Tak Hallus - Mr. Winthrop Projects [ss]

Sunlight burst through the cabin window as Browning threw apart the curtains.

"There you go, Swami," said Browning, turning from the open window but still obscured by his dark contrast to the bright day behind him. "Is that enough nature for you?"

Mr. Winthrop, seated on the wooden floor in a full lotus position, squinted at the sudden light. Somewhere out in the forest that surrounded the cabin, a bird chirped. A pine-scented wafture of moist mountain air reached him and he took several Pranayama, pulling the air deeply into his lungs.

"That's fine, Browning," he answered.

Browning nodded once, his great round head like a basketball with ears when silhouetted in the sunlight, and moved away from the window, returning to the solitaire same he had left on the table.

"But I'm not a swami."

Browning sat down and looked over the plat of cards, reminding himself of their positions. He picked up the deck and turned up the first card, then paused and twisted around in his chair as if Mr. Winthrop's protest had only just arrived at his brain after the long journey from his ear.

"A guru?"

"I'm not a guru either."

"A yoga?"

"Yogi. Yes, in an eclectic sort of way."

"What do you call yourself, Winthrop?"

"An ad-man."

Browning turned back to his game, flipping up a card, then placing it on the table with a plastic snap of its corner.

"I like Swami better," he said without looking around.

"I don't suppose it matters," said Mr. Winthrop.

"Nope. As long as you do your job, it don't matter what you call yourself."

Mr. Winthrop was still unsure precisely what job he was supposed to do. The only certainty was the consequence of failure. He had worked for the past week setting up the Winthrop Projector in the basement of the cabin, an unlikely enough place for a telethesia projector, and on the one occasion when fatigue had overtaken him, Browning had interpreted his clumsiness with the equipment as an attempted slowdown and pulled an ugly looking .45 from inside his coat, jamming a bullet-laden clip into the grip and jacking a shell into the chamber. Browning said nothing at the time, but Mr. Winthrop got the message.

"You gonna have that thing ready to show Mr. Nicolson today?" asked Browning without looking up from his game.

Shaken from his thoughts by the mention of Nicolson's name, a name that gathered significance the longer its owner remained absent from the cabin, Mr. Winthrop took his feet out of his lap and stood up. "Yes. I think so."

"You better."

"All I can do is my best." Browning turned from his game, smiling a toothy grin meant more to unsettle than reassure.

"That's right, Swami. Mr. Nicolson wants you to do your best." The smile faded slowly as Browning's eyes moved from Mr. Winthrop to the rug that covered the trapdoor to the basement, indicating the conversation was finished and it was time to get moving.

"All right. All right," said Mr. Winthrop, walking to the rug and skidding it aside with a bare foot. "But I could work a lot better if I knew more about the goal."

"You'll learn all that soon enough," said Browning, gesturing at Mr. Winthrop with a little downward hooking motion of the ace of spades between his fingers, urging Mr. Winthrop to get down to work.

Mr. Winthrop stooped and touched the two loose boards - positioned so it was impossible to step on both at the same time - that activated the door. It slid back, sighing with a faint hydraulic whish and revealing the top two metal steps of a staircase descending to darkness. He stood up and patted the pockets of the baggy coveralls Browning had given him to replace his gray pin-striped suit.

"Did I leave my screwdriver up here?"

"Huh?" asked Browning, glancing at the card in his hand as if it might somehow have transformed itself into a screwdriver.

"Screwdriver," repeated Mr. Winthrop.

"Oh," said Browning, lingering on the sound. "Screwdriver."

"Yes."

"Ain't seen it."

"You know, Browning, if you keep me working in that damp cellar in my bare feet, I'm liable to electrocute myself. Then where would you be?"

"I wouldn't do that if I was you, Swami." Browning frowned slightly. "Mr. Nicolson wouldn't like it."

"So why don't you give me my shoes?"

Browning waved the card in his hand toward the open window. "It's hard to run over pine cones barefoot. Besides, if you think you're going to get zapped, you'll be careful." Browning paused a moment, then grinned as if a better way of putting it had occurred to him. "It'll keep you on your toes, Swami." The grin faded. "Now get to work."

Mr. Winthrop turned toward the hole in the floor and started down the steps, feeling them shake under even his slight weight and hearing flanges rattling against bolts somewhere below him. At the bottom of the stairs, he touched the light switch. Four overhead lights in enameled metal shades flooded light over the concrete floor and walls of the dingy basement.

Attached to the wall opposite Mr. Winthrop was a workbench. His equipment, the Winthrop Projector in its four-foot cabinet topped by an inch diameter parabolic reflector, sat next to a hologram recorder, a lifeless oscilloscope, a voltmeter and a new set of hand tools that Browning had brought him.

He walked to the workbench and cleared away the bits of wire and solder left from the previous day's work, sweeping them onto the floor with the edge of his hand, then examined the projector to see where he had left off.

Mr. Winthrop had originally envisioned something like the projector as a graduate student forty years before. Though he had been working on his Ph.D. in electronics at the time, trying to get the data for his dissertation - "On the Properties and Potentialities of Super High Frequency Semiconductors," University of California Press, 1953 - into some kind of shape, he still had connections in the psychology department where he got his first doctorate. In particular he still met frequently with Dr. Kempton, chairman of his board in the psych department and a man whose test procedures were still used in parapsychological researches. It was at this time that Mr. Winthrop volunteered to act as one member of a control group that would establish a statistically "normal" standard against which to measure Dr. Kempton's "specimens." Mr. Winthrop proved abnormal.

He was immediately shifted to the "specimen" group. It turned out Mr. Winthrop had what Dr. Kempton could only classify as "uncanny negative intuition." Sitting in Dr. Kempton's laboratory, waiting for a flashing light to indicate that the person in the next room had turned over another ESP card and was concentrating on it, Mr. Winthrop would mark one of the five symbols on his answer sheet and invariably be wrong.

This performance never bothered Mr. Winthrop, who was thinking about semiconductors most of the time in those days, but it bothered Dr. Kempton who re-tested Mr. Winthrop in every permutation of the basic situation, invariably finding that Mr. Winthrop was wrong.

"It's impossible, Winthrop," said Dr. Kempton on the day after scoring one of Mr. Winthrop's tests.

"What's impossible?"

"That you should score well over four standard deviations below the statistical mean."

"Do you think I cheated?" asked Mr. Winthrop, his tone indignant at having put out his best efforts only to be accused of some impropriety.

"Not at all." Dr. Kempton glanced down at the score sheet and tugged thoughtfully at one corner of his drooping black moustache. "I just wonder how you got through school with this ... this problem of yours."

"I never thought of it as a problem."

"But half of taking examinations is guessing."

"I don't think it has anything to do with guessing," said Mr. Winthrop. "I always did all right on guessing."

"You did?"

"Check my transcripts."

Dr. Kempton looked past Mr. Winthrop, as if reading some thought in the air just behind him. "Come with me, Winthrop. I want to run a few more tests on you."

Dr. Kempton's tests, by putting Mr. Winthrop on the card-flipping end of the testing, proved fruitful. There were times, usually when Mr. Winthrop was relaxed after a good night's sleep, that the subject in the other room named one hundred percent of the cards Mr. Winthrop turned up. There were other times, when he was distracted by his upcoming orals for the electronics doctorate, that the score conformed to the statistical mean.

The tests and his electronics degree were finished about the same time. Mr. Winthrop had been away from the psychology department for several weeks, occupying himself with the problem of getting a job, before he got Dr. Kempton's final judgment on the test series.

"Do you remember that mood series we did?" asked Dr. Kempton, indicating a pile of papers on his office desk.

"Yes."

"On your good days, the subjects even picked up your mood. For example, on May 5th, you were depressed about something."

"Orals ... just the Orals."

"Whatever. In any case, every one of the subjects reported depression, some more than others. And on May 15th you were elated about something."

"Orals."

Dr. Kempton looked up, a raised eyebrow asking how the same stimulus could cause two such diverse responses.

"They were over."

"Oh."

Mr. Winthrop grinned.

"Anyway, each of the subjects came out of the test rooms elated.

"Maybe they were glad to get out."

Dr. Kempton grunted. "The nearest I can guess is that you have some sort of ability that occasionally allows you to project your thoughts, and more consistently allows you to project your mood, though both seem so random they must be uncontrollable. That's what blocked out any reception when you were on the receiving end of the tests."

"Maybe I should have been an actor."

"That reminds me, Winthrop. What are you going to do now that your education's finished? I could arrange something in this department, if that would interest you."

"Ad-man."

"Pardon me."

"I'm going into advertising."

"After ten years of higher education!" Dr. Kempton's expression was shocked to the point of anger. "You are going into advertising!"

"Because of it."

The years passed and Mr. Winthrop prospered. Aided by his background in psychology and a sharp sense of intuition, he managed to rise quickly in a cutthroat industry and stay on top. Flexibility and imagination were his operating principles. When visiphones came into general use in the mid-Eighties, he contracted with AT&T to establish "Operation Busy Body," the campaign that sandwiched three-second deodorant commercials between busy signals.

"If you're as busy as they are," a healthy looking Swedish blonde would say, "try No-Od." Then she would turn discreetly away from the camera, revealing an interesting expanse of bare back, as if preparing to try No-Od. It was discovered that a high percentage of middle-aged men would punch out their own numbers just to watch the busy signals.

His electronics degree contributed little to this success until the early Nineties, though he kept up with the field and even made a few small contributions through experiments with organic circuitry in his home laboratory. Then in the spring of 1990 he read Dill's paper on generating the Alpha rhythm through inductive fields and knew that technology had at last caught up with his vision. If you could put people to sleep electronically, he reasoned, without attaching electrodes and without the subject being aware of the process, you could do other things. You could advertise inside his cranium, for example. An ideal method of getting a client's message across. But there were problems. Electronically reproduced and induced Alpha rhythms were one thing, modulating the signal with an intelligible comment about a product was another. That was Mr. Winthrop's contribution.

Mr. Winthrop heard a metallic rattling from the stairs behind him and looked up from the tip of his soldering gun. He could only work on the grosser aspects of the circuitry in this environment, the power supply and some of the intermediate phase amplifiers, but Browning didn't seem to have damaged any of the equipment in transit, so nothing more was necessary. Browning was coming down the stairs, his hand in his coat pocket and by the shape of the bulge around it, holding a large lump of metal.

"Drop the gun, Winthrop!" shouted Browning across the basement, pausing with one foot still on the bottom step and a hand on the railing.

Mr. Winthrop looked at the soldering gun in his hand.

"This?" he said, holding it up and clicking the trigger several times. Two lights under the soldering tip blinked as he clicked.

"Drop it!"

He dropped it, hearing it clatter against the concrete floor and glancing down at it. The tarnished copper tip was bent at a disjointed, perpendicular angle to the body of the gun.

Browning looked back up the stairs, cupping his free hand around his mouth, and shouted.

"All right, Mr. Nicolson! It's safe!"

Nicolson. The Nicolson, thought Mr. Winthrop, watching the stairs as first a black leather shoe and gray pantleg, then another shoe and pantleg, appeared. When the body was visible to the waist, the man bent down and a head appeared just below the door in the ceiling.

That Nicolson! thought Mr. Winthrop when he recognized the face and felt irritated with himself for failing to make the connection before.

Satisfied that it was safe, the face disappeared and the body continued down the stairs until the whole man was visible.

"There it is, Mr. Nicolson," said Browning, gesturing in Mr. Winthrop's general direction with a constricted jerk of the hand in his coat pocket.

"Does it work?"

"Don't ask me. Ask him." Browning nodded toward Mr. Winthrop.

Nicolson dismounted the stairs and walked, the jaunty walk of a short man, across the basement floor toward Mr. Winthrop. Nicolson had a head and neck like a golf ball on a tee, a small round head on a thin neck, and cocked it to one side, inspecting Mr. Winthrop and the equipment as he approached.

"So this is it, eh, Winthrop?" said Nicolson. He said it as though Mr. Winthrop were a long-time employee who had only just finished a project they had worked on together for years. Though Mr. Winthrop recognized Nicolson from television news clips, he had never met him.

"Yes, that's it, Senator. Now when do I get out of here?"

"Be patient, Winthrop." Nicolson inspected the equipment, standing with his hands clasped behind him as if the projector were some objet d'art he was considering purchasing but reluctant to touch.

"Patient! I was in the middle of one of the biggest ad-campaigns my agency has ever mounted when that thug of yours - "

"Nephew."

"Pardon me?"

"He's my nephew. The boy was always a problem until I found work for him."

"Oh," said Mr. Winthrop, blinking once at Browning, then returning his gaze to Nicolson. "There is a family resemblance."

"Shape of the head."

"Round, yes. I see it."

"Oval."

"Look, Nicolson!" said Mr. Winthrop, increasing his fervor, "I don't care if it's square! I want out of here!"

"When your work's done, we'll see about it."

Suddenly Mr. Winthrop had a cold premonition, a vision of his probable future. He looked at the bulge in Browning's pocket.

"How ..." said Mr. Winthrop and swallowed. "How do I know I'll get out?"

"You don't."

"But - "

"Murder hasn't been my line."

"Has kidnapping?"

"Not until now," said Nicolson and looked up from the projector, grinning at Mr. Winthrop with a grin that echoed Browning's tight malicious grin.

"I see how you got as far as you did in politics."

"I'm not done yet, Winthrop." Nicolson's grin retreated to a self-satisfied smile and he returned his attention to the projector. At last the goal was clear to Mr. Winthrop. Why the possibility had never occurred to him, a man with forty years experience in the advertising game, he didn't know, but watching Nicolson inspect his equipment, there could be no mistaking it. The same techniques that marketed underarm deodorant, marketed politicians, and Nicolson was up for re-election in '96. Or was he after a different market?

"The presidency?" said Mr. Winthrop tentatively.

"You've got it, Winthrop. Now show me how this stuff works."

Mr. Winthrop's thoughts spun with the ramifications of Nicolson's plan. He imagined Winthrop Projectors in vans outside every polling place in America, tapes inside spinning out the message, selling the product, selling America on Nicolson. He imagined the repeal of the Twenty-second Amendment and Nicolson President for life, and beyond, through some appointed successor. Browning? No, Nicolson had more sense than that. He imagined Nicolson as President, signing the order imprisoning Mr. Winthrop for life.

"Nicolson, how do you suppose the electorate will react when they hear about this kidnapping business?"

"Who'll believe you?"

"My reputation for honesty is - "

"Who'll believe you," interrupted Nicolson, indicating the projector with a flick of his index finger, "when I have the ideal means of convincing them otherwise? Now how does this thing work, Winthrop? I have to get back to Washington. And make it simple. I'm no electronics expert."

"Neither's Browning," said Mr. Winthrop, prodding the soldering gun with the tip of his big toe.

Mr. Winthrop explained that the projector used a slight Alpha rhythm as a carrier, raising the subject's consciousness threshold to a point just short of somnolence, then phase modulated it, generating controlled fantasies in the subject's preconscious mind.

"Dreams," said Nicolson.

"Yes, but controlled dreams."

"But you mean unconscious." It irritated Mr. Winthrop to have his authority questioned on so elemental a point. "When I say preconscious, I mean preconscious. If it was generated in the unconscious, we would get extremely unreliable results. The best analogy I can give you is post-hypnotic suggestion. The hypnotist tells the subject he will have an overwhelming desire for oranges ten minutes after he emerges from hypnosis and will search everywhere for them. That's just words. Ten minutes after he emerges, he has an overwhelming desire for oranges and searches everywhere for them. That's conduct."

Nicolson, a man who frequently listened to experts descant before forming his professional judgments, nodded understandingly, though it was difficult to tell how much he understood.

"Go on."

"Fantasies work in much the same way. For example, you may awaken from a dream in which you were continually frustrated in attaining some goal: love, safety, crucial information ..."

"Advancement."

"... Anything. In one way this is a method of telling you something isn't right in your life and you must do something about it. In another, it's a method of releasing the tensions of life through fantasies."

"Dreams," said Nicolson. "This thing makes dreams." Nicolson's round cheeks became flushed and his eyes narrowed, angry now that he realized what the projector did. "What good are dreams?"

"Controlled dreams."

"So what?"

"If you're selling dream oranges, it does a lot of good."

"Orang - " Nicolson's eyes came open, wide and sparkling. He nodded vigorously, emitting a sustained "Ahhh" to show his pleasure and comprehension. "Oranges, Ahh, yes," said Nicolson. "Is it set up for anything?"

"No-Snap Wrap."

Nicolson looked at Mr. Winthrop, a faint puzzlement on his face. "Never heard of it."

"It's new. Not bad stuff, actually." "What is it?"

"Do you really want to know?" "Yes," said Nicolson. The way he said it, combined with his deepening frown, suggested he might have to use stronger means if he weren't told.

"It's an oxygen catalyzed banding product, like a rubber band, that lets you wrap a bundle and wait ten minutes while it shrinks tight."

"Snapless?"

"Yes."

"Doesn't sound very exciting." "That's my job. To make it sound exciting. Besides, I can't control what kind of products people try to market."

A faint smile appeared on Nicolson's thin lips. "Then you shouldn't mind working for me. Now let's see how this thing works."

"Oh, no!" yelped Browning, quickly dodging under the staircase. "You ain't using that Swami's gizmo on me!"

"Browning!" said Nicolson, harsh authority and' decisive leadership back in his voice now that he was dealing with something within his purview. "You get out here or I'll tell my sister she can put you back to work in the plumbing shop!"

Nicolson turned to Mr. Winthrop. "It won't hurt him, will it?" "Unfortunately, no."

"All right, Browning! Get out here!"

Browning peered out from under the staircase, his .45 in his hand with the hammer back.

"And put that away!"

"O.K., Mr. Nicolson. But if he zaps me in the head and jumps you, don't blame me."

Nicolson looked at Mr. Winthrop. "He has a point there." Then turned back to Browning. "Give me the gun."

Browning walked over and handed Nicolson the automatic, checking it first to make sure the safety was on.

"Where did you get this old thing, Browning?" asked Nicolson, scrutinizing the .45.

"Old Reliable," said Browning. "I've had it since I was a kid."

"We'll have to get you something better."

"No thanks. That one works every time," said Browning and grinned at Mr. Winthrop.

Nicolson slipped the gun into his pocket. "Go ahead, Winthrop."

Mr. Winthrop flipped up a half-dozen safety covers over switches and pressed each switch in turn. There was no sound, nor any visible reaction by the projector, except for the pointers on two meters that jumped halfway across their scales and a sine wave that appeared on the oscilloscope, an S on its side under the grid on the screen.

"Ready," said Mr. Winthrop. Nicolson nodded.

Mr. Winthrop touched the hologram recorder and thick tape started moving past the laser playback head, collecting on the empty spool while it fed the basic commercial content into the projector.

Watching the recorder, Mr. Winthrop realized he had neglected to explain one element of the system to Nicolson; how the tape was prepared. He had failed to mention that the Alpha rhythm was modulated by a combination of the three-dimensional image, in this case the No-Snap Wrap, and Mr. Winthrop's own mood projections, picked up as a spurious effect by the hologram recorder in something like the same manner that students in Dr. Kempton's lab had picked up his mood.

Making the initial tape had proved the most difficult and delicate part of the operation. Mr. Winthrop had taken up yoga at the age of sixty in order to calm his nerves and develop the degree of emotional control necessary to "orchestrate" the tape. After much experimentation, Mr. Winthrop had found that his best method of stimulating the acquisitive desire necessary to supplement the tape was to focus his mood at first on the impulse to purchase - a task he found relatively simple after his years of studying that phenomenon in the advertising business - then work his emotions through a sequence of Desire, Purchase and Fulfillment - all while the laser-punctured tape was recording the product. The recording, for reasons Mr. Winthrop was only beginning to understand, picked up the emotional sequence as a sort of Empathy track surrounding the product and when the tape was played through the telethesia projector, the result was analogous to a posthypnotic suggestion to purchase the product.

"I'll take some," said Browning.

After the demonstration, Nicolson ordered Mr. Winthrop to prepare a tape with him as the subject matter rather than its present product.

"No-Snap Nicolson," said Browning and grinned at his own sudden wit.

Nicolson scowled and Browning attempted an expression with more gravity, forcing the corners of his mouth down while the center involuntarily continued to smile. The result was a pouch-lipped camel expression that seemed to irritate Nicolson more than the grin.

Nicolson turned back to Mr.Winthrop, mild disgust dimpling one corner of his mouth.

"Will this do for an image, Winthrop?" asked Nicolson and pulled a depthphoto of himself from his inside coat pocket. "I have to get back to Washington. It's the original from one of my campaign posters."

"I suppose so," answered Mr. Winthrop, considering the full, youthful contours of the depthphoto. "But it's not a very good likeness."

"It is, too," insisted Nicolson, peering at the picture.

"Look at the shape of the head," said Mr. Winthrop, running his finger around the face in the depth-photo.

"Looks perfectly normal to me."

"That's what I mean."

Nicolson's eyes flicked up from the depthphoto, fixing Mr. Winthrop with a squinting stare and pressing his lips tightly together until he spoke.

"Listen, Winthrop" - Nicolson reached into his pocket and extracted Browning's .45, waving the tip of its keyhole shaped muzzle under the tip of Mr. Winthrop's brown nose - "just because I need you right now, doesn't give you the right to wisecrack about me!" Nicolson's eyes went from Mr. Winthrop's to the .45, recognition dawning in them, as if unaware until now what was in his hand. He returned the gun to his pocket.

"Who's wisecracking?"

"You were!"

"Not me."

Nicolson looked at Browning. "Was he wisecracking?"

"Huh?" said Browning, who had been thinking about something else, or at least not thinking about the conversation.

"Was Winthrop wisecracking?"

"Let me see the picture and I'll tell you."

Nicolson handed the depthphoto to Browning.

"Well?"

"Nope," said Browning, staring at the picture and mustering a solemn, judicial expression. "He wasn't wisecracking. It's a terrible picture of you. It's very dignified, though."

Nicolson grunted and snapped the picture out of Browning's fingers.

"Use it anyway," he said, thrusting the depthphoto toward Mr. Winthrop. "I've got to get back to Washington."

Nicolson started for the staircase, handing Browning the .45 as he passed, but paused before mounting them, looking back across the basement toward Mr. Winthrop., "And do a good job, Winthrop. There might be a bonus in it for you if you do a good job..."

"That's better than I'm getting now," said Mr. Winthrop quietly.

"... I want to be sold like I've never been sold before!" concluded Nicolson, disappearing up the stairs and waving at Browning and Mr. Winthrop as if leaving a press conference. There was a faint whish as the door closed above them.

"Old No-Snap's a little touchy about his dignity, ain't he, Swami?"

"Uh-m-m," answered Mr. Winthrop in the noncommittal way he had developed after years of heading the Winthrop agency.

Mr. Winthrop turned back to the workbench and Browning eased up behind him, peering over his shoulder at the depthphoto.

"What are you doing now, Swami?"

"Looking at the picture."

"Oh," said Browning. "I'll leave you alone then, so you can do it right. Old No-Snap wants you to do it right."

Mr. Winthrop continued examining the depthphoto, noticing how the photographer had removed some of Nicolson's more obvious imperfections, until he heard the staircase rattle and the overhead door whish, indicating that Browning was in the cabin above. While rewinding the hologram tape, Mr. Winthrop planned his attack on the problem. Selling Nicolson. Selling Nicolson. The idea floated in his brain like an abandoned ship in the fog. Nicolson wanted to be sold. He wanted to be sold like he had never been sold before. He wanted - And suddenly Mr. Winthrop had it. The perfect marketing strategy.

The week went by with Mr. Winthrop persevering on the tape. Every morning he would wake at 7:00 a.m. in the cabin to find Browning staring at him. Browning slept during the day when Mr. Winthropwas safe in the basement. From 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. Mr. Winthrop would go through a series of Hatha yoga exercises, beginning supine in the Salvasana and working his way through a Bhujangasana, or on alternate days a Salabhasana instead, to a perfect Sirsasana headstand, at last ending it with a Padmasana, the classic full lotus position with his hands on his knees, index fingers and thumbs forming the proper "O" position of the mudra.

By 8:00 o'clock his sensory thresholds were so low that not only the sputter and putt of the unfertilized eggs Browning cooked for Mr. Winthrop's breakfast - Mr. Winthrop had become a vegetarian shortly after becoming a yogi - but every other sense impression became sharply focused in his mind and with them the sensitivity he needed to gauge the emotional effect of his orchestrated telethesia tape. Though it was only necessary to get Nicolson's picture on the tape once, copying the aura of visionary leadership and dignified practicality caught by the depthphoto, it took great sensitivity and considerable reworking to get the exact effect he wanted from the Empathy track.

At one point Mr. Winthrop even considered the possibility that Nicolson might make a good presidential candidate. After all, Nicolson's voting record in the Senate, as far as Mr. Winthrop was concerned, was adequate, if undistinguished. Nicolson had a tendency to vote for what was popular and harmless, rather than stand on principle and be defeated in the next election, but that was only good politics. As someone had said, half of being a politician was getting elected and the other half was getting reelected. If Nicolson turned out to be as responsive to his constituency as President, was there anything wrong with it? Mr. Winthrop quickly abandoned such thoughts, realizing that Nicolson would need to be responsive only to his own whims with the projector to insure election. Besides, Nicolson was alien to the American tradition since there had never been a kidnapper-president.

"Is it finished yet, Winthrop?" shouted Nicolson from the stairs a week later.

"Almost."

The stairs rattled and clanked as Nicolson made his way down, followed by Browning, who rubbed sleep from his eyes with both fists and yawned between them.

"Good." Nicolson walked across the basement, striding confidently with his coat pushed back and his hands in his pockets. "You can't imagine what a week I've had."

"Mine's been pretty quiet."

"I imagine so, Winthrop." Nicolson glanced over his shoulder at Browning. "Has he been working every day?"

"If that's work," answered Browning. "Every morning he gets up and twists himself into a pretzel for an hour, then comes down here."

"We all have our strange habits, Browning," said Nicolson, smiling at Mr. Winthrop. "You'll have to learn to be tolerant if you want to get ahead in this world."

"You're in a good mood today," said Mr. Winthrop.

"And why shouldn't I be?" Nicolson held his index finger and thumb an inch apart in front of Mr. Winthrop's face. "I'm that far from the presidency if this thing of yours works." He dropped his hand.

"It works."

"It better."

"Yeah," said Browning, grinning.

Mr. Winthrop had skipped his yoga today, having completed the Empathy track for the recording the previous day. He knew it accounted for some of his nervousness. Nicolson's presence for a demonstration accounted for the rest.

"Let's see it, Winthrop."

Mr. Winthrop gestured to Browning to stand in front of the projector. "Oh, no!"

"It didn't hurt last time, did it?" asked Nicolson.

"No, but this is different."

"Don't you want to vote for your uncle?" asked Mr. Winthrop.

"Sure," said Browning, glancing back and forth between Mr. Winthrop and Nicolson. "Family's family, but you ain't tried this one on anybody."

"Get out of the way, Browning," said Nicolson, shoving Browning out of the area of the projector's field. "I wanted to see how this thing worked anyway. What's on this tape, Winthrop?"

"Just you."

"Fine. Fine."

Mr. Winthrop's nervousness increased and he punched the playback button on the recorder. He was thankful he had to do nothing more to get Nicolson into the field. Tape started past the head.

"Nothing's happening," said Nicolson.

Mr. Winthrop glanced at the tape. "It will."

Suddenly Nicolson's face was suffused with pleasure, his black eyebrows hopping up his forehead to form neat semicircles above his wide-open eyes. Slowly his jaw became slack and his mouth opened slightly, growing into an awestruck smile as Mr. Winthrop watched.

"Is it working, Mr. Nicolson?" asked Browning.

"It's beau-ti-ful, Browning." Nicolson's voice was slow and enraptured, without its normally crisp pronunciation.

"What do we do now?" asked Browning.

"Let him go."

"I'll need my shoes," interjected Mr. Winthrop.

"Let him go?" Browning cocked his head to one side and squinted into Nicolson's almost gleeful eyes. "Are you sure about that, Mr. Nicolson?"

"It works. It's beautiful. Let him go."

"All right, Mr. Nicolson. But that wasn't the way we planned it." Mr. Winthrop shivered.

"My shoes."

"They're upstairs in the cabinet. Mr. Nicolson, you want me to drive him to the airport, too?"

"Let him go," repeated Nicolson.

Browning shrugged, turning his palms toward the ceiling and looking toward Mr. Winthrop for sympathy. "He says let you go - I let you go, Swami."

Mr. Winthrop glanced at the tape, noting it still had ten minutes to play, and headed across the basement floor. He padded up the metal stairs and through the open door into the cabin. He found the storage cabinet with his shoes and clothes, slipped his shoes on quickly and scooped up his gray suit, planning to change later.

Outside the cabin, Mr. Winthrop picked a direction through the forest that would bring him out near the mountain town they had passed on the way in, yet keep him away from the road. He started into the forest at a brisk trot, hugging his suit under his left arm and, for the first time that morning, felt the knot in his stomach relax. The air was cool and somewhere ahead birds began to sense his presence. They fluttered, chirped and flew from limbs as he trotted past. He glanced at his watch as he ran. The ten minutes were about up. It would be another minute or two until the time delay circuit he had installed during the week went off and fused the projector into a lump of modern art. When Nicolson realized what had happened, he would send Browning in pursuit, but Mr. Winthrop had enough of a lead.

Mr. Winthrop smiled, remembering Nicolson's expression. Nicolson's own image, a dignified and overwhelming symbol of achievement and competence, had captured Nicolson so completely that he was unaware of the non sequitur accompanying it: let Winthrop go. Such was the illogic of dreams, thought Mr. Winthrop. He had been selling dreams for forty years.

Nor had Nicolson noticed the second suggestion, slipping into his mind like an investigator from the Senate Ethics Committee, that would impel him to reveal the events in the cabin at his next press conference. A sense of freedom and accomplishment Mr. Winthrop had not felt in years swept over him.

He trotted on through the forest, beginning to make out the first of the buildings in the village. Somewhere in the distance he heard a turbine whining up a mountain road. Nicolson wanted to be sold like he had never been sold. It hadn't been too difficult after all. You can always sell a man something he wants, even if it's only a brief glimpse of who he thinks he is, thought Mr. Winthrop and trotted into the village.