The cab came to territory he recognized, and he stopped it at an all-night restaurant. Coffee might help. While he was waiting for it, he invested a dime in a call to his office; you never could tell, maybe someone had called.
Someone had. The Sleepless Secretary hooted and groaned and came across with the record of a familiar, scared voice: "Mr. Mundin, uh, this is Norvell Bligh. Can you come and get me out of jail?"
Chapter Eight
Norvie woke up with a start. They were joggling him, with identical, contemptuous smiles. Even in the fog of sleep he felt a little stab of pride at Virginia's beauty, a twitch of unhappiness at the same bony beauty smothered beneath the fat of her daughter.
"What's the matter?" he croaked.
His voice sounded odd, and he realized he wasn't wearing his hearing aid. He groped for it beside the bed. It wasn't there. He sat up.
He yelled at Alexandra, his voice thin and strange to him as it was sustained through the bones and cavities of his body rather than the neat chain of the auditory apparatus: "Where is it? If you've hidden it again I'll break your neck!"
Alexandra looked smugly shocked. She mouthed at him, "Goodness, Norvell, you know I wouldn't do that" The exaggerated mouthing was a mockery of consideration; he had repeatedly told her that exaggeration only distorted the lips.
Virginia tapped him on the shoulder and said something, stiff-lipped. He caught an "eep" and a "larm."
He clenched his fists and said, "What?"
She mouthed at him, "I said, you must have come in too drunk to set the alarm before you went to sleep. Get up. You're an hour late for work now."
He leaped from bed, anguish spearing his heart, Oh, God! An hour late on this day, of all days!
He found the hearing aid—on the floor in the entrance hall, where he couldn't possibly have left it, any more than he could possibly have failed to set the alarm. But he didn't have time for that minor point. He depilated in ten seconds, bathed in five, dressed in fifteen and shot out of the house.
Fortunately Candella wasn't in.
Norvie sent Miss Dali to round up his staff and began the tooling-up job for the integrator keyboard, while the production men busied themselves with their circuits and their matrices, and the job began. This was the part of Nome's work that made him, he confessed secretly to himself, feel most like God. He fed the directions to Stimmens, Stimmens fumblingly set up the punch cards, the engineers translated the cards into phase fields and interferer circuits. . . . And a World That Norvie Made appeared in miniature.
He had once tried to explain his feelings to Arnie. Arnie had snarled something about the presumptuous conceit of a mere pushbutton. All Norvie did, Arnie explained over many glasses of beer, was to decide what forms and images he wanted to see. It was The Engineers who, in Their wisdom, transmuted empty visions into patterns of light and color that magically took the form and movement of tiny fighters and wrestlers and spear-carriers. The original thought, Arnie explained severely, was nothing. It was the tremendous technical skill that transformed the thought into visual reality in the table-top model previewer that was important.
And Norvie humbly agreed. Even now he was deferential to the production men, those geniuses so well skilled in the arts of connecting Circuit A to Terminal IV, for they were Engineers. But his deference extended only to the technical crew. "Stimmens, you butterfingers," he snarled, "hurry it up! Mr. Candella will be here any minute!"
"Yessir," said Stimmens, hopelessly shuffling the stacks of notes out of Norvell's hands.
Stimmens was coming along well, Norvie thought. A touch of the whip was good for him.
It took twenty minutes and a bit more, and then Norvell's whole design for a Field Day was on punch cards. While Stimmens was correcting his last batch of cards, the production men began the highspeed run-through. The little punched cards went through the scanners; the packed circuits measured voltages and spat electrons; and in the miniature mockup of the Stadium, tiny figures of light appeared and moved and slew each other and left.
They were Norvell's own, featureless and bright, tiny and insubstantial. Where Norvell's script called for the bodies of forty javelin-throwers in the flesh, the visualizing apparatus showed forty sprites of light jabbing at each other with lances of fire. No blood spilled; no bodies stained the floor of the Stadium; only the little bodiless fire-figures that disappeared like any other pattern of excited ions when the current went off.
Somehow, inside Norvell's mind, it was here and not in the big arena that the real Field Days took place. He had heard the cries of the wounded and seen the tears of the next of kin waiting hopelessly in the pits, but they were not real; it was as mannikins that he thought of them always.
One of the production men looked up and said approvingly, "Good show, Mr. Bligh."
"Thanks," said Norvell gratefully. That was always a good sign; the technical crews had seen 'em all. Now the question was, what would Candella say?
He found out.
What Candella said, gently at first, was:
"Bligh, the upcoming Field Day is important. At least, it seems to me that it is. It seems to me that everything we do is important. Don't you think so?"
Norvell said, "Well—"
"I'm glad you agree. Our work is important, Bligh. It is a great and functional art form. It provides healthful entertainment, satisfying the needs of every man for some form of artistic expression. It provides escape—escape for the hardworking bubble-house class, escape for the masses of Belly Rave. For them, in fact, our work is indispensable. It siphons off then: aggressions so that they can devote their time to— uh—to comparatively harmless activities. Allotments and Field Days! Our society is built on them. You might call our work the very foundation of society, looked at in that way. Do you agree?"
Norvell's voice failed him. He said in almost a whisper: "Yes, sir."
Candella looked politely apologetic. "I beg your pardon?" "Yes, sir!" Norvell, too late, found he was almost bellpwing.
Candella looked pained. "You needn't shout." he reproved —gently, smilingly. "There is nothing wrong with my hearing." Norvell winced. You unutterable louse, he thought. But Candella was going right on. "—foundation of our society, as I say, but also an art form. The cultured classes appreciate our efforts on the artistic plane; the rabble of Belly Rave— with all respects, my dear Bligh, to the origin of your charming wife—need it on the glandular level. Every show we produce is important. But the Field Day——"
He hesitated, and the composition of his features changed. His thick brows came down like the ragged anvils of thunderclouds; his temples pulsed. His voice became a bass roar. He thundered, "The Field Day, you asinine little tineared incompetent, is the biggest day of the year! Not just because it draws the biggest audience—but because that's the one I am judged by! The Board attends. The Mayor attends. The men from G.M.L. attend. If they like it, good. If they don't—it's my head that's on the line, Bligh! And I don't want it lopped off because of the idiotic blunderings of a half-witted ass like you!"
Norvell opened his mouth; it hung open, wordless. Candella roared on, "Not a word! I want no excuses. You had the assignment, and you muffed it. Your notion of what constituted a Field Day was, of course, uninspired. But I thought that, with patching and improvising, we might get by. However, I no longer think so—not since examining the superb presentation that was handed me this morning—at nine o'clock, I might add." He slammed a sheaf of punch-cards on the desk. "By a member of your own staff, Bligh! A brilliant boy whom you have evidently been holding down. Thank God for his guts! Thank God for his loyalty! Thank God he had the courage and sense to come to me with this masterpiece instead of permitting you to destroy it!"