This week in the saga

The morning after the two-and-a-half-hour broadcast he is furious about the wrong headline: the story is not the record audience, the story everybody prints is that the machines failed. Wednesday the Manhattan judge rules the gag stays on — the leading candidate for the presidency may not answer a reporter's question about his own trial, and voting begins in three weeks. Thursday he sees what they have done with the man he beat: the old king is given the opening night of their convention, the slot nobody watches, and thrown out of his own party's week. Death Valley, he calls it, and for once there is no joy in his voice. Monday the hall in Chicago fills for someone else; near midnight she declines his network's debate, and the duel he thought he had arranged dissolves into a negotiation about which camera will hold it.