“With pleasure,” Campbell said, his tone contradicting the words. “Well, perhaps I should start by explaining that my work is concerned with the negotiation of city tax contracts, and this morning I had to visit Black-bury and discuss their purchases of water and power for the coming year. And just as I was leaving I-uh. Well, I had a rather awkward problem dumped in my lap.”
“Don’t tell me,” Prior said sourly. “The dinge there.” He pointed at the remaining corner of the screen. “Well, right now I have problems of my own, and the last thing-”
“I know you have, Mr. Prior,” Voigt cut in. “Do I have to remind you that the PCC monitors the transof all licensed vu-stations? It hasn’t entirely escaped our notice that the incidence of transmission faults affecting the Matthew Flamen show has hit a statistically improbable high. That’s why I thought of bringing our-ah-involuntary visitor to your attention. The name of that dinge, as you termed him, happens to be Pedro Diablo.”
“What?” Prior jerked like a newly hooked fish. “Are they out of their skulls, parting with a man like that? Why, he’s worth a couple of army corps all by himself!”
“I understand that’s his own opinion also,” Campbell muttered. “I had the story in not inconsiderable detail after he’d been forced into my skimmer at gunpoint this morning.”
“But what possessed them?”
“A visit from Herman Uys,” Campbell said.
“Uys? In Blackbury? But I wouldn’t have thought he’d be seen dead in.” Prior’s voice tailed away in beAfter a pause he added feebly, “Anyhow, I didn’t know he was in the country.”
“Nor did Diablo,” Campbell said grimly. “Nor-which is far worse-did the Immigration Service.” He wiped his face with a large yellow handkerchief. “The Afrimust have developed some wholly new technique for deceiving our computers, I guess. But that’s irrelethey’ve tipped their hand and we’ll be on guard in the future. Let’s stick to the point.”
He tucked away his handkerchief and leaned closer to the camera.
“Apparently Uys has been conducting heredity checks on all municipal employees. Mayor Black has rashly promised to cut back the non-melanist heredity of the city’s population to twenty-five percent in the next genand I need hardly tell you that the rigidity of his attitude is backfiring very satisfactorily. We’ve alhad undercover feelers regarding the proposed safe-conduct of surplus population units, chiefly young unmarrieds, to other cities in order to widen the gene-pool, but I’m pleased to say we can scotch that idea under the Mann Act. However.”
He hesitated. Suddenly his executive urbanity slipped like a carnival mask on a broken elastic.
“Frankly, Mr. Prior, we’re, engaged in so many tickmaneuvers right now, with such minuscule compuweightings in our favor, that the dismissal of Pedro Diablo is far from the unalloyed blessing it might apI doubt if you’re familiar with the contract bethe Federal government and the Blackbury city council, but it just so happens it’s one of the worst anyone ever wrote. Because it’s one of the oldest; it prethe advent of the computers we use nowadays to get rid of dangerous loopholes. Some crazy goddamned idiot thought we could bribe kneeblanks to desert from the enclaves, way back when, and there’s still a provn the contract which compels us to guarantee equivalent employment and better salary and living conditions to anyone who comes out of the city, whether he defects or gets deported. And Diablo knows all about that. He quoted clause, paragraph and line to me when I was bringing him away this morning. And he is boiling mad.”
“So it occurred to me,” Voigt put in, “that the services of one of (he most brilliant talents ever to handle the visual media might not inappropriately be engaged by the nearest surviving counterpart on blank-run channels of the programs he has been accustomed to prepare in his-ah-former environment. Especially since our computer analyses, Mr. Prior, indicate that some time around now your principal’s temperament is liable to get him into a certain amount of trouble with the Holodirectorate.”
The sly old fox! Prior shook his head in reluctant adThe PCC might be a dead letter, but Eugene Voigt certainly was not. There were so many possibilities inherent in the proposal just made to him that his head was spinning. If worse came to worst and Flamen stuinvolved himself in a quarrel with Holocosmic, it would be a marvelous lifeline to be associated with Diablo; talent like his would remain salable indefinitely. In point of fact, however, it seemed unlikely things would come to such a pass. Assuming Diablo really was as angry with his former boss as Campbell believed, why shouldn’t a joint Flamen-Diablo show become the only program which could tackle knee scandals as well as blank ones? That would bring the audience rushing back by the tens of millions-people like Nora, for inand his neighbors, half-fascinated and half-reby the walking talking aliens against whose dethey had to be on guard night and day.