Chapter 435: Chapter 204: Iron Man
「3:15 AM.」
「Senate Office Building Hearing Room.」
Time here seemed to have congealed, frozen by some viscous substance.
The hearing had been going on for seventeen straight hours.
The press gallery, once packed with reporters, was now mostly empty. Only a few interns and the stenographers in charge of the record remained, propping their eyelids open as they mechanically tapped at their keyboards.
The camera’s red light was still on, its C-SPAN live feed faithfully transmitting the long, tedious scene to the few television screens across America that were not yet dark.
The faces at the chairman’s dais had already changed three times.
The Republican Party Senators had implemented a shift system.
Every four hours, a new batch of fresh, energetic faces would walk in to replace their exhausted colleagues.
They held thick lists of questions in their hands. But in the witness chair, there was only one person.
Leo Wallace.
He had no replacement.
He had been sitting here since ten o’clock this morning.
The cushion on the hardwood chair had lost its spring, digging into his bones like a rock.
His lips were chapped and peeling, his eyes were sunken, and his once-sharp gaze was now clouded by a physiological haze.
"Mr. Wallace."
The Senator leading the charge this round was from Idaho. He was flipping through a brochure for the "Pittsburgh Revitalization Plan."
"Please turn to page 42. It says here you printed fifty thousand flyers to explain the concept of worker cooperatives to the public."
The Senator’s tone was caustic.
"According to my calculations, the printing cost for this full-color coated paper is about 0.35 US Dollars per sheet. If you had chosen ordinary recycled paper, the cost could have been as low as 0.12 US Dollars."
"What I want to know is, does the resulting 11,500 US Dollar difference mean you are misusing Federation funds? Or perhaps, does it demonstrate a certain carelessness regarding fiscal discipline?"
It was a mind-numbingly boring question.
But here and now, at three in the morning in a Senate hearing, it was a saw.
It wasn’t lethal, but it ground away at your nerves, trying to saw through the last thread of your sanity.
Leo felt a thick paste churning in his brain.
He wanted to laugh.
These Senators had wasted half an hour here over a printing fee of just over ten thousand dollars.
He wanted to stand up, throw the microphone in that Senator’s face, and tell him that the workers of Pittsburgh were starving to death while he was worried about the thickness of paper.
But his legs were numb, as if filled with lead, too heavy to obey his own commands.
"I..."
Leo coughed twice, trying to clear his throat, but it only brought a metallic, coppery taste to his mouth.
’Answer him, Leo.’
Roosevelt’s voice echoed in his mind.
’This is their tactic.’
’They’re betting you’ll collapse. They’re betting you’ll get so fed up with the humiliation that you’ll slam the table and storm out, or that you’ll hit your physical limit and ask for a recess.’
’Even if you just ask to use the restroom, even for just five minutes.’
’Tomorrow morning, Cole will tell the cameras: See? The young man evaded questioning. He has a guilty conscience. He couldn’t face the people’s oversight.’
’This is the price of power.’
’In this position, your dignity isn’t your own. Even your pain isn’t your own.’
’Bite down until your teeth shatter, and then swallow the pieces.’
’Even if you die, you die in that chair.’
Leo’s fingers dug into the edge of the table, his nails turning white.
The pain brought back a sliver of clarity.
He looked at the Senator, who was still waiting for an answer.
"Senator."
Leo’s voice was soft and slow.
"Regarding the choice of paper. We needed to consider that these flyers would be distributed on construction sites. The workers’ hands are covered in grease and sweat. Ordinary recycled paper would fall apart at a touch, and the information would be lost."
"Coated paper is waterproof and durable. This means one flyer can be passed around ten times instead of being thrown away after a single use."
"From the perspective of dissemination efficiency and cost-per-read, this was actually more economical."
"If you require it, I can have my financial officer prepare a comparative report on paper durability versus dissemination efficiency."
The Senator was taken aback for a moment.
He hadn’t expected Leo, in this state, to be capable of giving such a logically sound answer—and even a counter-attack.
He sullenly closed the file, muttered a few useless words about "extravagance," and dropped the line of questioning.
He had survived another round.
The clock hands pointed to 3:30 AM.
The doors to the hearing room were pushed open.
A set of footsteps approached.
Brian Cole walked in.
The veteran Republican Party bigwig had just had two hours of sleep in the break room, taken a shower, and changed into a fresh shirt.
He looked refreshed and energetic, as if he were just starting his day.
Cole walked up to the dais and took the place of the previous Senator.
He sat in the leather chair, looking down on Leo from his elevated position.
Leo’s face was deathly pale, the dark circles under his eyes so heavy they looked like bruises, and he exuded an aura of utter, withering exhaustion.
But he still sat ramrod straight.
This kid from Pittsburgh was wedged there like a nail.
He didn’t drink, didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, and didn’t even use the restroom.
He was defending his position in a manner that bordered on self-torture.
Cole knew that conventional methods had failed.
The questions about the budget, about environmental protection, about the thickness of paper—none of it could break this young man.
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