"Don't interrupt me! God, to think a man I trusted should turn out to
be Judas himself! You animal, the Company has protected you from the
day you were born, and you try to destroy it. Why, you pitiful idiot,
you aren't fit to associate with the dogs in the kennel of a decent
human being!"
There was more. Much, much more. It was a flow of abuse that paralyzed
me, less because of what he said than because of who was saying it.
Suave, competent Defoe, ranting at me like a wounded Gogarty! I
couldn't have been more astonished if the portrait of Millen Carmody
had whispered a bawdy joke from the frontispiece of the Handbook.
I stood there, too amazed to be furious, listening to the tirade from
the midget image in the viewplate. It must have lasted for three or
four minutes; then, almost in mid-breath, Defoe glanced at something
outside my range of vision, and stopped his stream of abuse. I started
to cut in while I could, but he held up one hand quickly.
He smiled gently. Very calmly, as though he had not been damning me a
moment before, he said: "I shall be very interested to hear what you
have to say."
That floored me. It took me a second to shake the cobwebs out of my
brain before I said waspishly, "If you hadn't gone through all that
jabber, you would have heard it long ago."
The midget in the scanner shrugged urbanely. "True," he conceded. "But
then, Thomas, I wouldn't have had you."
And he reached forward and clicked off the phone. Tricked! Tricked and
trapped! I cursed myself for stupidity. While he kept me on the line,
the call was being traced--there was no other explanation. And I had
fallen for it!