“Because that’s how I feel.” Stanley smiled, but he didn’t feel like his smile. He would have to talk about the managing editor—that was clear enough. The church was cold, almost too cold. Then he said, “Not entirely. I think it’s a question of who do you want to spend most of your days talking with, who it is you most can’t do without on that front.”

“It’s important because of the message it sends to the Room,” Adam said, a little irritated by Stanley’s weak attempt at interest, but he meant this—this observation mattered to him. “It’s important because I feel we’re slipping.”

Stanley knew this perennial problem had to do lately with the White House surveillance story the other paper had managed to get. In Adam’s mind, Martina had been responsible for that, because she hadn’t argued with Adam about placing trust in Mitch Pendleton, an old head. She should have fought. Stanley knew that if she had fought Adam—that would have been wrong too. Her elbows would have been deemed too sharp. It was impossible not to get on the wrong side. They should have just seen that. Why didn’t they? If Stanley had written the management tomes that no editor studied (they had no training; they reported, then edited), he would have made a diagram with pale yellows, greens, and pinks mapping this phenomenon. Instead, in real life, the wrong side you got on in any interoffice battle was judged a character trait. In Martina’s case it was: not assertive enough. No one considered what the other side of wrong would have meant.

The clobbering had continued. That got said. Often. The other paper had been pushing out driblets of new information that were termed staying on top of the story, forcing television to follow, blogs to fizz, columnists to insist and dismiss. Stanley paid it little mind. But Adam, he did. Adam cared deeply.

“It’ll break Martina’s heart” was all Stanley could think to say. “She deserves the job. This latest foul-up—it shouldn’t dominate your thinking. There’s only so much she can do.”

“Gordon inspires people. He’s a gifted, aggressive journalist with a keen eye for a story, a masterful sense of history and politics.”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

“Stanley, you really are biased.”

Stanley resisted the impulse to shrug. What he really wished was that he could tell Adam what Vera had been finding out about the pilot. But it was too early. She needed to learn more. Right now, what she had was not much more believable than a UFO sighting. Oh. He realized now. Wood contracted and expanded, didn’t it, with temperature changes? The pew, the cold, it made sense. The church’s floor of stone would magnify the least reverberation.