“And, yet, a newspaper is an abstract thing. Newspapers do not, in fact, exist. What exists is a relatively small group of human beings—newspapermen. A few thousand of them, at most. And how many of these, I wonder, realize the power they represent? How many understand the extent of their responsibility?

“You were all attracted to journalism, my friends, because it seemed a bright, shiny and marvelously romantic subject. It is romantic, but I hope that I have shown that it is also the hardest and perhaps the most important work in the world.

“To become journalists, you must automatically—if you are honest men—give up the individual prejudices and biases that we equate with personal freedom. You must see that subjectivity has no place in the newspaper business, that it must be submerged and dissolved, always. Which is to say, you must tell the truth.

“Before you settle on this career, gentlemen, examine the question: Are you willing, are you able, to tell the truth? Is it within your power to make the intellectual and physical and spiritual sacrifices that are necessary to do that seemingly simple thing, and do it consistently? Can you tell the plain, unadorned, unslanted truth, regardless of the consequences real or imagined?

“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.