Walton blanked the screen and avoided the next caller. He called his secretary and said, “Will you instruct everyone now calling me to refer their business downstairs to Assist Administrator Eglin. If they don’t want to do that, tell them to put it in writing and send it to me. I can’t accept any more calls just now.” Then he added, “Oh, put me through to Eglin myself before you let any of those calls reach him.”
Eglin’s face appeared on the private screen that linked the two offices. The small man looked dark-browed and harried. “This is a hell of a job, Roy,” he sighed.
“So is mine,” Walton said. “Look, I’ve got a ton of calls on the wire, and I’m transferring them all down to you. Throw as many as you can down to the subordinates. It’s the only way to keep your sanity.”
“Thanks. Thanks loads, Roy. All I need now is some more calls.”
“Can’t be helped. Who’d you pick for your replacement as director of field agents?” Walton asked.
“Lassen. I sent his dossier to you hours ago.”
“Haven’t read it yet. Is he on the job already?”
“Sure. He’s been there since I moved up here,” Eglin said. “What—”
“Never mind,” said Walton. He hung up and called Lassen, the new director of field agents.
Lassen was a boyish-looking young man with stiff sandy hair and a sternly efficient manner. Walton said, “Lassen, I want you to do a job for me. Get one of your men to make up a list of the hundred biggest private estates still unequalized. I want the names of their owners, location of the estates, acreage, and things like that. Got it?”
“Right. When will you want it, Mr. Walton?”
“Immediately. But I don’t want it to be a sloppy job. This is top important, double.”
Lassen nodded. Walton grinned at him—the boy seemed to be in good control of himself—and clicked off.
He realized that he’d been engaged in half a dozen high-power conversations without a break, over a span of perhaps twenty minutes. His heart was pounding; his feet felt numb.
He popped a benzolurethrin into his mouth and kept on going. He would need to act fast, now that the wheels were turning. McLeod arriving the next day to report the results of the faster-than-light expedition, Lamarre missing, Fred at large and working for a conspiracy of landowners—Walton foresaw that he would be on a steady diet of tranquilizers for the next few days.
He opened the arrival bin and pulled out a handful of paper. One thick bundle was the dossier on Lassen; Walton initialed it and tossed it unread into the Files chute. He would have to rely on Eglin’s judgment; Lassen seemed competent enough.
Underneath that, he found the script of the FitzMaugham memorial program to be shown that evening. Walton sat back and started to skim through it.
It was the usual sort of eulogy. He skipped rapidly past FitzMaugham’s life and great works, on to the part where Interim Director Walton appeared on the screen to speak.
This part he read more carefully. He was very much interested in the words that Percy had placed in his mouth.
XI
The speech that night went over well… almost.
Walton watched the program in the privacy of his home, sprawled out on the foamweb sofa with a drink in one hand and the text of Percy’s shooting-script in the other. The giant screen that occupied nearly half of his one unbroken wall glowed in lifelike colors.
FitzMaugham’s career was traced with pomp and circumstance, done up in full glory: plenty of ringing trumpet flourishes, dozens of eye-appealing color groupings, much high-pitched, tense narrative. Percy had done his job skillfully. The show was punctuated by quotations from FitzMaugham’s classic book, Breathing Space and Sanity. Key government figures drifted in and out of the narrative webwork, orating sonorously. That pious fraud, M. Seymour Lanson, President of the United States, delivered a flowery speech; the old figurehead was an artist at his one function, speechmaking. Walton watched, spellbound. Lee Percy was a genius in his field; there was no denying that.
Finally, toward the end of the hour, the narrator said, “The work of Popeek goes on, though its lofty-minded creator lies dead at an assassin’s hand. Director FitzMaugham had chosen as his successor a young man schooled in the ideals of Popeek. Roy Walton, we know, will continue the noble task begun by D. F. FitzMaugham.”
For the second time that day Walton watched his own face appear on a video screen. He glanced down at the script in his hand and back up at the screen. Percy’s technicians had done a brilliant job. The Walton-image on the screen looked so real that the Walton on the couch almost believed he had actually delivered this speech— although he knew it had been cooked up out of some rearranged stills and a few brokendown phonemes with his voice characteristics.
It was a perfectly innocent speech. In humble tones he expressed his veneration for the late director, his hopes that he would be able to fill the void left by the death of FitzMaugham, his sense of Popeek as a sacred trust. Half-listening, Walton began to skim the script.
Startled, Walton looked down at the script. He didn’t remember having encountered any such lines on his first reading, and he couldn’t find them now. “This morning,” the pseudo-Walton on the screen went on, “we received contact from outer space! From a faster-than-light ship sent out over a year ago to explore our neighboring stars.
“News of this voyage has been withheld until now for security reasons. But it is my great pleasure to tell you tonight that the stars have at last been reached by man… A new world waits for us out there, lush, fertile, ready to be colonized by the brave pioneers of tomorrow!”
Walton stared aghast at the screen. His simulacrum had returned now to the script as prepared, but he barely listened.
He was thinking that Percy had let the cat out for sure. It was a totally unauthorized newsbreak. Numbly, Walton watched the program come to its end, and wondered what the repercussions would be once the public grasped all the implications.
He was awakened at 0600 by the chiming of his phone. Grumpily he climbed from bed, snapped on the receiver, switched the cutoff on the picture sender in order to hide his sleep-rumpled appearance, and said, “This is Walton. Yes?”
A picture formed on the screen: a heavily-tanned man in his late forties, stocky, hair close-cropped. “Sorry to roust you this way, old man. I’m McLeod.”
Walton came fully awake in an instant. “McLeod? Where are you?”
“Out on Long Island. I just pulled into the airport half a moment ago. Traveled all night after dumping the ship at Nairobi.”
“You made a good landing, I hope?”
“The best. The ship navigates like a bubble.” McLeod frowned worriedly. “They brought me the early-morning telefax while I was having breakfast. I couldn’t help reading all about the speech you made last night.”
“Oh. I—”
“Quite a crasher of a speech,” McLeod went on evenly. “But don’t you think it was a little premature of you to release word of my flight? I mean—”
“It was quite premature,” Walton said. “A member of my staff inserted that statement into my talk without my knowledge. He’ll be disciplined for it.”
A puzzled frown appeared on McLeod’s face. “But you made that speech with your own lips! How can you blame it on a member of your staff?”
“The science that can send a ship to Procyon and back within a year,” Walton said, “can also fake a speech. But I imagine we’ll be able to cover up the pre-release without too much trouble.”