Then it was a lesson even for Peyton himself, who saw by his own example how one can successfully turn a given thing inside out, portraying disadvantages as advantages. After all, the most important thing is not what happens. The most important thing is how to tell about it. Because the one who tells about it will also keep silent about the most important thing in all this – will keep silent about himself, because without him all the above mentioned will not make sense at all… All this will not make sense without Peyton. The Peyton who's gonna get what's coming to him, not because he's the best. Not even because he deserves it. It's because he decided to.

– You know, every time, I worry a lot. I worry that I won't be able to find the right words… put those words in the right order even… I worry that I'll go hoarse while I'm saying something… But you know… I never worry about being heard      I'm proud to say that all the time, all the years that

I've been serving Apollo-24, I've spent hand in hand with the most loyal and worthy people on Earth, who have survived and who are capable of any task… – having finished this phrase, Peyton took the water bottle that stood on the podium and poured some liquid into the glass that stood next to it.

He knew perfectly well that the only thing people would hear now was the slight clink of glass against each other, and then the sound of water being poured.

Moreover, he knew very well how this sound was heard from different points in the audience, because once he had specifically asked his assistant to pour water into a glass while Peyton himself would run around the empty auditorium and listen from different places to see how well this sound could be heard in the speakers. Then he did the same thing with a slight toss of the pen from his hand to the podium stand. Then with a deep sigh. Then with a cough      And so on until

the entire list he had prepared in advance was complete. Sometimes he even added something new to it and went back to experimenting, each time finding something new for himself.

Of course, he did not stop there. And then he asked the assistant to look in different directions: straight ahead, to the right, to the left, while he himself was also in different places at that moment and looked at how it should look.

And then he began to experiment with "climbing" out of the grandstand. The thing is that the rostrum itself, due to its massiveness, seriously separated him from everyone else. It turned out that he was hiding behind it. And he would have been happy to throw it away, but some of the elders could not stand more or less long without its help, so he had to leave it as it was. And that was completely at odds with his goals of being as close to everyone as possible, so that they could all be easily controlled.

The only thing that could be done under such conditions was to bring his hands beyond the edges of the podium – to place them on the edge, or to bring them higher so that they would appear as something omnipresent to the audience. And in this configuration, he decided that the barely noticeable could make the difference in this competition for attention. The thing is, people often pay

attention to some little thing out of the ordinary. They start to focus on it, or even fixate on it… And Peyton chose his index finger, which could literally jump out of the outer part of the edge of the podium a little bit upwards – Peyton would put his hand on the edge of the podium, wrapping his hand around it a little bit and pretending that his hand was either holding this edge firmly or resting freely on it. And then in bursts of his phrases he would raise his index finger sharply, admiring what he said as an exclamation mark.