This week in the saga

The war arrives and the paper answers it. Two days before the tanks move he grades the man assembling them — a genius, he tells a radio show; playing his successor like a drum, says the letterhead. Then, in the dark before dawn on the twenty-fourth, the invasion begins, and his verdict goes out the same day: none of this would have happened if he were still in the office. At the winter conference in Florida the hall is full and the speech runs long. And on the twenty-eighth of February a statement about the alliance and the dues and the tank-busters goes into the out-tray — and the paper stops. After four hundred and eighteen sheets in thirteen months, the court of the exile has issued its last scroll. Nobody marks the date, because nobody knows: the network is open now, and everyone is waiting for the voice to walk into it.