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Archer noticed that his hands had stopped trembling.
    “All right,” O’Neill said. “You have two weeks. I don’t know what I’ll say to Hutt, but I’ll stall him off.”
    “Thanks, Emmet,” Archer said, feeling pleased with O’Neill.
    “Yeah,” O’Neill said. “I’ll probably be on my ass by next Friday. Here …” He reached into his pocket and took out a folded piece of paper. It was a galley sheet. “Maybe you’d like to read this.” He put it on the table in front of Archer.
    Archer opened it and glanced down at it. It was the article from the magazine. It looked badly printed and harmless on the flimsy paper.
    “Do you mind if I read it?” he asked.
    “Go ahead,” O’Neill said. He waved to the bartender for two more whiskies.
    “Of all the programs on the air at this time,” Archer read, “one of the most flagrant and cynical offenders against loyal and patriotic Americans is University Town, sponsored by the Sandler Drug Company, produced by the Hutt and Bookstaver Agency, and directed by Clement Archer.”
    “Water or soda?” the bartender asked, standing beside Archer’s chair. Archer folded the galley automatically.
    “Soda,” he said. He watched the bubbly water fill the glass. The bartender went away and Archer opened the galley again. He read hazily, not being able to focus very well without his glasses and too lazy to take them out for half a column of print.
    The article was written in the aggrieved prophetic style with which people air their views on Communism in the newspapers. There were some pugnacious metaphoric generalities about the necessity of clearing the American air of the termites who inveigled their way into the middle of the American home and then charges that Stanley Atlas, Frances Motherwell, Alice Weller, Manfred Pokorny and Victor Herres were either Communists or sympathizers. It offered some twenty organizations on the Attorney-General’s list in which the actors were alleged to hold membership, lumping them all together and making it sound as though all the people who were accused were equally culpable. Pokorny, according to the article, was soon to be brought before the Immigration authorities, with a view toward deportation. The article closed with a blunt hint that if the sponsors of the program did not take action, appropriate steps would be instituted by the American people.
    Archer sighed when he finished the article. Except for the names, it was so familiar, and by now, so boring. He was always surprised at the freshness and vigor with which the crusaders of the press could stir up the old names and the old charges. Even if a man felt that they were true and he was serving his country nobly by repeating them, it took a special imperviousness to boredom to roar them over and over again like that. Power, he glimpsed dimly, is finally in the hands of those who find a geometrically increasing pleasure in repetition. The equivalent among saints would be a man who merely said, “God, God, God,” ten thousand times a day. I am probably a weakling, he thought, because I demand novelty.
    “Dandy, isn’t it?” O’Neill asked. He had been staring at Archer’s face as he read, studying it for hints of what Archer was feeling.
    “Delicious prose style these fellows have perfected,” Archer said. “Can I keep it so I can study it?”
    “Sure,” O’Neill said. “But burn it when you’re through with it.”
    “You’re jittery, Emmet,” Archer said. “Maybe you ought to join Alcoholics Anonymous.”
    “Yeah,” said O’Neill. “I’m jittery all right. And I don’t join anything.”
    “Thanks,” Archer said, “for the two weeks. I hope it doesn’t cost you your job.”
    “Who knows?” O’Neill stared at him sourly. “You marked me lousy tonight, didn’t you?”
    Archer hesitated. “A little, maybe. Around the edges.”
    “It’s always nice to have honest friends.” O’Neill let his breath out in a long, sighing sound. He looked