"You do think it's funny."

"I'm merely applying a lesson somebody taught me when I started here. If it happened yesterday, it ain't news. And the News Nipple reports the news."

"This isn't strictly for the Nipple," Walter admitted.

"Uh-oh."

He ignored my expression, which I hoped was sufficiently sour, and plowed ahead.

"We'll use cuts from your stories in the Nipple. Most of 'em, anyway. You'll have Brenda to do most of the leg work."

"What are you talking about?" Brenda asked Walter. When that didn't work, she turned to me. "What's he talking about?"

"I'm talking about the supplement."

"He's talking about the old reporters' graveyard."

"Just one story a week. Will you let me explain?"

I settled back in my chair and tried to turn off my brain. Oh, I'd fight it hard enough, but I knew I didn't have much choice when Walter got that look in his eye.

The News Nipple Corporation publishes three pads. The first is the Nipple itself, updated hourly, full of what Walter Editor liked to think of as "lively" stories: the celebrity scandal, the pseudo-scientific breakthrough, psychic predictions, lovingly bloody coverage of disasters. We covered the rougher and more proletarian sports, and a certain amount of politics, if the proposition involved could be expressed in a short sentence. The Nipple had so many pictures you hardly needed to read the words. Like the other padloids, it would not have bothered with any copy but for the government literacy grants that often provided the financial margin between success and failure. A daily quota of words was needed to qualify for the grants. That exact number of words appeared in each of our issues, including "a," "an," "and," and "the."

The Daily Cream was the intellectual appendix to the swollen intestine of the Nipple. It came free to every subscriber of the pad-those government grants again-and was read by about one in ten, according to our more optimistic surveys. It published thousands of times more words per hour, and included most of our political coverage.

Somewhere between those two was the electronic equivalent of the Sunday supplement, published weekly, called Sundae.

"Here's what I want," Walter went on. "You'll go out and cover your regular beats. But I want you to be thinking Sundae while you do that. Whatever you're covering, think about how it would have been different two hundred years ago, back on Earth. It can be anything at all. Like today, sex. There's a topic for you. Write about what sex was like back on Earth, and contrast it to what it's like now. You could even throw in stuff about what people think it's gonna be like in another twenty years, or a century."

"Walter, I don't deserve this."

"Hildy, you're the only man for it. I want one article per week for the entire year leading up to the bicentennial. I'm giving you a free hand as to what they're about. You can editorialize. You can personalize, make it like a column. You've always wanted a column; here's your chance at a by-line. You want expensive consultants, advisors, research? You name it, you got it. You need to travel? I'm good for the money. I want only the best for this series."