THE LONG WAY HOME, PART TWO
Lynda Day’s Journal (extract)
December 19, 1991Today’s rule of thumb for dealing with aliens: They love to show off when dealing with "inferior" creatures like us. Laura calls it being "on the jazz," and here’s how it works with Paul. We’re down at the airport bright and early and on the plane, when Paul noticed there was no pilot. He got on the phone and reads the riot act to some poor grunt at the other end who didn’t have the answer Paul wanted, and so Paul said ‘I’ll fly the damn thing myself’ and hung up. So he wandered up to the cockpit and we didn’t see him again for twenty minutes or so. Then he stuck his head out and yelled, "Anybody back there know how to fly a plane?" Laura and I were in the back of the plane, and Sophie was up towards the front. Laura turned and whispered in my ear, ‘Look at his eyes; he’s on the jazz.’ Sure enough, his eyes were sparkling like he had some really clever plan. Sophie saw this, and immediately started protesting. ‘Oh, no. You aren’t doing that again. Not me.’ ‘Nonsense,’ said Paul. ‘I need a co-pilot, and you’ll do just fine.’ ‘I don’t know how to fly,’ she protested, but Paul just stared at her and she grew really quiet and didn’t move. He eventually looked away, snapped his fingers, and cheerily wandered back to the cockpit. Sophie shook her head, muttered ‘You bastard," in his general direction, and followed along behind him. I am never flying anywhere with him again once this is over!
Sarah wasn’t expecting many visitors during the day, assuming that the Junior Gazette staff was finally getting their minds back on work and trying to get the post-fire edition out. Julie had told her that she’d scheduled final paste-up for tonight, and Sarah had examined some of the stories and gave her approval. She was therefore rather surprised to see Colin Matthews wander her hospital room, tumble over a chair, and fall on the floor.
"Colin, are you okay?" she called out.
"Ow," he exclaimed. "Yes, I’m fine. I just blacked out for a second. Coming through the door, I--"
"I know," she nodded. "One of Paul’s gadgets is malfunctioning. I’ll have a word with him about it when he gets back."
Colin dragged the chair over to her bedside. "Sarah, I have the deal of a lifetime for you."
"Better than exam relaxers?" she asked.
"Oh, much better. Television."
Sarah looked at him strangely. "I think that’s already been invented."
"We’re going to put Lynda on television.. Sarah, she’s a natural. She has star potential written all over her."
"Lynda wants to be in the newspaper business. Why would she want to run off and host ‘Crazy Stuff’ for a living?"
"Sarah, I’m going to give you a lesson about money. The Junior Gazette doesn’t make very much of it. We’re always living hand to mouth, and Bobby Campbell was always threatening to pull the plug on us. What have we got now that is going to change that? Answer: nothing."
"Rather a bleak point of view, isn’t it? Col. Marriner didn’t buy the paper based on its past performance. He’s got plans for it, too."
"Marriner is all about money. He’s got loads of it, and he likes to give it away. Crazy idea, huh? Personally, I love money, and the more of it, the better. Sooner or later, though, people who give away money run out unless they make more. We can give him that. We can give the world a news program that they will want to tune to because Spike and Lynda will be there doing Spike and Lynda things while covering real issues people care about."
"With Lynda in a short skirt, no doubt."
"Keeps the dads tuned in. Ratings, Sarah. If the TV Junior Gazette has ratings, advertisers come knocking on our door and bring their checkbooks. That’s not how it works now. I knock on doors, I beg and grovel. And for what? A pound here and there. Whoopee, that thrills Bobby Campbell to no end."
"It’s a tempting thought. I mean, we have some people who could probably make the transition. Kate and Julie are naturals for TV," Sarah mused. "Frazz, Tiddler, and Polly are all good reporters with good stage presence. You’re asking us to make a hell of a jump. We’d be starting all over again from nothing."
"Have you seen the Junior Gazette lately? There isn’t one!. No building. No ready advertising base--who’s going to give us money now that we’re on even shakier ground? I can’t tell you this will succeed, but I know where we’re going is ‘Failure City’. Now’s our chance to really make people say ‘Junior Gazette’ and know who we are."
"Colin, I’m not sure about this, but I think it’s worth running past Col. Marriner. If you want to put a formal proposal together, I think you might have a chance. My understanding of his thinking is that he wants to return the Junior Gazette to the way it used to be run when we first started. There might be a way to keep that and save us at the same time. This might be it, Colin."
"Thank you, Sarah." Colin got up and shook her hand. He made to leave the room, but stopped and said "I’m glad you made it. Would have been a serious bummer if you’d died, you know."
"Yeah," she said, staring off into the distance. "Not much chance of that happening now."
Colin left the room, happily whistling a little tune as he marched down the corridor and into the elevator. There were several people inside the elevator as it continued down to the bottom floor, and most of them looked at the whistling and wide-eyed Colin as some kind of lunatic. One young woman eyed him more seriously. As the elevator stopped and the doors opened, Colin walked out into the lobby, only to have the woman touch him on the shoulder. Colin turned to see who had touched him, and saw a tall and slim teenager with long, blonde hair looking very curiously at him.
"Do you remember me?" she asked.
Colin couldn’t quite place the face, but something in the voice rang a bell within his mind. She sensed his difficulty and uttered the phrase that ended all doubt in his mind.
"Show me your rabbit suit."
Fort Mitchell’s two unhappy "guests", Kate Roberts and Kevin Ross, were bundled out of their respective "hotel suites" on the base when the plane carrying Lt. Colonel Marriner landed after a refueling stop on the East Coast. They watched under guard from a conference room in the control tower as the soldiers unloaded the flag-draped casket of Leslie McDowell from the rear of the plane and loaded it into the back of an Army ambulance. Three soldiers disembarked from the front of the plane along with one civilian; after a brief conference with some of the Army brass on the ground, the landing party got into the ambulance and drove up to the control tower. After a few minutes, the door to the conference room opened and in walked
"Lynda," Kate and Kevin shouted and ran to greet her.
"Lynda, you have got to get us out of here!" Kate said. "We’re prisoners and nobody will tell us anything."
Kevin chimed in. "They took our notes, my camera, and allowed us only one phone call to the British ambassador."
"I’m going to write a nice little piece about how our ambassador is a weak-kneed little cream puff who won’t stand up for his own citizens," Kate added.
"They haven’t told you anything?" Lynda asked. Both of them nodded.
"I expect the Americans didn’t know what to say. They seem to have fewer alien problems than the British, for whatever reason." The owner of the voice that said these lines strolled into the room and looked the party over. Kate noted the nameplate on the speaker’s chest.
"Marriner," she said angrily. "This is your doing. A new face? Who else did you take with you when you died this time?"
Marriner turned away, growing visibly angry. Lynda was growing unhappy as well. "This is as much my fault as his, so if you want to yell at someone, you try taking me on, Kate."
"Why are you defending him," Kate asked, generally puzzled at Lynda siding with the enemy, as she perceived it.
"One, if you get on his nerves, you two stay here until you rot. Two, you don’t know what happened and are jumping to conclusions. Three, Julie sent you, not Marriner. Save some indignation for her. God knows she deserves it."
Marriner had composed himself during the time Lynda held the floor, and decided to re-enter the fray. "I apologize for the inconvenience, and I’ll try to make it up to you as best I can. Things are complicated when you’re dealing with alien incursions, and the government wanted to make sure that the public was not unduly alarmed. Fact of life: aliens scare people. Sometimes maintaining civil order has to come at a price, and I’m afraid you were it this time."
"Easy for you to say," Kevin replied. "You haven’t been locked up under armed guard."
"No," Marriner said testily. "I just watched a friend of mine get shot in my arms, and I’m here to bury another. We’ll leave out how much fun dying is, as I don’t think you’ll ever be able to tell me how traumatic your experience will be. You only die once. I’ve done it twice, and I have it to look forward to eleven more times before I finally rest in peace. Give me protective custody any day, you ingrate."
"Who died then?" Kate asked.
"Leslie McDowell. Sarah took a bullet in the chest and is recuperating in hospital," Lynda said.
Kate muttered an obscenity. Kevin looked at the floor. "Who did it?" he asked.
"An alien," Paul said. "Although you are expressly forbidden to repeat that in public, I must tell you. Lynda killed it in self-defense after it tried to kill her, too."
"And how are you responsible for this," Kate asked Lynda.
"I stole something from the alien and Paul was supposed to get it back. Paul spared my life, and the alien decided that was grounds for all of us who knew of Paul to die. You would have been on his list of mistakes that needed correcting, too. Consider yourselves fortunate to be here now."
Kate and Kevin looked at the floor and said nothing.
"You’re under my custody now," Marriner said. "We’ll be flying home after the funeral tomorrow. Until then, you’re under the care of my associates Sgt. Wilmot and Sgt. Jenkins."
"Wilmot and Jenkins?" Kate said, exchanging a bewildered glance. "Surely you don’t mean...."
"You might wish you’d stuck with being in jail," Marriner said with a smile.
Late that night, Matt Kerr stood alone in his office, peering out the window into the night. His thoughts were on the strange turns that life was taking around him. When he had returned to Norbridge to take over the Gazette, he was full of great dreams about what he could do as an editor, and how he could improve on all the mistakes his own editors had made when he was a reporter and having to fight for stories he believed in. When Bill Sullivan, Timothy Winters, and he had set up the Junior Gazette, he was even more sanguine about making a difference in the world. Four years had passed, and his naiveté was gone. His own reporters complained about not getting their own way. He worked longer, enjoyed it less, and wondered what had ever possessed him to seize this dream in the first place. The Junior Gazette had grown up too fast and declared their independence from his own dreams for its future. Lynda and her reporters now competed with his own for stories, chased the same advertising dollars, and made life miserable by going behind his back to get things done. His wife of six years filed for divorce and moved out, claiming he was never home. Very true, that. He hadn’t been, and hadn’t realized until it was too late to save the marriage. The divorce had been finalized three months ago.
Two weeks after his divorce, he’d been sitting at a local bar when Julie Craig stopped by to say hello and express her condolences. The two of them had gotten to talking over drinks, and both shared their frustrations about life in the Gazette. Julie had been increasingly marginalized by Lynda, who seemed to rely more on Spike in recent days than on her--Julie was finding herself left out of the loop more and more frequently, and tolerated it less and less. Both of them looked at the old Junior Gazette and saw something there that was missing in the new commercial model. One thing led to another, and they were plotting to bring the old Junior Gazette back. The fire had been a godsend--Lynda’s hold over the paper had been broken, and there was now a chance to gain everything back if only Julie could hold her own. With the first edition after the fire printed, she had done just that. It wasn’t up to Lynda’s standards of quality--whatever could be said of Lynda, she ran an excellent paper and was a good judge of what worked and what didn’t--but Julie was new and would be allowed to make some mistakes just as Lynda had when she began. Since then, they had been seeing each other regularly in quiet, out of the way spots to discuss possibilities and plot strategy. On one of those occasions, they had entirely too much to drink and wound up sleeping together. This worried Matt Kerr greatly when he awoke. After all, Julie Craig was a high school girl when she had begun working for the Junior Gazette, and Kerr had a difficult time not thinking of her as one of his "kids" now. Unfortunately, Julie had grown up and helped to destroy Winters’ marriage and reputation over Winters’ escapades with the school secretary. Now she had gotten him in a compromising position, and he was having to cater to her wishes more than he’d like to. This unnerved him, but he couldn’t bring himself to let her go.
Julie walked into his office unannounced. They’d planned to go out together for a few drinks, and she’d arrived looking absolutely stunning in an evening dress that accentuated every curve on her body. Kerr shook his head. "Too gorgeous, Julie," he said.
She did a little twirl around to show the dress off. "Whatever else can be said for Paul Marriner, he is a generous employer on pay days!"
"I wouldn’t eat too much or that thing might explode."
"You could always feed me some grapes when we get home. I’m curious to find out now."
"Julie, where did you get the idea I was going to take you home?"
"You haven’t gotten the idea yet," she smiled. "But you will. Trust me."
"What did Lynda say when you talked to her?" Kerr asked.
Julie pulled a chair up to Kerr’s desk, sat down in it, and put her feet up on his desk. Kerr couldn’t help notice how beautiful those legs looked. "She’s going to fight us."
"I figured as much," Kerr said. "Lynda Day won’t back down for anybody, and we’re damn lucky she didn’t have enough to nail us when she had the chance."
"Oh come on, Matt. You told the truth. We were writing her obituary that night. That was a very good speech you gave. Blew her completely out of the water."
Kerr looked at her and smiled. "Well, yes it did. I suppose I forgot to say what we were doing before we wrote her obituary."
"And after," Julie said, with a seductive grin on her face. "I guess I’m losing my touch if you forgot all about that little detail."
Kerr looked at her smile and her legs and quickly looked away. "The question is, what do we do about it now. Once she gets back from America, she’s going to try and move back in."
"Then we need something to keep her out. Ever try Colin?"
"I try to forget I know him."
"You? I dated him a couple times. You can’t trust him to even look after your pets without killing them. God knows I’d like to forget him, but he’s our man."
"Expose Colin, and nail Lynda by association?" Matt asked.
"Exactly. Lynda must have known Colin was involved in some of the shady deals he does. Who’s going to believe Lynda looked the other way for three years and never asked how Colin always found the money to keep the paper running even when we weren’t selling anything? Unless she’s a complete fool, that is, and then we nail her for incompetence. Works either way."
"And Marriner? Marriner got Colin from the beginning over the insurance money."
"Too bad he’s not any better than Lynda. We paint with a broad brush, and nobody even has to mention he’s an agent or an alien or whatever the hell he’s playing at. No, this is business, and we’ll be rid of them all if we play our cards right."
"The Corruption of the Junior Gazette," Kerr mused. "An interesting headline for the parent paper. With a by-line from Julie Craig, of course."
"Absolutely," Julie giggled. "I want Lynda to know who is responsible for her early retirement."
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This page created by Murray Head on the eleventh of June, 1998.