“If the answer is yes, then you should not hesitate to give your lives to journalism, for you will become forces for incalculable good in the world.

“If the answer is no, then I beg you to take up other pursuits—any other pursuits. For a weak journalist can bring darkness to the earth more quickly than the mightiest king . . .”

Tom shook the words away. They had seemed painfully pompous when he’d first heard them, almost twenty-five years ago, and now he was embarrassed at remembering them with such accuracy. Cahier had been, after all, a teacher, not a news­paperman. It did the old boy’s ego good to think he was preparing the future rulers of the world.

But Tom watched old Lulu, pumping and throbbing, her metal arms lifting out the printed sheets, and he thought of the many things he’d caused her to say.

“Tom!”

“It’s okay, Jack. Just a little sleepy, is all. Rough night.”

The old man seemed alarmed. He had known Tom McDaniel as a calm person of clockwork routine. “It’s about that thing, that speech, ain’t it?” he asked.

“I guess.”

“Well, you let me call Freddy and—”

“No,” Tom said, pulling himself back to Caxton, back to the Messenger building, to 1957. “I’ll have the copy to you in a half hour.”

He went to his office, ripped the empty sheet of paper out of the typewriter, inserted a fresh one.

Pompous, perhaps, he thought. But Cahier had been mostly right. I can shout at the people in the crowd and they won’t listen, but when I put those words down in cold, hard print—the same words—they’ll pay attention.

That’s what Cahier was talking about.

LEADING SCIENTISTS DISCOVER WORLD IS FLAT he typed, in capitals. “The Oakville Research Center today released the news that, contrary to previous belief, the earth is not round. According to Albert Einstein, Jr., ‘A spectro-inductive photograph, taken from a height of three hundred miles, shows that the so-called curvature of the Earth is due wholly to a warp in the ionosphere. It is now absolutely certain that our Earth is as flat as a flapjack . . .’ ”

Tom looked at the paragraph, smiled faintly and dropped it into the wastebasket.

He typed THE WAY WE LOOK AT IT and paused. “As everyone knows, the Messenger, along with school officials, the county court, the Mayor of Caxton, and most Caxton citizens, was opposed to the move toward integration of the races,” he wrote, and felt his heart inside his chest. “We fought the issue from its inception to the final decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, employing every legal means. However, we believe that the government of the United States is a government of law and not of man, and that the Supreme Court is the final arbiter in deciding what is law. Therefore, once the Supreme Court has spoken and until the decision of that Court is changed by an amendment to the Constitution by a vote of the people, we have no choice except to obey the law.