Harry Turtledove - Reincarnations

But it wasn’t a newspaper office, or not exactly. If the Intelligencer wasn’t the trashiest supermarket and 7-Eleven rack filler around, the troops hadn’t done their job for the week. "For this I went to journalism school?" Mort muttered.

He wished for a cigarette. The smoke would have made the place smell even more authentic. But the Intelligencer office had gone smoke-free a couple of years before-it was either that or lose their health insurance. Besides, he was wearing a transdermal nicotine patch. Smoke while you had one of those things stuck to you and you were a coronary waiting to happen.

Behind glasses that were going to turn into bifocals the next time he got around to seeing his optometrist, his eyes lit up for a moment. Transdermal patches… he might be able to do something with that. They were hot these days, and no more than three percent of the lip-movers who bought the Intelligencer were likely to have even a clue about what transdermal meant.

So… the beginning of a headline formed in his mind, 72-point type, sans-serif, with an exclamation point at the end. TRANSDERMAL PATCHES CAUSE…!

"Cause what?" he mused aloud.

Cause heart attacks if you’re stupid enough to keep lighting up while you’re wearing one? He shook his head. That wasn’t scary enough. You didn’t necessarily die from a heart attack, and if you did, it was over quick.

Cause cancer? That one was stale even for the Intelligencer (which was saying something). Besides, the whole idea behind nicotine patches was to keep you from getting lung cancer. Pfeiffer’s ethical sense was stunted (Would I be here otherwise? he thought), but it hadn’t quite atrophied.

Cause AIDS? He shook his head again. Something there, though. Suddenly, like striking snakes, his hands leaped at the keyboard. Letters flowed rapidly across the screen: TRANSDERMAL PATCHES CAUSE AIDS-LIKE SYNDROME! He knew just how to write that one up. When you took the patch off, you went through some of the same whimwhams you did when you gave up smoking (he’d call a trained seal of a doctor for the impressive-sounding quotes he’d need). And some of those whimwhams were enough like early AIDS symptoms to give the piece the germ of truth his editor liked.

Speak of the devil, he thought, because his editor came by just then, paused to see what he was working on, and nodded approvingly before heading off to the next desk. Don’t think of Ed Asner as Lou Grant here. Katie Nelligan looked more like Mary Tyler Moore with red hair.

Mort sighed. If she hadn’t been his boss, and if he hadn’t had a well-founded suspicion that she was smarter than he was (although if she was all that smart, why did she work for the Intelligencer?), he’d have asked her out a year ago. One of these days, he kept telling himself. It hadn’t happened yet.

Katie came back, dropped a wire service report into his IN basket. "See what you can do with this one, Mort," she said.

He looked at the news item. Kids in Japan, it seemed, raised stag beetles (not Japanese beetles, for some reason) as pets. Then they’d put them up on round cushions two at a time to see which one could grab the other by the projecting mouthparts and throw it off. They’d just chosen a national champion beetle.

"Jesus Christ," Mort said. "Sumo-wrestling bugs!"

"That’s just the slant we’ll want on it," Katie said. She nodded again-twice in one morning, which didn’t happen every day. "Can you give me a draft before you go home tonight?"

"Yeah, I think so," he answered. What was he supposed to tell her?

"Good," she said crisply, and went on down the aisle between desks. Mort looked back at her for a couple of seconds before he returned to his computer.

He discovered he’d forgotten what he was going to write next about the transdermal patches. No wonder, he thought. Sumo-wrestling bugs-Lord, that was enough to derail anybody’s train of thought. Bullshit about patches and the truth about bugs… "Hell of a way to make a living," he said under his breath.

Nobody glanced over at him to see why he was talking to himself. People at the Intelligencer did it ever day. Nobody, but nobody, was ever a bright-eyed, eager eighteen-year-old getting himself ready for a hot career writing for a supermarket tabloid. It wasn’t a job you went looking for, it was a job you fell into- generally from a great height.

"If I weren’t Typhoid Mary, I wouldn’t be here," Mort said, again to himself. He’d worked for four different papers in three years, each of which went belly-up within months of hiring him. The jobs had disappeared, but his rent and his car payment and his child support hadn’t. He’d been here five years. Whatever else you said about it, the Intelligencer wouldn’t go broke any time soon. What was that line about nobody going broke overestimating the stupidity of the American people?

A guaranteed regular paycheck-yeah, that was one thing that kept him coming to the office every morning. The other was something he hadn’t thought through when he’d taken this job: now that he’d worked for the Intelligencer, no real newspaper would ever take him seriously again.

He saved the patch story, got to work on the sumo-wrestling stag beetles. He took a certain perverse pride in the way he reworked it to fit the Intelligencer’s style: breezy, breathless, no paragraph more than two sentences long, no words more than three syllable if he could help it. Besides, Katie’d given him a deadline for that one, and he always met deadlines.

He was just heading into the wrapup when the lights went off.

"Oh, shit," he said loudly, an editorial comment echoed and embellished all over the office. When the lights went off, so did the computers. Mort hadn’t saved the stag beetle story as he worked on it, so it was gone for good. He’d have to do it over from scratch, and doing it once had been once too often.

Besides which, with the power gone, the inside of the Intelligencer office was black as an IRS man’s heart: no windows. The publisher, three floors up-he had a window, and one with an ocean view. The peons who did the actual work? They got peed on, as their name implied.

Katie Nelligan’s voice cut through the chatter: "Does anybody have a flashlight at their desk? There’s supposed to be an emergency kit in here somewhere, but we haven’t needed it for so long, I’ve forgotten where."

No flashlights went on. Mort didn’t even have a luminous watch. He just sat at his desk, figuring the only thing he was likely to do in pitch darkness was stumble over somebody’s chair and break his fool neck.

Wouldn’t that be a great way to go? If a network correspondent cut himself shaving while he was covering a war, he turned into a national hero overnight. But if a tabloid reporter killed himself trying to get out of his office, he might make page seven on the inside section of the newspaper. Having his passing altogether ignored was a hell of a lot more likely.

Somebody else did get up, and promptly tripped. Feeling smugly virtuous, Mort stayed put.

Then, all of a sudden, he could see again. Standing in the doorway were four slim, manlike shapes, each glowing a slightly different shade of bluish green. All together, they put out about as much light as a nightlight.

"Give me a break," Mort said. "Who’s the practical joker?" Slim, glowing aliens were as much an Intelligencer hallmark as no funnies was with the New York Times. He’d written at least half a dozen stories about them himself. They all contradicted one another, but who kept track?

"I’ll bet I know who did it," Katie Nelligan said: "San Levy at the News of the World." The News of the World specialized in aliens, too, generally warty yellow ones; Levy, who held down Katie’s job over there, was a notorious prankster. Katie turned to the glowing quartet. "Okay, boys, you can knock it off now. We’re wise to you. How about turning the lights back on, too?"