Diablo passed his hand over his forehead, looking dazed. “It’s fantastic,” he admitted. “The detail, I mean. Like Uys’s reaction to the suggestion that he’d been hired like a Bantu houseboy, to clean house for a knee-blank. it’s in character, damn it! Christ, if I’d been allowed this kind of equipment instead of studio sets and actors-!”
“Allowed?”
“I mean if the budget had run to it.” Diablo overcame his excitement with an effort. “So what sort of answer are you going to propose for the question you started with-why is Uys in Blackbury?”
Flamen turned back to the keyboard he had used first. “That’s still being comped,” he said when the screen lit. “The little arrow-see it?-indicates the rating is still going up as fresh data are assessed. I’ll leave that to cook for a moment and get the special item out of the way. That’s some tape I made yesterday at the Ginsberg Hospital; there was a pythoness performing and I reher trance. It’ll make a nice ground-softener for something which may eventually turn out to be rather big.”
“One of the items you screened earlier?” Diablo in
“No, something new which is only at the tentative stage. We have this offer of free Federal computer time, as you know, and one of the things I want to do with it is have. Well, have someone padded-it doesn’t matwho.” Flamen had almost forgotten that Prior was in the room; he gave him an uneasy glance.
“You see, I suspect that the treatment patients in the Ginsberg are getting may sometimes make them worse instead of better, but the director is Elias Mogshack, and he’s got such a planetary reputation I’d need absounquestionable authority to back a challenge to him. Let’s just ask what would happen if my suspicions were well-founded, though.” He stretched one arm out and struck a code again. The figure which appeared on the screen provoked an exclamation of approval.
“Ninety-plus! I can’t recall when I last had such a high reading!”
“In favor of what?” Diablo asked.
“Of his being tossed on the garbage pile. In which case I literally don’t dare not soften the ground-let’s allot that pythoness’s trance the most we can give a single subject according to our contract with HolocosThat’s four minutes. There! Are we ready for anyelse yet? Still not? You picked a good day, Diablo-we seem to have tapped a gang of very deep subNever mind, there’s one other point I’d like comped before I start compiling the tape for the show and we still have about ninety minutes in hand. Let’s see what our chances are of curing the sabotage trouble I told you about, given unlimited free Federal computer time. Of course, faced with that Holocosmic is bound to cave in right away, but I believe in doublechecking.”
He leaned over the board and carefully composed the question. At his shoulder, watching every move, Diablo said, “This sabotage thing-have your employers given way to pressure from someone you offended?”
“I wish people did get sufficiently offended to react like that,” Flamen muttered. “But it’s been two years since an advertiser tried to have me taken off the beams because I said something he didn’t like. Out here peojust don’t seem to care very much any more. Most likely, Holocosmic themselves want to move me over for another all-advertising slot.”
The words died. On the screen, in response to his coded inquiry, there was a single large digit: an inconinexplicable, incomprehensible zero.
US looks to a long, violent summer
From Richard Scott, Washington
It is generally accepted as inevitable that the racial riots in American cities this summer will exceed in violence and number even those of last year.
And because their causes, as analysed in the National Advisory Committee’s report, are so basic, so deep-rooted, so much a product of the pattern of Amerilife, they will be eradicated only after a major national effort and over a long period of time.
Meanwhile the national Government, the State and city police forces, and the orcitizens, both black and white, are already preparing themselves for what may well be the most riotous summer in the nation’s history.
Forces standing by