'Yes, Doctor,' Pethel said, walking toward him. 'What can I do for you today ?' As if he didn't know. Trying to fight off Myra as well as keep his mistress, Cally Vale, Dr Sands had enough problems; he really needed the use of his Jiffi-scuttler. Unlike other customers it was not going to be possible to put this man off.

Plucking by reflex at his great handlebar mustache, presidential candidate Jim Briskin said tentatively, 'We're in a rut, Sal. I ought to fire you. You're trying to make me out the epitome of the Cols and yet you know I've spent twenty years playing up to the white power structure.

Frankly, I think we'd have better luck trying to get the white vote, not the dark. I'm used to them;

I can appeal to them.'

'You're wrong,' his campaign manager, Salisbury Heim, said. 'Your appeal - listen and understand this, Jim - is to the dark kid and his wife scared to death their only prospect is winding up bibs in some gov warehouse. "Bottled in bond," as they say. In you these people see...'

'But I feel guilty.'

'Why ?' Sal Heim demanded.

'Because I'm a fake. I can't close the Dept of SPW warehouses; you know that. You got me to promise, and ever since I've been sweating my life away trying to conceive how it could be done.

And there isn't any way.' He examined his wristwatch; one quarter-hour remained before he had to give his speech. 'Have you read the speech Phil Danville wrote for me ?' He reached into his disorganized, lumpy coat-pouch.

'Danville!' Heim's face convulsed. 'I thought you got rid of him; give me that.' He grabbed the folded sheets and began going over them. 'Danville is a nut. Look.' He waved the first sheet in

Jim Briskin's face. 'According to him, you're going to ban traffic from the U.S. to Thisbe's satellite.