They went inside without answering, then settled down to work side by side. A couple of hours later, sheets slid into the laser printer tray, one after the other. Mort scooped them up, saying, "Let me go over these one more time. I’ve been using a computer for ten years now, but I still edit better on hard copy."
"Yeah, me too." Katie read over his shoulder. They each made a last few changes, then printed out the altered pages again. This time Katie took them from the printer. She slid them into their proper places, made a neat little pile of the story, and stuck a paper clip in the top left corner. "It’s done."
"Wait," Mort said. "Let me have it for a second." He took it over to the xerox machine, made two copies. "I’ll take one of these home, and I’ll stash the other one in my desk-just in case."
"In case the aliens come back, you mean?" Katie said. He nodded. She went on, "I don’t think it’d help, but it can’t hurt, either. First thing tomorrow, I go upstairs and lay this"-she hefted her own copy of what they’d done "-and the photos on Mr. Comstock. If he says no, I quit."
"Me, too," Mort said. Some things, by God, were more important than a job.
Katie yawned. "Let’s go home. It’s been a long day."
"Boy, hasn’t it just?"
Everyone in the Intelligencer office stared nervously at the door through which the aliens had departed. Mort wasn’t anticipating their return; like the rest of the tabloid crew, he was waiting for Katie Nelligan to come back from her conference with the publisher. She’d been up there a long time.
The door opened, which proved it wasn’t the aliens coming back. Everybody jumped all the same. In stamped Katie, looking the way a Fury might have if she were Irish instead of classical Greek.
Mort could find only one reason for her to look like that. "Mr. Comstock won’t go for it?" he exclaimed in dismay.
"Oh, no. He will. We lead with it, next week’s issue." Katie bit of the words one by one. Little spots of color that had nothing to do with rouge rode high on her cheeks. "But he doesn’t believe it. He doesn’t believe us."
Cries of outrage echoed from walls and ceilings. "What does he think, we made it up to sell his stinking papers?" Mort yelled. We’ll all go up there and tell him-"
"No we won’t. I told him the same thing, and he said we’d regret it if we tried." Katie’s scowl grew darker. "And yes, that’s just what he thinks. On the photos, he thinks he spotted the wires holding us up in the air."
"Jesus!" If he hadn’t already been starting to bald, Mort would have torn his hair. "There weren’t any goddamn wires!" le memory of yesterday’s terror flooded back, sharp as a slap in the face.
"I know that as well as you do, Mort," Katie said. "So here’s what I’ve got in mind: we’re going to pretend we don’t care what Mr. Comstock says. We’ll put this out the right way, and people will believe it."
The staff sprang to work with the fire and dedication mutiny in call forth. They threw themselves at the story with the dogged, fatalistic courage of English infantry climbing out of their trenches and marching into German machine-gun fire at the Somme. Mort was astonished at what some of the people- men and women whose total illiteracy he would till now have reckoned a boon to mankind-could do.
"You know, Katie," he said when the editor walked by, "this is gonna be a ‘Hey, Martha!’ to end all ‘Hey, Marthas!’ Everybody will want to read it."
"I think you’re right. And we’ve got a real Freddie Krueger of a picture on the front page to grab ‘em and pull ‘em in." She bristled. "I had to stop Comstock from using the one that looked right up my skirt. That man!" She clenched her fists till the knuckles whitened.
Mort looked at his watch. It was getting close to five. "Do you want to drown your sorrows in another bottle of Chianti?" he asked.
She’ll say no, he thought with the automatic pessimism of a man who’d been through a divorce and taken a few knocks afterwards for good measure. But she said yes. And after a truly Lucullan feast at Napoli (or Mort thought so, anyhow, but he was too happy to be objective), she went back to his apartment with him. The mess it was in proved he hadn’t expected that. If it bothered her, she didn’t let on.
Afterwards, still on the disbelieving side but happier-much happier-than he had been at the restaurant, he ran a hand down the smooth skin of her back and said, "What made you decide to-?" He let it hang there, so she could ignore it if she wanted to.
She gave him that I-know-something-you-don’t-know look again, the one he’d seen on her face when he asked her to dinner the day the aliens came. It stayed there long enough that he thought she wasn’t going to answer. But she did, if obliquely: "Remember the backwash?"
"Huh?" he said, but then, realizing what she had to be talking about, he went on, "From the alien, you mean? Sure. What about it?"
Katie hesitated again, then said carefully, "I didn’t mean just from the alien. Bits came from you, too, just like you got bits from me. And one of them happened to be… how you feel about me. It’s hard to be sure about a man-I suppose it’s hard for a man to be sure about a woman-but this time, I didn’t need to have any doubts. And so-" She leaned forward on the rumpled bed and kissed him.
Absurdly, he was jealous. He’d gotten bits from her, sure, but nothing like that (as far as he was concerned, the prom corsage didn’t count). The one he remembered most vividly had come from the alien, that contemptuous They’d never that broke off unfinished.
From what had happened since, Mort was beginning to think he knew who they were and what they’d never, but he didn’t tell that to Katie. He might have been wrong-and even if he was right, what the hell could he do about it?
IF you went into a market or a convenience store a few weeks ago, you probably saw the Intelligencer on its rack, jammed in there with the rest of the tabloids. You probably took a look at the front page photo, shook your head, and walked on by to get your beef jerky or pipe cleaners or whatever it was you needed.
And even if you plunked down your eighty-five cents and read the whole piece, odds are you just took it in stride. After all, a tabloid’d do anything to sell copies, right? You’d never believe in aliens, would you?
Katie cried when the story went belly-up. The late-night talk-show hosts didn’t even take it seriously enough to make jokes about it. Mort wasn’t surprised. The green-and-glowing guys had known just where to take their sample, all right.
But don’t think this is a story without a happy ending. Mort and Katie are getting married next month. They still have a lot of planning to do, but they’ve agreed on one thing: the wedding won’t be in the Intelligencer.
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Reincarnations Page 12
