He passed the outer gate well enough, fumbling his ID against the lockplate and fidgeting during the seconds it took for preliminary verification to come. The lock clicked and he burst in, pulling the girl after him.
"We wish to report ..." he began. I waved at him to shut up. "Name, number and duty," I said. "That's the routine." Of course the information had typed out from the banks before he got in.
"Oh. I'm sorry." I think he really was. "My name is Karl Onlon, professor of elementary biology, downstairs." That meant he tended a teaching machine at the center mid-town branch of the university. "Number ... my number is—" and he peered at his ID "—ah, US1006-929 113 274CE."
The point of asking for name, number and duty is to let the Source cool down a bit. He had, a little, so I said, "Okay, what's your story?"
"We wish to report signs of the presence of a herd of small ruminant animals in Central Park Memorial Plaza," he said. He waved toward the patch of white-mottled brown about a kilometer away, where dirt and rocks and a whole lake had been raised to rooftop level for an open-air park. Naturally, that was done when pointless things were still being done.
"What you tell me doesn't matter as far as appearing in the Sun is concerned," I told him. "But I have to know details before I can pass you in to the Scoop. The World Press Association decides on the stories." He nodded. "You are the Source?"
"Ah ... actually, no," Onlon said. "I'm the Second. My daughter Gini—" he'd been standing with his arm around the little girl, and squeezed her shoulder "—is the, uh, Source. But she is a very sensible person, and I will vouch for—Second—anything she tells you."
Truly, I was already getting a little uncomfortable with this pair. The girl hadn't said anything, but she stood looking grave and important, and something else too, up at her father. Open pride, it looked like. Yet sometimes she almost smiled. He was earnest enough, except when he looked down at her.
I was weighing all this while I listened with half an ear to the story. This wasn't a Flack, or a Flack's trick. That I was certain of. You can tell. Deviates don't come in father-daughter pairs, so it wasn't an obscenity kick. And this wasn't a Scoop-smash.
I didn't think it was a news story, either. But Onlon seemed quite convinced that this pack of animals that left the tracks was rare, not only in Nork but anywhere. The tracks were distinctive, he said. And the girl, whose voice matched her face, grave yet with a kind of ... happiness in it, did seem sensible. So I passed them in, to the Scoop.