"Bodger...." Stanton straightened up, his face grim in defeat. "I have to know: If I do as you ask, countermand the Goons, call off the Ultrablack—What will happen to me, afterwards?"
"I can't say, Fred," Bodger replied flatly. "We'll have it put to a general Vote."
"I see," said the President, knowing full well what the result of such a Vote would be, with the Hive enraged against his exposed treachery. "Is it your best offer?"
"My only," said Bodger. "Let's go, Fred."
He prodded Stanton's back with the Snapper, and the President began to move forward, holding his head high, toward the staircase leading to the control-chamber entrance. Frank opened the panel at the rear of the prop-Goon, and called for Andra to join him inside it, then he took Lloyd and Grace by the arms, via the controls, and guided them through the black blindness after Bodger and his prisoner.
At the head of the staircase—really no more than a tier-cut segment of the lead-concrete Sub-Level Two, over which the correspondingly undercut left wall of the twenty-five-foot-thick level could slide—Frank had to come to a halt, his prop-Goon not being equipped with extendable cogs to fit the treads and risers, as the real Goons' wheels were. "I'm going down there with him," Lloyd said, starting down into blackness.
"No," his father's voice came from the level below. "I'll handle this myself, Lloyd. I can see my way and you can't."
Lloyd stood undecided on the brink of the staircase, then Grace found his arm in the dark and drew him back. "I want to talk to you about your father, Lloyd," she said, when he was again at her side. "He said some strange things, up in the Unit...."
Descending the ladder below his prisoner, the Snapper aimed upward always at the base of Stanton's spine, Bodger reached the cable-net flooring, and gestured the President to the chair before the control panel. "Here," he said, returning the other's Voteplate. "You'll need this. But I don't have to tell you the penalty for one attempt at trickery on your part."