"Grays?"
"Highly evolved aliens. Think of little green men-except they're gray. They like to perform medical experiments on humans."
Bulla swallowed his anger. "I have a statement," he said tightly. "It will only take five minutes."
"Too long. We need a soundbite. Thirty seconds or less. Can you boil it down to the pithiest point?"
"Lightning," Amos Bulla said quickly.
"How's that?"
"As far as we can now tell, a gargantuan thunderbolt struck the BioBubble. It was a freak accident. Nobody at fault. Nobody to blame. Let's just keep our heads and the lawyers out of this, shall we?"
"What evidence supports this belief?"
"Fulgurites. They're all over the site. In fact, you could say it's one gigantic fulgurite."
The media failed to ask what a fulgurite was, so Amos Bulla got away with it. Not that he expected otherwise. The media was not one to display its ignorance. At least while the cameras were whirring. Later some would question the lightning-bolt hypothesis. Others would simply report it as fact. By that time, Bulla would know if he were out of a job or not. It sure stank that way from ground zero.
"Will you rebuild?" a new voice asked from in back of the pack.
"That decision has not been made yet," Bulla admitted.
"Who will make it? You?"
"I'm only project director."
"Will the decision be made by the mysterious backer of the project?"
Amos Bulla smiled as he had been instructed to.
"You'll have to ask Mr. Mystery. If you can locate him."
No one laughed or chuckled or even smiled. They were deadly serious. He was hoping for some humor.
"Will BioBubble IV come equipped with a lightning rod?" someone asked.
"This is being looked at," Bulla ad-libbed.
A mistake. He knew it was a mistake the moment the words spilled from his lips. Great communicators did not ad-lib. You tumbled ass over teakettle down the rabbit hole that way.
"Sir, why did the BioBubble, a multimillion-dollar research station, fail to include a common lightning rod-a precaution even the most modest trailer home enjoys?"
"A common lightning rod would not have saved the BioBubble from the gigantic bolt that thundered down from the heavens last night, say our experts," Bulla said, throwing a keep-your-damn-mouth-shut glance over his shoulder to Tom Pulse, who loitered out of camera range.
"Then you anticipated a lightning strike?" a reporter asked quickly.
"No."
"Then you were negligent?" another demanded.
"No one was negligent!" Bulla snapped.
"Then why are nearly thirty scientific volunteers now entombed in glass like so many ants in amber?"
There was no answer for that. No good answer, and Amos Bulla knew that. He swallowed hard and considered giving his reply in cryptic, TV unfriendly Latin when a scarlet Saturn SU sedan came down the winding road and out stepped a serious-faced man with short black hair, professorial glasses and the vague air of a professional stage magician. He wore a camel-colored corduroy coat over a brick red turtleneck.
The man stood poised by the scarlet Saturn, saw his arrival was unnoticed and slammed the rear door shut. The sound carried but made no impression. So he opened it again and slammed it harder.
And this time heads turned. Gasps came from those turned heads, and as if the media had been sprinkled with magician's magic dust, they turned their attention from Amos Bulla to the media-friendly presence they all recognized.
"Hey! Isn't that Dr. Pagan?"
"He's always good for a snappy soundbite!"
A concerted rush was made for Dr. Cosmo Pagan, who struck a pose by the scarlet Saturn. He was quickly ringed by a horseshoe of reporters straining their mikes and cameras in his direction.
"Dr. Pagan, what can you tell us about this event?"
"Is this the work of extraterrestrials?"
"The BioBubble people say lightning. Can you refute this?"
"I have not yet examined the site," said Dr. Cosmo Pagan in the singsongy voice that America had first experienced on a famous PBS special many years ago, and revisited on countless science and astronomy specials ever since. He stepped forward.
The converging media abruptly backed up, parting like the Red Sea before a latter-day Moses.
The glass video lenses tracked Dr. Pagan as if he were some kind of glass magnet. The media throng followed like iron filings trailing after a lodestone.
Dr. Pagan walked up to the outer edges of the BioBubble mass, wearing a studious expression. He sucked on an unlit briar pipe. His corduroy coat had felt patches at the elbows, and the Arizona wind played at his hair like a mother's gentle fingers.
"This is not the work of lightning," he announced.
The hovering media crowded close, as if afraid to miss a single crumb of scientific wisdom. No one asked questions. No one questioned him at all. Such was the reverence in which Dr. Cosmo Pagan was held.
"The absence of fulgurites confirms this," he added.
Out of microphone range, Amos Bulla groaned to himself.
Walking farther along, Dr. Pagan purposefully broke the thin-edged glass under his Hush Puppies as if it were a melting ice bank.
"I see blisters and seeds and stones-things that occur when an impure mix is turned to glass."
Geologist Tom Pulse drifted up to Bulla's side, and Bulla asked, "Is he making sense?"
"Not as much as the press thinks. He's throwing glass-manufacturing terminology around. Not applicable here."