A name both familiar and unfamiliar leaped out at him.
"Who's this Venus Mango?" he asked his secretary.
"CNN reporter."
"Is she cute?"
"Depends on your taste."
"Is she up and coming?"
"Yes."
"Tell her we're on."
Venus Mango was in fact what Pagan liked to call a heavenly body. And she was science editor for CNN.
She knew the Crab Nebula from the Trifid, and recognized over fifty other Messier objects. That made them compatible in Cosmo Pagan's eyes.
Dr. Pagan invited her to dinner after the interview. Of course, she accepted. Who wouldn't say yes to the famous boyish face, the erudite manner and easily tousled hair?
"Marry me," Cosmo asked in the middle of dessert, a red Jell-O dome with black-licorice decorations that Cosmo called Martian Moon Jelly.
"What!"
"I love you, Venus."
"You say 'Venus' as if you've been saying it all your life."
"Marry me and I promise to have an asteroid named after you," Cosmo promised.
The future Venus Pagan said yes in the second hour of their first date. They were married by the weekend, and Cosmo Pagan proudly showed her the documentation on their honeymoon at China's Purple Mountain Observatory by the light of a nifty lunar eclipse.
"Why is this dated ten years ago?" Venus asked.
"I had a premonition."
Venus Pagan wept openly. "This is the most amazing thing any man has ever done for me."
"Wait'll you experience the galactic orgasm."
Venus Pagan in truth didn't so much advance Cosmo Pagan's career as she maintained it. Cosmo decided to settle for that. He wasn't a spring chicken anymore. There was an actual worry line seaming his high forehead now. Fortunately on-camera makeup shielded his adoring public from the unnerving sight.
Besides, how high could an astronomer go?
For the first time in his life, Cosmo Pagan was content to settle down for the easy ride.
This year was turning out to be a comet year. Hayakute II. Then Hale-Bopp. The public lapped it up, and Dr. Pagan was only too happy to feed their curiosity.
So when the BioBubble burst, it was just another cosmic event engineered to further that career, and a break from explaining the Oort Cloud for the gazillionth time.
The phone began ringing off the hook immediately. Of course, the first call he returned was Venus's. Cosmo was no fool. Where was he going to find another earthbound Venus who could do anything for his career?
By the next morning, he was quoted in virtually every newspaper and TV news program in the nation and beyond.
This time he discovered they played it for laughs.
" 'Someone up there doesn't like us'?" he sputtered, reading back his own quote. "Everyone used that comment! It was a throwaway. I gave a detailed, reasoned, poetic analysis, and they print a side-of-the-mouth attempt at levity?"
"You gave a windy speech to a TV camera," Venus returned. "You know better. All TV wants is soundbites."
"I'm used to having a forum," Cosmo lamented. "And editorial control."
"Not this time, honey. Get over it."
But Dr. Cosmo Pagan wasn't about to get over it. Twenty-five years of popularizing astronomy and the heavens had made him famous from Anchorage to Asia, but one last honor still eluded him.
Respect from his fellow astronomers. They hated him to a man.
"I have to do something about this," he fumed.
"Why bother? The story has a half life of maybe three days."
"I'm going to the BioBubble."
"I won't recommend being tied to this one. The BioBubble is a joke. You said so yourself."
"That was when it first started. I've since changed my mind," he growled.
"Suit yourself."
And Dr. Pagan did. He drove his Mars red Saturn with the license plate that read BARSOOM-1 to the Martian-like landscape of Dodona, Arizona, and stole the spotlight out from under the BioBubble people.
By the time he had returned home, the ink was drying on the print-media story.
" 'Dr. Pagan says Martians crushed BioBubble!'" he screamed. "I never said that!"
"I saw it on CNN," Venus said. "You came darn close."
"I said visitors from outer space. I was being poetic. By 'visitor,' I meant an asteroid or meteor. Not little green men!"
"Nobody says 'little green men' anymore. They say 'grays' now."
"I don't believe in that UFO conspiracy crap."
"You don't believe in the current shuttle program, either."