Blind with rage, he stormed towards the door, and stopped only when one of the two armed macoots who had brought him here, and who had waited on guard at the entrance since his arrival, prodded him hard enough in the belly for the pain to penetrate his armor of fury.
Recovering his self-possession, he turned slowly and found that Lenigo was on his feet, glowering at him. There was a moment during which the air seemed to crackle with invisible lightning. Then Lenigo rounded on the man nearest to him, Mehmet abd’Allah.
“Looks like Mayor Black didn’t lose his marbles! Letting this traitor go was a right good notion!”
In a strained voice Mehmet said, “Yes, Morton, but if he does know as much as this-”
“No loyal kneeblank would sell our secrets to a honky spoolpigeon! You heard him say he told Matthew FlaLenigo wiped his sweating face. “Come Monday the bastard will have spread it all over!”
“No, baby,” Diablo said. “The Gottschalks bought out Holocosmic to close down the Flamen show. They want you to go right along promoting their sales for them.”
“And he didn’t say he told Flamen,” Dr. Barrie Ellison said. “He said Flamen told him.”
“You’re not going to believe.” Lenigo’s words trailed away as he looked around the ring of dark stern faces enclosing him.
“It does kind of fit together,” Rosaleen Lincolnson said reluctantly. “Like the blanks are better armed than we are right now, and even if we did get hold of System C units we still would have to learn to use them.”
“Meantime the blanks would come down like hawks,” Diablo said. “So scared that we might be able to afford the cut-price equipment, they’d make damned sure no one in any of the enclaves could even make the down payment.”
“They’re vicious bastards,” Dr. Ellison conceded. “It figures.”
“But-!” Lenigo exploded. Mehmet abd’Allah cut him short.
“Is this a Gottschalk sales campaign?” he demanded of Diablo.
“Biggest ever, that’s all.” Diablo clenched his fists. “You fall for this con job, you won’t have a moment’s peace the rest of your life and it won’t be a long life either.”
“Don’t listen to him!” Lenigo screamed.
The others ignored him. They were exchanging seriglances. Jones W. Jones said, “I guess this needs to be checked out before we commit ourselves any further. I mean, I know the Gottschalks always feed new weapinto the enclaves first, but it’s one thing to think of it as a compensation for economic and numerical inferiand another as a systematic con job.”
“Didn’t you ever watch my shows out of Blackbury?” Diablo demanded in genuine astonishment
“Of course, but-”
“But what?” Diablo stamped his foot “But you never took them seriously, just dismissed them as anti-blank propaganda? The hell with you, then! There was truth in there, truth as I see it, and that’s what I’m saying now and I’d honestly rather be among blanks than among fools who can fall in behind this bastard Lenigo and dance right along to the tune the Gottschalks play. Let me out of here before I throw up.”
He strode towards the door and this time the macoots made no attempt to stop him.
When he had gone, Lenigo said, “Broze an’ sis, I give you my word.”
They weren’t listening. They were paying attention to Dr. Ellison, who was saying, “In any case, if this kind of supposed-to-be-secret detail has reached Pedro Diablo, and if we’re to believe that he learned it off a blank spoolpigeon, we got to cool it. It simply isn’t going to work the way we have it set up.”
“But-” Lenigo said.
“Freeze it,” Mehmet abd’Allah told him, and turned back to Dr. Ellison.
“Now me, I don’t relish being used any more than he does.” A jerk of the head towards the closed door through which Diablo had vanished. “I suggest we should.”
Flamen looked from the looped-tape cut of Celia to the reality and back again, and tried with some puzzleto analyze his own feelings. Something wrong.? No, not wrong exactly; just not as he had expected. The fury he had felt at being deprived of his show by the new Holocosmic directorate-Gottschalk nomiall of them, assembled hastily from half a dozen networks and cobbled into a spur-of-the-moment board-should have lasted indefinitely. To have a lifetime career snatched away ought to have created a lasting grudge.