Sometime during the night Morton Lenigo managed to elude the ISM operatives assigned to tail him and when things had calmed down enough for such matters to come to the attention of their headquarters he had alhad almost five hours to lose himself.
“Assuming Voigt kept his promise,” Flamen said, punching the appropriate code into his comweb board with a series of crackling clicks, “this line ought to plug straight through to the Federal computer he’s reserved to sort out our interference problem. Yes, there we are. Now we’ll feed it the show as canned and let it compare that with the version received by the public, and draw the-ah-logical conclusion. There was somewrong with the reading we got earlier, that’s definite. Zero’s impossible.” He wondered if his consounded forced. “I’ll get IBM to check, see if the digit selector slipped its gears. Probably it ought to have shown 100.”
Prior was plucking at his lower lip. “Yes, I guess there isn’t any other explanation,” he muttered.
“So that’s it” Flamen pushed back his rotachair and started to rise.
“You mean.?” Diablo hesitated. “You mean you’re finished for the day?”
“Well-yes, of course. We only do the one slot, Monthrough Friday.”
“But you hardly seem to have done anything,” Diablo said. “I mean. Well, I have this feeling I must have missed something.”
“I tried to explain everything as I went along,” Flamen said. “But if there was something I overlooked-”
“No, I guess it’s just that I’m not used to working with your kind of equipment.” Diablo shook his head, an exof wonderment on his dark face. “Let me see if I got it right. All you needed to do was select the subright? And make up the reconstructions from the stock tape you found on file, and speak the commentary so it could be recorded. Then everything else was auto
“Sure.” Flamen was looking vaguely puzzled. “We always have exactly fifteen minutes-or to be strictly accurate, fourteen and forty-five seconds to allow for station ID at either end. And the commercials are prenaturally, and the new material is automatiadjusted so that it fits into the available time. The last computer on the row sort of weaves the various strands together and provided Holocosmic’s own comdon’t raise any objections we have the tape.”
“Are there many objections?”
“Oh. I guess we have to change something about once a week, on the average. It’s a lot too often, at that.”
Diablo thought about it for a while. Suddenly he laughed. “I must sound like a real country mouse,” he said. “It is kind of a shock, though. You see, I’ve been accustomed to working a nine-till-nine schedule five and often six days a week, with a couple of half-hour meal-breaks if I was lucky. This has live-action studio work beat to a faretheewell. Why, that snippet with Uys and Mayor Black alone would have had to be planned a week ahead for me to get such detail into it. Never mind casting and rehearsing the actors.” He paused, speculatively eying Flamen. “Would you mind if I asked a hell of a personal question?”
“Depends. Try me.”
“What do you pull in for this like three hours a day job?”
“Ah. Oh, it’s a matter of record, if you know where to look, and I guess it’s nothing to be ashamed of. A hundred thousand a month, gross. Mark you, that has to spread over rental and maintenance for the computers, this office, Lionel’s salary, my informers’ fund which about two or three times a year turns me up a beat which I couldn’t have deduced without access to consources, miscellaneous expenses like buying computer security codes, the whole shtick.”
“And-my salary now, as well?”
“I doubt if I could afford you!” Flamen gave a humorchuckle. “No, like you said, you wanted the letter of the Blackbury contract adhered to, so you’re a charge on Federal funds. As a matter of interest, though, what were they paying you in Blackbury?”
“Two thousand,” Diablo said after a brief hesitation. “Two thousand?” Prior almost fell off his chair. “Oh-but I guess that’s net, isn’t it?”
“Of course. I didn’t have to pay anyone or rent any equipment. I had a city-subsidized apt with a rent of only a hundred, no office costs, nothing else.”