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promise to abide by the rules of the corporation and do what she was asked to do, etc., etc. The third covered her under the group lawsuit insurance policy in case she said something on the air that somebody else didn't like. The usual.
    The fourth, however, was of more positive interest. It was basically a set of rules for an expense account for a foreign assignment, how to prepare one, what they would and would not cover, and the like. The list of what they covered was pretty damned extensive, but the rule apparently was to receipt everything and give it to Terry before, a certain cutoff date. And finally, there was an agreement that she would work for up to seven days on this assignment as their exclusive agent and on-camera representative as a free-lance commentator, and licensed unlimited use of any and all footage and commentary given during that period for the onetime fee of—my heavens! That was hundreds of dollars per day !
    "You look surprised," Terry noted.
    "I—I never expected to be paid for this."
    "You aren't plugging a book, you haven't got a forthcoming PBS series or whatever, so you're hired as a freelancer. Just remember that your fee is based on doing satisfactory work and I'm the one who decides if you do."
    Lori sighed. She knew at that point that even if she wasn't being paid a dime she'd have to see it through, grit her teeth and go through with the whole thing. Very dangerous or not, this was the chance of a lifetime, the potential turning point in her life she'd abandoned all hope of ever getting.
    "I'm in," she told the producer.
    Amazonia: Rockfall Minus One
    manaus lay so far into the amazonian interior of brazil that since its founding, its major connection to the rest of Brazil and the world as well had been just the Amazon River. Although now it was possible to reach the city by road, the river and the airplane were the primary twin connectors of the city to the rest of civilization.
    Still, Manaus was a very large city, born during the boom in gold and other treasures of the Amazon discovered and developed in the nineteenth century. Great old houses and a magnificent if now rundown center city, with its old-world buildings defiant against the jungle, looking more like Lisbon at its finest, displayed Manaus's past, and with the development of the interior in full swing, it was something of a boomtown again. Its airport, always vital since the founding of the national airline decades before, was as grand and modern as any in the western world and was the main port of entry for foreign airliners, almost as if Brazil were intent on reminding all its visitors that there was more to the country than Rio and Sao Paulo. There were first-class hotels here once more, with all the amenities of modern civilization, and in its bustling streets one could buy almost anything.
    With a corporate credit card, it wasn't hard for the two women to pick up what they needed, although it was a hardship to do so in the couple of hours allotted to the task. Terry had to be back at the hotel in a hurry; she'd been on the phone and fax in the hotel's business center almost since arriving, and she still had much to do. By the time they returned, messages had piled up, and before heading back down to the business center, Terry told Lori to order from room service and unpack and repack as needed.
    A bellman came up a few minutes later with a folder full of papers, and Lori looked them over after being told they were from Terry. They turned out to be faxes of the latest computer summaries, including maps and tracking data. It was now felt that the angle and velocity would not take the approaching meteor over the Andes, which was a relief to Peru and Ecuador, of course, but the projections also indicated it would track a bit north of the original estimates.
    She grabbed a map of Brazil and did a plot. If the projections held up, it would luckily hit in one of the remotest and least populated areas left in the country, but