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others, is enjoying the jokes of a popular network comedian, or engrossed in the news that will be tomorrow’s headlines, or engaged by one of the many fine dramas that may be heard on the radio. And you know that it’s no fake, no mere posturing for the photographer, and indeed if you look close you can see that the dial in the radio glows.
    There is another photograph above this one. A newscaster sits in his studio behind a big web microphone. In his dark, wide-lapelled suit he looks like a banker, the longitudes of his decency in the dimly perceived pinstripes. He holds his script. You glimpse a thin bracelet of shirtcuff. The “On the Air” sign is still inert, but there is a large-faced wall clock behind him, a thick second hand sweeping toward the landmark at the top of the clock where time begins. He looks toward the control booth at his director. He sits militantly, responsibly urgent—and this is no posture either but the careful, serious alertness of a man pacing himself, as attuned and concentrated as a child waiting to move in under the arc of a jump rope.
    Alias Dick Gibson, alias Marshall Maine, alias Tex Ellery, alias a dozen others, knew, knew then, blessed by nostalgia as some are blessed with prescience, this steady hindsight that was contemporaneous to him and as involuntary as digestion, that all this was the truth, that those pictures had it right: Americans were in their living rooms, before their floorlamps, on their sofas, in their chairs, along their rugs, together in time, united, serené. And so he felt twinges, pins and needles of actual conscience; he needed to join his voice to that important chorus, that lovely a cappella.
    He approached Lee, the reasonable Credenza, and spoke to him about it. He said KROP should be no different than other stations.
    “I see what you mean. I’ll talk it over with the brothers and get back to you,” Lee told him.
    And then, two weeks after he had first introduced the subject, he received a delegation of Credenzas in the transmitter shack. Surprised by their presence there and to a certain extent intimidated by seeing so many of them gathered at one time—only Charley and Bill, whose legislative duties kept them in Lincoln, did not come—he was at first alarmed, suspecting actual physical attack.
    Louis III spoke. “You, Marshall Maine, Lee says you ain’t satisfied with the way we do things on our station.”
    He was prepared to yield at once, to concede to the pressures of what seemed to him their vigilante loomings, when the off-duty transmitter man—one of those tattooed vagrants common in those days, an old navy man, retired possibly, but more probably court-martialed and perhaps even a deserter, one of those thick-veined, long-armed quiet men, someone keeping to himself, soured by a grudge or ruined by a secret—woke up and, seeing the brothers, having less contact with them than Maine—even more of a drifter than Marshall, there less time than him—not knowing who they were, or perhaps suspecting that they had come for him, threw a punch, drew a knife.
    “Hold it!” the transmitter man yelled, missing Felix. “No tricks!” he screamed, and turned briefly to Marshall Maine, forming their plan even as he lunged toward the Credenzas. “The Saigon caper, mate,” he said, “I take these four, you get them two.” At these words—they had barely spoken in the three weeks the man had been at the station—Marshall felt an unaccountable flush of pride. Then Poke poked the transmitter man and the old fellow fell down—collapsed, for all Maine knew, died. Poke’s punch had loosened the man’s grip on his knife and it flew neatly, almost politely, handle first into Jim Credenza’s hand.
    Marshall Maine found himself mourning, grieving for a pal. “The Credenza County caper, mate,” he said softly. Then, anger at the Credenzas’ building on his grief for his new friend, he addressed himself to George and Louis III, the two Credenzas he had