“I’m excessively fond of my own opinions,” Conroy said wryly. “Students are generally sufficiently overnot to shout their professors down, even these days, and it gives me a false sense of achievement when I see my own doctrines coming back at me in their term papers. But I had no business taking it for granted you’d want to stick around here, of course. It’s just that-well, like I said, we have a problem, and. Do you get hunches, Mr. Diablo?”
“I guess I do, now and then. Not that they amount to real premonitions, if that’s what you’re driving at Or else I’d still be at home and a lot happier. But one gets a feel for the propaganda potential of any given news-item, for example.”
“That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about,” Conroy nodded. “Over the past hour or two I’ve been seeing and hearing some absolutely extraordinary things, and there’s a tantalizing sense of a pattern growing out of them. You got the same feeling, didn’t you, Flamen?”
A little annoyed at being shuffled to the sidelines on his home ground, Flamen gave a curt nod; a heartbeat later he repented and amplified it, looking puzzled.
“Yes, back there at the hospital I had this momentary fit of-of excitement, I guess it was. It was so strong it made me feel dizzy.”
“I’m still getting it,” Lyla said, very pale. She was standing in the doorway as though shy about entering. “I never felt anything like it before-at least, not since I was a kid and everybody around me was busy preparing for war to break out I didn’t understand what was hapof course, but I distinctly associate to the same mixture of fear and excitement.”
“Miss Clay is a pythoness,” Conroy said to Diablo. “How do you feel about pythonesses?”
There was a pause. At length, with a chuckle, Diablo drew up the left sleeve of his smart New York-styled oversuit and revealed that just below the elbow he was wearing a Conjuh Man Inc. juju bracelet: an intricately braided ring of hair from a lion’s mane.
“It’s the kind of thing I guess we know more about than blanks do,” he said. “You take sibyl-pills, Miss Clay?”
“Ah-yes.”
“We kneeblanks were used to tapping the same kind of mental forces long before they got around to synthe drugs you use in a clean modem laboratory. I have-I mean I had-a seeress on my staff back home who could do almost everything these computers do exbuild up reconstructed scenes for transmission. Used her a lot, like about one story a month regularly wherewe needed more data than we could get through official channels. She was right, too, four times out of five. Matter of fact I’m kind of glad to see how blank society has been turning back to human insights these past few years instead of sticking to machines exclu
“That’s fascinating,” Conroy said. “I never heard about that.”
Diablo’s lip curled. “You weren’t intended to. We’ve been running the Fed authorities in little circles trying to trace leaks which don’t exist. Which they will conto do, I don’t doubt, even if you go straight to the comweb and tell them what I just said. It’s what hapwhen you rely too much on machinery-you wind up following the same old mechanical grooves all the time. Automatics don’t make allowances for like differof personality. You lay down hard-and-fast prinfor them, and they follow them blindly to the most absurd conclusions, and eventually they drag you along in their wake.”
“Damned right,” Conroy said. “I knew you were a thinking man, Mr. Diablo, and I’m even more glad to have met you than I expected to be. Look, why don’t we sit down and talk about this thing we seem to have got involved in?”
“Sure,” Diablo nodded. “If you take it seriously I’m willing to bet on my being interested too.” He glanced at his watch. “I would kind of like some lunch, though-I didn’t eat breakfast today.”
“I’m sure we can send out for some. Flamen?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake! Yes, of course we can!” ScowlFlamen moved around his desk and sat down in his regular chair. “I warn you, though, Professor, that if this turns out to be the waste of time I half expect I’m going to be very damned angry.”