Lester’s fingers and palms brushed the rods and buttons of his breastplate-console. Let the rattle and the clank and the sound of the crowd stay as they are. A shade more of the force field’s rasping hum to warm his viewer’s nerve endings ... to ready them ...
The woman’s sobbing. His thumb touched a stud. Let it start to come through now. Softly ... barely hearable ... subtly swelling.
The little knot of blue-coverall-clad men. A medium shot, then rapidly to a close-up of their burden, the dangling limbs half-hidden by their bodies and the merciful sagging of the blue-green plasti-sheet. A tight shot, but passing... the merest flicker. Nothing staring, nothing lingering, nothing in bad taste.
In Lester’s right ear was the sound of his own voice, recorded on his way to the scene and before he came upon it so that he would not need to break his silence until his selected moment. His voice giving the boy’s age, his group-affiliations, the routine details of his death. All quietly, all monotonously even, the greater to contrast with what was the meat of Lester’s program.
Nineteen seconds. The sobbing louder now and growing. The mother, kneeling, body sagged, hands clenched, dark head bowed.
Lester put a hand on her shoulder, letting it show in his finders, knowing that each of his viewers could see it as his own, extended, sympathetic, understanding ...
The woman did not respond to his touch. Unobtrusively Lester increased the pressure of his thumb, gouging. She stirred under his hand, shrinking, her head lifting.
Lester’s hand darted back to his console.
Her eyes. Dark, dulled, beseeching. Fine.
And now Lester spoke. He spoke with practiced hesitance, the gentle respecter, for his viewer, of her desire and right to her privacy at a time like this.
“How do you feel to have lost your only child?” His hands hovering, the woman looking at him ... now.
Her eyes widened, flickeringly. Sorrow surging and pain, deep and of the soul, opened to the finder. Raw, fresh.
Great. I’m right never to test, never to speak until this moment.
“Please try to control yourself. I’m your friend, we’re all your friends. Tell us.” And he repeated his question.
Her head bent sharply back, the eyes half closing now, her mouth open, the lips trembling, the intensity of her emotion visibly choking the sound in her throat, making of her attempt to speak a silent mouthing.
Easy . . . easy does it.
Her hands came up. Fists, pressing against each other and under her chin. “My baby, my baby,” and her voice was a moan.
Lester needed only the one hand, his left. The other he stretched toward the woman, touching her hair, his fingertips only, gently, benevolently, seeing it in his finder, looking deep into her upturned face.
In the corner of Lester’s finder the sweep second hand began to wipe the red glow from the timer’s face. When it came around to the twelve, except for the sponsor break and his verbal sign-off, he would be off the air. .
Sobs began to rock the kneeling woman. Lightly at first a mere staccato catching of the breath, but growing. Growing in a crescendo of violence that, peaking, made of her body a heaving, thrashing, straining animal thing.
Great racking, convulsive sounds rasped from her throat. A thread-thin trickle of blood started from one corner of her tortured mouth.
Enough.
Her head dropped, her whole body now bowed and shaking.
Lester watched his hand go out to her, stop in midair. He did not try to hide its trembling. His fingers closed, his hand came back, not having touched her. Leaving her, huddled, tremulous, to herself and her great sorrow.
Slow fade and ... go to black.
Ninety seconds. Exactly and on the dot and another of his human-interest segments for the intergalactic network was over; another moment in the life story of a little person had been made immortal.
Lester eased his headgear off, handed it to the waiting technician, stood rubbing the spots where the temple pieces had pressed. The woman had stopped trembling now and was looking dazed, uncomprehending. They always do, the subjects.
Swiftly, but not too roughly, Lester raised up her limp left arm, undid the cuff and stripped off the tiny receptor taped to the wrist. Another he took from her ankle and two more from the back of her skull, from under the concealing black hair. He could have left to one of his technicians this stripping off of the tiny receptors, that, obedient to the commands of his console, sent their impulses impinging upon the nerve streams of his subjects. But Lester felt that doing it himself, this body contact with his subjects, was just one more tiny factor that helped keep fresh his unmistakable feeling of rapport.
His lead technician touched his shoulder from behind, indicating they were about ready for his verbal signature and the one part of his program Lester found distasteful. A compliance with a regulation he felt was onerous and a little demeaning. Some day those who made these artistically pointless rulings would recognize the validity of his technique and perhaps eliminate this abhorrent note. Until then...
Lester leaned forward and spoke into the button mike his technician was holding out to him.
And at the end, “... The emotional response of the subject was technically augmented.”
EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING
Ray Nelson
At the end of the show the hypnotist told his subjects, “Awake.”
Something unusual happened.
One of the subjects awoke all the way. This had never happened before. His name was George Nada and he blinked out at the sea of faces in the theater, at first unaware of anything out of the ordinary. Then he noticed, spotted here and there in the crowd, the nonhuman faces, the faces of the Fascinators. They had been there all along, of course, but only George was really awake, so only George recognized them for what they were. He understood everything in a flash, including the fact that if he were to give any outward sign, the Fascinators would instantly command him to return to his former state, and he would obey.
He left the theater, pushing out into the neon night, carefully avoiding giving any indication that he saw the green, reptilian flesh or the multiple yellow eyes of the rulers of earth. One of them asked him, “Got a light, buddy?” George gave him a light, then moved on.
At intervals along the street George saw the posters hanging with photographs of the Fascinators’ multiple eyes and various commands printed under them, such as, “Work eight hours, play eight hours, sleep eight hours,” and “Marry and Reproduce.” A TV set in the window of a store caught George’s eye, but he looked away in the nick of time. When he didn’t look at the Fascinator in the screen, he could resist the command, “Stay tuned to this station.”
George lived alone in a little sleeping room, and as soon as he got home, the first thing he did was to disconnect the TV set. In other rooms he could hear the TV sets of his neighbors, though. Most of the time the voices were human, but now and then he heard the arrogant, strangely bird-like croaks of the aliens. “Obey the government,” said one croak. “We are the government,” said another. “We are your friends, you’d do anything for a friend, wouldn’t you?”
“Obey!”
“Work!”
Suddenly the phone rang.
George picked it up. It was one of the Fascinators.
“Hello,” it squawked. “This is your control, Chief of Police Robinson. You are an old man, George Nada. Tomorrow morning at eight o’clock, your heart will stop. Please repeat.”