“In favor of their own private equipment?”
“Seems likely, I’d say.”
“Maybe they know something,” Diablo said after a moment for thought. “Did you check the current list of Iron Mountain clients to see if there’s someone on it who’s on the Gottschalk blacklist?”
“Ah.” Flamen bit his lip. “Damn it, I didn’t think of that. Thank you. I’ll see if anything comes of it, but it may take me a while to get hold of the client list.” He tapped his keys again, on the adjacent board this time, thinking about the idea of the whole of Iron Mountain being blown up, say by a smuggled nuke. That would wreck the organization of at least a thousand major corporations.
And it was a possibility he certainly should have con
“Now!” he resumed. “We have some tape already from a special item, so we can afford to pick and choose today. We’ll start, I think, with a subject of personal into yourself. What’s Herman Uys doing in Black-bury and how did he con Mayor Black into firing his key vu-man?”
“Now just a-!” Diablo tensed instantly; just as quickly he canceled the reaction under Flamen’s level gaze.
“You approve of a South African blank being alto sabotage the American knee community’s propchannels?” Flamen said silkily.
“I-ah.” Diablo drew a deep breath and finally contrived a headshake.
“Very well then. Let’s find out what stock we have available for Uys. I don’t have to ask about Mayor Black; he’s vain, and we have tape on him we could lasso the moon with.” Flamen moved to a computer on the wall at right angles to the first one.
“More or less what I thought,” he muttered when the data were screened in response to his question. “Pracnothing! Black-and-white 2-D material and that’s it Well, we can make do with that. This is a recent one, comparatively speaking.” The screen blurred, cleared, showed Uys coming down the steps from a plane door, presumably at home in South Africa, being greeted by his family and gesturing away a group of reporters.
“Let’s have color. holographic depth. yes, that’s better. good. we can abstract from that and blend it with Mayor Black and let’s see now. Amerilocation and b.g., better have some macoots. Ah, that’s not bad for a start, is it?”
This was the part of his job which was genuinely creative, and he always enjoyed it very much: the adaptation of the most unpromising raw materials to generate a full-color, three-dimensional construct so conthat only a person who had actually been on the scene of the event could point to inaccuracies.
“Christ, it’s like magic,” Diablo muttered, making no attempt to appear blase. The screened image had evolved through a period of chaotic confusion into a fixed picture of Uys at a laboratory bench-unquestionin America, not Africa, though it was the total imand not any specific detail which made that plain-turning to speak to Mayor Black as the latter walked in accompanied by a pair of armed macoots.
“Nothing magical about it,” Flamen said offhandedly. “I just had the right data to draw on-typical genetic lab design, the proper computer printouts, the proper material in jars and dishes lying around, that kind of thing. The scenes are automatically weighted for weather conditions, clothing, angle of sunlight, and so on, and all we have to do now is add the sound.” He struck codes on the keyboard. “Voices-we’re bound to have something on tape, I guess, even for Uys, and even if we haven’t the machines will fake a South African acCharacteristic phrase-weighting-let’s spice it with a few choice Afrikaner slogans. And here we go.”
The fixed image moved. Voices emerged from a conspeaker. Mayor Black said, “An’ how you gettin’ on with cleanin’ house for us?”
Uys flinched, colored a little, controlled himself and answered in a dead voice that no one could have failed to assign to an Afrikaner, “If you mean how is the camdeveloping to purify the melanist heredity of this city, I have located several impure lines which need to be discontinued. In particular there’s a mongrel called Pedro Diablo who-”
Flamen flicked a control and the sound faded, though the images continued. “How does that strike you?” he inquired.