Chapter 11

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.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” said McLeod. He shrugged apologetically. “You see, that planet’s there, all right. But it happens to be the property of alien beings who live in the next world. And they’re not so happy about having Earth come crashing into their system to colonize!”

Somehow Walton managed to hang onto his self-control, even with this staggering news crashing about him. “You’ve been in contact with these beings?” he asked.

McLeod nodded. “They have a translating gadget. We met them, yes.”

Walton moistened his lips. “I think there’s going to be trouble,” he said. “I think I may be out of a job, too.”

“What’s that?”

“Just thinking out loud,” Walton said. “Finish your breakfast and meet me at my office at 0900. We’ll talk this thing out then.”

Walton was in full command of himself by the time he reached the Cullen Building.

He had read the morning telefax and heard the newsblares: they all screamed the sum and essence of Walton’s speech of the previous night, and a few of the braver telefax outfits went as far as printing a resumé of the entire speech, boiled down to Basic, of course, for benefit of that substantial segment of the reading public that was most comfortable while moving its lips. The one telefax outfit most outspokenly opposed to Popeek, Citizen, took great delight in giving the speech full play, and editorializing on a subsequent sheet against the “veil of security” hazing Popeek operations.

Walton read the Citizen editorial twice, savoring its painstaking simplicities of expression. Then he clipped it out neatly and shot it down the chute to public relations, marked Attention: Lee Percy.

“There’s a Mr. McLeod waiting to see you,” his secretary informed him. “He says he has an appointment.”

“Send him in,” Walton said. “And have Mr. Percy come up here also.”

While he waited for McLeod to arrive, Walton riffled through the rest of the telefax sheets. Some of them praised Popeek for having uncovered a new world; others damned them for having hidden news of the faster-than-light drive so long. Walton stacked them neatly in a heap at the edge of his desk.

In the bleak, dark hours of the morning, he had expected to be compelled to resign. Now, he realized, he could immeasurably strengthen his own position if he could control the flow of events and channel them properly.