"Lady mine," he said, "a lifetime is composed of a finite number of minutes. What is happening now is important. I have seen men who well knew they'd be dead in half an hour enjoy a glass of tup most thoroughly. Others spent the same half hour worrying. They were just as dead but they had missed a glass of tup."

"You're impossible!"

Jettero looked at his watch. He said, "You have just wasted one minute of your life. Don't waste the next one. Give me a kiss."

"Oh, Jettero, I wish you knew Lombar like I do!"

"I assure you, lady mine, that you are just now in much better company. Come here."

And though he smothered her with kisses and though he soon had her mind on other things, he did not, that night or in the weeks to come, succeed in smothering her worries.

Somehow she KNEW it was far more dangerous than he said. But he wouldn't even listen!

Haggard with the smell of his own brand of danger, three days later Madison was returning to the Royal ante­chamber, escorting Lombar Hisst.

Keyed up until it felt his whole insides were going to rip asunder, Madison would know now, in just minutes, if he was to stride on to victory or be left expiring in some unpleasant Voltar gutter, a loser cast away. Just a hair's width of miscalculation could expose all and even bring him death.

For three days he had worked and worked hard, with the knowledge that a failure at any given point in a complicated chain could leave him lost and condemned forever upon this distant strand and it would wreck forever his last chance to finish Heller.

The major problem had been to prove to Hisst that he, Madison, was such a magical PR that he could get the Lords to bow to Hisst-a thing which Lombar, a commoner, considered utterly impossible-and to get the action shown through the Confederacy on Homeview.

The sequence of minor problems had been hair-raising, each one in itself.

The first incipient nervous breakdown occurred when the son of Snor had been unable to wake his father up long enough to get him to stamp and certify a blanket order giving Madison the run of Homeview. Finally the boy had been persuaded by Teenie to go back and, when no nurses or doctors were about, and out of the sight of the security scanners, get Lord Snor's seal of the Interior Division out of a desk and stamp the order himself.

The next threatened crackup happened when the manager of Homeview at the Joy City Studios had been unable to believe that Lord Snor would issue such an order and had tried to call Palace City to verify it. Unable to connect with Snor, he had gotten back at Madison-he evidently did not like the Apparatus-by giving him a lousy crew. No director, a scrub team of drivers and crewmen and, worst of all, a cameraman whose wife had just left him and who was not yet recovered from a five-day drunk. "A stinking order from the stinking Apparatus to do a stinking event only deserves a stinking crew," he had said, little reckoning that he was putting Madison's life on the line-and he probably would have cheered if he had found out. "We'll put it in the Family Hour, so hold it on time, for we won't reprogram all of Homeview just to insert a stinking clip." Madison had left him wondering what the blazes a PR man was and had had to be content with what he got. Hair-raising!

Then a page had had to sneak into a meeting of the Grand Council. It had only been attended by five members and these were all bleary with speedballs. The page had slipped the prewritten resolution under the palsied hand of the Crown who was stamping something else and then he had to get it logged by a clerk who was too deaf to hear things that were being passed. Madison had crouched outside shivering until the page sauntered out, tapping his jacket to signify he now had a legal order to the Master of Palace City to change building names.

It had taken every credit Teenie could scrape up to bribe the Master to order the name wanted and to make the ceremonial arrangements for the right minute of the day. If this final result, about to be received, did not work, then Teenie would be after his blood again.

And then there had been the struggle of pages and sons to get most of the Lords to feel indulgent enough toward children to agree to attend the affair, followed by the heroic feat of actually getting them into their robes and out there.

Throughout the event, Madison had been too tied up with guiding Lombar to keep an eye on the Home-view crew. It had been HARROWING to have to walk along with dignified mien and resist all cravings to watch that (bleeped) cameraman and see if he even had the thing on, much less pointed at the exact required angle. If Madison had looked, the camera would have gotten him subjective-looking into its lens-like some gawker. So as of right here and now, walking across the antechamber, bringing the chief back to his desk, Madi­son did NOT know what he had in the can.

Lombar lumbered to his desk in front of the bolted door of the Emperor's bedchamber and sank down in his chair. There was no telling what his reaction was thus far: he was completely silent.

Madison went over to the Homeview screen and with a bit of fiddling got it turned on. He didn't know how to calculate the transmission time as the signal had left Palace City through a thirteen-minute future drag, had been transmitted to the planetary network center at Joy City and then had to come back and go through time relays to get back into Palace City time. So he didn't know how to set the digitals to be sure he was ahead of the program on the screen's recording strip, which would give him a replay. His palms were dripping and his hands shook.

Oh, God, he was about to do a thing which no PR with any brains would ever dream of doing: showing a client a program which the PR himself had not pre­viewed. With a drunk cameraman, heavens knew what was on that strip and if that camera had even wobbled, Madison knew he would be dead.

He abandoned time calculation. He just yanked the strip ahead at random and hoped he was before the start point he wanted.

He got the afternoon "Family Hour." There was a picture of a woman rocking a child and crooning while the commentator went on and on about the joys of moth­erhood.

Madison stole a glance at Hisst but Hisst was just sitting there, eyes upon the screen. Madison couldn't figure the reaction.

The commentator said that you should never feed a child anything but mother's milk so that "what gets indrawn with sweet nourishment carries with it, on this channel of deliciousness, a soft and vibrant flow of love and family."

Madison wished desperately he knew how to fast-forward the strip. He glanced at Hisst to see how he was taking it: the yellow eyes, aside from their ever-present flicker of insanity, were unreadable.

The picture showed a lot of shots of strange animals rutting in dirt and the announcer condemned all beast milk as imparting only lust and greed, and wound up in style.

Now there came a series of views of ancient buildings. SCHOOLS! Oh, thank heavens, this was finally the start of the program they had just enacted.

A rather nasal commentator voice was running along with a history of schools and began to show those which had been named after members of the Royal family and even Emperors.

Madison cast a covert glance at Hisst. He was just sitting there in his gaudy scarlet Apparatus general's full-dress uniform, more like a brutish Devil than a man. One couldn't tell what he was thinking.

Then suddenly the part that Madison had been waiting for came on. "... but times change and the parade of power across the stage of history can ever glitter to new heights. Yesterday it was determined by Lord Snor, Lord of the Interior, acting through the Master of Palace City, to celebrate our dedication to fineness and decency in tomorrow's noblemen and courtiers and celebrate as well the glory and dedication of our magnificent and relentless protector of the realm, Lombar Hisst, Spokesman of the Emperor..." Madison thought the text was absolutely great, for, after all, he had written it himself; but he didn't quite like the trumpet fanfare: it sounded more like razzmatazz. He glanced anxiously at Hisst to see how he was taking it but Madison could get no reaction at all!