Page 118 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Airtight

“No question. I don’t know what kind of damage control you and
Ben can do, but we’ve got to come out now. Can’t wait for the
official ceremony. Too bad; only a few minutes away.”
“Never mind that!” I cried. “Open the dome and get her out of
there. I’ll call the hospital. Uh, that’s right, isn’t it, Ben?”
Poor Ben was sitting in shock. I’m sure his mind instantly
presented him with a dozen doom-and-gloom scenarios playing out
from the inevitably sensationalistic coverage of the event. The media
were already in place. Damage control? Nothing short of a city-wide
power failure would save the show. It might not matter how well our
gene-spliced crops had grown as long as the experiment stuck in
people’s minds as somehow linked to a dead scientist. Ben was
listening to some very distant drums, not to me.
Since I had snapped out of the daze first, I got the ball rolling.
Hospital, next of kin, security. By the time Ben and I went downstairs
to the parking lot we could hear sirens approaching along the access
road. Many of the reporters already hanging around the hermetically
sealed entrance to the huge metal and glass geodesic dome saw me
and came running over. They knew me, and something was obviously
not going according to plan. Then the seal to the Ecodome broke
with a great whooshing sound, and the remaining members of our
crew came out into the open field blinking and unsteady. Things got
pretty hectic.
Ben didn’t look camera-ready, especially after Laurel came out on a
stretcher and was whisked away in an ambulance, so I sent him back
into the building with our people; this was no time for them to sound
off on any subject. Without a prepared statement I had to wing it,
telling the media as little as possible and stressing the importance to
the world of the test results for which Laurel Reath, technobotanist,
had made the supreme sacrifice. I might not have covered myself or
Cyborganics with glory, but somewhere down in paragraph five of a
story headlined “BOTANIST DIES IN SCIENCE BUBBLE”
mention might be made of the project’s achievements.
After I finished, a couple of the boys with video cameras wanted
to go inside the Ecodome to get some footage of the place for the
evening news. I hesitated. Ben was not available to give permission,
and the project team was scheduled for various medical checkups and
debriefings, just like real astronauts. Some of that was my idea, to

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