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fragment hits the plane, it could be disaster. And when it hits, like I said, it'll be like an atomic bomb."
    "It's what we get paid for, Doc," Gus commented, sounding singularly unconcerned. "Can't cover a war without gettin' in the line of fire once in a while."
    "I'm afraid he's right," Terry agreed. "Listen, Doctor, if you feel it's ridiculous to risk your life being with us, we can rig up something on the ground for you to join in the comments, but we have to be where the action is, risk or not. In this business you have to develop a kind of insanity, sort of like being a permanent teenager, taking risks and never thinking about the consequences. If not, we might as well stay in Atlanta and just cover the aftermath. We're good at what we do, which is why so few of us get killed, but reporters do get hurt sometimes, even killed sometimes, in the pursuit of a story, and this is a major one. I thought that was understood. We'll have a ton of very famous scientists back in Atlanta and around the country feeding stuff to the anchors from their safe offices in the States. You're the one who'll be on site. You have to think about that, and now."
    It was a sobering thought she hadn't considered up to that point. There was risk in this, not the career risks and romantic risks she'd thought about before—those suddenly seemed very minor—but real risk to life and limb. As the meteor came in over the coast of west Africa, it would begin to burn and shatter, and pieces would begin to break off. Most would fall in the Atlantic, but by the time it reached the Brazilian coast, it would be quite low and quite hot and coming in incredibly fast. Those pieces would be raining down over an area perhaps hundreds of miles wide. Parts of the country would look as if they had been bombed by an enemy air force. Fortunately, the region was in the main lightly populated, although there would be some towns that would suffer. But if it cleared the Andes, it would rain over populous portions of Peru like a carpet bomb attack. And there was nowhere that was totally unpopulated anymore except most of Antarctica.
    This could be a major disaster, and she was being taken right into the middle of it, as dangerously close as possible to get the right pictures.
    She could die.
    My God! No wonder they passed the buck to me! That probably was unfair, she told herself, but she still wouldn't put it past them.
    Of course, a lot of science was achieved at great risk. The geomorphologists who worked with exploding volcanoes took risks as a matter of routine; medicine and biology since well before the days of Madame Curie took risks as well. It could be a dangerous business, but it usually wasn't. The last astronomer to take a risk greater than pneumonia from spending a long, cold night at the telescope was probably Galileo before the ecclesiastical court in Rome.
    Of course, it would be easier if she really were here doing science, but she wasn't. There were teams of top scientists all over the region doing that kind of work; with the level of prediction achieved by the computers on this event, it would probably be the most studied and viewed happening in contemporary science. She had no equipment, no labs waiting back home for her findings and samplings, no support at all. She was a mouthpiece, a witness for the cable TV audience.
    Terry was getting a bunch of papers out of her briefcase. "Unless you want to bug out in Manaus, you'll have to sign these," the producer told her, shoving the papers over. "I have to fax signed copies back when I arrive and then Fedex the originals. It's mostly standard stuff."
    She took the papers and started to look through them. The first was the personal release—she agreed that she had been told there was risk to this job and that she accepted the risk and wouldn't sue the company if something happened, in exchange for which they'd cover all medical expenses from on-the-assignment injuries. The second was the general waiver and