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say-so rises steadily. Don't you think they're being a trifle over-sensitive for people who want to hold an audience?"
    He paused, but Prior didn't say anything.
    "I read it this way," he resumed. "They can't afford to simply show me the exit—I'd collect a palladium-plated handshake for breach of contract. So they're merely hoping I'll get annoyed enough to start yelling, when they could clobber me for like insulting the Head of Programming and the PCC wouldn't be able to touch them. So I suggest you make like me and hang on as long as you can. A hundred thousand tealeaves a month isn't something you can collect by knocking on the first door you pass."
    Halfway through the last sentence Prior stopped paying attention. Flamen deduced from his expression that at his end the screen had either switched to another picture or blurred out altogether again. He made to cut the circuit, but changed his mind. It was amusing to watch the normally imperturbable Prior mouthing curses which couldn't be heard because at the same time as the vision outward had failed so had the sound inward.
    But his enjoyment was short-lived. His smile vanished as he reverted to contemplation of the truth which Prior was resolutely declining to face for some such superficial reason, perhaps, as the idea that the directors of the Holocosmic network were—like Brutus—"honorable men."
    "A man can smile and smile and be a villain," he murmured, briefly pleased with the aptness of the quotation but almost at once dismayed by the image of the smiler with the knife. What other explanation could there be for the interference which was cropping up daily on his program and on no other transmission from the Holocosmic studios? It simply had to be sabotage.
    Worse yet, it must be connived at by the directorate. Had it been due to infiltrators, Holocosmic would have stopped at nothing to eliminate it; they were as concerned as any company in the world about maintaining internal security. Instead of which, again and again the engineers had fobbed him off with declarations of their inability to trace the trouble.
    The logical conclusion was that they wanted to move his slot over and make room for yet another all-advertising segment. It was against the regulations laid down by the Planetary Communications Commission, of course, to run more than twelve hours' continuous advertising out of the twenty-four, and getting rid of their last spool-pigeon would take Holocosmic over the prescribed limit. But the PCC was a bad joke and had been for years: an ancient watchdog without any teeth.
    It wasn't the first time they'd attempted to mislay him, moreover. They'd tried it directly following Celia's breakdown, hiring a venial psychiatrist to testify that her resorting to sykes was due to her husband's systematic disregard of her needs and preferences, this constituting sadistic cruelty. A person capable of such behavior, they'd argued, was unfit to perform before the great viewing public. (Horse laugh—if you dug into the private lives of the Holocosmic directorate you'd come up with material for another Hundred and Twenty Days without the need to plagiarize, and long ago Flamen had made himself a quiet promise that if they ever squeezed him hard enough he'd go out in a blaze of glory by swapping his last-ever taped show, duly approved by the network's computers, for another in which he gave chapter and verse on the directorate's vices.)
    Their real lever, though, had been fulcrumed on her commitment to the Ginsberg, a public hospital, instead of to a private sanitarium, and that Prior had miraculously undermined in the shocked tones of an adoring brother: whose reputation stood higher in the contemporary world than that of Elias Mogshack its director, universally acknowledged field-leader in remedial psychiatry—who here among admitted laymen would question the brilliance of one appointed to oversee the mental hygiene of populous New York? So, a rapid compromise whereby he