“But just a moment!”
“Shut up and hear me out, will you? You can’t expect me to believe you’re going after Mogshack for your wife’s sake, when you’ve admitted that you’d drifted so far apart you didn’t even realize she was taking Ladromide-hm? Oh, I’m not blaming you! Marriage isn’t compuland making a success of it is even less so, and anymarriage doesn’t conform with Mogshack’s celeideal that can always be approached more closely ‘like a mathematical limit.’ Your motives don’t much conme, so let’s forget them for the moment, hm?”
Flamen buried his scowl in his glass.
“Now my motives, on the other hand, are something I want to try and make clear to you. It may take a while, so let’s go and sit down, shall we?” He turned and led the way to a nearby lounge, not allowing the distraction to brake the steamroller progress of his discourse. “To draw on medical images with which you may not be familiar, I regard people like Mogshack as counterof the homeopaths who used to teach, in somatic medicine, the virtues of doses of the causative agent as cures for everything from poisoning to pyorrhea. Cerif someone is pathologically afraid of kneeblank armies marching up his front path, you may stabilize him superficially by training him to use a gun and fire it more quickly and more accurately than his potential attacker. But consider, Mr. Flamen, what is the actual, physical result?” His tone changed completely; he had been alternating between banter and self-deprecatory hectoring, but now he leaned forward with almost painsincerity.
“It’s a dead man on the path, Mr. Flamen,” he said. “And it’s no part of a doctor’s duty to encourage the taking of life. True?”
To Flamen’s surprise he found that his mouth had gone dry. He gave a wary nod.
“Now an honest cure,” Conroy pursued, “would lie somewhere along the axis where the man coming up the path was invited in, and enjoyed his visit, and left his host pleased to have entertained him. Does the image get across, or are people already too isolated to consider that idea any longer?”
Cautiously Flamen said, “Well, it’s obviously better to have people meeting as friends than as enemies.”
“But it doesn’t end there, in a platitude!” Conroy thumped the arm of the couch and raised a faint cloud of dust “Or rather, it shouldn’t. When did you last do something to bring people closer together? Isn’t your daily show designed to do the opposite? Spoolpigeons foment distrust in a systematic professional manner.”
“Now look here!” Flamen slammed his glass down on the table before them. “I pick liars and peculators and hypocrites for my targets! I’d be ashamed to do anyelse!”
“With the result that people who pay attention to you start to question the motives of everybody around them.”
Conroy said. “They take it for granted that the world is riddled with corruption and chicanery and fraud.”
“You think it’s better to be deceived than to be told the truth?”
“You think it’s good for people to imagine that everywho’s richer or more powerful or more fortunate than themselves got there by cheating and lying and wriggling through loopholes in the law?”
For a long moment the two men stared at one another, less than arm’s length apart, until Conroy gave a chuckle and reached to retrieve his beer.
“Apologies, Mr. Flamen. The last thing I want to do is attack someone who dislikes hypocrisy. So do I. But, you see, there is this paradox which bothers me terribly. Day in, day out, for-what?-forty-odd weeks of the year, I imagine, you deliver your exposes and your bits of scandal which may, I admit, achieve results like levering corrupt officials out of their jobs or something of that sort. But what you do and say isn’t a function of the number of public injustices you hear about-it deon the three-vee slot you have to fill. Have to, five times a week! At the very least I’m sure you must often have blown up some triviality into a grand crusade simply because nothing bigger had turned up the same day.”
Flamen said, slowly, “Yes, I’d have to plead guilty on that. And.” He hesitated, then forced the words out, recalling what Diablo had said about gauging the success of a show by the number of suicides it provoked. “And pretty often exposes like that are regarded as especially successful, not because they were really imbut because the target was exceptionally badly defended. Like you get some poor son-of-a-bitch killing himself in shame.”