Dmitri PchanskiiThe chamber in the communications center was called a “privacy booth,” but the enclosing walls felt like a tiny coffin around Dmitri Pchanskii’s bulky frame.
The echo screen in front of him seemed too small to capture anything more than his surgically distorted face, giving him no room at all to gesture and move his hands—and Pchanskii liked to emphasize his words as he spoke, with a wave here and a shaking fist there, leaning forward to address his audience on a more intimate level, or spreading his arms wide to encompass the whole world. Instead, the cramped image would make him look like a monster, a real Martian, when he broadcast back to Earth. But he could see no way to fix it, so he would have to take advantage of the shock value. He would get only one chance to use
