“All right,” Lou’s voice said pleasantly. “And how could we go about that? Do we write nasty letters to the editor?”
There’s a much more effective way, Malone thought. There’s no trouble in getting rid of a man if you can make him expose himself. And you’ve managed that pretty well. You’ve thwarted their idiotic plans, made them stumble over their own fumble-mindedness, played on their neuroses, concocted errors for them to fight and, in general, rigged things in any possible way so that they’d quit, or get fired, or lose elections, or get arrested, or just generally get put out of circulation somehow.
It’s extremely effective—and it works very well.
Sometimes, you’ve only had to put the blocks to individuals. Sometimes whole nations have had to go. And sometimes it’s been in-between, and you’ve managed to foul up whole organizations with misplaced papers missent messages, error, and changed minds and everything else you can think of.
As a matter of fact, it sounds like fun.
“Well,” he imagined Lou saying, “it is fun, in away. But it’s a deadly serious business, too.”
Sure it is, Malone thought. I think the first time that came home to me was when I saw what was happening in Russia, and compared it to what had been going on over here. Tom Boyd saw that, too, when I pointed it out to him—as you probably know if you were spying on my mind at the time.
Not that I mind that in the least.
Come more often, by all means.
But Tom, in case you weren’t listening, said: “Over here there are a lot of confused jerks and idiots.... And in Russia there’s a lot of confusion.”