Halfway through the last sentence Prior stopped payattention. Flamen deduced from his expression that at his end the screen had either switched to another picture or blurred out altogether again. He made to cut the circuit, but changed his mind. It was amusing to watch the normally imperturbable Prior mouthing curses which couldn’t be heard because at the same time as the vision outward had failed so had the sound inward.
But his enjoyment was short-lived. His smile vanished as he reverted to contemplation of the truth which Prior was resolutely declining to face for some such superficial reason, perhaps, as the idea that the directors of the Holocosmic network were-like Brutus-“honorable men.”
“A man can smile and smile and be a villain,” he murbriefly pleased with the aptness of the quotabut almost at once dismayed by the image of the smiler with the knife. What other explanation could there be for the interference which was cropping up daily on his program and on no other transmission from the Holostudios? It simply had to be sabotage.
Worse yet, it must be connived at by the directorate. Had it been due to infiltrators, Holocosmic would have stopped at nothing to eliminate it; they were as conas any company in the world about maintaining internal security. Instead of which, again and again the engineers had fobbed him off with declarations of their inability to trace the trouble.
The logical conclusion was that they wanted to move his slot over and make room for yet another all-adversegment. It was against the regulations laid down by the Planetary Communications Commission, of course, to run more than twelve hours’ continuous advertising out of the twenty-four, and getting rid of their last spool-pigeon would take Holocosmic over the prescribed limit. But the PCC was a bad joke and had been for years: an ancient watchdog without any teeth.
It wasn’t the first time they’d attempted to mislay him, moreover. They’d tried it directly following Celia’s breakdown, hiring a venial psychiatrist to testify that her resorting to sykes was due to her husband’s systemadisregard of her needs and preferences, this constisadistic cruelty. A person capable of such behathey’d argued, was unfit to perform before the great viewing public. (Horse laugh-if you dug into the private lives of the Holocosmic directorate you’d come up with material for another Hundred and Twenty Days without the need to plagiarize, and long ago Flamen had made himself a quiet promise that if they ever squeezed him hard enough he’d go out in a blaze of glory by swapping his last-ever taped show, duly apby the network’s computers, for another in which he gave chapter and verse on the directorate’s vices.)
Their real lever, though, had been fulcrumed on her commitment to the Ginsberg, a public hospital, instead of to a private sanitarium, and that Prior had miracuundermined in the shocked tones of an adoring brother: whose reputation stood higher in the contemworld than that of Elias Mogshack its director, universally acknowledged field-leader in remedial psy-who here among admitted laymen would questhe brilliance of one appointed to oversee the menhygiene of populous New York? So, a rapid comprowhereby he undertook to meet the cost of her incarhimself instead of leaving her as a charge on public funds, and consequent inevitable disaster.
At the time Flamen had wondered why the directorate gave ground so swiftly. He stopped wondering the mothe first of the swingeing monthly bills arrived, towith the unchallengeable State-comped contract to which he had carelessly committed himself. He didn’t have to consult a computer to discover that he was corAnd he couldn’t provide a cushion by, say, moving to a less expensive house. He was compelled to maintain that standard of living which was quote appropriate unquote for a person to whom Holocosmic allotted five slots a week. His accountants were first-rate and his tax demands were laughable, but he couldn’t weasel out of his obligatory expenditures. He was defeated behe started by the scale of Holocosmic’s computers; his own were good, but for equipment like theirs you had to hire computers like his to write the programs-no human being could manage it.
So knowing the knife was in: what to do? Make overto a rival network? Suicide-apart from the obvious truism that when only one spoolpigeon had managed to stay in business no network was likely to be interested in hiring a newcomer, he’d be dropped on his butt withhours on some specious but adhesive charge such as disloyalty to his employers. Also he would instantly stop being able to meet Celia’s hospital bills out of income, and the penalty for premature removal was colossal. Though Mogshack’s last report had been cautiously opit was clear that Celia was not by any means fully recovered. So that left one possible solution: hold his audience. Somehow. Anyhow. It was his only rethe computer factor which showed a higher ratfor him personally, Matthew Flamen, than for an all-advertising segment.