Steeply's father and M*A*S*H — "I think you’re right, that it’s…"

The anecdote turns out to have been about the present all along. Steeply admits that when he's back east near the lab where the seized cartridge is held, he "find[s] himself tempted" — half-picturing the addicted engineer Hoyne "in the old man's old recliner, hunched and scribbling feverishly," the exact posture of his dead father. The appetite that killed a heating-oil dispatcher over decades of harmless TV is the same appetite a trained federal operative feels tugging him toward the lethal object now, and he knows it, and knowing it doesn't cancel the pull. The horror and the pull are one substance; the father was just the slow-motion demonstration of what the fast version does.