"Well?"
"Well, then a few little things. A narcotics man came to see me. Just personal. Just curious. They've been pulling in the higher-ups in the dope traffic, by the way—on info from the guys caught in that raid.
"Then that Canaveral deal? Were you listening that night?"
"I always tune you in. It seems to me that today is one of celebration. The dome landed."
"Yeah Yeah, celebration. I'm a newsman, and I get stories that don't go out. There's one that just an hour before zero—a man suddenly died of a heart attack. The technician who took his place—you don't stop a countdown like that for a heart attack—checked his work and found an error that would have misfired the thing. There was also one circuit that had been changed, but they left that because it was changed to be more accurate. They figured the dead guy had done it."
"So?"
"So ... well, nothing. I just wanted to ask you. The witches don't touch anything real these days, of course, so even if ... they were ... well, magic somehow, they couldn't have been involved."
There wasn't even a pause for lip-chewing this time.
"Are you trying to insinuate that Witch products—"
The question was left hanging, but Bill Howard stood there looking his sponsor in the eye.