Oswald had a few of the "crank calls" and reported them as such. Bill Howard had a number of calls, and didn't report them. Bill Howard worried, and added two and two, and sweated, and reported the details of Formosa each night. The details giantized in gruesomeness until their very content was too much for the airways, and he had to censor them as he gave them out. Bill Howard sweated in the cold January weather, and each day he ferreted further, seeking out the realities behind the censorship that lay heavy now even over the wires. By phone, by gossip, by hearsay and by know-how he got the stories behind the story--the real horrors that he couldn't broadcast. Sometimes he rebelled at the censors and himself as one of them, but he knew better than to rebel. It's facing us all, he thought. We each have the right to know. This is the way the world ends, he thought. With a whimper that comes after the agony, when agony is too great. And he kept remembering a little girl walking towards a camera with big eyes. If I were a physicist, he told himself, if I were a physicist instead of a newshawk, I could get a computer to tell me the probability ratio of whether I hold an answer. That probability ratio is probable ten billion to one, he told himself. That probability ratio is zero. Witches are for burning, he told himself. He told himself a lot of things, and he sweated through the cold January weather. * * * * * It had been two weeks since the world heard the first details of Formosa, and the details were so grim now that you couldn't use them at all. Just a blanket story. That night, the map of the world behind his desk, Bill Howard leaned toward his audience. He told them the human side of the story of Formosa. He spoke of the people there, the pawns in a game of international suicide, real people, not just statistics. He described a family, and he made them the family next door. Mother, father, children, watching one another die, not prettily but with all the torture that the laboratories of the world could dream and put together. A family that watched each other go insane, knowing what was happening. A family that watched each other die, writhing and unknowing in insanity. He took his pointer and he showed the growing perimeter of the quarantine. He traced the location of the center of the disaster. Then he leaned again toward his audience. "Listen, now," he said, "for the world cannot sustain this torture." He took a deep breath and he put the full force of his being into his words. "Witches of the world, unite," he said, "to make it clean, clean, clean, Witch clean--NOW!" The final word was out before the network censor reached the cut-off switch. * * * * * The President and his cabinet put the country on a double alert. Russia had cleaned up Formosa, they knew, and would hit the United States with disease and ultimatums next.