know all these vile tales already, they fill to fat Jack Summer’s file. There’s really no need to repeat them.”
The toadman cleared his throat. “It certainly sounds to me as though this fellow isn’t NewzNet material at all,” he said. “We stand, let me remind you, for a certain moral and—”
“Listen, Virgil,” said the war correspondent, pointing a furry finger at him, “Summer’s last three reports for us were picked up by more vidwall stations across the universe than anything else NewzNet’s done this year. The gross income from his—”
“There’s no need,” put in Henrietta, “to babble confidential information in front of—”
“I hadn’t heard about those sales figures, Wink.” Summer invited him to sit beside him. “Can you give me more details?”
The catman eased down next to him. “Thinking of asking for a pay hike?”
“I’m almost always thinking about that,” admitted Summer.
Chapter 2
His small green editor made one more slow circuit of the glazwalled office. “Well, sir, I might be able to get you an additional 50,000 trudollars,” he said slowly. “Not much more.”
“That’ll help a little.”
“I understand your poor wife has been forced to take employment as a groutherder on a pastoral space colony that orbits—”
“Ex-wife,” corrected Summer, who was sitting on a rubberoid sofa and gazing down through the vufloor at the planet Barnum below them. “Yes, it’s sad what lack of money will lead you to, Fred.”
Carefully Fred Taliaferro made his way back to his lucite desk. “For a while I thought I might get over my fear of heights,” he said, not looking down. “No such luck.”
Summer suggested, “Have your floor and walls opaqued.”
The green man hopped into his desk chair. “Nope, that’d make them think I was flawed,” he said as he picked up a pile of faxsheets of various sizes and colors. “Well, sir, let’s get down to…um…by the way, did you insult Virgil Brigmush?”
“Might have. Who is he?”
“Senior VP in Marketing. Claims you took an unauthorized ride up here this morning, were rude to him and used gutter language.
Grinning, Summer nodded. “I did all that, except for the foulmouth stuff.”
“Jack, I keep trying to explain to you that, while NewzNet is the most liberal news and reporting service in this corner of the universe, the management people tend—”
“I’ll control my impulses next time. Some robots were chasing me around the port down there, so I caught the first shuttle for here that—”
“Have you ever sat down with a computer and drawn up a budget? That way you wouldn’t be dunned all the—”
“The new assignment,” reminded Summer.
“Hum?” Blinking twice, Taliaferro glanced at the papers he was holding in his bright green hands. “Yes, right. You know about the illegal drug called Zombium?”
“Sure, nasty stuff. Most of it comes from the back country on the planet Murdstone. I did a piece on the Zombium traffic for Muckrake six or seven years—”
“I read it, yes.” His editor fluttered the handful of papers. “Maybe, you know, you ought not to talk openly about how long ago you wrote for that magazine, Jack. This is a young man’s business, after all. At least the field reporter end of it. The fact you’re nearly thirty-five might—”
“I’ll be forty in January.”
Taliaferro gave a forlorn shake of his head. “That’s even worse. Well, sir, you don’t look that old, so maybe—”
“Let’s get back to the Zombium story. Does NewzNet want me to travel out to Murdstone to—”
“Yes, but not directly.” Taliaferro plucked a yellow sheet from his fistful. “We’ve been getting rumors… fairly reliable ones…that a spacecraft known as Hollywood II may be involved in smuggling the stuff.”
Summer said, “That’s one of those vidmovie outfits, roams the Barnum System making flix. Yep, they’d be in a position to smuggle most anything. Who’s the source of your rumors?”
His green editor didn’t meet his eyes. “He’d prefer not to be involved any furth—”
“C’mon, Fred, I don’t work that way.”
“Okay, all right. I’ll supply you with the name, but don’t contact him directly unless—”
“You want me to go onboard the Hollywood II?”
“Exactly, yes.” Taliaferro held up another sheet of paper, salmon-colored this time. “You’ll be pretending to do a story on their latest production. It’s entitled…where is that memo? Yes, Galaxy Jane.”
“Galaxy Jane was a space pirate in this system back ninety years ago or so.”
“Yes, so it says here. She had a lair on Murdstone and was also involved in some native uprisings,” said the editor. “Apparently the movie’s going to concentrate on that phase of her colorful career.”
“Convenient for them if they are smuggling Zombium,” observed Summer. “The weed the stuff’s concocted from grows all over the Pegada Territory, which is also where Galaxy Jane operated in her heyday.”
Taliaferro selected a purplish sheet of faxpaper, scanned it, frowned, let it drop to one side. “We’ll want you to interview the stars of this opus. Let me see Francis X. Yoe will be portraying…um…Captain Thatcher King of the Royal Mounted Stungunners and…I wish the printer down in Backgrounding didn’t have this fuzzy sanserif typeface…Yes, this says Flo Haypenny is going to be Galaxy Jane.”
Summer looked again at his editor. “She’s a onetime Zombium user.”
“I didn’t know that. But then I was in Sports for three years before they stuck me here in Scandal and Crime and so I—”
“Supposedly she was cured after a stay at Greenmansions, that rehab colony out by—”
“When was this?” He was scribbling marginal notes with his electropen.
“Seven years back.”
“That long ago? Is Flo Haypenny old, too?”
“Thirty-five.”
Taliaferro shook his head. “Sad,” he observed. “Well, sir, you’re scheduled to board the Hollywood II when it docks at Spaceport/A down on Barnum tomorrow afternoon. You’ll stay onboard during the two-day jaunt out to Murdstone, hang around while they do location work. We’d like to get something good from you—it has to play at least six minutes—within a week or less.”
“May take longer.”
“Budget and Allocations gets on my tail if my people drag—”
“I’ll give it a valiant try, Fred.”
His editor pushed the collection of papers across the desk top. “You can browse through these, then return them to me.”
“You forgot a page.” Summer nodded at the purple sheet.
“Hum?”
“There.”
“Oh, this?” Gingerly he lifted it. “Jack, suppose…well, suppose I get you a raise of 75,000 trubux?”
“Who?”
“What?”
“Who do you want me to drag along on this damn assignment with me?”
“You’re