the attaché's room fills
all were watching the recursive loop the medical attaché had rigged on the TP’s viewer the night before, sitting and standing there very still and attentive, looking not one bit distressed or in any way displeased, even though the room smelled very bad indeed.
Context
The Entertainment as the great equalizer, demonstrated by a roster. Everyone who walks through that door to investigate — the personal physician, his assistant, two Embassy security guards with sidearms, two Seventh Day Adventist pamphleteers "with all good spiritual intentions" — is neutralized identically the instant they catch the screen. Rank, armed force, and religious faith are three different kinds of protection against the world, and the sightline dissolves all three the same way, leaving them "very still and attentive" and untroubled in a room whose very bad smell is the serial's own accumulating incontinence — no one on the page is dead, and the dossier's follow-up (107, p. 548) finds this whole cohort alive in wards. The horror is the uniformity: the weapon does not care who you are or what you came armed with. It only requires that you look.