Jack Chalker: Echoes of the Well of Souls

She was suddenly struck with a twinge of panic. What if the television people saw her and decided that there was no way somebody looking like her could go on? What if they told her at the last minute that they were getting somebody from the observatories in Chile? There had to be quite a scientific team assembling there for this event.

It was the deserted civil aviation terminal, she told herself. Rushing around from a standing start and then being dropped into this lonely silence. She wasn’t very convincing, however. She was getting old and fat and unattractive at an accelerating rate, and it scared the living hell out of her.

She kept going to the windows and peering out at the Learjet, wondering if she shouldn’t be outside, even in the dark. They might miss her, might not even know she was there.

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.