Footfall Read Free

picture himself: the idiot grin, mouth slightly open, drifting down the line of screens without looking where he was going, tripping over cables.
    Nat couldn’t make himself care. A screen changed to show something like a dry riverbed or three twined plumes of smoke or … F-ring, the printout said. Nat said, “What the hell …”
    “You’d know if you’d been here last night.”
    “I’ve got to get some sleep.” Nat didn’t need to look around. He’d written two books with Wade Curtis; he expected to recognize that voice in Hell, when they planned their escape. Wade Curtis talked like he had an amplifier in his throat, turned high. Partly that was his military training, partly the deafness he’d earned as an artillery officer.
    He also had a tendency to lecture. “F-ring,” he said. “You know, like A, B, C, rings, only they’re named in order of discovery, not distance from the planet, so the system’s all screwed up. The F-ring is the one just outside the big body of rings. It’s thin. Nobody ever saw it until the space probes went out there, and Pioneer didn’t get much of a picture even then.”
    Nat held up his hand. I know, I know, the gesture said. Curtis shrugged and was quiet.
    But the F-ring didn’t look normal at all. It showed as three knotted streamers of gas or dust or God knows what all braided together. “Braided,” Nat said. “What does that?”
    “None of the astronomers wanted to say.”
    “Okay, I can see why. Catch me in a mistake, I shrug it off. A scientist, he’s betting his career.”
    “Yeah. Well, I know of no law of physics that would permit that!”
    Nat didn’t either. He said, “What’s the matter, haven’t you ever seen three earthworms in love?” and accepted Wade’s appreciative chuckle as his due. “I’d be afraid to write about it. Someone would have it explained before I could get the story into print.”
    The press conference was ready to start. The JPL camera crew unlimbered its gear to broadcast the press conference all over the laboratory grounds, and one of the public relations ladies went around turning off the screens in the conference mom.
    “Hmm. Interesting stuff still coming in,” Curtis said. “And there aren’t any seats. I had a couple but I gave them to the Washington Post. Front-row seats, too.”
    “Too bad,” Nat said. “What the hell, let’s watch the conference from the reception area. Jilly’s out there already.”
    On the morning of November 12. 1980, the pressroom at Jet Propulsion Laboratories was a tangled maze of video equipment and moving elbows. Roger and Linda had come early, but not early enough to get seats. A science-fiction writer in a bush jacket gave up his, two right in the front row.
    “Sure it’s all right?” Roger asked.
    The sci-fi man shrugged. “You need ’em more than I do. Tell Congress the space program’s important, that’s all I ask.”
    Roger thanked the man and sat down. Linda Gillespie was trapped near the life-size spacecraft model, fending off still another reporter who was trying to interview her: what had it been like, marooned on Earth while her husband was aboard Skylab?
    She looked great. He hadn’t seen her since — since when? Only twice since she’d married Edmund. And of course he’d been at her wedding. Linda’s mother had cried. Damn near cried myself, Roger thought. How did I let her get out of circulation? But I wasn’t ready to marry her myself. Maybe I should have…
    The trouble was, he wasn’t getting any story he could understand. People were excited, but they didn’t say why. The regular science press people weren’t telling. They all knew each other, and they resented outsiders at big events like this.
    Roger doodled, looking up when anyone called a greeting, hoping nobody would want his attention. He hadn’t asked for this assignment.
    He heard, “Haven’t you ever seen three earthworms in love?” and looked. A clump of science-fiction writers stood