‘Good morning, Lyle,“ Regan began, pleasantly enough.
Henderson was in no mood for pleasantries. The aide put a newsfax sheet down on the Factor’s desk and blurted, “Look at this, Factor! Just look!”
Regan looked.
It was a clipping from a gossip column in one of the New York tabloids. Regan frowned, scanned the Sheet, waded through tales of Broadway nonsense. He wondered why Henderson was so irate. Perhaps the gossip columnist had said something nasty about Claude Regan’s marital problems, eh? On the surface, Nola was still his wife, and nobody officially knew there was trouble between them, but still, these snoopers…
Only why should Henderson be so sore about that?
Regan didn’t know. He read his way three quarters down the column, and then he saw what the trouble was. It had nothing to do with him and Nola.
It said:
F.B.I, agents are running around in circles trying to confirm a story which says that a certain foreign power is going to bomb the World’s Fair on opening day. As it comes to us, the Fair is slated to go Boom next October 12, when it’ll be chock full of notables from all over the world. Just where the fatal missile is going to take off from is slated to remain secret forever if the perpetrators can manage it. Our guess is that a certain heavily populated Oriental power is cooking up the big blast by way of dealing the deathblow to American prestige once and for all.
Regan looked up. He felt as though someone had just rammed him in the gut with a jackhammer.
‘Oh, Christ,“ he said. ”Christ! When did this garbage get published?“
‘Yesterday, Factor. It came through the machine at noon, and we started getting phone calls about five minutes later. And of course you had taken off for space, and there was no way we could reach you.“
‘How did you follow up?“
‘We had the story killed,“ Henderson said. ”I phoned the Graphic in your name, and let them know that we’d bring a libel action if that story didn’t get cut out. They dropped it from all editions starting twelve-thirty.“
Regan grinned wryly. “Did you get legal opinion on the libel angle?”
‘I asked Martinelli. He said it probably wasn’t actionable, but that I ought to call anyway.“
‘Good man. Who’d you talk to?“
‘The publisher,“ Henderson said. ’Tony Coughlin himself. He was pretty badly shaken up about it. He said he had no idea such a thing was running in his paper, and he was firing the columnist right away.”
‘A lot of good that does us,“ Regan muttered. ”Well, I don’t blame Coughlin for getting scared. Global holds notes on his lousy sheet. I could put him out of business tomorrow, if I wanted to, and he knows it.“
‘That won’t help, sir.“
‘Don’t I know that?“ Regan scowled. ”I wish I had put him out of business the day before yesterday! What a stinking business!“ He stared at the yellowish fax sheet on his desk, and the offending words seemed to blaze at him like beacons. ”How many people do you figure saw this thing?“
‘The Graphic has about seven hundred fifty thousand subscribers, sir.“ Henderson shook his head. ”The story ran for only half an hour. That’s a probable exposure of maybe fifty thousand readers. But you know how a thing like that spreads. Somebody reads the Fair is going to be blown up, and he tells three of his friends, and they turn around and tell-“
‘I know. Yes.“ Regan hammered on his desk. ”Have you talked to the F.B.I.?“
‘Yes, sir. They don’t know a thing about it.“
‘It’s all a figment of this bastard’s imagination, then,“ Regan said. He rose, paced around the office. He wanted to break things, to smash, to rend and tear. ”Some hundred-buck-a-week moron is trying to write a column, and he’s a hundred words short when he’s through gabbing about who’s sleeping with whom. So he pops a stimmo and inspiration strikes and he fakes a story about the bombing of the World’s Fair, and suddenly we’re in a mess because nobody wants to risk coming to see us. Damn! Damn damn damn!“
‘I haven’t issued any retractions, sir,“ Henderson murmured. ”I wasn’t sure how to handle it. Perhaps the best thing is just to let it die of its own accord.“
Regan peered out. Dark November clouds scudded across the horizon. It was a bleak, miserable day, and he felt bleak and miserable inside. “If we don’t deny it,” he said. ‘people are going to keep thinking that there’s a Chinese plot to H-bomb the Fair. If we do deny it, we’ll not only sound unconvincing, but we’ll thereby bring the story to the attention of a lot of people who may not have heard it in the first place. So we’re fried whatever we do. Eh, Lyle?“ ”I was thinking the same thing.“ ”How does the staff feel about this?“
‘Divided, sir. Martinelli and a few others think we should get the Graphic to issue an immediate retraction. The rest seem to believe we ought to let the matter drop without raising a fuss about it.“ ”And you?“ Regan said. ”I don’t know, sir. I don’t know at all.“ Regan closed his eyes for a moment, trying to group his defenses. This was a low blow, a totally unexpected blow from the gutter.
He was silent a while. A muscle flicked in his cheek. He longed to get his hands on the man who had written that story. But what good would that do? So long as there were tabloid newsfax sheets, there would be mud thrown, lies given out as solemn truth, and all the rest. There is a kind of person, Regan reflected, whose role in the universe seems to be to destroy, and if not to destroy then to tarnish.
At length he said, “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll have the Graphic run a little squib saying that yesterday’s story was pure fabrication. Just a column inch or so, so it won’t draw attention. Then you and your staff will get on the phone and talk to the boss of every communication medium in the country-every newsfax chain, every video network, every news magazine. You will give out the word that the bomb story was vicious, irresponsible, and baseless, and that Claude Regan feels it should be allowed to die without further discussion. That he believes there should not even be a report of the incident, no matter if the story says six times that there won’t be any bombing. I want it killed.”
Henderson frowned. “Suppose it backfires, sir? Suppose somebody decides that the news must be published without external interference, and makes a cause celebre out of this? I mean, they might begin by reprinting the original story, and then cover your attempt to kill it.” “It’s the chance we take,” Regan said. “Global Factors holds the mortgage on everybody, Lyle. I’ve never tried to use that as a lever to control the news media before. I’ve studied history and I know all about the Zenger case and the rest But there’s too much at stake, here. Somebody has played dirty with us, and I’ve got to play dirty in return. I don’t like it, Lyle, but I’ve got to do it. Get started.”
Henderson left. Regan remained standing near his window, clenching and unclenching his fists.
The filthy bastards, he thought.
Somebody should have killed that story in the womb. But it was out, and no amount of behind-the-scenes suppression would really succeed in quashing it now.
People would talk. It was risky enough to get into a spaceship and fly off to a satellite in the sky. It was risky enough to spend time aboard a satellite. Hadn’t a satellite blown up in 1977 and taken four lives? Suddenly everybody would remember that incident, irrelevant to the present situation as it was. Okay. Given those risks, should one go on to take the further risk of being aboard a target for a Chinese warhead?
Regan felt like weeping. How could he tell people that the chance was one in a billion that anything would go wrong with the Satellite? How could he stand up and say that the world was at peace, that it was ten years since anybody had last detonated a nuclear bomb even for testing purposes, that economic competition cutthroat-style had come to serve at long last as the much-mooted Moral Equivalent of War? The Chinese wouldn’t blow up the Fair. Hell, Ch’ien himself would be on board, opening day. Nobody would blow up the Fair, neither the Chinese nor the Russians nor the Congolese nor the Lithuanians nor the Andorrans. Nations didn’t think in terms of blowing each other up anymore. They had subtler ways of fighting. The only one who would dream up such an idea was a tired, typewriter-happy rummy fighting a deadline in a newsfax office.