?”

“You may mention my father and his hospitality,” the man in green responded. “In fact, we want you to do so. But do not mention me or what you have seen here.”

“Fair enough. Uh—for the record, what does your father officially grow and export from here?”

“Bananas,” Juan Campos responded flatly. Terry rolled her eyes, and Lori had a hard time not laughing in spite of the danger. It was all too, well, comic book, real as it might be.

“Doc, you and John stand over there against the barn,” Terry instructed. “We want to play with the lighting, and Gus wants a camera test. We’ll have to adjust to get rid of some of the shadows. John, I’m going to talk to base and see what they want and when.”

They were already getting bitten by all sorts of small insects—a medical crew had met them at the airport in Manaus and had filled them with shots, but in spite of that and liberal doses of industrial-strength bug repellent on the plane, Lori was still not sure what was biting her or how hard it would be to look into a camera and not keep scratching and swatting. Thoughts of assassin bugs and malaria mosquitoes came to her unbidden. Once in the lights, though, the little bastards seemed to gang up in swarms. It was going to be a very tough few minutes with those lights on.

Almost as surreal was the little Brazilian man with the pancake and small kit of makeup who actually came in and touched both of them up while Gus took his own sweet time doing his tests and also rearranging the lighting. Finally the main lights went off, leaving them with enough electric light to see but still giving an almost eerie sense of darkness after that brightness.

“Can’t do with available light and get a decent shot here,” Gus told them, “but I think we can manage with just the one portable light there.”

He seemed oblivious to the bugs. “Aren’t you getting eaten alive, Gus?” Lori asked him. “How can you keep that steady?”

“Aw, shucks, this ain’t no worse than a Minnesota lakes summer,” he responded casually. “Up there the bugs got to get in all their eating in a real short time. You catch ‘skeeters in little teeny bear traps.”

“Yeah. Sure.” She remembered an old boyfriend once saying that anybody who started something with the words “Aw, shucks” should be closely watched and never totally trusted. Gus wanted everybody to think of him as just a country hick from the Minnesota backwoods, but this was a man who made a living as a free-lance cameraman for foreign correspondents. She couldn’t help but wonder what that country hick act concealed. Perhaps he was the type of person nobody could ever really know.

It was amusing to watch Maklovitch at work. He’d stand there with his scribbled notes, lights on, camera running, and go through the shorthand script several times, often stopping and looking disgusted and then starting all over again. Occasionally he’d examine himself in the tiny monitor and call for somebody to adjust his hair or put a little makeup here or there, and then he’d also go back and forth with someone on the microphone as if he were on the telephone. It was a moment before she realized that he was sort of on the telephone; he had an earpiece connected to the large apparatus beneath the satellite dish just beyond and was clearly in direct communication with Atlanta.

Suddenly he looked around. “Doctor Sutton!” he called.

“Yes?”

“Get over here! We want to introduce you and go over the initial spot.”

She hurried over, suddenly as self-conscious of her appearance as Maklovitch was of his, but it was too late to do much about it.

Terry came up to her and handed her an earpiece similar to the reporter’s. She stuck it in her ear. A small microphone was clipped to the front of her blouse.

“Hello? Doctor Sutton? You reading us?” a man’s voice came to her.

She was suddenly panicked, unsure of how to reply.

Maklovitch was an old hand at this sort of thing and said, “Just talk. That little mike you have on will pick you up. Just use a normal tone. It’s pretty sensitive.”

“Uh—yes, I hear you fine,” she responded, feeling sudden panic and stage fright.

“All right. We’ll be coming to your location after the next commercial spot.”

“That can take twenty minutes,” Maklovitch commented dryly. Then he said to her, “It’s going to be easy. Just relax, I’ll make some introductory remarks, introduce you, then ask you the same kind of questions we’ve asked all along. They might have a few extra questions as well, but don’t expect anything complex or anything you might not be ready for. This isn’t brain surgery, and the audience aren’t physicists. Okay?”

She nodded nervously. Up until now this was the one thing she’d thought the least about; now, oddly, it was the thing that was making her the most nervous, and she tried desperately to calm down.

“All I want to do is not make a fool of myself,” she told him honestly.

“Don’t worry. You’ll do fine. The one problem is the audio. You’ll be hearing two channels at once sometimes— the director or supervising producer in Atlanta and the anchors. Just don’t let it confuse you.”

The next few minutes were something of a blur, but all thoughts of the discomfort, the lights, the bugs, and the heat and humidity faded. She remembered being asked, “Is there any danger that this asteroid is large enough to cause worldwide problems?” and answering reflexively.

“If you mean the sort of thing that wiped out the dinosaurs, a nuclear winter, no,” she told them. “At least not from the figures I’ve seen so far. We did have a near miss with an asteroid that might have done us in a few years back, but this isn’t in that league. Still, it is a very large object, relatively speaking, and there will be some very nasty aftereffects. We might well have some global cooling for a period of years, much as if a couple of very big volcanoes erupted at the same time, and, depending on the upper-level winds here, an even more dramatic effect on the South American and possibly African continents for some time. It will be impossible to say anything for sure until we see it hit.”

“Then we don’t have to find a survivalist with a fallout shelter,” one of the distant anchors said jokingly.

“No. Although if you’re living in the western Amazon basin and know somebody with one, it might not be a bad idea,” she responded.

There was more of that sort of question and answer, but considering she wasn’t even going on current data, there was, she reflected, nothing she could say that any nonscientist might not have said from somewhere in the States.

Still, when the light went down and somebody, probably Terry, said, “Okay, that’s enough for now,” Lori felt almost stunned, not quite remembering what had gone on. Almost everything—their questions, her replies, even her annoyances—seemed distant and unfocused, beyond remembering clearly. She was suddenly afraid that she’d just made an absolute fool of herself on national television.

Terry came up to her and asked, “Well, what do you think about the new data?”