roans. Awkwardly, around
the tables and the knapsacks, they formed a rough circle and took hands. They
held it for an long, painful moment, then gratefully let go.

They worked their way upstairs and outside. The wind had picked up, and it blew
Hershie's cape out on a crackling vertical behind him, so that it caught many of
the others in the face as they cycled or walked away.

"Supe, let's you and me grab a coffee, huh?" Thomas said, without any spin on it
at all, so that Hershie knew that it wasn't a casual request.

"Yeah, sure."

#

The cafe Thomas chose was in a renovated bank, and there was a private room in
the old vault, and they sat down there, away from prying eyes and autograph
hounds.

"So, you pumped?" Thomas said, after they ordered coffees.

"After _that_ meeting? Yeah, sure."

Thomas laughed, a slightly patronising but friendly laugh. "That was a _great_
meeting. Look, if those guys had their way, we'd have about a march a month, and
we'd walk slowly down a route that we had a permit for, politely asking people
to see our point of view. And in between, we'd have a million meetings like
this, where we come up with brilliant ideas like, 'Let's hand out fliers next
time.'

"So what we do is, go along with them. Give them enough rope to hang themselves.
Let 'em have four or five of those, until everyone who shows up is so bored,
they'll do _anything_, as long as its not that.

"So, these guys want to stage a sit-in in front of the convention centre.
Bo-ring! We wait until they're ready to sit down, then we start playing music
and turn it into a _dance-in_. Start playing movies on the side of the building.
Bring in a hundred secret agents in costume to add to it. They'll never know
what hit 'em."

Hershie squirmed. These kinds of Machiavellian shenanigans came slowly to him.
"That seems kind of, well, disingenuous, Thomas. Why don't we just hold our own
march?"

"And split the movement? No, this is much better. These guys do all the
postering and phoning, they get a good crowd out, this is their natural role.
Our natural role, my son," he placed a friendly hand on Hershie's caped
shoulder, "is to see to it that their efforts aren't defeated by their own
poverty of imagination. They're the feet of the movement, but we're its
_laugh_." Thomas pulled out his comm and scribbled on its surface. "_They're the
feet of the movement, but we're its laugh_, that's great, that's one for the
memoirs."

#