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Writing had a physical and even sensual feel that was unfamiliar. She was
surprised at her reaction to it, this trying to get things down on the little
pages. Ideas became part of her. She pictured herself two centuries back in
time, with the Bronte sisters. She began to realize what sketching must be
like for
Philippe, who had talked of impressions entering his eyes, mixing in his
brain, and traveling down his arm onto the paper.
At the same time, she made preparations to prevent Sturgis from destroying the
work. She tried to visualize how they might come after her. "Give us all those
videos you shot." "Is this everything?" "Now we're going to search your room."
The first line of defense was to back up her videos with duplicate chips that
she hid in various parts of the station as the opportunity appeared, coding
these locations into her written notes.
But the electronic copies weren't safe; she knew Sturgis's people had
detectors that could pick up electronic data storage. Even a hundred buttons
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would be no guarantee. They could sweep her luggage, her body, even the whole
station. But they were powerless against simple little notebooks as long as no
one knew about them. She would have to hide them, too, one at a time, as she
filled them.
Should she tell Carter about the notebooks? The question nagged at her.
Finally she decided against it.
Demonstrations of trust and love were fine, but you had to have your own life.
Later, she knew, she would have another problem: the organization of facts was
different from the facts themselves. There was the question of how to cover
Elena, Stafford, even Sturgis himself. Could she depict any of them as,
somehow, "good" or "evil"? Or were those merely labels we assigned from our
own biases? No one, even Sturgis, thought himself to be evil.... Especially
Sturgis. They all thought they were on the side of the angels, carrying out
their professional duties.
Later that night she was on a roll. She told Carter she needed to be alone.
She wrote as much as she could: the arrival at the station, their first
meeting with Stafford, Sturgis and his rules.
When she filled the first notebook on Saturday morning, there was the question
of where to hide it.
Scientific facilities, she had noted, were always full of clutter. She
wandered artlessly around the station, with her equipment, recording
impressions. When she came to Stafford's lab, she saw an open door. She peeked
in. Stafford had apparently stepped out. She found a dusty recess behind
shelving that had not been moved in ages. Checking the room for surveillance
monitors, she stood against the shelving as if to take an image, and behind
her back, slipped the first notebook there, to pick up after the story broke.
After all these centuries, the high-tech warriors could still be defeated by
the simplest sword the written word.
She returned to her room and started filling the second notebook: how the
artifact had looked in the cave, how it had felt being there, her talk with
Sturgis, how the tremor felt.
She did not write what she had been doing when the tremor struck.
Carter spent Friday in amazement. Annie, the night before, the night that
would not leave his mind, had placed a bomb in his hands. Would he really
playa role in getting the story out before Sturgis's deadline?
Probably the question was academic; there was no way to get a message out. But
if the chips were down, what would he do? No doubt Sturgis had the law on his
side. When do you break the laws of your country? Were "break" and "laws"
words that he really believed applied here?
And what of the tremor? Entries posted on the net, including a spare account
with Annie's byline, indicated that minor seismic disturbances were still
being detected at a depth of 950 kilometers under the pole, triangulated by
the polar seismic grid. Now and then he would stop and try to feel them some
vibration in the building or under his feet. But he felt nothing. Everyone [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]