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bandied about the room this last hour. But we have nothing more in the pot, and it's time to cook." 87 This metaphor went past Benjamin. " 'Cook'?" "I have to get back to a lot of people about this. Word gets around. The NSF and NASA both fund this Center, and they do like to be kept in the loop. I've been shielding you folks while you worked, but I have to start speaking for you now. Unless you'd rather do it yourself?" "Oh no," Benjamin said, knowing this was what she wanted. "You do it." "Good. Then I'll be answering a lot of phone calls I've been stalling. And you four start writing up a statement." "Statement?" Benjamin felt uncomfortably that he was asking stupid questions whose answers were obvious to the others. "For the media," Kingsley said offhandedly. "Quite so." Martinez said, "At its present speed, it could reach us within a month." "I suggest we not emphasize that aspect," Benjamin said, choosing his diction so that it echoed Kingsley's precision. "Especially since it is not headed for us at all." "Oh?" Martinez looked surprised. He realized he had not shown his trajectory plots around yet. "It's curving in and downward, heading at an angle to the ecliptic plane. I can't pick out any 88 destination. It will pass through the solar system and leave, as it is unbound. It is moving very fast." 89 She could remember drinking coffee to stay awake and keep working; now she needed it to wake up at all. Running mostly on caffeine, Channing puttered around in her home office, Page 35 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html immersed in cyberspatial bliss: sleek modern desk the size of a tennis court; ergonomic chair that was better than a shiatsu massage and cheaper; picture window on the Pacific (today looking anything but); overstuffed leather chaise where she spent far too much time recouping; big tunnel skylight leading up to a turquoise tropical sky. Self-respect demanded that she not work in pajamas. That left a lot of room in a vast sartorial wasteland, from T-shirts and khaki to turtlenecks down to jeans, running shorts, and tanks. All those were off the menu if she was going to do a visual conference with anybody, in which case she needed at least a decent frilly blouse, say, or even a full dress suit top only needed, of course, since her camera had a carefully controlled field of view. She had heard of the new image managers that touched 2 90 up your face as you spoke, smoothing out lines and wrinkles and even black eyes if you wanted. To order up one on the Net would be quick, easy to install& and the vanity of it would pester her inner school-marm for weeks. Nope, let 'em see the truth. That's what science is about, right? Why not treat scientists the same way ? Today something clingy, island-soft, and cool. In blue, it cheered her. She had liked working at home the first month, despised it thereafter. After all, "I work at home" carried the delicate hint that you were in fact just about unemployed, or downsized out of the action, at the fringe of the Real World. So she tried to be systematic. No distractions, that was the trouble. After years working at the Center, it was hard to get by with no coffee break, water cooler chat, endless meetings with clandestine notes passed ridiculing the speaker, business lunches, the sheer simple humanity of primates making a go of it together. Work at home and you could never quite leave it. Slump onto the couch at nine at night when Benjamin was on a trip, all ready to kick back and veg out like any deserving, stressed adult& and down there at the end of the hall lurked the reproachful glimmer of the desk lamp. It was hard to walk down there and turn it off and walk back to a sitcom without checking the e-mail or looking at 91 tomorrow's calendar, especially since its first screen was the latest selection from Studmuffins of Science . She suspected her social skills, honed in the labyrinths of NASA and the NSF, were atrophying. So she did the next best thing, first off in the morning: answer vital e-mail, delete most without answering, and look over her notes. This kept her in a sort of abstract cyber-society. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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