"Yeah, sure."
#
The cafe Thomas chose was in a renovated bank, and there was a private room in the old vault, and they sat down there, away from prying eyes and autograph hounds.
"So, you pumped?" Thomas said, after they ordered coffees.
"After that meeting? Yeah, sure."
Thomas laughed, a slightly patronising but friendly laugh. "That was a great meeting. Look, if those guys had their way, we'd have about a march a month, and we'd walk slowly down a route that we had a permit for, politely asking people to see our point of view. And in between, we'd have a million meetings like this, where we come up with brilliant ideas like, 'Let's hand out fliers next time.'
"So what we do is, go along with them. Give them enough rope to hang themselves. Let 'em have four or five of those, until everyone who shows up is so bored, they'll do anything, as long as its not that.
"So, these guys want to stage a sit-in in front of the convention centre. Bo-ring! We wait until they're ready to sit down, then we start playing music and turn it into a dance-in. Start playing movies on the side of the building. Bring in a hundred secret agents in costume to add to it. They'll never know what hit 'em."
Hershie squirmed. These kinds of Machiavellian shenanigans came slowly to him. "That seems kind of, well, disingenuous, Thomas. Why don't we just hold our own march?"
"And split the movement? No, this is much better. These guys do all the postering and phoning, they get a good crowd out, this is their natural role. Our natural role, my son," he placed a friendly hand on Hershie's caped shoulder, "is to see to it that their efforts aren't defeated by their own poverty of imagination. They're the feet of the movement, but we're its laugh." Thomas pulled out his comm and scribbled on its surface. "They're the feet of the movement, but we're its laugh, that's great, that's one for the memoirs."