Still, there it was. He had insisted on making it a matof official record that the Blackbury-Washington conbe fulfilled, even though the very term made it certain that the contract must be an anachronism. This was still a honky country, but Washington had been a black-majority town for decades, and identifying it now with the Federal government was a mere symbol-the real seats of power were to be found in the dispersed centers set up during the war scare of the nineties, mostly in the Deep South where Mister Charley could be relied on to come running with gun in hand at the least threat of a knee revolt. Who should know that betthan a man who’d exploited it often and often in his own programs?
His mind teemed with new possibilities. It wouldn’t stop, and why should anyone expect it to? For ten years he’d fostered his talents; they couldn’t be switched off like a vuset. Perhaps the cruelest thing Mayor Black had done to him, apart from taking a honky’s say-so in dehim, was depriving him of an outlet for his ideas. As though he were a time-traveler who’d spent years perfecting his Latin only to misfire and find the target city had been overrun by the Goths last week.
On the other hand-and he brightened a trifle at the realization-he had been spared what would have hapin the inverse situation. Suppose some dark-skinned misfit had been deposited at the outskirts of Blackbury: instant directives would have come down telling the local vu-station to get him on the beams right away, coax him into virulent denunciation of his former friends before his wrath had cooled.. It was as much to guard against that risk as because he was genuinely afraid of the way he might be treated that he had inon full compliance with the Blackbury-Washington contract.
But, as a mercy, he had been spared the expected siege of cameras and mikes, interviewers and political agents. He might have said, in his first outbreak of fury, things he couldn’t have lived down. And after all it was Uys, the white Afrikaner, who had been at the bottom of his trouble. Venial, power-hungry, oversexed, whathis faults might be, surely Mayor Black was too intelligent to go on undermining his own position! Sooner or later he was bound to realize that in dispensing with his internationally famous vu-man Pedro Diablo he was throwing away one of his most valuable weapons, and that that must be exactly what Uys had wanted in the first place!
There was a shrill buzzing sound. He jumped, then made the automatic mental correction. That was the noise a comweb made out here when someone was callup. Back in Blackbury, of course, the call-sign was the thump of an African speaking drum uttering the Yoruba phrase for “come and listen.” He was going to have to rid himself of a hell of a lot of ingrained relike a typist changing to a machine with a differkeyboard layout. But he would just have to suffer in silence.
Sighing, he announced that he was ready to accept the call.
It was almost surprising that a room large enough to hold an audience of forty for the performance by the pythoness had been incorporated in the design of the hospital. The emphasis Mogshack placed on unbreachprivacy was so intense that there were no assembly halls, open sitting-rooms nor even a gymnasium. Moghimself preferred not to deal with his staff face to face; he “retired and regrouped” so frequently that weeks might pass without even his senior assistants encounterhim in the flesh.
However, worried for fear his plans might later need to be altered in the light of experience, the architect had insisted on some areas of the hospital being fitted with retractable walls, and taking away half a dozen of these in a sector temporarily not occupied by pacreated a space adequate for the performance.
The audience had already begun to assemble when Reedeth switched on his comweb screen to watch the proceedings. He had never had the least intention of insisting that he be physically present, but he had been unable to resist the chance of making Ariadne blush. He chuckled as he glanced over the green-clad patients entering the room, but his amusement faded the instant he realized that among the first of them was Harry Madison.