ated out to the men in the room, and
a few minutes later they heard the slow, exasperated steps of the
turnkey as he walked over to give his prisoner a light.

At 3:32 pm, the deAngelis board came alive as half-a-dozen lights
flashed red, and the needles on the dials below them trembled in the
seventies and eighties. Every other light on the board showed varying
shades of pink, registering in the sixties. The operator glanced at the
board, started to note the times and intensities of two of the dials in
his log, scratched them out, then went on with his conversation with the
audio controller. The younger reporter got up and came over to the
board. The controller and the operator looked up at him.

"Nothing," said the operator shaking his head in a negative. "Bad call
at the ball game, probably." He nodded his head towards the lights on
the deAngelis, "They'll be gone in five, ten minutes."

The controller reached over and turned up the volume on his radio. The
radio should not have been there, but as long as everyone did his job
and kept the volume low, the Captain looked the other way. The set
belonged to the precinct.

The announcer's voice came on, "... ning up, he's fuming. Doak is
holding Sterrett back. What a beef! Brutaugh's got his nose not two
inches from Frascoli's face, and Brother! is he letting him have it. Oh!
Oh! Here comes Gilbert off the mound; he's stalking over. When Gil puts
up a holler, you know he thinks it's a good one. Brutaugh keeps pointing
at the foul line--you can see from here the chalk's been wiped
away--he's insisting the runner slid out of the base path. Frascoli's
walking away, but Danny's going right aft ..." The controller turned the
volume down again.

The lights on the deAngelis board kept flickering, but by 3:37 all but
two had gone out, one by one. These two showed readings in the high
sixties; one flared briefly to 78.2 then went out. Brutaugh was no
longer in the ball game. By 3:41 only one light still glowed, and it was
steadily fading.

Throughout the long, hot, humid afternoon the board held its reddish,
irritated overtones, and occasional readings flashed in and out of the
seventies. At four o'clock the new duty section came on; the deAngelis
operator, whose name was Chuck Matesic, was replaced by an operator
named Charlie Blaney.

"Nothing to report," Chuck told Charlie. "Rhubarb down at the point at
the Forbes Municipal Field, but that's about all."

The new opera