Except for the occasional rolling of the occasional head. The whole ritual is an exercise in waving the right hand violently in front of the public eye in order to distract attention from what the left hand is doing under the table. In a case like this one, of course, the left hand is doing nothing at all. That’s exactly what it should be doing, but the public wouldn’t go for that. The public wants to know how it happened and why it happened and why somebody didn’t have an instant solution to take care of the problem the minute it arose. The public wants blood, Mr. Skinner. That’s why the mayor needs a scapegoat, and that’s why you’re here, and I doubt you really understand that. I doubt you understood it before, and I rather doubt you understand it now.

I don’t think we’re getting off on the right foot. If it will reassure you, I’ve received no instructions-either explicit or implied-to pin blame on any individual or group of individuals. My job, quite specifically, is to determine whether there’s any way we can prepare better preventives for future contingencies of this kind.

You can’t, Mr. Skinner. But of course that’s what the public won’t buy. We live under the constant threat of instant extermination. Emotionally nobody but a suicide can contend with that. We want guarantees. We want them, but of course they don’t exist. How could they? Look, it’s meaningless trying to pin the blame on anybody or trying to forestall future wild-card attacks. This kind of thing falls under the classification of acts of God. You can’t expect anybody to anticipate every wild delusion of every deranged mind out there. My civil-defense office has a handful of employees. Our area encompasses nearly twenty million people. Do you think we can read twenty million minds? There was no way to predict that a kook in a thirty-year-old bomber would circle over Manhattan Island threatening to demolish the city if we didn’t pay him five million dollars’ ransom.