And somewhere else, possibly, a poet named Prior was listening to his baby's coughing and trying to write a poem--a poem that Walton and a few others would read excitedly, while the billions would ignore it.
Walton saw that Percy was dead right: Roy Walton could never have sold Popeek to the world. But FitzMaugham, that cagy, devious genius, did it. By waving his hands before the public and saying abracadabra, he bamboozled them into approving Popeek before they knew what they were being sold.
It was a lousy trick, but FitzMaugham had realized that it had to be done. Someone had killed him for it, but it was too late by then.
And Walton saw that he had taken the wrong track by trying to be reasonable. Percy's callous description of humanity as "seven billion morons" was uncomfortably close to the truth. Walton would have to make his appeal to a more subliminal level.
Perhaps, he thought, at the level of the kaleidowhirls, those endless patterns of colored light that were the main form of diversion for the Great Unwashed.
_I'll get to them_, Walton promised himself. _There can't be any dignity or nobility in human life with everyone crammed into one sardine can. So I'll treat them like the sardines they are, and hope I can turn them into the human beings they could be if they only had room._
He rose, turned out the light, prepared to leave. He wondered if the late Director FitzMaugham had ever faced an internal crisis of this sort, or whether FitzMaugham had known these truths innately from the start.
Probably, the latter was the case. FitzMaugham had been a genius, a sort of superman. But FitzMaugham was dead, and the man who carried on his work was no genius. He was only a mere man.
The reports started filtering in the next morning. It went much as Percy had predicted.
_Citizen_ was the most virulent. Under the sprawling headline, _WHO'S KIDDING WHO?_ the telefax sheet wanted to know what the "mealy-mouthed" Popeek director was trying to tell the world on all media the night before. They weren't sure, since Walton, according to _Citizen_, had been talking in "hifalutin prose picked on purpose to befuddle John Q. Public." But their general impression was that Walton had proposed some sort of sellout to the Dirnans.