The waiting room on the eighth floor was very small, very plush, very intimate, very private. Richards had it all to himself.

At the end of the elevator ride, three of them had been promptly whisked away down a plushly carpeted corridor by three cops. Richards, the man with the sour voice, and the kid who blinked a lot had been taken here.

A receptionist who vaguely reminded Richards of one of the old tee-vee sex stars (Liz Kelly? Grace Taylor?) he had watched as a kid smiled at the three of them when they came in. She was sitting at a desk in an alcove, surrounded by so many potted plants that she might have been in an Ecuadorian foxhole. “Mr. Jansky,” she said with a blinding smile. “Go right in.”

The kid who blinked a lot went into the inner sanctum. Richards and the man with the sour voice, whose name was Jimmy Laughlin, made wary conversation. Richards discovered that Laughlin lived only three blocks away from him, on Dock Street. He had held a part-time job until the year before as an engine wiper for General Atomics, and had then been fired for taking part in a sit-down strike protesting leaky radiation shields.

“Well, I’m alive, anyway,” he said. “According to those maggots, that’s all that counts. I’m sterile, of course. That don’t matter. That’s one of the little risks you run for the princely sum of seven New Bucks a day.”

When G-A had shown him the door, the withered arm had made it even tougher to get a job. His wife had come down with bad asthma two years before, was now bed-ridden. “Finally I decided to go for the big brass ring,” Laughlin said with a bitter smile. “Maybe I’ll get a chance to push a few creeps out a high window before McCone’s boys get me.”

“Do you think it really is-”

“The Running Man? Bet your sweet ass. Give me one of those cruddy cigarettes, pal.”

Richards gave him one.

The door opened and the kid who blinked a lot came out on the arm of a beautiful dolly wearing two handkerchiefs and a prayer. The kid gave them a small, nervous smile as they went by.

“Mr. Laughlin? Would you go in, please?”

So Richards was alone, unless you counted the receptionist, who had disappeared into her foxhole again.

He got up and went over to the free cigarette machine in the corner. Laughlin must be right, he reflected. The cigarette machine dispensed Dokes. They must have hit the big leagues. He got a package of Blams, sat down, and lit one up.

About twenty minutes later Laughlin came out with an ash-blonde on his arm. “A friend of mine from the car pool,” he said to Richards, and pointed at the blonde. She dimpled dutifully. Laughlin looked pained. “At least the bastard talks straight,” he said to Richards. “See you.”

He went out. The receptionist poked her head out of her foxhole. “Mr. Richards? Would you step in, please?”

He went in.

The inner office looked big enough to play killball in. It was dominated by a huge, one-wall picture window that looked west over the homes of the middle class, the dockside warehouses and oil tanks, and Harding Lake itself. Both sky and water were pearl-gray; it was still raining. A large tanker far out was chugging from right to left.

The man behind the desk was of middle height and very black. So black, in fact, that for a moment Richards was struck with unreality. He might have stepped out of a minstrel show.

“Mr. Richards.” He rose and extended his hand over the desk. When Richards did not shake it, he did not seem particularly flustered. He merely took his hand back to himself and sat down.

A sling chair was next to the desk. Richards sat down and butted his smoke in an ashtray with the Games emblem embossed on it.

“I’m Dan Killian, Mr. Richards. By now you’ve probably guessed why you’ve been brought here. Our records and your test scores both say you’re a bright boy.”

Richards folded his hands and waited.

“You’ve been slated as a contestant on The Running Man, Mr. Richards. It’s our biggest show; it’s the most lucrative-and dangerous-for the men involved. I’ve got your final consent form here on my desk. I’ve no doubt that you’ll sign it, but first I want to tell you why you’ve been selected and I want you to understand fully what you’re getting into.”

Richards said nothing.

Killian pulled a dossier onto the virgin surface of his desk blotter. Richards saw that it had his name typed on the front. Killian flipped it open.

“Benjamin Stuart Richards. Age twenty-eight, born August 8, 1997, city of Harding. Attended South City Manual Trades from September of 2011 until December of 2013. Suspended twice for failure to respect authority. I believe you kicked the assistant principal in the upper thigh once while his back was turned?”

“Crap,” Richards said. “I kicked him in the ass.”

Killian nodded. “However you say, Mr. Richards. You married Sheila Richards, nee Gordon, at the age of sixteen. Old-style lifetime contract. Rebel all the way, uh? No union affiliation due to your refusal to sign the Union Oath of Fealty and the Wage Control Articles. I believe that you referred to Area Governor Johnsbury as a corn-holing sonofabitch.'”

“Yes,” Richards said.

“Your work record has been spotty and you’ve been fired… let’s see… a total of six times for such things as insubordination, insulting superiors, and abusive criticism of authority.”

Richards shrugged.

“In short, you are regarded as antiauthoritarian and antisocial. You’re a deviate who has been intelligent enough to stay out of prison and serious trouble with the government, and you’re not hooked on anything. A staff psychologist reports you saw lesbians, excrement, and a pollutive gas vehicle in various inkblots. He also reports a high, unexplained degree of hilarity-”

“He reminded me of a kid I used to know. He liked to hide under the bleachers at school and whack off. The kid, I mean. I don’t know what your doctor likes to do.”

“I see.” Killian smiled briefly, white teeth glittering in all that darkness, and went back to his folder. “You held racial responses outlawed by the Racial Act of 2004. You made several rather violent responses during the word-association test.”

“I’m here on violent business,” Richards said.

“To be sure. And yet we-and here I speak in a larger sense than the Games Authority; I speak in the national sense-view these responses with extreme disquiet.”

“Afraid someone might tape a stick of Irish to your ignition system some night?” Richards asked, grinning..

Killian wet his thumb reflectively and turned to the next sheet. “Fortunately for us-you’ve given a hostage to fortune, Mr. Richards. You have a daughter named Catherine, eighteen months. Was that a mistake?” He smiled frostily.

“Planned,” Richards said without rancor. “I was working for G-A then. Somehow, some of my sperm lived through it. A jest of God, maybe. With the world the way it is, I sometimes think we must have been off our trolley.”

“At any rate, you’re here,” Killian said, continuing to smile his cold smile. “And next Tuesday you will appear on The Running Man. You’ve seen the program?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know it’s the biggest thing going on Free-Vee. It’s filled with chances for viewer participation, both vicarious and actual. I am executive producer of the program.”

“That’s really wonderful,” Richards said.

“The program is one of the surest ways the Network has of getting rid of embryo troublemakers such as yourself, Mr. Richards. We’ve been on for six years. To date, we have no survivals. To be brutally honest, we expect to have none.”

“Then you’re running a crooked table,” Richards said flatly.

Killian seemed more amused than horrified. “But we’re not. You keep forgetting you’re an anachronism, Mr. Richards. People won’t be in the bars and hotels or gathering in the cold in front of appliance stores rooting for you to get away. Goodness! no. They want to see you wiped out, and they’ll help if they can. The more messy the better. And there is McCone to contend with. Evan McCone and the Hunters.”