Emergency broadcast button

The emergency broadcast button is a portable radio link meant to carry an alarm and connect Jubal Harshaw’s home to the news networks covering it. During the Special Service raid, Harshaw orders it set to a dead-man mode, with Anne keeping her thumb on the button; when the link fails, he loses both a safeguard and the ability to tell whether the authorities are coming or whether his publicity arrangements are functioning. Its eventual diagnosis is prosaic: the equipment was not broken, but had no power because a circuit breaker was open.

Purpose and Setup

Harshaw’s arrangement makes the button part of a larger effort to ensure that events at his home cannot be concealed. When two large air cars approach, he orders Anne to keep the panic button on its dead-man setting, while also directing Mike to hide underwater in the pool. Anne offers to stand at the pool’s edge in her Witness cloak with her thumb on the button. Harshaw gives her thirty seconds of delay and instructs her to restore her thumb to it if the cars land. The device is therefore not merely a convenient call button: it is a contingency alarm within a plan whose success depends on outside observers learning what happens.

That plan is already uncertain as the first black squad carrier lands in the garden around the pool and another begins circling the house. Harshaw wishes the authorities had parleyed first, but he cannot rely on that possibility. The button’s dead-man setting reflects his attempt to make silence itself trigger a response. At the same time, the procedure puts the system in Anne’s hands, making its operation depend on her remaining at her post while the household responds to an imminent raid.

Failure and Exposure

After the attempted raid, Harshaw learns that New World Networks did not see what happened at his home. He orders Larry to retrieve the panic button, believing that Anne probably has it, and recognizes that the two dozen recorded hold messages need not be checked individually: their delivery depended on the same signal that failed to reach the news channels. What had been arranged as a broad exposure mechanism has thus failed at its common point of connection.

Larry hands Harshaw the portable radio link. Harshaw jokes that he wanted to sneer at it and see whether it sneered back, then asks how to test it without waking three networks. Larry explains that the transceiver has a switch for a local test: throw the switch and push the button, and a light should come on. A full test would require calling the networks from the transceiver and asking them to confirm the signal all the way through to the cameras and back to the monitor stations. Harshaw also asks whether Larry could identify a fault if the test shows that they are not getting through. Larry can perhaps find a loose connection, but says Duke is the household’s electronics specialist.

The failure becomes especially dangerous during Harshaw’s telephone negotiation with Joseph E. Douglas. While Douglas leaves the screen, Harshaw tells Larry that, with the transceiver out, he is bluffing without knowing whether Douglas has gone to issue the suggested news release or instead to send the police back. Harshaw cannot verify which course Douglas has taken, and the phone call keeps him occupied while the equipment remains unreliable. He sends Larry to contact Tom Mackenzie and warn him that the biggest story since the Fall of Troy may be missed unless the setup is working at once. The radio link’s failure therefore reaches beyond the missed broadcast: it deprives Harshaw of information at the moment when he is trying to manage both the government and the press.

Diagnosis and Consequences

The problem is eventually exposed during preparations for Mackenzie’s follow-up interview. After the New World Networks mobile stereovision unit arrives, its crew checks the equipment lent to Harshaw. The crew boss reports that there is nothing wrong with the transceiver or the field setup. The technician then explains the apparent malfunction: nothing was wrong with the device; power had not been supplied because the breaker at the board was open.

That discovery redirects the blame from a defective machine to a simple failure in setup. Harshaw stops Larry and Duke from turning the incident into an argument over whether Duke had told Larry to reset the breaker. The missed camera coverage leaves Harshaw privately relieved: Mike’s unusual abilities remain secret, along with the unexplained disappearance of the policemen and two squad cars. The sequence makes the button’s failure consequential in both directions. It frustrates the planned public exposure of the raid, but the same absence of coverage helps preserve secrets Harshaw does not want strangers to investigate.

Narrative Significance

The button’s changing role is a small but telling reversal. At first it promises that the household can make a covert raid visible; then its silence leaves Harshaw unable to distinguish a diplomatic concession from another threat; finally, the supposed technical breakdown proves to be an open breaker. The device is at once an alarm, a communications link, and a weak point in the machinery of publicity. Its failure shows that Harshaw’s elaborate defense against secrecy depends not only on political judgment and media attention but on a switch being thrown and a circuit being powered.

The episode also turns a piece of normally unobtrusive equipment into an object that demands attention. The transceiver is trusted as a working connection until its failure makes its material dependence unmistakable: the networks cannot receive the alarm if the system is not powered, and Harshaw cannot know whether his messages have reached them. The eventual explanation is mundane rather than conspiratorial, but its effects are not. A simple open breaker shapes what can be broadcast, what Harshaw can infer, and which events remain unseen.