It was the single largest gathering of explosively tense people on the face of the earth. Tense people don't like surprises. Therefore, there was a great deal of shock and unhappiness in that hall when, ten minutes before air time, just as the President and Tip McLane were emerging from their makeup rooms and taking their positions on the stage, Cyrus Rutherford Ogle appeared, walked up to the moderator, and informed him that William A. Cozzano would not be participating in tonight's debate because he had more important things to do.
Pandemonium was a term coined by Milton to refer to the capital of Hell, where all of the demons were together in one place. From this it naturally came to mean any central headquarters of wickedness. Over time, though, as happens with many good words, its meaning had been diluted to mean any place that was noisy and chaotic. Nowadays, a person could speak a pandemonium at a birthday party full of two-year-olds.
Cy Ogle preferred the old definition of the word. No other word could possibly have described the situation in the auditorium after he strolled on to the stage and made his announcement. There was no doubt in his mind that if not for the presence of witnesses, the campaign staffs of the President, Tip McLane, the panel of journalists, and the organizers of the debate would drag him outside and hang him from a stately tree on the Columbia campus. Outside of an actual lynching, never had so much hostility been directed against one man by so many people for so many reasons. Consequently he could scarcely prevent himself from grinning through the whole thing.
There was an initial phase during which people merely screamed at him, then ran off into the wings to spread the news to other people, who ran out to scream at him some more. This probably would have gone on for quite some time if not for the fact that air time was rapidly approaching. So it got compressed into a very intense couple of minutes. A tone of emotional restraint was imposed by the technical types, who had a show to put on.
"Well, I can't give you Cozzano in person," Ogle said, "and I'm deeply sorry for that. But to make amends, we did blow quite a bindle buying some satellite time. Be can bring you Cozzano live from his home in Tuscola."
This announcement brought of Pandemonium into a state of stunned silence. Cozzano could participate via TV? And Ogle was paying for the satellite time? We can live with that.
"Only thing is," Ogle said, after they had bit on that, "that we will need to make one small change in the format. Cozzano has an important announcement to make. A very, very important announcement. And with your forbearance, we would like to have a minute or two at the beginning of this program for him to make that announcement."
Absolute silence reigned on the stage.
Pandemonium had relocated downstairs, into the press room, where a couple of hundred reporters were screaming into their telephones. Most of them were screaming the same thing: Cozzano is withdrawing from the race!
They managed to launch the program on time. The moderator took these last-minute changes calmly, made a few changes to his notes, and sat down in his throne, unruffled. McLane and the President met in the middle of the stage and shook hands (this encounter had been choreographed during an hour-long summit conference between their campaign staffs) and Cozzano's lectern remained unoccupied.
Out in the parking lot behind the auditorium, several semitrailer rigs were parked in parallel slots. There were some satellite uplink trucks, one GODS container on a flatbed rig, and a mobile studio from one of the networks, which was the nerve center of the whole debate: this was where the pool feed originated. Feeds from all of the cameras on the stage converged on this vehicle and showed up on small monitors. A director sat in front of them and decided which camera was going on the air. Now, the director had a new feed patched into his system, which came directly from a satellite downlink. This feed originated in Tuscola, Illinois.
When he had learned about the business with Cozzano, the director had been expecting just a simple, live, one-camera feed, probably Cozzano sitting in his living room by the fire, or something. It would be there all night long, and whenever Cozzano's turn came up, he would push the appropriate button and the image of Cozzano would go out.
Naturally, it turned out to be a lot more complicated than that. The feed from Tuscola, when he first saw it, consisted of a long shot of Cozzano's house as seen from the street. Obviously, Cozzano's house wasn't going to participate in the debate. They would have to have at least one more camera, inside the house. Which meant that somewhere in Tuscola there was another director who was sitting in another studio like this one - a director who worked for Cy Ogle and William A. Cozzano. That director was managing feeds from at least two cameras, deciding which one was going to be fed up to the satellite.
The director, in his trailer behind the auditorium, was the first person in the United States to figure out that Ogle had taken them for a ride. The choreography of this debate, which had been hammered out through many hours of negotiations, over a period of weeks, had just been torn to shreds and replaced by something totally new, entirely Ogle's.
The moderator began the debate with a few introductory remarks. On TV, you always had to explain the obvious, over and over again: "In four days, Americans go to the polls to select the man who will be their next president. This is a profoundly significant choice ..."
"... this debate was originally intended to include all three major candidates. Tonight, we have two of them. The President of the United States. And Representative Tip McLane of California."
As the moderator introduced the two men, the directory, outside in the trailer, caused their faces to appear on air. Neither one of them seemed to be ready for it. Ever since Ogle's announcement, no one had really known what the hell was going on, what would happen when, who would be introduced in what order. McLane and the President had both spent a lot of time in front of television cameras in the last few days, in the privacy of their campaign headquarters, practicing what they would do at the moment they were introduced; now, neither one of them did the right thing. They looked agitated, sweaty, shifty-eyed, and when they realized they were on TV, they both looked surprised.
"The third candidate, William A. Cozzano, Governor of Illinois, announced a few minutes ago that he could not participate."
The director cut to a camera that had been set up to show all three of the candidates' lecterns in a single shot. McLane and the President looked stiff and self-conscious. The empty lectern made both of them look foolish.
"Instead, he will be addressing us from his home in Tuscola, Illinois."
Cut to the shot of Cozzano's house with the sun setting behind it. It looked inviting and refreshing compared to the stale tense atmosphere of the auditorium.
"Now, the format of this debate has been established in advance, by consensus between campaign staffs and the sponsoring organizations, and I intend to adhere strictly to that format. But there is one deviation that needs to be made, and we will do that right away now and get it out of the way. I understand that Governor Cozzano has an important announcement that he needs to make, and that he is going to make it now. So I will offer the floor to him at this time. Governor Cozzano, are you there?"
"Here goes nothing," said the director, out in his trailer, and cut from the image of the moderator back to the feed from Tuscola.
The feed remained steady on the image of the house for a minute. Lights were coming on inside as the sun set spectacularly behind it. It looked cheery and welcoming and it broke the rigid, lockstep schedule of the debate. Then the Tuscola feed cut to a shot of William A. Cozzano. But it was not the expected picture of Cozzano in a suit, sitting by the fire reading a book and smoking a pipe. It was totally different. For a few moments, it was difficult to make out. Cozzano appeared to be lying on his back in a cramped space, staring upward, reaching up above him with one arm. "Good evening," he said, "I'll be with you momentarily."