All that the machine does is take the stored videotapes that are in its files and play them back. But it also manipulates size and perspective or superimposes one over another . . . so that you can, as I, in fact, have done, put the living person of someone you don't like in a position embarrassing to him, and project it on a montage screen so that only a studio tech can find the dots on the pattern where the override betrays its presence.
Obviously, this is a way out of almost any propaganda difficulty, since it is child's play to make up any event you like and give it the seeming of reality.
Of course, everybody knows it can be done. So the evidence of one's own eyes is no longer quite enough, even for a voter. And the laws can cut you down. I had thought of whomping up some frightful frame around Connick, for example. But it wouldn't work; no matter when I did it, there would still be time for the other side to spread the word of an electoral fraud, and a hoax of this magnitude would make its own way onto the front pages. So I used the machine for something much more interesting to me. I used it as a toy.
I started by dialing the lunar base at Aristarchus for background, found a corps of Rocketmen marching off in the long lunar step, patched my own face onto one of the helmeted figures, and zoomed in and out with the imaginary camera, watching R3/C Odin Gunnarsen as a boy of nineteen, scared witless but doing his job. He was a pretty nice boy, I thought objectively, and wondered what had gone wrong with him later. I abandoned that and sought for other amusements. I found Candace's images on tape in the files and pleasured myself with her for a time. Her open, friendly face gave some dignity to the fantastic bodies of half a dozen 3-V strippers in the files, but I stopped that child's game.
I looked for a larger scope. I spread the whole panoply of the heavens across the screen of the tape machine. I sought out the crook of the Big Dipper's handle, traced its arc across half the heavens until I located orange Arcturus. Then I zoomed in on the star, as littler stars grew larger and hurtled out of range around it, sought its seven gray-green planets and located Number Five among them, the watery world that Knafti had spawned upon. I bade the computing mind inside the tape machine reconstruct the events of the orbit bombing for me and watched hell-bombs splash enormous mushrooms of poisonous foam into the Arcturan sky, whipping the island cities with tidal waves and drowning them in death.
Then I destroyed the whole planet. I turned Arcturus into a nova and watched the hot driven gases sphere out to embrace the planet, boil its seas, slag its cities . . . and found myself sweating. I ordered another drink from the dispenser and switched the machine off. And then I became aware that the pale blue light over the door to Haber's office was glowing insistently. It was time; my visitors had arrived.
Connick had brought his kids along, three of them; the lover from Donnegan General had brought two more; Knafti and Colonel Peyroles had Timmy Brown. "Welcome to Romper Room," I said. "They're making lynch mobs young this year."
They all yelled at me at once-or all but Knafti, whose tweeting chitter just didn't have the volume to compete. I listened, and when they showed signs of calming down, I reached into fat cat Haber's booze drawer and poured myself a stiff one and said, "All right, which of you creeps want first crack?" And they boiled up again while I drank my drink. All of them, except Candace Harmon, who only stood by the door and looked at me.
So I said, "All right, Connick, you first. Are you going to make me spread it all over the newscasts that you had a dishonorable discharge?. . . And by the way, maybe you'd like to meet my assistant blackmailer; Miss Harmon over there dug up the dirt on you."
Her boyfriend yelped, but Candace just went on looking. I didn't look back, but kept my eyes on Connick. He squinted his eyes, put his hands in his pockets, and said, with considerable self-restraint, "You know I was only seventeen years old when that happened."
"Oh, sure. I know more. You had a nervous breakdown the year after your discharge, space *scared, as they call it on the soapies. Yellow fever is what we called it on the Moon."
He glanced quickly at his kids, the two who were his own and the one who was not, and said rapidly: "You know I could have had that DD reversed-"
"But you didn't. The significant fact isn't that you deserted. The significant fact is that you were loopy. And, I'd say, still are."
Timmy Brown stuttered: "One moment. I, Knafti, have asked that you cease-"
But Connick brushed him aside. "Why, Gunnarsen?"
"Because I intend to win this election. I don't care what it costs- especially what it costs you."
"But, I, Knafti, have instructed-" That was Timmy Brown trying again.
"The Armistice Commission issued orders-" That was Peyroles.
"I don't know which is worse, you or the bugs!" And that was Candace's little friend from the hospital, and they all were talking at once again. Even Knafti came dragging toward me on his golden slug's belly, chirruping and hooting, and Timmy Brown was actually weeping as he tried to tell me I was wrong, I had to stop; the whole thing was against orders and why wouldn't I desist?
I shouted: "Shut up, all of you!"
They didn't, but the volume level dropped minutely. I rode over it: "What the hell do I care what any of you want? I'm paid to do a job. My job is to make people act in a certain way. I do it. Maybe tomorrow I'll be paid to make them act the opposite way, and I'll do that, too. Anyway, who the hell are you to order me around? A stink-bug like you, Knafti? A GI quack like yourself, Whitling? Or you, Connick. A-"
"A candidate for public office," he said clearly. And I give him much manna-he didn't shout, but he talked right over me. "And as such I have an obligation-"
But I outyelled him, anyway. "Candidate! You're a candidate right up till the minute I tell the voters you're a nut, Connick. And then you're dead! And I will tell them, I promise, if-"
I didn't get a chance to finish that sentence, because all three of Connick's kids were diving at me, his own two and the other one. They sent papers flying off Haber's desk and smashed his sand-crystal decanter, but they didn't get to my throat, where they clearly were aimed, because Connick and Timmy Brown dragged them back. Not easily.
I allowed myself a sneer. "And what does that prove? Your kids like you, I admit-even the one from Mars. The one that Knafti's people used for vivisection-that Knafti himself worked over, likely as not. Nice picture, right? Your bug-buddy there, killing babies, destroying kids . . . or didn't you know that Knafti himself was one of the boss bugs on the baby-killing project?"
Timmy Brown shrieked wildly, "You don't know what you are doing. It was not Knafti's fault at all!" His ashen face was haggard, his rotten teeth bared in a grimace. And he was weeping.
If you apply heat to a single molecule, it will take off like a torn with a spark under his tail, but you cannot say where it will go. If you heat a dozen molecules, they will fling out in all directions, but you still do not know which directions they will be. If, however, you heat a few billion, about as many as are in a thimble of dilute gas, you know where they will go: they will expand. Mass action. You can't tell what a single molecule may do-call it the molecule's free will if you like-but masses obey mass laws. Masses of anything, even so small a mass as the growling troop that confronted me in Haber's office. I let them yell, and all the yelling was at me. Even Candace was showing the frown and the darkening of the eyes and the working of the lips, although she watched me as silently and steadily as ever.
Connick brought it to a head. "All right, everybody," he yelled, "now listen to me! Let's get this thing straightened out!"
He stood up, a child gripped by each elbow, and the third, the youngest, trapped between him and the door. He looked at me with such loathing that I could feel it-and didn't like it, either, although it was no more than I had expected, and he said: "It's true. Sammy, here, was one of the kids from Mars. Maybe that has made me think things I shouldn't have thought-he's my kid now, and when I think of those stink bugs cutting-"