A hush fell over the recorded crowd as attendants helped the five contestants who hadn't made it off the course. There was just Wanda-Jean and the young man. The voice of Bobby Priest came back again.
"Okay, kids, just so you know you're getting a fair shake on "Wildest Dreams," you've got three seconds, I'll repeat that, three seconds to change your minds."
The crowd noise rose again. The amplified voices were baying either to move or to stay put. Wanda-Jean glanced at the young man. She decided that he was kind of cute. Neither of them moved. The crowd was cut off as the three-second siren sounded.
Bobby Priest's voice boomed out again.
"And now, what we've all been waiting for!"
A small, clear voice piped up inside Wanda-Jean's head. It said: Emote. You still won't make it if you don't look right.
"The answer to the Question!"
Wanda-Jean dutifully twisted her hands and looked as though she was suffering the worst agonies of suspense.
"The current population of the world is… wait for it… yes! Answer C! Five billion!"
Wanda-Jean emoted as fully as she could. She put all her remaining strength into leaping for joy as the lights went up around her. Afterward she was never clear whether she had been putting it on or doing it for real.
"ARE YOU COMING TO BED?"
Mallory was already wearing the black semi-transparent negligee from Beneath It All. Dus-tin was still dressed, hunched in the conversation pit with his arms wrapped around his knees. The only things he had discarded were the coat and tie that he had worn to dinner. He knew what she wanted, but, perversely, he didn't feel like playing the game. Dinner with the Fedders had been a tedious exercise in pretentious snobbery, and he wanted a little time to himself. Martin Fedder was a shallow little social climber, and wife Laramie was just plain stupid. Dustin was worn out from doing what was expected of him. He had tried to weasel out of the Fedders' invitation, but Mallory had insisted. For some reason she believed that Laramie Fedder might be of help to her in landing the Krebs account. Dustin couldn't see it himself. About the only thing that Laramie Fedder had ever landed was the unspeakable Martin, and she was welcome to him. Now that the evening chez Fedder had been endured, Mallory expected Dustin to retire to the bedroom and give her a half hour of his undivided and energetic attention.
He shook his head. "I think I'm going to sit and watch TV for a while."
Dustin was aware that TV was becoming his equivalent of a headache. Mallory was silhouetted against the light from the bathroom door. She looked good, but his mood wouldn't let him respond. When she spoke, there was an edge to her voice that indicated that if he kept this up, he would pay dearly sometime in the near future.
"TV? Do you feel okay?"
"I think I drank a little too much of Martin's port."
"Being a little drunk never slowed you down before."
"I feel more queasy than drunk. Besides, I want to watch Bones Bolt."
"Bones Bolt? Are you kidding? You're going to turn yourself into an imbecile. That show is nothing but hysterical garbage."
"We have to stay aware of garbage."
"That's bullshit, Dustin, and you know it."
Dustin was aware of her slim legs, narrow waist, and full breasts. If Mallory hadn't been such a deadly combination of self-interest and ambition, she would have been perfect. He wanted her right then and there, but he wanted much more to prove a point.
"He's doing a piece on the feelies. Renfield of Combined Media is going to be on it."
Mallory practically spat. "The feelies! I'm so sick of that word."
She stalked off to the bedroom, slamming the door behind her. He would definitely pay in the morning, if not later that night. He sighed and reached for the remote.
The theme had already started. The crushing electronic pulse of the pressure drop instrumental was cranked up to pain threshold. The crowd in the pit were baying right along with it, and at regular intervals they would break into the unique ululation that was the hallmark of Bones Bolt's audience in the pit-what Dustin always referred to as the monkey noise. The cameras panned slowly across the faces of the crowd members who were already in the first throes of controlled hysteria. They were mainly male and mainly in their teens and early twenties. Later in the show, they were likely to become violently physical, a behavior that was tacitly encouraged. The set for "The Bones Bolt Show" was deliberately grim. One critic had likened it to a "stark prison from outer space that happens to be in the middle of a major inmate uprising." The focal point of the set was the pit itself, the circular central area that contained the noisy and frequently angry audience. They were quite literally walled in. Dustin was of the opinion that this was probably the best place for them. Young, unchecked, inner-city males were the greatest fear of a middle class that felt itself increasingly under siege. The audience was surrounded by a circular wall, some eight feet high, designed to resemble massive riveted steel, like the hull plates of a battleship. The flat top of the wall provided a podium for Bolt and his invited guests. Blinding white spotlights constantly circled as though searching for signs of trouble, adding to the all-over jailbreak ambience and creating a sense of frenetic confusion. A narrow catwalk extended out from the wall like a bridge, over the heads of the crowd. It was from there that Bolt communed with his people and, when the spirit moved him, urged them to greater excesses.
The theme faded and Bones Bolt made his grand entrance. His face leaned into the camera in massive close-up.
"Okay! Shut up!"
Bones Bolt was a larger-than-life figure. He was wearing what appeared to be a kind of dark green satin cowl that, coupled with the heavy gold chains that always hung around his neck no matter what the costume, gave him the appearance of a bizarre African monk or maybe a black Ku Klux Klansman with his hood thrown back, which was a very weird concept in itself. Instead of shutting up, the mob in the pit only bayed louder. Bolt advanced along the catwalk over the heads of the faithful. He leaned over the guardrail, his attitude threatening.
"I said shut up! Shut the fuck up!"
Bones Bolt had almost single-handedly forced the FCC to forget about their seven deadly words doctrine. Much of his style went all the way back to the old rolling bucket school of rowdy twentieth-century TV preachers like Swaggart, Sharpton, or the Rev. Ike, but his delivery was all his own.
"If you rowdy motherfuckers don't shut the fuck up… you won't be hearing what we got on the show for you tonight!"
The audience noise subsided. Dustin suspected that the quieting of the mob had a great deal more to do with a good audio mixer than the force of Bones's personality, even though Bones was hardly lacking in that department.
"Tonight we are going to look at the feelies."
There was a roar from the crowd.
"That's right, brothers and sisters, the feelies!"
He straightened up, fist clenched to the sky.
"You hear me up there in the towers? You hear me, Combined Media? You hear me, CM? Tonight, you going to hear Bones Bolt and tremble!"
Another roar. The visual cut to a close-up of Madison Renfield-the caption read: "Senior Vice President of Combined Media." Renfield, the archetype of the self-satisfied and somewhat faceless corporate spokesman, looked as though he was wishing profoundly that he were anywhere but just a few feet from that sea of young, sweating, angry faces. There was a common question as to which was the more certain suicide: going on "The Bones Bolt Show," or refusing the invitation.