Steeply's father and M*A*S*H — "And I kind of half-picture Hank…"

The scene closes the loop between the dead father and the living assignment. Steeply admits that when he's east and near the samizdat's temptation, he half-pictures his colleague Hoyne "in the old man's old recliner, hunched and scribbling feverishly" — and that Hoyne's eyes, and the Arab attaché's, get the look his father's eyes got, the stuck expression Marathe finally names as "trapped in some sort of middle. Between two things. Pulled apart in different directions." The son sees his father in every victim of the fatal Entertainment; the father's death is the template through which Steeply reads the whole threat. What the father transmitted was a way of recognizing the look of a person being consumed — and the son has made a career of hunting it.