“Uh…sure…uh…go ahead, Mr. Durch.”

“Call me Arthur.”

“Arthur!” said the host, beginning to look horribly rattled.

Arthur Durch turned and looked at a television camera. “I’m really sorry you can’t be here with me tonight, Evelyn dearest. I just want you to know I love you more than there are stars in the sky.”

“What is your specialty, Arthur?”

“Pardon?”

“Your specialty. What is your specialty?”

“You already said it. Sex!”

“Oh, God… I mean, goodness… ha ha ha…I said it, didn’t I? I said God. I mustn’t, you know. It’s taboo to say God on the air. Or is it? So Mr. Dur…so Arthur, what are you going to do with one hundred million dollars…if…if you answer The Big Question correctly.”

“For me to know and you to find out,” replied Arthur Durch, winking at the camera.

“Oh, ha ha ha ha ha ha. For me to know and you to find out! Clever, clever, clever. Okay, Mr. Durch…I know, I know. Arthur. Okay, Arthur, our model Beautiful Monique will take you to your soundproof capsule—the one on the far right. Let’s have a big good-luck hand for…for…Arthur!

Durch received nothing resembling a “big good-luck hand.” It was more like a smattering of applause. He wasn’t a favorite.

“We’ll be back to start the first round of The Big Question,” yelled host Rip Puckett over the cheering audience, “right after these messages.”

“You’ve lost it, Puckett!” screamed the livid producer, showering spittle on the host’s face the instant he stepped backstage. “You’ve completely lost it!”

“I…he…that guy Durch threw me for a loop with his badgering,” said Rip Puckett, wiping his face dry with his handkerchief.

“What badgering?”

“He told me to call him by his first name. He rattled me. I think he was trying to rattle me.”

“Well, he certainly succeeded. Call everybody by their first name, idiot!”

“Okay, okay,” muttered the host. “I just wish you wouldn’t call me an id—”

“And stop your goddamn laughing. It’s getting on everybody’s nerves.”

“I’m trying to act jolly.”

“Fuck jolly, do you hear?”

While the producer was ripping Puckett a new one, someone from the Nielsen Corporation, the company that had rated the nation’s television and radio shows for decades, called the National Broadcasting Company. The Nielsen man spoke to the network’s vice president of research and development.

“Right now,” said the Nielsen man, “three out of every four television households in America are watching your Big Question program, Harry. Just thought you’d like to know.”

“Thank you for calling, Sid,” said the network’s vice president of research and development. “That is nice to know.”

The delighted network veep telephoned the producer in the control room and told him the good news.

The producer did something he rarely did.

He smiled.

In the first round of Game One, each contestant answered the first question correctly. In the second round, Arthur Durch was asked to name the six most common causes of impotence in men.