The station was oddly quiet today. Maybe it was the absence of Spruance Del Curtin, who’d gotten pulled off to some other duty and had Quinn Merton taking over his shift for the day.
But Autumn never had any trouble with him. It probably helped that she was the daughter of a Shep herself, and had inherited her father’s long face and lanky build. All the Sheps had taken one look at her and known that she was Off Limits for their antics.
Still, she was noticing his absence far too much as she sat at her desk, trying to work her way through the latest reports from Earth. At least AP and Reuters were still reporting, although she had her doubts about the reliability of some of the stringers. Especially after she’d talked with Dr. Thuc and some of the people up at Gagarinsk, she was very cautious about any reports about analysis or sequencing of the genome of the diablovirus, especially the ones suggesting it might have been artificially manipulated. Without evidence that the person doing the reporting had a strong background in the biological sciences, there was no telling how well they understood what their sources were telling them, or how much they might be letting wishful thinking or fear color their understanding.
Of more concern were the local reports she could still pick up — and the fact that a number of local radio and TV stations had stopped updating their websites altogether. Just how badly were things unraveling down there? Not just in the areas where technological civilization had been primarily an elite phenomenon and people outside the big showplace cities continued to live as their ancestors had from time out of mind, but in places she considered thoroughly modern.
Heck, there were several small-town radio stations in Minnesota that hadn’t updated their websites in over a week. Call signs she recognized from late-night twirling of the radio dial,. that she’d followed for old times’ sake. Some of them even had people she knew personally from broadcast journalism classes at U-Minn.
Would it do any good to try to raise them by e-mail? Most of the station websites did include contact information, at least for their news staff if not for the on-air personalities.
At least then you might be able to get a better sense of just what’s happening on the ground, without the filter of what appearances officialdom wants presented to the rest of the Solar System.