"Tepondicon! Tepondicon!" yelled the crowd.
Well, it was confusing, and disconcerting, too. With all eyes focused upon me, my every movement would be watched. A wrong word, a misstep, and those cheers would change to death yells. And yet as the carriage bore me smoothly along the paved streets, the significance of it all became clear in my mind in every detail.
These people were rats, scum of the System. What matter if their hopes were falsely raised to the heights? They were doomed anyway by the plague. And in four days more the Jupiter Stone would be mine. Up until now, my life had been one great series of failures. At the Martian School of Technology I had been expelled in my sophomore year for a mere matter of selling drugs to my fellow students. I had been cashiered from the Royal Space Force for what the upstart officers called insubordination. Gamblings, swindlings, I had tried them all with little luck. This would be my metamorphosis, my emergence from the cocoon of mediocrity into success.
The procession drew up before the Power Division building. The Power Commissioner, a tall gangly man this time, waited to receive me at the top of the steps.
But inside his office, with the roar and hubbub of the streets cut off, the interview was much the same as the two previous. He passed a box of cheroots across the desk, leaned back and smoked contentedly.
"And to think," he said, "that a week ago I was ready to join the list of suicides. Mr. Dulfay, I wonder if you realize what this means to the people. Freedom from the plague. It seems incredible."
"You must remember," I cautioned, "It's only an experiment as yet. I can promise nothing."
He waved this aside. "You will be successful," he said. "The hopes of thousands cannot be denied. And now the power. All we have is at your disposal."
Voltar! Xynan! Malakan! In the fourth, fifth and sixth cities everything worked like clockwork. My welcome in each succeeding metropolis was greater than the last. Crowds screamed "Tepondicon!" to the echo. The cities must have ransacked every corner of their confines to festoon their battlements and parapets with tinsel. Hope was hysteria. The black spectre of the plague was pushed to the background. As the legendary hero, Tepondicon, I was the embodiment of all their dreams and hopes.