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an emulsion glitch.
Rust started to reach for the telephone, then thought better of it.
"This is worth more to the networks than to that rag," he muttered. "It's
red-hot."
He got to work developing print thirteen.
At the local CBS affiliate, the news director was having none of it. "It's a
still picture. We're TV. We need tape. Still pictures make viewers reach for
their clickers."
"It shows the exact instant before the ray hit the Reliant," Red said
urgently.
"You got the moment of the explosion?"
"No. But I got some great after shots. Shows the thing actually hissing and
spitting like a volcano."
"We might be able to use them. Leave them, and we'll get back to you."
"It's the before shot that's important. Everyone knows the Reliant was
torched. But no one know what did it. This picture may be the only clue."
The news director got interested. Grabbing the picture, he looked at it and
made assorted faces. "What am I looking for?"
"Letters in the sky."
He looked closer and saw the white configurations against the background star
constellations just behind the Reliant.
"Those?"
"Yeah. See? They spell out a word, probably in an alien language."
"Looks like plain English to me."
"Look closer. The N is backward."
"Okay, it's backward. And it's a little p not a big P. So what?"
"But the M and the P face frontward," Rust said excitedly.
"I repeat my so?"
"That means it's not an M and a P. Not our M or P."
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"What are you saying, Rust?"
"I think this is a signal from Mars."
"Oh, get off it."
"Okay, maybe not Mars, but some language from beyond our earth. Maybe this was
a warning. Stop launching shuttles or you're all toast."
The CBS news director cast a skeptical eye in Travis Rust's specific
direction. "M, backward N and P say all that?"
"They could," Rust said hopefully.
"They could be the call letters for Martian TV, too.... Who did you say you
work for, Rust?"
"I'm free-lance," Rust said quickly.
"Who's your best client?"
Rust swallowed. "The Enquirer, " he admitted.
Print thirteen went sailing toward the exit.
"Follow it out. No sale."
At the ABC and NBC affiliates, the doors were slammed in his face before Rust
could barge past the lobby guards.
"We were warned about you," he was told at both locations.
That left Fox.
At Fox, they were very interested. Very.
"Our ratings on the alien-autopsy special were so high we had to show it all
over again the next week," the Fox news broadcaster said gleefully as he
shuffled through Rust's stack of photographs.
"Then you'll take it?"
"We've got a news organization now. Of course we'll take it. But it's gotta be
a world Fox exclusive. And you come along as part of the package."
"Package?"
"These are stills. I need a talking-head expert to tell the story, and you're
the only game in town."
"Twenty thousand bucks," Rust said quickly.
"Deal."
Fox had a news special on the air within the hour. Travis Rust found himself
happily sweating on national television, explaining what he was doing in the
marshlands outside the Kennedy Space Center, what he saw, what he didn't see
and his theory on the alien letters that appeared in the sky before an unknown
power had puddled the orbiter Reliant.
The program went out live, and Rust had visions of fame and fortune. Not to
mention a career change. The media was always hungry for telegenic experts.
Travis Rust would be only too happy to pontificate on the extraterrestrial
threat to Earth-a subject on which he was an unqualified expert, having read
the National Enquirer every week since 1984.
That was before the three men in the charcoal black suits and impenetrable
sunglasses burst in on midtelecast and confiscated every photo in sight.
Travis Rust, too.
"Who are you people?" the hapless interviewer was saying as Rust was picked up
by his elbows and escorted off camera with his shoe heels barely dragging the
floor.
"Government agents," one of the trio barked, failing to display ID.
"They're the men in black!" Travis Rust screamed. "They cover up stuff like
this!"
The newscaster followed with a microphone. "What?"
"My Enquirer editor will know! Tell him what happened here!"
And that was the last the public saw of Travis Rust until the world had been
dragged to the brink and beyond.
Chapter 19
Dr. Harold W Smith was toiling under the shaky fluorescent lights of Folcroft
Sanitarium in Rye, New York. His computer beeped at him, alerting him of a
mission-pertinent story moving on the wire.
It was out of AP. They were carrying a report that Fox TV was broadcasting a
live interview with a news photographer who had snapped critical shots of the
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Reliant disaster.
The touch of a hot-key transformed Smith's amber monochrome screen into a
color TV set. He got the local Fox affiliate by entering another code.
The picture resolved just as Travis Rust was being escorted from the studio by
three faceless men in dark sunglasses and dull black business suits, calling
out something about men in black.
"What are men in black?" Smith wondered aloud.
Putting the question aside, he watched as the stammering Fox broadcaster tried
to fill the dead air now that he was alone in the studio facing an empty
guest's chair that still spun from the velocity with which Travis Rust had
been taken away.
"That was Travis 'Red' Rust, being carried off by three men purporting to be
from the government. To recap, Mr. Rust snapped what may be the single most
important photograph in the chain of events that began with the BioBubble
disaster and progressed to the Reliant catastrophe. Just moments before the
Reliant collapsed into a bubbling metallic mass, an ominous word appeared in
the night sky. Consisting of three letters, two seemingly in our Roman
alphabet, but the middle one looking like a reversed N. "
The camera came in for a tight shot of the broadcaster's serious,
sweat-dappled face.
"Are these acts of sabotage warnings from a hostile intelligence from beyond
our own atmosphere?"
"Rubbish," said Smith, starting to reach for the hot-key that would restore
normal computer functions.
Then tape was played of the photo under discussion.
Harold Smith froze. His gray eyes took in the three letters. They blinked. His
firm mouth, normally compressed in concentration, made a round, bloodless hole
just before his jaw dropped on slack muscles.
"My God!" he croaked.
Blindly Smith reached for the red telephone that connected him with the White
House.
THE PRESIDENT of the United States was conferring with his national-security
advisers when the call came in.
When he had first taken over the Oval Office and the previous Chief Executive
had explained about CURE and the hotline, he said that he had set up a baby
monitor in the Lincoln Bedroom two flights above so that when the red
telephone rang, he would know it if he were anywhere in the White House.
And the outgoing President had surrendered the portable baby monitor, saying,
"It's your worry now."
The thing was ringing now, and the President said, "Excuse me. Been sitting
here so long, I gotta pee up a storm."
His advisers were working the phones, trying to discover which-if any-agency
was kidnapping journalists on live TV, and hardly noticed. They were pale and
haggard of face and baggy of eye. The office TV was flickering in its cabinet
niche.
The tiny elevator took the Commander in Chief to the red telephone, which was
still ringing. He snapped up the handset.
"Go ahead, Smith."
"Mr. President. There is a strange report on Fox News."
"Yeah. I heard. Some goofball Enquirer photographer."
"I do not think so."
"They're talking up Martians."
"The letters are not Martian, Mr. President. They are Cyrillic."
"What's that?"
"The letters of the Russian alphabet devised by Saint Cyril in the ninth
century. They are based on the Greek alphabet, so there are many letters in
common."
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