He thought of his promise yesterday that he was goto fix Mogshack’s wagon. Why had he said that? Behe was honestly worried about Celia? He’d believed so on the surface of his mind, but the sharp edge of Diablo’s personality, honed in a community where black was black and white was white and there were no shades of gray in between, had made the pretense gape apart like the splitting of a drumhead.
No. In his heart of hearts he was no longer interested in Celia; he’d become resigned months past to losing her as a wife, and once she was evicted from that role she became one person among millions, a stranger. Yet, just as he had once spoken in harsh uncompromising terms like Diablo’s, so too his younger self had uttered and meant the formal public promises of a marriage ceremony.
It was one thing to recognize as a bitter fact that over half the marriages contracted in twenty-first century America had already ended in divorce, though the cenwas barely fourteen years old; it was something else again to relegate a person who had once ruled your universe to the status of a mere tool, the instrument to undermine Mogshack and demonstrate that Matthew Flamen the spoolpigeon was still a power to reckon with.
All that had been poised at the edge of awareness, worked out during the night and needing only the last-straw impact of circumstance to bring it avalanching into the open. Diablo happened to have been the bearer of that straw, and had let it fall at the moment when rational judgment warned that he dare not respond, for there was a show to be taped and comped and revised and delivered in barely two hours.
“Matthew, is something wrong?” he heard Prior say. With a tremendous effort he dragged himself back to the present.
“No, nothing,” he lied with convincing casualness. “I was just considering how best to acquaint Mr. Diablo with our techniques, but I guess that’s a non-problem, isn’t it? You must use equipment more or less like ours in Blackbury.”
Diablo scanned the computer boards which occupied three walls of the office, with a screen over each, and shook his head.
“Nope. I doubt there’s a setup like this in any of the knee enclaves except maybe Detroit, and if there’s one there it’s probably used for defense and budgeting, not for propaganda. Frankly, I been wondering what it’s all for.”
“Show you, then,” Flamen said, rising. “We don’t have too much time to put our day’s show together, but I did once comp a ten-minute show in level time, so if I have to hurry I can. Let’s see now!” He crossed the room to stand before the board closest to the doorthis one was the most heavily used, as could be seen from the deep nail-marks in the tops of its keys.
“We’ll start with the one that got away,” he said, half-mockingly, half-angrily. “The Morton Lenigo thing. Backfacts first”-he tapped a code on the board with practiced fingers. “Now that they’re set up, let’s take a starting point from which we can dig deeper. For inlet’s ask what the Detroit city government threatto do in order to secure Lenigo’s admission.”
Diablo had come over to stand beside him and watch. Flamen was pleased to hear his very faint hiss of inbreath as he voiced the idea which had struck him in the skimmer.
“It was Detroit, then? You of all people ought to know. Don’t worry, though. I’m not going to force inout of you. Our equipment isn’t the best in the world, but it’s well primed with data, and anyway I didn’t have to comp that one out-I just deduced it.” At the back of his mind he was aware that he was adopting this patronizing tone in order to get back at the knee for that dismaying fit of insight he’d suffered a minute earlier, and was unable to prevent himself continuing, and was dismayed all over again at that too.
Christ, he thought: I’m beginning to wonder why I still have any friends left if this is me-now. Worse yet. do I have any friends?
But aloud, in response to the appearance on the screen over the computer board of a short list of key subjects each followed by a probability rating in perterms: “See here, it says the most sensitive point for them to apply pressure at is their annual tax-assessment. They’ve nearly satched the market for skimcommercial transport vehicles and their other main products, and they didn’t quite compute their obsolesprogram as cleverly as they intended. We could take at least a three-month blockade before we ran out of replacements, and if we had to we could welsh on the contract the Federal government made with them and start producing our own spares. Whereas they’d have starvation riots in about a month and a half; we deliberately keep down their stocks of food. However, their purchases of power and water bring in so big a slice of the Federal budget, in hard African and Middle Eastern currencies, that threatening to set up-oh, pera condensation plant. Is something wrong?”