Mercury Rises Read Online Free Page A

still survive. Every day the Banner lost its thousands and the Beacon lost its tens of thousands. And now that Harry was dead and the Banner was on the verge of collapse, Finch had evidently decided to take the high road by looting its rival for its assets and staff. The Beacon didn't need any more reporters or editors; Christine could only assume that Finch's true motivation was to obliterate any memory of the Banner and prevent it from ever rising from the ashes.
    As ambivalent as Christine had been about the Banner 's strategy of combining proselytizing and news reporting, she found the Beacon 's methodology even more distasteful. At least Harry was up-front about his motivations (excluding the bit about proclaiming the Apocalypse); there was never any attempt to conceal the faith-driven agenda of the Banner . The Beacon , however, was another story.
    The Beacon was run by the sort of cynical atheists who stuck four-legged fish symbols labeled "DARWIN" on their cars in response to the Jesus fish that marked the hatchbacks of their Christian counterparts. Admittedly, the Jesus fish trend had always seemed a little silly to Christine. The fish had been used as a secret identifier by the early Church in the days of persecution by the Romans; sticking it on your car in the twenty-first century reeked of the sort of smug camaraderie that afflicted aging fraternity brothers and those old women who wore red hats when they met for brunch at Denny's. But the Darwin fish---that was something else entirely. Once it stopped being an amusing, ironic commentary (after about the eight hundredth time she had seen one), it began to strike her as somewhat petty and mean-spirited. Beyond that, it had the unintentional effect of elevating Darwin to the position of secular messiah, which seemed to Christine to be a telling marker of the subconscious motivations of the amphibianists, the automotive decal version of a Freudian slip. 2
    In other words, the Beacon 's staff patted themselves on the back for advancing the cause of Reason and Science, but in reality their motivation was more negative than positive; more anti-religion than pro-science. This wasn't entirely their fault; it's much easier to rally people behind the idea of a miraculous savior than the idea that the purpose of the Universe, if there is one, can only be pieced together through a painstakingly dull process intelligible only to the sort of people who took honors calculus in high school. And since magazine editors tended to be yearbook committee people, the Beacon 's involvement in the scientific process was essentially reduced to the role of yelling, "GO SCIENCE! BEAT RELIGION!"
    That sort of deluded secularism was the last thing Christine needed after three years of dealing with deluded religiosity, and in any case she was more convinced than ever, thanks to her involvement in the events of the almost-Apocalypse, that she was not cut out to be a reporter. Unlike the Banner 's other employees, she had the additional burden of knowing exactly what had happened in Anaheim and not being able to tell a soul.
    What had happened was that her boss and sometimes friend, Harry Giddings, had been duped into proclaiming the onset of the Apocalypse by a Machiavellian schemer who turned out to be not only a demoness but a bad sport and a plagiarist. As a result of his duping, Anaheim Stadium and everyone in it had imploded, sucked through a pinpoint portal into an adjacent plane. That was a tough truth to face, and an even tougher one to keep quiet about. And as skeptical as anyone at the Banner might have been about that story, she knew that the smug twits at the Beacon would be even less receptive. Not that she planned on telling anyone, but somehow the idea of working among diehard skeptics filled her with dread. It would be like Troy Van Dellen moving to the rural Midwest: he still showed no signs of coming out of the closet, but even a closeted homosexual had to feel more comfortable