Interface

 Stephen Bury and Neal Stephenson

  

 PART 1

 The State of the Union

 
  

 1

 William Anthony Cozzano's office was a scandal.Soit was whispered in the high councils of the Illinois Historical Society. Forover a century, under dozens of governors, it had looked the same. Then Cozzano had come along and moved all the antique furniture into storage (Abraham Lincoln was the greatest man in history,Cozzano said, but his desk was a piece of junk, and StephenDouglas's side chair was no prize either). Cozzano had dared tomoveelectronics into the frescoed vault of the governor's office - athirty-six-inch Trinitron with picture-in-picture so that he could watch C-SPAN and football at the same time! And his chair was noantique, but a high-tech thing with as many adjustable features asthe human body had bones. He had suffered enough abuse, he claimed, in Vietnam and on the frozen turf of Soldier Field anddidn't deserve to be mangled by some antique chair day in and dayout, Illinois Historical Society be damned. That chair was everything Cozzano wasn't: fat with padding and glossy with petal-soft leather where Cozzano was lean and craggy and weathered, a man who had waited his whole life to look the way he did now, asif carved from a block of white oak with a few quick strokes of anadze.

 Cozzano was sitting in the chair one night in January, holding afountain pen as big as an uncooked hot dog in his left hand.Cozzano returned to his home in the small town of Tuscola everyweekend to mow the lawn, rake leaves, or shovel snow, so callusesmade a dry rasping sound as his writing hand slid across the paper.

 The fountain pen looked expensive and had been given to himby someone terribly important a long time ago; Cozzano hadforgotten whom. He late wife, Christina, used to keep track of who had given him what and send out little notes, Christmas cards, andso on, but since her death, all of these social niceties had gonestraight to hell, and most people forgave him for it. Cozzano foundthat the pen's bulk fit his hand nicely, his fingers wrapped aroundthe barrel without having to pinch it like a cheap ballpoint, and theink flowed effortlessly on to the paper, nib scrawling and calluses rasping, as he signed the endless stream of bills, proclamations, resolutions, letters, and commendations that flowed across his desklike blood cells streaming in single file through the capillaries of thelung - the stately procession that sustained the life of the body politic.

 His office was on the second floor of the east wing, directlyabove the capitol's main entrance, overlooking a broad lawndecorated with a statue of Lincoln delivering his farewell address toSpringfield. The room had only two windows - tall narrow north-facing ones that were blocked even from the late afternoon sun by the north wing and the soaring capitol dome. Cozzano called it the"arctic circle" - the only part of Illinois that was in darkness for sixmonths out of the year. This was a somewhat obscure and technical joke, especially in these days of endemic geographic ignorance, butpeople laughed at it anyway because he was the Governor. He kept his desk lamp going all day, but as the sky had darkened and as heworked into the night, he had not bothered to turn on the over­ head fixtures, and he now sat in a pool of illumination in the middleof the dark office. Around the edges of the room, innumerablepieces of decoration reflected the light back at him.

 Each governor decorated the office in his own way. Only a few things were immutable: the preposterous fresco on the ceiling, themassive doors with brass lions' heads mounted in their centers. Hispredecessor had gone in for a spare, classical nineteenth-centurylook, filling the place up with antiques that had belonged toLincoln and Douglas. This impressed visitors and looked nice forthe tour groups who came by every hour to launch flashcubebarrages over the velvet rope. Cozzano had banned the tourgroups, slamming the doors in their faces so that all they could seewas the brass lions, and turned the office into a cluttered Cozzanofamily museum.

 It had started on the day of his first inauguration, with a smallphoto of his late wife, Christina, placed on the corner of hishistorically inaccurate desk. Naturally, photos of his children, MaryCatherine and James, came next. But there was no point instopping with the immediate family, and so Cozzano had broughtin several boxes containing pictures of patriarchs and matriarchs going back several generations. He wanted pictures of his friends, too, and of their families, and he also needed various pieces ofmemorabilia, some of which were chosen for sentimental reasons, some for purely political ones. By the time Cozzano was finisheddecorating his office, it was almost filled with clutter, smelling saltshad to be brought in for the Historical Society, and, as he sat downfor the first time in his big leather chair, he could trace the entire genealogy and economic development of the Cozzano clan, and oftwentieth-century Illinois, which amounted to the same thing.

 There was an old aerial photograph of Tuscola as seen from itsown water tower in the 1930s. It was a town of a few thousand people, about half an hour south of the academic metropolis ofChampaign-Urbana and a couple of hours south of Chicago. Evenin this photo it was possible to see gaudy vaults in the towncemetery, and Duesenbergs cruising the streets. Tuscola was, for afarm town, bizarrely prosperous.

 In an oval frame of black walnut was a hand-tinted photographof his great-grandfather and namesake Guillermo Cozzano whohad come to Illinois from Genoa in 1897. In typically contraryCozzano fashion he had bypassed the large Italian communities onthe East Coast and found work in a coal mine about thirty milessouthwest of Tuscola, where soil and coal were the same color. He and his son Guiseppe had gone into the farming business, snappingup one of the last available parcels of high-quality land. In 1912,Guiseppe and his wife had their first child, Giovanni (John)Cozzano, followed three and five years later by Thomas and Peter.All of these events were recorded in photographs, which Cozzanowould be more than happy to explain to visitors if they made themistake of expressing curiosity, even allowing their eyes to stray inthat direction. Most of the photos featured buildings, babies, or weddings.

 John Cozzano (photo) lost his mother to influenza at the age ofsix and, from that point onward, lived his life as if he had been shotfrom a cannon. During his high-school years in the vigorous 1920s he held down a part-time job at the local grain elevator (photo). Bythe time economic disaster struck in the 1930s he had worked his way up into the management of that business. With one foot in hisfather's farm and the other in the grain elevator, John was able to get the family through the Depression in one piece.

 In 1933, John fell in love with Francesca Domenici, a youngChicago woman. As evidence of his fitness to be a husband, hedecided to buy an enormous stucco Craftsman house on a tree-lined brick street on the edge of Tuscola (photo). Even by thestandards of Tuscola, which had an inordinate number of large andmagnificent houses, it was a beaut: three stories, six bedrooms, witha full basement and a garage the size of a barn. All of the woodworkwas black walnut, thick as railroad ties. He was going to buy theplace for five hundred dollars from a railway company man whohad gone bankrupt. At this time, John had only three hundreddollars in the bank, and so he was forced to borrow the remainingtwo hundred.

 This quest eventually led him to Chicago, and to the doorstep ofSam Meyer (photo), formerly Shmuel Meierowitz. Sam Meyeroperated a number of coexisting businesses out of a single storefronton Maxwell Street, on Chicago's near west side (photo). One thinghe did was lend money. Sam's son was named David; he was alawyer.

 Every Italian person John Cozzano had ever spoken to for morethan about ten minutes had spontaneously warned him of thedanger of borrowing money from Jews. He had accepted thesewarnings at face value until he overheard Anglo-Saxons in Tuscolawarning each other, in exactly the same terms, of the dangers ofborrowing money from Italians. John borrowed the money andbought the house. As soon as he had cleaned all the junk out of thebasement and taken care of a dire flea infestation, he went back upto Chicago and proposed to Francesca.

 He bought a ring from Sam Meyer on credit and they weremarried in Chicago in June 1934. After a short honeymoon at theGrand Hotel on Mackinac Island (photo), they moved into the bighouse in Tuscola. Within eleven months, John had repaid all of his   debts to Sam Meyer, and he discovered that, contrary to legend, itwas possible to carry on a financial transaction with a Jew withoutforfeiting your shirt, or your immortal soul.

 This planted a seed in his mind; he might be able to buy the grainelevator on credit and get rid of the feeble old man and theincompetent drunk whom he had been working for. John spent the rest of the 1930s buying the elevator and then trying to develop it into something bigger: a factory to convert corn into other things.Francesca spent the same time trying to get pregnant. She had four miscarriages but kept trying anyway.

 As of the beginning of 1942, when America entered the war,John Cozzano, Mr. Domenici, Sam Meyer, and David Meyer werepartners in Corn Belt Agricultural Processors (CBAP), successfulcorn syrup production facility in Tuscola, Illinois (photo). John andFrancesca were the parents of a brand-new baby boy, William A.Cozzano (photo), who by that time was the fourth grandchild ofGuiseppe. He was, however, the first grandson. Everyone who laid eyes on the new baby predicted that he would one day be Presidentof the United States.

 Thomas joined the army, was sent in the direction of NorthAfrica, but never got there; his transport ship was sunk by U-boats in the North Atlantic. Peter found gainful employment as a Marinesniper in the Pacific. In 1943 he was taken prisoner by the Japaneseand spent the rest of the war starving in a camp. John was both tooold and, as a farmer, too strategically important to be sent off to war.He stayed home and tried to keep the family enterprises afloat.

 War required lots of parachutes. Parachutes took a hell of a lot ofnylon. One of the feedstocks required to manufacture nylon wascellulose. One excellent source of cellulose happened to be corn­cobs. And John Cozzano's factory had been throwing awaycorncobs by the hundreds of tons ever since it had gone intoproduction. The heap of corncobs that rose from the prairie outsideof Tuscola had now become the highest point in several counties and could be seen from twenty miles away, especially whenever pranksters set fire to it (photo).

 Sam Meyer contacted everyone he knew. A lot of these wererecent immigrants from Central Europe and were only too happyto invest in a parachute factory, knowing that it could have only one conceivable practical use. John got the nylon production unit up and running just in time to throw out a very low bid on a verylarge government contract. The next year, Allied shock troops poured into Normandy borne on billowing canopies of Cozzanonylon (photo).

 Peter came back from war with bad kidneys and a bad leg. Whilehe was not well equipped for doing physical labor, he performed a useful role as a troubleshooter, figurehead, and conversationalist of CBAP until he died of kidney failure in 1955. His father, Giuseppe,died two months later. During the interval between the war andthese deaths, things had gone smoothly for the Cozzano family,except for the annihilation of the ancestral farmhouse in 1953 by atornado (photo).

 Two times in two months, the entire Meyer clan, led by Samueland David, came down from Chicago to attend funeral services.Hotel rooms were scarce in Tuscola and kosher kitchensnonexistent, so John and Francesca put the Meyers up in their bigstucco house and did what they could to provide them withacceptable cooking facilities. Francesca learned to keep a blowtorchhandy so that Sam Meyer's son-in-law, a rabbi, could perform aritual cleansing of her oven (photo).

 During these visits, William Cozzano, now thirteen, shared his bedroom with a number of younger Meyers, including David's son Mel, who was the same age. They became friends and spent mostof the time down the street at Tuscola City Parky playing baseball,Jews versus Italians (autographed baseball in glass box).

 A year later Samuel Meyer died in Chicago. The Cozzanos allcame north. Some of them stayed with the Domenicis, but theMeyers returned the favor by giving other Cozzanos a place to stay.Mel and William shared a mattress on the floor (photo).

 After that, Mel and William stayed in constant touch. They likedeach other. But they also knew they were the eldest sons of familiesthat had accumulated much and that if they screwed up and lost it,it would be no one's fault but their own.

  

 The remaining space in the office was filled with William A.Cozzano's personal memorabilia:

 A black-and-white photo of his parents, the Olan Mills logoslanted across the bottom, shot in a makeshift traveling studio in a Best Western motel on the outskirts of Champaign-Urbana in 1948.

 An assortment of six-inch-high capital letter T's, made fromcloth, mounted under glass, along with a corny photo of the seventeen-year-old Cozzano, pigskin tucked under one arm, other arm held out like a jouster's lance to straight-arm an imaginary linebacker from Arcola or Rantoul.

 Diploma from Tuscola High.

 A photo of William with Christina, his high-school sweetheart,on the campus of the University of Illinois, where they had bothattended college in the early sixties.

 A wedding picture, the couple flanked by eight roughed andfalse-eyelashed sorority belles on one side and seven tuxed andpomaded University of Illinois football players, plus a single Nigerian graduate student, on the other.

 Diploma (summa cum laude) with major in business and minorin Romantic languages.

 A battered and abraded football covered with thick stoutsignatures, marked ROSE BOWL.

 Two photos of Cozzano in the Marines, mounted side by side inthe same frame: one, picture-perfect William in full-dress uniform,staring into the distance as though he can see a tunnel of light in thesky at one o'clock high, JFK in glory at the end of the tunnel, asking William what he can do for his country. The second picture,two years later: William Cozzano in a village in the CentralHighlands, unshaven, eyes staring out alarmingly white and cleanfrom a smoky face, a slack-jawed, inadvertent grin, a Browningautomatic rifle dangling from one hand, a cherubic Vietnamese girlsitting in the crook of the other arm with her left leg wrapped in fresh white gauze, staring up at him with her tiny mouth open in astonishment; Cozzano was smiling through a crazy weariness thatthreatened to bring him to his knees at the next moment but the girl sensed that she was safe there.

 Another glass mount, but instead of cloth letters this one hadforged medallions hanging on colorful satin ribbons: a purple heart and a bronze star from Cozzano's first tour and another purple heartand a silver star from his second, surrounded by a flock of lesser decorations.

 Baby pictures of Mary Catherine and James.An illuminated parchment from Pope John XXIII superfluouslyblessing their marriage.

 A picture of his father on a fishing trip in Alaska, shortly beforehis fatal heart attack.

 A photo of Cozzano in his Chicago Bears uniform, sitting on hishelmet to keep up and out of a sideline morass, black grease onhis cheekbones, blood hardening on his knuckles, grass stainson his shoulder pads.

 Pro Bowl rings from a couple of different years in the Nixon andFord administrations.

 The last formal portrait of Christina, shot just before she hadbeen transfigured by radiation and chemotherapy; this one also said"olan mills" and had been shot in a slightly nicer motel room inChampaign-Urbana by the same photographer who had doneCozzano's parents in 1948.

 A photo of William giving a victory speech on the front lawn ofthe family house in Tuscola, flanked by Mary Catherine and James.Autographed photo of William with George Bush at The PekingGourmet Restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, a harshly flash-litamateur snapshot, Cozzano and Bush eating Peking duck inshirtsleeves and yukking it up.

 Cozzano jogging around Camp David with Bill and HilaryClinton.

 An invitation to a White House dinner from the currentPresident.

 The dome of the Illinois State capitol was built on foundations ofsolid stone seventeen feet thick. Cozzano needed to keep all of thisstuff in his line of sight while he worked, because these pictures andsouvenirs were his foundations.

 Cozzano was reading a letter that he was supposed to sign. He knew that he should simply do it, but his father had told him thathe should always read things before he signed them. Since a largepart of Cozzano's job involved signing things, this meant that he often worked late. He was holding his big pen in his left fist,nervously popping its cap on and off with the ball of his thumb.

 The intercom made a gentle popping noise as Marsha, his secretary, turned on her microphone in the next room. Cozzanostartled a little. Marsha had a talent for finding things to do, andwhen Cozzano stayed late she often hung around for a few hoursand did them. Her voice came out of the speaker: "The State of theUnion speech is about to begin, Governor."

 "Thank you," Cozzano said, and shut off the intercom. "Iguess," he added, to himself.

 Cozzano reached for the remote control and turned it on toC-SPAN - he could not abide the network anchors - just in timeto see the cameras pan over the ritualistic standing ovation givenevery president, no matter how incompetent. Continuing tothumb buttons on the remote, he caused a little window to openup in the corner of the screen, running the Comedy Channels' livecoverage.

 The egregious hypocrisy of the scene disgusted him. How couldthose assholes cheer the person who was leading -wrong, failing tolead - the country into disaster?

 Eventually the applause died down, and the Speaker of theHouse reintroduced the president. There was a second obligatory standing ovation. Cozzano scoffed, shook his head, rubbed histemples with the palms of both hands. He couldn't take it. Thecameras swept the section where the president's wife and family sat,smiling bravely. The president pathetically waved his arms to quietthe ovation, and then began his speech.

 A year from tonight, I hope to stand on the West Front of thisgreat building and begin my second term as your President.

 (cheers and applause, mostly from one side of the hall)

 He proceeded to do some ritual complaining about the usualtopics: the budget deficit and the national debt. Just as predictably,he blamed it on the usual suspects: gridlock in Congress, thegrowth of entitlements, the insurmountable power of PACs, and,of course, the need to pay interest on the national debt, which hadgrown to something like ten trillion dollars. The only mildlyinteresting news coming out of the speech so far was that heintended to adopt a Rose Garden strategy during the comingelection year, staying at the White House and doing battle with thetwo-headed monster of the deficit and the debt. This was the onlyresponsible thing he could have done; but Congress applauded himdeliriously.

 It was all so completely predictable, so politics-as-usual, thatCozzano was lulled into a near coma, trapped between boredomand disgust. Which made it all the more shocking when thebombshell hit.

 We must either cut entitlements - the payments made to oursenior citizens on Social Security, and sick people onMedicare and Medicaid - or we must cut the interest that ispaid to the national debt. Now, granted, we borrowed thatmoney. We must pay it back if we can. And we most certainly will make our best effort to pay it back. But not at the expenseof the sick and the old.

 (applause and cheers)

 Our debt is the result of our own sinful irresponsibility in fiscalmatters, and we must accept the consequences of those sins.

 But I am reminded of the words of the great Russian religious figure Rasputin, who once said, in a similar time of economictroubles, "Great sins demand great forgiveness."

 (applause)

 Let us not forget that we owe this money to ourselves. Surelywe can find it in our hearts to repent from our economicfoolishness and to forgive ourselves for the mistakes that weremade by ourselves and by our predecessors.

 (applause)

 This nation was founded upon a great social contract. Acontract in which people banded together to formgovernments in the defense of life, liberty, and property. Thisnoble experiment has lasted for more than two centuries.Written into the contract by our founding father Jefferson wasthe assertion that if government violates the contract, thepeople have the right to overthrow it. This is the basis of theglorious revolutionary tradition that serves as a shining light ofinspiration for the entire world.

 (applause, cheers)

 Tonight, in the spirit of Jefferson, I call for a new socialcontract. I am proposing to the Congress, and to the Americanpeople, the Declaration of Fiscal Independence.

 (applause)

 In short, my fellow Americans, I propose as a first step to placea cap on the percentage of our budget that can go towardpaying interest on the national debt. The exact level of thiscap, and the details of its implementation, are subject to discussion and agreement between my staff and Congress -and I'm sure that we can look forward to many livelydiscussion on the issue.

 (laughter)

  

 But regardless of the details, the message is the same. Great sinsdemand great forgiveness. Let us now forgive ourselves, sothat we may go forth into the brave new world of the thirdmillennium with a clean slate and a clear conscience.

 (thunderous applause and cheers)

 Let the message go forth to the world that the country of thethird millennium will be the United States of America andthat its opening breaths of life were sounded in this noble hallon this great evening.

 (ten-minute standing ovation)

 It was an outrage, pure and simple.

 Having failed over his entire term in office to do anything aboutthe budget deficit, the President was now going to patch it up byallowing America to weasel out of its financial obligations.

 Which was bad enough in and of itself; but he was also trying toportray this measure as an act of Lincolnian fortitude on his part.

 Cozzano felt an atavistic desire to fly to Washington, climb upon that podium, and slap the President across the face. It was the same brute, animalistic impulse that came into his head when heimagined someone hurting his daughter. His heart thumpedpowerfully a few times. He realized that he was being primitive andstupid, and tried to calm himself down. There was no point inthinking these things.

 Still Cozzano did not sign the letter on his desk - a thank-younote to the Prime Minister of Japan for his hospitality duringCozzano's visit last week. His powerful fingers gripped the smoothinlaid barrel of the pen. The rhodium alloy nib, charged with just the correct amount of French ink, was poised a few millimetersabove the grainy surface of the buttery cotton-fiber stationery thatCozzano used for personal correspondence. But when Cozzanomoved the pen - that is, when he did the thing in his mind that, ever since he had been inside his mother's womb, had caused hisfingers and his hand to move - nothing happened. His eyes tracked

 across the paper, anticipating the pen's course. Nothing. ThePresident spoke on and on, stopping every few sentences to bask inadulation.

 Cozzano's hand sweated. After a while, then pen fell out of hisfingers. The nib dove into the paper and slid straight across it like aplow skidding across hard prairie. It left a comet-shaped streak of blue-black on the page, whacked down flat, and rocked side to sidefor a few moments, making a gentle diminishing noise.

 He cursed under his breath and a strange sound came out of hismouth, a garbled word he'd never heard before. It sounded sounfamiliar that he tried to look up, thinking that someone else might be in the room. But no one was here; he had spoken theword himself.

 When he moved his head it threw him off balance and pulledhim toward the left. His left arm had gone completely limp. He sawit slide off the desk, but he didn't quite believe it, because he didn'tfeel it move. The cufflink, a cheap hand-me-down from his father, popped against the sharp edge of the tabletop. Then his arm wasswinging at his side, eased to a halt by the slight mechanical frictionof his elbow and shoulder joints.

 He slumped back into the chair's comfortable, Cozzano-shapedrecesses. His right arm slid off the desk as he did so and he foundthat he could move it. He was sitting comfortably in his chair now,sagging leftward. He saw his intercom and knew that he couldpunch the button and call Marsha. But it was not clear what heshould say to her.

 His eyes drooped half shut, the sound of the roaring, stomping,howling, and applauding Congress closed in on him like a nail keglowering over his head, and in his confusion, he lost his will. Hewas entirely too tired to do anything, and why bother to fight it?He had accomplished enough for several lifetimes. The only thing he'd missed out on so far was having some grandchildren.

 That, and become President, which he was going to do beforethe year 2000. But he wasn't sure if he really wanted that awful jobanyway.

 2

 The State of the Union was never a big event in Cacher,Oklahoma. Forty-eight-year-old Otis Simpson yawned and looked at the wall clock, just for the record. It was 02:46:12 GreenwichMean Time. He turned the sound off. The speech had devolvedinto endless waves of applause. Commentators were beginning tobreak into the sound track in hushed, solemn tones, stating theobvious: "the President shaking hands with congressional leaders ashe makes his way out of the room." Soon the analysts would comeon and tell Otis what he had just watched, and Otis definitely didn'tneed that. The only opinions that mattered would be coming in viafax and modem during the next few hours. His job was to stayawake in the meantime. So he triggered the other monitor andbegan to keep one eye on an HBO flick, already in progress.

 Otis had inherited his mother's tendency toward bulk, his fatherOtho's awkward looks, and a light regard for basic hygiene. Themany folds in his ample frame contained an inexhaustible supply ofsweat-blackened lint balls, and his thinning hair failed to concealthe skin ailments that plagued his scalp. He had never married. His mother had died giving birth to him. He served as a trusted assistanton his father's work, the full extent of which he never fullyunderstood.

 Otho Simpson, eighty-six, had, as was his pattern, gone to bedat 00:00:00 Greenwich Mean Time. This time was as good abedtime as any other and was easy to remember. Otho and Otislived belowground, in a former lead mine, and did not pay muchattention to the diurnal cycle upstairs. Their job was to gather andrespond to information from all over the world, from all twenty-

 four time zones, and so there was not much point in trying to hewto a particular schedule. Otho was spare and gaunt, hampered bypersistent urinary tract infections that filled whatever room he wasin with a disconcerting odor and caused continual pain. Unlike hisson, Otho had a mind that, had he chosen, could have earned hima Nobel Prize in economics or physics or at least made him a very rich man in a more conventional sense. Instead, he had become anaccountant of sorts, and spent his life looking after a body of investments with a total cash value in the neighborhood of thirtytrillion U.S. dollars.

 These assets did not belong to any one specific person or entity,as far as Otho could tell. They belonged to a coordinated inter-national network of investors. Otho didn't know who these peoplewere. He wasn't supposed to know and he probably wasn'tsupposed to think about it. But he did think about it from time totime, and he had drawn some conclusions based on circumstantialevidence. Most of them were individuals, many were families;some were corporations. Their net worths varied from a fewmillion dollars up to tens of billions. Judging from the hours when they liked to do business, most of them must be living in Americanand European time zones, with a few in the time zones that wereused by Japan, Hong Kong, and Australia. He only knew one member of this organization by name, one Lady GuenevereWilburdon; she was his contact and his boss.

 In the last half century, especially after the death off his wife in1948, Otho had rarely left Cacher. Several times a week he wouldhobble on to the lift, ride it several hundred feet straight up to the surface and go for a stroll through the ruins of the town, taking inwhat passed for fresh air in Cacher and feeling the sun on his skin.But he felt most comfortable down below, in the subterraneancapsule that was his home, surrounded by twenty feet of solidreinforced concrete, breathing filtered air and drinking distilledwater.

 The capsule had been built during the early fifties by a hugeinternational contractor called Maclntyre Engineering. It was builtto exactly the same set of specifications used for the control capsulesof Minuteman silos - easy enough, since Maclntyre had con­structed most of those. Any information that could conceivablyinfluence the performance of the economy - public andproprietary, open and secret, from hard data to vicious gossip - wasfunneled into the capsule over a variety of communications links.Otho read every word of it and used it to manage the investmentsof the Network. His life was rather solitary and he had not seen amovie in a theater sinceThe Sound of Music, but he did not care; thehonor of being the anonymous manager of a significant fraction of the assets of what used to be called the Free World sufficed to givehim a value-laden life.

 Several hours after the conclusion of the State of the Unionaddress, at 06:00:00 GMT, a digitized chord sounded from one ofthe workstations, waking Otis up. A window materialized on the screen and filled with columns of numbers. This was normal; ithappened every day at this time.

 A chorus of faint humming noises was emanating from a stainlesssteel rack carrying several dozen identical fax machines. Otis wassurprised to note that nearly all of the machines suddenly had longstrips of paper dangling out of them, and several were still active. Most of his father's clients took a hands-off approach and rarely, ifever, bothered him with specifics.

 Otis went to the workstation and scanned the numbers: astatistical summary of how the Network's investments had per­formed during the last twenty-four hours, and initial responses to the State of the Union Address from the stock exchanges in Delhi,Novosibirsk, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo. All of the capitalmarkets were sharply down. Commodities, especially gold, weresoaring uncontrollably.

 The digital clock on the wall clicked to 06:10. Otis went in towake up Otho. Otho and Otis slept in steel-framed bunk beds in a small room just off the communications center.

 "Daddy, the figures for yesterday are in."

 Otho sat up in bed without hesitation, as if he'd never beenasleep. Another workstation was next to him on a bedside table. Hereached out with one withered hand, grabbed a mouse, and chose

 a few commands from the menus on the screen. A copy of thefinancial tables materialized. He put on a pair of extremely thickglasses that made his eyes look the size of baseballs.

 The numbers for the first part of the day weren't bad. But theState of the Union address had changed all that.

 "We got a lot of faxes too," Otis said, handing his father a thick sheaf of slick, curly paper, covered with notes from all over theworld, many handwritten.

 "Jesus Christ," Otho said, "what did that son of a bitch say?"

 "Daddy, I turned the sound off on him and watched an HBO movie."

 "Probably not a bad idea. Pull up the CNN monitor tape and rerun the speech for me - no, hold it, I can't stand the thought of watching him. Download a transcript off the news wire."

 "Okay, Daddy."

 Ten minutes later, Otis brought back the transcript. Othoscanned through it, looking for a few key words, and went almost instantly to the concept of forgiveness. Deep vertical crevices appeared in the middle of his brow and he let out a feeble streamof air through pursed lips.

 By this time Otis knew he was in for a long night, so he turnedon the bedside TV set and punched up CNBC.

 "That bastard has just got every bull and bear in the world goinginsane." Otho set the faxes down on his bedside table and slippedhis feet into a pair of slippers by the bed. "But he's half right. This country has problems. Someone needs to do something or all of itsinvestors will get screwed."

 "Investors?"

 "Yup. America used to have citizens. Then its government putit up for sale. Now it's got investors. You and I work for theinvestors."

 Otis regarded his father with the mixture of respect, fear, and awe that he had shown since he was a child. "What's going on,Dad?"

 "It was just a matter of time before some politician actually became stupid enough to mention forgiving the national debt."

 "Like Senator Wright?"

 "Yeah. Who died in a plane crash. But obviously the Presidentthought it sounded like a catchy idea."

 "How are you going to handle this, Daddy?"

 "Crank up the word-processing software. I'm going to do thefirst round-robin report since the Cuban Missile Crisis. This is too big for me to just fly off the handle - I have to provide the Networksome options."

 Otho's joints creaked and ground audibly in the nearly perfectsilence of the capsule as he made his way out of bed, over to a stainless steel toilet, and from there into the control center. He sat down in front of a large high-resolution monitor and began jotting down a few options, as they came into his head. Later, he could rework them into deathless prose:

 a.    Pull investment out of the U.S. national debt - absorbing the
loss immediately - and explore new areas, such as purchasing the
larger part of the former Soviet Union;

 b.    Do nothing and hope that the American political structure
will muddle through;

 c.    Intervene directly in American politics in order to return it to
a certain sort of stability and to insure our long-term investment in
the debt;

 d.    Suggestions?

 He then directed his system to send out the message in encryptedburst-mode fax transmissions. Beyond vague geographical indi­cations, he did not know to whom the faxes would go. When hehad taken control of the Network's finances fifty years ago, it hadbeen stipulated that all communication would be to code-identifiedparticipants.

 The returns came in remarkably quickly. In the aftermath of thePresident's speech, everyone important was awake right now,regardless of time zone.

 With the exception of a few Middle Easterners who wanted theNetwork to invest massively in the Muslim-dominated republics ofthe former Soviet Union, most of the Network liked the thirdoption. The clincher was a fax from Lady Wilburdon, the acting

 chairperson, who noted, "You have done well for us, and we placeour trust in you. Put your country back in working order."

 He spent a few minutes doodling with an old, well-worn sliderule. Back in the early seventies he had purchased a couple of thefirst pocket calculators and, as a mathematician, been horrified bytheir illusive precision. The slide rule was a far more trustworthyand illuminating guide to the numerical world.

 The United States had borrowed ten trillion dollars since theonset of Reaganomics. A significant fraction of that debt was nowowned by the Network. Those loans were supposed to bring in acertain fixed amount of interest every year. The cap proposed bythe President would reduce that income by an amount on the orderof a few tens of billions of dollars per year - possibly even more, ifthe country went into a deeper crisis and made further cuts.

 In the long run, then, the Network stood to loose hundred ofbillions of dollars from the measures that the President had justproposed. Otho was therefore justified in spending real moneyhere - easily in the tens of billions. This was more than enough tothrow an election. Perot had nearly done it for just a few hundred million.

 Otho knew perfectly well that his Network was not the onlyorganization of its type in the world, and that he was not the only person running through this sort of a calculation tonight. It wasn'tenough just to mess around with an election; everyone would be getting into that game during the next few months. The important thing was to do it well, and not just on an ad hoc basis but as partof a coherent long-range strategy.

 If the Network planned carefully and wasn't too obvious aboutit, it could go far beyond managing the outcome of this one election. It could actually erect a system that would enableAmerica's investors to have a permanent say in the management of their assets. It would eat up a lot of the Network's liquidity, but bymoving some money around, Otho would be able to free upenough to assemble quite a little war chest. The markets had all gone to hell anyway, providing a perfect cover for the enormous shifts he would have to make in the next couple of days.

 The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced thatit was a sound decision. He should have done it a long time ago.The fact that he hadn't probably proved that he was obsolete, orsomething.

 The United States of America had severed its purpose. It wastime to cash her in. Like a big creaky old corporation, herindividual parts, intelligently liquidated, were worth more than thewhole. She still had the best damn military money could buy, as theIraqis had discovered during the Gulf War, and she still came upwith new ideas better than anyone. Under new, fiscally responsiblemanagement, she could still perform well, pay her debts, andprovide a tolerable standard of living for her citizens. Otho neededto make sure that that management was provided by the Networkand not by one of the other entities with which the Networkcompeted.

 He sent out a fax to Mr. Salvador telling him to swing by Cacherfor a face-to-face. That was the hard part; he had never been goodat the interpersonal stuff. Then he got down to the work he didbetter than anyone else in the world: sending out sell orders, shuffling assets, arranging his pieces on the board.

 In simple numerical terms, liquidating the Constitution of theUnited States was not the biggest or the most difficult job Otho hadever undertaken. For some reason it made him nervous anyway.Since the Kennedy assassination he'd had nothing but contempt forpoliticians. But he wasn't attacking a particular president here; hewas attacking the institution of the presidency. Meddling withprimal forces. He moved slowly, made mistakes in his arithmetic,forgot things, kept going back on his own decisions. It was an unfamiliar sensation to be agonizing about his job. Images keptcoming unbidden into his mind, clouding his thoughts: FDRdeclaring war on Japan, the moon landings, D-Day, football gameson Thanksgiving, Lou Gehrig's farewell speech.

 More than once his fingers came to a dead stop on the keyboard as these and more personal, more emotional memories surgeduncontrollably through his mind. He wondered if senility hadfinally touched him. Finally he had to get up and hobble over to

 their little kitchen and take the bottle of vodka out of the freezer.He knew that he was doing the right thing here, that if he didn'tsomeone else would. But it hurt.

 By 10:00:00 GMT, the communications room was once againquiet. Otis woke up from a short nap and went in to check onOtho.

 From the dark room, a thin voice almost chanted, "Well youknow, this country once worked real well, when we had values thatpeople believed in."

 Otis saw the empty vodka bottle on the table, still fogged withcondensation, and realized that his father had just gotten drunk forthe first time in three decades. "What do you mean by values?"

 "They were code words likehonesty, hard work, self- reliance .myths, actually, to motivate the people to accept the naturalinequities found in a market system. In the old days, contract was sacred: divorce, bankruptcy, fraud, were taboos for the average people. The rogues of course, the robber barons were beyond that.We have to return the country to those values so that there won'teven be a thought to renege on the debt."

 "Daddy . . ."

 "Yes, boy?"

 "How will you do it?"

 "I think I'll hand this one off to Mr. Salvador. He's an ambitious fella. He obviously wants to take my place a couple of years down the road, or whenever Lady Wilburdon decides to replace me. He'san asshole, and there's a good chance he'll get killed or ruinedtrying to do this. And if he survives, he'll be a better man for it."

 "Daddy?"

 "Yes, boy."

 "Good night, Daddy."

 3

 "Look, it'snot like this issome kind of a-"aaron green said.Then a cautious instinct took control and he brought himself upshort. He was looking over the epaulets of the security guard at alarge red sign on the wall: DO NOT MAKE JOKES ORCOMMENTS REGARDING WEAPONS OR EXPLOSIVEDEVISES.

 "It's not awhat?" said the guard in front of Aaron, a wiry olderwhite man. Aaron was still trying to decide where to begin whenthe guard spoke the dreaded words: "Step over here with me, sir."

 Aaron followed the guard over to a table, just beyond the picketline of metal detectors, still within the dreaded security zone.Beyond it lay the concourse, a pacifist Utopia full of weaponlesscitizens streaming in an orderly fashion toward their gates. In theoverpriced bars and overpriced restaurants, business-suited travelersstood, drinks in hand, below television sets, watching the Presidentdeliver his State of the Union address.

 "What do we have there, sir?" said the guard behind the table,the chief of this beady-eyed, polyethnic truth squad. He was a verywide, convex black man with a deep voice and he was trying tosound open-minded and jolly. He was wearing an ID flasher withthe name BRISTOLS, MAX.

 "It's a piece of electronic equipment," Aaron said, setting thecase on the table.

 "I see. And you can open this up and show it to me?" Bristolsaid.

 The case was largely full of gray foam rubber. A rectangularcavity the size of a couple of shoe boxes had been excavated from

 the center. Filling this cavity was a white steel box with ventilationslots cut into the top. The box was exactly the right width to fit into a standard electronics rack.

 The plan was that one day, a whole lot of these things would besacked together in racks, racks lined up next to each other,hundreds in a single room. The room and the equipment would be owned by big media companies in L.A. They would buy all of thestuff from Green Biophysical Systems, of which Aaron Green wasthe founder, chief technologist, president, and treasurer.

 With the lid of the case open, the upper half of the faceplate wasvisible. It had no controls, knobs, or anything, just a single red LEDwith the wordpower printed underneath it, and, in big letters, theGreen Biophysical Systems logo, and the acronym IMIPREM.

 The power cord was coiled up in a separate niche in the grayfoam rubber. Yet another niche contained an item that Aaronhoped they wouldn't notice: a cuff. Hard plastic shell lined withblack foam, for comfort. He wondered what the guards wouldthink of that.

 "Looks interesting," the guard said. His insincerity was palpable."What is it?"

 Aaron took a deep breath. "An instantaneous, multiplexing,integrating, physiological response evaluation and monitoringdevice."

 "What does it do?"

 It doesn't blow up."Well. It's a little bit like a polygraph."

 "I need to see it work."

 "What?'

 "I need to see your IMIPREM work," Bristol said.

 Aaron pulled the IMIPREM out of its foam rubber nest and setit on the table. Then he uncoiled the power cord, fit one end intoa three-pronged recessed socket on the back of the unit, andplugged the other end into a wall outlet near the table. The littleLED came on. "There," he said.

 Bristol raised his eyebrows and looked extremely dubious."That's all it does?"

 "Well, it does a lot more than that, naturally," Aaron said, "butit has no interface, per se, except through a computer. See, if Icould hook this up to a computer, it would produce all kinds ofmeaningful output."

 "But the only thing it'll do right now, here, for me, is turn onthis little red light," Bristol said.

 Aaron was trying to come up with a diplomatic way to say yeswhen they were interrupted by another person. He was carrying alaptop computer. He was holding the device out at arm's length.

 "Tick, tick, tick, tick!" the man was saying. But he pronouncedit "teeuhk, teeuhk." He was one of those southerners who couldadd syllables to words and make it sound good. "And then somewhere over Newark - BOOM! Haw, haw, haw!"

 The old guard grinned and guided him to the table.

 "Sir," Bristol said.

 "Howdy," the man with the computer said. "This is a Compaq- more bang for the buck than IBM! Haw haw!"

 As Aaron watched in disbelief, Bristol exchanged a friendly,knowing grin with the big southerner.

 "Got a Gamma Prime CPU, a gigabyte drive, and three poundsof Semtex," the southerner said.

 He had a smooth, trombonelike voice that could be heard formiles. All of the metal detector guards were looking at him andchuckling. The businessmen filing through the metal detectors,picking their pocket change out of the plastic buckets, were lookingat the southerner with appreciative grins, shaking their heads.

 He was tall, probably a couple of inches over six feet, had lovehandles, an unexceptional suit, a high forehead, the beginnings' ofjowls, a florid complexion, eyebrows raised up in a perpetuallysurprised or skeptical expression, a tiny little pursed mouth."Whoa, looks like I got some competition here!" he blurted,eyeing the IMIPREM in mock wonder.

 Then his whole face changed; suddenly his eyes were narrowed and darting, he had become secret and conspiratorial, shootingsidelong glances at Bristol, Max. "Abu Jihad!" he hissed at Aaron. "Praise be to Allah! We have perfected a nuclear device capable offitting under an airline seat!"

 The big guard and the southerner joined together in loud,booming laughter. "I got a glass of bourbon with my name on it in that bar by the gate," the southerner finally said, "so let me crankthis thing up for you and get on out of here. If you don't mind, sir,"he added to Aaron, courteously enough.

 "Not at all."

 The man snapped the computer open and folded back the top;to reveal its screen, a flat, high-resolution, color monitor. Aaronhad other things to be worrying about right now, but he couldn't help staring at the man's computer; it was one of the nicest andmost powerful laptops you could buy, certainly one of the mostexpensive. These things had only been on the market for a coupleof months. This one was already worn and battered around theedges.

 The southerner hit the on button, hollering "BOOM!" so loudthat Bristol actually startled a little bit. Then he laughed.

 The screen came alive with windows and icons. From a distance,Aaron recognized about half of the icons. He knew what this soft­ware did. He could guess that the southerner did a lot of statisticalanalysis, desktop publishing, and even desktop video production.

 "Sir, would this do the trick?" Bristol was saying.

 "Yo!" said the southerner, giving Aaron a dig on the arm. "He'stalking to you!"

 "Huh?" Aaron said.

 "Would this computer be capable of talking to your machinethere?" Bristol said.

 "Well, yes, if it had the right software loaded on to its hard drive.Which it doesn't."

 "Oh, I see what's going on," the southerner said. Suddenly hestuck out his hand toward Aaron. "Cy Ogle," he said. "Pro­nounced, but not spelled, like mogul."

 "Aaron Green."

 Cy Ogle laughed. "So you have to show this guy here that yourbox won't blow up when we reach our cruising altitude. And untilyou hook it up to a computer, it won't do anything except turn onthat little red light."

 "Exactly."

 "Which don't mean jack to him, because that light is about thesize of a grain of rice, and for all he knows the rest of the box is fullof black powder and roofing nails."

 "Well..."

 "You have the software with you? On floppies? Well, load it inthere, and let's take this baby for a spin."

 Aaron couldn't believe the guy was serious. But he was. Aaronfished the diskette with the IMIPREM software out of his briefcaseand popped it into the drive on Ogle's machine. A single-typedcommand copied the files on to Ogle's hard drive.

 In the meantime, Ogle had already figured out what to do withthe cable: he ran it from the back of the IMIPREM into the corresponding port on the laptop.

 "Okay. Ready to roll," Aaron said.

 Aaron unbuttoned his shirt cuff. He fished the plastic cuff out ofthe case and snapped it snugly around his exposed wrist.

 A ten-foot cable dangled from the cuff. Most of it was coiled upand held together by a plastic wire tie. Aaron plugged it into theback of the IMIPREM.

 A new window materialized on the screen of Ogle's computer. Itwas a moving, animated bar graph. Half a dozen colored bars, ofdifferent lengths, fluctuated up and down. At the base of each barwas a label:

  

 BP       RESP       TEMP       PERSP     PULS

 GSR       NEUR

 "It's monitoring my body right now. See, the bars stand forblood pressure, respiration, body temp, and a few other things. Ofcourse, this is its most basic level of functioning, beyond this it'scapable of an incredible number of different-"

 Ogle's hand slammed down on Aaron's shoulder and grippedhim like a pair of barbecue tongs.

 "I'm an undercover agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms," Cy Ogle said, "You're under arrest for conspiracy

 to commit terrorist acts on board an airliner. Don't move or you'llbe shot!"

 "What!?" Aaron screamed.

 "Just kidding," Ogle said, "Haw, haw!"

 "He's right, look at the bars," the guard said.

 Blood pressure and just about everything else had suddenly shotway up. As they watched, and as Aaron calmed down, the barssubsided.

 "Thanks for the demonstration, sir, it was very interesting," the guard said. "Have a nice flight."

 Then Bristol turned to look down the concourse. Aaron andOgle were both looking that way too; some kind of generalizeddisturbance seemed to have broken out. But it wasn't hooligans or terrorists. It was businessmen in suits, stampeding out of the barsand restaurants where they had been watching the President onTV. They ran down the concourse, knocking travelers and sky capsaside, and began to scuffle over the few available pay telephones.

 Ogle chuckled indulgently. "Looks like the President made acorker of a speech," he said. "Maybe we should hook you machineupto them."

 As it turned out, they were on the same flight, sitting across theaisle from each other in the first row of first class. Coach was full of shuffling grannies and beefy sailors; first class was mostly empty.Ogle worked on his computer for the first hour or so, whacking the keys so rapidly that it sounded like a hailstorm on the tray table,occasionally mumbling a good-natured "shit!" and doing it again.

 Aaron pulled a blank tablet of graph paper out of his briefcase,uncapped a pen, and stared at it until they were somewhere overPittsburgh. Then it was dinnertime and he put it away. He wastrying to organize his thoughts. But he didn't have any.

 After dinner, Ogle moved from the window to the aisle seat,right across from Aaron, and then startled Aaron a little by orderingthem both drinks.

 "Big presentation," Ogle said.

 Aaron heaved a sigh and nodded.

 "You got some kind of small high-tech company."

 "Yeah."

 "You developed this thing, spent all your venture capital, prob­ably maxed out your credit cars to boot, and now you got to makesome money off it or your investors will cash you in."

 "Yeah, that's about right."

 "And the cash flow is killing you because all the parts that go intothese things cost money, but you don't actually get paid for themuntil, what, thirty or sixty days after you ship 'em. If you're lucky."

 "Yeah, it's a problem all right," Aaron said. His face was gettingred. This had started out interesting, gotten uncanny, and now itwas starting to annoy him.

 "So, let's see. You're going to L.A. The big industry in L.A. isentertainment. You got a device that measures people's reactions tothings. A people meter."

 "I wouldn't call it a people meter."

 "Course not. But that's what they'll call it. Except it's a wholelot better than the usual kind, I could see that right away. Anyway,you're going to go meet with a bunch of executives for movie and television studios, maybe some ad agencies, and persuade 'em tobuy a whole bunch of these things, hook 'em up to man-on-the­streettypes, show 'em movies and TV programs so they can do allthat test audience stuff."

 "Yeah, that's about right. You're a very perceptive man, Mr.Ogle."

 "What I get paid for," Ogle said.

 "You work in the media industry?"

 "Yeah, that's a good way to put it," Ogle said.

 "You seem to know a lot about what I do."

 "Well," Ogle said. All of a sudden he seemed quiet, reflective.He pushed the button on his armrest and leaned his chair back acouple of inches. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes,curled one hand around his drink.  "High-tech has its ownbiorhythms."

 "Biorhythms?"

 Ogle opened one eye, turned his head a bit, peered at Aaron.

 "Course you probably don't like that word because you are Mr.High Tech, and it sounds to you like cocktail-party pseudoscience."

 "Exactly." Aaron was beginning to think that Ogle knew him better than he knew himself.

 "Fair enough. But I have a legitimate point here. See, we liveunder capitalism. Capitalism is defined by competition for capital.Would-be businessmen, and existing businesses seeking to expand,fight for the tiny supply of available capital like starving jackals around a zebra leg.

 "That's a depressing image."

 "It's a depressing country. It's not like that in other countrieswhere people save more money. But it's like that here, now,because we don't have values that encourage savings."

 "Okay."

 "Consequently you are starved for capital."

 "Right!"

 "You had to get capital from venture capitalists - or vulturecapitalists, as we call them - who are like the vultures that feed onthe jackals when they become too starved and weak to defendthemselves."

 "Well, I don't think my investor would agree."

 "They probably would," Ogle said, "they just wouldn't do so inyour presence."

 "Okay."

 "Venture capitalism is risky and so the vulture capitalists hedgetheir bets by pooling funds and investing in a number of start-ups at once - backing several horses, as it were."

 "Of course."

 "But what they don't tell you is that at a certain point a coupleof years into its life cycle, the start-up suddenly needs to double or triple its capitalization in order to survive. To get over those cashflow problems that occur when orders suddenly go from zero tomore than zero. And when that happens, the vulture capitalists lookat all of their little companies and they cull out the weakest two-thirds and let them starve. The rest, they provide with the capitalthey need in order to continue."

 Aaron said nothing. Suddenly he was feeling tired and depressed.

 "That's what's happening to your company right now," Oglesaid. "You're, what, three years old?"

 "How'd you know that!?" Aaron said, twisting around in hisseat, glaring at Ogle, who remained quiescent in his big fat chair.He was almost expecting to see a crew fromCandid Camera filminghim from the galley.

 "Just a lucky guess. Your logo," Ogle said, "you designed yourlogo yourself."

 Again Aaron's face reddened. He had, in fact, designed it himself.But he thought it was fairly professional, a lot more so than the typical home-brewed logo. "Yeah, so what?" he said. "It works.And it was free."

 "Okay, this is ridiculous," Aaron said. "How did you knowthat?"

 "If you were old enough to have made the cut - if you hadpassed through the capitalization barrier - you would haveimmediately gone out and hired professional designers to spiff upyour corporate image. The vultures would have insisted on it."

 "Yeah, that was going to be our next step," Aaron said.

 "That's okay. That speaks well of you, as a scientist, if not as abusinessman," Ogle said. "A lot of people start with image and thentry to develop substance. But you are a techie and you hate all thatsuperficial crap. You refuse to compromise."

 "Well, thank you for that vote of confidence," Aaron said, notentirely sarcastically.

 The flight attendant came through. They each ordered anotherdrink.

 "You seem to have this all figured out," Aaron said.

 "Oh, no, not at all."

 "I don't mean that to sound resentful," Aaron said. "I was justwondering-"

 "Yes?" Ogle said, raising his eyebrows very high and looking atAaron over his glasses, which he had slid down his nose.

 "What do you think? You think I have a chance?"

 "In L.A.?"

 "Yeah."

 "With the big media moguls?"

 "Yeah."

 "No. You don't have a chance."

 Aaron heaved a big sigh, closed his eyes, took a gulp of his drink.He had just met Ogle but he instinctively knew that everything thatOgle had said, all night long, was absolutely true.

 "Which doesn't mean that your company doesn't have achance."

 "It doesn't?"

 "Course not. You got a good product there. It's just that youdon't know how to market it."

 "You think I should have gone out and gotten a flashy logo."

 "Oh, no, I'm not saying that at all. I think your logo's fine. It's just that you have a misconception in your marketing strategy."

 "How so?"

 "You're aiming at the wrong people," Ogle said, very simplyand plainly, as if he were getting annoyed at Aaron for not figuringthis all out on his own.

 "Who else can I aim at with a product of this type?"

 Ogle squeezed his armrest again, leaned forward, allowed his seatto come upright. He put his drink on his tray table and sat upstraight, as if getting down to work. "You're right in thinking thatthe media need to do people-metering kinds of stuff," he said."The problem is that the kinds of people who run media companiesare not going to buy your product."

 "Why not? It's the best thing like it. It's years ahead."

 Ogle cut him off with a dismissive wave of the hand. "Doesn'tmatter," he said flatly, and shook his head. "Doesn't matter."

 "It doesn't matter how good my product is?"

 "Not at all. Not with those people. Because you are selling tomedia people. And media people are either thugs, morons, orweasels. You haven't dealt very much with media people, haveyou?"

 "Very little."

 "I can tell. Because you don't have that kind of annoying,superficial quality that people get when they deal for a living withthugs, morons, and weasels. You are very earnest and sincere andcommitted to certain principles, as a scientist, and thugs andmorons and weasels do not understand that. And when you givethem an explanation of how brilliant your machine is, you'll just beputting them off."

 "I have spent a hell of a lot of time finding ways to explain thisdevice in terms that almost anyone can understand," Aaron said.

 "Doesn't mater. Won't help. Because in the end, no matter howyou explain it, it comes down to fine, subtle technicalities. Mediapeople don't like that. They like the big, fabulous concept." Oglepronounced "fabulous" with a mock-Hollywood gush.

 Aaron laughed rather hotly. He had seen enough media peopleto know this was true.

 "If you come to a media person and you want to do a miniseriesabout the Civil War, or Shakespeare, or the life of J.S. Bach, theywill laugh in your face. Because nobody wants to watch that stuff.You know, intelligent stuff. They want pro wrestling. Mediapeople who try to do Shakespeare get fired or go broke. The onlyones who survived long enough to talk to you are the ones whobacked pro wrestling. And when you come up to them talkingabout the fine points of your brilliant technology, it makes them think of Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci, which they hate andfear."

 "So I'm dead."

 "If you rely on selling to media people, you're dead."

 "But who else needs a device like this one except for mediapeople?"

 "Well," Ogle said softly, sounding almost surprised, as if he hadn't gotten around to considering this question. "Well, actually,I could use it. Maybe."

 "You said you were in media," Aaron said.

 Ogle held one finger up. "Not exactly. I said I worked in the media industry. But I am not a media person, per se."

 "What are you?"

 "A scientist."

 "And what is your field of study?"

 "You, Aaron, are a biophysicist. You study the laws thatdetermine the functioning of the body. Well, I am a political biophysicist. I study the laws that govern the functioning of the body politic."

 "Oh. Could you be a little more specific?"

 "People call me a pollster," Ogle said. "Which is like calling youa palm reader."

 4

 Eleanor Boxwood Richmond heard the State of the Unionaddress on the radio, but she didn't really listen to it. She wasdriving a borrowed car down abandoned streets in EldoradoHighlands, an aborted suburb ten miles north of Denver. She hadborrowed the car from Doreen, who lived in the trailer next tohers, several miles to the east, in the town of Commerce City.

 In case the police tried to phone with any news of her husband,Eleanor had dropped her football phone out her kitchen window,pulled it across the gap between her trailer and Doreen's, and fed itthrough the window of Doreen's bedroom. Eleanor's husband, Harmon, for whom she was searching, had obtained the footballphone free of charge by subscribing toSports Illustrated some years ago. Now theSports Illustrated were still showing up on time, everyweek, while Harmon himself, depressed by unemployment and bankruptcy, had become more and more erratic. Some things you could at least count on.

 Eleanor felt foolish and humiliated every time she spoke on thefootball phone. It did not make looking for a job in the bankingindustry any easier. She would sit there in her trailer, which wouldbe baking hot or freezing cold according to the outside tem­perature. She kept the windows closed even in summer so that thescreaming of Doreen's kids, and the heavy metal from the trailer onthe other side, would not be audible to the person she was speakingto. She would telephone people wearing dark suits in air-conditioned buildings and she would hold the little plastic football to the side of her head and try to sound like a banker. So far she hadnot gotten any jobs.

 Back in the old days, when the whole family had lived together,happily, in their big house in this suburban development inEldorado Highlands, they had had a phone in every room. Inaddition to the football phone they had had a sneaker phone; acheap little Radio Shack phone that would always go off the hookunless you set it down firmly on a hard surface; and a couple of solid, traditional AT&T telephones. All of these phones haddisappeared during the second burglary of their trailer and so theyhad been forced to get the football phone out of storage and usethat instead.

 Eleanor Richmond had not seen her husband, Harmon, in twodays. For the first day, this had been more of a relief than anything else, because usually when she did see him, he was half-reclined ontheir broken-backed sofa in front of the TV set, drinking. Fromtime to time he would go out and get a Mcjob, work at it for a fewdays, quit or get fired, and then come back home. Harmon neverlasted very long at Mcjobs because he was an engineer, and flippingburgers or jerking Slurpees grated on his nerves, just as talking onthe football phone grated on Eleanor's.

 The neighborhood that Eleanor was driving through had beenbuilt on a perfectly flat high plains ranch in the early eighties. All ofthe houses were empty, and three-quarters of them always hadbeen; as you drove down the curvy streets, you could look acrossyards that were reverting to short-grass prairie, in through the frontwindows of the houses, all the way through their empty interiors,out the back windows, across a couple of more yards, and through another similar house on another similar street.

 Eleanor and Harmon Richmond had purchased their housebrand new, before the carpet was even installed. It was early in theReagan administration. Harmon worked for a medium-sized aerospace firm that sold avionics to the Defense Department.Eleanor had just finished raising their two children to school ageand had reentered the workforce. She had started out as a teller fora bank in Aurora and been promoted to customer servicerepresentative in fairly short order. Soon she would be branchmanager. Eleanor's mother, a widow, had sold the ancestral townhouse in Washington, D.C., and moved out to a fairly niceretirement community a short distance away.

 They were doing pretty well for themselves. So, when thehouses around them remained empty, for a month, then sixmonths, then a year, and the value of their house began to fall, theydidn't get too worried about it. Everyone makes a bum investmentnow and then. They were well compensated, the mortgage pay­ments weren't that bad, and they could easily cover their expenses,including the monthly payment to Mother's retirementcommunity.

 Times had actually been good for several years. They shouldhave taken advantage of that to squirrel some money away. But theRichmonds were the only people in their respective families whohad managed to make the breakthrough to the middle class, which meant that each one of them had a coterie of siblings, nephews,nieces, and cousins living in various ghettos up and down the East Coast, all of whom felt they had a claim on what they all imaginedwas the family fortune. They wired a lot of money back East. Itdidn't come back.

 They broke even until the early nineties, when Harmon'scompany got LBO'd, and the financiers in New York who hadbought it began to break it up and sell off the little parts to variouspeople. The particular part of it that Harmon worked for got soldto Gale Aerospace, a defense contractor based in Chicago. Theygave him a choice: move to Chicago or move to Chicago. But theycouldn't move to Chicago without selling their house, which now was worth half what they had paid for it. Harmon got fired.

 They following year, the bank that Eleanor worked for wasbought out by a huge California bank that already had millions ofbranches all over the area - including one that was directly acrossthe street from the one where Eleanor worked. They closed herbranch and she lost her job.

 The foreclosure on their house had not been long in coming.They had bounced around from one big apartment complex toanother for a few years and finally wound up in the trailer park inCommerce City, next to Doreen. They still had two cars, a 1981

 Volvo wagon that they had bought used, and a rather old Datsunthat did not work anymore and -was parked, permanently, in frontof the trailer. Harmon had taken the Volvo with him when hedisappeared, stranding Eleanor in the trailer.

 She had sought him everywhere else. Now, just for the sake ofbeing complete, she was back in the old neighborhood.

 It was amazing how quickly you forgot the street patterns. It wasalmost as if the people who laid these things out wanted you to getlost. She drove for a quarter of an hour down the winding lanes,courts, and terraces, flipping U-turns in circles. The voice of the President of the United States continued to whinny from the radio.The words seemed almost devoid of meaning and the rhythm of the speech was constantly broken up by outbursts of applause andcheering. The pale, desiccated prairie grass, dusted with powderysnow, reflected the moonlight through the windows of the emptyhouses. Many of the streets had never been finished, the asphaltwould simply terminate and become a hard-packed arroyo linedwith uncompleted houses, their naked studs and unconnectedplumbing lines projecting into the dry air like the rib cages of deadanimals.

 Finally she saw some landmarks that reminded her of where shewas, and her old reflexes took over, guiding her automaticallythrough the twists and turns.

 Their house sat up on a little rise at the end of a cul-de-sac, alollipop-shaped street that broadened into a circle at the end. Theirhouse was right at the top of the lollipop, looking down the lengthof the street and out over a nice view of the Rockies rising into thenight sky with the lights of Denver lapping up against them.

 The house shone tonight in the moonlight. The "WhiteHouse." They had called it that partly because it was white, andpartly because moving into it had made them feel like theywhite people.

 It was meant ironically. Feeling like a white person had been one of Eleanor Richmond's big goals in life. She had grownup in the heart of Washington, D.C., and had often gone for weeks at a time without seeing a single white face. People would come infrom other parts of the country and complain about how the systemwas stacked against them; the cops and the judges and the jurieswere all white. But in D.C., the cops and judges and juries were allblack. As were the teachers and the preachers and the nuns who hadeducated Eleanor. She had never gotten the sense that being blacksingled her out in any way. In some ways that had actually made iteasier for her and Harmon to settle down in a predominantly whitemiddle-class area.

 Still, moving into a white house in a suburban development in Colorado had made her feel like a pioneer on the edge of thewilderness. She had often longed to jump into the Volvo and drive back to D.C. It felt better if she joked about it, and so she called itthe White House. And when her relatives from D.C. came out tovisit and bum money off of them, she laughed and joked about theWhite House all the way from the airport, so that by the time theygot there, and saw just how white it was, they were ready for it, andthey didn't take her for some kind of traitor.

 When she pulled into the old cul-de-sac, the White House wasdead ahead, sitting up on its little hill, and it was all lit up fromwithin. The only house within a mile that was lit up. Someonemust have broken into it and turned all the power back on at thecircuit panel.

 Someone named Harmon.

 Eleanor braked Doreen's little car to a halt, there in the handleof the little lollipop street, and sat for a couple of minutes, staringthrough the windshield, up the hill, at the White House full of lightand good cheer.

 The Volvo was not visible anywhere. But the light inside the garage was turned on. Once he'd gotten the power restored, hemust have used it to open the garage door, and parked the Volvoinside, just like in the old days.

 Eleanor was trying to make up her mind what she should donow. Because her husband had clearly gone crazy. Either that, or gotten so drunk that he might as well be crazy.

 She was tired of having crazy relatives. Her mother hadAlzheimer's. They had moved her to a much cheaper nursing homeand might have to move her into the trailer any day now. She was basically crazy. Her kids were both teenagers, hence crazy bydefinition. Now her husband was crazy.

 Eleanor Richmond was the only person in the whole family whowas not crazy.

 Not that she wasn't tempted.

 Eventually she reasoned that, crazy or not, it wouldn't do herhusband any good to wind up in jail. He might think, in his own crazy, drunk mind, that he still owned this house. But he didn't.The Resolution Trust Corporation owned it; they had taken itover from the defunct savings and loan that had foreclosed on it.Eventually the RTC would probably sell it to speculators whowould come and strip out the usable wiring and carpets, or maybejust bulldoze the whole thing down to its floor slab and turn theneighborhood into a dirt-bike track or a toxic waste dump. Eleanorknew that this house was walking dead, a real estate zombie, andthat it was going to be wasted. But that didn't change the fact thatthey didn't own it anymore and Harmon could go to jail for havingbroken into it.

 Maybe going to jail would do Harmon some good. Shame hima little, snap him out of his depression.

 But she kept saying that to herself every time something bad happened to them and it never worked; he just got more depressedand bitter. He didn't need any more shame.

 She'd better go get him. Once again, Eleanor, the solid one, thenoncrazy maternal figure, would bail everyone else out. Somedayshe would have to indulge herself and go crazy a little and letsomeone else bail her out. But she didn't know anyone who wasup for the job.

 The front door was unlocked. The house smelled funny. Maybe ithad been shut up for too long, baking in the sun that poured inthrough the windows all day, peeling all kinds of fumes andchemicals out of the paint and the carpet and making the air stink.She left the door open.

 "Harmon?" she said. Her voice echoed off every wall.

 There was no answer. He was probably dead drunk in the livingroom.

 But he was not in the living room. The only things there, theonly sign that Harmon had been in the place at all, were a few toolsdropped on the floor in one corner of the room, over by a littlebroom closet where they used to store the slide projector and the Monopoly game and the jigsaw puzzles.

 The door to the broom closet was open, the tools spilled out onthe floor next to it. A hammer and a crowbar. Eleanor would haveknown that they were Harmon's even if he had not carefully paintedRICHMOND on the handle of each one, in her nail polish.

 The thin strip of trim that ran around the door had beenremoved entirely and thrown on the floor, little nails poking upinto the air. Uncovered drywall had been exposed where the piece of trim had covered it up, and Eleanor could see dents in it whereHarmon had inserted the crowbar.

 The door opening was lined with another piece of trim, adoorjamb with a little brass strike plate about halfway up where thelatch of the door would catch. Harmon had tried to pry this jamboff.

 Eleanor squatted down in the doorway and put her hand on the doorjamb. An uneven ladder of pencil and ball-point pen marksclimbed up the wood. Each mark had a name and a date written next to it: Harmon Jr. - age 7, Clarice - age 4. And so on. Theyreached all the way up to nearly Eleanor's height; the last one wasmarked Harmon Jr. - age 12.

 Harmon had tried to pry the jamb off and take it with him. Butthe wood was thin and cheap, and under the twisting force of hiscrowbar, it had split in half down the middle, half of it remaining nailed down to the door frame, the other half pulled halfway out,white unstained wood exposed where it had shattered.

 She wondered how long Harmon had been sitting there on theirbroken-backed sofa in the trailer in Commerce City, his beer in hishand, meditating over this doorjamb, planning to come and take itaway. Had it been eating away at him ever since they had moved out?

 Clarice's birthday was next week. Maybe he intended to give thisto her as a birthday present. It had great sentimental value, and itwas free.

 "Harmon?" she said, again, and heard it echo again off the barewalls of the house. She went to check the bedrooms, but he wasn'tin any of them.

 The sound of music finally drew her to the garage. Faint, tinnymusic was coming out of the Volvo's stereo. It was barely audiblethrough the mud room door. She went into the garage.

 Harmon was sitting in the driver's seat of the Volvo, reclined allthe way back. Once she got the door open, she recognized the music: Mahler's Resurrection Symphony. Harmon's favourite.Years ago, on their first trip to Colorado, they had parked on thesummit of Pike's peak and listened to this tape, loud.

 She walked quietly up the flank of the Volvo and looked in the driver's window. Harmon had leaned the seat all the way back andfolded up his jacket to make a little pillow on the headrest. His eyeswere closed and he wasn't moving.

 The keys were in the ignition, in the ON position. The tank wasempty. The engine was dead. The volume on the stereo was turned all the way up. The tape had been running for hours, possibly evendays, auto-reversing itself back and forth, playing the symphonyover and over again, running the battery down until hardlyanything came out of the speakers.

 Harmon was dead. He had been dead for quite some time.

 Before she did anything else she reached inside the car andpounded the garage door opener clipped to the sun visor. The big door creaked open, letting in a rush of fresh clean air and opening up a clear glittering view of the suburbanized foothills.

 It was a very sensible thing to do. Eleanor Richmond did itbecause she was not crazy, would not allow herself to be crazy,would not allow herself to succumb to the poison gas that herhusband had used to kill himself. Her kids and her mother neededher and she could not indulge herself the way Harmon had.

 She did not want to look at Harmon or touch his body and soshe went and sat on the front steps of the White House for a while,letting tears run down her face and shatter her clear view of thelights of Denver. She did not have any shoulder to rest her head onand so she scooted over to one end of the step and leaned against the white vinyl siding of the house, which gave a little under the weight of her head.

 After a while, she walked back in through the open front door and went back into the living room. She picked up her husband's crowbar from where he had thrown it away. The floor was dentedbeneath it; he must have hurled it down there in a rage when thedoor jamb had shattered. From there he had probably gone straightto the Volvo.

 Eleanor worked the point of the crowbar underneath the portionof the doorjamb that was still nailed down, and prying gently, alittle at a time, moving the crowbar up and down its length, workedthe jamb loose from the frame of the house. It held together okay and she knew that a little Elmer's glue would fix it right up. Shewould ask Doreen's boyfriend to nail it up to the wall of the trailer and then she would have Clarice and Harmon, Jr., stand against it and she would measure their height and mark their progress. Theywould roll their eyes and say it was stupid, but they would secretlylove it.

 Every few seconds, all the way through this, she remembered,with a shock, that her husband was dead.

 She carried the doorjamb out and fed it in through the openwindow of Doreen's car. It still stuck out a little bit but it would beokay for the drive home. Living in Commerce City, watchingMexicans, she had learned that you could get away with letting justabout anything hang out the windows of your car. She backed out of the driveway and turned around in the big circle and leftWhite House beyond, driving aimlessly into the heart of her old neighborhood, looking for another house with lights in it, a housewhere they might have a working telephone.

 PART 2
The Ride

  

 5

 Marsha Wyzniewczki's relationship with her boss had neverbeen ceremonious. When he didn't answer for the third time, shegot up from her desk, worked up a good head of steam acceleratingacross ten feet of office floor, and threw her full hundred and ten pounds against one of the two tall, narrow, Lincolnesque doors thatseparated her office from the Governor's.

 A small old gray man was hunched over in the Governor's chair,in a pool of light in the dark office. Marsha had to look at him forseveral seconds before she was completely sure that this man wasWilliam Anthony Cozzano, the tall sturdy hero who had enteredthe office a few hours ago, ruddy from his afternoon jog up aroundLincoln's Tomb. He had somehow been transformed intothis. A wraith from the VA Hospital.

 A mother's reflex took over; she groped for the wall switch,lighting up the office. "Willy?" she said, addressing him this way forthe first time ever. "Willy, are you all right?"

 "Call," he said.

 "Call whom?"

 "Goddamn it," he said, unable to remember a name. This wasthe first time she had ever heard him utter profanity when he knewthat she was listening. "Call her."

 "Call whom?"

 "The three-alarm lamp scooter," he said.

 Cozzano flapped his right arm, causing his whole body to bendperilously to that side, and pointed across the office at his wall ofpictures. "Three-alarm lamp scooter."

 Marsha couldn't tell which picture he was pointing at. Christina?The little Vietnamese girl? One of the bridesmaids?  Or hisdaughter, Mary Catherine?

 Mary Catherine was a doctor, three years out of medical school. She was a neurology resident at a big hospital in Chicago. The lasttime the Governor had gone to the city, he had visited herapartment and come back chuckling about one detail of her life: She spent so much time on call and slept so little that she had tohave three alarm clocks by her bed.

 "Mary Catherine?"

 "Yes, goddamn it!"

 Marsha went back to her little cockpit, where she sat all day,irradiated on three sides by video screens. Sliding a computermouse around on the desktop, she located Mary CatherineCozzano's name and slapped a button. She heard the computerdialing the number, a quick tuneless series of notes, like the song ofan exotic bird.

 "South Shore Hospital switchboard, may I help you?"

 Cozzano's voice broke in before Marsha could say anything; he had picked up his extension. "The budlecker! Make the budleckergo!" Then, infuriated at himself: "No, goddamn it!"

 "Excuse me?" the operator said.

 "Mary Catherine Cozzano. Pager 806," Marsha said.

 "Dr. Cozzano is not on call at this time. Would you like to speakto the doctor who is?"

 Marsha did not understand the following words were true untilshe spoke them: "This is a family emergency. A medicalemergency."

 Then she dialed 911 on another line.

 Then she went back into the Governor's office to make sure that he was comfortable in his chair. He had slumped over to one side.His right arm kept lashing out like a gaff, trying to hook on tosomething sturdy enough to pull his full weight, but the surface ofhis desk offered no purchase.

 Marsha grabbed the Governor's upper left arm in both of herhands and tried to move him. But Cozzano reached across his bodywith his right hand and gently, firmly, pulled her hands loose. She

 watched his hand for a moment, confused, then noticed that he wasstaring directly into her eyes.

 He glanced significantly at the telephone on his desk. "Fuckme," he said. "Get the maculator!" Then he closed his eyes tight infrustration and shook his head. "No, goddamn it!"

 "The maculator?"

 "The old Egyptian. Glossy head. He'll fix this muggle. Get theboy of my father's acehole! Ace in the hole."

 "Mel Meyer," she said.

 "Yeah."

 That was an easy one; Mel was the second preset on theGovernor's phone, a one-button job. Marsha picked up the phoneand pushed that button, with a sense of relief that made herdecisive. Mel was the guy to call. She should have called him first,before calling the ambulance.

 She ended up having to try a couple of numbers before shereached him on his car phone, somewhere on the streets ofChicago.

 "What is it!" Mel snapped, getting things off to a typically briskstart,

 "It's Marsha. The Governor has had a stroke or something."

 "Oh, no!" William A. Cozzano said. "You're right. I had astroke. That's terrible."

 "When?" Mel said.

 "Just now."

 "Is he dead?"

 "No."

 "Is he in distress?"

 "No."

 "Who is aware of this?"

 "You, me, an ambulance crew."

 "Is the ambulance there?"

 "Not yet."

 "Listen carefully." In the background, Marsha heard honking,the squealing of tires, the dim filtered sound of other motoristsshouting at Mel, their voices Dopplering wierdly as they veered andaccelerated around him. He must have pulled on to the shoulder,sidewalk, or wherever else he saw clear space. Mel kept talkingsmoothly and without interruption. "You don't want anambulance there. Even at night the Capitol is crawling with media jackals. Damn that glass wall!"

 "But-"

 "Shut up. I know you have to get him medical attention. Who'son security detail? Mack Crane?"

 "Yes."

 "I'll call and tell him to get Willy into the dumbwaiter. You takethe stairs down to the basement - don't wait for the damn elevator, don't talk to any press - and find Rufus Bell, who's down in the boiler room, smoking Camels and waiting for the lottery numbers to come up on TV. Tell him that the Governor needs his help. Tellhim to clear a path to the civil defense tunnel."

 Then Mel hung up. Marsha was saying, "Civil defense?"

 The Governor was smiling at Marsha with one side of his face. The other side was expressionless. "He is a smart back," he said."No! You know what I mean. Do what he said."

 The Governor's offices were separated from the rest of thecapitol by a huge glass wall that completely sealed off the east wing. Just inside the glass wall was a generously sized reception area,furnished with leather chairs and davenports, where visitors waited to see the Governor or his staff. Right up against the glass was asecurity desk where Mack Crane or another member of theGovernor's security detail was always stationed, twenty-four hoursa day, keeping a sharp eye on anyone who approached from thedirection of the rotunda. Mack was a plainclothes Illinois cop, bald head fringed with straight, steely hair, wearing an unfashionably wide tie over a short-sleeved shirt. By the time Marsha had made itout of the Governor's office; through her own office, and out into the reception area, Mack's phone was already ringing, and as shepunched her way out through the glass doors, heading for theRotunda, she could hear him saying, "Hi, Mel."

 Rufus Bell was downstairs in his little asbestos empire, smokingunfiltered Camels and watching television on a little black-and-white set he had poised on an upended bucket, when Marsha droveher shoulder into the steel door of the boiler room. Something in her manner caused him to rise to his feet.

 "This is an emergency," she said. "The Governor needs yourhelp."

 Bell flicked his cigarette into a coffee can full of water, scoring adirect hit from ten feet away, simultaneously punching the TV's offswitch with a knee. Then he just stared at her and Marsha realizedhe was waiting for instructions.

 "Is there a civil defense tunnel or something?"

 By way of saying yes, Bell strode over to a big sheet of stained and lacquered plywood bolted to a wall. The plywood had dozensof cup hooks screwed into it. A key chain dangled from each cuphook. He grabbed one.

 "Willy's coming down," Marsh said, she swallowed. "On thedumbwaiter."

 Rufus froze solid for a long moment, then turned around andlooked searchingly at Marsha.

 "You need to clear a path from the dumbwaiter to the civildefense tunnel. Big enough for a stretcher."

 Bell shrugged. "Shouldn't be hard," he said, exiting the room.He was a big round man with a rolling gait that looked slow, butMarsha had to hurry to keep up.

 As they came into the hallway, Bell turned and held the keychain out to her, suspending it by a single one of its myriad keys,held between his thumb and forefinger. "You want me to clear thathallway, you gotta do the tunnel yourself. End of this hall, take aright, go to the very end."

 Marsha had thought that she knew her way around the statehouse but now was beginning to feel lost and uncertain. But Bellwas staring at her remorselessly, holding the key chain right up inher face, and she had to do it. She took the keys, getting a firm gripon the important one, and ran down the hallway.

 "Yo!" Bell said, "you'll need this!"

 She turned around to see Bell holding up a thick black rubber-coated flashlight. He clicked it on, waved it back and forth a coupleof times, and underhanded it to her down thirty feet of hallway.She plucked it out of its spinning trajectory with a one-handed-grab, shattering two fingernails, and spun on her heel.

 Behind her she could hear a tremendous clattering; looking backshe saw Rufus beginning to shove entire file cabinets this way amthat. That was all she took in before she turned down the nextcorridor.

 It was built from several different kinds of masonry piecedtogether and then painted the same color, a thick glossy industrialyellow. The ceiling was obscured by bundles of heavily insulatedpipes and ventilated steel conduits carrying thick black electricalcables. The corridor was narrowed by flimsy steel cabinets and rackslining  the  walls,  stuffed  with  maintenance  supplies,  guttedSelectrics, and ancient civil defense biscuits.

 The door at the end of the hall was small, heavy, and almost toodimly illuminated to see. A heavily yellowed cardboard sign wasstuck to it, bearing the FALLOUT SHELTER emblem. Once itwas unlocked, it took a mighty tug just to budge it. Then it openedslowly and steadily, with the momentum of a battleship, andslammed into the wall hard enough to knock off chips of the thickold yellow paint. Beyond was a circular tunnel stretching away,ruler-straight, for as far as the beam of the flashlight could penetrateIt was barely high enough for her to enter without stooping. Coldair oozed out and flowed over her shins.

 She aimed the beam at the floor, because her main concern atthis point was to notify any vermin of her approach so that theywould at least have the option of getting out of her path. Then sheducked through the low frame of the door.

 Running down the tunnel, she tried to figure out whichdirection she must be going now. Her trip down the stairway hasgotten her all spun around. She decided that she must be goingnorth, under Monroe Street, toward the squat limestone buildingthe former steam plant, that housed the Illinois Emergency Servicesand Disaster Agency.

 Finally she reached the end of the tunnel. There was anothermassive blastproof door here, which opened using the same key;clearly Rufus Bell had been through from time to time, oiling thelock and the hinges. She threw the bolt and put her shoulder againstthe door, the silky filaments of her blouse snagging on the roughlayers of rust and flaked paint.

 But it seemed to open by itself. Brilliant light poured through. She was looking into a wide hallway in another basement some­where. Four people were staring at her in amazement: onecustodian and three emergency medical technicians, fully equippedwith a gurney and several big fiberglass equipment cases.

 One of the EMTs, a tiny, athletic-looking young woman with ashort bristly haircut, peered down the length of the tunnel. "Doesthat lead somewhere?" she said. "I guess it does."

 The capitol only had three passenger elevators and they all openeddirectly on to the Rotunda, a yawning four-story-high well whereprivacy was pretty much out of the question. But buried in the wings of the building were large dumbwaiters used by house,senate, and gubernatorial staff to shuffle cartons of papers back andforth. They were easily large enough for a person, even a big personlike Cozzano, to sit in.

 Marsha led the EMTs through the basement, and into the storageroom under the east wing where the Governor stored inactive files.Along the way they picked up Mack Crane, who was loitering in acorridor intersection, keeping a sharp eye in the direction of the s tairs that led up to the first floor, looking for what Mel Meyer had referred to, alternately, as "jackals" and "witnesses." Marsha couldnot help darting one glance up the stairs. She was expecting aphalanx of photographers and video crews, poised to capture her wide-eyed expression so that they could splash it up on the frontpage of theTrib tomorrow. But the top of the stairs was guarded bya sentry line of orange cones warning of a WET FLOOR. Bell must have done that; while no one was really afraid of a wet floor,anyone who knew the ways of the statehouse would try to avoidwalking through the middle of one of Bell's mopping projects andearning his undying enmity and noncooperation.

 The dumbwaiter was stopped in the storage room, doors open.

  

 Governor William A. Cozzano was sprawled out on the basementfloor with his head and shoulders cradled in the lap of the janitor who was talking to him softly. Bell did not look up as the gurneyapproached. He said something to Cozzano, something about"medevac." He slipped one arm under Cozzano's shoulders and one under his knees and picked the two-hundred-fifty-poundGovernor up as if he were a six-year-old.

 "Just leave him there," one of the EMTs said, but Bell steppedforward and gently laid Cozzano out full length on the gurney,ready for transport.

 The EMTs worked over Cozzano for a few minutes. Then theyrolled him out into the corridor and back toward the civil defensetunnel. Marsha glanced up the stairs as they went by and saw theknees and feet of a nocturnal journalist heading for the first-floormen's room.

 The gubernatorial stretcher, with its motorcade - the EMTs,thesecretary, the cop, and the janitor - moved quickly and silentlythrough the basement, down the tunnel, and into the basement ofthe building that Marsha had glimpsed earlier. No one said any-thing except for Cozzano, who said, jovially. "Why is everyone sowallpapered?"

 The janitor in the other building was holding the freight elevatorfor them. They all rode it up to the ground floor, along a shorthallway, and out through a roll-up steel door and into a parking lotwhere an ambulance was waiting. The cold air of the January nightcame through Marsha's blouse as if she were naked. She pirouettedslowly, looking around, trying to establish her bearings.

 The ambulance had backed into a three-sided nook that openedout on to an empty gravel parking lot covered with gray hard-packed snow. They were in back of a one-story building of rough-hewn limestone. This building had a notch taken out of its corner,and the back wall of that notch contained the roll-up door. Thebuilding was separated by a gap of just a few feet from a much largerseven- or eight-story building whose solid, windowless back wall formed the third side of the nook.

 The big building was the Illinois State Armory, which alsohoused the Illinois State Police. The small building from whichthey'd just exited was the Emergency Services and Disaster Agency,its roof studded with funny-looking antennas. Marsha, who'd beenworking in the capitol for twenty years, was astonished to realize these things: that the Governor of Illinois had a secret escape route, a vestige of the Cold War, a secret bolt-hole to escape from atomicattack and deliver himself into the protection of the IllinoisNational Guard.

 She wondered how many other secrets about the capitol and the office of the Governor, and about this Governor himself, she hadnever learned or even suspected. She wondered why she'd never been told about these things. And she wondered how Mel Meyerhad known. For Marsha the acquisition of knowledge had alwaysbeen an orderly process pursued in public schools, but Mel wasdifferent, Mel came by his knowledge in mysterious ways. He didn't even have a government job, he was just the Governor'slawyer and friend, he hardly ever came to Springfield, and still he carried all the secret blueprints and phone numbers in his head.

 As the EMTs were pulling the doors of the ambulance closed onCozzano, she saw Bell standing there, staring at Cozzano through the rear windows. As the driver shifted the transmission intoforward gear, the ambulance's backup lights flashed once like heatlightning and illuminated Bell's face, burning the still image into Marsha's retinas. Bell's forehead was wrinkled in the middle, his eyebrows angled upward in the center, his eyes were glistening and red. As the engine revved, he suddenly straightened up, clicked the heels of his boots together, and snapped out a salute.

 Cozzano was staring back at Bell through the tiny windows inthe back of the ambulance. The Governor moved his right arm,heavy with blood-pressure cuff and intravenous lines, and returnedthe salute. The ambulance moved forward on twin jets of steamyexhaust and angled across the parking lot, headed for the trauma center at Springfield Central Hospital, less than a mile away.

  

 6

Assoon as Dr. Mary Catherine Cozzano got on the downelevator, headed for the parking garage, she began to go through aritual she had developed for passage through hostile territory. Shehauled the strap of her purse up over her head so that it randiagonally across her body, snatch-proof. It hung on her right hipso as not to interfere with her pager, which was clipped to her lefthip. She unzipped the purse, pulled out her key chain, andclenched it in her right fist so that the keys stuck out from betweenher fingers like spikes on a medieval weapon. As she carried herkeys in her purse, she observed no size limitations; her key chainwas as sprawling and ramified as a coronary artery, branching out to include a miniature Swiss Army knife, a penlight, a magnifying glass(all freebies from drug companies), and a stainless steel policewhistle. The whistle dangled on a thick length of metal rope. Shegot it between her thumb and index finger, ready to use. She hadalready made sure that she was wearing her running shoes - nothigh heels, not boots - and a pair of scrub pants that offered her legsfreedom of movement. That was a given, because these were theonly clothes anyone could tolerate on a thirty-hour shift in asprawling hospital.

 Finally, as the elevator was passing downward through the lobbylevel and into the subterranean parking levels, she reached into herpurse and pulled out a black box that fit neatly into her left hand. It was rectangular with a bend near one end. The bent end wasconcave and sprouted four blunt metal prongs about a quarter of aninch long, making it look like the mouthparts of a tremendouslymagnified chigger. The prongs were symmetrically arranged: an

 outer pair that stuck straight out from the end of the device, and an inner pair, closer together, angled toward each other as they sprouted from the concavity. When Mary Catherine found the boxinside her purse, it fell naturally into her hand in such a way that her index finger was resting on a black button, just under the crook, near the prongs. Mary Catherine pulled it out of her purse, held itaway from herself, and pulled the trigger.

 A miniature lightning bolt, a purplish-white line of electricaldischarge, popped between the two inner prongs. It created an alarming, crusty buzzing noise that seemed to penetrate deep into her head. The spark whipped and snapped in the air like a slack clothesline caught in a November wind.

 She tested it like this, every day, because she was William A.Cozzano's daughter, and because her father was John Cozzano'sson, and everyone in their family learned, when they were veryyoung, not to be sloppy, not to assume, not to take anything forgranted.

 Then the elevator doors opened, like the opening curtain on acheap horror film, and she was staring into a low-ceilinged cata­comb, filled with greenish, inexpensive institutional light that washard on the eyes but did not really seem to illuminate anything.These were the tombs where doctors and nurses buried their carswhile they worked. Most of the cars were shambling zombies, longsince turned undead by the depredations of mobile chop shops that  cruised up and down the ramps night and day.

 During these trips through the catacombs, Mary Catherine likedto tell herself that her chosen speciality gave her an advantage inself-defense: she could diagnose people from a distance. By the waythey walked, by the reactions on their faces, she could tell activepsychotics from healthy, run-of-the-mill radio thieves.

 Mary Catherine was not the kind of woman who would carry aweapon in her purse. She was not sure what kind of woman would, but certainly not her. She did it anyway. At first it had been a con­cession to her father. Ever since the death of her mother, herfather's concern for her safety had become an obsession with him.When she had moved into her apartment, he drove up fromTuscola with all of his tools and spent a weekend reinforcing thedeadbolts, putting bars on the windows, caging her in from theoutside world. The people who lived in the apartment across theair shaft - an extended family of Brazilian immigrants - spent mostof that weekend gathered in the living room, almost as if for afamily portrait, staring in astonishment as the Governor of Illinoisdangled halfway out of a sixth-story window sinking bolt hole afterbolt hole into the brick window frames with a massive three-quarter-inch electric drill that he had borrowed from one of hisfarmer cousins.

 The next time her birthday rolled around, Dad had given her asmall, neatly wrapped box. Mary Catherine had been embarrassedand flushed with gratitude, thinking it was a necklace - and comingfrom Dad, it was sure to be too formidable to wear. But when shehad gotten it out of the box, it turned out to be a stun gun instead.A fitting weapon for a neurologist.

 Dad had never observed any limitations on his life. He sawnothing remarkable in assuming that one day he would bePresident of the United States. He had always assumed that MaryCatherine would feel the same way. He always told her that she could do anything she wanted with her life, and while she neverdoubted him, she always took it with a grain of salt. And when hefirst became aware that, as a woman, she was in danger in ways thathe was not, and that this danger limited what she could do, he wasdeeply troubled. He refused to accept it for a long time. But he wasstarting to understand and was trying to find ways to exempt herfrom the regulations that society imposed on all women. Because,goddamn it (she could hear him say), it just wasn't fair. Which wasall the reason he needed to do anything.

 She was halfway to her car when her beeper detonated, scaring her half out of her scrubs. She had been awake or virtually awake forthirty-six hours and was running on a lean, rancid bland of caffeine and adrenaline. One reflex told her to grab the beeper and push thebutton that would make it shut up. The other reflex told her to pullthe trigger on her stun gun and get it up into the solar plexus of anybad guys who might be in her vicinity. The reflexes got a little confused and the two little black boxes collided, the stun gun and the beeper, and the stun gun won; the beeper went silent.

  (a) This was no time to stand still and figure out the problem and (b) as of thirty minutes ago, she was no longer on call. This had been a mistake on the part of the operator. She had paged the wrong doctor. Sooner or later, they would figure it out, they alwaysdid. Right now, Dr. Cozzano needed to get home and sleep.

 When she got back to her apartment, her answering machine was taking down a message from a man whose voice she did not recognize. She just caught the tail end of it as she was coming through the door: ". . . condition is stable and he's under the personal care of Dr. Sipes, who of course is a very fine neurologist, Thanks. Bye."

 She recognized the name Sipes; he was on the faculty of theCentral Illinois University College of Medicine and he showed up at all the conferences. Apparently this call had come from down-state, where some colleague had a question about something.Didn't sound urgent; she would call him back later. She turneddown the volume on the answering machine, locked all of the locks that Dad had installed to keep her safe, fed the cat, and went into the bathroom.

 There was a mirror in the bathroom. Mary Catherine had notlooked in a mirror for something like a day and a half. She took this opportunity to see if she still recognized herself.

 Her father was the Governor of Illinois, which meant that this face of hers showed up on television and in the newspapers with some regularity. She had to look respectable without being dowdy.She was also a doctor, so she had to look smart and professional. She was a resident, so she had no money and couldn't spend any time at all worrying about how she looked. And she was the product of asmall town in Illinois and had to go back there every couple of weeks and not seem uppity and strange to her old Girl Scout chums.

 Once you left the city limits of Chicago you were in Big HairTerritory. Mary Catherine had been the only girl in her high schoolwho had escaped the syndrome. She had extremely thick, black, luxuriant Italian hair with a natural wave that, during the humidsummers, turned into a curl. She would have preferred to shave her head for the duration of the residency. Dad was never happy unlessshe let it grow down to her waist. In compromise, she had settled on a cut that let it hang just above her shoulders.

 She showered and climbed into bed with wet hair. A few bits ofmail had arrived, notes and cards from friends and family membersin other parts of the country, and she leafed through them by herbedside lamp. Her eyes could not trace the handwriting, and thecontents penetrated her brain only feebly. It was a waste of time.She reached to turn off the ringer on her telephone, but discoveredthat it was already turned off. She had probably turned it off thelast time she had attempted to get some sleep, whenever that was.The time was 9:15p.m. She set her three alarm clocks for fiveo'clock in the morning. She tossed the pager and the stun gun onto her bedside table. The pager no longer responded when she pushed the TEST button. Apparently the stun gun had fried itsmicrochips.

 When she woke up, the bedside clocks all read within a fewminutes of 9:45 and someone was pounding rhythmically on herfront door with a heavy object. For a moment she thought she hadoverslept and that it was 9:45 in the morning, but then she realizedthat it was dark outside and her hair was still wet.

 It sounded like someone was trying to break in with a sledge-hammer. She pulled on jeans and an ILLINI sweatshirt, went to thedoor, and peered out through the peephole.

 It was a cop. The wide-angle view in the peephole made hisbody very large and his head very small, amplifying his already cop-like appearance. He had a hug L-shaped billy club in one hand andwas patiently ramming the butt of it into her door. Standing behindthe cop was a man in a trench coat with his hands in his pockets. He was shorter than the cop, so that the peephole magnified hisface rather than his body. It was Mel Meyer.

 "Okay!" she shouted. "I'm up." She sounded cheerful and readyfor anything, even though she was neither. Women of the prairie did not bitch, nag, or whine.

 Then she thought: Why is Mel here?

 Dad had as many lawyers as a mechanic had wrenches. Heembodied a large business, a fortune, a few charities, and the stateof Illinois, and lawyers came with all of those things. They werealways around. Always calling Dad, taking him to dinner, comingover to his house with papers to sign. Sometimes she couldn't tell which were his friends, which were his business associates, andwhich were actually representing him. To Mary Catherine, lawyershad always seemed as common as air, the taxi drivers, bag boys, and janitors of the world of affairs.

 But if all those other lawyers were William A. Cozzano's army, then Mel Meyer was the stiletto strapped to his ankle. Mel was the eschatological counselor of the Cozzano clan, drafter of wills, executor of estates, godfather of children, and if the whole world turned to decadence and strife one day and civilization collapsed, and Dad were trapped on a hilltop surrounded by the heathen, Mel would shoot himself in the head so that Dad could use his corpse as arampart. He was small, bald, rumply, tired-looking, lizard-eyed, and didn't talk much, because he was always thinking everything out two hundred years into the future.

 And now he was standing in her hallway, with a cop, quiet and motionless as a fire hydrant, hands in the pockets of his trench coat, staring at the wallpaper, thinking.

 She undid the locks and opened the door. The cop stepped aside, clearing a wide space between Mel and Mary Catherine."Your pa needs you," Mel said. "I got a chopper. Let's go."

 Springfield Central had started out as your basic Big Old Brick Hospital with a central tower flanked symmetrically by two slightly shorter wings. Half a dozen newer wings, pavilions, sky bridges, and parking ramps had been plugged into it since then, so that looking at it from the window of the chopper, Mary Catherine could see it was the kind of hospital where you spent all your time wandering around lost. The roofs were mostly flat tar and pea-gravel, totally dark at this time of night, though in areas that wereperpetually shaded, patches of snow glowed faintly blue under thestarlight. But the roof of one of the old, original wings was a patchof high noon in the sea of midnight. It bore a red square with awhite Swiss cross, a red letterH in the center of the cross, and somewhite block numerals up in one corner. Well off to the side, newdoors - electrically powered slabs of glass - had been cut into theside of the old building's central tower.

 It made her uneasy. This wasn't Dad's style. As the governor of one of the biggest states in the union, William A. Cozzano couldhave lived like a sultan. But he didn't. He drove his own car and hedid his own oil changes, lying flat on his back in the driveway of their house in Tuscola in the middle of the winter while frostbittenmedia crews photographed him in the act.

 Zooming around in choppers gave him no thrill. It just remindedhim of Vietnam. He took this to the point where he probablywouldn't have known how to get a chopper if he had needed one. Which is why he had to have people like Mel, people who knewthe extent of his power and how to use it.

 "We have limited information," Mel said, on the way down."He suffered an episode of some kind in his office, shortly aftereight o'clock. He is fine and his vital signs are totally stable. Theymanaged to extract him from the state-house without drawing awhole lot of attention, so if we play this thing right we may be ableto get through it without any leaks to the media."

 In other circumstances, Mary Catherine might have resentedMel's talk of media leaks at a time like this. But that was his job.And this kind of thing was important to Dad. It was probably thesame thing that Dad was worrying about, right now.

 If he was awake. If he was still capable of worrying.

 "I can't figure out what the problem would be," Mary Catherinesaid.

 "They're thinking stroke," Mel said.

 "He's not old enough. He's not fat. Not diabetic. Doesn'tsmoke. His cholesterol level is through the floor. There's no reasonhe should have a stroke." Just when she had herself reassured, sheremembered the tail end of the message she'd heard on her answer-ingmachine, the one that mentioned Sipes. The neurologist. For thefirst time it occurred to her that the message might have been about her father. She felt a sick panicky impulse, a claustrophobicurge to throw the helicopter door open and jump out.Mel shrugged. "We could burn up the phone lines getting more info.  But it wouldn't help him. And it would just create more potential leaks. So just try to take it easy, because in a few minutes we'll know for sure."

 The chopper made an annoyingly gradual soft descent on to the hospital roof. Mary Catherine had a nice view of the capitol dome outher window, but tonight it just looked malevolent, like a sinister antenna rising out of the prairie to pick up emanations from distant sources of power. It was a tall capitol but not a big one. Its smallness always emphasized, to Mary Catherine, its unnatural concentration of influence.

 Springfield liked to bill itself as "The City Lincoln Loved." Mel always referred to it as "The City Lincoln Left."Mel and Mary Catherine had to sit inside for a moment and let the momentum of the rotor spin down a little. When she got the thumbs-up from the pilot, Mary Catherine put her hand on her hair and rolled out on to the white cross in her running shoes. She had thrown a trench coat on over her sweatshirt and jeans, and the buckle whipped back and forth on the end of its belt; the wintry air, traveling at hurricane speed under the rotor blades, had a windchill factor somewhere down around absolute zero. She didn't stop running until she had passed through the wide automatic glass doors and into the quiet warmth of the corridor that led to the central elevator shafts.

 Mel was right behind her. An elevator was already up and waiting for them, doors open. It was a wide-mouth, industrial-strength lift big enough to take a gurney and a whole posse ofmedical personnel. A man was waiting inside, middle-aged, dressedin a white coat thrown over a BEARS sweatshirt. This implied thathe had been called into the hospital on short notice. It was Dr.Sipes, the neurologist.

 She was used to being in hospitals. But suddenly the reality hither. "Oh, God," she said, and slumped against the elevator's pitilessstainless steel wall.

 "What's going on?" Mel said, watching Mary Catherine'sreaction, looking at Dr. Sipes through slitted eyes.

 "Dr. Sipes," Sipes said.

 "Mel Meyer. What's going on?"

 "I'm a neurologist," Sipes explained.

 Mel looked searchingly at Mary Catherine's face for a momentand figured it out. "Oh. Gotcha."

 Sipes's key chain was dangling from a key switch on the control panel. Sipes reached for it.

 "Hang on a sec," Mel said. Since he had emerged from thechopper his head had been swinging back and forth like that of aSecret Service agent, checking out the surroundings. "Let's justhave a chat before we go down to some lower floor where I assumethat things will be in a state of hysteria."

 Sipes blinked and smiled thinly, more out of surprise thanamusement, he wasn't expecting folksy humor at this stage in theproceedings. "Fair enough. The Governor said that I should beexpecting you."

 "Oh. So he is talking?"

 This was a simple enough question, and the fact that Sipeshesitated before answering told Mary Catherine as much as a CATscan.

 "He's not aphasic, is he?" she asked.

 "He is aphasic," Sipes said.

 "And in English this means?" Mel said.

 "He has some problems speaking."

 Mary Catherine put one hand over her face, as if she had aterrible headache, which she didn't. This kept getting worse. Dadreally had suffered a stroke. A bad one.

 Mel just processed the information unemotionally. "Are theseproblems things that would be obviously noticeable to a layman?"

 "I would say so, yes. He has trouble finding the right words, andsometimes makes words up that don't exist."

 "A common phenomenon among politicians," Mel said, "butnot for Willy. So he's not going to be doing any interviews anytime soon.""He's intellectually coherent. He just has trouble putting ideasinto words."

 "But he told you to expect me.""He said that a back would be coming.""A back?"

 "Word substitution. Common among aphasics." Sipes looked at Mary  Catherine.  "I  assume  that  he  doesn't  have  a  living grandmother?"

 "His grandmothers are dead. Why?"

 "He said that his grandmother would be coming too, and that shewas a scooter from Daley. Which means Chicago.""So 'grandmother' means 'daughter' and 'scooter-'""He refers to me and all the other physicians as scooters," Sipessaid.

 "Oy, fuck me," Mel said. "This is gonna be a problem."Mary Catherine had a certain skill for putting bad things out of hermind so that they would not cloud her judgement. She had been trained that way by her father and had gotten a brutal refresher course during high school, when her mother had fallen ill and died ofleukemia. She stood up straight, squared her shoulders, blinked hereyes. "I want to know everything," she said. "This Chinese water torture stuff is going to kill me."

 "Very well," Sipes said, and reached for his key chain. The elevator fell.

 All that Mary Catherine was doing, really, was coming to the hospital to visit a sick relative. The chairman of the neurology department did not have to guide her personally through the hospital. She was getting this treatment, she knew, because she wasthe Governor's daughter. It was one of those weird things that happened to you all the time when you were the daughter of William A. Cozzano. The important thing was not to get used to this kind of treatment, not toexpect it. To remember that it could be taken away at any time.

 If she could make it all the way through her father's political careerwithout ever forgetting this, she'd be okay.

 Dad had a private room, on a quiet floor full of private rooms,with an Illinois State Patrolman stationed outside it.

 "Frank," Mel said, "how's the knee?"

 "Hey, Mel," the trooper said, reached around his body, andshoved the door open.

 "Change into civvies, will ya?" Mel said.

 When Sipes led Mel and Mary Catherine inside, Dad was asleep. He looked normal, if somewhat deflated. Sipes had already warned them that the left side of his face was paralyzed, but it did not showany visible sagging, yet.

 "Oh, Dad," she said quietly, and her face scrunched up and tearsstarted pouring down her face. Mel turned toward her, as if he'dbeen expecting this, and opened his arms wide. He was two inchesshorter than Mary Catherine. She put her face down into theepaulet of his trench coat and cried. Sipes stood uncertainly,awkwardly, checking his wristwatch once or twice.

 She let it go on for a couple of minutes. Then she made it stop."So much for getting that out of the way," she said, trying to makeit into a joke. Mel was gentlemanly enough to grin and chucklehalfheartedly. Sipes kept his face turned away from her.

 Mary Catherine was one of those people that everyone naturallyliked. People who knew her in med school had tended to assume that she would go into a more touchy-feely speciality like familypractice or pediatrics. She had surprised them all by pickingneurology instead. Mary Catherine liked to surprise people, it was another habit she had picked up congenitally.

 Neurology was a funny speciality. Unlike neurosurgery, whichwas all drills and saws and bloody knives, neurology was puredetective work. Neurologists learned to observe funny little tics inpatients' behavior - things that laymen might never notice - andmentally trace the faulty connections back to the brain. They weregood at figuring out what was wrong with people. But usually itwas little more than a theoretical exercise, because there was no cure for most neurological problems. Consequently, neurologiststended to be cynical, sardonic, remote, with a penchant for darkhumor. Sipes was a classic example, except that he appeared to have no sense of humor at all.

 Mary Catherine was trying to make a personal crusade of bring­ingmore humanity to the profession. But standing by her stricken father's bedside crying her eyes out was not what she'd had in mind."Why is he so out of it?" Mel said.

 ''Stroke is a major shock to the system. His body isn't used to this. Plus, we put him on a number of medications that, taken together, slow him down, make him drowsy. It's good for him to sleep right now."

 "Mary Catherine told me that guys of his age, in good shape,shouldn't have strokes.""That's correct," Sipes said."So why did he have one?"

 "Usually stroke happens when you are old and the arteries to your brain are narrowed by deposits. This patient's arteries are in good shape. But a big blood clot got loose in his system.""Damn," Mary Catherine said, "it was the mitral valve prolapse,wasn't it?"

 "Probably," Sipes said.

 "Whoa, whoa!" Mel said, "what is this? I never heard about this."

 "You never heard about it because it's a trivial problem. Most people don't know they have it and don't care.""What is it?"

 Mary Catherine said, "It's a defect in the valve between the atrium and the ventricle on the left side of your heart. Makes a whooshing noise. But it has no effect on performance, which is why Dad was able to join the Marines and play football.""Okay," Mel said.

 "The reason it makes a whooshing noise is that it creates a pattern of turbulent flow inside the heart," Sipes said. "In some cases,this turbulent flow can develop into a sort of stagnant back-water. It's possible for blood clots to form there. That's probably what happened. A clot formed inside the heart, eventually got largeenough to be caught up in the normal flow of blood, and shot uphis carotid artery into his brain."

 "Jesus," Mel said. He sounded almost disgusted that somethingso prosaic could fell the Governor. "Why didn't this happen to himtwenty years ago?"

 "Could have," Sipes said. "It's purely a chance thing. A boltfrom the blue."

 "Could it happen again?"

 "Sure. But we're keeping him on blood thinners at the moment,so it can't happen right now."

 Mel stood there nodding at Sipes while he said this. Then Melkept nodding for a minute or so, just staring off into space.

 "I have eight hundred million phone calls to make," Mel said."Let's get down to business. List for me all of the other humanbeings in the world who know the information that you just gave me. And I don't want him being wheeled around this hospital for everyone to look at. He stays in this room until we make furtherarrangements. Okay?"

 "Okay, I'll pass that along to the others-"

 "Don't bother, I'll do it," Mel said.

 It was like the old days in Tuscola, when a hot, portentousafternoon would suddenly turn dark and purple and the air wouldbe torn by tornado sirens and the police cars would cruise up anddown the streets warning everyone to take cover. Dad was alwaysthere, guiding the kids and the dogs down into the tornado cellar,checking to see that the barbecue and lawn chairs and garbage canlids were stowed away, telling them funny stories while the cellar door above their heads pocked from the impacts of baseball-sizedhailstones. Now, something even worse was happening. And Dadwas sleeping through it.

 And Mom wasn't around anymore. And there was her brotherJames. But he was just her brother. James wasn't any stronger thanshe was. Probably less so. Mary Catherine was in charge of theCozzano family.

 Sipes and Mary Catherine ended up in a dark, quiet room in frontof a high-powered Calyx computer system with two hugemonitors, one color and one black-and-white. It was a system forviewing medical imagery of all kinds - X-rays, CAT scans, andeverything else. This hospital had had them for several yearsalready. The hospital where Mary Catherine worked probablywouldn't get one until sometime in the next decade. MaryCatherine had used them before, so as soon as Dr. Sipes set her up with access privileges, she was able to get started.

 After a while, Mel somehow tracked her down and sat next toher without saying anything. Something about the darkness of the room made people hush.

 Mary Catherine used a trackball and a set of menus and controlwindows to open up a large color window on the screen. "They put his head in a magnet and baloney-sliced his brain," she said. "Come again?" Mel said. It was funny to see him non-plussed."Did a series of CAT scans. Had the computer integrate theminto a three-dimensional model of Dad's melon, which makes it a lot easier to visualize which parts of his brain got gorked out."

 A brain materialized in the window on the computer screen,three-dimensional, rendered in shades of gray. "Is this the way doctors talk?" Mel said, fascinated."Yes," Mary Catherine said, "when lawyers aren't around, that is. Let me change the palette; we can use a false-color scheme to highlight the bad parts," she said, whipping down another menu.

 The brain suddenly bloomed with color. Most of it was now in shades of red and pink, fading down toward white, but smallportions of it showed up blue. "When lawyers and family members are present," Mary Catherine said, "we say that the blue parts weredamaged by the stroke and have a slim chance of ever recovering their normal function.""And amongst medical colleagues?""We say that those parts of the brain are toast. Croaked. Kaput.

 Not coming back.""I see," Mel said."Been taking a stroll down memory lane," Mary Catherine said.

 "Check this out." She played with the menus for a moment and another window opened up, a huge one filling most of the black-and-white screen. It was a chest X-ray. "See that?" she said, tracinga crooked rib with her fingertip.

 "Bears-Packers, 1972," Mel said. "I remember when theycarried him off the field. I lost a thousand bucks on that fuckinggame."

 Mary Catherine laughed. "Serves you right," she said. She closedthe window with the chest X-ray. Then she used the trackball torotate the image of the brain back and forth in different ways toreveal selected areas. "This stroked area accounts for the paralysisand this small one here is responsible for his aphasia. In the old dayswe had to figure this stuff out just by talking to the patient andwatching the way he moved."

 "I detect from your tone of voice that you think this is allbasically superficial crap," Mel said.

 Mary Catherine just turned toward him and smiled a little bit.

 "I like video games too," Mel said, "but let's talk seriously for amoment here."

 "Dad's mixed dominant, which is good," Mary Catherine said.

 "Meaning?"

 "He does some things with his right hand and others with hisleft. Neither side of the brain predominates. People like thatrecover better from strokes."

 Mel raised his eyebrows. "That's good news."

 "Recovery from this kind of insult is extremely hard to predict. Most people hardly get better at all. Some recover quite well. We may see changes over the course of the next couple of weeks that will tell us which way he's going to go."

 "A couple of weeks," Mel said. He was clearly relieved to havea specific number, a time frame to deal with. "You got it."

 "Guess what?" Mel said to the Cozzanos the morning after thestroke. It was sixa.m. None of them had slept except for theGovernor, who was under the influence of various drugs. JamesCozzano had arrived shortly after midnight, driving his Miata infrom South Bend, Indiana, where he was a graduate student in thepolitical science department. He and Mary Catherine had spent the whole night sitting around in the Executive Mansion, which was nice, but not exactly home. Mary Catherine had tried to sleep inbed and been unable to. She had put on her clothes, sat down in achair to talk to James, and fallen dead asleep for four hours. Jamesjust watched TV. Mel had spent the same time elsewhere, on the telephone, waking people up.

 Now they were all together in the same room. The Governor'seyes were open, but he wasn't saying much. When he tried to talk,the wrong words came out, and he got angry."What?" Mary Catherine finally said.

 Mel looked William A. Cozzano in the eye. "You're running forpresident."

 Cozzano rolled his eyes. "You swebber putter," he said. Mary Catherine gave Mel a wary, knowing look, and waited foran explanation.

 James got flustered. "Are you crazy? This is no time for him tobe launching a campaign. Why haven't I heard about this?"

 His father was watching him out of the corner of his eye. "Don'tsquelch," he said, "it's a million fudd. Goddamn it!"

 "I spent the whole night putting together a campaign com­mittee," Mel said.

 "You lie," Cozzano said.

 "Okay," Mel admitted, "I put together a campaign committee along time ago, just in case you changed your mind and decided to run. All I did last night was wake them up and piss them off." "What's the scam here?" Mary Catherine said. Mel sucked his teeth and looked at Mary Catherine indulgently. "You know, 'scam' is just a Yiddishized pronunciation of'scheme'- a much nobler word meaning 'plan.' So let's not be invidious.Let's call it a plan instead."

 "Mel," Mary Catherine said, "what's the scam?"Cozzano and Mel looked soberly at each other and then crackedup.

 "If you turn on that TV in a couple of hours," Mel said, "youwill see the Governor's press secretary releasing a statement, which Iwrote on my laptop in the lobby of this hospital and faxed to himan hour ago. In a nutshell, what it says is this: in the light of theextremely serious and, in the Governor's view, irresponsible state­mentsmade by the President last night, the Governor has decidedto take another look at the idea of running for president - becauseclearly the country has gone adrift and needs new leadership. So hehas cleared his appointment calendar for the next two weeks and isgoing to closet himself in Tuscola, with his advisers, and formulatea plan to throw his hat into the ring."

 "So all the media will go to Tuscola," James said. "I would guess so," Mel said."But Dad's not in Tuscola."Mel shrugged as if this were a minor annoyance. "Sipes says he's transportable. We'll use the chopper. More private and presidentialas hell."

 Cozzano chuckled. "Good backing," he said. "We'll go to thebuckyball."

 "What's the point?" James said. He actually shouted it. Suddenly he had become upset. "Dad's had a stroke. Can't you see that? He'ssick. How long do you think you can hide it?""A couple of weeks," Mel said."Why bother?" James said. "Is there any reason for all thissubterfuge? Or are you just doing it for the thrill of playing thegame?"

 "People my age get their thrills by having good bowel move­ments, not by playing games," Mel said. "I'm doing it because wedon't yet know the full extent of the damage. We don't know how much Willy is going to recover in the next couple of weeks.""But sooner or later...""Sooner or later, we'll have to come out and say he's had astroke," Mel said, "and then the presidential bid is stillborn. But it'sbetter to have a nice little planned stroke at home, while trying tolead the country, than a big ugly surprising one while you'repicking your nose in the statehouse, don't you think?" "I don't know," James said, shrugging. "Is it?"

 Mel swiveled his head around to look directly at James. His face bore an expression of surprise. He was able to mask his emotionsbefore they developed into disappointment or contempt.

 Everyone had always assumed that James would one day developfrom a bright boy into a wise man, but it hadn't happened yet. Likemany sons of great and powerful men, he was still trapped in a larvalstage. If he hadn't been the son of the Governor, he probablywould have developed into one of those small-town letter-of-the­law types that Mel foundso tiresome.

 But he was the son of the Governor. Mel accepted that. Hedidn't say what was on his mind:James, don't be a sap.

 "James," Mary Catherine said, speaking so quietly that she couldbarely be heard across the room, "don't be a sap."

 James turned and gave Mary Catherine the helpless, angry look of a little brother who has just had his cowlick pulled by his bigsister.

 Mel and the Governor locked eyes across the bedspread.

 "Hut one!" Cozzano said.

 7

 GangadharV.R.J.V.V.Radhakrishnan, M.D.,Ph.D., had notcracked a skull in seventy-nine days and he was not happy about it. Even the shaven-headed thugs stamping out license plates ten milesdown the road at the New Mexico State Men's Reformatorywould get rusty without their daily quota of practice on the license-plate stamping machine. For a neurosurgeon, eleven weeks withoutpressing the madly vibrating blade of the bone saw against a freshlypeeled human skull was intolerable.

 In order to crack a skull he had to get to a decent hospital. Inorder to reach a decent hospital from here, he had to use the EltonState University airplane. But every time he needed it, the footballcoach had taken it out on a recruiting trip to L.A. or Houston. Thiswas in direct violation of Dr. Radhakrishnan's contract with EltonState, which stated that he would have access to the airplane asneeded.

 The only person who could help him was Dr. ArtaxerxesJackman, the president of Elton State University, and Jackman hadto be approached in the right way. Jackman had a Ph.D. ineducation and higher administration. It was almost criminal fraudto call him a doctor, but in the academic sense, a doctor he was. Dr.Radhakrishnan had not spent most of his life in his native India without figuring out that important positions are quite often filledby underserving swine, who must be deferred to in any case.

 His own father was a case in point. Forty years ago, about thetime Gangadhar had been born, Jagdish Radhakrishnan had been arising young idealist in the Nehru administration. That veryidealism had led to an appointment on the Railway CorruptionEnquiry Committee of 1953. Jagdish had carried out his respon­sibilities zealously, refusing to pull his punches even when itbecame evident that he was getting close to many a high-rankingofficial. He found himself summarily transferred to a low post in theSheet Mica Price Controller's organisation, where he had lan­ guished ever since, living only for the achievements of his two sons:Arun, the golden boy, the firstborn son,  now a member ofParliament, and to a lesser extent, Gangadhar.

 Gangadhar V.R.J.V.V. Radhakrishnan knew that the faculty ofElton State University was, in the academic world, roughlyequivalent to the Sheet Mica Price Controller's Organisation, and that if he ever wanted to get out of this place he would have showmore discretion - more savvy - less boneheaded idealism than hisfather had back in the 1950s. For half a year he had been trying,diplomatically and politely, to get in for a face-to-face with Dr.Jackman, but there meeting kept getting postponed.

 Before he even veered into the parking lot of the Cooverbiotechnology pavilion, blood balloons began to detonate on thewindshield of his full-sized, one-ton, six-wheel-drive Chevypickup truck. He kept driving even though he could no longer seethrough the windshield. If he was lucky, he might run over ananimal rights activist and then claim it was an accident. The truck was not in a mood to slow down; it was heavily laden with fifty-pound sacks of Purina Monkey Chow. He had just paid for themonkey chow himself, with his own money, down at the grainelevator - the closest thing there was to a skyscraper in Elton, awhite tubular obelisk sticking up above the railroad tracks on theedge of town. He had talked to the grinning windburned Nazis,given them his money, endured their snickering at his accent and their remarks about his heavy winter coat.

 "So what do you do with this stuff? Fry it up or just eat it cold?"one of them had said, as they were piling the monkey chow intohis truck.

 "I feed it to brain-damaged lower primates," Dr. Radhakrishnanhad said. "Would you like a sample?"

 The one thing they valued him for - that gave him potentialstatus as a human being in their eyes - was his monster truck: 454cubic inches of V-8 power, double wheels on the rear axle, a thickblack roll bar brandishing great mesh-covered Stalag 17 searchlightsthat could pick out a shrew on a rock in a midnight windstormacross two miles of chaparral. He had traded in a BMW for thiscoarse and ungainly machine halfway through his first winter here,almost two years ago, when he found out that the ultimate drivingmachine simply did not go in a six-foot snowdrift.

 The double-edged windshield wipers smeared blood across the windshield in gory arcs, giving him a partial view of the loadingdock. It wasn't real blood, of course. After the first few attacks, theyhad decided it was politically incorrect to use the real stuff and theyhad switched to Karo syrup with red dye in it. In the cold Februaryair, it congealed on contact. Dr. Radhakrishnan preferred the realblood; it was easier to wash off.

 A dozen of his grad students and lab techs were waiting for himaround back at the loading dock. Dr. Radhakrishnan pulled up to it and left the motor running. They jumped into the back like a commando team and formed a human chain, passing the fifty-pound sacks of monkey chow up across the dock and into thefreight elevator. Radhakrishnan had a total of fifteen grad students:four Japanese, two Chinese, three Korean, one Indonesian, threeIndian, one Pakistani, and one American. They had learned towork together well at times such as this, even the American.

 He pulled his empty truck around into the parking lot. Dr.Radhakrishnan had a reserved parking space near the entrance.Right now half a dozen activists were occupying it with theirbodies, staging a die-in. Most of them were just doing it in theirLevi's and Timberland's, but the star of the show was a person in agorilla suit with a big steel colander over his head with a pair of jumper cables clamped on to it. The gorilla spazzed out and diedgrandly as Dr. Radhakrishnan's blood-soaked four-by-four cruisedpast in low gear, a shattered balloon fluttering from the radioantenna, and parked in an unreserved spot farther from the door.

 They thought they were going to force Dr. Radhakrishnan tochange his ways by making him feel bad. They thought that theway to make him feel bad was to make him feel unliked. They weredesperately wrong on both counts.

 He shoved a magnetically coded ID card into a slot, punched ina secret code, and the door opened for him. This new facility hadbeen built securely, because they knew that the animal rightspeople would try to find a way in. They didn't have a chance; they were like raccoons trying to break into a missile silo.

 The top floor belonged to Radhakrishnan and his crew. He hadto punch in more numbers to get out of the elevator lobby. Thenhe smelled home. It had the sharp disinfectant smell of a doctor'soffice with a low undertone of barnyard.

 A baboon was sitting in a stainless steel chair in the Procedure Room, wrists and ankles loosely taped in place. The baboon was anesthetized and did not need to be restrained; otherwise, the tapewouldn't have held him. All it did was fix him in a convenientposition.

 The entire top of the baboon's skull had been removed to exposethe brain. Park and Toyoda were under the hood, as it were,working on the baboon's electrical system. Toyoda had his handsin there, maneuvering a narrow probe with a miniature video camera on the end of it. The output of the video camera wassplashed up on a big-screen Trinitron. Nearly inaudible high-pitched ticking and whistling sounds emerged from the headphones of his Walkman; he was listening to some particularly noxious form of American music.

 Park held a retractor with one hand and a mug of coffee in theother. Both of them ignored the baboon and kept their eyes on theTV set. It was providing live coverage of the interior spaces of thebaboon's brain: a murkey universe of gray mush with the occasionalbranching network of blood vessels.

 "A little bit left," Park suggested. The camera swung in thatdirection and suddenly there was something different, somethingwith hard, straight edges, embedded in the brain tissue. It did notseem to have been dropped into a hole, though; it seemed asthough the brain had grown around it, like a tree growing around a fence post. The object was a neutral, milky white, with a serialnumber stamped into the top. Any layman coming in off the streetwould have identified the substance as teflon. It was just translucentenough that one could make out, inside the teflon shell, a sort of squared-off sunburst pattern, like the rising sun flag of the ImperialJapanese Navy, etched in silver against a neutral gray background.At the center of that sunburst was a tiny square region thatcontained several hundred thousand microscopic transistors.

 But neither Park nor Toyoda nor Dr. Radhakrishnan looked atthat part of it. They were all looking at the interface - the boundarybetween the sharp edge of the teflon casing and the brain tissue,with its infinite, organic watershed system of capillaries. It looked good: no swelling, no necrosis, no gap between the baboon and themicrochip.

 "A keeper," Toyoda said, grinning, pronouncing this newlyacquired bit of American slang with great precision.

 "Bingo," Park said.

 "Which baboon is this?" Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

 "Number twenty-three," Toyoda said. "We implanted threeweeks ago."

 "How long has he been off the antirejection meds?"

 "One week."

 "Looks like he'll do well," Dr. Radhakrishnan said. "I supposewe should go ahead and give him a name."

 "Okay," Park said as he slurped uncertainly at his lukewarm java."What do you want to call him?"

 "Let's call him Mr. President," Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

 Two men were waiting for Dr. Radhakrishnan in front of his office.It was unusual, this early in the morning; Dr. Radhakrishnan'ssecretary wouldn't even be here for another half hour. One of themen was Dr. Artaxerxes Jackman, of all people, looking somewhat grumpy and astonished. The other man was a stranger, a man in hisforties with sandy blond hair. He was wearing the best suit that Dr.Radhakrishnan had ever seen west of the Mississippi, a charcoal-gray number with widely spaced stripes, sort of a City of London number.Both men stood up as Dr. Radhakrishnan entered the room.

 "Dr. Radhakrishnan," Jackman said, "no one was here so we justfigured we'd set up and wait for you. I want you to meet Mr.Salvador here."

 "Dr. Radhakrishnan, it's a pleasure and an honor," Salvador said,extending his hand. He wore no jewelry except for cufflinks; when he extended his arm, just the right amount of cuff - plain, basicwhite - protruded from the sleeve of his jacket. He did not go infor the crushing American style of handshake. His accident wasdefinitely not American either, but beyond that, it was as untrace­ableas a ransom note.

 "You are up bright and early," Dr. Radhakrishnan said, usheringMr. Salvador into his office. Jackman had already departed, slowlyand reluctantly, casting glances over his shoulder.

 "No earlier than you, Dr. Radhakrishnan, and certainly nobrighter," Mr. Salvador said. "Jet lag would not allow me to sleeplater and so I thought I would get an early start."

 Dr. Radhakrishnan handed him some coffee. Salvador held themug out in front of him for a moment, examining it like a freshlyexcavated amphora, as though he had never seen coffee served inanything other than a cup with a saucer. "Comanches," Salvadorpaid, reading the mug.

 "That is the name of the football team associated with this institution," Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

 "Ah, yes, football," Salvador said, his memory jogged. He was showing all the signs of a man who had just flown in from some other hemisphere and who was trying to get cued into the local culture. "That's right, this must be high football territory. The pilot told me that we are on mountain time here. Is that correct?" "Yes. Two hours behind New York, one ahead of L.A.""I didn't know that such a time zone existed until this morning.""Neither did I, until I came here."

 Salvador took a sip of coffee and sat forward, all business."Well, I would love to indulge my weakness for endless small talk, but it would be wrong to waste your time, and it is rude for me to sit here being mysterious. I understand that you are the world's best brain surgeon."

 "That is flattering but not exactly true. I could not even aspire tothat tide unless I devoted myself to doing procedures."

 "But instead you have chosen to devote your career to research."

 "Yes."

 "It is a common career choice among the very finest medical minds. There's more of a challenge in trying something new, isn't there?"

 "In general, yes."

 "Now, it is my understanding - and please correct me if I saysomething stupid - that you are developing a process to helppersons who have suffered brain damage."

 "Certain types of brain damage only," Dr. Radhakrishnan said,trying to be discouragingly cautious; but Mr. Salvador was not evenslightly deterred.

 "As I understand it you implant some kind of device in thedamaged part of the brain. It connects itself to the brain on one sideand to the nerves on the other, taking the place of damaged tissue."

 "That is correct."

 "Does it work with aphasia?"

 "Pardon me?"

 "A speech impediment - caused, say, by a stroke?"

 Dr. Radhakrishnan was badly thrown off stride. "I know whataphasia is," he said, "but we do our work on baboons. Baboonscan't talk."

 "Suppose they could?"

 "Speculatively, it would depend on the extent and the type ofthe damage."

 "Dr. Radhakrishnan, I would appreciate it very much if youwould listen to a tape for me," Salvador said, pulling a microcassetterecorder out of his pocket.

 "A tape of what?"

 "Of a friend of mine who recently became ill. He suffered astroke in his office. Now, as luck would have it, this took placewhile he was dictating a letter on a tape machine."

 "Mr. Salvador, excuse me, but what are you getting at here?" Dr.Radhakrishnan said.

 "Nothing really," Salvador said, good-humored and unruffled as ifthis were an entirely normal procedure.

 "Are you about to ask me for some kind of a medical opinion?""Yes."

 Radhakrishnan had a canned speech cued up, about how the doctor/patient relationship was extremely solemn and how he could not even dream of diagnosing a patient without hours of examination and the all-important paperwork. But something stopped him from saying it.

 It might have been Mr. Salvador's unpretentious and offhand manner. It might have been his personal elegance, his obvious status asa member of the upper class, which made it painful to bring up such banal issues. And it might have been the fact that he had been escorted here personally by Jackman,  who  would not have bothered to do so unless Mr. Salvador were very important.Mr. Salvador took Dr. Radhakrishnan's silence as permission. "The first voice you will hear will be that of my friend's secretary, whodiscovered him after the stroke." And he started the tape rolling. The sound quality was poor but the words were clearenough.

 "Willy? Willy, are you all right?" The secretary sounded hushed, almost awed.

 "Call." This command did not sound finished; the man wanted tosay, "Call someone," but he could not summon forth the name. "Call whom?"

 "Goddamn it,  call her!"  The man's voice was  deep,  hisenunciation flawless."Call whom?"

 "The three-alarm lamp scooter.""Mary Catherine?""Yes, goddamn it!"

 "That's all there is," Mr. Salvador said, switching off the machine.Dr. Radhakrishnan raised his eyebrows and took a deep breath."Well, based on this kind of evidence, it's difficult-"

 "Yes, yes, yes," Mr. Salvador said, now sounding a bit annoyed,"it's hard for you to speculate and you can't say anything on the record and all that. I understand your position, doctor. But Iattempting to engage you in a purely abstract discussion. Perhaps itwould have been better if we had met over dinner, rather than insuch a formal setting. We could arrange that, if it would help to getyou in the right frame of mind."

 Radhakrishnan felt miserably stupid. "That would be difficult toarrange in Elton," he said, "unless you are very fond of chili."

 Mr. Salvador laughed. It sounded forced. But it was nice to makethe effort.

 "Speaking very abstractly, then," Dr. Radhakrishnan said, "if thestroke hit his frontal lobes, he may very well have personalitychanges, which my therapy could not fix. If that part of his brainwas spared, then the cursing probably reflects frustration. Yourfriend, I would wager, is a successful and powerful man, and youimagine how such a man would feel if he could not even say simplesentences."

 "Yes, that puts it in a new light."

 "But I can't say much more than that without more data."

 "Understood." Then, offhandedly, as if asking for directions to the men's room, Salvador said: "Can you fix the aphasia, then? Assuming your off-the-cuff diagnosis is correct."

 "Mr. Salvador, I hardly know where to begin."

 Mr. Salvador took out a cigar, a mahogany baseball bat of a thing,and scalped it with a tiny pocket guillotine. "Begin at thebeginning," he suggested. "Care for a cigar?"

 "To begin with," Dr. Radhakrishnan said, accepting the cigar,"there are ethical questions that entirely rule our performing anexperimental procedure on a human subject. So far we've onlydone this on baboons."

 "Let us do a little thought experiment in which we set aside, forthe time being, the ethical dimension," Mr. Salvador said. "Thenwhat?"

 "Well, if a doctor were willing to do this, and the patient fully understood what he was getting into, we would first have to buildthe biochips. In order to do this we would have to take a biopsy afew weeks ahead of time, that is, take an actual sample of the patient's brain tissue, then genetically reengineer the nerve cells -in and of itself, hardly a trivial operation - and grow them in vitro until we had enough."

 "You do that here?"

 "We have an arrangement with a biotech firm in Seattle."

 "Which one, Cytech or Genomics?"

 "Genomics."

 "What is their role?"

 "They implant the desired chromosome and then culture the cells in vitro."

 "They grow them in a tank," Mr. Salvador translated.

 "Yes."

 "How long does that phase last?"

 "A couple of weeks usually. Cell culture is dodgy. Once we had gotten the cultured cells back from Seattle, we would fabricate the biochips."

 "How long does that take?" Mr. Salvador was obsessed with time.

 "A few days. Then we would proceed to the implantation."

 "The actual operation."

 "Yes."

 "Tell me about that."

 "We identify the dead portions of the brain and remove them cryosurgically. It's rather like a dentist drilling out a cavity, cutting away damaged material until he hits a sound part of the tooth."

 Mr. Salvador winced exquisitely.

 "When we do this on baboons, we do it in a specially con­structedoperating room here that is not sterile. It is not evenminimally fit for humans. So in order to do this operation on ahuman, it would be necessary to build a specially designedoperating theater from scratch. The operating room would prob­ablycost more than this entire building in which we are sitting."

 This last statement was intended to scare Mr. Salvador off, but it seemed only to bore him. "Have you ever got to the point ofdrawing up plans and specifications for such a facility?"

 "Yes, in a speculative way." Anyone who knew the first thingabout grantsmanship always had that kind of thing lying around, todemonstrate the need for far greater amounts of money.

 "May I take a copy with me?"

 "The plans are on disk. You'll need a fairly powerful Calyxsystem just to open them up."

 "Is that some sort of computer thing? Calyx?"

 "Yes. A parallel operating system."

 "It is something that one could buy?"

 "Yes, of course."

 "Who makes it?"

 "It's an open system. So there are many such machines on themarket - mostly aimed at engineers and scientists."

 "Who makes the best sort of Calyx machine?"

 "Well, it was invented by Kevin Tice, of course."

 Mr. Salvador smiled. "Ah, yes. Mr. Tice. Pacific Netware. MarinCountry. Superb. I shall see if Mr. Tice can supply us with a nicemachine that will run his Calyx operating system."

 Dr. Radhakrishnan assumed that Mr. Salvador was employing abit of synecdoche here. But he was not entirely sure. "If you do getaccess to a Calyx machine, with the proper CAD/CAM software,these disks will run on it."

 "Then I would be delighted to take a disk with me, with yourpermission," Mr. Salvador said. Without further discussing thatissue of permission, he continued, "Now, what happens after theoperation?"

 "Once the implantation had been performed, if the patient didnot die in the process, there would be a period of a few weeks inwhich we would keep him on antirejection meds and monitor himclosely in order to make sure that his body did not reject theimplant. Assuming it worked, he would then have to be retrained.The patient tries to move the paralyzed part of his body. If the movement is correct, then we instruct the chip to remember thepathway taken by the signals from the brain into the nerve. If it isincorrect, we instruct the chip to block that path. Gradually, the good paths get reinforced and the bad ones get blocked."

 "How do you instruct the chip? How do you give it feed-back, asit were, once it is implanted inside the patient's head?"

 "It includes a miniaturized radio receiver. We have a transmitterthat simply broadcasts the instructions directly into the patient'sskull."

 "Fascinating. Utterly fascinating," Mr. Salvador said, sincerely enough. "And what is the range of this transmission?"

 "I'm sorry?"

 "Well, how far away from the transmitter can the patient be?"

 Dr. Radhakrishnan smiled the same smile he had used withJackman. "You misconstrue me," he said. "We do not use radiotransmission because we need to talk to the patient's biochip froma distance. We use it because this enables us to communicate withthe biochip without using an actual wire through the skull into thebrain.

 "I see, of course," Mr. Salvador said dismissively. "But radio is radio, isn't it?"

 Dr. Radhakrishnan smiled and nodded. He could not find any way to disagree with the statement "radio is radio."

 8

 Aaron Green faked it for a whole week, throwing hisIMIPREM into the trunk of his rented Dynasty every day andhawking his wares up and down the length of Wilshire Boulevard.Then he got up one morning, rummaged through his briefcase,emptied out the pocket where he stuffed people's business cards,and pulled one out. Plain black ink on white paper: CY OGLE -President - Ogle Data Research, Inc.

 Ogle was the guy. The man who had taken one quick look at hisIMIPREM, in the least auspicious circumstances, and recognizedits value. A guy as smart as Ogle didn't need any sales pitch. Nofancy presentations.

 Aaron had known ever since their conversation on the plane thathe would eventually make this phone call. But he had forcedhimself to stick to the original plan for a week anyway.

 Enough of that. The card listed offices in Falls Church, Virginia,and Oakland, California. Hardly auspicious. Aaron dialed thenumber in Oakland, steeling himself for a lengthy round oftelephone tag.

 "Hello?" a man's voice said.

 "Hello?" Aaron said, caught off guard. He had been expecting asecretary.

 "Who's this?"

 "Excuse me," Aaron said, "I was trying to reach-"

 "Mr. Green!" the man said, and Aaron recognized him as CyOgle himself. "How are you doing down there in Holl-ee-wood?Are you having a fabulous time?"

 Aaron laughed. He had assumed, on the plane, that Ogle musthave been drunk. But now he sounded the same. Either Ogle was drunk all the time, or never.

 "I don't think I'll be putting my handprints in cement anytime soon."

 "Had many interesting conversations with those big media moguls?"Aaron decided to test Cy Ogle. "They're all teflon golems."

 "And all of your scientific arguments just slide right off their high-tech, nonstick surface," Ogle said without skipping a beat.

 'What's going on?" Aaron asked. "You answering your owntelephone now?"

 "Yup."

 "It's just that I figured, being president of your own company and all, you'd have a secretary or something.""I do," Ogle said. "But she's a real good secretary, so I'm not going to waste her time having her answer the phone.

 "Well," Aaron said, "I don't want to wasteyour time. You mustbe busy."

 "I'm busy pushing on the gas pedal and keeping this old gas-guzzler between the white lines," Ogle said.

 "Oh. You're driving?"

 "Yeah. Going to Sacramento to sell the Governor a bill of goods."

 "Oh. Well as long as you and I were on the same coast-"

 "You thought we should get together about your IMIPREM."

 "Exactly," Aaron said. He was pleased that Ogle still remem­beredthe acronym.

 "Let me ask you one question," Ogle said. "Could you make itsmall?"

 "The IMIPREM? What do you mean?"

 "It's big now. Bigger than a breadbox, as we used to say. Got abig old power supply built into it, I would guess. Is there any intrinsic reason you couldn't miniaturize it? Make it portable? Say, Walkman sized, or even smaller, like wristwatch sized?"

 "It would be a major project-"

 "Stop trying to be a business executive," Ogle said. "I don't wantyour opinion of this from a major project point of view. I want youto do what you do best. Now, a V-8 engine can't be small; it won't work. But a calculator can be small. Is the IMIPREM a V-8 engine or a calculator?"

 "A calculator."

 "Done. Now stop worrying about all this business shit. Go toDisneyland."

 "Huh?"

 "Or the Universal Studios tour. Or something. I won't be back until tonight."

 "Okay."

 "This afternoon, before traffic gets screwed up, go to LAX andtake a shuttle up to San Francisco and a car will meet you. Bringeverything."

 "Gotcha."

 "We got a new project underway, since I last talked to you, thatyou are going to just love," Cy Ogle said. "You are just going tolove it."

 Then Ogle hung up the phone.

 Aaron considered showing up in the full set of Mickey Mouse ears,just to prove that he had in fact gone to Disneyland. But he decidedat the last minute that this would be just a little bit too off-the-wall.So he opted for a simple, oversized, 100 percent cotton Goofy T- shirt. A T-shirt was more conservative than a set of ears, and Aaronhad a feeling that Cyrus Rutherford Ogle would relate better,somehow, to Goofy.

 When he came off the plane in San Francisco, a man wasstanding by the gate holding a hand-lettered sign that said A.GREEN. The driver seemed to read everything in his face, andventured into the torrent of deplaning businessmen to take Aaron's IMIPREM case out of his hand before Aaron had even identifiedhimself.

 The driver was named Mike. He wasn't a uniformed chauffeur or anything like that, just a normal-looking black kid of eighteenor twenty, wearing a black T-shirt. Quiet, courteous, and efficient.

 After a brief wait by the baggage carousel, Mike led him out to anavy-blue Ford Taurus with an oversized engine and lots ofantennas (innocuous but powerful; correct but not ostentatious;comfortable but not decadent) and drove him up the freeway to theBay Bridge and across to Oakland, surging from lane to lane(decisive but not reckless). They exited shortly after getting intoOakland and then cruised down into a semirenovated downtownarea and from there into a not-so-renovated area on the fringe ofthe waterfront warehouse district.

 A number of the buildings down here were well on their way to being trashed, but as usual in California, there were a few nice ones that stood out, not so much because they'd been perfectly main­tained, but because they had been well-designed to begin with.

 One of the best was a big old Art Deco Cadillac dealership, a glass-walled flatiron of a building set in the angle of two diverging avenues. The ground floor was huge and wide open, with ceilingsthat looked some twenty-five feet high, completely wrapped intinted glass. That was the showroom; behind it, farther back intothe block, was garage space. Above this ground floor were four orfive additional floors of office space. On top of the building, the word CADILLAC was written large in orange neon script,looming over the intersection in letters that must have stood twentyfeet high. Beneath that, mounted high on the prow of the building, was a big clock, a full story high, its numbers and hands outlined in more neon. The neon worked but the clock didn't.

 Most of the big windows were in surprisingly good shape. A fewof them had fist-sized holes in them, backed up with sheets ofplywood, and the wide, double glass doors that had once beckonedwould-be Cadillac buyers into the dealership had been rebuilt inplywood and painted black. The upper floors of the buildinglooked empty. A few yellowed windowshades hung askew. Itwasn't until Mike pulled the Taurus up in front of the blackplywood doors, and Aaron saw the street number spray-paintedacross them in orange, that he realized this address matched the one printed on Cy Ogle's business card.

 Once Aaron entered the showroom, his eyes adjusted wellenough to see that it was mostly empty. No desks, no Cadillacs. Hepulled the door shut behind him and latched it using a big, old-fashioned hook and eye.

 The formerly high-gloss floor of the showroom was covered,patchily, with swaths of bleak off-brown indoor-outdoor carpeting, and the occasional half-unrolled length of battered and scarred grayfoam rubber. A gridwork of black iron pipes hung down below theceiling, and a few dozen theatrical spotlights were clamped on tothe pipes here and there.

 Other light fixtures were affixed to tall,  telescoping polesmounted on tripods. The tops of these devices had big whiteumbrellas on them to serve as reflectors; the effect was that of asparse field of gigantic sunflowers. Heavy black electrical cables,bundled together with gray tape, snaked all over the floor.

 It was a stage. And the stage had props, scattered around irration­ally: a couple of heavy, impressive wooden desks. Plastic plants.Several bookshelves loaded with books. But as Aaron found whenhe looked at one of these, it was fake. There were no books on theshelves. What looked like a line of books seen on edge was a hollowplastic shell. The entire bookshelf weighed all of about twentypounds.

 There were some muffled clunking noises, and some lights cameon at one end of the room. Aaron could only see about half of theshowroom floor from here, the rest of it had been blocked off byflimsy partitions.

 Finally he made out the streamlined pear shape of CyrusRutherford Ogle, standing next to a gray steel circuit-breaker box bolted to the wall, clunking lights on and off.

 "Goofy," Ogle said, "my favourite."

 "Oh. If I'd know, I would have brought you a souvenir."

 "I get a souvenir every time I meet with one of my clients, hawhaw haw," Ogle said. "Come on back, my offices are back here,such as they are."

 "Interesting building," Aaron said.

 "We figured we'd leave the big CADILLAC up on the roof." Ogle said, "to attract Republicans."

 Aaron walked toward the back of the showroom, picking his way over cables and rolls of carpet padding.

 "You might wonder why a man who has been described as a cross between Machiavelli and Zeffirelli would hang out in Oakland. Why not Sacramento, where the politicians are, or L.A., where all the media scum hang out?"

 "The question had crossed my mind," Aaron said.

 "It's a tug of war. Closer I am to Sacramento, the better it is for the politicians. Closer I am to L.A., the better it is for the creative talent."

 "You're close to Sacramento. So I guess the politicians win."

 "They do not win, but they predominate. See, media people have no scruples. They will go anywhere. Politicians have no scruples either. But they like to act as though they do. And it is beneath their sense of artificial dignity to go all the way to L.A. because they still think that I am just a huckster and it makes them think that they are groveling to the false gods."

 Ogle turned his back on Aaron and led him through a maze ofpartitions.

 "So why not set yourself up in Sacramento, if media people willanywhere?" Aaron said, strolling after him, looking around.

 "Media people will go anywhere, but I won't. I won't go to Sacramento because it is a dried-up shithole. And San Fran is too damn expensive. So here I am, the best place I could ever be."

 They were approaching some kind of an elaborate construction, aroom within a room. It was a three-dimensional webwork of two-by-fours surrounding and supporting a curved wall. An old-fashioned, lath-and-plaster wall.

 One side of the construct had been slid away so that Aaron could seeinside. The room as a whole was elliptical in shape, now split open like a cracked egg.

 Ogle noticed his curiosity and gestured at it. "Go on in," he said, "Nicest room in this whole place."

 Aaron sidestepped the unadorned beams of the wooden framing and passed through the gap into the oval room.

 There was a nice desk in here. It was an office. An oval office.It wasthe Oval Office.

 Aaron had seen the real Oval Office in the White House oncewhen his high-school band went to Washington, D.C. And thiswas the same. If the two halves were slid back together, it wouldbe an exact replica.

 "It's perfect," he whispered.

 "On TV it's perfect," Ogle said, ambling into the room. "Onfilm, it's just pretty good. Good enough for the yokels, anyway."

 "Why would you need something like this?"

 Ogle tapped the big leather swivel chair with the palm of hishand, spinning it around toward him, and fell into it. He leaned the seat back and put his feet up on the presidential desk. "Ever hear ofthe Rose Garden strategy?"

 "Yeah, vaguely."

 "Well, the White House is a busy place, what with all of those tour groups traipsing in and out, and as I said, most of the mediatypes are here in Cal. Sometimes it's more convenient to pursue theRose Garden strategy right here in Oakland."

 "I didn't know you operated at that level," Aaron said. "I didn'tknow you worked for presidential candidates."

 "Son," Ogle said, "I work foremperors."

 "In the 1700s, politics was all about ideas. But Jefferson came upwith all the good ideas. In the 1800s, it was all about character. Butno one will ever have as much character as Lincoln and Lee. Formuch of the 1900s it was about charisma. But we no longer trustcharisma because Hitler used it to kill Jews and JFK used it to getlaid and send us to Vietnam."

 Ogle had broken a six-pack out of a junky old refrigeratorbehind the "Oval Office" and set up the cans on the presidentialdesk. Aaron had pulled up another chair and now both of them hadtheir feet up on the desk and beers in their hands.

 "So what's it about now?" Aaron said.

 "Scrutiny. We are in the Age of Scrutiny. A public figure must withstand the scrutiny of the media," Ogle said. "The President isthe ultimate public figure and must stand up under ultimatescrutiny; he is like a man stretched out on a rack in the public square in some medieval shithole of a town, undergoing the rigors ofthe Inquisition. Like the medieval trial by ordeal, the Age of Scrutiny sneers at rational inquiry and debate, and presumes that mere oaths and protestations are deceptions and lies. The only way to discover the real truth is by the rite of the ordeal, which exposes thesubject to such inhuman strain that any defect in his character willcause him to crack wide open, like a flawed diamond. It is a mystical procedure that skirts rationality, which is seen as the work ofthe Devil, instead of drawing down a higher, ineffable power. Like the Roman haruspex who foretold the outcome of a battle, not by analyzing the strengths of the opposing forces but by groping through the steaming guts of a slaughtered ram, we seek to establish acandidate's fitness for office by pinning him under the lights of a television studio and counting the number of times he blinks his eyes in a minute, deconstructing his use of eye contact, monitoring his gesticulations - whether his hands are held open or closed, toward or away from the camera, spread open forthcomingly or clenched like grasping claws.

 "I paint a depressing picture here. But we, you and I, are like the literate monks who  nurtured the flickering flame  of Greek rationality through the Dark Ages, remaining underground, know-ingeach other by secret signs and code words, meeting in cellars and thickets to exchange our dangerous and subversive ideas. We donot have the strength to change the minds of the illiterate multitude. But we do have the wit to exploit their foolishness, to familiarize ourselves with their stunted thought patterns, and to use that knowledge to manipulate them toward the goals that we all know are, quote, right and true, unquote. Have you ever been onTV, Aaron?""Just incidentally."

 "How did you think that you looked?"

 "Not very good. Actually I was kind of shocked by how strange I looked."

 "Your eyes looked as if they were bulging out of your head, did they not?"

 "Exactly. How did you know that?""The gamma curve of a video camera determines its response tolight," Cy Ogle said. "If the curve were straight, then dim thingswould look dim and bright things bright, just as they do in reality,and as they do, more or less, on any decent film stock. But becausethe gamma curve is not a straight line, dim things tend to lookmuddy and black, while bright things tend to glare and overload; the only things that look halfway proper are in the middle. Now,you have dark eyes, and they are deeply set in your skull, so thatthey tend to be in shadow. By contrast, the whites of your eyes areintensely bright. If you knew what I know, you would keep themfixed straight ahead in their sockets when you were on television, exposing as little of the white as possible. But because you are notversed in this subject, you swivel your eyes around as you look atdifferent things, and when you do, the white part predominates andit jumps out of the screen because of the gamma curve; your eyeslook like bulging white globes set in a muddy dark background." "Is this the kind of thing that you teach to politicians?""Just a sample," Ogle said."Gee, it's really a shame that-""That our political system revolves around such trivial matters.Aaron, please do not waste my time and yours by voicing theobvious.""Sorry."

 "That's how it is, and how it will be until high-definitiontelevision becomes the norm.""Then what will happen?"

 "All of the politicians currently in power will be voted out ofoffice and we will have a completely new power structure. Becausehigh-definition television has a flat gamma curve and higherresolution, and people who look good on today's television willlook bad on HDTV and voters will respond accordingly. Theiroversized pores will be visible, the red veins in their noses fromdrinking too much, the artificiality of their TV-friendly hairdos willmake them all look, on HDTV, like country-and-western singers.A new generation of politicians will take over and they will all looklike movie stars, because HDTV will be a great deal like film, and movie stars know how to look good on film."

 "Does any of this relate to me, or are we just speaking in the abstract here?" Aaron said.

 Cy Ogle rotated his beer back and forth between the palms of his hands, as if attempting to start a fire on the tabletop.

 "A human being cannot withstand the scrutiny given to apresidential candidate, any more than a human being could survive the medieval trial by fire, in which he was forced to walk barefoot across hot coals."

 "But people did survive those trials, didn't they?" "Ever taken a fire-walking course?""No. But I've heard they exist."

 "Anyone can walk barefoot across hot coals. But you have to do itright. There's a trick to it. If you know the trick, you can survive. Now, back in medieval times, some people got lucky and happened tostumble across this trick, and they made it. The rest failed. It was therefore an essentially random process, hence irrational. But if they had had fire-walking seminars in the Dark Ages, anyone could have done it.

 "The same thing used to apply to the modern trial by ordeal. Abe Lincoln would never have been elected to anything, because random genetic chance gave him a user-unfriendly face. But as a rational person I can learn all of the little tricks and teach them to my friends, eliminating the random, hence irrational elements from the modern trial by ordeal. I have the knowledge to guide apresidential candidate through his trial in this, the Age of Scrutiny.""What kinds of tricks?"

 Ogle shrugged. "Some are very simple. Don't wear herringbone patterns on TV because they will create a moire pattern. But some ofthem are - and I do not use this term in a pejorative sense - fiendish. That's where you come in."

 "I gather you want to use the IMIPREM to monitor people's reactions to political debates, or something."

 "Don't ever say IMIPREM again. I hate the word," Ogle said. "It's a clumsy high-tech name. It's the worst trade name everinvented. Right now, your device is going to get subsumed into alarger group of technologies. It is going to become one veryimportant element in a large and extremely complicatedtechnological system. The name for that system is PIPER. Whichstands for poll instantaneous processing, evaluation, and response."

 "You asked me if I could make it small enough to be portable,"Aaron said.

 "That I did."

 "You want to have your poll subjects carry these things aroundwith them. You want to monitor their reactions to the campaignin real time. That'spoll instantaneous processing evaluation. Andevaluation must mean that you're going to feed all the data into yourcomputers so that you can analyze and evaluate the incoming dataas fast as it arrives."

 "You are very perceptive," Ogle said.

 "How aboutresponse?"

 "How about it?"

 "I understand the instantaneous processing and evaluation. Buthow can yourespond to a poll instantaneously?"

 "As I said," Ogle said, "your device will be only a small part ofa large system."

 "I understand that. But I'm asking-"

 "Similarly, you, Aaron, will be only a small part of a largeorganization. Not the leading man anymore. A small price to payfor financial security, wouldn't you agree?"

 "Yes, I'm just wondering-"

 "One of your responsibilities, as a part of this large team, will beto use your head a little bit and not try to delve into matters that areremote from your own little sphere. You can't understandeverything."

 "Oh."

 "Only I, Cyrus Rutherford Ogle, can understand everything."

 "I was just asking out of pure curiosity."

 "What it this the Age of, Aaron?"

 "Scrutiny."

 "Guess what is going to happen to you and your company whenyou become part of the PIPER project?"

 "We will get scrutinized."

 "Guess what is going to happen, then, if you insist on asking infelicitous questions, out of pure curiosity?"

 "I will get roasted alive on hot coals."

 "Along with me and everyone else involved in PIPER, including my clients."

 "Say no more, I will be discreet."

 "Good."

 "I'm just trying to figure out what my responsibilities will be in PIPER."

 "To work with our chip people and miniaturize your device. I have already made an appointment with some clever fellows at Pacific Netware, up in Marin County. We will go up there tomorrow and meet with them, like medieval monks gathering in aremote orchard, and we will build high the flame of, quote, rationality, unquote."

 9

 Tuscola in late morning was silent except for the whistles ofhundred-car freight trains thundering north-south along the IllinoisCentral or east-west on the B&O, and the occasional distantblatting noise of a truck downshifting on the highway. Cold wintersunlight was  slanting in through  the beveled-glass windowssurrounding the front door, forming a spray of little rainbows onthe aging shag carpet that covered the living room floor. Cozzanoshad always placed a premium on warmth over exquisite taste andso they had shag carpet. William A. Cozzano had known for a longtime that there was good oak flooring under there and had beenresolving, for the last twenty years, to peel up the carpet and sandit and refinish it. It was one of those things that would wait until hisretirement.

 But he wouldn't be able to do it now. There was no way hecould handle a big floor sander. He would have to pay someone todo the work for him. He had always done his own work on his ownhouse, even when it meant waiting until he had a free weekend.

 The street was made of red brick. So was the sidewalk. Thebricks were heaved up from place to place by the roots of the bigoak trees in the front yard. In other spots they were graduallysinking into the lawn. Kids from the afternoon kindergarten classwere ambling down the sidewalk on their way to the EverettDirksen Elementary School two blocks away, which had beenretrofitted into a former hospital. They took no notice of the house.Older kids, who could read the words THE CozzanoS on thelittle sign hanging on the lamppost in the front yard, always staredand pointed, but the kindergartners didn't. Cozzano recognized agrandnephew twice removed and tried to wave, but his arm didn't work.

 "Goddamn it," he said.

 When he moved his tongue, a wave of drool crested over his lower lip and ran out the left side of his mouth. He felt it running ina thin stream down on to his chin.

 Patricia came back into the room, of course, just in time to get a good look at this. She was a local girl, former babysitter to James and Mary Catherine, had worked in Peoria as a nurse for some years, and was now back home in Tuscola, working as a babysitteragain. This time for William. Before the stroke, she had treated William Cozzano with awe and deference.

 "Whoops, did we have a little accident there?" she said. "Let's just wipe that right up." She took a diaper out of her pocket and ranit up Cozzano's chin, a brisk uppercut. "Now, here's your coffee - decaf, of course, and pills. Lots of little pills."

 "What are those pickles?" Cozzano said.

 "I'm sorry, William, what did you say?"

 He pointed to the little plastic cup that Patricia had set down next to him, filled with colourful circles and oblongs.

 Patricia heaved a big sigh, letting him know that she'd rather he didn't ask such questions. "Blood pressure, anticlotting, heart stimulation, elimination, breathing, and then of course some vitamins."

 Cozzano closed his eyes and shook his head. Until two weeks agohe had never taken anything other than vitamin C and aspirin.

 "I put some skim milk in your coffee," Patricia said.

 "I take it purple," Cozzano said.

 Patricia beamed. "You mean you take it black?"

 "Yes, goddamn it."

 "It's just a little hot, William, so I wanted to cool it down a bit soyou wouldn't burn your mouth when you took your medicine."

 "Don't call me that. I'm the coach," Cozzano said. Then heclosed his eyes and shook his head in frustration.

 "Of course you are, William," she said in a buttery voice, and putthe little cup of pills into his right hand. "Now, down the hatch!"

 Cozzano did not want to take the pills, merely because he didnot want to give Patricia satisfaction in any way. But at some levelhe knew that was puerile. So he tossed the pills into his mouth.Patricia took the cup from his hand and gave him the coffee, whichwas tepid and beige. Cozzano had gotten in the habit of drinkingblack full-roast coffee, and the only kind available around here wasthe sour greenish grocery-store variety. He lifted the mug to his lipsand forced down a couple of big, awful swallows, feeling the pillscrowd together in his throat and stick halfway down his esophagus.He would rather leave them stuck there than drink any more of thatsmall-town coffee.

 "Very good!" Patricia said, "I can see you have a knack for this."Cozzano was accustomed to being a superman and now he wasbeing praised by a Big Hair Girl for his ability to take pills."Would you like to watch a little TV?" Patricia said. "Yes," he said. Anything to get her out of the room."What channel?"Why didn't she just give him the remote control? Cozzanoheaved a big sigh. He wanted to watch channel 10, CNBC. In hiscondition, one of the few things Cozzano could do was manage thefamily's investments. And in the economic chaos that had beenunleashed by the President's State of the Union address, theyneeded a lot of management.

 "Five million," he said. "No, goddamn it!""Well, sometimes it seems like this cable TV has about fivemillion channels, but I don't think I can do that!" Patricia said in ahigh, inflated tone, her I'm-making-a-joke voice. "Did you meanto say channel five?"

 "No!" he said. "Twice that.""Two?"

 "No! Three squared plus one. Six plus four. The square root ofone hundred," he said. Why didn't she just give him the remotecontrol?

 "Oh, here's a news program. How's that?" Patricia said. She hadhit one of the network stations. It was a little one-minute news break at the top of the hour, between soap operas.

 "Yes," he said.

 "Here's the remote control in case you change your mind," sheaid, and left it on the table next to him.

 Cozzano sat and watched the little news break. It was totally inconsequential: presidential candidates cavorting around Iowa in a series of staged media events. The caucuses were in a week and a half.

 Cozzano could have won the caucuses without lifting a finger.People in Iowa loved him, they knew he was a small-town boy. Anyone who lived in the eastern part of that state saw him on TV all the time. All he had to do was pick up a phone and get nominated. Looking at the candidates on TV, he was tempted to dojust that and put an end to all of this nonsense.

 Senators and governors were out in the snow, picking up baby livestock, milking cows, standing in schoolyards wrapped up in heavy overcoats, tossing footballs to red-faced blond kids. Cozzano chortled as he watched Norman Fowler, Jr., billionaire high-tech twit,walking across the hard-frozen stubble of a cornfield in eight-hundred-dollar shoes. The wind chill was thirty below zero andthese guys were standing out on the prairie without hats. That said everything about their fitness to be president.

 Cozzano's family had always told him he ought to run forpresident one day. It sounded like a nice idea, bandied across adinner table after a couple of glasses of wine. In practice it would beugly and hellish. Knowing this, he had never seriously con­sideredthe idea. He had known for some time that Mel had quietly organized a shadow campaign committee and laid the groundwork.That was Mel's job, as a lawyer, he was supposed to anticipate things.

 Of course, now that Cozzano had had a stroke and couldn't run, he wanted to be President worse than anything. He could make a phone call and a few hours later a chartered campaign plane wouldbe waiting for him at the airport in Champaign, and suddenlyliterature and campaign videos would be piled up in heaps all over the United States. Mel could make it happen. And then Patricia would wheel him up on to the plane, drooling for the cameras.

 This was the hardest phase of recovering from the stroke.Cozzano had not yet readjusted his expectations of life. When hishigh expectations collided with reality, it hurt like hell.

 The news break metamorphosed into a commercial for cold medicine. Then the anchor person came back on to tell America when the next news break would be. And then a new program started up:Candid Video Blind Date.

 Cozzano was so disgusted that he could not change the channelfast enough. It was as if this tawdry program would cause himphysical damage if he watched it for more than ten seconds.

 The remote control was on the table to his right, on the goodside of his body. He reached over for it, but she had put it a littletoo far back on the table; the heel of his hand could touch it but hisfingers couldn't. He tried to screw his arm around into a kind ofself-induced hammerlock, but in his disgust he was doing it sohastily that he just ended up knocking it farther back on the table.It shot backward, flew off the table, and buried itself in the shagcarpet. Now it was stuck between the table and a bin full of oldnewspapers: a two-week accumulation of theTrib, The New York Times, andThe Wall Street Journal, none of which he would everread.

 He couldn't reach the damn thing. He would have to ask Patriciafor help.

 On the screen, the hysterical applause of the crowd had subsidedand the host was warming them up with a few jokes. The humor was crudely sexual, the kind of thing that would embarrass even a ninthgrade boy, but the crowd was eating it up: in a series of reaction shots,Big Hair Girls and fat middle-aged women and California surfer types jackknifed in their seats, mouths gaping in narcotic glee. The game show host grinned devilishly into the camera.

 "Goddamn it!" Cozzano said.

 Patricia was washing some dishes in the kitchen and had the water going full blast, she couldn't hear him.

 He didn't want Patricia to hear him. He didn't want to begPatricia to come into the room and change the channel on the TVfor him. He couldn't stand it.

 He couldn't stand this TV program either. William A. Cozzano waswatchingCandid Video Blind Date. Across town, John and Guiseppe and Guillermo were turning over in their graves.All of a sudden tears came to his eyes. It happened without warning. He hadn't cried since the stroke. Suddenly he was sobbing, tears running down his face and dripping from his jaw on tohis blanket. He hoped to God that Patricia didn't come in.He had to stop crying. This wouldn't do. This was too pathetic, Cozzanotook a few deep breaths and got it under control. For some reason, the most important thing in the world to him was that Patricia not find out that he had been crying.Sitting there in his wheelchair, trying not to look at the television set, Cozzano let his eye wander around the room, trying toconcentrate on something else.

 In the far end of the living room, a pair of heavy sliding doors led into a small den. Cozzano had never used it for much. It had a small rol1-top desk where he balanced his checkbook. A beautiful antique guncase stood against one wall. Like all of the other furniture in Cozzano 's house it had been made out of hardwood by people who knew what they were doing back in the nineteenth century. There wasmore solid wood in one piece of this furniture than you would find in a whole house nowadays. The top half of the gun case was a cabinet for long weapons, closed off by a pair of beveled-glass doors with a heavy brass lock. A skeleton key projected from, the keyhole. Cozzano had half a dozen shotguns and two rifles in there: allof his father's and grandfather's guns, plus a few that he had picked up during his life. There was a pump shotgun that he had used in Vietnam, an ugly, cheap, scarred monstrosity that spoke volumes about the nature of that war. Cozzano kept it in there as a reality check. It made a nice contrast between the fancy guns, the ornate collector's items that various rich and important sycophants hadgiven him.

 Above and below the long weapons, a few handguns hung on pegs. The bottom half of the gun cabinet consisted entirely of small drawers with ornately carved fronts where he kept his ammunition, oil,rags, and other ballistic miscellanea.

 Sitting in the next room in his wheelchair, Cozzano tried a littleexperiment. He reached up into the air with his right hand, seeinghow high he could get. He was pretty sure that he could reach highenough to turn the skeleton key on the gun cabinet doors. And ifnot, he could always haul himself up out of his wheelchair for a fewmoments and carry all his weight on his right leg. The cabinet wasmassive and stable and he could probably use it to pull himself up.So he could probably get the doors open. He could pull out oneof the guns. It would probably make the most sense to use one ofthe handguns, because the long weapons were all enormous andheavy and would be awkward to maneuver with only one hand.The .357 Magnum. That was the one to use. He knew he hadammunition for it, stored in the upper right-hand drawer, easy toreach. He would pull the pin that held the cylinder in place and letit fall open into his hand. Then he would drop it into his lap, lettingit rest on the blanket between his thighs. He would grope in thedrawer and pull out a handful of rounds. He would insert a few ofthese into the cylinder - one would suffice - and then snap it backinto place. He would rotate the cylinder into position to make surethat one of the loaded chambers was next up.

 Then what? Given the power of the weapon, it was likely that the bullet would come flying out the far side of his head and hitsomething else. There was an elementary school nearby and hecould not take any chances.

 The answer was right there: across the den, opposite to the guncase, was a heavy oak bookcase.

 Cozzano couldn't see it from here. He reached down and hit thejoystick attached to the right arm of his wheelchair. A whiningnoise came out of the little electric motor and he began to moveforward. Cozzano had to do a little bit of back-and-forth to gethimself free of the living room furniture, then he swung aroundback of the sofa and into the den. He spun the wheelchair aroundin the middle of the den and backed himself up to the wall next tothe bookcase.

 It was perfect. The bullet would emerge from his head, hit theside of the bookcase, and if it penetrated that inch of hardwood,would go right into the back cover of the first volume in a commemorative edition of the complete works of Mark Twain. No bullet in the world could make it all the way through Mark Twain.

 So freedom was within reach. Now he just had to think it though.

 Suicide would void his life insurance policies. That was a minus. But that didn't matter so much; his wife was already dead and the his kids could support themselves. In fact, his kids didn't need to work, they had trust funds.

 His body would be discovered by Patricia. That was a plus. He would not want to put a family member through that kind of trauma.It was a good bet that his brains would be splattered all over theroom. Patricia was a medical professional who would be psychologically equipped to handle this, and Cozzano felt that theexperience would be good for her. It might make her into a littleless of a sugary lightweight.

 He wondered if he ought to leave some kind of a note. His rolltop desk was right there. He decided against it. It would look pathetic, written with his wrong hand. Better for him to be remembered for what he had done before his stroke. For anyone whoknew him,Candid Video Blind Date running on his TV set was suicide note enough.

 Besides, Patricia might come in and discover him writing it. Then, he knew, they would take away the guns and anything else that he might use to hurt himself. They would shoot him full of drugs and mess with his brain.

 And maybe they would be right. Maybe suicide was a stupid idea, Ofcourse it wasn't a stupid idea. Suicide was a noble thing when done in the right circumstances. It was the act of a warrior, Cozzanowas about to fall on his sword to spare himself further humiliation.

 And now was the best time to do it. Before his spirit was broken bythe drool on his chin and by the numbing onslaught of daytime television, before his feeble new image was discovered by the media harpies and broadcast to the world.

 The doctors had said that as time went on, he might haveadditional strokes. This meant he might become even morepathetic, incapable of taking his own life.

 Cozzano had never been sick. Cozzano had always known thatbarring the odd drunk driver or tornado, he was going to live untilhe was in his eighties.

 Decades. Decades of this hell. Of watchingCandid Video BlindDate.Of looking at that horrendous shag carpet and wishing he wasman enough to handle a big floor sander. It was unimaginable. Cozzano hit the joystick and rolled across the room to the guncabinet.

 There was a sharp rapping noise. Someone was knocking on thewindow.

 Cozzano turned the wheelchair halfway around and looked. Itwas Mel Meyer, standing out on the porch, waving to him.

 10

 Mel Meyer saw some boys on the shoulder of the interstatechecking the tie-downs on a flatbed truck carrying a piece of farm machinery. He pulled into the left lane to give them a safe berth, and as he shot past them he realized that the boys were about sixty and forty years old respectively. They only looked like boys because, on this cold February day, they were wearing denim jackets that barely came down to their waists. Culture shock again, You'd think he would have gotten used to it by now.

 Mel understood intellectually that these people had to wear shortjackets because it gave them greater freedom of movement whilethey worked, and he also understood that their mall-dwellingfemales wore pastel workout clothes and running shoes at all timesbecause they were more comfortable than anything else. But toMel they all looked like children. This was not because Mel was some kind of a snob. It was because he was from Chicago and thesepeople were from the entirely separate cultural, political, and economic entity called downstate.

 To make anything work between two such disjointed places there had to be the equivalent of diplomats - people who, in another context, had once been defined as "men sent abroad to lie for their country - in both senses of the word." The intra-Illinoisdiplomats were the old family law firms in the major and minortowns of the state. These professionals lacked the partisanship tohave a killer impulse for their clients. Instead they saw life in terms of each side winning, if at all possible.

 In Chicago there were perhaps a hundred families such as theMeyers, ranging through the Polish, Slovak, Irish, Ukrainian,Hungarian, and even WASP sections of town, who kept the linesbetween the two Illinoises open and flowing, working in enter-prises legal and illegal. It was perhaps the purest and most professional group in Illinois, and the Meyers were masters of the guild.Shmuel Meirerowitz's  son David,  even though  he was aConservative Jew, had the skill and honesty to gain the trust of eventhe most bigoted downstate ambulance chaser.  Generations oflawyers from. Cairo, Quincy, Macomb, Decatur, and Pekin (homeof the Fighting Chinks) knew that the Meyer family's word wasgood. It was not particularly surprising, then, that the Cozzanos hadencountered the Meyers, and that they had formed, an alliance.

 Since then, a lot of Meyers had put a lot of miles on various cars,driving back and forth. Shmuel normally rode the Illinois Central,but David cruised up and down U.S. 45 in the stupendous Cadillacsand Lincolns of the 1950s and 1960s, and Mel scorched thepavement of Interstate 57 in a succession of Jaguars and Mercedes-Benzes.

 Mel had defined his very own Checkpoint Charlie, the officialdividing line between Chicago and downstate. He drove by itevery time he took I-57 south from the heart of the city. It was outin one of the suburbs, Mel had never bothered to find out which,where traffic finally started to open up a little bit. The landmark inquestion was a water tower, a modern lollipop-shaped one. It waspainted bright yellow, and it had a smiley face on it. When Mel sawthe damn smiley face he knew he had passed into hostile territory.The flatness of downstate was, in its way, just as stark and awe-inspiring as Grand Canyon or Half Dome. He had been down herea thousand times and it always startled him. The settlers had comehere and found an unmarked geometric plane; anything that roseabove that plane was the work of human beings. When Mel had firstcome this way it was mostly grain elevators, water towers, and ranksof bleachers rising up alongside high-school football fields. Theseartifacts were still there, but nowadays the most prominent structures were microwave relay towers: narrow vertical supports made of steellatticework, sprouting from concrete pads in cornfields, held straightby guy wires, drum-shaped antennas mounted to their tops. Eachantenna was pointed several miles across the prairie in the direction ofthe next microwave relay tower. This was how phone calls gotbounced around the country. These things were all over the place,crossing the country with a dense invisible web of high-speed communications, but other places you didn't see them. In cities they were hidden on the tops of buildings, and in places with hills, theywere built into the high places where you couldn't see them unless youknew where to look. But out here, the buildings and hills had fallen out from under the phone company and their invisible network had been laid bare. It was not merely visible, but the single most obvious thing about the downstate landscape.It caused Mel to wonder, as he skimmed across the prairie on I-57, its four lanes straight as banjo strings, paralleling the equally straight Illinois Central railway line, whether downstate had some magical feature that might expose another network, a network that had, so far, so perfectly hidden its workings in the complexity of the modern world that Mel wasn't even sure it existed.

 Cozzano beckoned Mel into the house and rolled forward into theliving room.

 "Hey, Willy, how are you?" Mel said, coming in the front door.

 He spun a stack of newspapers into Cozzano's lap: theFinancialTimeswas on top, and Cozzano could see the red corner of theEconomiststicking out underneath. Mel pounded Cozzano on the shoulder, peeled off his heavy cashmere overcoat, and, oblivious to thefact that it cost more than a small car, tossed it full-length on to the sofa where it would pick up dog hairs. "What is this shit on the TV?"he said. He went up to the set and punched buttons on thecable box until he got CNBC. Then he turned the volume down soit wouldn't interfere with the conversation.

 "Hey, Patty," Mel said. "You need to do any medical stuff with Governor Cozzano in the near future?"

 Patricia had no idea how to deal with people who were not fromTuscola. She just stood in the dining room, glowing fuzzily in her peach-and-lavender sweatsuit, drying her hands, looking at Mel, completely baffled and uncertain. "Medical stuff?"

 "I am asking you," Mel said, "if the Governor will be needing any specific medical attention from you in the next few hours -medications, therapy, anything like that. Or are your duties goingto be strictly domestic in nature - making food and taking him to the bathroom and stuff like that?"

 Patricia's eyes looked down and to the left. Her mouth wasslightly ajar. She was still completely nonplussed.

 "Thank you," Mel said, reaching his arms far apart to grab thehandles of the big sliding doors that separated the living room fromthe dining room. He drew them shut with a thunderclap, closingoff their view of Patricia. Then he went to another door that hadbeen propped open and kicked out the doorstop.

 "In or out, Lover. Command decision!" he snapped.

 Lover IV, the golden retriever, scurried into the room and gotout of the way as the door swung shut.

 "You gotta take a leak or anything?"

 "No," Cozzano said.

 "You look good, for a guy who's exhausted."

 "Huh?"

 "You've been working so hard thinking about the campaign thatyou have collapsed from exhaustion," Mel said. "You're taking aweek or two off to recover. In the meantime, your able staff isfilling in for you."

 Mel popped down on the couch next to Cozzano. He began torub his chin with his hand. Mel had a thick and fast-growing beardand shaved a couple of times a day. For him, chin rubbing wassomething he did when he was taking stock of his overall situationin the world.

 "You were going to blow your brains out, weren't you?"

 "Yeah," Cozzano said.

 Mel thought it over. He didn't seem especially shocked. Theidea did not have a big emotional impact on him. He seemed to be weighing it, the way he weighed everything. Finally he shrugged, unable to deliver a clear verdict.

 "Well, I've never been one to argue with you, just offer advice,"Mel said.

 "Yes no."

 "My advice right now is that it is entirely your decision. But there may be factors of which you are not aware." "Oh?"

 "Yeah. I'm sure you're probably thinking what it would be like tospend twenty, thirty years this way."

 "You win the Camaro!" Cozzano said.

 "Well, it's possible that you may not have to. I'm getting, uh, shall we say,feelers, from people who may have a therapy to cure this kind of thing.""Cure it?"

 "Yeah. According to these people you could get back a lot of what you lost. Maybe get back all of it." "How? The melon is dead."

 "Right," Mel said, not missing a beat, "the brain tissue is toast, Kaput. Croaked. Not coming back. They can rewire some of the connections, though. Replace the missing parts with artificial stuff.Or so they say."

 "Where?"

 "Some research institute out in California. It's one of Coover's little projects."

 "Coover." Cozzano chuckled a little bit and shook his head. DeWayne Coover was a contemporary of Cozzano's father. Like JohnCozzano, he had gotten lucky with some investments during the war. He was a billionaire, one of those billionaires that no one ever hears about. He lived on some patch of warm sandy real estate down in California and he didn't get out much except to play golf with ex-presidents and washed-up movie stars. His granddaughter Althea had gone to Stanford with Mary Catherine and they had been on the fringes of each other's social circles.

 John Cozzano and DeWayne Coover had had a number of dealings during and after the war and had never really hit it off. Some people liked to believe that there was some kind of rivalryBetween the two men, but this was a completely off-the-wall idea.Coover's success dwarfed that of the Cozzano family. He was in an entirely different league.

 "I got a call from one of Coover's lawyers," Mel said. "It was onan unrelated thing. A leukemia thing."

 After Christina died of leukemia, Cozzano had founded acharitable organization to research the disease and assist victims.DeWayne Coover, who had a penchant for big medical researchprojects, had been a major contributor. So it was not unusual forCozzano's people to talk to Coover's people.

 "So I'm talking to the guy, and it's about some kind of trivialquestion relating to taxes. It comes into my head to wonder why this guy, who is a senior partner in a big-time L.A. firm, is talkingto me about this issue, when it's so tiny that our secretaries couldalmost handle it. And then he says to me, 'So, how's the Governor doing these days?' Just like that."

 Cozzano laughed and shook his head. It was incredible howword got around.

 "Well, to make a long story short, he's been dumping bucks intoresearching problems like yours. And he's definitely putting outfeelers."

 "Get more phone books," Cozzano said.

 "More information about it? I knew you'd say that."

 Cozzano raised his right hand to his head, shaped like a pistol,and brought his thumb down like a hammer.

 "Right," Mel said, "a bullet to the head is the most experimental therapy of all."

  

 11

  

 Thenext time Dr. Radhakrishnan heard from Mr. Salvador wasten days later, when two packages arrived in his office, courtesy of GODS, Global Omnipresent Delivery Systems. One of them was a small box. The other was a long tube. Dr. Radhakrishnan paused before opening them to marvel at their pure, geometric perfection. In India, as in most of the United States, mail was a dusty, battered, imperfect thing. Mail came wrapped up in pro­tectivelayers of inexpensive, fibrous brown paper, tied together withfuzzy twine that looked like spun granola; the contents burst through the wrapping at the corners, skid marks trailed along every side, and the shapes of the packages and envelopes always came just a bitshort of the geometric ideal. Addresses were scrawled on it in magicmarker and ballpoint pen, antique-looking stamps, fresh from the engraver, stuck to it, annotations made by various postal workers along the way.

 That was not how Mr. Salvador mailed things. When Mr. Salvador mailed something, he went through GODS. The biggest name in the express-mail business. Mr. Salvador's mail was not made of any paper-based substance. No fibers in there. Nothing brown. The wrapping was  some kind of unbreakable plastic sheeting with a slick teflonesque feel to it, white and seamless as the robe of Christ. Both of the packages were festooned with brilliantly colored, glossy, self-stick, plasticized GODS labels. None of the labels, nor any other parts of the packages, had ever been sullied by human hand-writing. Everything was computer-printed. Every oneof the labels had some kind of bar code on it. Some of the labels contained address-related information. Some contained lengthystrings of mysterious digits. Some pertained to insurance and otherlegalistic matters, and others, like medals on an officer's chestseemed to be purely honorific in nature.

 The color scheme consisted of three hues; every check box, every logo, every stern warning and legal disclaimer on every label was in one of these three hues. The hues all went togetherperfectly and they looked great, whether they were on thepackages themselves or on the neatly pressed NASA-style coverallworn by the fetching young woman who had delivered thepackages, obtaining Dr. Radhakrishnan's signature on a flat-screened notebook computer that beeped and squealed as itbeamed his digitized scrawl back to the remote computer insidethe glossy, tri-hued GODS delivery van.  The woman wascheery, confident, professional, apparently taking a little time offfrom, her normal job as a trial lawyer, aerobics instructor, ornuclear physicist to do some life-enriching delivery work. Dr.Radhakrishnan,  the  world's  greatest neurosurgeon,  had feltsmall, dirty, and ignorant before her. But before he could ask herfor a date, she was out the door, having more important thingsto do.

 Dr. Radhakrishnan opened the box first. There was no tape; themagic white wrapping stuck to itself. As he pulled it apart, stickers and labels tore in half, and he got an intuition that, perhaps, part ofthe thrill of receiving such mail was that you got to dramatize yourown importance by tearing it apart. It was like ravishing an expensive, salon-fresh call girl.

 Inside the wrapping was a featureless hard plastic box, white andunmarked, that had to be opened using some trick that Dr.Radhakrishnan could not figure out right away. When the box hadbeen penetrated, the entire contents turned out to have been sealedin plastic wrap, like a glass in a motel room. Dr. Radhakrishnanknew that in the context of American culture, to seal something upin plastic was to honor it.

 The contents turned out to be a short stack of unmarked 3.5-inch floppy disks. He remembered that he and Mr. Salvador hadhad a discussion about the Calyx operating system, so, on a hunch,he popped one of the disks into the Pacific Netware workstation onhis desk.

 The systems were compatible. There were a few files stored on thedisk, all in a standard format used for color images. They all sounded like medical scans of one type or another. Dr. Radhakrishnan opened some of them up and checked them out; these files were all pictures of the same man's brain. The man hadsuffered a stroke that had, to judge from the position of the two affected areas, probably interfered with his speech and caused some paralysis on the left side. Interestingly enough, the affected parts of thebrain were isodense, which is to say that they had the same density as the healthy parts of the brain surrounding them. This indicated that these pictures had been taken within a few days of thestroke.

 It did not take much imagination on Dr. Radhakrishnan's part to realize that he was looking at the brain of Mr. Salvador's friend. Mr. Salvador was implicitly asking him a question: is this the type of damage that you can fix?

 And the answer was yes. In theory. But the facility that would be required to do the work did not exist and wouldn't exist for years, even with preposterously optimistic assumptions about grants and funding. Oh, you could build one anytime you wanted, if you had themoney. But who had that kind of money?

 Dr. Radhakrishnan eventually outsmarted the latching system on thetube. Rolled up inside was a thick stack of poster-sized sheetsof paper.

 In his cluttered lab it took some doing just to find a table large enough to unroll them. Finally he chased Toyoda out of the coffee room, where he had been watching MTV, and cleared off thecounter, wiped up a few spills with a napkin, and unrolled the pages across the wood-grained Formica. Unrolled, the stack of sheets was nearly half an inch thick. They were all the same size, and all covered with precise, colorful drawings.

 Flipping quickly through the stack he saw floor plans, elevations, detailed renderings of individual rooms. The top sheet was anelevation. It portrayed a modern, high-tech structure perched on apiney bluff overlooking the sea. There was a modest parking lot, asatellite dish on the roof, lots of windows, an outdoor cafeteria,even a bicycle path. Looked like a nice place to work.

 The second sheet was an elevation of an entirely differentbuilding. This one was in an urban setting. It had an austere sand-stone color with a few darkly tinted windows set up above street level. It was also high-tech, but at the same time it was strikinglyIndian: he could see the classic motifs of Hindu architecture,updated and streamlined. The materials were unusual: reinforced concrete where it counted, of course, but sandstone and marble on the outside, even some traditional inlay work.

 The third sheet showed the same building from a higher angle,revealing a central, glassed-in atrium lined with offices and a bloomwith lush flowering tropical plants. Behind it, a neighborhood oflow, blocky concrete structures stretched toward a somewhat morebuilt-up district a few blocks away, centered on a huge circularroadway lined with shops and offices.

 Dr. Radhakrishnan was shocked to recognize the ring road: it wasConnaught Circus, the solar plexus of his home city of New Delhi.Once he figured that out, everything snapped into focus, heunderstood which direction he was looking in, recognized the shapesof the Volga Hotel and the glassfront of the big British Airways officeon the Circus, the entrances to the underground bazaar.

 He knew exactly where this building was. It had been drawn inon the site of the Ashok Cinema, a memorable, if decrepitstructure, where Papa had taken him to movies as a child. Right in between Connaught Circus and the India Gate, close to the seat ofgovernment, embassies, everything.

 If this building - whatever it was - was really under construction,or even being contemplated, it was news to him. He should haveheard about it by now, because fancy new high-tech structures didnot spring up every day there. Dr. Radhakrishnan did not knowwhat  this  building  was,  but  he  could  recognize  high-tech architecture when he saw it. It seemed that someone had ambitious plans to create a sort of silicon ashram.

 Maybe this was some sort of an investment opportunity. Or maybe they were trying to attract researchers to this new complex, Butit had to be a far-off fantasy on someone's part because if ground had been broken in Delhi - if this plan had even been whispered - Dr. Radhakrishnan would have heard about it. He was notthe most well connected Delhian by a long shot, but he knew people and he stayed in touch.

 He continued paging through the stack, trying to glean some clues. The drawings alternated between the two buildings: the one onthe bluff above the sea and the one in Delhi.Space was set aside for offices, R&D, laboratories, operating rooms, and even a few private bedrooms, complete with all of the equipment you would expect to see in a state-of-the-art intensive-careward. Evidently these buildings were for biomedical research ofthe most advanced sort.

 The building in Delhi included one operating theater that was especially large and complicated. Dr. Radhakrishnan found a detailed plan of the room and went over it carefully, growing more andmore certain as he did so that he had seen this before: it was an exact reproduction of the specialized operating room that he had described to Mr. Salvador. The one that Mr. Salvador had takenwith him on those disks.The plans for Radhakrishnan's ultimate operating theater had simply been dropped whole into the blueprints for a new building. But it wasn't a hack job. The systems had all been integrated into their surroundings. The plumbing lines, the electrical wiring, the gaslines, all went somewhere. Subtle modifications had been made without changing the essential features. In fact, the room had been improved in several ways. Engineers had been at work on this. Very good engineers.

 Dr. Radhakrishnan was beginning to experience a prickly, hot feeling centered on the back of his neck, as though he were the victim of a joke of psychological experiment. He shuffled quickly through the stack, trying to get clues, looking for a point of reference. But he couldn't find anything that explained whether thiswas reality or fantasy, who had these plans drawn up, or why.

 Until he got to the last sheet, which showed an elevation of thefront entrance of the building in Delhi. The doorway was sur­roundedby a massive masonry frame. The material had a rich red hue, the color of Indian sandstone. The name of the building wascarved into flat square stone next to the door, a Rosetta stone inEnglish and Hindi:

 DR. RADHAKRISHNAN V.R.J.V.V. GANGADHAR

 INSTITUTE OF BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH - DELHIBRANCH

 He read it over several times, as though this were the first timehe had ever seen his own name written down.

 He sifted back through the stack, looking for elevations of thebuilding above the ocean. Finally he dug up an elevation showingit from ground level, with a concrete marker set into the ground bythe entrance to the parking lot:

 ROBERT J. COOVER BUILDING

 DR. RADHAKRISHNAN V.R.J.V.V. GANGADHAR

 INSTITUTE OF BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH -CALIFORNIA BRANCH

 Finally, a clue here. Robert J. Coover was a very rich man. Abillionaire. The building in which Dr. Radhakrishnan was standingwas the Coover Biotech Pavilion; Coover had had it throwntogether a couple of years ago when he decided that biotechnologywas the wave of the future.

 It made sense, in a way. This Elton State thing had just been afishing expedition, a stratagem to attract promising talent. Now thatDr. Radhakrishnan's project with the baboons had succeeded sobrilliantly, Coover understood that it was time to pull away and getserious about forging ahead. And Dr. Radhakrishnan was ready todo some forging.

 It was 9:30 a.m., one of the few times of day when he and his brother in Delhi might be awake simultaneously. In Delhi, the opposite side of the world from Elton, it was 10:00p.m. and Arun would probably be watching the news on his television set.

 Dialing  India was  always  an  adventure.  He  got  through eventually and reached his brother at his home in one of the pleasant  colonies  on  the  outskirts  of the  metropolis,  where government officials lived with their air conditioners. As he had anticipated, the English language version of the news was running inthe background. The sound quality on the phone was very bad and Arun had to run over and turn the television down in order for them to get through the obligatory several minutes of family-related small talk.

 "Me? Oh, I'm fine, everything is going well enough," Dr. Radhakrishnan said. "I heard some - some rumors about a new development in the city and I wanted to ask you if you knew anything about them."

 "What sort of rumors?"

 "Has anything been happening lately with the Ashok Cinema?"

 A silence. Then, "Ha!" Arun sounded satisfied, vindicated. "So news of this heinous crime has even reached Elton, New Mexico!"

 "Only the most tenuous reports, I can assure you." Dr. Radhakrishnan did not want to put his brother off by explaining to him that if a hydrogen bomb were dropped in the middle of Connaught Circus, it probably wouldn't show up in the American media unless American journalists were killed.

 "I knew it would come out eventually. Little brother, it is corruption and CIA intrigues. Pure and simple. That's the only explanation."

 "Are they planning to do something to the theater?"

 Arun laughed bitterly. "Let me catch you up on events. The Ashok Theatre does not exist anymore, as of yesterday!"

 "No!"

 "I kid you not."

 "I knew it was decrepit but-"

 "It is more decrepit now. They have smashed it to the ground.

 Within twenty-four hours the site was picked clean by a millionharijans. The came from every quarter of the city, like piranhas,descended on the rubble before the dust had settled, and carriedaway every piece of the building. Why, my secretary says that todaythey had earth-moving equipment there, digging a basement!"

 "But . . . who is 'they' in this case?"

 "Guess."

 "I can't."

 "Maclntrye Engineering. The right hand of the CIA!"

 Like many Indian politicians of a certain age, Arun liked to findthe CIA everywhere. Gangadhar, having spent some time in theStates and gotten an idea of the way that large American institutionsactually operated, had his doubts. He had come to realize thatMacIntyre Engineering would be a far more fearsome multi-national corporation if it had nothing whatsoever to do with the United States Government.

 "Since when are you such a cinema bluff anyway?" Gangadharasked.

 "What do you mean?"

 "Why is this such a heinous crime? The Ashok Theatre was a dump. It was high time for it to be torn down anyway."

 Arun sighed at his brother's naivete. "It is not so much what theydid as the way they did it," he said.

 "How was that?"

 "They swaggered. They came into town like pirates. Littlebrother, it was like the old days, when the Brits or the Yanks wouldcharge in and do as they pleased."

 "But Arun, we are a sovereign country. How could they-"

 "A sovereign country run by men." Arun sighed. "Corruptiblemen."

 "They bribed their way in?"

 "Gangadhar, do you have any idea how long it would normallytake to obtain all the permits to raze a theater and begin con­structionof a new structure?"

 "Weeks?"

 "Months. Years, Maclntyre did it in days. They only got hereaweek ago. The telephone lines were smoking, Gangadhar, so manyof their people were phoning in from the States, calling all the rightofficials, sending round limousines to take them out to lunch. Ihave never seen anything like it."

 Someone was rapping on the frame of Dr. Radhakrishnan'sdoor. He looked up to see yet another delivery person from GODScarrying a package. This one was the size of an orange crate.

 "Just a moment, I have to sign for something," he said. Hebeckoned the courier into his office, signed his name on the notebook computer with a nonchalant flourish, and waved himout. He withdrew a penknife from his desk drawer and began tocut the fiberglass tape that held the top of the box in place. It was a thick-walled styrofoam sarcophagus.

 "Do you have any idea what sort of structure they intend tobuild?" Dr. Radhakrishnan continued.

 "If they had gone through the normal channels, I would, but theink is hardly dry on the blueprints, the workers themselves probablydon't even know what they are building. The pace of the construction is frantic. They have actually purchased a local cementfactory for their own private use! Gangadhar, everyone says thatAmerica had gone downhill, but you would never believe it if youcould come here and see this. The only parallel I can think of is theManhattan Project."

 "Did I ever tell you about the time I went to the Taj Mahal?"Dr. Radhakrishnan said, suddenly, on a whim.

 "I don't know. Why?"

 Dr. Radhakrishnan had gotten the lid off the styrofoam box. Thewalls were three inches thick. The interior was filled with a swirlingfog of dry ice. He waved his hand over it to dissipate the cryogenicmist. In the middle of the container, neatly packed between large chunks of dry ice, was a small rack made of clear plastic, about thesize of a cigarette case. It was made to hold several narrow glasstubes. At the moment, it held two of them.

 "I was standing there looking at some of the inlay work on the north wall of the structure. Magnificent stuff. And this group ofAmericans was there. Had come all the way around the world tosee the Taj Mahal. It was beastly hot, must have been forty-fivedegrees. They were all dirty and tired and as usual there werepickpockets all over the place. And one of them said, 'Hell, we should just build one of these things. In Arizona or somewhere.'

 "You're kidding."

 "Not at all. He thought that they would just raise some moneyand replicate the Taj. And all the other Americans just nodded asthough that were a perfectly reasonable idea."

 "It's unbelievable."

 Dr. Radhakrishnan had opened the little case now, taking carenot to burn his hands with the intense cold, and removed the twonarrow glass tubes. Each one was mostly empty except for a smalldark wad of material near one end. He raised them up toward thelight.

 "They have no values of any kind," he said. "Nothing meansanything to them. The Taj is just a construction project, a particularmanipulation of assets. And whatever they're doing on the Ashok Theatre site is more of the same."

 He saw a glint of red and realized that the dark wads must betissue samples of some kind, which had presumably leaked a bit ofblood against the glass walls of the tubes before they had frozen. Hestepped over toward his window to allow the winter sunlight toilluminate them a little better.

 Arun's voice sounded far away. "Maybe they're building a Taj inDelhi so they don't have to take the bus all the way to Agra," hejoked.

 Dr.  Radhakrishnan  said nothing.  He  had recognized the contents of the tubes.

 Mr. Salvador had mailed him pieces of two people's brains.

 12

 From two thousand feet above the California coast, Dr.Radhakrishnan could see the whole thing taking shape. This wasone of those especially nice corporate jets with oversized windows:a Gale Aerospace Gyrfalcon. The windows gave him a panoramic view of the entire parcel: there was the flat, sandy plain where the future position of the private landing strip was already marked outwith little fluorescent orange flags. There was the gravel accessroad, which was rapidly being transmuted into asphalt by a roadcrew. There was the grove of trees that would be turned into a little park where the workers could recreate. And finally, high above thepounding white crests of the Pacific, there was the rocky bluffwhere the facility itself would be constructed.

 Was being constructed.

 "My God," Dr. Radhakrishnan blurted. "It's half finished."

 Mr. Salvador smiled. "This sort of rough structural work alwaysgoes surprisingly quickly. I suppose that putting on all the door-knobs will take eons. Care for another cigar?

 The coastline passed beneath them. The afternoon sun was now slanting in through the windows on the left side of the Gyrfalcon.

 Dr. Radhakrishnan still didn't know how to take all of this. Hehad been thinking about it for days and still hadn't figured it out. It

 was way too much. Totally unrealistic. He had scraped for moneyand recognition his whole career. Now he was getting everything.

 The Manhattan Project, as Arun had said. This could not be happening. But it was happening.

 His instincts told him that there was no rational explanation forbis frantic expenditure of money. But that was a closed-mindedattitude not befitting a scientist. He was not a businessman. Whowas he to say that it didn't make financial sense?

 Dr. Radhakrishnan V.R.J.V.V. Gangadhar belonged on thisbusiness jet. And he deserved his research institutes also. It wasaltogether fitting and proper.

 "I couldn't help noticing you had some newspapers in yourbriefcase," Dr. Radhakrishnan said. "I didn't get a chance to pickone up this morning."

 "Yesterday'sNew York Times," Mr. Salvador said.

 "Oh," Dr. Radhakrishnan said disappointedly. "I was hoping to take a look at the stock quotes."

 "Say no more," Mr. Salvador said. He put his cigar down andmoved to the front of the cabin. He sat down in a leather swivelchair in front of a portable communications setup that was builtinto the forward bulkhead of the Gyrfalcon, just behind thecockpit. It included a telephone and a fax machine, a keyboard, anda couple of flat-screen monitors. The fax machine had been oozing paper almost since the moment they had taken off in Elton, and bynow a long curlicue had piled up beneath it on the deck. "TheseGale birds are pricey but they have peerless avionics," Mr. Salvadorcontinued, punching away on the keyboard.

 A stock ticker materialized at the bottom of one of the monitorscreens, scrolling from right to left. "Can you make this out from where you are?"

 "Yes, I can see it very clearly, thank you."

 "I should have anticipated our interest and had it running when you came aboard. My apologies."

 "Oh, I'm not that much of a player," Dr. Radhakrishnan said,embarrassed by the fuss. "But I have a bit of stock in Genomics, thatcompany in Seattle. When we began working with them, I was so impressed that I decided to buy in."

 "And it's been moving rapidly of late, making you a nervouswreck," Mr. Salvador said.

 "Exactly. Takeover rumors. I told my broker to sell at eighty-three."

 "Then you made out brilliantly.""I did? What do you mean?"

 "Genomics was just bought out by Gale Aerospace this morning.At eighty-five. You called it exactly."

 "Gale Aerospace now owns Genomics?" Dr. Radhakrishnansaid. He was relieved and delighted. But he also thought it was justa bit eerie. He glanced around at the interior of the jet's cabin as if it might be able to tell him something."Yes."

 "Why would a rocket and missile company want to own ascruffy little genetic engineering firm in Seattle?"

 "Diversification!" Mr. Salvador said. "An intelligent enough strategy in this age of world peace, wouldn't you say?"

 "Yes. Now that you mention it, it does seem perfectly logical." "While we happen to be on the subject of tissue culture, did youget my other package? The tissue samples?" Mr. Salvador said.

 Tissue samples was a nice word for it. "I did," Dr.Radhakrishnan said. "They were good clean samples. Whoevertook them for you knew his business.""We try to hire well," Mr. Salvador said.

 "This is the first opportunity I have had to work with humanbrain tissue," Dr. Radhakrishnan said. As he delivered thissentence, he slowed down, sensing that he was on slick footing.

 Mr. Salvador smiled understandingly. "I know that the regula­tions on these things in the States can be quite stifling."

 "Exactly. Anyway, I, uh, or we, my students and I, were not sure exactly - we have so little experience." Dr. Radhakrishnan knewthat he was groping pathetically, but Mr. Salvador kept smiling andnodding. "We have, anyway, initiated the cell culturing process with those samples . . . sent them on to Genomics. There were afew false starts-"

 "Naturally. That's how science works."

 "-but the samples you gave us were so, well, generous, solarge, that we had a lot of margin for error. I am almost surprised,well . . .""Yes?"

 "Of course human brains are larger than baboon brains, so myperspective is skewed just a bit, but if I were to take samples of ahuman brain that were so large, I would" - again, he sensed he wason slick footing - "well, let us say that in America, with itsmalpractice hysteria, where you always have to cover your tail-""Ridiculous." Mr. Salvador agreed."-lawyers-"

 "Carping and niggling and backfilling," Mr. Salvador said. "Insome ways, Doctor, America is the best place in the world to doresearch. In other ways, with its litigiousness, it is a terrible place. We think that India and America may be able to complement eachother in this respect."

 He was so good."Exactly. Mr. Salvador, you have a knack.""I am so pleased that we are able to see eye to eye on this," Mr.Salvador said.

 "How  are  the,  uh,  patients  doing,  by  the  way?"  Dr.Radhakrishnan said. "Ha! I almost called them specimens."

 "Call them whatever you like," Mr. Salvador said. "They aredoing well. You will be able to examine them shortly. Of coursewe would not have selected them for inclusion in this program ifthey had not already suffered neurological damage, so this makesanswering your question somewhat problematic.""Yes, I see your point.""Well. I don't mean to wear you out with all this technical chitchat. We'll be taking the great circle route to Delhi," Mr.Salvador said. "We'll make refueling stops in exciting places Anchorage and Seoul. There's a private cabin on the other side ofthat bulkhead where you can get some rest, and while you're there I'm sure that Maria will be happy to give you a massage or engage you in conversation or whatever it is that would make the time gofaster."

 "Ah," Dr. Radhakrishnan said. "I thought I smelled perfume.""As you can see, Mr. Coover is a consummate host. My job doesnot come with such fringes, but I have more than enough to occupy myself." Mr. Salvador nodded in the direction of thecommunications rig on the bulkhead.

 "You are a busy man," Dr. Radhakrishnan observed."Great things are afoot," Mr. Salvador said with uncharacteristic gusto. "For certain people, this is a fascinating time to be alive."

 Dr. Radhakrishnan certainly felt that way. "How long have youbeen working for Mr. Coover?"

 Mr. Salvador paused before answering, his face alert, his eyesglittering. He was not thinking about how to answer so much as hewas studying Radhakrishnan's face. He seemed, as usual, ever soslightly amused. "I wouldn't make unwarranted assumptions," hesaid.

 Dr. Radhakrishnan wanted to pursue this line of questioning buthe had realized that, by asking about Mr. Salvador's background, hehad blundered into the realm of bad taste. And that was muchworse than bad morals or bad manners for a certain kind of person.However, he sensed without having met her that Maria would be a much more accessible person on all levels. "I'm going tofreshen up," he said, nodding toward the private cabin in the back."Take your time and relax," Mr. Salvador said, "it's a long wayto India."

 In his usual style, Mr. Salvador had gone to great lengths to makeDr. Radhakrishnan feel at home in Delhi, even though Delhiwashis home. A large suite had been rented out at the spectacularImperial Hotel, an aptly named pile sitting at the end of a palm-tree-lined drive just off Janpath. It was just south of ConnaughtCircus and less than a mile from where the institute was being constructed. Mr. Salvador had rented out a couple of floors of thehotel. During the course of the long flight across the Pacific, Mariahad developed quite an infatuation with Dr. Radhakrishnan andinsisted that she be allowed to stay in Delhi for a while; Mr.

 Salvador had grudgingly granted her a suite of her own, just downthe hall from Dr. Radhakrishnan's. Mr. Salvador was staying at theother end of the hall in lesser but still opulent surroundings.

 When Dr. Radhakrishnan arrived at the Imperial, a pleasantsurprise awaited: his entire extended family. They all cheered andhugged and kissed him right there in the parlor of his suite and thenmoved downstairs to a banquet room for a lengthy dinner. Dr.Radhakrishnan felt like a conquering hero back from the wars,being welcomed home by the maharaja with a royal feast.

 After that, Maria had to nurse him through a day or two ofhangover, fatigue, and jet lag. When he finally felt ready, he calledfor a car and told the driver to take him southward down Janpathinto the New Delhi South Extension, where, he had been assured,the temporary laboratories of the Radhakrishnan Institute werebustling away.

 On his way out of the hotel, he met a young American fellow inthe elevator. Dr. Radhakrishnan could have met this man inAntarctica and still recognized him immediately as an Americanhigh-tech entrepreneur. He was in his early thirties. He had longhair that had probably been cut in the mirror at home. Hebeard. He wore glasses. He was dressed in blue jeans, sneakers, adecent enough striped white shirt, and a crumpled wool blazer. Hewas carrying a briefcase in one hand and a rather formidable laptopcomputer in the other.

 And one other key point: unlike everyone else he had met since the beginning of the flight to Delhi, he did not make any effort tobrown-nose. "Hi, you must be Radhakrishnan," the man said. "I'm Peter Zeldovich. Most people I work with call me Zeldo.That's my handle on most e-mail systems. Nice to meet you." Heput his laptop on the floor of the elevator and stuck out hand; Dr.Radhakrishnan shook it, limply and reluctantly.

 "Gotten over your jet lag yet?" this man said as they took theelevator down to lobby level.

 Dr. Radhakrishnan had already forgotten his proper name. Hewas terrible with names. Now he knew why everyone called thisperson Zeldo. His real names vanished instantly from memory; Zeldo lingered unremovably on the doorstep of the mind, like asteaming turd left behind by a stray dog. Hopefully they would notbe working together very much.

 Naturally they would not have to work together. It was Dr.Radhakrishnan's institute, he was in charge, he could send Zeldoback to his festering West Coast bachelor pad whenever he got tobe too annoying. Which might not take very long, at this rate. "Heard you were on your way in to the Barracks, so I thought I'd hitch a ride with you," Zeldo said as they exited into the lobby."The Barracks?"

 "Yeah. That's what we've been calling the temporary institute. Guess you haven't seen it yet."

 "Why would you call it by that name?" Of course it was superfluous even to ask questions like this; these breezy American chaps had to have nicknames for everything.

 "Because that's what it is. It's down south, on the edge of this military zone-""The Defence Colony?"

 "Yeah." Zeldo reached for one of the doors, almost colliding with the turbaned doorman who opened it for him.Dr. Radhakrishnan had only been back in the civilized world for a couple of days, but now it felt as if he had never left, and as if the years in Elton were nothing more than a frigid nightmare,"Anyway, the temporary lab facilities are set up in these barracks-type buildings. Soviet concrete things, you know. It'll be okay forthe time being, I guess."

 Zeldo had the presence of mind to allow the driver to open the cardoor for him,  and he slid into the seat ahead of Dr. Radhakrishnan. He folded up his long legs so that his knees were pressed against the back of the driver's seat and piled the briefcase andthe computer on his lap. The driver pulled out on to Janpath, ignoring the painted lanes and creating his own, in the traditional local style.

 "I'm the  chiphead from Pacware,"  Zeldo  said,  as if Dr. Radhakrishnan were supposed to know what that meant."What is Pacware?"

 "Pacific Netware. I design logic devices - chips - for them.""Am I to gather that you are connected, in some way, with my institute?"

 Zeldo gaped at him. "Sure," he said. "I'm doing the hardware design on the silicon portion of the new model biochips.""I was not aware that a new model was required."

 Zeldo shrugged. "New models are always required," he said."Hardware design is a fast-moving target. You don't update yourdesigns every few months, you're working with Stone Agetechnology."

 Dr. Radhakrishnan was finding it very difficult to keep histemper under control. Perhaps he was still just a bit irritable fromhis travels. For him to come home in triumph and finally to receivethe recognition he deserved, and then to be stuck in an elevator,and a car, with this laid-back Yank who told him he was back inthe Stone Age-

 But he held his tongue, because he had an inkling that Zeldomight be half right. The chips they put into the baboons were off-the-shelf models with limited capabilities. It was a basic fact, withelectronics, that if you designed a customized chip to do a particularjob, it could work thousands of times faster than an off-the-shelfmodel.

 If Zeldo could do this job properly and build a new, specializedchip for this purpose, it might vastly improve the capabilities of Dr.Radhakrishnan's implant.

 Actually, bringing in a "chiphead" from a hot company likePacific Netware was a brilliant idea. He wished he had thought ofit himself. He wondered whohad thought of it.

 "Did they try to set you up with a babe?" Zeldo said."I'm sorry? A babe?"

 "Yeah. A chick. You know, a prostitute."Dr. Radhakrishnan wished that Zeldo had not used this word. "They did with me," Zeldo said. "Bought me a first class ticketon British Airways to get me over here from San Francisco. Soonas I get on, this incredible woman sits down next to me. She wasplaying footsy with me before we even pulled away from the gate.God, she was a hot lady."

 Dr. Radhakrishnan smiled conspiratorially. "You liked her, eh?"he said.

 "Well, she didn't have a lot going for her intellectually," Zeldosaid, frowning, "and I'm involved in a monogamous relationship athome."

 They did not converse much more until they arrived at theDefence Colony, whose gate was guarded by heavy machine gunsin sandbag nests, manned by eagle-eyed Sikhs. The Sikhs let themthrough without opening fire; a minute or two later they were atthe Barracks.

 They had obviously been constructed to house troops assignedto guard duty and other low-level work in the Defence Colony.Because this was Delhi, and the Defence Colony was prestigious,they were actually quite nice, for barracks. Each building was thirtyor forty meters long, wide enough for a row of beds down either side with a broad aisle down the middle. They were all concreteand concrete block, with tin roofs, and it was clear that they had been hastily painted and retrofitted with better electrical service andair-conditioning. The Radhakrishnan Institute now occupied twoof these buildings. Building 1 was filled with offices andlaboratories. Building 2 was filled with beds. The beds were filled with brain damage cases.

 Strokes were generally not a major health problem in India. The classic stroke patient was a fat old smoker and though may peoplesmoked in India, few people were fat and many did not have theopportunity to get old. Fortunately, from the point of view ofresearch, any time you got nearly a billion people living andworking in conditions not notable for safety, you did not have torely on strokes in order to see a broad and deep spectrum of braindamage.

 On his initial inspection of Building 2, Dr. Radhakrishnan saw a fascinating assortment of unfortunates who had been combed fromthe slums. It seemed that Mr. Salvador had some sort of connectionwith the Lady Wilburdon Foundation, a British charity group thatoperated free clinics and hospitals all over India. Mr. Salvador had exploited this connection, recruiting medical students from all overthe country as brain damage talent scouts who would scanincoming cases and let him know of any promising prospects. In addition to the two whose brains had already been sampled, Dr.Radhakrishnan saw a man who had had a brick dropped on hishead in a construction site. A soldier shot through the brain duringethnic violence in Srinagar. A lunch delivery boy from Delhi whohad been thrown off his motorcycle rickshaw in a collision with alorry. A street kid from Bombay who, in trying to do a second-story job on an old colonial structure, had slipped and fallen twelvefeet; a spike on the wrought-iron fence had entered his openmouth, passed up through his palate, and impaled his brain.

 Even by Western standards, the care these patients werereceiving was fairly generous. The building was no architectural gem, but it was clean and well maintained. It was not lavishlyappointed with high-tech equipment, but it was well-staffed withattentive nurses and nursing students who were clearly doing allthey could to see to the patients' individual needs. And none ofthese patients was paying a single rupee. Most of them had norupees to begin with.

 Building 1 had its own generators, a pair of brand-new Hondaportable units delivering a hundred and twenty volts of all-American sixty-cycle power. The juice was filtered and con­ditioned through an uninterruptible power supply and then routedthrough shiny, freshly installed conduit to be a generous number ofgalvanized steel junction boxes, bolted to the barracks walls everycouple of meters, studded with American-style three-prong outlets.All of this had been setup so that Zeldo and his ilk could fly straightin from California, drop their whores off at the Imperial, and plugtheir computer and other more arcane devices straight into the wallwithout having to deal with the awful culture shock of incom­patible plugs and voltages. More to the point, the Honda generatorswould not flicker, spike, brown out, and back out as the Delhi grid was apt to. No precious data would be lost to unpredictable Third World influences.

 Zeldo and a couple of other slangy pizza-eating beards fromAmerica had laid claim to one end of Building 1 and set up their own little outpost of heavy metal music and novelty foam-rubbersledgehammers for pounding on their workstations when they gotfrustrated. They had even erected a sign: PACIFIC NETWARE-ASIAN HEADQUARTERS. On his way in, Dr. Radhakrishnanhad noted the presence of a freshly installed satellite dish, and hecould not help but suppose that they were connected to that.

 Mr. Salvador had his own little nook at the other end of thebuilding, as far away from the foam rubber sledgehammers as hecould get. He was not in at the moment, but Dr. Radhakrishnanknew Mr. Salvador's style when he saw it: a heavy antique desk, comfortably scuffed, an electric shoe polisher, and every communications device known to science.

 The intervening space was all at Dr. Radhakrishnan's disposal. Atthis point it was all new, empty desks and new, empty filingcabinets. A few people had already moved in. Supposedly, Toyodawas on his way in from Elton and might have already arrived.There were also a few promising Indian graduate students whomMr. Salvador had managed to recruit away from their positions inAmerica and Europe, and there were signs that some of thesepeople had already arrived, claimed desks, and gotten down towork.

 At the moment there was nothing for Dr. Radhakrishnan to doexcept sit down with a big stack of medical records that had beenassembled on the head cases in Building 2, and sort through them,looking for patients with the right sort of brain damage.

 A couple of hours after Dr. Radhakrishnan arrived, a patient namedMohinder Singh was brought in. He was a lorry driver fromHimachal Pradesh, way up north in the foothills of the Himalayas.He had been driving down a mountain road with a bundle of half-inch pipe lashed to the back of his lorry. The pipes were apparently of different lengths; some stuck out farther than others. His brakeshad gone out and he had gone off the road and slammed intosomething. The bundle of pipes had shot forward. The longest onehad come in through the back window of the truck, struck him justbehind the ear, passed all the way through his head, and emergedthrough one of the eyeballs. A nearby road crew had used ahacksaw to cut off most of the pipe, leaving only the portion thatwas stuck through his head, and he had been evacuated to a nearby Lady Wilburdon Charities clinic where he had been noticed by one of the talent scouts.

 He did not look very promising at first. It seemed likely that thepipe had smashed things around quite a bit inside there and bruisedlarge portions of the brain. But Dr. Radhakrishnan had not gottento where he was by being hasty and superficial. He shipped Singh down the road to the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences for aseries of head scans.

 AIIMS was India's foremost medical research institute and it wasonly a couple of minutes away from the Barracks along the Delhi Ring Road. They would be able to take some excellent pictures of Mr. Singh's brain with the equipment they had there. And, in a stroke of luck, the chunk of pipe that was still embedded in Mr. Singh's head was made out of copper, a nonmagnetic substance;they would be able to run him through an NMR scanner withoutturning it into a projectile.

 Dr. Radhakrishnan was stunned to learn that the pipe had gone through his head almost three days previously. He must have beerin great pain, but he refused to acknowledge it. From the headdown he was well-nourished and in perfect health. This was one patient who was not going to go into shock every time they put aneedle in his arm.

 When Singh came back from AIIMS with a stack of films andscans piled on his chest, Dr. Radhakrishnan was pleasantly sur­prised. The pipe was thin-walled, cut off fresh and sharp on the endthat had gone through Singh's head. As best as Dr. Radhakrishnancould tell from trying to interpret the images, it had sliced its waythrough the soft, gelatinous brain tissue, rather than shoving itaround and bruising it. It had acted almost like a core sampler.

 Once the pipe was taken out and some of the mess cleaned up,assuming that Singh did not get infected, which was simply aquestion of antibiotics, he was going to be an ideal candidate fortherapy.

 "Not a whiner," Mr. Salvador said, when he came by later toinspect. "Robust. Positive attitude, as far as I can tell. Willing to tryjust about anything. He reminds me of the chap in the States."

 "What chap?"

 "Whom you heard on the tape. Whose scans you looked at."

 "Ah, yes."

 A thrilling sensation suddenly washed over Dr. Radhakrishnan'sbody. A wave of adrenaline seemed to be rushing through hiscirculatory system like a chemical tsunami. He opened his eyes alittle wider and blinked a few times as though he had just steppedout into bright warm sunlight after a long winter in Elton, New

 Mexico, and his body rocked from side to side just a little bit, itsstance and balance changing as he stood up straighter, breathed alittle deeper. The jet lag vanished. He looked around him, suddenlytaking in the room with the frighteningly intense glare of a raptorsoaring on a mountain thermal. His hands tingled, almost as if thesaw and the drill were already there, buzzing away, slicingheedlessly through bone, penetrating into the core of some otherhuman being.

 Mr. Salvador could take his Gyrfalcon jet and his cars and hisinstitutes and his hotel suites. He could take them all back to America. It wouldn't matter. This was the feeling that Dr. Radhakrishnan V.R.J.V.V. Gangadhar lived for.

 All of the nurses and orderlies in this part of the barracks had risenuncertainly to their feet. "What are you waiting for!?" he snapped.

 "This poor man has a pipe through his head! Let's get it out."

 13

 "I'm going to be real straight with you," Mel said.

 "Somehow I'm not surprised," Mary Catherine said.They were sitting together at a corner table in an old-fashionedfamily-type Italian restaurant. The restaurant was across the streetand down the block from the hospital where Mary Catherine hadspent most of the last four years. When families of stricken patientshad to eat, they gathered around the big circular tables here andglumly plunged their forks into deep, steaming dishes of lasagna,like surgeons around an operating table.

 "You dad is not a happy camper right now," Mel continued."And it's going to get worse in a week or two, when we have tocome out and tell the public that he has suffered a stroke. I don'tknow how he's going to react."

 She slapped her menu down on the table and stopped evenpretending to read it. "Enough, enough," she said. "What the hellare you saying?"

 "Your dad would rather die than live the way he is now," Melsaid.

 Mary Catherine kept looking and listening for a few seconds,until she finally realized that this was all there was to it. If Mel hadbeen talking about anyone else, "he would rather die" would havebeen a figure of speech. But not with Dad. She could just imaginehim, sitting down there in Tuscola, making the executive decisionthat it was time to die, and then formulating his plan."That's enough," she said. "That's all you have to say."Then she closed her eyes and silently let tears run down her face for a half a minute or so.

 She opened her eyes, rubbed her face with her napkin, blinkedaway the last tears. Mel was sitting with his hands folded together,patiently waiting for her to finish. Out of the corner of her eye she could see a hefty waitress loitering with her pad and pen. The helphere knew how to deal with grief. The waitress was trying to figureout -when it was okay to approach the table.

 "Okay, I'm ready to order," Mary Catherine said, louder than she had intended.

 The waitress approached. Mel hurriedly snatched up his menu and began to scan it; he wasn't ready. Watching him, MaryCatherine suddenly felt a lot of affection for good old Mel, trying topick out an entree, any entree, because Mary Catherine was ready to order.

 "I'll have the fettucine with pesto and a club soda," MaryCatherine said.

 "Some kind of baked noodle thing without any meat," Mel said."Lasagna? Manicotti?" the waitress said. But Mel could not be bothered with details; he didn't hear her. "And a glass of white," he said, "You want a drink, Mary Catherine?"

 "No thanks, I'm working," she said. Finally the knot went out of her throat and she felt better. She took a couple of deep breaths."All clear," she said.

 "You're handling it well," Mel said. "You're doing a good job ofthis."

 "I suppose he has a little plan all worked out.""Yeah. The den. Sometime when there's no kids out in front of the house, I would guess."

 "He'll probably use the big shotgun from Vietnam, right?"Mel shrugged. "Beats me. I'm. not privy to all his decisions.""You know, James and I always used to get into trouble whenPatricia was babysitting us as a kid. And Mom and Dad would come home and be just shocked." Mary Catherine laughed out loud, blowing off tension. "Because Patricia was such a nice girl and why were we being so mean to her?"Mel laughed."So now I'll have to go home and give Dad a hard time forwanting to shoot himself while Patricia's babysitting him." Sheheaved a big sigh, trying to throw off the aching feeling in her ribs. "But it's really hard to talk to him when he's in that - that wholesituation he's in now."

 "See, he's acutely aware of that. And that's why he made thisdecision."

 "So why are you here?" she said. "Is this an official message fromDad?"Mel snorted. "You kidding? He'd kill me if he knew I was tellingyou this."

 "Oh. I thought I was being given one last chance to go downand talk to him before he did it."

 "No way. I think I caught him in the act. Lining up hisshot," Mel said. "Now he's too embarrassed to actually do it for awhile."

 "Well...of course I want him to live. But I have to admitkilling himself now would be a lot more true to his nature."

 "Absolutely," Mel said. "And it would give him a chance to getin a last dig at Patricia, which is incentive enough." Mary Catherine laughed."But he's not gonna do it," Mel said.

 "Why not?" It was unusual to think of Dad making up his mindto do something, and then holding back.

 "There's one possibility we are investigating. A new therapy thatmight bring him back to where he was."

 "I haven't heard of any such thing," Mary Catherine said.Mel set his briefcase up on the table and snapped it open. Hepulled out a manila envelope and handed it to Mary Catherine.

 Inside was a stack of a dozen or so research papers, mostlyreprints from technical journals. On top was an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph of a rakishly modern, high-tech structure on a bluff above the ocean. "What is this place?"

 "The Radhakrishnan Institute. They do heavy-duty neurologicalresearch. Those papers describe some of the work they've beendoing."

 Mary Catherine set the photograph aside and began to flipthrough the research papers.

 "I thought you might be interested in seeing some of that stuff. It's all gibberish to me," Mel said.

 Mary Catherine frowned. "I'm familiar with these papers. I'veseen them. All in the last three years."

 "So?"

 "Well, the stuff described here is all fairly basic research. I mean,in this one here, they're talking about a technique to grow baboonbrain cells in vitro and then reimplant them in the baboon's brain."

 "So?"

 "So the date on the paper is three months ago. Which means itwas probably written sometime last year."

 "So?" Mel would continue to asking this question until hell frozeover or he understood what she was getting at.

 "So, it's like these guys just invented the wheel last year, and now they're claiming that they can make a car."

 "You're saying it's a hell of a stretch between putting some newcells into a baboon's head, and fixing your dad."

 "Exactly."

 "How long would it take to cover that ground?"

 "Well, I don't know. It's never been done before. But I wouldthink it would take at least five or ten years, if everything wentwell."

 "Why would they-"

 "They're neurosurgeons, Mel. Neurosurgeons are the ultimatemacho shitheads of the medical world. Nobody can stand them.Their solution to everything is cold steel. But they can never reallydo anything."

 "What do you mean? Cutting a hole in a guy's brain seems likedoing a hell of a lot."

 "But there's no cure for most neuro problems. They can chopout a tumor or a hematoma. But they can't really cure theimportant problems, and, because they are macho shitheads, thatdrives them crazy. Clearly, that's the motivation behind thisresearch. And the inflated claims."

 Mel pondered this one for a while.

 Mary Catherine sipped on her club soda and watched Melponder it. As usual, it seemed that his affair had a lot of dimensionsthat he wasn't telling her about. A gray winter light was shining in through the window, bringing all of the wrinkles in Mel's face into high relief, and suddenly the look on his face seemed frighteninglyintense to her. "This is a tough one," he finally said, shaking hishead. "Too much emotional shit getting in the way. Can't thinkstraight."

 "What are you thinking, Mel?"

 Mel shook his head. "Five or ten years. See, I haven't reallytalked to anyone yet. All I get is feelers. These feelers are so subtleI can't even tell if they are really there. Like this here" - he pointedto the photograph and the papers - "came in the guise of a fund-raising mailing. They wanted to now if your dad wanted tocontribute to this thing. But it's no coincidence. I know that fordamn sure."

 "Have they offered to fix Dad's brain, or not?"

 "Absolutely not, and you can bet they never will," Mel said. "They will wait for us to ask them. That way, if it goes wrong, it was our idea. But from the way they are acting, you would thinkthat they were ready to put him under the knife tomorrow."

 "So here is the sixty-four thousand dollar question," Mary Catherine said. "Does Dad believe that these people can fix himup? Does he believe it enough to keep him from killing himself?"

 "For now, definitely. He won't do it today, or tomorrow.But. . ." Mel stopped in midsentence.

 "But if I blab my big mouth and say that this is highly speculativeand might be five or ten years down the road, that's different,"Mary Catherine said.

 "I don't like to put this pressure on you," Mel said, "but yeah, Ithink you have a point there." He reached across the table, grabbed the photograph, and held it up. "This keeps him alive. It's his hope.It's all he has right now."

 "Well, that's good," Mary Catherine said.

 Mel gave her a penetrating look. "How is it good?"

 She was taken aback by the question. "It keeps him alive, likeyou said. And even if it does take five or ten years before this surgery can be performed, we can keep his hope alive until then.And then, maybe someday, we'll have him back."

 Mel stared at her morosely. "Shit. You've got it too."

 "Got what?"

 "That same look on your face as Willy had when I told him about this." Mel slapped the picture facedown on the table, broke eye contact, looked out the window, started rubbing his chin.

 "What are you thinking about?" she prompted him after a fewminutes.

 "Same thing as ever. Power." Mel said. "Power and how it works." He heaved a big sigh. "The power that some unheard-ofthing called the Radhakrishnan Institute is suddenly wielding overthe Cozzanos." He heaved another big sigh. "And over me."

 "Your emotions getting in the way?"

 "Yeah."

 "Get a detached opinion, then."

 "That's a good idea. I should talk to Sipes down there at the U."

 "Don't. Sipes is a big-time researcher in these fields."

 "So he's a good guy to talk to, right?"

 "Not necessarily. That means he has theories of his own.Theories that may compete with Radhakrishnan's."

 "Good point. Very devious thinking by your standards," Melsaid with cautious admiration. "Why don't you go check it outyourself?"

 Mary Catherine was startled. She blushed slightly. "I thought theidea was to be objective," she said.

 "Objective is nice, it's a cute idea," Mel said, "but there'snothing like family, is there?"

 "Well-"

 "Suppose we did find some supposedly objective doctor to checkthis Radhakrishnan thing out for us. Would you really take hisword for it?"

 "No," she admitted, "I'd want to go and see this thing formyself, before Dad went under the knife."

 "Done. I'll hire you, on an hourly basis, as a medical consultant for Cozzano Charities," Mel said. "Your job will be to investigatethe medical qualifications of research programs that we are considering donating to. And right now we are considering a donation to the Radhakrishnan Institute."

 "Mel, I'm a resident. I can't take time off."

 "That," Mel said, "is a political problem between CozzanoCharities and the director of your fine hospital. And I have beenknown to involve myself in politics from time to time."

 14

 During the wintry depths of his depression, his seasonalaffective disorder in Elton, New Mexico, Dr. Radhakrishnanwould have settled for any kind of surgery at all. He would sit in hishouse, looking out the windows into the dim blue light, which would sift down from the sky like a gradual snowfall, and watch theneighbors' dogs sniff and dig into snow-banks, and wonder how one went about getting one's hands on a dog, and whether it was technically illegal to do brain surgery on one, just for practice. Now that he was back in the saddle, though, he was starting to get picky.In this phase of the project, they were working on Mr. Easyriderand Mr. Scatflinger, not their real names. The samples of braintissue that had been overnight-expressed to Dr. Radhakrishnan inElton had belonged to these two men.

 It was not entirely clear what their real names were. Both of the patients were in the category of found objects. Neither one was neurologically equipped to identify himself, and if either of them had been in the habit of carrying identification, it had beenremoved by other persons before they had come under the purview ofthe authorities. Before Dr. Radhakrishnan arrived to impose some sense of decorum on the Barracks, the Americans (naturally) had come up with these names. Like everything else that bubbled upover the rim of the icky cultural stewpot of America, the names werepervasive and sticky and could not be scrubbed off onceapplied. Actually, for a while they had referred to Mr. Scatflinger as Mr. Shitpitcher, but this was completely unacceptable - the nurses could not even bring themselves to say it - and so Dr. Radhakrishnan had changed it.

 Mr. Easyrider had been run over by a motorcycle. They could not be positive about this, since there were no witnesses to theevent, but the motorcycle track running over the side of his headprovided telling circumstantial evidence. The resulting trauma hadcaused a subarachnoid hemorrhage, which is to say that a blood vessel had burst inside his head and bled internally, killing part ofthe brain.

 Mr. Scatflinger, nee Shitpitcher, had been employed in heavingcow manure on to a trailer. The trailer had tipped, an avalanche hadtaken place, and his legs had been underneath it. There were majorbroken bones. A fat embolism formed at the site of one of thesebreaks, passed up into his heart, and then apparently crossed overfrom one side of his heart to the other through a small congenital hole. From there it was pumped straight up his carotid artery intohis brain where it caused a massive stroke. This was known as a paradoxical embolism.

 If Dr. Radhakrishnan were to take certain doctrines of hisreligion absolutely literally, he would not be allowed to have any contact with either Mr. Easyrider or Mr. Scatflinger. Yet today he was going to carve great holes in their skulls and implant freshbiochips. Of course he was wearing gloves, so technically speakinghe wasn't coming into contact with them. But this was atechnicality.

 Anyone who adhered, at least nominally, to any religion that wasinvented millennia ago by people who ran around in burlap andbelieved that the Earth was built on the back of a turtle - that is, any of the major religions - ran into little dilemmas like those on aregular basis. The Christians practiced ritual cannibalism. When­ever he flew between the West and India there was always at leastone Muslim on the plane who had to get out the in-flightmagazine, check out the route map on the back page, triangulateagainst the position of the sun, and try to figure out in whichdirection Mecca lay. And when the ambulance had brought a Chiricahua Apache in to the Elton State University hospitals witha severe brain bleed that needed emergency surgery, Dr.Radhakrishnan had not had time to consult all of the religiousauthorities in order to figure out whether Hinduism allowed him to touch an Apache. He just gloved up and dove in there. At acertain point one had to just shrug, stop looking over one'sshoulder theologically, and get on with life. Perhaps in some later life, at some more mystical plane of existence, Dr. Radhakrishnanwould find out whether or not he had broken any cosmic rules bytouching an Apache in New Mexico, or by touching Messrs.Easyrider and Scatflinger here in Delhi. In the meantime, likeeveryone else, he had to translate the arcane precepts of his ancientreligion into a somewhat looser and vaguer set of rules called ethics,or values.

 "I am waiting for the biochips," he said into the telephone."Waiting and waiting and waiting."

 There was a brief silence on the other end of the line, or whatpassed for silence. Indian telephones had a sort of organic quality.Not the sterile silence of American fiber-optic linkups. On one ofthese phones, one felt that one was plugged into the electro­magnetic fabric of the entire universe; the phone system just onehuge antenna picking up emanations from other telephones, tele­vision and radio stations, power lines, automobile ignition systems,quasars in deep space, and stirring them together into a thick soniccurry. This is what Dr. Radhakrishnan listened to while he waswaiting for Zeldo to come up with another excuse for not beingready.

 "There's just one more bug that we really ought to get rid of,"Zeldo said. "Twenty of the best guys in the business are going overthis code line by line."

 "Twenty? You only have four people there!"

 "Most of the work is being done in California. Over a satellite link,"Zeldo said.

 ''Well," Dr. Radhakrishnan said, "while your team is sipping espresso in Marin County, my team is standing in a hallway here at AIIMS with two brain-damaged patients on gurneys, waiting."

 A long silence, the sonic curry poured forth from the telephone."I don't know what to tell you," Zeldo said. "It's not quite ready."

 "Did you hear about the programmer's wife?" Dr. Radhakrishnansaid. "She is still a virgin. Her husband just sits on the edge of the bedevery night and tells her how great it's going to be."

 Zeldo did not laugh. Dr. Radhakrishnan was beginning to getthat tingly feeling in his hands.

 He stuck his head out of the office and looked down the hallway. Mr. Scatflinger was lying on the gurney, quiescent, his head freshlyshaved, blue lines drawn on his scalp like the rhumb lines of anancient navigator.

 "Can you or can you not reprogram this thing remotely, afterimplantation?"

 "We can modify the software. That's how we're programmingit as we speak. It's sitting in the culture tank and we're talking to itover the radio."

 "It's finished."

 "No."

 "Put the culture tank into the truck and get it over here now.That is an order."

 The chip consisted of a silicon part - the part that Zeldo wasresponsible for - surrounded by an inert teflon shell, connected oneither end to brain cells that had been grown in a tank in Seattle.The only way to keep those brain cells alive was to supply themwith oxygen and nutrients. The biochip sat in a tank full of a care­fully pH-balanced, temperature-regulated, oxygenated chemicalsolution that Zeldo and the other Americans referred to as "chickensoup." The soup gave the brain cells everything they needed to stayalive, except for intellectual stimulation. The chip was only acouple of centimeters long in its entirety and so the tank itselfwasn't that large, just a few liters in size. But it was attached to avariety of machines to keep it properly balanced and regulated, sothe apparatus as a whole ended up being roughly the size of avending machine. It rolled around on oversized rubber wheels, andit had enough built-in backup battery power so that it could beunplugged from the wall for up to half an hour. All of thisportability was needed, for the time being, because of the far-flungnature of this enterprise. The chips had first been incarnated inSeattle, placed into this tank, and then rolled on board a speciallychartered GODS jet, where the support systems had drawn powerfrom the airplane's generators. From the Indira Gandhi Inter­national Airport, the whole mess had been transported to theBarracks for debugging. Now it had to be shipped down the roadto AIIMS for the actual surgical procedure. Each time it wastrundled from one place to another it had to survive on batterypower for a few minutes.

 Zeldo and his cohorts referred to the apparatus as the Cabinet ofDr. Caligari. They hauled it around in the back of a truck. The truck poked its way slowly down the Delhi Ring Road, pulled offinto the parking lots of AIIMS, and backed up to a loading dock.

 The back door flew open and there were Zeldo and his hackers, surrounding the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, all blinking lights and bubbling tubes.

 There was an interval of half an hour or so, during which the patients were prepared for surgery, the operating room people gotscrubbed and gloved, and Zeldo and his crew got the Cabinet ofDr. Caligari transferred across the hospital to the operating theater, leapfrogging from one power outlet to the next, down hallways and up elevators. Then Dr. Radhakrishnan just had to perform a coupleof operations.

 It was strange, and possibly ludicrous, to be doing both Mr. Easyrider and Mr. Scatflinger at the same time. Each operation was a major event in itself. But there were many strange and ludicrousthings about the way the Radhakrishnan Institute was currentlyfunctioning. As they went over the plans for this day, they had allshared a creepy, unspoken feeling that they were extending them­selves years beyond where they really ought to be, and that manythings might go wrong.

 The operations were conceptually simple. Incisions were made along the lines that had been drawn on the patients' shave heads.Flaps of scalp were peeled back and the bleeding was cauterizedor clamped off. When the actual skull was exposed, Dr.Radhakrishnan cut through it with a bone saw.

 A polygon of skull, a trap door of sorts, was cut into the side ofthe head and saved for later use. Still, the brain itself was notexposed; they looked through the hole at a tough inner membrane,the brain's final layer of protection. When this was flapped out of the way, they were looking at actual brain matter.

 "It was a debacle. I am personally ashamed. I will never do anythinglike that again. The level of incompetence makes me physically ill. I may shoot myself," Dr. Radhakrishnan was saying.

 "Have a drink," Mr. Salvador said. This was easy to arrange because they were sitting in the bar of the Imperial.

 "When I am tense I bite my lip. Today I think I have swallowedhalf of my own blood supply."

 "Think of it as opening day for a new business venture," Mr.Salvador said. "It's always a debacle."

 "Evendebacle does not do justice to this day," Dr. Radhakrishnansaid. "It was an apocalypse."

 Mr. Salvador shrugged. "That's why we make mistakes, so wecan learn from them."

 "One gets very impatient, doing research for years and years.The pace is so gradual. After a while you say, "I wish I could justget on with it and put one of these things into a human brain andsee what happens. But this business today reminds me of why wetake years and years to get ready for these things."

 "The patients are both alive. All's well that ends well."

 A waiter came by and gave Dr. Radhakrishnan another drink.Mr. Salvador tossed some rupees on to the table. "Why don't youtake that with you?" he said. "I have something to show you."

 "What?"

 "Let's go for a spin."

 The former site of the Ashok Theatre had been surrounded by abarricade twenty feet high. In places it consisted of chain-link fencewith tarps stretched across it. In places it was pieced together with scraps of wood. In and of itself the fence was a considerable invest­ments; the materials that went into it could have housed thousands.Things did not become much clearer after Mr. Salvador and Dr.Radhakrishnan had gotten past the guard at the gate. Most of thesite was filled with a scaffolding. It was just a dense three-dimensional web of steel, with some parts of it additionally shored up with wooden beams. So far most of the work was being done iniron; the scaffolding was intertangled with another web ofreinforcing rods.

 The density of activity was incredible. The site seemed to con­tain several workers per square yard, all doing something as fast asthey could. Several cranes were active, moving giant prefabricatedconstructs of reinforcing rod into place.

 "All reinforced concrete. So it looks like hell until we pour," Mr.Salvador said.

 Dr. Radhakrishnan would have gotten lost in a second, but Mr. Salvador knew his way through the tangle. He led him fearlesslyinto a passage that cut through the heart of it, straight in toward thecenter, brushing past workers the entire way. He noticed along theway that he was now walking on planks. Looking down betweengaps, he could see straight down one or two stories. The place wasextraordinarily well lit with thousands of electric lights strung onlong yellow cords. Hundreds more workers were down belowthem, bending more steel rods into place. Large amounts ofconcrete had already been poured down there.

 As they approached the middle, Dr. Radhakrishnan could seeglimpses of more concrete through gaps in the scaffolding. It was asort of squat concrete obelisk, rectangular in cross-section, risingstraight up out of the foundation below them, up to a height ofthree stories above their heads. It was large enough, perhaps, to put a volleyball court on each level. The walls had a few rectangular openings on each level where, presumably, this part of the buildingwould later be connected to adjacent rooms or hallways.Thousands of reinforcing bars sprouted from the walls at the levelsof the floors-to-be and along the locations of future walls, givingthe whole tower a bristly, hairy appearance. The bare concretewalls, still so new and clean they were almost white, had alreadybeen partly obscured by conduits, plumbing, and ductwork thatgrew up and snaked around the structure like tropical vinesclimbing a tree. Craning his neck to look up towards the top, Dr.Radhakrishnan could see the louvered enclosures of large pieces ofmachinery mounted on the roof, probably air conditioners and electrical generators.

 The obelisk was connected to the surrounding scaffold work bya couple of catwalks, giving it the appearance of a keep in the centerof a medieval castle. When they walked across the bridges into thebuilding, they passed through some kind of a cultural divide.Everyone working inside here was Korean, Japanese, or American and they were speaking English to each other with varying degrees of proficiency. Some of them were wearing smart, clean coveralls,and some of them were wearing ties. Two or three big Calyx computer systems were already up and running, nice ones withhuge color screens, and engineers were using them to zoom in onvarious subsystems.

 "This, of course, is the essential core of the operation," Mr.Salvador said. "The only part that you will really need in order tocontinue your research. It will be ready to use in a week. As longas you don't mind walking through an active construction site inorder to reach it, that is."

 "Not at all," Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

 15

 Merely scooping out a hole in a man's brain and dropping ina biochip was not enough. It was like assaulting a supercomputerwith a Skilsaw and then throwing in a handful of loose silicon chips.

 The biochip had to be connected into the brain tissue in billions or trillions of different ways. All of the connections were micro­scopic and could not be made by the hand of any surgeon. Theyhad to grow.

 Brain cells didn't grow. But the connections between them did. The network of linkages was constantly shifting and reconnectingitself in a process that was usually described as "learning." Dr.Radhakrishnan did not really care for this terminology because itcontained a value judgement. It implied that every time newsynapses were formed inside a person's mind it was because theywere memorizing Shakespeare or being taught how to integratetranscendental functions. Of course, in reality most of the internalrewiring that went on in people's brains took place in response towatching game shows on television, being beaten up by familymembers, figuring out the cheapest place to buy cigarettes, andbeing conditioned not to mix plaids with stripes.

 As soon as it had seemed like it was a safe bet that Mr. Easyriderand Mr. Scatflinger were going to live for while, they were trans­ferred back to the Barracks in a specially equipped ambulance. Theywere laid side by side in a separate room that had been built onto oneend of Building 2. They were connected up to numerous machines,wired into a support system. Each of them had a red polygon on hishead, a U-shaped welt, hairy with black sutures, marking theboundary of the flap that had been peeled back during surgery.

 In the center of the area outlined by the surgical scar, a bundleof lines was plugged into the patient's head. It passed through the middle of the flake of skull that had been neatly sawed out by Dr.Radhakrishnan's bone saw. While Dr. Radhakrishnan hadoccupied himself with implanting the biochip, a lesser surgeon - more of a technician, really - had drilled a few holes through thedisembodied chunk of skull and implanted a plastic connector. The connector was about the size of a dime and was really a cluster ofsmaller connections: half a dozen tiny tubes for passing fluids in andout, and a miniature, fifty-pin electrical plug, a nearly microscopicversion of the port on the back of a computer. Since mostcommunication between the biochip and the outside world wassupposed to happen over the radio, only a few of these fifty pinswere hooked up to the biochip itself. Most of them were hookedup to sensors that monitored the patient's condition and to theelectrostimulus system that was supposed to encourage the growthof new connections between brain and biochip.

 When the operation was finished, this connector peekedthrough the skin, somewhat in the fashion of a wall socket. The researchers could then interface with the patient by sticking amatching plug into the socket; when it was stuck in properly, all ofthe fluid and electrical connections were made in an instant. Somany tubes and wires were crammed together in this bottleneck that they seemed to explode from the side of the patient's head.Some of the connections ran directly to various pieces of bedsidemachinery that monitored pressure inside the skull, delivered drugs,or helped to oxygenate the brain tissue in the biochip. Others weretaped to the head of the bed, from which they ran over to thenearest wall, passed through a hole, and ran through a conduit thatconnected the two buildings.

 The people in Building 1 saw Mr. Easyrider and Mr. Scatflingeras media entities, nothing more. No odors, no fluids, just images onTV monitors, tracings on oscilloscopes, graphics on their Calyx workstations, and the occasional disembodied sound effect comingout of a speaker. This, Dr. Radhakrishnan reflected, made it a loteasier to deal with them objectively.

 There was not much to do for the first few days. The brain cells inthe biochip had not yet had time to connect themselves up to thepatients' brain, so the chip was neurologically inert, just a deadpiece of shrapnel embedded in the head. Then, one morning atabout three o'clock, computer screens all over Building 1 suddenlycame alive as a neuron in Mr. Scatflinger's brain hooked up with aneuron on the fringe of the biochip.

 As soon as Dr. Radhakrishnan got there, they popped the corkson a few bottles of champagne and then stood under the monitorfor a while, watching the data stream by. Zeldo did some typing onhis workstation and brought up a new window on the screen, this one showing a running graph of the brain activity.

 "Someone go shine a light in his eyes," Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

 "Yes, Doctor!" said one of his Indian grad students. He ran outof the building, pulling a penlight from his pocket. A few moments later the grad student was visible on the closed-circuit monitor thathad been showing live coverage of Mr. Scatflinger from Building2. All eyes flicked back and forth between the closed-circuit set andthe computer monitor as the grad student leaned over the sleeping Mr. Scatflinger, peeled back one of his eyelids with his thumb, andshone the penlight into it.

 The graph jumped. The crowd went wild.

 "Well done, Doctor," someone was saying. It was Mr. Salvador,shaking his hand, offering a cigar. "Remarkable success, especiallyunder the circumstances." Around ninea.m., a burst of activity showed up on Mr. Easyrider's heretofore quiescent monitor. But even in the corner of his eye, Dr. Radhakrishnan could see that something was wrong. The signals coming in from the biochip showed no clear pattern in terms of intensity or duration.

 "Glitches," Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

 "But a whole hell of a lot of glitches," Zeldo said.

 "Glicherama," said one of the other Americans. Dr.Radhakrishnan bit his lip, knowing that for the rest of his career,this phenomenon, whenever it occurred, would be referred to asGlicherama.

 Sudden movement caught his eye. He looked over at the closed-circuit monitor for Mr. Easyrider and saw, instead of the patient,the backsides of several nurses who were standing around him,working feverishly.

 By the time Dr. Radhakrishnan made it over to Building 2, Mr.Easyrider was dead. His heart had stopped beating. They wheeledout the defib cart and shocked him a couple of times, trying to geta stable rhythm back, but in the end they could get nothing but badrhythms on the scope, and finally no rhythm at all.

 When they were sure he was dead, when they had closed hiseyes,  rolled  away  the  cart,  and  washed  their  hands,  Dr.Radhakrishnan picked up the intercom to Building 1. "Are yougetting any signals from the chip?" he said. He asked the questionout of purely academic interest; supposedly there was as bit ofrandom electrical activity in the brain after death."It's been dead for a couple of minutes," Zeldo said. "Completely dead?"

 "Completely dead. We didn't think to include a surgeprotector."

 "Surge protector?"

 "Yeah. To protect the chip from sparks and lightning bolts, youknow."

 "I haven't seen any lightning."

 "You held the lightning in your hands. You shocked him, man.That jolt from the defibrillator blew our chip to kingdom come."They did a postmortem more or less on the spot. A sterile environment was not required for an autopsy, so they partitionedoff one corner of the room to prevent other patients from seeingwhat was happening, and Dr. Radhakrishnan took Mr. Easyrider apart, piece by piece, paying special attention to the head.

 Building 2 was a distracting work environment because it wasfull of head cases - old ones dying of natural causes and new onesbeing wheeled in all the time, from all over the subcontinent. Braininjury sometimes left people as vegetables, but in some cases itcould cause bizarre behavior, and over the brief course of thisproject they had already seen their quota of screeches and headbangers. In the middle of Dr. Radhakrishnan's autopsy, theyapparently brought in a new one. A loud, coarse voice began toecho off the tin ceiling:

 "WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBAWUBBA WUBBA . . ."

 It was no worse than a room full of excited baboons. Hecontinued working, narrating his observations into a tape recorder;but he had to speak a little more loudly now because underneathhis words was a constant background noise of WUBBA WUBBAWUBBA WUBBA WUBBA . . .

 The cause of death was obvious enough. Mr. Easyrider's bodyhad rejected the implant. Dr. Radhakrishnan tried to be clinicalabout it.

 WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA . . ."The  organic  portion  of the  biochip  shows  pronouncedatrophy..."

 WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA . . ."The inorganic or silicon portion of the biochip is virtuallyrattling around loose inside the skull . . ." That was not veryscientific. He took a deep breath.

 WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBAWUBBA WUBBA . . .

 "There is considerable scarring and atrophy in the portions of thebrain adjacent to the implant." His head was spinning. He wastired. He just wanted to sit down and have a drink. "Conclusion:the host rejected the graft."

 He was becoming conscious of another irrelevant sensory input besides the stream of WUBBAs: he was smelling perfume. It was not something that would really pass for perfume in India, wherepeople knew as much about tastes and smells as Americans knew about heavy metal music. This was some kind of tedious lavender-and-roses concoction, something stupid and English.

 "It appears that necrosis started at the site of the implant andspread to the brainstem - leading to the patient's demise."WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA . . ."Doc?" someone said. Zeldo.

 He looked up at Zeldo, feeling very tired. Zeldo had pulled thecurtain aside and was now gaping at the bloody, dismemberedcorpse of Mr. Easyrider. He was not a medical person and was notinured to this kind of thing.

 Dr. Radhakrishnan turned to face Zeldo, bumping the table with his hip. The hemisphere of Mr. Easyrider's skull rocked back andforth a little bit on the tabletop.

 "Two things," Zeldo said.

 "Yes?"

 WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA . . .

 "There's a problem with Scatflinger. And there's a lady here tosee you."

 All of a sudden, the fact that he had gotten up at three in themorning was really getting to Dr. Radhakrishnan.

 Maybe these were simple problems, easy to fix. He emergedfrom the autopsy room still wearing his rubber gloves, smearedwith blood and gray matter. If this was just going to take a minute,there was no point in getting ungloved and then regloving later."First things first," he said, and led Zeldo toward the room that, asof this morning, Mr. Scatflinger now had all to himself.

 As he approached the door, the sound of WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA grew louder.

 No. It couldn't be.

 He opened the door. Half of his staff was gathered around thebed.

 Mr. Scatflinger, who had been unable to do anything except he in bed since his accident, was now sitting bolt upright in bed.

 He had been totally aphasic as well, unable to make a sound. Butnow he was saying, "WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA" asloudly as he could.

 Everyone was looking at Dr. Radhakrishnan to see how he wasgoing to react.

 "Well," he said to his staff, "I think one can make the case thatbeing able to say 'WUBBA WUBBA' is better than not being ableto say anything at all, and that, at least in a limited sense, we havedone Mr. Scatflinger here a great service."

 "Excuse me! Are you the gentleman in charge?" someone said.It was a lady's voice. Not just a female voice, but really alady'svoice.

 Dr. Radhakrishnan turned around slowly, half-paralyzed by anunexplainable sense of fear and loathing. The odor of lavender androses was quite strong now.

 He was looking directly into a bosom of Himalayan proportions,stoutly contained in some kind of undergarment and covered with aflowery print dress. His gaze traveled from the bottom to the top ofthe bosom, changing focus the whole way, and then encountereda soft, pale, yet sturdy neck. Above that was a face.

 It was a nice English lady's face, but too big. It was like lookingat the young Victoria through a big Fresnel lens. And on top, wherecustom would dictate some kind of a tightly curled, chemicallyinduced permanent wave, was something altogether out of place, a short, simple, straight, and maybe just a big shaggy kind of haircut.Certainly not an ugly way to wear one's hair, but just a little bit outof keeping with the social stature that was implied by her accent.

 "Madam," he said, "I am Dr. Radhakrishnan." He extended hishand.

 "Lady Wilburdon. How do you do," she said, shaking it.

 "Oh, god," Zeldo said, and ran away, gagging audibly.

 A gasp came from the staff. Dr. Radhakrishnan felt the back ofhis neck get hot. He was tired, he was stressed, and he had forgottenabout the gloves. This Lady Wilburdon creature now had Mr.Easyrider's brains all over her hand.

 There was brief moment of utter despair as he tried to think of away to draw this fact to her attention without making the breachof etiquette even worse than it already was.

 "Oh, it's really quite all right," she said, fluttering her bloodyhand dismissively. "I worked in the refugee camps of Kurdistan fora month, at the height of the insurrection, so a bit of a mess doesnot trouble me at all. And I wouldn't dream of having you interruptyour work just to shake hands with an interloper."

 Dr. Radhakrishnan was looking around uneasily, hoping to makeeye contact with someone who knew who this lady was, why shewas here, how she had gotten in past all of those Sikh commandos at the front gate, all of those .50-caliber machine-gun nests.

 Behind her he could see another woman, a smaller, auntish lady,conversing with Mr. Salvador. Mr. Salvador kept glancing at thebackside of Lady Wilburdon; he wanted to be here, not there, butclearly was having trouble extricating himself from polite small talkwith this other woman.

 WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA . . .

 "You are...a guest of Mr. Salvador?" he said.

 "Yes. My secretary, Miss Chapman, and I were passing throughDelhi on an inspection tour and we thought we would pop in andsee how Bucky's project was coming along."

 "Bucky?"

 "Yes. Bucky. Buckminster Salvador."

 "His name is Bucky?"

 "Buckminster. The boys at school used to call him B.M. forshort, but we suppressed that. It was uncouth and cruel."

 "School?"

 "The Lady Wilburdon School for Spoiled boys in Newcastleupon Tyne."

 "I didn't know there was such a thing as a school for spoiledboys," Dr. Radhakrishnan said numbly.

 "Oh, yes. There are a lot of them in England, you know. Andall of their parents are desperate for an environment that will givethem structure..."

 "That's quite enough," Mr. Salvador said, interrupting. Dr. Radhakrishnan was shocked to see the look on his face; suddenly he was pale and sweating. His mask of total aplomb had beenshattered, he was rolling his eyes, clearly out of control.

 "Quite enough of what, Bucky?" Lady Wilburdon said, lockingeyes with Mr. Salvador, who looked very short standing next toher.

 "Quite enough of having you stand around in this unpleasant place when I should be treating you to a lavish dinner alongConnaught Circus!" Mr. Salvador improvised. He was close to coming completely unhinged.

 WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA . . ."Oh, but I can go into some restaurant and order a mealwhenever I please. It's not every day I get the opportunity to touran advanced neurological research facility," Lady Wilburdon said.

 "Tour?" Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

 She seemed taken aback. "Yes. Well, I thought, as long as I washere..."

 "Naturally you can have a look around, Lady Wilburdon," Mr.Salvador said, shooting Dr. Radhakrishnan a panicky warning look.Clearly, resistance was out of the question.

 Suddenly Lady Wilburdon was looking past Dr. Radhakrishnan, over his shoulder, and a completely new expression had come overher face. It was a wonderful, sweet, lovely, maternal expression,like a mother greeting her children home from school.

 "Hello, sir, and how do you do? I am so sorry for intruding."

 She was looking at Mr. Scatflinger.

 Mr. Scatflinger was looking right back at her. Staring her straightin the eye. There was even a hint of a smile on his face. "Wubbawubba," he said.

 "Very well, thank you. Perhaps Dr. Radhakrishnan would be sogood as to introduce us?"

 "Yes. Lady Wilburdon, this is, uh, Mr. Banerjee. Mr. Banerjee,Lady Wilburdon."

 "It's so nice to make your acquaintance."

 "Wubba wubba wubba."

 Mr. Salvador was taking advantage of this break in the con­versation to sit on the edge of an empty bed and clamp one handover his face.

 "I take it that Mr. Banerjee will soon be undergoing thismiraculous new surgical procedure that Bucky was telling meabout."

 "Wubba wubba wubba."

 "Actually, he has already undergone it," Dr. Radhakrishnan said.No point in dissembling.

 She was just a trifle taken aback. "I see."

 "Before the operation he could not sit up in bed or speak. Now,as you see, he can sit up for prolonged periods, and he hasdeveloped the ability to say 'wubba wubba.' " "Wubba wubba wubba," Mr. Scatflinger said."Do you suppose that, as time goes on, he will develop theability to say other sorts of things?"

 "Absolutely. You see, the implant has not been patterned yet.There is a powerful computer inside his head. But right now, theconnections are scrambled. The computer has no program. We willhave to train him to speak over a period of weeks or months."

 "I see. So after the operation, there is a prolonged period ofrehabilitation." "Exactly."

 "And the new facility you are building will have such facilities,which, as I notice, are lacking here.""Precisely."

 "Wubba wubba wubba wubba," Mr. Scatflinger said."It was so nice to have met you, Mr. Banerjee," Lady Wilburdonsaid, "and I wish you the best of luck in the course of yourtherapy." She stepped back out of Mr. Scatflinger's room, whichobliged Dr. Radhakrishnan to follow her. "We have high hopes for him," he said.

 "I am sure that you do," Lady Wilburdon said. "But I see thatanother one of your patients has not been as fortunate."

 She was looking over at Mr. Easyrider, sprawled out on a bloodytable with his brains spilling out of his head, the cup of his skullupended next to him.

 Mr. Salvador was still collecting his wits, which had been blownall over the Indo-Gangetic plain. Dr. Radhakrishnan had to handlethis himself.

 The woman had to be important. He had never heard of her, butwith some people, you could just tell that they were important.

 "The name of Lady Wilburdon is famous throughout theworld," he said.

 "I am the seventh person to bear that title," she said, "and by farthe least distinguished."

 "You evidently travel quite a bit, inspecting things."

 "Hundreds of institutions throughout the world, yes."Then you will appreciate, perhaps better than anyone, that thepatients who come into this place are often in very grave condition.""I see that very clearly."

 "It is not unusual for them to pass away while they are under ourcare."

 "Yes," Lady Wilburdon said, "but this poor gentleman passedaway after you performed the operation, did he not?"

 "Ha, ha!" Dr. Radhakrishnan said. "You are astonishingly per­ceptive." No point in denying it, now. "How could you possiblyhave known that?" Maybe this woman had deeper connectionsthan he had supposed.

 "I am not an anatomical expert," Lady Wilburdon said, "but asI cast my eye over the gentleman, I see that you have sawed off the top of his head and extracted a large gray sort of thing that I take tobe his brain."

 "Of course, you are right."

 "And I have taken the liberty of assuming that the distinguisheddirector of this institute would not bother personally to perform adetailed autopsy on a patient who had expired of causes that weremerely incidental."

 "Infection," Dr. Radhakrishnan said. "His surgical woundsbecame infected with a nosocomial microbe, which is to say, a bugthat he picked up in the hospital."

 "I am familiar with the terminology," Lady Wilburdon said, andexchanged an amused look with her female companion.

 Finally Mr. Salvador had recovered sufficiently to weigh in.

 "Infections are always a terrible problem in brain surgery," he said.

 "That  is  why  we  operate  out  of these  buildings,"  Dr.Radhakrishnan lied. "Because they are not hospitals per se, thechance of nosocomial infections is greatly reduced."

 "But we still must perform all of the surgical procedures atAIIMS," Mr. Salvador said.

 "And this is where he picked up the fatal organism," Dr.Radhakrishnan concluded. He and Mr. Salvador exchanged a triumphal look, trying to shore each other up.

 "Then I shall be extremely careful to wash up," Lady Wilburdonsaid, looking at her bloody hand, "now that I too have beeninfected with this very deadly pathogen."

 "Yes. We should all probably do that," Dr. Radhakrishnansaid, "before we spread the infection to Mr. Singh or any of theother patients." This phase of the lying process was known asbackfilling.

 The backfilling process continued as Dr. Radhakrishnan andLady Wilburdon scrubbed themselves in the sink that had been setup at one end of the building. Mr. Salvador and the lady's com­panion, Miss Chapman, washed their hands too, for good measure,to ensure that the fatal infection did not spread through the ward. Lady Wilburdon obviously knew a thing or two about washing upand threw herself into the process at a frighteningly vigorous pitch,running a stiff plastic brush back and forth under her fingernailswith the speed of an automatic paint shaker, spraying a fountain of pink suds into the air. She scrubbed herself all the way to elbows, like a surgeon.

 "You must forgive us for handling your visit so awkwardly anddiscourteously," Mr. Salvador ventured, "as this is the first time thatanyone has ever come to visit any of our patients.""Ooh, how terribly sad," said Miss Chapman."I shall relay news of this situation to the Lady WilburdonOrganisation for the Visitation of Destitute Invalids here in Delhi,"Lady Wilburdon said. "Arrangements can be made-""Oh, we really couldn't ask-"

 "Emotional factors are terribly important. Loneliness can kill justas surely as nosocomial infections."

 "No," Dr. Radhakrishnan said. He had to draw the line some­where. "You are very generous. But I must rule it out on medicalgrounds. Later, when we have the permanent facility constructed,perhaps we can arrange for routine visitation."

 Mr. Salvador cringed visibly. Lady Wilburdon got just a bitsniffy. "Well," she said, "I count myself fortunate that I was able tocome in and have a lovely visit before this very strict policy wasimposed."

 "As you will understand, we did not have to impose a policyuntil now."

 Mr. Salvador was trying to patch it all up. "But if you canprovide me with a forwarding address in England, I will keep you apprised of our progress."

 "England?" Lady Wilburdon said. "Oh, no. We shall be here inIndia for another month at least."

 "Oh. Well, that's delightful news. Delightful.""Of course, we will be all over the subcontinent, but sooner orlater we always come back to Delhi."

 "Then I shall look forward to dinner with you on at least oneoccasion," Mr. Salvador said weakly.

 "When does the next fellow, Mr. Singh, have his operation?""We have it scheduled for Wednesday."

 "Four days from now," Miss Chapman said. She took anoversized appointment calendar, a desktop model, from her totebag, and opened it up. "Mr. Singh has his brainwork done," she mumbled to herself, penciling it in.

 Meanwhile, Lady Wilburdon was reading over her companion'sshoulder. "Tomorrow we leave for Calcutta, to inspect the LadyWilburdon Institute for the Rehabilitation of Syphilitic Lepers." Both men drew sharp breaths.

 "Canthey be rehabilitated?" Mr. Salvador said. He seemedastonished, verging on slightly amused.

 "Syphilitic lepers are easy," Lady Wilburdon said, "compared tospoiled boys."

 Mr. Salvador turned red and shut up, leaving Dr. Radhakrishnanall alone to terminate the conversation. "Feel free to phone when you return to Delhi," he said."Telephone?"

 "Yes. No visitation, remember."

 "But Mr. Singh will be having his operation in the new facility,will he not?"

 "Oh. Yes, that's right. It should be ready by then.""So he will recover in the new facility as well."Dr. Radhakrishnan could only nod.

 "See you in a few days," Miss Chapman said, snapping herappointment book shut and beaming at them cheerily. The two women bustled out and climbed into a waiting car.

 Mr. Salvador spun on his heel, went straight across to Building1, and pulled a bottle of gin out of his desk. He and Dr.Radhakrishnan sat down across from each other, wordlessly, andbegan to drink it, straight, from paper cups. After a minute or two, Zeldo came over and joined them. This was a little troubling in andof itself, because Zeldo was some kind of a puritanical health freak.Drinking straight gin from a paper cup was not his style at all.

 "What wasthat?" Dr. Radhakrishnan finally said, when he and Mr. Salvador, or Bucky, or B.M. as he was called by his schoolchums, both had a few ounces of ethanol pumping through theirsystems.

 Mr. Salvador threw up his hands. "What could I possibly say to you verbally that would add to the impression you have already received?"

 "She knows you."

 Mr. Salvador sighed. "My father was Argentine, of German andItalian ancestry. My mother was British. One of our homes was inEngland and that is where I went to school. Once or twice a year,shewould come seeping through the place to inspect it. She wouldsit in the back of a classroom for a few minutes and watch. Madeall the teachers nervous as hell. Students too. She even made thecustodians nervous."

 "You had dealings with her then?"

 "None. Never. How she could possibly remember my name is acomplete mystery to me. She must have a photographic memory.She is a freak of nature," he finally concluded, belaboring theobvious.

 Dr. Radhakrishnan said nothing. He had the feeling that Mr.Salvador lied to him quite a bit. But this seemed a particularlyobvious lie. Mr. Salvador had been extremely upset. Lady Wilburdonwas more than the titular head of his old school; she must have somepower over him. And the idea of someone actually having powerover the all-powerful Mr. Salvador was certainly interesting.

 "What   killed   Mr.   Easyrider   is   still   mysterious,"   Dr.Radhakrishnan said, "but I have high hopes for Mr. Scatflinger."

 "I don't," Zeldo said. It was the first time he had spoken sincehe had taken to drinking.

 "Why not? Everything's going perfectly with him."

 "Once we get his chip trained," Dr. Radhakrishnan said,"presumably he will become a bit more versatile."

 "We can't train his chip. His chip is dead," Zeldo said.

 "If it were really dead, he wouldn't even be able to say wubbawubba."

 "It crashed. It's stuck. We ran afoul of that bug I was trying towarn you about."

 "So what's it doing?"

 "It got caught in an infinite loop."

 "An infinite loop?"Dr. Radhakrishnan was flabbergasted. Infinitywas a mathematical concept, very easy for a bithead like Zeldo to bandy about, but not something that biologist usually had to deal with.

 "Yes."

 "Meaning?" Mr. Salvador said.

 "Meaning that he will keep saying wubba wubba until he dies,"Zeldo said.

 "Hmm. That's not going to make much of a favorableimpression on Lady Wilburdon," Mr. Salvador said.

 "We can send him back," Dr. Radhakrishnan said. "Send himoff to the hinterlands. He can found his own religious sect."

 16

 It was a creepy and surreal morning when they implanted thebiochips in the mind of Mohinder Singh. Dr. Radhakrishnan gotup early, as he always did on the morning of an operation. He went downstairs, eschewing room service, and watched the sun come upover Delhi from the cafe of the Imperial Hotel. The air pollutionwas especially bad this morning. Some kind of dire temperatureinversion had clamped itself down over the city like a bell jar, trap­ping and concentrating the cocktail of dust, automobile exhaust,coal smoke, woodsmoke, manure smoke, and the ammoniatedgasses that rose up from the stewn excreta of millions of people andanimals. This being winter, the air was relatively humid, or ashumid as it was ever likely to get. The humidity condensed aroundthe countless nuclei provided by all of that air pollution, so that when the sun rose, it had to force its way up through a thick cloacalfog, and turned a furious red color, the color of Elvis's face in his last moments on earth. When it finally burst free of the horizon, thesun simply disappeared and became a mere bright tendency in theburnt-orange sediment of the eastern sky.

 Dr. Gangadhar V.R.J.V.V. Radhakrishnan sipped tea and ran over the whole project one more time, wondering if they hadoverlooked anything.

 Mr. Salvador had been spending even more time than usual onthe telephone recently. This was totally irrelevant to today'soperation, but Dr. Radhakrishnan remained curious about theAmerican side of this project. Old Bucky had to spend a certainamount of time every day at the Barracks. The phone would ring,he would answer it, and he would talk. For hours. And Dr.Radhakrishnan would stroll back and forth through the Barracks,tending to his own work, and occasionally cock an ear in oldBucky's direction, hoping to overhear something.

 Most of what he overheard, he already knew; Mr. Salvador wasjust relaying information about the project to others. But on oneoccasion, wandering around near Mr. Salvador's desk, Dr.Radhakrishnan heard him involved in a very intense, and veryloud, conversation about something called Super Tuesday.

 Dr. Radhakrishnan was sure he had seen this phrase somewherebefore, but he did not have the foggiest idea what it meant. Some kind of American thing. He kept meaning to ask Zeldo if he knew,but kept forgetting.

 After a while, Zeldo came down, murmured a sleepy hello tohim, occupied another table nearby, and began to read theTimes ofIndia.

 Dr. Radhakrishnan had far too much on his mind to concern himself with politics, and rarely looked at theTimes. But whenZeldo moved on to one of the interior pages, opening the paperand holding it up in the air, Dr. Radhakrishnan could clearly see aheadline, down low on the first page:

 U.S. CANDIDATES VIE IN "SUPER TUESDAY"ELECTIONS

 "What is Super Tuesday?" he said.

 Zeldo spoke to him through the paper. "It's today," he said. "A bunch of the states have their primaries on the same day."

 "Primaries?"

 "Yeah. You know. To select the presidential candidates."

 Dr. Radhakrishnan didn't want to hear anything more about it. He knew it would cloud his mind. He sat there drinking his tea.Then it was time to go to work.

 It all went smoothly there in the magnificent central operatingtheater of the Radhakrishnan Institute. He had never seen theplace, except in his dreams, or in the computer simulations, untilhe walked in to begin the operation. The room was circular, huge,high-ceilinged, a cathedral of technology. The floors were whiteand mirror-smooth. The walls were white painted concrete. All thelight was recessed halogen fixtures, painfully bright, and unnaturallypure in coloration compared to the tainted, smoky-yellowillumination provided by old-fashioned bulbs. It felt just the way itshould: as though every technological system on earth convergedon this one spot, on the operating table that stood in the middle ofthe room.

 "Jeez," Zeldo said, walking into the place, "all we need is askylight and some lightning rods."

 They did it much better this time around. Everything was calmand quiet. Everyone knew their moves. All the equipment wasbrand new and worked perfectly.

 They lowered the biochip down a shaft into the middle ofMohinder Singh's brain and nestled it into the space that had beencut away. This time it was a perfect fit. The incision had been madeunder the control of a computer, there were no gaps, the new cellswould knit together with the old ones much more quickly.

 The closing process took a couple of hours but Dr.Radhakrishnan stayed there through the whole thing, watching hisassistants put Mr. Singh's head back together. Zeldo stood off to theside at a Calyx console, monitoring the signals from the chip.

 By the time they were sewing Mr. Singh's scalp flap back downover the reassembled skull, lines of data had begun to scroll up themonitor screen. The biochip had already made contact. Zeldo wasastonished by this, but Dr. Radhakrishnan wasn't. They had doneit right this time.

 "What is it?" Mr. Salvador said. He had just come in from thehotel. Clearly, he had been catching up on sleep, sex, drinking, or some other fundamental bodily function, and had been interruptedin the middle by Dr. Radhakrishnan's telephone call. Clearly he was not happy about it.

 "Check this out," Dr. Radhakrishnan said, leading him into theroom where Mohinder Singh had, for the last few days, been recovering from the operation.

 "Is this going to be more wubba wubba?" Mr. Salvador said.

 Mohinder Singh was sitting up in bed, as usual, and smoking, as usual. His scar was nearly obscured by the deepening shadow of hishair. He looked up as Dr. Radhakrishnan and Mr. Salvador cameinto the room, squinting at them impassively through cigarettesmoke.

 Dr. Radhakrishnan spoke to him briefly in Hindi, gesturing inthe direction of an ashtray that rested on a table next to the bed on Mr. Singh's paralyzed left side.

 Mr. Singh looked down at the hand and it began to twitch. Thenit jumped into the air like a small animal spooked by a sudden noise,and came to a stop out in front of Mr. Singh's face. The hand beganto move toward his mouth, a few inches at a time, in a zigzagging course, like a sailboat trying to tack upwind into a moorage. As it got closer the fingers began to vibrate nervously. They wanted toclose over the cigarette but they didn't want to get burned.

 Then, suddenly, he had gripped the cigarette. He yanked it out of his mouth and extended his arm out over the ashtray in oneexplosive movement, scattering ashes the whole way. His hand vibrated for a moment above the general vicinity of the ashtray,dumping a few more ashes from the end of the cigarette, some ofwhich actually landed in the ashtray.

 Dr. Radhakrishnan spoke another couple of words and Mr.Singh's hand dropped straight down into the ashtray, crushing thecigarette and mostly putting it out. Then he jerked his hand backinto his lap, leaving the cigarette in the tray, spinning out a long tenuous line of smoke.

 "Astonishing," Mr. Salvador said. He looked quite awake andconsiderably less grumpy.

 Dr. Radhakrishnan spoke another few words. Then he said, toMr. Salvador, "I have asked him his name."

 Mr. Singh's mouth came open and then closed again, the lipscoming together: "Mmmmmo-

 "Mo," Dr. Radhakrishnan echoed.

 "Derrrrrr."

 "-der. Mohinder."

 "Ssssin."

 "Mohinder Singh. Very good." Dr. Radhakrishnan spoke inHindi again, then translated: "What kind of lorry were you drivingat the time of your accident?"

 "Ta . . . ta."

 "That's right. A Tata 1210."

 "Still no signs of tumor or rejection?"

 "None."

 "Right," Mr. Salvador said, "that's it, then." He spun on his heeland burst out of the room.

 Dr. Radhakrishnan waited for a few moments, then followedhim.

 The offices were upstairs. He entered the stairwell and heard Mr.Salvador above him, taking the steps two or three at a time.

 By the time he had followed Mr. Salvador, quietly, up to theoffice level, old Bucky had already got through to someone on the telephone:

 "What? All right, I'll speak loudly. Can you hear me? Good.Listen carefully; we are go for launch. Yes. Yes. Unequivocally.Yes, you have a good day too."

  

 17

 Working out the politics of Mary Catherine's temporaryleave of absence from her residency and arranging the trip to the various and far-flung organs of the Radhakrishnan Institute took a few weeks. The trip itself lasted a week and a half. When Mary Catherine flew home from California, Mel drove his sports car, aMercedes 500 SL, down from Chicago and picked her up at theChampaign-Urbana Airport. He took U.S. 45 from there; it passedwithin two blocks of the Cozzano house and served almost as aprivate driveway connecting the family with the outside world.Mel preferred two-lane roads with lots of heavy trucks, because thatway he had something to pass.

 Mel tried to make small talk as they blasted along between thesnowed-over cornfields. Mary Catherine was preoccupied andspent most of the time squinting out the window. Farmmachinery threw spouts of black diesel straight up into the sky,visible from miles away. From time to time the tires of theMercedes rumbled as they drove over a spot where mud andcornstalks had been tracked across the road by a tractor and thenfrozen down hard to the pavement. South of Pesotum it becamepossible to see the towers of CBAP heaving up over the linear horizon, kicking out silvery bubbles of steam that dissolved intothe clouds.

 "Something on your mind?" he asked.

 "Just a lot of impressions in a short time," she said, shaking herhead. "I want to be coherent when I talk to Dad.

 Mel grinned, just a bit. So that was it. Even in his currentcondition, Dad continued to scare the hell out of Mary Catherine.

 "Just give your professional opinion," Mel said. "After that, we'reall grownups."

 He slowed the Mercedes and turned off the highway. The tiresstarted to buzz as they drove down brick streets. A plywood signmarked the entrance to town:

 WELCOME TO TUSCOLA
ATTEND OUR CHURCHES

 "It's small in terms of staff. It is absolutely gigantic in terms ofresources. Everything they own seems to be brand new," MaryCatherine said.

 She was sitting on the sofa in the living room. Dad was sittingdirectly across the coffee table from her, watching her face. Mel wasoff to the side. Patricia was hovering, throwing logs on the fire,getting coffee.

 "If you buy their basic scientific approach, then these guys arecertainly equipped to move forward with it," Mary Catherinecontinued. "They have money to burn."

 "Do you buy it?" Mel said.

 "It works on baboons. It makes paralyzed baboons capable ofmoving, and even walking again. That has been proved, I think,beyond a doubt."

 "Does it work on femelhebbers?" Cozzano asked, using his newword for people.

 "I asked them that question many times," Mary Catherine said, "and I might as well have been saying 'femelhebbers' for all theinformation I got."

 Cozzano laughed and shook his head ruefully.

 "I was skeptical going in. But what they have done is extremelyimpressive, and it seems to me that if they could produce onehealthy person who has gone through their therapy, then we might actually have something."

 "Tell me about your detailed impressions," Mel said.

 "I saw the institute itself dead last - just this morning. These guysmade up the whole itinerary for me, so I didn't have much flexibility."

 "Did you feel you were getting the Potemkin Village treat­ment?" Mel asked.

 "Yes. But that's normal."

 "True," Mel said.

 "First place I went was Genomics, in Seattle. It's south of down­town, near the Kingdome, in a big old warehouse that they guttedand redid. All pretty new and clean, as you'd expect. Most of thespace is used for things unrelated to this project. They have onesuite on the top floor where they do brain work for Radhakrishnan.When I was there they had several cell-culturing projectsunderway. It's a typical lab with small glass containers all over theplace with handwritten labels stuck to them, and by reading thelabels I could pick up the names of some of the subjects they're working on. The names I saw were-" Mary Catherine leafedthrough her notes for a second, "Margaret Thatcher, Earl Strong,Easyrider, Scatflinger and Mohinder Singh."

 An uneasy laugh passed around the table. "I know who the firsttwo are . . ." Mel said.

 "That's what I thought. But later, when I went to Elton, I foundout that Margaret Thatcher and Earl Strong are two of theirbaboons. They name all the baboons after political figures."

 "Did you also see baboons named Easyrider and Scatflinger?"Mel said. "Those sound more like animal names to me."

 "No. And I have no ideas on Mohinder Singh, either."

 "Mohinder Singh might be a baboon," Mel concluded, "namedafter some guy in India that Radhakrishnan doesn't like. But it'salso possible that Mohinder Singh is a human being."

 "They keep talking about their facilities in India," MaryCatherine said. "It may be a person they are experimenting on outthere. Working on, I should say."

 "Well, go on," Mel said.

 "From Seattle I went to New Mexico for a couple of days. Verynice facility there - the Coover Biotech Pavilion."

 Mel and Cozzano exchanged looks.

 "Again, they obviously know what they're doing. I spent a longtime going over detailed records of all of the baboons they've worked on. It's clear that they have learned a lot about this over the years. Their first subjects had rejection problems, or the biochipsfailed to take, et cetera. Over time they have solved those problems.Now they can do it almost routinely.

 "Then I went to San Francisco and talked to some of the peopleworking on the chips at Pacific Netware. These guys are reallygood - the best in the business. They were the only ones willing totalk about the human element."

 "What do you mean by that?" Mel said.

 "All of the biologist types are gun-shy about the idea of doingthis with human beings. You can't get them to talk about it. It'sclear that there are some potential ethical problems there that theyhave been trained to avoid. But the chipheads don't have any ofthose cultural inhibitions. They would probably volunteer to getthese things implanted in their own heads."

 "Why? Are they brain damaged?"

 "No more so than anyone who works on computers for a living.But to them, see, it's not a therapy so much as it is a way ofimproving the human mind. That's what gets these guys psychedabout it."

 "You're joking," Cozzano said.

 "The biologists won't even allow themselves to think abouttrying this on people - even several brain-damaged volunteers. Thecomputer people have already gone way beyond that point in theirthinking. Half the guys I talked to firmly believed that in ten or twenty years they would be walking around with supercomputers stuck in their heads."

 "This is getting weird," Mel said.

 "I don't want to wash a duck," Cozzano said. "I just want tobring the trousers."

 "Understood," Mary Catherine said, "but I'm here to talk aboutthe credibility of this process. And the point I'm making here is thatit is extremely credible as far as the people at Pacific Netware areconcerned."

 "Okay, we got that point," Mel said. "Tell me about theinstitute."

 "Beautiful piece of real estate on the California coast. Very secluded. Has its own private airport. Lots of open space for recreation."

 Once again, Mel Meyer and the Governor were exchanging significant looks. "A guy - even a famous guy - could get in and out of the place without being noticed?"

 "Mel, you could fly in, go down the road to this institute, sunyourself in the courtyard, swim on the beach, and no one wouldever see you."

 "Read me the blueprints," Cozzano said.

 "You want some information about the building?" MaryCatherine guessed.

 "Yes."

 "The building is nice and new, like everything else. Some partsof it aren't even finished yet. There's an incredible operatingtheater, which looked like it was finished, but there's no way to tellthat without actually going in and trying to do brain surgery there.And the actual rooms are luxurious. All private rooms. Bigwindows with balconies over the ocean. The patients hang out onthe balconies, watch TV, listen to CDs, or whatever."

 "You actually saw patients there?" Mel said.

 "Yes. But because of privacy considerations, I couldn't go totheir rooms or talk to them. I saw one or two, from a distance,sitting out on the balconies in their wheelchairs, reading news­papers or just staring into the distance."

 "You saw patients there. Which means they have actually doneoperations on human beings," Mel said.

 "I guess that's the conclusion we are led to," Mary Catherinesaid.

 "Well put. Well put," Mel said.

 "You think we are being led to a false conclusion?" MaryCatherine said incredulously.

 "No way to know, is there?"

 "There's a couple of small things," she said, a little uncertain.

 "Tell us everything," Mel said. "We'll decide what's small andwhat isn't."

 "I went to the bathroom at one point and washed my hands. Andwhen I turned on the faucet, it sort of coughed."

 "Coughed?"

 "Yeah. Sputtered for a few seconds. As if there was air trapped in the pipes. It used to happen here, whenever Dad worked on theplumbing."

 At first, Mel shook his head, not getting it. Then his eyeswidened with astonishment. Then they narrowed in fascination."You were the first person ever to use the faucet in the ladies'room," Mel said.

 "Goddamn it! I think you are wrong," Cozzano said to Mel.

 "Since parts of the building were still under construction, it'spossible that they had to alter some of the pipes after that sink hadbeen in use for a while," Mary Catherine said, "and that this causedair bubbles to be introduced."

 "Please continue," Mel said. He was acting like a lawyer in acourtroom now, interviewing a neutral witness.

 "I wandered around the grounds a little bit. It's a nice place fora stroll. And on the bluff, overlooking the sea, a few hundred yardsaway from the building, behind a little rise, I found the remains ofa fire. Someone had piled up a bunch of straw there and burned it."

 "Straw?" Mel said.

 Cozzano nodded. "It keeps the patio slippery."

 "When we used to pour concrete on the farm, we would coverit up with damp straw. You have to keep concrete damp for severaldays, preferably a week or two, while it cures," Mary Catherinesaid. "So it's not surprising that they would have a bunch of strawlying around a place where they were building a big reinforced-concrete building. There are a lot of ranches nearby and it's anatural thing for them to use. When I walked back from the site ofthe fire to the building, I saw a lot of pieces of loose straw caughtin the undergrowth, and many of them were stained white withconcrete. Some of the straw was still damp."

 "So when they were finished, they got rid of the straw bydragging it to this place and burning it," Mel said.

 "Yeah. They burned it the night before," Mary Catherine said.

 "How do you know that?" Cozzano said.

 Mary Catherine held up the little finger on her right hand. Thetip was cherry red. "I made the mistake of sticking my finger downinto the bed of ashes."

 Mel said, "They got rid of the straw right before you got there."

 "It was lying around somewhere after they finished thebuilding," Mary Catherine said. "They knew that I was comingand they wanted the place to look tidy, so they burned it."

 "What about the goddamn patients? What about other potentialcontributors? Don't they want the place to look tidy for thosepeople too?" Mel said. "What's so special about you?"

 "It was just a coincidence," Cozzano said.

 "I think they finished the building the day before you got there,"Mel said.

 Everyone except Mel burst out in nervous laughter.

 "Bullshit," Cozzano said.

 "Mel you showed me a photograph of the place two and a half,three weeks ago," Mary Catherine said. She said it kiddingly. Sheknew what Mel was up to here. It was just like him to state things in the most exaggerated, overstated way possible, just to shake people up.

 "There was something funny about that photograph. It was too clean-looking. I think it was fake," Mel said.

 Cozzano shook his head and twirled one finger around his ear. There was no point arguing with Mel when he had shifted into fullcombat mode.

 "They have ways of faking that stuff now," Mel insisted.

 "And the patients I saw?"

 "Actors."

 "What are you getting at, Mel?" Mary Catherine said. She saidit with one eye on Dad; she was trying to anticipate the kinds ofthings he would say if he could. "I can't think of any logicalexplanation for what you are saying."

 "I can. Here's how it goes: Coover runs into that guy fromPacific Netware. Kevin Tice. They run into each other golfing orsomething. And Coover tells Tice about this guy Radhakrishnanand his work with baboons. Coover is a tired old guy with a softspot, he just thinks of it as a way to help stroke victims. But Tice isa big idea man, he reads too much science fiction, he's not satisfiedwith just being a billionaire, he wants to have a supercomputer inhis head as well. Because if what you are saying is true, then thisprocess of putting chips into people's heads will one day be huge.It's the kind of technology that Tice has to get a jump on right nowso he can become the world's first trillionaire a couple of decadesdown the road.

 "So Tice starts pumping money into it for his own purposes.They continue working with baboons, maybe even round up some untouchables in Calcutta or somewhere and do it to them so theycan learn how to do it on humans. And then, all of a sudden,Governor Cozzano has a stroke. And Tice and Coover see a big opportunity. By fixing the brain of someone who is powerful andfamous they can jumpstart this new industry of theirs. So they goout and build this thing in California. I'll bet it 'was already underconstruction and they just hurried up the process a little bit. Just gotit done yesterday in time to impress Dr. Mary Catherine Cozzano here. But she was a little too observant."

 "Bullshit," Cozzano said.

 "If what you say is true," Mary Catherine said, "then the worstconclusion we can come to is that they really want Dad as a client,and they've pushed their schedule up in order to make a goodimpression on him."

 Mel thought that one over for a while. Cozzano, obviouslyamused, watched Mel's face. "I don't like the idea of them usingWilly as a guinea pig," Mel said.

 "Phooey," Cozzano said. "Better a dead pioneer than a live feeb."

 "You want to pursue this?" Mary Catherine said.

 "Yes, goddamn it," Cozzano said.

 Mel just closed his eyes and shook his head in disbelief.

 "There is a step we can take now, without committingourselves," Mary Catherine said. "I don't know whether I like this. But I have to give you all the information. As you said, Mel, we'reall adults."

  

 "What is it?" Mel said warily.

 "Dad has to go up to Champaign, to Burke Hospital, tomorrowfor a routine checkup. While he's in there, we could arrange for abiopsy."

 "Of what?"

 "Brain cells."

 "Why?"

 "We could send them to Genomics. They could hang on tothem there. That way, if Dad made the decision to go ahead withan implant, they could culture the cells and prepare the biochip atany time."

 "Do it," Cozzano said.

 "Oh shit," Mel said.

 "Do the biopsy?" Mary Catherine said. "Tomorrow?"

 Cozzano just looked her in the eye and nodded. His eyes looked a little brighter. He smiled at Mary Catherine with the good side ofhis mouth, and a thin trickle of drool steamed down out of theother side.

 "I'm tired of this," Cozzano said, wiping off the drool with hisgood hand. "This is bad."

 "Yes, it's bad," Mel said, "but-

 "I want to be the Milhous," Cozzano said.

 "And one day you will be," Mel said, "but-"

 "Shut up, goddamnit!" Cozzano bellowed. Suddenly he ripedthe blanket off his lap with his good hand. Then he pitched forwardin his wheelchair so violently that he seemed to be falling out.

 Everyone jumped up and converged on him. But he wasn'tfalling. He was trying to stand up. The momentum of his upperbody carried him halfway to his feet and he used the powerfulthrust of his good arm to push him up on one leg. Then he almosttottered over, but Mary Catherine had already danced around thecoffee table and now she drove her shoulder up under her father's armpit, taking most of his weight.

 Though no one but Mary Catherine would ever know it, thishad taken a lot of guts on her part, because her impulse had beento shrink away. Suddenly back on his feet, Dad was massive, dark, and towering. Mary Catherine's love for her father had always beenmingled with a judicious amount of fear, or maybe respect was anicer word for it. He had never struck her or even threatened to,but he never needed to. The tornadic force of his personality made people cringe and scurry, especially when he was mad, and right now he was really pissed. He threw his entire weight on her bodyfor a moment, nearly buckling her knees, and finally got his weightcentered over his good leg again.

 And then he started to hop. He was going somewhere. He hadfixed a dark, unblinking gaze on the far wall of the den, and seeingthis, Mary Catherine tried to help him along. They moved togetherone hop at a time across the shag carpet and into the den. Melshuffled along behind them.

 Cozzano was headed for a framed picture hung on the wall. Itwas a picture of Cozzano shaking George Bush's hand on the southlawn a few year ago. Barbara Bush stood off to the side, hands clasped together, beaming supportively. Behind them rose thecolumns of the White House.

 Cozzano went straight across the floor and fell, crushing MaryCatherine into the wall with his bad shoulder and pinning herthere. He reached across his body with his good hand and slammedthe end of his index finger into the framed picture so hard that itwhacked back into the wall and a couple of cracks appeared in theglass.

 He wasn't pointing to himself or to the Bushes. He was pointingto the White House.

 "This is mine," he said. "This is my barn." He slammed his indexfinger into the White House a couple of more times for emphasis."I should have done it before."

 "You have to get better first," Mary Catherine said in a strangled voice.

 "Well, I guess I better print up a shitload of bumper stickers," Mel said morosely. "Femelhebbers for Cozzano."

 Mary Catherine didn't say anything. She was feeling the hairsstand up on the back of her neck.

 Her dad was running for president. Her dad was running forpresident.President of the United States. It was enough to make herforget about the stroke, to obliterate the fact that there was no wayhe could be elected in his condition.

 She wanted to talk to her mother. She wished Mom was here.This would be a good time to have a mother.

 But Mom wasn't here. She forced herself to open her eyes andstare at him.

 He was looking right back at her with the frightening, soul-penetrating glare that made people want to leave the room.

 Then it went away and was replaced by an idiotic grin. MaryCatherine had seen this grin a million times while examiningneurology patients, and she had seen it on Dad's face a few times since the stroke, usually when it seemed like he was giving up. Itwas the drooling, clownlike, sheepish grin of a near vegetable. Itwas a lot more frightening than his intense glare.

 "You are the quarterback now, peanut," he said. His eyes rolledback into his head and he went completely limp, as if his bones hadturned to water. Mary Catherine let him down to the floor asgently as she could; Mel stepped in to support his head.

 "He's just had another stroke," Mary Catherine said. "Forgetabout the phone, Tuscola doesn't have 911. Let's get him into that fast little car of yours. And then you need to drive it like a bat outof hell."

 18

 The South Platte River looked big and important on maps ofDenver. It approached the city from the north-northeast. Its valleyand flood plain were several miles wide and served as a corridor fora bundle of major transportation routes: state highways, aninterstate, natural gas pipelines, major railways, and high-tension power lines. The first time Eleanor had seen it was shortly after sheand Harmon had arrived in Denver and they were driving around looking for places to live. Harmon drove and Eleanor navigated,and she got them lost. She got them lost because she was trying to use the mighty South Platte as a landmark, and instead they kept crossing back and forth over a paltry creek or drainage ditch out inthe middle of nowhere. Not until she actually saw the name of the thing on a sign by a bridge could she believe that this dried-up rill was all there was to it.

 They had crossed the Platte again a couple of years ago on theirway to the Commerce Vista Motel and Mobile Home Haven. Inretrospect, Eleanor knew that Harmon had craftily plotted theirtrajectory so that they could reach the place without having to passthrough any part of Commerce City proper. They'd come in fromthe northwest, from the middle-class suburbs where they had raisedtheir family, past brand-new strip malls sitting totally empty withweathered FOR LEASE banners stretched across their fronts, acrossopen grassland that was too close to the flood plain or too far fromthe highway to develop. At the edge of Commerce City they hadpassed quickly through a brief unpleasant flurry of franchisedevelopment and then come upon the Commerce Vista. SomehowEleanor had failed to notice the WEEKLY RATES sign on themotel's marquee, and she hadn't even bothered to look across thehighway, off to the eastern edge of the mobile home park. Shehadn't looked that way because it was nothing but empty grassland stretching vastly under a white sky, and Eleanor didn't like to lookeast across that territory because it told her exactly how far she wasfrom home. But if she had looked she would have seen that it was surrounded by tall chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, withsigns every few yards reading U.S. ARMY CORPS OFENGINEERS - NO TRESPASSING. Tangles of plumbing stuckmysteriously out of the ground from place to place, and every fewhundred yards was a white wooden box with a peaked roof, like anoversized birdhouse, containing instruments to monitor the air.

 Prairie grass was the only thing that would grow in the yellow rock flour that passed for soil at the Commerce Vista. But thevegetation was all gone and so now it was just a hardpan mixedwith broken glass so that it sparkled when the sun hit it right. Therewere no particular roads or streets, only the tracks left by the lastvehicle. The only thing that kept it all from blowing away was thetamping action of car and truck tires, and the little waist-high fencesthat partitioned the land into tiny lots and gave each trailer a yardto call its own.

 On their first visit to the place, Eleanor had noticed that theneighbor's gate had a little decoration on it. One of Doreen's kidshad put it up. It was a jack-o-lantern: a circle of orange con­struction paper with three black triangles in it, one for each eye andone at the bottom that was apparently supposed to be the mouth.It hadn't struck her as odd that they had Halloween decorations upin June. Not until they'd moved in did Doreen explain that thesymbol was, in fact, a copy of the radiation symbols that their kids saw across the highway at the arsenal.

 She remembered all of these things one night as she reclined in the front seat of her old Datsun, trying to get some sleep. Eleanor tried not to think of the old Datsun as a car. She tried to think of itas a highly compact mobile home. She called it the Annex.

 She could still remember walking down the street in D.C. withher mother when she was a kid and encountering dirty men whoslept in parked cars. She could remember how frightened she was of those men and of the way they lived. She didn't want to be likethat.

 It was not really such a big deal, when you thought about it logically. She was living in a mobile-home park, for god's sake.What was a mobile home but a big boxy car without an engine?Her old beat-up Datsun, parked on four flat tires in front of the mobile home, was like a little annex, a mother-in-law apartment.

 The seats did not exactly recline all the way, but they reclinedquite a bit. The only hard part was trying to find a comfortableplace to lay her head, because it tended to roll back and forth onthe hard surface of the headrest as she relaxed. After a couple ofhard nights she finally worked out an arrangement of pillows thatheld her head in place comfortably. That and a sleeping bag and she was all set. She knew that she might be sleeping this way for awhile, so she safety-pinned clean sheets into the inside of the sleeping bag and took them out every week and laundered them.

 The car's battery was run down but it still had enough juice to run the radio, so it could be said that the Annex had a homeentertainment system. Sometimes Eleanor would sit there andlisten to a little music, or to news of the presidential candidates.Looking out the windshield, she could see into her neighborDoreen's trailer and see the candidates running around on Doreen'sTV set on top of the fridge. When she watched TV in this way,from a great distance, through layers of dirty glass, unable to hear the sound, it had a weird, pixilated look to it. There were so manypoliticians going so many places, doing so many cute things to getthe attention of the cameras. It was like a nursery school, shethought, full of lonely kids who were always punching each other,running with sharp objects, and sticking pencils up their noses -anything to draw attention to themselves. The TV producers, likeoverburdened nursery-school teachers, cut frantically from onethree-second shot to another, trying to keep track of them, and alltheir little activities. Each cut made the image on Doreen's TV setjump, startling Eleanor a bit and making her eyes jerk involuntarilytoward the screen.

 So that was why kids couldn't stop watching television.

 The candidates did not seem to have much of an attention span.As the weeks went on, most of them ran into trouble of one kindor another - a poor showing in a state primary, a scandal, or moneywoes - and dropped out. It always seemed momentous at the timeof the actual announcement, and when Eleanor saw a candidatestanding somberly in front of some blue curtains, she would turn onthe Annex's radio and listen for news of his withdrawal. But a fewdays later she would realize that she could hardly even rememberthe candidate's name or what he stood for. And it got to the point that whenever one of the candidates made his little withdrawal speech, she would say, "Good riddance," and snap off the radio.

 Eleanor Richmond was sleeping in her car because there was noroom left in the mobile home. It only had two bedrooms. Untilrecently, she and Harmon had slept in one and their childrenClarice and Harmon Jr., had slept in the other.

 Now everything was discombobulated. Harmon had killedhimself. Harmon, Jr., had taken to staying out late. Clarice hadremained stable and reliable, a good girl, for a few weeks followingthe suicide, and then one night she had not come home at all.

 And then Eleanor's mother had moved back in with them.Eleanor spent about half of one night trying to sleep in the same bedwith her mother before going out into the living room, where shefound Harmon, Jr., sacked out on the couch. From there she hadgone straight to the car.

 Eleanor loved her mother, but her mother had died a long timeago. Only the body lived on. The Alzheimer's had started when she was in the first retirement community. The nice one. Theexpensive one. By the time they were forced to move her into thenot-so-nice one, she had deteriorated to the point where she hadno idea what was going on, which was a blessing for all concerned.

 Now she was home with Eleanor. She was back in diapers. Mother didn't mind, but Eleanor certainly did - and the childrencouldn't handle it at all. Eleanor hadn't seen much of her children since Mother had moved in.

 With other kids, that would have been worrisome. But Eleanor'skids weren't like that. She had raised them the way Mother hadraised her. They had their heads on straight. Even when Clarice stayed out all night, Eleanor felt confident that she was using her head and not doing any of that stupid underclass behaviour.

 Harmon Jr., was a case in point. He had been horrified that firstmorning when he found his mother sleeping in a car. He had triedto insist that he be the one to sleep outside. Eleanor had put herfoot down. She was still a parent; Harmon, Jr., was still her child.It was the parent's duty to look out for her children. No son of herswas going to sleep outside, not while she could help it. Harmon,Jr., eventually backed down. But the next day he came home with some sheets of silvery plastic stuff that he had brought at an autoparts store. He went out to the Datsun and stuck this material upon the insides of all the windows, turning them into one-waymirrors. From inside the car, it just tinted the windows a little bit. But from, the outside, no one could see in.

 Eleanor really liked it. She liked to come out here and snuggleinto her sleeping bag, lock the doors, and He for a while, gazing outthe windows. Usually when you went to bed, you were blind. Ifyou heard a mysterious noise outside the window or in the house,you felt scared and helpless. You had to get out of bed and turn on all the lights to find out what was happening. Here in her silveredbubble she could see everything, but no one could see her. If she heard a noise, all she had to do was open her eyes, and she couldsee that it was a cat scratching in the dirt, or Doreen coming backfrom her evening shift at the 7-Eleven. And if it was anything morethan that, she had Harmon's old officer's .45 sitting in the glovecompartment right in front of her, practically in her lap. Eleanorhad spent a few years in the Army herself and she knew how to useit. She knew exactly how to use it.

 When money got short and times got hard, you stoppedworrying about all the superficial nonsense of modern life and you got down to basics. The basic thing that a parent did was to protecther family. That is why Eleanor Richmond felt more comfortable,and slept much more soundly, in her silverized glass bubble with aloaded gun six inches away. Whatever else was going wrong, sheknew that if anyone tried to get into her house and hurt her family,she would kill them. She had that one base covered. Everythingelse was details.

 Her eyes came open in the middle of the night and she knew thatsomething was wrong without even turning her head.

 The Commerce Vista ran right up to the edge of the highway,and it didn't have any of this exit-ramp nonsense. One minuteyou were going sixty miles an hour and the next minute you wereskidding across yellow dust and broken glass, trying to kill speed.Whenever someone performed this maneuver, Eleanor heard itand opened her eyes. The first thing she saw was always thewhite aluminium front of the mobile home. If the car then turned on to her particular lane, its headlights would sweep across thesurface.

 It had just happened a few seconds ago. And now she heard footsteps crunching in the gravel, right outside of the car.

 She lifted her head slowly and quietly. A man was walking infront of her car. A beefy, bearded white man, young-looking butwith the bulk of middle age, dressed in jeans and a darkwindbreaker, wearing a baseball cap. He moved confidently, as if he belonged in her front yard, as if he belonged on her frontstep.

 Which he definitely did not.

 Eleanor had practiced this; she had been ready for it since the firstnight in the Annex. As the man was mounting the steps to theirfront door, his back turned to her, she rolled out the front door ofthe car, dropping to her knees, pulling the gun out of the glovecompartment, and took cover behind the corner of the mobilehome, sighting down the side of the house, drawing a bead on thecenter of the man's windbreaker. From here he looked exactly like a silhouette target at the firing range.

 He hadn't heard her yet. She raised her head for a second and looked at his car. It was a beat-up old sedan with no one else in it.The man had come alone. His mistake.

 "Freeze! I'm covering you with a .45," she said. "I'm an Armyveteran and I have fired hundreds of rounds into targets that werea lot smaller and farther away than you are."

 "Okay," the man said. "Can you see my hands? I'm holdingthem up."

 "I see 'em. Why don't you lace them together on top of your head and then turn around to face me."

 "Okay, I'll do that," the man said. He did.

 "What are you doing here?" Eleanor said.

 "My job."

 "You a robber?"

 "No. I'm a cop. Detective Larsen of the Commerce City PoliceDepartment."

 "Can you prove that?"

 "I can prove it by showing you my ID," Detective Larsen said."But in order to do that, ma'am, I'll have to take it out of mypocket, and it would be a shame if you misinterpreted that asreaching for a gun. So let's talk about this for just a second and seeif we can negotiate a way for me to extract the ID from my pocketwithout giving you the wrong idea."

 "Don't worry about it," Eleanor said, pointing the gun up at thesky and coming out from behind her cover. "Only a cop would talklike that."

 "Well, let me show you my ID anyway," Larsen said. He turned sideways so that she could see his butt. He slowly reached aroundinto his back pocket and took out a black wallet. He underhandedit twenty feet to Eleanor, then left his hands well away from hissides while she opened it up and looked at it.

 "Okay," she said, tossing it back. "Sorry if I spooked you."

 "Normally I'd be real pissed," he admitted. "But under thecircumstances, ma'am, it's all right. You Eleanor Richmond?"

 Larsen's face went all fuzzy and out of focus. Eleanor's eyes werefilling up with tears. She didn't even know why, yet. "I got thefeeling something real bad happened," she said.

 "You're right. But it's going to be okay, considering."

 "What happened?"

 "You son is in the hospital in serious but stable condition. He'sgoing to be all right."

 "Car crash?"

 "No, ma'am. He was shot."

 "Shot!?"

 "Yes, ma'am. Shot in the back by a suspected gang member, indowntown Denver. But he's going to be okay. He was very lucky."

 Suddenly Eleanor was seeing clearly again. The tears had goneaway. It was so shocking that just for a minute, curiosity over­whelmed everything else.

 This was terrible. She should have been freaking out andpanicking. Instead, she felt eerily calm and alert, like a person whohad just been sucked out of an airliner into a cold, scintillating bluesky. Her life was completely falling apart now. She felt thecomplete abandon of a person in free fall.

 "My son was shot and you're saying he's lucky?"

 "Yes, I am, Mrs. Richmond. I've seen a lot of people shot. Iought to know."

 "Detective Larsen, is my son in a gang and I don't even know about it?"

 "Not as far as we can tell."

 "Then why did they shoot him?"

 "He was using a pay telephone downtown. And they wanted to use it."

 "They shot him over a pay phone?"

 "As far as we can tell."

 "What, my son wouldn't let them use it?"

 "Well, no one uses a pay phone forever. But he didn't give it upas quickly as they wanted him to. They didn't want to wait. So theyshot him."

 She frowned. "Well, what kind of a person would do something like that?"

 Detective Larsen shrugged. "There's a lot of people like that nowadays."

 "Well, why are our presidential candidates running aroundhaving sex with bimbos and sticking pencils up their noses whenwe have people growing up in Denver, Colorado with no values?"Detective Larsen was looking progressively more bewildered.

 "Presidential politics aren't my speciality, ma'am.""Well, maybe they ought to be."

 A few weeks later, Eleanor found herself sitting on a rather nice,brand-new wrought-iron bench in front of the Boulevard Mall in downtown Denver. She was in no mood to be at a mall, butcircumstances put her here a couple of times a day.

 Her son was convalescing, and taking his sweet time about it, atDenver County Hospital, which was a mile or so down south ofthe state capitol and the high-rise district. This part of townincluded the hospital, various schools, and museums - all of themunicipal stuff. It also included the old downtown shoppingdistrict, which had been badly in need of some really devastatingurban renewal for quite some time.

 Just recently the urban renewal had come in the form of theBoulevard Mall, a brand-new pseudoadobe structure built on thebulldozed graves of more traditional retail outlets. It was near SpeerBoulevard, only a few blocks from the hospital. A lot of bus lines converged there. Denver had hired some publicity genius who hadcome up with a catch phrase for the bus system: The Ride. Thisbeing the automotive West, where only tramps and criminals were thought to take public transit, the buses were slow, few, and farbetween, and so Eleanor had been spending a lot of time takingThe Ride lately, or waiting for it, which was even morehumiliating.

 She consoled herself with the fact that it made sound financialsense. Sitting down with her calculator, like the banker she hadonce been, and weighing all the alternatives, she eventually figured out that the most logical way for her to spend her time was to takeThe Ride downtown twice a week, to this neighborhood. Alongwith all of its municipal buildings, it included a few big oldmainline churches, several of which had gotten together and startedup a food bank. Originally it was just to help Mexicans live throughthe Rocky Mountain winter, but in recent years it had started toattract a more diverse clientele. So while Eleanor was out of thehouse picking up cheese, powdered milk, oatmeal, and beans, Doreen was keeping an eye on Mother. In return, Eleanor gave Doreen some of the food and watched Doreen's kids for a coupleof hours a day. This was known, among intellectuals, as the bartereconomy.

 Since the shooting, she had added an additional stop: she wouldgo out and visit Harmon, Jr., at Denver County Hospital. Harmonhad learned, from his father, to hold his feelings inside and notcomplain about things, so sometimes it was hard to tell how hereally felt. But he seemed to be doing okay psychologically, muchbetter than Eleanor would have been if she had been shot in theback for no reason. As Harmon, Jr., came out from under the shockand the effects of the drugs, he got his old spark back, plus a littlebit of a macho swagger that had not been there before. He had beenshot and he had survived. That was one way to get a name foryourself in high school. The macho bit was cute, as long as hedidn't take it too far.

 Thinking of her son made Eleanor smile to herself as she sat onthe bench in front of the Boulevard Mall. Across her lap was a largebrick of orange cheese encased in a flimsy cardboard box, and several pounds of rolled oats and pinto beans in clear plastic bags.Above her head was a large sign in red metal saying THE RIDE.

 All around her, people were strolling in from the parking lots,converging on the front entrance of the mall. These people had their very own rides, many with licence plates from outlyingcounties. She got more than one dirty look from these people. Thiswas not unusual in Denver, which now had its ghettos at theoutskirts of town, but even for Denver it seemed like she wasgetting a lot of dirty looks. Then she realized that every other oneof these people was wearing a T-shirt or a baseball cap emblazonedwith the slogan EARL STRONG COMES ON STRONG.

 Everybody knew that Earl Strong's real name was Erwin DudleyStrang, but no one seemed to care, and that was just one of the many things about the man that pissed Eleanor Richmond off.

 Not that there was anything wrong with changing your name.

 But political candidates had been crucified in the press for doing farless significant things. Earl Strong/Erwin Dudley Strang seemed toget away with murder.

 He could have picked something a little less obvious than Strong.To change your name, and then use the name's double meaning aspart of a campaign slogan...it was a little much. As if he werenothing more than a new TV series. But even though people knewexactly what Erwin Dudley Strang was doing, they lapped it up like thirsty dogs.

 Maybe one reason Eleanor felt bad when she heard of the manwas that she had known of him from way back and she had nevertaken him seriously.

 The first time she had ever seen the name Erwin Dudley Strang,it had been printed across the laminated face of a photo ID card. She had seen it through the distorting lens of the peephole on thefront door of the house in Eldorado Highlands. She was on theinside of the house, by herself, waiting for the cable TV installer to show up; the cable company had promised that an installer wouldarrive between nine and five, and so she had spent the whole daywaiting in an empty house. He had finally rung her doorbell at 4.54p.m.and stood out on the front doorstep holding up his officialcable TV installer's ID card so that it was the only thing she couldsee through the peephole when she looked out.

 She could at least pride herself on one thing: she had known, justfrom that one little gesture, that Erwin Dudley Strang was a creep.

 She opened her front door. Erwin Dudley Strang lowered thebadge to reveal a narrow, concave face, cratered like the surface ofthe moon. He looked Eleanor Richmond in the eye, and his jawdropped open. He stared at her without saying anything for severalseconds. It was the look that white people gave to black people tolet the black people know that they didn't belong there. To remind them, just in case they'd somehow forgotten, that they were on thewrong continent.

 "Can I help you?" Eleanor said.

 "Is the lady of the house in?" he said.

  

 "I am the owner. I am the lady of the house," she said.

 Keeping that fixed stare on her face, Erwin Dudley Strangblinked a couple of times and shook his head melodramatically. Buthe never said anything. It almost wouldn't have been so bad if hehad said, "Shit, I never thought I'd see a black person out here."But he didn't do that. He shook his head and blinked, and then he said, "Yes, hello, I'm here to install your cable TV."

 In the course of installing the cable system he had to go in andout of the house half a dozen times. Each time, he was careful tostare her down while standing in the corner of her peripheral visionso that she would know that he was there. Each time, she feltherself getting hot under the collar and turned squarely toward him,and each time he glanced away just a moment before her eye methis, blinked, shook his head, and continued about his work.

 He walked around the house brandishing a power drill with a preposterously elongated bit, which he used to drill holes all theway through the exterior walls wherever she told him she wanteda cable TV wire. Even the way that he handled this tool raisedEleanor's hackles; it seemed clear, somehow, that a large portion ofErwin Dudley Strang's ego was bound up in this tool, and thatpenetrating the walls of total strangers' homes was the really swellpart of the job as far as he was concerned.

 And consequently he always pushed on the drill a little bit toohard, tried to make it happen a little bit too fast, and ended upshoving the drill bit through the wall with brute force rather than waiting for it to cut cleanly; everywhere he poked a hole throughthe wall he managed to burst a sizable hole through the drywall, and every time he did it, he came back in and shook his head inastonishment as if this were the first time it had ever happened. As if defective drywall had been used to build the Richmonds' newhouse, the Richmonds had been foolish enough not to notice, and there was not a thing he could do about it.

 He ran the cables along the outside of the house, not by stapling them but by tucking them between the pieces of vinyl siding. As aresult they all fell out within the first couple of days, leaving gaps inthe siding where it no longer interlocked properly. Harmon endedup spending an entire weekend fixing the holes in the drywall andreattaching the cable to the house and getting the siding poppedback together. Harmon also noticed that Strang had neglected toground the cable system properly, which put the whole family atrisk of electrocution, and so he rigged up a way to ground it to acold-water pipe down in the basement.

 All of this was in defiance of Erwin Dudley Strang's statement,which he repeated to Eleanor several times, that the stuff was cablecompany property and they were not allowed to mess with it in anyway.

 "It's all hooked up," he said, at some point when he hadarbitrarily decided that he was finished. "Now, if you'll show meyour TV, I'll hook it up for you."

 The Richmonds had not moved into the house yet. There wasnot a stick of furniture in the house, or for that matter in the wholedevelopment. Erwin Dudley Strang had passed through everyroom in the place and must have noticed this. Now he was askingto see their television set, staring at her blankly, with the forcedinnocent expression of a sixth-grade bad boy who has just nailedthe teacher with a spitball.

 She was just completely baffled by the man. Clearly, what he wassaying had no relationship to what he was thinking. He was playingsome kind of game. She had no idea what it was.

 "It's not here. We haven't moved in yet," she finally said.Mother had taught her, when in doubt, to be polite.

 "Well, then I can't show you how to hook it up."

 "It's cable-ready," she said. "All we have to do is screw the cablein the back and turn it on."

 "And plug it into the power outlet," he corrected her, just a hintof a smirk on his face.

 "Yes, and plug it in. Good point," she said.

 "Now, is it ready for all bands of cable? Because the bands heremight be different from the bands there."

 She had been expecting something like this. Telling ErwinDudley Strang that their set was cable-ready was tantamount tomaking fun of his drill bit. He could not let it go unpunished. Hewould have to one-up her and display his technical mastery.

 "From the bands where?" she asked.

 His eyes darted back and forth. Clearly this was something of acurve ball. "Wherever y'all came from," he said, putting a long, drawling emphasis on the "y'all."

 "If you don't know where we came from, how do you knowthat the bands are different?"

 "Well, you came from back East, didn't you? From one of thembig cities?"

 "No. We were at Fitzsimons Army Medical Center for a coupleof years. Before that we lived in Germany."

 "Oooh, Germany," he said. Then, moving so suddenly that hemade Eleanor startle, he stood up straight, clicked the heels of hiswork boots together, and jutted his right arm out in a Nazi salute."Sieg Heil!"he hollered. He dropped his arm and a smile spreadacross his face as he watched Eleanor's reaction. "Lots of thosekinds of people there? You know, National Socialists?"

 "You mean Nazis?"

 "Well, that's kind of a slang term, but yeah, that's what I mean."

 "Never saw onethere," Eleanor said. "If you're finished, you canleave now."

 Strang raised his eyebrows fastidiously. "Well, technicallyspeaking, I'm not finished with the installation until I have hookedup the TV set and gotten it running to the satisfaction of theowner."

 "My husband is an engineer. He'll get it running. If we're notsatisfied, we'll call the cable company."

 "But before I leave, I have to get your signature on this docu­ment," Strang said, holding up an aluminium clipboard, "whichstates that the installation is complete and you are satisfied with thequality of service."

 "I'll sign anything, at this point."

 "You sure?" Strang said, wiggling the clipboard just out ofEleanor's reach.

 "Positive."

 "We could test it right now if you could get a TV set."

 "For the eight hundredth time, I do not have a TV."

 "I'll bet you could get one, though."

 "I have no idea what you're talking about."

 Strang looked out the windows of the living room, down theblock. "Must be some other houses around here that have TVs. I'llbet you could figure out a way to get your hands on someone else'sTV set, if you really wanted it."

 She just stared at him, narrowed her eyes, shook her head inamazement.

 He continued, "Course now thaty'all are out here in the nicepart of town, I'll bet you don't do that kind of thing no more. ButI'll bet you still got the skills.Y'all are just a little rusty."

 "I'm gong to call the cable TV company and they are going tofire your ass," she said.

 "They can't," he said. "I don't work for them. I'm an inde­pendent contractor. Just a small-time entrepreneurial businessmanstruggling to make my way."

 "Then I'll make sure they never hire you again."

 "Your word against mine," he said, "and even if they believeyou, there's plenty of other cable systems out here in ColorfulColorado that keep my services in high demand."

 She knew it was crazy for her to be arguing this with him. Sheshould just throw him out of the house. But her parents hadraised her to talk things out. They had worked their fingers to the bone paying for an expensive Catholic education so that the nuns could teach her to be a rational, intelligent citizen. She could notget over the impulse to make Erwin Dudley Strang see reason."Why shouldn't they believe me?" she said. "Why would Ibother to call in such a complaint? It's not something I would dofor fun."

 "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," he said.

 "What!?"

 "I seen the way you been looking at me," he said. "If you wanta taste, why don't you just ask for it?"

 "Oh, Jesus," she said, "get out of my house. Get out now. Justget out."

 "Upstairs bedroom has some nice carpet in it. Almost as good asa bed."

 Then she astonished herself by kicking him in the nuts. Hard. Adirect hit. His mouth formed into an O shape, his eyes got big, hestuck his arms down between his thighs, sank to the living roomfloor, and lay down on his side, sucking in quick, short breathsthrough his puckered lips.

 She went right out to her car, rolled up the windows, locked thedoors, and started the engine.

 After a few minutes, Strang came out, walking in little tiny babystep, climbed gingerly into his van, and after sitting there in the front seat for a few ominous minutes, backed out of the drivewayand went away.

 Later they found out that he had forged Eleanor's signature onthe work order form. She didn't care.

 The next time Eleanor saw Erwin Dudley Strang, he was ontelevision, his name was Earl Strong, and his complexion wasfrighteningly, unnaturally smooth, as if he had been lovinglyspackled, buffed, and polished. The white skin of his cheeks wasluminous under the lights of the television studio, and almost fuzzy,like an off-focus beauty shot of an aging movie star. As if the cameracould not find any feature or blemish to focus on.

 She saw his face on the local public-access cable TV channel onenight when she was flipping through the channels after Harmon and the children had gone to bed. It went without saying that thecable had never worked perfectly ever since Strang installed it. Itwas always a little snowy, with a bit of fuzz in the audio, andwhenever the wind blew, the picture started to jump. But puttingup with bad television was preferable to phoning the cable TVcompany and having them sendhim back to fix it.

 It was creepy and ironic to be flipping through the channels,cursing the bad reception, cursing the man who had installed it, and suddenly to havehim show up on screen, in a full talking head shot, wearing a business suit.

 She looked at him for a moment and flipped on to the nextchannel. She didn't want to see the man. So he was wearing abusiness suit. He had found some other profession to give a badname to. She didn't care.

 But a few nights later she saw him again, and this time the lettersEARL STRONG were superimposed on the bottom of the screen, and finally she had to stop right there and watch.

 It was some kind of talk show. Not a slick network productionby any means. Just a sheet-metal desk in front of a big piece of bluepaper with a Goodwill sofa next to it where the guests sat.

 But Earl Strong/Erwin Dudley Strang wasn't sitting on the sofa.He was sitting behind the desk, in a cheap folding sheet-metal chairthat creaked whenever he shifted his weight. He was the host.

 Eleanor had to go and dig up the little channel guide, the littleslip of cardboard that Strang had given her years ago, to find outwhat channel she was watching. It said CH. 29 - PUBLICACCESS CABLEVISION.

 Earl Strong was talking politics with an assortment of off-brandphilosophers who drifted across his little stage, seemingly followingtheir own cues. The camera angle never varied. Clearly there was only one camera taping this thing, and it was sitting on a tripod, running on autopilot. It was comically inept, just the kind of thingthat he would throw together.

 The title of tonight's broadcast was "The Three-FifthsCompromise: Error or Inspiration?" Eleanor could only listen to about thirty seconds of it before she was overcome by an oddcombination of boredom and fury.

 The name of the show wasComing on Strong. Earl Strong keptcoming on, week after week, year after year. It seemed that every time she happened to flip past his little program, he looked a littledifferent: he did something about those crooked teeth. Got his chinlengthened. Fixed the nose. Bought a narrower and more conser­vative set of neckties. Played endlessly with his hairstyle until hefound one - close-cropped but carefully sculpted - that worked.Bought himself a chair that did not creak. Moved to a better studio,got a two-camera setup, then a three-camera setup. Got com­mercial sponsorship from Ty (Buckaroo) Steele, a prominent localpurveyor of cut-rate used cars, and made the jump from public-access cable to one of the local commercial stations.

 And at each step of the process, Eleanor laughed and shook herhead, remembering him curled up on the floor in her living room,sucking in short little breaths, and she wondered how long it wouldtake for this man to be found out for the shabby little fraud he reallywas. Each time he attained a little more success, Eleanor wasshocked for a moment, even a little frightened. Then she calmedherself down by reminding herself that the higher he got, theharder he would fall in the end.

 Surely someone would take it upon themselves to expose thisman.

 But no one ever did.

 And then, all of a sudden, Earl Strong was running for theUnited States Senate, he was ahead in the polls, and everyone lovedhim.

 19

 A white limousine pulled into the parking lot of the mall,swung past the line of waiting buses, and came to a stop in front ofthe main entrance. This limousine was far from elegant; it was arolling billboard for Ty (Buckaroo) Steele's Pre-Owned andRemanufactured Vehicles Inc. The only time it ever came out ofthe garage was during parades, when Buckaroo himself would driveit down the street with some local beauty queen popping out of thesunroof to wave at the crowd and pelt the young 'uns with hardcandy.

 But Buckaroo had now found another way to use it. The doorsopened up and several men in dark suits climbed out and walked, in a cluster, toward the entrance of the mall. In the middle of thegroup she could clearly make out the pre-owned and remanu­facturedface of Earl Strong, who in these parts was invariablydescribed as "the next Senator from Colorado."

 A few moments after he went into the mall, a big cheer rose upfrom inside. They were holding some kind of campaign eventinside there.

 She shook her head, staring at a huge COMES ON STRONGposter stuck to the side of a bus directly in front of her.

 Her bus wasn't due to leave for half an hour. There was really noreason for her to sit outside on this bench when she could go intothe mall and kill time. It was just that she felt so trashy, walkingthrough the nice mall in her clothes, rumpled from having beenslept in, and her rumpled hair, carrying big hunks of generic bulk food that she had gotten for free.

 Right next to her was a big pseudoadobe litter basket, nearly

 overflowing, and resting on the top layer, neatly folded and putaway, was a thick glossy shopping bag from Nordstrom.

 Eleanor pulled the bag out and unfolded it. It was clean and new.

 She put her cheese and oatmeal inside the Nordstrom bag, got up, and walked toward the entrance of the shopping mall. She wanted to see what Erwin Dudley Strang was up to.

 As she was approaching the entrance, she saw her reflection inthe glass doors. She had thought it was a clever trick, hiding herwelfare cheese in the Nordstrom bag, but when she saw herself, sherecognized something about her silhouette, a shape she'd seen in many cities, on many park benches, and a realization came to her.

 She had become a bag lady.

 It was a spear through her heart. She lost her stride and stumbledto a complete halt. Tears flooded her eyes uncontrollably and her nose began to run. She sniffed, blinked, swallowed, and fought itback.

 The Earl Strong supporters were veering around her, turningback to look at her face. She couldn't just stand there. She pickedup her pace and punched through the glass doors and in so doing, transformed herself from a bag lady into a shopper.

 In the central part of the mall, Earl Strong was standing up on araised podium, coming on strong.

 "Thank you all for coming today. I wanted to do this inJanuary, but the mall wouldn't let me have the space because theysaid it was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. And I said that I certainlywouldn't want to have my name associated with a man whoplagiarized his dissertation and shacked up with women he wasn'tmarried to."

 Nervous but exultant laughter ran through the crowd: a lot ofheavy middle-aged white men raising their eyebrows at each otherto see if they dared laugh at Martin Luther King. They did.

 "Then I wanted to do it in February, but they said it wasPresident's Day. And I said that I liked the sound of that, but that I was only running for the Senate, and the presidency would have towait for a few more years."

 That line brought a round of applause and a slowly gatheringchant of "Run! Run! Run" from the crowd. Earl Strong, obviously pleased, let the chant build for a few seconds, long enough to be picked up by the TV cameras, then made a big show of quieting itdown by waving his hands over the crowd.

 "That left March or April. But in April, we've got Easter, when Christ rose from the dead, and that one is a little out of my scope.So I settled on March. March is a plain and simple month, raw andhonest, not tricked up with any fancy holidays, and I decided thatsuited my style best. And another thing about the month of March:it comes on strong!"

 That cued an outburst of cheering and chanting that went on forseveral minutes.

 Below, Eleanor wandered through the crowd with her shopping bag, watching the Strong supporters cheering and jumping up anddown and pumping their fists in the air. She was totally invisible.They had eyes only for Strong. The few who did notice her got the same shocked look that Erwin Dudley Strang had gotten years agowhen he had first seen a black woman standing in the doorway ofa suburban house. Then they looked away. Guiltily.

 People were so easy to understand, when you were a mom.Eleanor could see their guilt a mile away, see them trying to deludethemselves, like kids who believed that they could make unpleasantthings go away just by wishing.

 The only thing they needed, she realized, was a good talking-to.Which was one thing that Earl Strong could never give them.

 Eventually the cheering died away and Earl Strong stoppedshaking his clasped hands over his head and returned to thepodium, shot his cuffs, adjusted his collar just a bit. Eleanor had wandered rather close to him, was now looking up at him from justa few feet away. His face was thickly plastered with television makeup. In his perfect, stiff suit and his injection-molded haircut and his heavy pancake, he looked like a cardboard cutout.

 "Now you might ask why I went to so much trouble, and waitedso long, for the opportunity to speak here at the Boulevard Mall.After all, there are better places to hold a campaign event. But thismall has something that none of those places can provide. As I standhere in the crossroads of this beautiful mall I can look in alldirections and see economic prosperity at work."

 Applause.

 "I don't see people standing in line for a handout. I don't see people going to court and suing other people for what they thinkthe world owes them. I don't see people breaking into otherpeople's homes and stealing things. I see people working hard inhonest businesses, small businesses, and to me that is what makes America the greatest nation on earth."

 Applause.

 "And I have particular respect for the small businessmen, andwomen - let's not forget the women's libbers!-" laughter "-whobuilt these businesses, because for a number of years, I was a small businessman myself, owning and operating my own enterprise as anindependent contractor."

 Eleanor could not restrain herself; standing now at the base of thepodium, she spoke up. "Excuse me! Excuse me?"

 Earl Strong looked down at her with a fixed, glazed smile. Henoticed that she was black. Once again, he got that look on hisface.

 But he was older and, if not wiser, then smarter. He didn't let itthrow him off. She could see the wheels turning beneath hisartificial face. She could see him having an inspiration, making aquick command decision.

 "I don't usually take questions from the audience at this point in the speech," he said, "but some people have been saying that I onlyappeal to one kind of person, and I'm glad to see that a raciallydiverse group is here today, and I see that one of them has acomment she wants to make, and I'm very interested in hearingwhat she has to say. Ma'am?"

 Television sound men brandished their boom microphones like fishermen on a dock waving grotesque, furry lures, competing forthe attention of the only fish in the pond.

 "You were saying that you were a businessman," she said, andsuddenly her voice was very loud through the amplifiers, and sherealized that she didn't have to shout anymore.

 "That I was," Strong said. But his voice didn't come through;Eleanor had the microphones.

 "You were a cable TV installer," she said, in a normal tone ofvoice. She sounded good. Everyone had always said she had a goodtelephone voice.

 "Yes, ma'am, that I was," Strong said, shouting toward the microphones now, his voice high and strained.

 "Well, a cable TV installer isn't so much a businessman as he is aburglar with pretensions."

 Most of the crowd gasped. But a lot of them actually laughed.Not the deep forced belly laughter with which they had respondedto Earl Strong's canned jokes. It was nervous tittering, choked offin the middle, just this side of hysteria.

 Earl Strong was cool. He was good. The smile on his face barely wavered. He was silent and calculating for a few moments, waitingfor the laugher to die away, searching her up and down with hiseyes.

 "Well," he said, "I must say that's quite a disrespectful attitude for a woman who's carrying a big piece of cheese in her bag thatwas paid for by my tax dollars."

 A smattering of belly laughs, and sparse applause. Most of thepeople were silent, nervously realizing that Earl Strong was vergingon dangerous territory. And in the near vicinity of Eleanor, therewas violent convection in the crowd. Die-hard Earl Strongsupports were stepping away from her as if she was going to givethem AIDS, and minicam crews and news photographers were converging on her as if she were going to make them famous.

 "Well," Eleanor said, "I would say that even showing yourself inpublic is pretty cheeky when you are nothing more than a pencil-neck Hitler wannabe with a face from Wal-Mart."

 This time, there was utter silence, except for a few sharp intakes of breath.

 Earl Strong had gone bright red under his pancake makeup.

 "Besides," she added, "this cheese didn't come from your taxdollars. It was bought by churchgoers who give money to supporta public food bank. Have you ever been to church, Mr. Strong?

 Before you started running for something, that is."

 "I am a conservative Christian," he said. "I have no qualms aboutsaying so."

 "You have no qualms about saying anything that'll get youelected."

 Another nervous titter from the crowd. But father away, aroundthe fringes, a cheer went up; passing shoppers had gathered,attracted by the noise and now they were cheering her on.

 "I saw you show up just now in that tacky limousine. Most ofthe people who ride around in that thing are used-car salesmen or silicone beauty queens. Which one are you?" she said.

 "I resent the implication that there's something wrong with the used-car trade."

 "It's not exactly a character reference for you, Erwin Dudley Strang or whatever your name is."

 "My name is Earl Strong. And it's anhonest business like anyother."

 "Oooh, Erwin Dudley Strang is giving me a lecture about howto be honest," Eleanor said. "I know you think all black people aredishonest. Well, the only dishonest thing I've ever done is tellmyself I had a chance to make it in a white society."

 "There we have it," Strong said, addressing the crowd again. "The defeatist attitude that is bringing our economy down andbrainwashing many minority people into thinking that they have tohave affirmative action programs in order to succeed. This is aclassic example of the attitude problem that prevents black peoplefrom succeeding, even where no real impediments exist."

 "I don't have a car," Eleanor said. "That's a real impediment. Idon't have a job. My husband's dead. How many more impedi­ments do I need?"

 "None whatsoever," Strong said. "That's plenty. Why don't youjust shut up now."

 "I won't shut up because I'm hurting you on television, and youdon't have the brains or the balls to stop me."

 A bigwhooo! went up from the shoppers.

 Strong laughed. "Lady, I represent a political ground swell in thiscountry that is more powerful than you can imagine. And there is nothing you can do, on or off television, to hurt me. All you do isannoy me."

 "I know that's what you think. Ever since you took that beltsander to your face you think you're the second coming of Ronald Reagan. You think you're made of teflon. Well, it takes more thana simple mind and synthetic smile to be Ronald Reagan. You also have to be likable. And you aren't any more likable than you werewhen you showed up at my door at 4:54p.m. and installed mycable like some kind of a trained monkey."

 "Oh, so that's it," he said. "This is some kind of vendetta."Strong looked up at the crowd, turning his face up into the lightagain. "This woman is upset because she gets static on her daytimesoap operas."

 "No," Eleanor said, turning around to face the crowd, "I'mupset because my son just got shot in the back for using a payphone. And Earl Strong, this juvenile delinquent with a fifty-dollarhaircut, is standing up tall and pretty telling me it's all because Idon't have values. Well, I may be sleeping in a car and eatinggovernment surplus cheese but at least I haven't sunk low enoughto become a politician who feeds happy lies to starving children."

 "I am exactly the opposite of the kind of politician you think Iam," Earl Strong said, "I am a man of the people. A populist."

 "A populist? To you, a populist is someone who's popular... toyou, a homecoming queen is a populist. To me, a populist issomeone who serves the needs of the populace. And the only thingyou've ever done for the populace is show up late, drill holes intheir houses, and hand them a big fat bill. Which is exactly what Ipredict you'll do for us in the Senate."

 A high, enthusiastic screeching arose from the predominantlyfemale shoppers gathered around the edge, whose numbers hadnow swelled to exceed the Strong supporters. They rattled theirshopping bags, waved their fists in the air, and stomped the floor with their stylish pumps.

 20

 There were lots of empty offices on the upper floors of CyOgle's old Cadillac dealership. When the PIPER project gotunderway, Aaron requested some place for the West Coast head­quarters of Green Biophysical Associates. Ogle just shrugged andtold him to go upstairs and stake a claim. Aaron picked out an officeon the third floor. As far as he could tell, he was the only other person in the whole building, which was kind of surprising in anelection year.

 But he was hardly the first. The building had the eroded,overused character of a subway station, with depressions worn intothe thresholds and steps. Every time Aaron stepped through adoorway, through the sole of his tennis shoe he felt a gentleconcavity in the floor, burnished down through several stackedlayers of linoleum that left concentric ovals that looked like lines ona topographic map.

 The offices were furnished with old steel desks and chairs doneup in the colorless hues and unconvincing wood grain reserved for office furniture, but the walls were virtually papered with brightlycolored bumper stickers and posters. Giant multiline telephonecables hung from rude holes in the plaster. Ogle was just in theprocess of computerizing his whole operation, buying big high-powered Calyx workstations from Pacific Netware, and thoseunsightly holes in the plaster made installation a snap. The vendorwould haul the boxes into an office, uncrate the computers, andfeed cables into the holes. They would emerge from ragged holes in other offices and plug into other workstations.

 Aaron could only identify about 10 percent of the candidateshyped on the bumper stickers and posters that covered the walls, ceilings, doors, and even toilets. Most of them seemed to be forsenatorial and gubernatorial races in states he wasn't familiar with.Many seemed to be from other countries. There were a few inCyrillic and other alphabets that Aaron couldn't even recognize,much less read.

 Aaron's life in the PIPER project was hectic but comfortable. Hehad discarded all pretense of being a serious businessman and gone back to basic R&D, and he was surprised to find how much happierhe was. This was his natural way of life. He would meet with thePacific Netware people, either here in Oakland or in MarinCounty, and identify a set of problems to work on. He would fly to Boston and solve those problems with his partners, then fly backhere and repeat the cycle. He left his nice suit in Boston on his first trip and then returned to Oakland on the red-eye, checking a duffel bag stuffed with T-shirts and flannel shirts. He slept on the floor ofthe new office in Oakland, ate pizza, and was happy.

 On many occasions he ran into people in the empty hallways or the empty stairwells, carrying sheafs of paper or videotapes from one bleak, empty office to another. So far he had not seen anyonetwice. He did not know anyone well enough to say hello to them.A lot of people worked for Ogle, it seemed, but they didn't stay inone place for very long. So he was a little startled one evening whenOgle abruptly stuck his head into the doorway and said, "You wantto see a hell of a thing?"

 "What is it?" Aaron said.

 "The first female president of the United States," Ogle said.

 "I didn't realize they had held an election."

 "Mark my words. I will lay money on it," Ogle said. "C'mon."

 Aaron got up and followed Ogle down the stairs. He needed tostretch his legs anyway.

 Ogle had a video editing studio set up on the first floor, back behind the "Oval Office" and all the other sets. Half a dozen smallbut good color monitors were mounted on racks, each hooked upto a different videotape machine, and all the machines were hookedup to each other, and to a Calyx workstation, with anincomprehensible web of thick black cables.

 Two men and a woman were in the room, draped over thefurniture in poses that suggested they had been there for quite awhile. Aaron had seen a couple of them, here and there, around thebuilding from time to time.

 Ogle was a goofball. He was loose enough to seem positively loopy to most people. He spent a lot of time staring off into space with his rosebud mouth twisted in kind of an incredulous, sneering grin. But he was also a southerner and could suddenly turn on full charm-school etiquette when it was the appropriate thing to do. Soas he led Aaron into the room, he pirouetted and held one hand outto gesture at these three people and properly introduce them.

 "This is Aaron Green of Green Biophysical systems, our headgenius on PIPER," he said. "Aaron, I would like you to meetTricia Gordon, who is the most talented time buyer on earth; shedid the buying on the big Coke campaign last year."

 Aaron did not have the slightest idea what Ogle was talkingabout. He smiled at Tricia Gordon, she held out her hand, heshook it. She was wearing a relatively formal blue knit dress, largishabstract jewelry, and had red hair that was done up in a fairlyambitious style. She was confident and pleasant.

 "And this is Shane Schram, a clinical psychologist from Duke byway of Harvard. He does our FGIs, and can he ever dig downbeneath the surface on an FGI!"

 Aaron still had no idea what was happening. He shook the handof Shane Schram, who did not stand up or say anything, justdropped the chopsticks he was using to eat with and held his handup in the air for Aaron to shake. He was broad-shouldered,prematurely bald, rumpled, and smart.

 Ogle was still laughing at Shane Schram. "When our FGI peoplecome out of the room, they feel like they've been on the rack.Shane is the Savonarola of focus groups."

 "I see, that's great," Aaron mumbled.

 "And this is my old pal Myron Morris, who once said that thesingle most important political development of the last quartercentury was the zoom lens. Myron's a filmmaker, in case youhadn't guessed. He did those cinema veritéflood-damage spots forRepresentative Dixon down in Texas."

 Aaron shook the hand of Myron Morris, who was a wide-faced,jolly but cynical type in his early fifties, wearing bits and pieces ofa fairly nice suit.

 "I just caught his off CNN," Ogle said, waggling a thick, three-quarter-inch video cassette in the air, "and I thought y'all mightlike to see it."

 "Was this on Prime News?" Tricia Gordon said.

 "It was indeed," Ogle said, shoving the cassette into a bigprofessional videotape recorder. The VTR clunked loudly, like abig truck shifting into gear, and an image materialized on the screenabove it.

 The anchorman was introducing a segment; over his shoulderwas a small head shot of Earl Strong, the scary populist who hadbeen making waves in Colorado. Aaron couldn't hear much,because the sound was turned down. They cut to a shot of ashopping mall with the words DENVER, COLORADO superedacross the bottom.

 Everyone except Aaron laughed.

 "Original choice of venue," Myron Morris said, apparentlybeing facetious.

 Reverse angle: as seen from near the entrance to the mall, awhite limousine pulled up, festooned with flags and slogans, and anumber of people climbed out, including Earl Strong.

 "Jesus, what a putz," Myron Morris said. "It's deserted. What a waste."

 Ogle must have noticed that Aaron looked confused. "Theyprobably have a million supporters inside the mall, but nonepositioned outside to greet him. So he looks like a nobody," Ogleexplained.

 "They should have pulled a bus or something up as a backdrop.Something. Anything," Morris said.

 "See, the parking lot behind is full of glare," Ogle explained."Reflections of windshields and so on. But the entrance to the mallis in shade. So we can't see the guy's face at all-

 "Now watch! He's just going to disappear here," Morris said.

 On the TV, Earl Strong crossed into the shadow of the mall andbecame a featureless silhouette. The camera zoomed in on his face,trying to compensate for the high contrast between the glare out inthe parking lot and the dim light on Strong's face, but it lookedterrible either way.

 "He tried," Ogle said.

 "Who tried?" Aaron said.

 "The cameraman," Morris snapped.

 On the TV, Earl Strong approached the doors of the mall and then there was another cut. Aaron still couldn't hear anything, butit sounded like a reporter was delivering a voiceover during all ofthis.

 "Master race in skimmers," Morris said.

 As if on cue, the screen was filled with a couple of big fat middle-aged white ladies in COME ON STRONG T-shirts and EARLSTRONG skimmers, clapping their hands to the beat of acampaign song.

 "Good rhythm for Aryans," Shane Schram said.

 "UFOs Ate My Brain," Tricia Gordon said.

 "Now we'll go to some stumpage," Morris said.

 Again, perfectly on cue, Earl Strong appeared on screen,delivering some prepared remarks.

 "Have you seen this footage before?" Aaron asked Morris.

 "Get out of here," Morris said.

 "Nice lighting, huh?" Tricia Gordon said.

 "I love it," Morris said.

 Earl Strong was standing on a platform. The camera shooting thisfootage was down below him, aimed upward so that, as backdrop,Earl Strong had mostly the ceiling of the mall. But part of theceiling consisted of skylights, and where it didn't have skylights, ithad brilliant mercury-vapor lamps. The skylights made greatpatches of glare and the lamps made long wavy streaks across Earl Strong's face.

 "Jesus. Television cameras should be outlawed in the Sun Belt,"Morris said. "Film only. How many times do I have to say it?"

 Everyone in the room was laughing at Morris. But Morris had eyes only for the TV set. "Whoa! Whoa! Hold up here! We havesome real-life campaign drama!"

 Everyone was suddenly totally silent, crowding in closer to thescreen.

 The camera was now aimed at a black woman who wasapparently standing down below Earl Strong. She was slender, with high cheekbones, and at first glance she looked as if she might be inher late twenties. But on second thought, early forties was morelike it. For a woman in her early forties she was a knockout. Not in an overtly sexy way. She had a nice face, with big eyes. She waswearing an overcoat that was too big, but its bulk contrasted wellwith her relatively sharp and slender build, and its navy-blue colorsuited her skin tones. Her backdrop was a wall of Earl Strong supporters wearing colorful T-shirts, all of whom were hastilybacking away from her; she stood in the center of an arena of fat,vivid Aryans, all facing inward, emphasizing her importance. As shespoke, she inclined her face up into the even, omnidirectional lightstreaming down from above; the same light that cast Earl Stronginto shadow served as perfect illumination for her.

 "The choreography blows my mind," Ogle said.

 "I love her," Tricia Gordon said. "And she lights well."

 "She's telling the truth," Schram said. "Whatever she's saying, Ibelieve her."

 "The drama of this thing is unreal," Myron Morris said. "Onewoman standing alone, all these trailer-park Nazis shrinking away like rats."

 Cut back to Earl Strong, now looking straight down at her sothat his face was completely obscured by a sinister shadow.

 Myron Morris suddenly went nuts! He fell out of his chair,dropping to his knees below the television set, and clasped his handstogether as if in prayer.

 "Zoom in! Zoom in! Zoom in and his career is over!" hescreamed.

 The camera began to zoom. Earl Strong's face grew to fill the screen, grew into a devastating extreme closeup.

 "Yes! Yes! Yesss!" Morris was screaming. "Slit the bastard'sthroat!"

 Once the backlighting had been removed by zooming in tight,the camera's electronics were able to pick up every nuance of EarlStrong's face in clinical detail. A storm front of perspiration hadburst through the powder and pancake on his forehead; individual drops of it began to run down. One of them made a beeline for thecorner of his eye and that eye began to blink spastically. EarlStrong's mouth was half open and his tongue had come forward,sticking half out of his mouth as he tried to think of what to donext. A huge Caucasian blur burst up through the bottom of theframe: his hand, brushing the sweat away from his stricken eyeball,stopping on the way down to shove one thumb into a nostril and pick out something that had been troubling him there.

 Morris suddenly jumped to his feet and thrust an accusing finger directly into Earl Strong's face on the screen. "Yes! You are dead! You are dead! You are dead! You are dead and buried, you inbredbooger picking little shit! We gotta find the cameraman who did that and give him a medal."

 "And a decent job," Ogle said.

 Back to the black woman, still standing there. Her face was alert,her jaw set, her eyes burning, but she remained solid and still, a perfect subject for the camera. The camera zoomed in a little closerbut still found no imperfections. There were a few wrinkles aroundthe eyes. It just made her look even wiser than she already did, standing next to Earl Strong.

 "Ronald Reagan eat your fucking heart out," Shane Schramsaid.

 "There's something about her face, too," Ogle said.

 "She's been through some heavy shit, you can tell. An AmericanPietá," Tricia Gordon said.

 "Let's go down there and represent her," Shane Schram said.

 "What's she running for?" Morris said.

 "Nothing. She's a bag lady," Ogle said.

 A look of ecstatic fulfillment came over Morris's face.

 "No!" he said.

 "Yes," Ogle said.

 "It can't be. It's too perfect," Morris said. "It is just too fuckingideal."

 "She's a bag lady, and according to our polls, she knockedtwenty-five points off of Earl Strong's standings today."

 Morris threw up his hands. "I quit," he said. "There's no needfor me. Real life is too good."

 "We have to run her for something," Tricia Gordon said, staring fixedly at the TV screen.

 "Excuse me," Aaron said, "but aren't you all forgettingsomething?"

 "What's that?" Ogle said. They were all staring at him, suddenlyquiet.

 "We haven't heard a word the woman's said," Aaron said. "Imean, she could be a raving lunatic."

 They all burst into dismissive scoffing noises. "Screw that,"Shane Schram said. "Look at her face. She's solid."

 "Fuck that shit," Morris said. "That's what writers are for."

 21

 Mary Catherine was expecting a car, not a limousine,soshedidn't know that the shiny black behemoth was hers until the drivergot out, walked around, and opened the door for her. By that time,the sight of the limousine was already drawing a crowd; not manyof these showed up in this particular neighborhood of Chicago.

 Her lunch date had told her that he would send a car around topick her up at the hospital. Instead, he had dispatched a limousine.Which didn't make a lot of difference to Mary Catherine. Both ofthem were just vehicles to her, just ways of getting around town.She had been around enough not to be bowled over by the gesture.It was just another exercise in being William Cozzano's daughter and trying to keep things in perspective.

 The limousine had a TV and a little bar inside of it. The driveroffered to give her a hand mixing a drink. She laughed and shook her head no. She was going to have to come back from this lunchand keep working.

 She knew that there was a certain kind of person - a certain kind ofman, to be specific - for whom the back of this limousine waslike a natural habitat, who felt as comfortable sitting on thoseleather seats and drinking Chivas in the middle of the day as MaryCatherine felt behind the wheel of her beat-up old car. During thetime that Dad had been Governor, she had run into a lot of thosepeople, gotten to know their peculiar rhythms and their particularview of life. They had always seemed completely alien to her, like cosmonauts or Eskimos.

 Then Dad had proclaimed her the quarterback. As if her regularjob wasn't enough responsibility. Now, she had to dash out of theneurology war, filled with gunshot-paralyzed drug dealers anddemented AIDS patients, and dash down the stairs and jump intothe back of a limousine where the decisions were all different: whatkind of drink to mix, what channel to view on the TV.

 She had club soda and watched CNN, which was what the TVset was already showing when she climbed in. The timing wasfortuitous: it was high noon, the beginning of a fresh newsbroadcast. The Illinois primary was tomorrow. The elections were still very much up in the air, not much else was happening in theworld, and so the campaign was being covered pretty heavily.

 The out-of-power party had their front-runner (NormanFowler, Jr.), their runner-up (Nimrod T. ["Tip"] McLane), andtheir plucky underdog (the Reverend Doctor Billy Joe Sweigel).And just to make things interesting, they also had a popularfavourite: Governor William A. Cozzano, who wasn't evenrunning. But wildcat Cozzano petition drives were popping up allover the place and so the media had to treat him as a seriouscandidate.

 All three of the legitimate candidates got roughly the same sortof coverage: shots of the great man flying or driving into aprefabricated campaign event, a rally at a high school or whatever.They shook hands, they smiled, and they all did something just a little bit wacky, hoping that it would gain them just a little morerecognition among TV viewers.

 Mary Catherine was tired and stressed and she quickly zoned out,found herself watching all of this stuff without really processing it.She had slumped way down in the soft leather seat of the limo,displaying posture that would have driven her late mother to hysterics, and was gazing through heavy lids at the colorful imageson the screen, letting them pass directly into her brain without hindrance. Which was exactly the way you were supposed to watch TV.

 As if on cue, there was her father.

 CNN was showing her a wall of glass windows. The camera wasaimed upward at the outside of a building. Ceiling light could beseen in a few rooms, and many of the windows were festoonedwith mylar balloons, flowers, and children's artwork. MaryCatherine saw an IV bottle hanging from a rack and realized thatshe was looking at a hospital. The camera zoomed in on a particularwindow with lots of expensive flower arrangements. A man in a wheelchair was dimly visible peeking out between the bouquets.

 Then it all snapped into place. This was Burke Hospital inChampaign, and they were zooming in on her father's private room. The TV crew must have gone to the roof of the parkingramp directly across the street, five stories high, and aimed thecamera up and across to his window.

 Dad was nothing more than a silhouette. The windows were allmetallic and reflective; you could only see into them when it wasdark outside. But sometimes when the sky was profoundly overcastin the middle of the day, it was possible to look in those windows and see dim shapes underneath the silvery reflections. And that waswhat some enterprising cameraman had captured on videotape: Dad, sitting in a wheelchair, looking out his window.

 The image was gray and indistinct and so you couldn't tell thatDad was, in fact, strapped into the wheelchair to keep him fromslumping over. He had been turned squarely toward the windowand so you couldn't see the support that rose up behind his head tokeep it from flopping around. He was lit from behind so youcouldn't see the drool coming out of his mouth and the moronicexpression on his paralyzed face.

 A couple of standing silhouettes were visible behind him: a nurseand a slender young man. James. James pushed the wheelchaircloser to the window so that Dad could see out. Then he left Dadalone there and disappeared from the frame. The camera panned180 degrees.

 The parking ramp covered about half a square block. Parkingwas not hard to find in the area, so few cars ever made it all the wayup to the rooftop level. Right now, half a dozen vehicles were scattered around. Most of the remainder of the roof was covered with people.Hundreds of them. They were carrying signs and banners. Theywere all looking straight up in the air. Straight up toward Dad. Andnow that he had appeared in the window, they were all rising totheir feet, reaching into the air, shoving their signs and banners upinto space as if Dad could reach down and pluck them out of theirhands. But it was a strangely silent demonstration.

 Of course it was - they were in front of a hospital. They had to be quiet.

 The camera zoomed in on a long, crudely fashioned banner, likethe ones that fans hold up at football games: WE LOVE YOUWILLY! Others could be seen in the background: FIRST ANDTEN FOR Cozzano! GET WELL SOON - THEN GETELECTED!

 There were a couple of shots of other hospital patients, in theirflannel jammies and their walkers, looking out windows and pointing. Then back to the shot of Dad's silhouette, just visiblefrom the chest up, in front of his window.

 He waved out the window.

 Which wasn't possible. Most of his body was paralyzed after thesecond stroke. But he was doing it. He was waving vigorously tothe crowd.

 Something looked funny: his hand and arm weren't big enough.

 It was James. He must be down on his knees next to Dad,concealed behind the windowsill, holding up his hand and waving for him.

 Cut back to the crowd, waving their banners hysterically, goingnuts.

 Cut back to the window. James was till waving, pretending to be Dad. Then his hand stopped waving and became a fist. Two fingersextended from the fist in a V sign.

 Mary Catherine shot upright and spilled her club soda on the limousine's wool carpet. "You bastard," she said.

 Back to the crowd. Finally they lost it, forgot they were in frontof a hospital, started screaming and cheering. Hospital security copsjumped forward, waving their arms, telling them to keep it down.And then they cut back to network headquarters, where all of thiswas being watched by their afternoon anchorman. Pete Ledger.Former pro football player, turned sportscaster, turned newscaster.

 A well-respected, middle-aged black guy with a sharp, fast tonguewho'd probably end up having his own talk show one of these days.

 His eyes were red. He reached up with one hand just for an instant and wiped his runny nose with the back of one finger,sniffled audibly, took a big deep breath, forced himself to smile intothe camera, and announced, in a cracking voice, that they weregoing to break for a commercial.

 "My God," Mary Catherine said out loud to no one. "We're indeep shit."

 She flinched as the door of the limousine came open, letting in bright unfiltered light. The car had stopped.

 She'd lost track, but something about the light told her they werenear downtown, hemmed in by skyscrapers. They were in acrowded little side street, just south and west of the Board of Trade,stopped in front of a brownstone with a first-floor restaurant. Anawning extended from the front door, across the sidewalk, to a loading zone along the curb. An uniformed doorman had openedthe door for her.

 He reached in with one hand and helped her out, which was anice, if superfluous, gesture. He was an older guy, a kindly white-haired doorman type, and as he was helping her out on to thesidewalk, he gave her hand an extra squeeze, nodded at her,looking at her in a way that was almost worshipful.

 There was another man, a guy in a plain old dark suit, standingunder the awning waiting for her. Dad had once told her that youcould gauge the quality of a restaurant according to how many people you spoke to before you actually got around to orderingfood. She wasn't even into the door of this place yet and she had already encountered two people.

 "Howdy, Miz Cozzano," the man said, "I'm Cy Ogle."

 "Oh, hello," she said, shaking his hand. "Did you just get here?"

 "Nah, I nailed down a table for us," he said. "But I figured thatsince I dug you out of work like this on such an ugly day, least Icould do was come out and say hi."

 "Well, that's very nice," she said noncommitally.

 So far, he didn't seem like the cynical, media-manipulating sonof a bitch that he was supposed to be. But it was way, way too earlyto be jumping to conclusions.

 Another guy in a suit, who clearlydid work here, nearly killedhimself bursting out the front door of the place, and met herhalfway up the sidewalk, holding out one hand, bending his kneesas he approached so that by the time he reached Mary Catherine hewas practically duck-walking. Mary Catherine could see in hiswhole face and affect that he was Italian.

 He was crying, for god's sake. He pumped her hand and grabbed her upper arm with his left, as if only all the willpower in his bodyprevented him from violently embracing her. He said nothing butmerely shook his head. He was so overcome with emotion that he couldn't speak.

 "We were just watching CNN over the bar," Ogle explained."It was incredible."

 Some kind of a huge commotion was going on inside the place. It got louder as Mary Catherine moved toward the door, led by thecrying Italian and followed by Ogle, and as she crossed thethreshold, it exploded.

 The back of the restaurant was all quiet little tables, but the frontof the place was a sizable bar, currently packed with bodies. They were all men in suits. This was an expensive place where people in the commodities business, and the lawyers and bankers who fed offthem, gathered to fortify themselves with martinis and five-dollar mineral water.

 And right now they were all on their feet, howling, applauding,stamping their feet, whistling, as if the Bears had just run back aninterception for a touchdown. They were going nuts.

 And they were all looking at Mary Catherine.

 She came to a dead stop, shocked and intimidated by the noise.Ogle nearly rear-ended her. He put one hand lightly on top of hershoulder and bent toward her. "Pretend they don't exist," Oglesaid, not shouting but projecting a deep actor's voice that cutthrough the noise. "You're the Queen of England and they'redrunks in the gutter."

 Mary Catherine stopped looking at them. She stopped makingeye contact with any of them. She focused on the back of thernaître d', who was plunging through the crowd of pinstripes,making an avenue for her, and she followed him straight throughthe thick of it and into the restaurant proper. The people at the barwere chanting now: Cozzano! Cozzano! Cozzano!

 Half of the people dining in the restaurant area stood up as shecame through. Nearly all of them applauded. The maître d' ledthem straight to a table at the very back of the place, behind apartition. At last, they had privacy. Just Mary Catherine and Ogle.

 "I'm really, really sorry about that," Ogle said, after they hadbeen seated, menued, watered, and breadsticked by a swirl ofefficient, white-aproned young Italian men. "I should havearranged to bring you in the rear entrance."

 "It's okay," she said.

 "Well, I'm embarrassed," Ogle said. "This is my business, you see. It was unprofessional on my part. But they had CNN goingabove the bar, and I didn't reckon on that footage being shown justbefore you got here."

 "Powerful stuff," she said.

 "It was unbelievable," Ogle said. He stared off into space. Hisface went slack and his eyes went out of focus. He sat motionlessfor a few seconds, moving his lips ever so slightly, graduallybeginning to shake his head from side to side, playing the wholething back on the videotape recorder of his mind.

 Finally he blinked, came awake, and looked at her. "The kickerwas Pete Ledger getting choked up. I never thought I'd see that ina million years."

 "Me neither," she said. "He's usually too smart for that kind ofthing."

 "Well," Ogle said, "this is some powerful stuff that's going onright now."

 That led them into small talk about the primary campaign, the misguided petition drives that were trying to put her father's nameon the ballots in several states, and eventually into a discussion ofDad's stroke and its aftermath. Mary Catherine kept the whole thing quite vague, and Ogle seemed content with that; wheneverthe conversation wandered close to Dad's medical condition, or hispolitical prospects, his face reddened slightly and he grew visiblyuncomfortable, as if these topics were way beyond the bounds ofsouthern gentility and he didn't know how to handle it.

 She had only rarely gotten a chance to watch Dad doingbusiness. But she knew that this was how Dad operated: lots ofsmall talk. It was an Italian thing. It meshed pretty well with Ogle'slow-key southern approach.

 In fact, Ogle seemed to have no desire to talk business at all, as ifthe near riot at the bar had embarrassed him so deeply that hecouldn't bring himself to return to that subject. So, after anopportune pause in the conversation, Mary Catherine decided toopen fire. "You manage political campaigns for a living. My dad's not running for anything and neither am I. Why are you buying melunch?"

 Ogle folded his hands in his lap, broke eye contact, and glancedaround at the food on the table for a few moments, as if this werethe first time he'd ever thought about it. "There's a bunch ofpeople in my business. Most of the important ones are busy runningprimary campaigns, for various candidates, right now. But not me.So far I have not committed my resources to any one candidate."

 "Is that a deliberate strategy?"

 "Sort of," Ogle said, shrugging. "Sometimes it pays not tocommit too early. You may end up backing some loser. In theprocess, you antagonize the guy who ends up being the nominee,and then you can't get any work during the general election, which is where the big money gets spent."

 "So you're holding back until you find out who's likely to getnominated. Then you try to get them as a client."

 Ogle frowned and stared at the ceiling as if something was notquite right. "Well, there's more to it. I have been doing this for anumber of years now. And frankly, I'm getting tired of it."

 "You're getting tired of your business?"

 "Certain aspects of it, yeah."

 "Which aspects?"

 "Dealing with campaigns."

 "I don't understand," Mary Catherine said. "I thought youwerethe campaign."

 "I wouldlike to be the campaign. Instead, I'm the mediaconsultantto the campaign."

 "Oh."

 "The campaign proper consists of the party's national committeeand all of its hierarchy; the individual candidate's campaignmanager and all of his hierarchy; and all of the pressure groups towhich they are beholden, and their hierarchies."

 "Sounds like a mess."

 "It's a hell of a mess. If I can just make an analogy to yourbusiness, Ms. Cozzano, running a campaign is like doing a heart-lung transplant on the body politic. It is a massively difficult andcomplicated process that requires great precision. It cannot be doneby a committee, much less by a committee of committees, most ofwhom hate and fear each other. The political nonsense that I haveto go through in order to produce a single thirty-second advertising spot makes the succession of the average Byzantine emperor seemsimple and elegant by comparison."

 "I find that kind of surprising," Mary Catherine said. "Peoplehave known about the value of media since the Kennedy-Nixondebate."

 "Long before that," Ogle said. "Teddy Roosevelt staged the chargeup San Juan Hill so it would look good for the newsreel cameras."

 "Really?"

 "Absolutely. And FDR manipulated the media like crazy. Hewas even better at it than Reagan. So media's been important for along time."

 "Well, you'd think that the major political parties would havefigured out how to deal with it more efficiently by now."

 Ogle shrugged. "Dukakis riding in the tank."

 Mary Catherine grinned, remembering the ludicrous image from1988.

 "The Democratic candidates in the '92 debate, sitting in thoselittle desks like game show contestants while Brokaw strode aroundon his feet, like a hero."

 "Yeah, that was pretty silly looking."

 "The fact is," Ogle said, "the major parties haven't learned howto handle media yet. And they never will."

 "Why not?"

 "Because of their constitution. The parties were formed in the days when media didn't matter, and formed wrong. Now they arelike big old dinosaurs after the comet struck, thrashing aroundweakly on the ground. Big and powerful but pathetic and doomed at the same time."

 "You think the parties are doomed?"

 "Sure they are," Ogle said. "Look at Ross Perot. If Bush's psy-ops people hadn't figured out how to push his buttons and makehim act loony, he'd be president now. Your father has everything going for him that Perot did - but none of the negatives."

 "You really think so?"

 "After the reception you got when you came through thatdoor," Cy Ogle said, nodding toward the entrance, "I'm surprised you would even ask me such a question. Heck, you dad's alreadyon the ballot in Washington state."

 She was appalled. "Are you joking?"

 "Not at all. That's just about the easiest state to do it in. Onlytakes a few thousand people."

 Mary Catherine didn't answer, just sat there silently, staringacross the restaurant. She had been watching this political businessfor a while, but she still couldn't believe that a few thousand totalstrangers in Seattle had taken it upon themselves to put her father on the ballot.

 "This is kind of interesting, as an abstract discussion," MaryCatherine said. "I mean, I'm enjoying it and I guess I'm learningsomething. But how it relates to my dad isn't clear to me."

 "You're going to be hearing from a certain major politicalparty," Ogle said. "Medical situation permitting, they're going to try to draft your father at the convention."

 "And if that happens, you want me to use whatever influenceI've got to get them to hire you?"

 Ogle shook his head. "They won't hire me. They don't workthat way. They always form their own in-house agency so that thepolitical hacks, with all their little ambitions and intrigues, can exertmore control over the ad people, whom they see as unprincipledvermin."

 "So beyond having interesting conversations, what use are youto me? And what use am I to you?"

 Once again, Ogle broke eye contact, put his silverware down, stared off into the distance, thinking.

 "Let me just state one ground rule first," he said. "This conver­sation is not a business thing."

 "It's not?"

 "Nope. But it's not a social thing either, because we are totalstrangers."

 "So what is it, Mr. Ogle?"

 "Two people talking to each other."

 "And what exactly are we talking about?"

 "Surfing."

 "Surfing?"

 "Media is like a wave," Ogle said. "It's powerful and uncon­trollable. If you're good, you can surf on it for a little bit, get a boostfrom it. Gary Hart surfed on that wave for a few weeks in 1984, after he won New Hampshire from Mondale. But by the time theIllinois primary came around, he had fallen off the surfboard. Thewave broke over him and swamped him. He tried again in 1988 butthat time he just plain drowned. Perot rode the wave for a monthor two in '92, then he lost his nerve."

 Ogle turned in his chair and focused in on Mary Catherine now."You and your family, you've been having a day at the beach.You've been out wading in the shallow waters where everything is warm and safe. But the currents are tricky and suddenly you find that you have been swept far out into the deep black water by amysterious undertow. And now, great waves are cresting over your heads. You can get up and ride those waves wherever they takeyou, or you can pretend it's not happening. You can keep treadingwater, in which case the tsunami will break on top of you and slamyou down on to the bottom."

 Mary Catherine just kept her mouth shut and stared into her water glass. She was feeling several powerful emotions at onceand she knew that if she opened her mouth she'd probablyregret it.

 There was fear. Fear because she knew that Ogle was exactlyright. Resentment because this total stranger was presuming to giveher advice. And there was a frightening sense of exhilaration, wildthrilling danger, almost sexual in its power.

 Fear, resentment, and exhilaration. She knew that her brother,James, was experiencing the same feelings. And she knew that he was ignoring the fear, swallowing the resentment, and giving in to the exhilaration. Holding up his hand in the V sign, egging on the crowd. It was unforgivable. A hundred million people were going to see that.

 She looked at Ogle. Ogle was looking back at her, a little bit sideways, not wanting to confront her directly.

 "There's a third outcome you didn't mention," she said.

 "What's that?" Ogle said, startled.

 "You start riding the wave because you enjoy the thrill of it. Butyou don't know what you're doing. And you end up gettingslammed into the rocks."

 Ogle nodded. "Yes, the world is full of bad surfers."

 "My brother, James, is a bad surfer. He's areally bad surfer," MaryCatherine said, "but he thinks he's good. And he seems to havelocated a really big wave."

 Ogle nodded.

 "Now, I have no idea, still, what it is that you want, or what youare proposing, or what you think you're going to get out of it,"Mary Catherine said. "But I can tell you this. James is a problem.My father and our lawyer Mel and I would all agree on that. Andwithout committing myself or my family to anything financial, let me say that if you can provide some advice in dealing with thisproblem, it would not be forgotten."

 "You did what!?" Mel said.

 She knew he was going to say it. "I asked him for advice," Mary

 Catherine said. She was in the back of the limousine, riding backto the hospital.

 "You shouldn't have done that," Mel said. "You shouldn't evenhave met with the guy without my being there."

 "I was very good. I'm not the sap you think I am, Mel. I didn't make any kind of financial commitment. It was just a couple ofpeople having lunch together, talking. And I asked him for advice."

 "About what?"

 "About James."

 Mel sounded disappointed, wounded. "Mary Catherine. Whywould you ask a total stranger for advice in dealing with your own flesh and blood?"

 "Because half of my family is dead, or nearly dead, you're away on business, and James is being a complete asshole."

 "What do you mean? What's James doing?"

 She explained it all to him: the wave, the V sign, the cheers ofthe crowd, the hysterical reaction of the businessmen inside the bar.

 But Mel didn't get it. He listened, he understood, but he hadn'tseen it. He hadn't seen the emotion on people's faces. He didn'tunderstand the power of what was going on here. To him it was allTV, it was all Smurfs, and he couldn't bring himself to take itseriously. He didn't get it.

 She was glad she had talked to Cy Ogle, who definitely did getit.

 "What did this guy say?" Mel said.

 "His name is Cy Ogle," Mary Catherine said, "and he said thathe would think about it."

 "What kind of a name is Ogle?"

 "That's beside the point. But he said that it was originallyOglethorpe, which is a big name in Georgia. But somewhere along the line someone had a bastard child, who ended up with the nameOgle, and he's descended from that person."

 "So he comes from a long line of bastards."

 "Mel!"

 "Don't Mel me. He charmed you with some kind of southernshit, didn't he? I can smell it from New York. Told you a bunch ofwacky tales about his picturesque family down in the land ofcotton, seemed like the nicest guy in the world."

 "Mel. Be honest. You don't know anything about handling themedia. Do you?"

 "I happen to know a lot about it."

 "Then how did that happen today? That thing with James? Ifyou're so good at handling the media, then why is it that everyonein the country has the impression, today, that Dad is running forpresident?"

 Mel didn't say anything. She knew she had him.

 "Because of what happened today, we have to have a mediaperson," Mary Catherine said. "It doesn't have to be Cy Ogle. Butdepending on what he does with James, it might very well be."

 Mel sounded glum. "I hate the media."

 "I know you do, Mel," she said. "That's why we're in deep shit now. We need someone who loves the media. And I can tell youthat whatever imperfections Cy Ogle might have, he definitelyloves his work."

  

 22

 WilliamA.Cozzano was a lousy patient. mary catherine hadnever understood this until she became a doctor in her own right,and got into the habit of judging people's ability to receive medicaltreatment.

 Good patients were as close as possible to being laboratory rats.They were meek, docile, cooperative, and not very intelligent. The intelligent ones gave you fits because they were always asking questions. They knew full well that they were as smart as the doctorwas. That if they were to go off and enroll in a medical school,they'd know as much as the doctor did within a few years.

 William A. Cozzano was one of those patients who disputedeverything the doctor said. Who forgot to take his medicine -deliberately. Who pushed his recovery schedule into the realm ofthe absurd. Partly it was a holdover from the war, where you had to keep going even when you were wounded, and partly it camefrom football, where the standard treatment for broken bones wasa layer of athletic tape.

 The stroke had been hell for him because it left him unable toargue with his doctors. Mary Catherine had seen it in his face. Adoctor would come in and tell him to turn off CNN and get somerest, because he needed sleep. Dad would get a certain look on hisface, the look that signaled the beginning of intellectual combat, thelook that he got when he was marshaling his arguments andpreparing to demolish an opponent. Then he would open hismouth and gibberish would come out. The doctor would turn off the TV, turn off the lights, and leave him there in the dark.

 He had been much the same way during his four-day stay at theRadhakrishnan Institute in California. But there it wasn't quite sobad. It was a cross between a research institute and an exclusiveprivate hospital. From the very first contacts the Cozzanos had withthe Institute, it was made plain to them that here, the patient wasn'tjust a laboratory rat. Here, the patient was a partner in his owntreatment and recovery. He was consulted on a number of majordecisions. He sat in on the meetings where recovery strategy wasdiscussed. These people weren't afraid of intelligent, questioningpatients. They welcomed them. They preferred them.

 "Neurology is a fascinating science, full of riddles and mysteries,"Dr. Radhakrishnan had said during their first meeting, in the conference room on the high bluff over the Pacific Ocean.

 Mary Catherine had stifled a smile. Radhakrishnan was a neuro­surgeon, and uncharacteristically, he was talking about what awonderful discipline neurology was. She wondered if it had anythingto do with the fact that the patient's daughter was a neurologist.

 "In your therapy," Radhakrishnan continued, "we will beexploring realms that have never been entered. We will watch thedata streaming out of your biochip like the astronomers viewing theimages from theVoyager spacecraft on its journey to the outerplanets. Every day and every hour, we will see new and unexpectedthings. Enough new data will be generated to write a thousandarticles and a hundred Ph.D. dissertations.

 "But the information that we receive from the implantedbiochip will be reaching us through a narrow bottleneck. You, the patient, will have access to a far broader spectrum of informationand experience. This is why we welcome the opportunity to pursuethis therapy with a highly intelligent and perceptive patient. We need your help, Governor Cozzano. We need your partnership inthis scientific venture."

 Dad hadn't spoken a word, just gazed out the big windows at thepounding surf. But Mary Catherine knew that he was hearing and understanding every word. He knew exactly what was going on.And she knew he was excited about it. Two months of beingtreated like a child by Patricia had left him ravenous for this kind ofthing.

 She had gone over every inch of the Radhakrishnan Institute.Reviewed the records of their baboon experiments and of theirwork on an Indian truck driver named Monhinder Singh, who hadbeen miraculously cured using the same therapy. Viewed manyhours of videotapes of Singh, taken before the implant and over thecourse of his subsequent therapy. The results would have beenimpressive to anyone; to a professional neurologist, they wereuncanny.

 She had interviewed Dr. Radhakrishnan and some of his top staffmembers for hours, asking them a lot of hard questions about whatcould go wrong with this procedure and what steps they had takento avoid it. She always got good answers to her questions. Answersthat seemed to have been prepared in advance, as though they had anticipated all of her thoughts.

 But this was a paranoid attitude. She couldn't find anythingwrong. The only bad thing that could be said about theRadhakrishnan Institute was that they had made the transition frombaboons to humans rather hastily. They had taken big chances. If it had failed, it would have meant that they were rash and foolish. Butit had worked, so they were brilliant and daring.

 It would have been better - a lot better - if they could havetrotted out a dozen or so Mohinder Singhs, at various stages ofrecovery. Because this one Punjabi truck driver did not make for atrack record. He was not a trend. He might just be a fluke.

 But William A. Cozzano had taught his daughter to bescrupulously egalitarian, and so at this point in the argument shealways caught herself short. Because it wasn't fair to adopt thatattitude. The only way to test this thing was by doing it on humans.Sure it would be nice to see a dozen Mohinder Singhs. It'd be nice for the Cozzanos. But what about the second Singh, and the third?They'd be taking a big chance with not much to go on. And theirlives were worth just as much as William Cozzano's.

 It wasn't fair.That's what Dad would say. It wasn't fair to haveother people take all the risk, then reap the benefits after it had become a sure thing.

 Besides, this way it was more of an adventure. And she just knewthat he'd be thrilled by that idea. Dad was a wild man at heart; he'dalways wanted to go out and do crazy things. But his position as thehead of the Cozzano clan had forced him to behave conservativelyall his life. The stroke had freed him of that oppressive respon­sibility. He had nothing to lose now.

 So she signed the papers. Since the stroke, Mary Catherine hadbeen in charge of her father's body. She sent him into thatoperating room with many doubts about the operation - but in thefull confidence that it was what he wanted.

 They shaved his head and rolled him into the operating theater at 7:45a.m. on the morning of March 25, a little more than twomonths after his initial stroke. Mary Catherine gave him a last kiss on his burnished scalp before they scrubbed him for surgery. Thenshe pulled on a jacket and went for a long walk along the edge ofthe bluff, letting the pure Pacific wind blow through her hair. Theyhad said that she could watch the operation if she wanted, but if itturned out to be fatal, she didn't want that to be the last memoryof her father.

 She found a high rocky outcropping, climbed to the top, and satdown. Below her, half a mile out to sea, a huge, beautiful ketch wastacking upwind. Farther out, she could barely make out thesilhouettes of big freighters cruising up and down the Californiacoast.

 God, I need a vacation, she thought. Then she thought: this is it.This is my vacation. So she enjoyed her vacation for a few minutes.

 Then, hearing a noise behind her, she looked over to see Jamesapproaching, fresh from the airport, a big grin on his face.

 So much for the vacation. Dealing with James had developedinto business.

 "You're right," Cy Ogle had said to her on the telephone the dayof the Illinois primary. "Your brother's a terrible surfer."

 "How'd you find that out?"

 "Remember that lunch you and I had?"

 "Sure."

 "I did the same thing with your brother. Brought him in from

 South Bend on a chopper. Bought him lunch at the same place."

 "And?"

 "The way he handled it was totally different."

 "Different how?"

 Ogle had chuckled. "You weren't impressed. You weren'timpressed by any old limousine. You weren't impressed by a fancylunch or by my reputation, or by people cheering at you because your last name's Cozzano."

 "And he was impressed?"

 "Oh, yes. Profoundly impressed. You could see it in his face."

 "Stop," she had said. "Don't even describe it to me. I knowexactly how he must have looked."

 "Well, we had a nice little chat, anyway."

 "What did you talk about?"

 Ogle had laughed. "Not anything even remotely similar to whatyou and I talked about. See, you are interested in relationships.James is interested in power. So we talked about power for awhile."

 This had left Mary Catherine feeling slightly queasy, because sheknew that Ogle was exactly right.

 It was a testosterone thing. She knew it was. James had beensuppressed by Dad. James was small, weak, had a low pain thres­hold, couldn't throw or catch a football, didn't like getting dirty.Dad had been enough of a good father to swallow his dis­appointment. But everyone knew it was present, just under thesurface. James just hadn't developed. And as soon as Dad had beenremoved from the picture, all those pent-up hormones had comeflooding out and he had started developing too fast. Developing inthe wrong direction, without any guidance from Dad.

 He needed a trellis to grow on. He needed it now, before hestarted any more trouble for the family. But Mary Catherine knew there wasn't a damn thing she could do; in James's current state of testerone overdrive, he was incapable of taking direction, or evenadvice, from a big sister.

 Mel couldn't do it either. Mel and James had never had much tosay to each other, they had never had the simpatico that Mel andMary Catherine did. Mel was a street fighter and James was coddledand naive, despite all of Dad's efforts to toughen him up. The twoof them just didn't connect on any level.

 This was a case in point. Dad had gone under the knife an hourand a half ago. James should have been there to kiss him good-bye.Mary Catherine knew damn well that people died in surgery andthat you had to be there when they went under, because they mightnever open their eyes again. And she had explained all of this toJames. Stated, over and over again, the importance of his beingthere before the surgery. And he had missed the boat.

 "Hey, sis. How you doing?"

 He didn't even realize that he had screwed up. That was thefrightening part. No self-awareness.

 "You're late," she said.

 He was shocked, shocked to find that she was mad at him. Heshrugged and held his palms up. "My flight was delayed. You knowhow O'Hare is."

 "So do you," Mary Catherine said, "and a Ph.D. candidate atNotre Dame should have the brains to allow for it."

 "Jesus," he said, now sounding wounded, "this whole thing hasturned you into quite the dragon lady."

 "You can say 'bitch' if you want."

 "Suit yourself."

 She turned away from him and looked out over the ocean again,watching the big ketch come about. Its booms swung across thedeck, its jibs went limp and fluttered for a moment, then reinflatedand snapped tight again as the boat settled into a new course.

 It didn't bother her at all. They were dealing with some heavy-duty shit here. And now, all of a sudden, she understood a lot of things about Dad that she hadn't understood before. Why he was such a tough guy. Why he could be so calculating.

 "There's plenty of flights. I thought maybe you would come outlast night," Mary Catherine said, trying not to sound quite so harsh.

 "I was busy. I had business to take care of."

 These words terrified her. She looked into his face. "What kindof business?"

 "Take it easy," he said reassuringly. "I'm not running around doing stuff behind your back."

 "I've never accused you of doing so," she said. "This is the firsttime that notion's come up."

 He blushed, looked away, got real clumsy for a few seconds. "Well, this thing is my own gig," he said. "Nothing to do with you or the family."

 "What thing?"

 "I got a job," he said, beaming with pride.

 "Well, that's great," she said, "but isn't that going to interferewith your Ph.D. work?"

 "No, that's just the thing," he said. "It's part of my Ph.D. work.I'm double clipping. I get paid to do this job, and I get my regularstipend as a grad student, and I'll probably get a book contract outof it too." James had a devilish look on his face, as if he had justoutmaneuvered Satan himself.

 "Well, James, that's wonderful!" she said. "What kind of job isthis?"

 "I'm doing a study of the presidential campaign. All of the politicking that's been going on during the primary season. Withemphasis on media strategy. And if I play my cards right, I'm prettysure this could turn into a book eventually."

 "That's great. How'd you get on to this idea?"

 "It just hit me the other day. I was talking to this guy. He's a big-time campaign media consultant. You might not have heard of him."

 "What's his name?"

 "Cy. Cyrus Rutherford Ogle."

 "Oh. How'd you get hooked up with him?"

 "He just invited me out to lunch," James said nonchalantly. "I'm not sure exactly why. But I think that, obviously, because of myfamily connections, combined with my poli sci expertise, he thought maybe I'd be a good person to know."

 "Yes, I should think so," Mary Catherine said, sounding terriblyimpressed.

 "We engaged in small talk for a while, nothing specific. Then hestarted asking me a lot of questions about my dissertation. Heseemed to be fascinated with the topic."

 "I'll bet he was."

 "I was asking him about some of the work he does and itoccurred to me that, since he seemed to be so interested in mywork, a mutual back-scratching arrangement might be possible sowe hammered this whole thing out, right there at the lunch table.He's giving me access to a number of campaigns - he has friendsand proteges working in virtually every important campaign rightnow. So I get lots of material I wouldn't otherwise have access to."

 "Well," Mary Catherine said, "it sounds like you just made a brilliant career move." It was taking a lot of effort to keep fromsmiling at her brother. He had the same proud, beaming look onhis face that he'd had at the age of six, when he caught a big toad in the backyard.

 James shrugged. "Yeah. But Jesus, it's a lot of work."

 "It is?"

 "Oh, yeah. Suddenly I've got all these contacts. Dozens of majorsources. All these people to keep track of. I've spent the last fewdays just talking to people on the phone, setting up a database tokeep track of all the information I'll be taking in. I'm going to berunning flat-out until Election Day."

 "Uh-huh."

 "But if there's one thing that I learned from Dad, it's that whenyou see an opportunity you have to go for it in a big way."

 "Well," Mary Catherine said, "I hope you're not biting off toomuch."

 This was manipulation in its purest form. He would have found it patronizing to be congratulated. Better to fret and worry aboutwhat a big, manly job James was undertaking.

 "What's that supposed to mean?" he said. He was irked, andrapidly getting more so, building up a nice crescendo of self-important rage. "You think I can't handle a big job?"

 Mary Catherine shrugged. "I have a lot of respect for you,James," she said noncommitally.

 "No, you don't. You still think I'm a little kid. But I'm not. I'm

 an adult. And maybe you don't want to admit that fact, now thatyou've become the self-appointed capo of this family and you thinkyou know what's best for everyone."

 "Fine. It's your choice," she said.

 "I've done big jobs before. And I'm going to do this one. I'mgoing to succeed."

 "Good. I wish you the best of luck."

 James shut up for a moment, calming himself down. "It's been hard, being the son of the Great Man."

 "I know it has been," she said. "I know it's been really rough."

 "There've been a lot of times when I felt like the idiot son, youknow. A lot of Dad's old cronies treat me like a little kid."

 By this, Mary Catherine knew that he was referring to Mel.

 "But Cy is totally different," he continued. "He treated me withrespect. As an equal. He had no doubts whatsoever that I couldhandle this job. And I'm grateful to him for that."

 Soam I, Mary Catherine thought.

 "You should meet this guy sometime," James said.

 "Maybe I should."

 An interesting thought had occurred to Mary Catherine. MaybeCy Ogle had manipulated her just as brilliantly as he had James.

 Or maybe not. She had handed him something close to a quidpro quo: help me out with James, this loose cannon on the deck ofthe good ship Cozzano, and then we'll talk some more. And he haddelivered. He had done it in less than a week. He had solved a bigproblem for them.

 Cy Ogle might be a person that they could use.

 23

 Eleanor's first hint that anything funny was going on waswhen she heard Doreen, in the next trailer over, going, "Whoo-ee!Look at this, baby!" in the singsong falsetto that she used to attractthe attention of her children. Meanwhile, Eleanor could hear thesound of tires grinding and popping on gravel, right outside of hertrailer.

 Eleanor looked out the window. Mobile homes, like jetairplanes, offered great views off to the sides but you couldn't see what was directly in front or behind. All she could see was the side of Doreen's trailer, and Doreen's big hairdo in one of the windows, flanked by the faces of her three kids, their eyes and mouths wideopen to accept new input. They were all looking at something thatwas going on in front of Eleanor's trailer.

 It must be the Nazis. They were coming to get her. Eleanor ranup to the front of the trailer, slapping the chain on to her door asshe went by it. She got up to the front where two tiny littlewindows looked forward, and she peeled the windowshade backjust a little.

 It was a big old Lincoln Town Car, navy blue, freshly polished,the cleanest and prettiest car within several miles of this trailer park.You could back it into an empty slot here and make it pass for amobile home.

 All the doors were open. Several men were getting out. Theywere all young men. They were all wearing sunglasses. At least twoof them had walkie-talkies as well, and they were using them. Andthey were looking around, scanning all points of the compass through their dark glasses, swiveling their heads back and forth like

 searchlights on a guard tower. One of them went up to the Datsun,put his face up close to the silvered glass, and cupped his handsaround his eyes.

 For the first few moments, Eleanor was convinced that theywere Nazi hit men who had come to blow her away. But that wasjust paranoia. The followers of Earl Dudley Strang were notaffluent men in suits and Lincoln Town Cars. And if they wishedto do away with her, they would come in the middle of the nightlike the jackals they were. Not in broad daylight, in a big car, likethis.

 Besides, they didn't act like hit men, or how she thought hit menwould act. They had gotten out of the car immediately on arrival, but then they just stopped. They made no move to enter Eleanor'strailer.

 Eleanor raised her windowshade a little more, feeling bolder, andnoticed that there was still one man inside the Lincoln Town Car.He was sitting in the middle of the backseat and he was talking onthe telephone.

 He finished his conversation, hung up, and scooted down to theend of the seat. He climbed up out of the car, assisted by one of theyoung men in the dark glasses, and stood up on the gravel. Hesquinted into the unfiltered sunlight, his face wrinkling uptremendously, like a High Plains arroyo.

 She would have recognized him on the dark side of the moon:it was Senator Caleb Roosevelt Marshall, Republican of Colorado.He was so old that he was actually named after Teddy, not Franklin,Roosevelt. And he was so conservative that, during the thirties,when a lot of his idealistic young peers were going to Spain to fighton behalf of the revolutionaries there, he had volunteered to fightfor the Fascists.

 He had been virulently opposed to America's participation inWorld War II. A strong supporter of General MacArthur and afierce advocate of "nuking the evil Chinks" (his words) in Korea.He had spent most of the fifties rooting out "Comsymps" from Capitol Hill and the media. He had called Goldwater a pinko. Hehad seen both the Berlin crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis asgolden opportunities for a first nuclear strike against the SovietUnion, and had stood side-by-side with Curtis Lemay in therecommendation that North Vietnam be bombed back into theStone Age.

 He had run abortively for president in four decades, from thefifties through the eighties, whenever he felt that the frontrunningRepublican candidate was not gloomy, threatening, and violent enough. Consistently voted against affirmative action. ThoughEleanor knew her civil rights history well enough to know that he had astonished just about everyone by voting in favor of the CivilRights Act of 1964.

 He was like that: he was fringy enough to teeter on the edge ofbecoming a one-dimensional stereotype, but one or twice a year hewould do something freakish and astonishing. He had gained the grudging affection of some people by consistently hating RichardNixon's guts from the very beginning. He had come down on theside of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmationhearings, and delivered a lengthy and profane speech in her defenseon the Senate floor, using it as an occasion to lament the totalimplosion of American values.

 Just when his image seemed on the verge of being rehabilitated, he would do something reactionary. For the last several years, hehad celebrated Animal Rights Day by going out to his family ranch in southwestern Colorado and branding a few calves in front of theTV cameras. It got him tons of publicity, reinforced his caveman image, and made him wildly popular among farmers, westerners,and anyone else who made money from animals. The man knew how to get a campaign contribution.

 Now this weathered, deathless, inexplicable gnome was standingin front of her trailer, surrounded by men that, she now realized,were Secret Service agents. She did not know if she should run away and hide, or welcome him.

 Soon enough he was pounding on her front door and she had tomake up her mind. She pulled her hair back and wrapped ascrunchie around it, went to the door, and opened it. But it was stillchained shut and so it only came open a few inches. She foundherself staring through the chain at Caleb Roosevelt Marshall. Theywere of roughly the same height.

 "Take it easy, woman," he said, glancing at the chain. "I'm nothere to burn a cross on your goddamn lawn."

 She closed the door, unchained it, and opened it all the way."Senator Marshall?" she said.

 "Eleanor Boxwood Richmond?"

 "Yes."

 "Slayer of Erwin Dudley Strang?"

 "Well . . ."

 "Fastest tongue in the West?"

 She laughed.

 "If you would invite me in, I would have a few things to discusswith you."

 "Come in."

 "You don't have to invite any of these people in." Marshall said.He turned around and slammed the door in the face of an agent.

 "Can I offer you anything to drink?" she said.

 "I am in suspended animation. The only things I am allowed todrink are strange concoctions brewed up by pharmacists. Youwould not be able to afford them, and I can only do so by takinghonoraria," he said. He talked like a guy who was used to havinghis voice heard by a million people.

 "Well, then, please sit down anywhere you like."

 "Whenever I lower myself to a seated or reclining position, itoccurs to me that I may never stand on my feet again," he said. "Toa man of my age, even sitting down becomes a morbid thing. So Ihope it will not make you feel awkward if I stand up."

 "Not at all." Eleanor pulled up a tall bar stool, one of the artifactsthat they had salvaged from the wreck of their middle-class lifestyle,and sat down on it without losing any altitude. This way she could still talk to him face-to-face.

 "I know that this conversation has already gotten off on thewrong foot because you think that I am an evil vicious old manwho hates persons of your race," Senator Marshall said.

 "The thought had occurred to me."

 "But in fact, the only thing I hate is bullshit. I hate bullshitbecause I grew up on ranch and I spent the first three decades of mylife shoveling it. I went into politics largely because it was a deskjob and naturally I thought that in a desk job I would not have toshovel any more bullshit. Of course nothing could have beenfurther from the truth. So you see I have spent my whole life up tomy nostrils in bullshit and consequently know more about it, andhate it more, than anyone else on the face of the earth.

 "Now, the reason that a lot of Negroes think I hate them issimple: there is a whole lot of bullshit in racial politics, even morethan in other aspects of politics, and when I react against thatbullshit, they think I'm reacting against them. But I'm not. I'm justreacting against their bullshit politics. Like affirmative action. That'sbullshit. But civil rights isn't bullshit at all. I voted for that."

 "I know you did."

 "And all these different terms - colored, Negro, black, Afro-American - that's all bullshit too. They're always willing to comeup with new rods for Negroes, but never to actually do somethingthat will help them, and that's bullshit. The basic fact is that allpeople should be treated the same, as specified in the goddamnConstitution, and everything else is bullshit."

 "Well, Senator, I am aware that you are not a totally one-dimensional person, and so I am willing to give you the benefit ofthe doubt as long as you are a guest in my home."

 "I thought you would. A lot of Negroes hate my guts and start jumping up and down and organizing protest rallies as soon as Icome over the horizon, but I figured you would be able to seethings a little more clearly. You know why?"

 "Why?"

 "Because you have a bullshit detector as good as mine, and thatis a rare quality."

 "Well, thank you, Senator."

 "And you're not afraid to use it."

 "Well, that was a somewhat unusual thing for me to do. I wasvery upset at the time and not thinking clearly."

 Senator Marshall was peeved and disappointed. "Bullshit! Youwere thinking as clearly as the human mind has ever thought. Whatdo you mean, you weren't thinking clearly?"

 "I mean that I was raised to have good manners and bediplomatic, and I would not have violated those standards if I hadnot been at the end of my rope emotionally."

 "Well, you and I have different interpretations of this. Shit, I've been at the end of my rope emotionally since I was five years old."

 "This fact has been widely commented upon," Eleanor said.

 "You were perfectly justified in saying everything you said," Senator Marshall said. "Do you realize that Earl Strong may neverrecover, politically, from what you did to him?"

 "I think you are being very optimistic to say that."

 "Bullshit. This is your polite upbringing talking, isn't it?"

 "Possibly."

 "I got a stack of poll results an inch thick. We have been watch­ing this thing. Hell, I wanted to come over here and congratulateyou the same night you did it. But instead I waited a few days for the poll results. And lady, you blew that son of a bitch to smith­ereens. You ripped that little tick's head off. You deserve a medal."

 Eleanor laughed. "A medal? I'd rather have a job."

 Senator Marshall stuck out his right hand and looked at Eleanorexpectantly.

 She didn't know what to do. The man was so weird. He was weird, he knew he was weird, he knew that she knew it, and he didn't care.

 Finally politeness took over and she reached out and shook hishand. He seized hers, not with the perfunctory squeeze of apolitician, but with the powerful grip of a man who has to pull himself up out of chairs and beds. He didn't let go.

 "Done," he said, "you're hired."

 Eleanor laughed wildly. "You're crazy!" she said, "what are you talking about?"

 "I don't know."

 "So you're just kidding."

 "Oh no. I sure as hell ain't kidding. You're definitely hired. I justhaven't worked through all the bullshit yet."

 "The bullshit?"

 "Job tide, GSA level, what kind of desk to get you, what kind ofgoddamn picture to hang on the wall of your office. See, one of thethings you learn, when you've hired a lot of people, and then firedmost of them, is that when you find a quality person, you hire themright away and work out the details later. And I just hired you."

 "Just on the strength of the fact that I said some nasty things toEarl Strong."

 "You said some true things," Caleb Roosevelt Marshall said, "which is something that few people in Washington are capable ofdoing. And you said them well, which is just as unusual."

 He still hadn't let go of her hand.

 "I would have expected you to like Earl Strong."

 "Ha! You think I'll support anyone who comes along and spoutsa few positions similar to mine. What do you think I am, a senileold moron?"

 "Isn't that how it works?"

 "Positions change. People don't. Earl Strong may or may notalways be a so-called conservative populist. But he will definitelyalways be a pencil-neck Hitler wannabe with a face from Wal-Mart, as you pegged him. I don't want to serve with him in theSenate. And you may have saved me from that fate. So I owe youajob."

 "Well, I'm not sure I want to work with you."

 "Eleanor Boxwood Richmond," he said, "you and I got exactlythe same politics. Only thing is, you don't know it yet."

 "How can you say that? I've been a liberal Democrat all my life."

 Still gripping her hand, Senator Marshall shook his headdismissively. "All that Democrat/Republican stuff is bullshit," hesaid. "And as far as liberal versus conservative, well, people are verypromiscuous in the way they use those words. They don't reallymean anything. Within those two camps there are very widedivisions. And between those two camps, there is a lot moreoverlap than you think. None of that bullshit really matters. Theonly thing that matters is values."

 "Values?"

 "Values. I've got 'em. You've got 'em. Earl Strong doesn't. That means you and I are on the same side. We have to stick together,you and I."

 "And that means you're going to give me ajob."

 "I already figured it out. Took me a few minutes, but I figuredit out. I need a health and human services liaison for my Denver office. We can start you on Monday. You'll work your ass off and make forty-five thousand plus full medical. Interested?"

 "What can I say?" Indeed, what could she say? "Sure. I'll take it.What do I have to do?"

 "Answer irate phone calls from parasites who want to knowwhat became of their welfare checks.

 "Okay. I can do that."

 "Done," the Senator said, and let go of her hand finally.

 "One question."

 "Yeah?"

 "Do you expect me to blow these people off, or to actually help them? Because if someone calls me wanting to find their welfarecheck, I intend to help them out."

 "None of them vote," the Senator said, "so they can all go to hellas far as I'm concerned. You can handle it any way you want."

 24

 The ride took her in slowly through Commerce City and north Denver, the attic of the West: square miles of warehouses,stacks of empty cargo pallets that must have consumed whole forests, entire blocks of businesses devoted to truck clutches.Eleanor had seen it too many times to count, but sitting on TheRide in her one and only decent dress, on her way to work -work - she saw it all from a new perspective, like a queen surveying her domain.

 The sky was always sapphire blue when Eleanor looked straightup, but as she tracked it down toward the horizon it faded to a hot yellowish brown as if something had singed it around the edges.Eleanor was never sure if the stuff in the air was pollution orairborne topsoil, but it usually gave her a bad feeling aboutwherever she was going. She was tired of being able to see so far,and wanted to be hemmed in a little bit.

 Downtown Denver fit that bill. It always looked clean because itwas built-up, and so you couldn't see far enough to notice howdirty the air was. Eleanor sat on a bench for a while, waiting foranother Ride, and marveled at the place. When you were used tothe dusty flatlands out by the arsenal, the smallest things - a freshlypainted GODS drop box sitting on a street corner, a young womanwearing white stockings, a Volvo with water beaded up on its hoodfrom the car wash - looked impossibly clean and new, like imagesfrom a Kodak or Polaroid advertisement.

 This was the world where a lot of people lived their whole lives.A world where Eleanor had lived for many years but that nowlooked like an alien planet to her dusty bloodshot eyes, and whereshe had just been given the tiniest of handholds.

 Tree-lined Pennsylvania Street ran north-south behind the statecapitol. At some point in Denver's early boom years it had been thefashionable place for barons to construct their mansions - not justhomes, but seats of political and social influence. The architecturewas diverse, and exuberant bordering on eccentric, including hugeVictorian homes, plantation-style classical structures, arched-and-turreted Romanesques, and one especially large and bizarrestructure, a red sandstone mission building that bore more than apassing resemblance to the Alamo.

 Senator Caleb Roosevelt Marshall used that building as his homeoffice, and he referred to it as the Alamo, which was not a popularjoke among his Mexican-American constituents, but then he wasnot the type to care.

 Like any big rambling eccentric old building, it had good officesand bad ones. The office assigned to Eleanor Richmond wasespecially bad, but that was a fact that wouldn't even occur to heruntil she had been working there for a while. When she showed upfor her first day as Health and Human Services Liaison, all she cared about was that she had a job. And a damn good job, as these thingswent.

 She was wearing her interview dress. She wasn't sure why. Shehad worn it to all of her job interviews in the past several years andit hadn't done a thing for her. She had interviewed for her job withSenator Marshall in a Towson State University sweatshirt and nonmatching Army sweatpants. But this was the one dress that shehad been at pains to take care of through all the turbulence in her life. She had somehow thought that she could never become a true bag lady if she owned one clean, decent dress. So now she waswearing it to work. When the paychecks started coming in, shecould go back to the Boulevard Mall, this time as a paying customer, and cut a swath through Nordstrom, like GeneralSherman plowing through Dixie.

 The first thing that anyone said to her was a sound effect:"Foop-foop-foop."

 She had been walking down a hallway in her interview dress,carrying a box full of photos and other personal effects in her arms,looking into each door as she went by, trying to find the one thatbelonged to her. And when she finally found it, walked into thesmall windowless room (later she learned it had been the walk-incloset of a railway baroness), and set her box down on the crated and elbow-worn formica of the desktop, she heard it. She turnedaround. A man was standing in her office doorway. She didn't like him.

 He was in his mid-to-late twenties, or maybe he was an olderguy who just looked young. He was wearing a pinstriped suit withcowboy boots. His comb had left visible, parallel grooves through his heavily gelled brown hair, like the tracks of fleeing dinosaurs in a fresh volcanic mudflow. He had sparkly gray eyes and high mischievous eyebrows that could have made him look wild andfun, if he could have ditched the suit and the gel for, say, a pair ofshorts and a long outdoorsman's mane. But instead he struckEleanor as unnaturally pinned back.

 When she first saw him, he was leaning into her office doorway,holding one index finger straight up in the air, rotating his handaround in a circle, saying ,"Foop-foop-foop."

 "Excuse me?" she said.

 "Somebody ought to put a revolving door on this office," hesaid. "Seems like I get a new neighbor in here every week - Hello,"he said, segueing in midsentence like a game show host, andturning the rotating index finger into an outstretched right hand,"Shad Harper. You'd be Eleanor."

 Eleanor took half a step toward him and began to extend herright hand. He dove in, grabbed her hand too soon, seized the verytips of her fingers, squeezed them together hard, and pumped for afew seconds.

 "EleanorRichmond," she said, but this hint was completely loston him, as she knew it would be.

 "Good to know you, Eleanor."

 "You have the next office,Mr. Harper?"

 "Yeah. Come on over any time you want to have a look at thecourtyard," he said, widening his eyes just a bit and staringsignificantly at the blank wall behind Eleanor's desk. The office ofShad Harper was a big old master bedroom or something, and she could already see that he had lots of windows.

 These were all things that would bother her later. At themoment, nothing could penetrate the endorphin buzz that she hadfrom actually being on a payroll.

 "Thank you," she said, "you're very kind."

 "Saw you on TV. That was quite a little tantrum you threw infront of Earl Strong there."

 "And what do you do for the Senator?" she said.

 "Oh," he said, as if he were surprised that she didn't alreadyknow, "I'm the BLM liaison."

 "BLM?"

 "Bureau of Land Management," he recited, with calculatednonchalance.

 Looking over his shoulder across the hallway, Eleanor could seea bleached longhorn skull hanging on one of the rare parts ofHarper's office wall that did not consist of windows. That, and thecowboy boots, told the story of Shad Harper.

 Bureau of Land Management. Colorado had a lot of land thatneeded to be managed. A lot of voters lived on or near that land.When the land did get managed, it was through federal programs.Shad Harper must be keeping tabs on a lot of money.

 He was very young. Which was not a problem in and of itself;Eleanor had known a lot of bright young things who were apleasure to be around. But Shad Harper didn't seem to realize thathe was still a young man. He ought to be out riding a mountainbike around Boulder. Any man of his age who was not out goofingoff was difficult to trust.

 He raised his eyebrows, showing exaggerated concern, andpuckered his lips into a silent O shape. "I think your phone'sringing, Eleanor," he said.

 Eleanor turned around and looked at her phone, an elaborate,high-tech, multiline model with lots of tiny little buttons on it.Each button had tiny little red and green lights next to it. Somebuttons had red lights going. Some had green lights going. Somehad both. Some of the lights were blinking others were not. Itlooked like a Christmas decoration.

 "Well, thank you," she said, "but I don't hear anything."

 "I took the liberty of turning the ringer off while this office was vacant," he said. "It was driving me crazy. I gotta get back. I'll seeyou later, Eleanor."

 He dodged out the door and across the hallway and made adiving grab at his own telephone, then burst into a good-natured,booming, masculine welcome. Whomever Shad Harper wastalking to, if he had been there in person, Shad would havebeen pounding him on the back and possibly even giving himnoogies.

 Eleanor set her box of stuff down on her desk, went aroundbehind it, and looked at the silently ringing telephone. She wantedto sit down, but there was no chair in the office, just a desk.

 She knew the deal here. Shad Harper, being a boy, had figuredout how to turn off the telephone's ringer. And she, being a girl,was supposed to sit helplessly for a while, and then go across thehallway and meekly ask him to turn it back on for her. Ten minutesinto her job, she would already owe him one.

 She already knew that she would rather shove a freshly sharpenedpencil into her eye than ask Shad Harper for a favor. She picked upthe telephone, clamping the handset down into its cradle with herthumb, and rotated it around, looking at all the tiny little switchesand jacks and plugs and connectors. It took some looking and someexperimenting, but eventually she found it. She flicked a switch.The phone rang.

 She picked it up. But before it even reached her ear she couldhear a conversation, already in progress. It was Shad Harperlistening to a crusty old rancher somewhere complaining about thecultural and genetic deficiencies of the Mexican race. He was doingthis by listing all of the ways that, in his view, they were similar to "niggers." After the man made each point, Shad Harper would say,"Uh-huh," in a chuckling and indulgent tone of voice.

 Her phone was still ringing. She pushed another button.

 It was Senator Marshall himself, now in D.C., talking to someone about polls. Her phone was still ringing; she pushed another button.

 It was a young black woman who apparently worked here in thisoffice, talking trash with another young black woman whoapparently worked in someone else's office. Her phone was stillringing; she pushed another button.

 "Hello?" a voice said. White female. Screaming kids inbackground.

 "Hello, Senator Marshall's office," Eleanor said.

 "I know I already reached the Senator's goddamn office," thewoman said, "but who am I talking to?"

 "Mrs. Richmond. Health and Human Services Liaison."

 "Finally. Jeezus, I been on hold for a quarter of an hour and mykids are going nuts here. Kin you hear 'em?"

 The sound of the kids got louder for a few moments and Eleanorrealized that this woman must be holding the phone out towardthem, waving it around a motel room or trailer full of screechingand fighting rug rats like a rock star pointing his microphone at thecrowd. Another Commerce City resident, no doubt.

 "Yes, I believe I can, ma'am," Eleanor said. "How may I helpyou?"

 A brief moment of stunned silence on the other end of the line."Well, didn't I already just explain that about three times?" Then,her voice farther away: "Brittany! Ashley! You stay away from yourgoddamn brother or I'll tan your hides!"

 "I don't know, ma'am," Eleanor said, "you never explained it tome."

 "Well, I explained it to the other gal."

 "Well, ma'am, I'm not quite sure who the other gal is. But I'dbe happy to listen if you'd care to explain it again."

 Another silence. Eleanor couldn't figure out why this womanwas being so quiet until her voice came back on again, and it was obvious that she had begun to cry. "Well, I ain't going through thewhole goddamn thing again! But let me tell you, bitch, that if it don't get taken care of today, I'll-

 "You'll what, ma'am?"

 "I'll go out and find wherever it is that I'm s'posed to register andget myself registered to vote and go out and vote against that oldfuck that you work for next time he comes up for reelection!Bitch!" Then the woman slammed the phone down.

 The phone began ringing immediately. Eleanor was starting to get the hang of this now; she pushed the button with the blinkinglight next to it.

 "Hello, Senator Marshall's office," she said.

 "Finally!" someone said. Black female. Then, away from thephone: "Hey, I finally got through!" Then, back into the phone: "You have any idea how long I been waiting on the line?"

 "A quarter of an hour or so?"

 "Shit, I been waiting all day."

 "It's only 9:13 - but I'm sorry for the delay, ma'am. How can Iassist you?"

 "I took my little daughters to a unlicensed day-care at my neighbor's house down the street and when I come home fromwork, her boyfriend had come in during the day and molested 'em,and I want to know if I can force him to take an AIDS test."

 "Did you call the police?"

 "Shit no. Why would I want to call them?"

 "Because a very serious crime has been committed."

 "Shit. I called you for serious advice, girl."

 "I'm giving it to you. Call the cops. Tell them what happened.Send the bastard to jail."

 "This G done already told me if call the cops he come kill me."

 "Ma'am, how could being killed possibly be any worse thanhaving your daughters raped?"

 Stunned silence. "What kind of an attitude is that?"

 "It's a reasonable attitude. It's the kind of attitude that any parentshould have."

 "Well, who are you to be telling me this?"

 "I'm a woman who was raised right by her parents and who's been trying to raise her two kids right."

 "What are you saying, that I ain't been raised right?"

 "That's exactly what I'm saying, if you care so little for those twoprecious daughters of yours that you won't even seek justice forthem. If anyone in my family ever got raped, nobody would restuntil the perpetrator was dead or behind bars."

 "Well, I didn't call you up so you could give me abuse.""Girlfriend," Eleanor said, "I'm gonna tell you somethingrealimportant right now and you better listen."

 "I'm listening," the woman said. She sounded cowed and meeknow.

 "This that I am saying to you is not abuse. It's the truth. It's justthat sometimes the truth is so harsh that when people hear itspoken, it sounds like abuse. And one of the problems we got inthis country, not just among black people but with everyone, is thateveryone is so easy to offend nowadays that no one is willing to saythe things that are true. Now, I just told you what to do. You goand do it. And if you have to go out and get a gun to protect youfrom that son of a bitch that raped your daughters, you damn wellbetter do it, because that's your responsibility, and if you can'thandle it, then you don't deserve to have those two little angels thatare a precious gift from God."

 Eleanor slammed the phone down. It started ringing.

 "Senator Marshall's office."

 The creaky voice of a very old man said, "Help! I've fallen and Ican't get up!"

 "Good morning, Senator Marshall, how are you?"

 "Wide awake and full of inspiration, after that!"

 "After what?"

 "Your motivational talk to that young woman. Well done!"

 "You were listening to that?"

 "I always listen in on my liaison staff," Senator Marshall said. "It'san essential part of the job. And if I had managed to get through to you before you actually swung into action, I would have given youfair warning. But now you know."

 "Well, I don't normally shoot my mouth off this early in themorning, but-"

 "You weren't shooting your mouth off. You were doing justfine. All those people out there are crying for more welfare checkswhen what they really need is to have someone like you poundsome common sense into their heads."

 "I don't necessarily agree with that," Eleanor said, mortified.

 "Anyway, nice to see you changed your position on gun control.You're going to fit right in at the Alamo!"

 "Who said anything about gun control?"

 "You did," Senator Marshall said. "You were pro-gun control,weren't you?"

 "In theory, yes," Eleanor said, "but I have a gun, and I knowhow to use it."

 "Well, tell me something. If that woman you were just talkingto had to fill out a bunch of forms and get permission from the government to have a gun, she wouldn't be able to take the adviceyou just gave her, would she?"

 Eleanor shook her head in exasperation. "You are just full of pissand vinegar, aren't you?"

 "No, I just like a good discussion, is all."

 "I have important people to talk to," Eleanor said, and hung upon him. Her phone rang immediately.

 25

 Aaron Green put his feet up on his desk at Green BiophysicalSystems in Lexington, Massachusetts, enjoying the first lull inthe action since his big conversation with Cy Ogle back inJanuary. They had ironed out all of the problems that they couldthink of having to do with the PIPER miniaturization project.Responsibility had been transferred to the shoulders of thePacific Netware people. Aaron had brought in aNew YorkTimesand aBoston Globe, and was reading some astonishingresults from the Illinois primary, which had taken place the daybefore.

 Several members of the party in power had challenged the incumbent President. Usually such efforts were purely symbolic,but the President's policy on the national debt had provided fodderfor a more serious challenge this time around, and these candidateshad racked up some surprisingly high numbers.

 The situation in the other party was even more interesting.There were two announced candidates - three, if you counted theReverend William Joseph Sweigel, which almost no one did.Everyone knew, and had known since Super Tuesday, that the realrace was between Tip McLane and Norman Fowler, Jr., the boybillionaire of Grosse Pointe.

 But apparently in the last week before the Illinois primary, unspecified persons had initiated a write-in campaign for William A. Cozzano, the Governor of Illinois, who was in the hospital recovering from a stroke. It seemed to be a genuine, spontaneousground swell. People had begun showing up in T-shirt stores andasking to have Cozzano printed on shirts and hats. Crudelyfashioned, xeroxed Cozzano posters had begun showing up onmailboxes and in car windows.

 In yesterday's primary, a lot of people had written in theGovernor's name. Alot of people. So many that the counting of the ballots had been delayed. But the results available as of the middleof the night before, when the newspapers had gone to press,suggested that Cozzano had actually won a number of precincts,made a strong showing overall, and might actually come in secondto Normal Fowler, Jr. He had been so strong, in fact, that he hadactually gotten several thousand write-in votes in theother party'sprimary.

 When Aaron saw the preliminary numbers printed in the paper,he turned on the TV in his office to see if he could get some up-to-date numbers. He never used to pay attention to this stuff, but since he had started hanging out with Ogle he had become veryelection conscious.

 The news networks were full of Cozzano. Cozzano in Vietnam.Cozzano being carried around on the shoulders of fellow Bears.Cozzano raking leaves in front of his big house in some backwatertown in Illinois. Cozzano waving from the window of his hospitalroom in Champaign. And the name Cozzano, crudely printedon T-shirts and homemade yard signs.

 He was startled to realize that someone was standing in his officedoorway. It was Marina, the office manager, word processing anddesktop publishing genius, fixer, diplomat, you name it. She lookeda little dreamy. If this had been a Warner Brothers cartoon, she would have had stars and birds circling around her head.

 "I just got the weirdest phone call," she said.

 "Tell me about it," Aaron said.

 "This guy called up. A guy with a southern accent. I think it'sthat guy you've been dealing with out in California."

 "Cy Ogle."

 "Yeah."

 "Well, what did Mr. Ogle have to say?"

 "That I was fired."

 "He said what?"

 "That I was fired. That the corporation was undergoing arestructuring and that I could apply for reemployment later."

 Aaron was more nonplussed than he was angry. It had to beOgle's weird sense of humor at work. "Well, who the hell is Ogleto be saying stuff like that?"

 "Exactly what I asked him. He said he was the chairman of the board of directors."

 "I'm the chairman," Aaron said.

 "I know that."

 Another person appeared in the hallway, standing behindMarina. It was Greg. College buddy of Aaron's. Cofounder of thecorporation. Chief biologist. "I have just been informed that I'm fired too," he said. "But maybe it's not so bad since our stock is selling for twice its normal value today. So I'm worth twice asmuch."

 "Good," Marina said, "so am I." Marina had lots to stock too.

 "Selling?" Aaron said. "None of our stock has changed hands inmonths."

 "Get with it," Greg said. "Fifty-five percent of it changed handsat 9:05 this morning."

 "What you're saying is that our venture capitalists sold us to someone else."

 "That's what it amounts to."

 "And Cy Ogle claims to be that someone," Marina said.

 The telephone on Aaron's desk began to purr. Aaron picked itup, indicating with a hand gesture that it was, okay for Greg andMarina to stay in the room.

 "You're probably pissed because I just fired half of ourcompany," Ogle said. "Which is understandable. It's hard to run atight ship based on emotion and personal loyalty. Damn hard."

 "Who's next? Me?"

 "Nope. You're staying on, along with your two electronics guys.We can use them. Everyone else has served their purpose."

 "How am I supposed to run an office without Marina?"

 "You don't have to worry about running an office anymore. Wehave plenty of room down here in Falls Church."

 "But I don't live in Falls Church, Virginia. I live in Arlington,Massachusetts."

 "Then you better get used to a hell of a long commute," Oglesaid, "because a moving truck is showing up at your office door infive minutes to pick up all your equipment and drive it downhere."

 "Now, wait just a second," Aaron finally said. He had been fighting the impulse to get pissed off ever since this weirdnessstarted. "This is just totally unacceptable. You can't just uproot ourlives like this. Hell, I don't even know for sure that you're the realchairman!"

 "I am," Ogle said, "but there's no point in your getting pissedoff at me."

 "There certainly is," Aaron said, "if you're the chairman."

 "I'm the chairman of Green Biophysical Systems as of 9:05a.m.,"Ogle said, "but as of 9:03a.m. I was no longer the chairmanof Ogle Data Research."

 "Huh?"

 "I got bought out too."

 "By whom?"

 "A whole bunch of folks. MacIntyre Engineering. The Coover Fund. Gale Aerospace. Pacific Netware. They own me now. Andthe first thing they did was tell me to buy you. So I did. And thenthey told me to initiate a radical downsizing program. So I did. And part of that is closing the Lexington office and moving it down hereto Falls Church."

 "And all of these events took place during the first five minutesof the business day."

 "Yup."

 "Gee," Aaron said, "a guy could almost get the impression thatthe groundwork for this whole thing had been laid well inadvance."

 "Draw your own conclusions. Throw a tantrum. Call me names.Just don't be late for the meeting."

 Aaron rolled his eyes. "What meeting would that be?"

 "Emergency board meeting for Ogle Data Research, whichyou're invited to sit in on, to be followed immediately by anemergency board meeting for Green Biophysics."

 "When and where?"

 "Right here at Seven Corners, at two o'clock this afternoon. Thatshould give you time to grab a pair of shuttle flights. Oh, and Aaron?"

 "Yes?"

 "We bought you out at twice your book value."

 "So I heard."

 "We'll double that figure again if any of your existingstockholders want to sell out. But they have to do it today."

 "I'll pass that along."

 "See you at two o'clock."

 Aaron hung up his phone. Cy Ogle's phone. MacIncyre's,Gale's, Coover's, and Tice's phone.

 "The bad news is, we just got hit by the financial equivalent of Desert Storm," he said, "and we lost. The good news is that we alljust quadrupled our net worth."

 Marine laughed, verging on hysteria.

 "Not bad for an hour's work," Greg said, looking at his watch.It was ten o'clock.

 A big, handsome head shot of Governor William A. Cozzano flashed up on the television screen. Roaring white noise came outof the speaker, the sound of a wildly cheering multitude.

 Aaron sold his stock. There was no point in hanging on to the stuffwhen he knew that it would drop to one-quarter of its currentvalue by the end of the day. He took a taxi to Logan, hopped the shuttle to LaGuardia, walked across the concourse and hoppedanother shuttle to National Airport in Washington.

 As the shuttle twisted and veered down the lower Potomac,Aaron looked out the window and saw the WashingtonMonument, the Mall, which seemed prematurely green to a personused to New England winters, and the dome of the Capitol. Herealized, somewhat to his own astonishment, that this was the firsttime he had been to Washington, D.C., since his high-school bandtrip fifteen years before.

 It was thirty degrees warmer here, humid, green, with flowers coming out all over the place. Spring, which hadn't even started inBoston, was a memory here. It gave him a feeling of being out ofit, of being way behind the times. He got on a little bus that inched its way through the airport's pathetically constricted traffic patternand finally let him off at Avis. There, he climbed into a brand-newnavy-blue Taurus. It was about a hundred and twenty degreesinside the car, and the controls for the air conditioner were alreadyset to MAX.

 D.C. was going to take getting used to. His car in Boston didn'teven have air-conditioning. He was going to have to buy a newgoddamn car.

 He went right out and got badly lost. That was okay, he hadplenty of time, and he felt like driving around lost for a while. Eventually he pulled into a 7-Eleven and bought a big oversized street map atlas for northern Virginia and figured out where Falls Church was: just a few miles due west of D.C. Right in the middleof that was a place called Seven Corners, where a whole lot of roads came together. It was difficult to miss. From its folksy name, Aaronwas expecting it to be sort of a quaint, woodsy crossroads.

 It wasn't. It was a place where seven different franchise ghettosintersected and piled their congestion on top of each other, auniverse of asphalt parking lots stewing in the Virginia sun. Andmost of it was a couple of decades old, and showing its age. It had been superseded by newer and nicer competitors farther away fromthe center of the metropolis.

 And because Aaron Green had come to know and appreciate the style of Cyrus Rutherford Ogle, he knew where to look. Heeventually found his way into the vast, mostly empty parking lot of a big old shopping center at the heart of Seven Corners. It wasa ghost mall. The anchor store, the behemoth at the dead centerof the mall, was a windowless monolith, sheathed in a sort ofwhite-gravel substance that had probably been sparkling and cleanback in the fifties but which had now gone dully gray and become stained with long vertical streaks of rust. A constellation of rusty,decapitated bolts projected from the wall way up high, and

 Aaron could see that it had once been a major department store.But now the sign was torn down and the row of plate-glassdisplay windows and double doors that stretched along the entirefront of the building at sidewalk level had been replaced by particleboard, painted black. Aaron walked into the place withouthesitation.

 It was just like the Cadillac dealership, except bigger. And, at themoment, it was somewhat noisier and more crowded than Ogle's operations tended to be when he was between campaigns. Morecolorful, too. A lot of people were working here right now, mostlyyoung people, most female, mostly black. Most of them werewearing bright new T-shirts. And all of the T-shirts had the wordCozzano printed on them. They were operating T-shirtprinting machines. Printing up more of them.

 But they weren't fancy. The insignia going on to those shirts(and hats and sweatshirts and windbreakers) was not a nifty logo, like a national campaign would use. Everything was being done insimple block letters, with no graphics. It was exactly what youwould get if you went into a seedy discount T-shirt printing placeat a carnival midway and asked them to print the wordCozzano on to a T-shirt.

 The same could be said of the crude 8½-by-ll campaign postersfloating out of the xerox machines, and of the campaign signs,being stapled together from fence pickets and refrigerator boxes andhand-lettered by more women in cheap Cozzano T-shirts.

 One corner was given over to folding tables with manytelephones on them. Young people sat behind the tables talking onthe phones. There were also a dozen desks with older people, suit-wearing people, sitting behind them, and these people were talkingon the phones too. On the wall behind all of this was a large mapof the fifty states, nearly obscured with little colored pins, streamers,flags, and yellow notes.

 "That right there," said the familiar voice of Cy Ogle, "is thespontaneous ground-swell department."

 Aaron ignored him. Ogle walked around until he was standingin Aaron's peripheral vision. He had pulled a bright yellowCozzano T-shirt over his dress shirt and donned aCozzano skimmer.

 "See, the problem with spontaneous ground swells is they are sodamn disorganized," Ogle said. "And that don't cut it, because theballot rules in the various states are just unbelievably complicated.For example, in New York-"

 "Spare me," Aaron said. "Spare me."

 "Anyway, welcome to the metacampaign," Ogle said.

 "Okay, I'll bite. What is the metacampaign?"

 "Y'know how, after the New Hampshire primaries, the com­mentators always concentrate on the runner-up? They never seemto give a shit about who actually won the damn thing. All theywant to talk about is who came in second. Who's got momentum.Big Mo. That's the metacampaign. The struggle for the hearts andminds of the media, and of big contributors."

 When Aaron first came into the Pentagon Towers offices of Ogle Data Research, carrying half a dozen PIPER prototypes in a box,he knew that Ogle must be serious about something, because hehad never known his new boss to own, rent, or come anywherenear real estate that was so civilized.

 This particular nice new office building was rooted in a bigshopping mall called Pentagon Plaza. It was one of the nicest mallsin the D.C. metro area, which was saying something. It was a self-contained metropolis; in addition to the mall it had a parking ramp,movie theaters, a Westin, a Metro station, and office space. Fromthe suite that Ogle had rented, on the eleventh floor, you couldlook out over the vast geometry of the Pentagon itself, across thePotomac, and into Washington. Or, if you looked in the otherdirection, you could stare straight down through the spectacularglass roof of the mall, down through its atrium, and into the foodcourt, half-full of tired shoppers, half-full of lunching brass from thePentagon.

 The office had been professionally decorated by someone with aserious thing about sleek. It was sleek from top to bottom and endto end, the kind of place where any man who didn't have his hairslicked back felt like some kind of a shit-kicking redneck. A sleek receptionist sat at the polished-granite cyclorama of the front desk,ensconced beneath the ODR logo, answering phone calls androuting nearly all of them to the shabby department store in Falls Church or the shabby Cadillac dealership in Oakland. Behind herwas all windows, chrome and glass - beautiful offices that no oneever used except, apparently, when they had some kind of animportant meeting with someone fatuous enough to be impressed by this kind of thing. Which probably included 99 percent of allpoliticians.

 But Ogle hadn't chosen this building because it was new, sleek,or convenient. As he told Aaron repeatedly, he liked it for onereason and one reason only: you got into the place by walkingthrough a mall. The point was all in the symbolism of the thing.Rooted in a goddamn shopping mall. The ultimate symbol of theAmerican middle class. The very people that Ogle made his moneyand staked his reputation on.

 It was also practical at times like this, when Ogle wanted to dowhat was known as focus group interviews. The idea behind an FGIwas that you got a few people together who represented a crosssection of America and you interviewed them, maybe showed them a few proposed campaign commercials, and got their reactions.

 Finding a cross section of America was pretty easy at PentagonPlaza. Take the elevator down to the mall level, wait for the doors to open, fling out a lasso, and you could reel in a complete focusgroup before they even knew what was happening.

 People who assembled focus groups for Ogle were very good atwandering through the mall and sizing people up. By watching a person's clothing, hair, jewelry, the way they walked, the thingsthey looked at, the stores they were fascinated by and the storesthey ignored, the kind of food they selected at the food court andhow they ate it, these observers could peg a person's incomebracket to within about ten thousand bucks and make some prettyaccurate guesses about what part of the country they were from,whether they came from a big city or a small town, and even what sorts of political views they were likely to hold.

 These Ogle employees were officially called Focus Groupanalysts, but in the corporate parlance they were simply referred toas ropers. The ropers had a parlance all their own, a system ofclassifying the American population. It was a vast field of expertiseand Aaron didn't have more than a foggy idea of how it worked.He didn't need to. They assembled the focus groups. Aaron ran theequipment.

 They attached half a dozen PIPER prototypes to the backs ofchairs. Each one had a cuff dangling from it. The chairs werearranged in a cozy semicircle in a nice little carpeted room in a nice,proper office in the Pentagon Towers offices.

 When they had gotten their little room all hooked up with theprototypes and some video stuff, Shane Schram, the burly,rumpled, prematurely bald, tough-guy psychologist, materializedfrom some other part of the country and sent a couple of ropersdown into the mall. Within a few minutes, sample Americansbegan to drift out of the elevators.

 Schram met them right there in the elevator lobby with a heartyhello and a thank-you for having agreed to participate. Thereceptionist showed them into the interview room, where theyfilled out little information cards, drank coffee, and ate doughnuts.Pretty soon, they had a full complement of half a dozen. Schramcame into the room, shut the door, thanked them all one moretime, and launched into his spiel.

 Each of the six subjects was being paid a hundred dollars for this.Ogle was spending a total of six hundred bucks to test a system thatcost millions. It was a heck of a deal.

 26

 "This is our office," Schram said, "and we're paying you ourmoney. But this time is allyours. You haven't heard of us. But weare a public opinion research company with a lot of big clients inpolitics and corporate America. A lot of people are listening to whatwe say about American opinion. And the way we learn about thatis by talking to people like you. And that's why I say that this timeis all yours - because the whole idea is for you to unload on us. Totell us exactly what you're thinking. I want you to be brutally frankand honest about it. You can say anything you want in this room, because I'm from New York City and you can't hurt my feelings.And if you don't bare your true opinions to me, then I can't tell myclients what is going on in the minds of America."

 Aaron wasn't in the room. He was in the next room, watchingall of this on television. Or hearing it, rather. None of the cameraswas pointed at Schram. They had half a dozen cameras in thatroom, each pointed at one of the subjects. Their faces appeared onhalf a dozen television monitors, lined up in a nice neat row, andunderneath each TV monitor was a computer monitor providing adirect readout from the PIPER prototype attached to their chair.

 The PIPER readout consisted of several windows arranged on acomputer screen, each window containing an animated graph or diagram. Right now, all of these were dead and inactive. On themonitor speaker, Schram could be heard explaining to the subjectshow to put on the cuffs: roll up your sleeve, remove jewelry, etcetera.

 One of the ropers, a young woman named Theresa, came intothe monitor room. She was carrying a stack of cards, one for each of the subjects. She took a seat behind a table, where she couldwatch the monitors, and began to arrange the cards in front of her.

 "Got a pretty wide spread today, considering," she mumbled.She shuffled through the deck, pulled out a card, and laid it out onthe left side of the desk, looking up at the TV monitor on the farleft. The monitor was showing a woman in her fifties, frosted blondhair in a complicated set, big jewelry, shiny lipstick, harshlypenciled eyebrows. "Classic MHCC, which we get too many of inthis mall."

 "MHCC?"

 "Mall-hopping corporate concubine," Theresa mumbled."Though to really find them in their pure form you need to gosomewhere like Stamford, Connecticut. Here they aren't really corporate, they're more government. Generals' wives."

 "Oh."

 Theresa put another card on the desk. This one apparentlybelonged to the person on the second TV monitor, a slightly portlyman in his mid-thirties, with a receding hairline and a somewhatnervous affect. "This guy is a debt-hounded wage slave. In itspurest form," she said.

 "Is that a pretty common one?"

 "Oh, yeah. There's millions of debt-hounded wage slaves."Theresa put down a third card. The third TV monitor depicted anolder black woman, gray hair in a bun, thick-rimmed glasses, with a wary look on her face. "Bible-slinging porch monkey."

 Number four, another black woman, this one in her late thirties, wearing the uniform of a major in the Air Force: "First-generation beltway black."

 Number five, a pleasingly plump middle-aged white womanwith a big hairdo, who seemed excited by the whole thing, eagerto please: "This dame is a frosty-haired coupon snipper right now.Later in life, depending on the economy, she'll probably developinto either a depression-haunted can stacker or a mid-American knickknack queen."

 Number six, an older white gentleman with a gaunt face, veryalert and skeptical: "Activist tube feeder. These guys are reallyimportant. There's millions of these and they vote like crazy."

 "How many of these categories do you have?" Aaron said.

 "Lots of'em. Hundreds. But we don't use all of them at once,"Theresa said. "We tailor the list to the job. Like, if we're trying tosell athletic shoes, we don't pay attention to the tube feeders, porchmonkeys, Winnebago jockeys, or can stackers. On the other hand,if it's an election thing, we can ignore groups who don't vote verymuch, like trade school metal heads and stone-faced urbanhomeboys."

 "I see."

 "Also there's a lot of overlap between groups, which makes thestats a little gloppy sometimes."

 "Gloppy stats?"

 "Yeah, it's hard to interpret the statistics because things getconfused. Like, you've got your 400-pound Tab drinkers. That's anadjective, pertaining to their lifestyle. You could treat 400-poundTab drinkers as a group unto themselves. Or you could narrow things down by looking at the ones who have no worthwhile jobskills. In that case, you'd have a new group called 400-pound Tab-drinking economic roadkill."

 "What good would that do you?"

 "Say you wanted to market a new diet system that was really elcheapo. You decide to market this thing by aiming for fat joblessindividuals. You come up with a marketing strategy where you saythat losing weight improves your chances of getting a job. Thenyou zero in on the 400-pound Tab-Drinking economic roadkilland market it to them as directly as possible."

 As the members of the focus group snapped the cuffs into placearound their wrists, the computer screens came alive with data. Thewindows on the monitor screens, which had been blank and inert,sprang to life with colorful, rapidly fluctuating graphics. The cuffscontained sensors that tracked various bodily responses and sentthem down the cable to the prototypes; here, the informationcoming in from the cuff was converted to digital form andtransmitted to a receiving station in this room.

 Aaron had spent much of the last month writing software to runon a Calyx workstation. This software would scan the incomingstream of data and present it in a graphical form so that Ogle, oranyone else, could glance at the computer screen and get animmediate snapshot of what the subject was feeling.

 Several times, Aaron had been on the verge of asking why it wasthat such quick analysis was needed. He couldn't understand whatthe big rush was. But before he asked this question, he alwaysremembered what Ogle had told him during their meeting in Oakland:You can't understand everything. Only I, Cyrus RutherfordOgle, can understand everything.

 Shane Schram's voice continued to drone from the speaker. Whenhe had greeted these people as they came from the elevators, he wasbouncy and exuberant. But now that they were cuffed to the chairs,he had gone back to speaking in a knowing, New York tone.Everything he said, he said as if he were resigned to it, tired of it,and as if it should be fairly obvious to anyone who wasn't stupid. Ifyou listened to it long enough you began to think that you andSchram were in together on a number of secrets that were hidden from ordinary saps.

 "Now, the subject of today's little get-together is the wonderfulworld of politics."

 Up on the TV screen, six faces nodded and winked knowingly.You could get a rise out of just about anyone by referring to politicsin this tone of voice.

 "Since we can't bring any politicians in here, we're going toshow you a bunch of television instead. All I'm asking you to do isto watch this TV program - it'll run to about a quarter of an hour- and then afterwards, we'll sit and talk about it."

 In the hallway outside the monitor room, Aaron heard ashuffling noise. Then a loud metallic clank. Then another shufflingnoise. Then another loud metallic clank.

 "I'm pushing the button that says PLAY," Schram said, jabbingat a button on the VCR, "but it's not playing. Another wonderfulproduct from our sneaky little Jap friends."

 Intense movement and color blossomed on all six of themonitors. This crack about the Japanese had produced the strongestemotional response of anything he had said today.

 The only problem was how to translate the physical data comingover the wires into information about their emotional state. That was still an inexact science. Seeing the vivid responses on thecomputer monitors, Aaron glanced up at the television screens,trying to read faces.

 To some extent, all of them were smiling at Schram's little joke.But most of the smiles did not look very sincere. They knew he hadmade a racist remark at the expense of the Japanese, and they knewthat they were supposed to find it funny, but none of them wassincerely amused. They were faking it.

 Which still didn't tell Aaron why they werereally thinking. Werethey angered by Schram's display of racism? Did they feelhumiliated to be reminded of Japan's economic success?

 "Oh, no wonder," Schram said, "there's no videotape in themachine. My secretary must have taken it out. That fucking cunt."

 Another burst of color and activity hit the computer monitors.The faces all looked shocked and nervous. But not all of them wereresponding in the same way. In particular, the women respondedcompletely differently from the men.

 Schram left the room, leaving the subjects alone with each other.

 Once again, Aaron heard the shuffling and clunking noise out inthe hallway. He stuck his head out the door. It was a janitoremptying metal wastebaskets into a rolling dumpster. The janitorwas some kind of an astonishing carnival freak; he was hunched over and he dragged one leg as he walked, and something didn't look entirely right about his complexion.

 "Jesus," Aaron mumbled under his breath.

 The janitor turned to look at him. He must have been some kindof a burn victim. His skin was rough, mottled, striated, like a pizza.He had no neck per se; his chin seemed to be welded directly to hischest by a long sheet of skin that had contracted as it healed.

 He turned into the room where the subjects were seated,dragging his dumpster behind him. Aaron ducked back into themonitor room to see all of the computer screens going wild. Thesix faces reacted almost in unison: they glanced up, their eyeswidened, they gaped and stared for an instant, then manners got thebetter of them and they pretended not to notice. But Aaron could see the emotional impact of this spectacle continuing to simmeraway beneath the surface. He could see them sneaking quickglances at the janitor, then looking away, ashamed by their owncuriosity.

 Within a few seconds, the janitor had finished emptying thewastebaskets and moved on down the hallway. The subjects satquietly, shooting looks back and forth, daring one another to saysomething.

 Schram came back into the room. "Well, my fucking secretarytook an unauthorized break. She obviously thinks she can use thebathroom any time she feels like it."

 This brought up lots of interesting stuff on the computer screens,particularly among the women.

 "But I rummaged through her desk and I found this videotape inher bottom drawer. It's unlabeled, but I think it's the right one."

 Aaron's monitor room had a seventh TV screen showing him thesame program that the subjects were watching. Until now it hadjust been showing static. At this point, the static was replaced by amoving image.

 It was a videotape of a woman sucking a man's penis.

 "Whoops," Schram said: "How do you stop this thing?"

 The image changed. Now it was a woman sandwiched between two men on a large, heart-shaped waterbed, having simultaneousanal and vaginal sex.

 "Goddamn new VCR. I'm not familiar with the controls,"Schram said. "Hang on a second, I think I heard my secretarycoming in, she knows how to work this thing. I'm really sorryabout this."

 Schram left the room for a minute or so, long enough for thewoman on the heart-shaped waterbed to reach an electrifyingclimax. Both of her lovers withdrew and reached a simultaneous, on-screen orgasm. Then a new sequence began: a man tied to anoverhead pipe being whipped by a woman in black leather.

 About this time, Schram and his secretary got back into theroom.

 "Oh, Jesus," the secretary said, "where did you get this? Wheredid this come from? Turn this thing off."

 The pornography stopped rolling and was replaced by static.Aaron could hear the sound of the videotape being ejected from theVCR.

 "I found it in your desk," Schram said. "I was trying to find thepolitical spots, which you so brilliantly lost."

 "Oh. And that gives you the right to go through my personalthings?"

 "Hey. What you do on your own time is your own goddamnbusiness. If this kind of stuff turns you on, you're welcome to haveit around your home. But when you bring it to work-"

 "Youbastard!" the secretary screamed. "Youbastard! just becauseyou couldn't get it up with me! That's why you did this!" Then sheburst into sobs and ran out of the room, screaming in humiliation.

 "I couldn't get it up with you because you were such a frigid bitch!" Schram yelled down the hallway.

 Aaron had long since stopped paying attention to any of themonitors. He was just staring at the wall, listening to the speaker, asif it were some kind of intense radio play.

 "I'm sorry about that, folks," Schram said. "To tell you the truth,I've always harbored a suspicion that she was one of those AnitaHill types. You know, comes on real sexy and then turns aroundten years later and says you've been harassing her."

 Out in the hallway, Aaron could hear the secretary's high heeled shoes clacking and popping as she returned. He stuck his head outthe door.

 She was storming back toward the interview room, her face aghoulish vision of streaked mascara. And she was carrying a gun.Aaron withdrew his head and slammed the door.

 "This is what you deserve, you son of a bitch!" she screamed,and then three quick explosions overwhelmed the speaker system.

 "I should kill you all, because you're witnesses!" the secretarysaid. "Don't anybody move from your chairs!"

 The only thing Aaron could do now was look at the TVmonitors. The subjects' faces had turned into sweating, distortedfright masks. Their eyes were wide open, darting back and forth, they were blinking rapidly, their jaws trembled, several held theirhands over their faces, trying not to scream.

 One of them - the debt-hounded wage slave - suddenly heldboth of his hands straight out in front of his face and turned his headto one side, bracing for the impact of a bullet.

 A metallic click sounded from the monitor speaker.

 "Shit!" the secretary said. "I'm out of bullets."

 This revelation triggered a burst of emotions on the computer screens that was more vivid than anything seen yet.

 "Freeze!" another voice shouted, a deep male voice. "Nobodymove! Put the weapon on the floor, ma'am."

 Aaron couldn't see what was happening, but he could see therelieved expressions on the subjects' faces, he could see theemotional response on the computer monitors. On the speaker, heheard the litany of the Cop Show Bust: "Lie down on yourstomach and lace your fingers together behind your head. Don'tmove and nobody will get hurt."

 It sounded safe. Aaron decided to go out and see what was goingon. He walked down the hall to the interview room.

 The secretary was lying on the floor. A large black cop was inthe process of handcuffing her. Schram was half-sitting, half-lyingon the floor, crumpled against the far wall of the room, coveredwith blood. Huge bursts of his blood had splattered on to the wallfrom the impact of the bullets and what looked like a gallon of thestuff had run out of his wounds and puddled on the floor allaround him.

 "My God," Aaron said. "I'll call an ambulance."

 "I already done it," the cop said. "Go to the elevators and waitfor 'em."

 Aaron did exactly that. And he didn't have to wait for very long;the crew arrived with astonishing speed, four men rolling in a biggurney and carrying their equipment in bags and boxes. Theydidn't do much work on Schram, just lifted him directly on to thegurney and wheeled him out of the room. And down the hallway.Down the hallway to the bathroom.

 The bathroom? Aaron followed them in there.

 Schram had already climbed to his feet and was in the process ofstripping out of his bloodstained clothes. Underneath his shirt,several small packets had been taped on to his body, electrical wiresrunning into them. All of these things were soaked with blood andappeared to have been blown open from within. As Aaronwatched, Schram ripped them off his body, exposing clean,unblemished flesh, and tossed them into the garbage.

 "Squibs," he said. "Do you think they bought it?"

 Aaron was still just standing there, his jaw flopped open like thehood of an abandoned car.

 "You bought it, obviously," Schram said, "so they probably did.Why don't you get back in there and I'll meet you in a couple ofminutes, after I get cleaned up." Schram stripped off the last of his clothes and walked, buck naked, into a shower stall, leaving a trailof bloody footprints on the polished white marble floor.

 The secretary had been hauled off in chains. Several more "cops"had arrived and begun to interrogate the six witnesses. One of the cops was blustery and bullying and seemed to be treating the six asthough they were all potential suspects in the crime. One of themwas soothing and sympathetic. As they took turns talking to the six subjects, the readouts on the screen fluctuated back and forth fromone extreme to the other.

 Within a minute or two, Schram had joined Aaron in themonitor room, wearing a fresh set of clothes. "Can't you get introuble for doing this?" Aaron said. He knew it was sappy even ashe was saying it. But he couldn't help himself.

 "For doing what?" Schram asked, sounding perfectly innocent.

 "For - for what you just did."

 "What did I just do?" Schram said.

 "You - I don't know, you scared those people."

 "So?"

 "Well, isn't that a little extreme?"

 "Life is extreme," Schram said.

 "But isn't it illegal to do that, or something?"

 "They all signed releases. Why do you think we're paying themmoney?"

 "Did the releases give you permission to dothat!"

 "The releases say that these people are willingly taking part in apsychological experiment," Schram said, "which is certainly thecase."

 "But aren't you going to tell them it was fake?"

 "Of course I will. Of course I'll tell them," Schram said. "Howelse are we going to get them pissed off?"

 "You want them to be pissed off?"

 "Before they get out of that room," Schram said, "I want to runthem through every emotion in the book."

 "Oh. Well, which emotion are they being put through now?"

 "Boredom. Which is going to take a while. And in the mean­time, I want to go back over our results so far."

 Everything that had happened to this point - the six feeds fromthe six video cameras, the audio track coming over the speaker, andthe streams of data coming from the PIPER prototypes - had allbeen recorded by the computers. By entering some commands into the Calyx system that controlled the whole thing, they were able togo back and replay portions of the experiment, seeing everything,on the dozen or so screens, just as Aaron had seen it the first time it had happened.

 The door opened and the hunchbacked janitor dragged himselfinto the room. He fixed his one good eye on Schram, slouchedover to him, and gave him a high five.

 "Oscar-winning performance," the janitor said."You get best supporting actor, Cy," Schram said. "Nah, it's all special effects," Ogle said, reaching up to grab thecurtain of tortured flesh that ran from his jawbone down to hischest. He pulled on it, and most of it peeled away in a single piece,leaving a few strips and patches of burnt-looking skin adhering tohis face and neck. With a few minutes of additional peeling andscrubbing, Ogle managed to get loose from most of the makeup,though a few fragments of it still stuck to him here and there, likebits of tissue paper left over from a bad shave, and the part of hisface that hadn't been covered still had colored greasepaint on it. Ogle didn't care; he was too busy staring at the monitors.

 He loved it. His eyes were virtually popping out of his head. Hismouth was wide open and frozen in an expression of boyish glee,like a farm boy getting his first look at Disney World. His eyesdarted back and forth from one screen to the next; he couldn'tdecide what to look at.

 "Days. Weeks," Ogle said. "I'm gonna be looking at this thingfor weeks."

 "Check out the look on that can stacker's face when you draggedyour sorry ass into the room," Schram said.

 "She's not a can stacker," Aaron said, "she's a coupon snipper."

 They ran through the whole thing a couple of times. The computer allowed them to run it like a videotape, with fast-forward, rewind, freeze-frame, the whole bit. As they wentthrough it, Schram jotted down notes on a yellow legal pad. Finallythey shunted the screens back over to a real-time display of whatwas happening, right now, in the interview room.

 Nothing was happening. The six faces were a picture of terminalboredom. The good cop and the bad cop had gone away and beenreplaced by a droning, monotonous voice that was going on and onin some kind of pseudolegal jargon.

 "That's an actor claiming to be a lawyer for Ogle DataResearch," Ogle explained. "He's been lecturing them for half anhour while we dicked around with all this stuff."

 "Let's see what self-righteous indignation looks like," Schram said, rising to his feet and heading for the interview room.

 "Ten-four on that," Ogle said.

 Schram walked into the interview room a moment later and the monitors all went ballistic. Ogle howled like a dog.

 "All the same," he said, "they all react the same. The hunchback, the shooting, the pornography, and they all reacted differently. Butwhen they're pissed off, they all look alike. And that's why self-righteousness is the most powerful force in politics."

 27

 The first thing he learned how to move was his right thumb.It wasn't a fluke, either. It was something that William Cozzanoworked on constantly from the first moment that he came awakeafter the implantation.

 Within a day, he was able to make the thumb jerk spasmodicallyfrom time to time. By the time they loaded him on the plane andflew him back to Tuscola, two days after the implantation, he wasable to jerk it whenever he wanted to.

 Then he learned how to move it both ways, straightening the thumb and then curling it into the palm of his hand. Once he gotthat down, he repeated it several thousand times, sixteen hours aday, until they gave him sedatives to make him sleep. Eight hourslater he would wake up and begin exercising his thumb again.

 For the first few days, neither Mary Catherine nor anyone elsecould figure out why he was concentrating on the thumb. Theyhad assumed that he would want to work on his speech skills. Andhe did, from time to time; within a week after the operation, it waspossible to watch him playing with muscle in his face. Theunderside of his jaw throbbed in and out as he moved his tonguearound inside his mouth, and his lips began to move, on both sides,jerkily at first and then smoothly. Within five days he had learnedto pucker up so that he could give Mary Catherine a kiss when shebent down to offer her cheek.

 But the whole time he was doing these things, his thumb wasactive. It became a subject of concern among Cozzano's therapyteam - the half-dozen physical therapists, neurologists, andcomputer people who had moved into some of the unusedbedrooms in the Tuscola house to monitor the Governor'srecovery. They had meetings about that thumb. Worried aboutwhether the movement was voluntary or involuntary, discussed the idea of taping it down so it wouldn't get worn out and arthritic overtime.

 It all became clear the first time they put a remote control into his hand. By that time, his fingers had developed enough co­ordination to wrap around the underside of the remote and hold it in place, giving that thumb, now highly coordinated, the freedomto roam around on its top surface, punching buttons. Changing channels. Moving the volume up and down. Activating the VCRto tape certain programs, then playing them back later.

 They decided to give him a test. They arranged a dinner party on a Thursday evening at seven o'clock, knowing that it wouldinterfere with Cozzano's favorite TV show, a satirical cartoon. Hepassed that test with flying colors; without any hints or promptingfrom the therapy team, he used his thumb to program his VCR.

 "He still knows how to do it," said the head computer person,Peter (Zeldo) Zeldovich. He was awed. "I mean, I wrote half of theCalyx operating system. But I can't program a VCR."

 "His memory seems pretty good," Mary Catherine said. She haddriven down from Chicago to attend the dinner, then snuck up to the hallway outside the master bedroom to see Dad rewind thevideotape and play back his favourite program.

 The other bedrooms had been turned into a high-tech wonder­land. Zeldo filled Mary Catherine's old bedroom with computers and James's with communications gear. Mom's sewing room wasfull of medical stuff. The two guest bedrooms were set up withbunk beds and mattresses on the floor so that the nurses andtherapists could alternate between sleeping and working withoutleaving the house.

 Everything that Dad did now - every tiny motion of his thumb,every twitch of his lips - had huge informational ramifications thatZeldo could plot and graph on his computer screens. Thousands of connections had now grown into place between Dad's neurons andthe biochip, and hundreds of new ones were still being made everyday. All of the impulses passing from his brain outward into hisbody and back passed through these connections, and could bemonitored by the biochip. Even when Dad was sleeping, itamounted to an overwhelming flow of information, like all thetelephone calls being made into or out of Manhattan at a giventime.

 There was no way to understand all of it. No way to keep track.The best that Zeldo could do was keep a running tab on what washappening, building up a statistical database, maybe get some senseof which connections were being used for the thumb and which forthe left eyebrow. Still, it was fascinating to watch.

 That all of these things worked was no news. The chip hadworked in the baboons and it had worked in Mohinder Singh, afterall. The real question on their minds was: how much damage had the strokes done to other parts of Cozzano's mind, for example,memory, personality, cognitive skills?

 The fact that he still wanted to watch the same TV show, stillthought it was funny, and still knew how to program his VCRanswered several questions. It was good news on all fronts.

 But mostly Cozzano watched the news and public affairs pro­grams about the presidential campaign. They would pin the latestnewspapers and magazines up on a reading stand in front of his faceand he would pore over them, his eyes flicking back and forthbetween the coverage on the televisions and the printed page.

 Only then - after he had got control of the TV channels and hadcaught up on the newspapers - only then did he start working onspeech.

 They set an ambitious schedule for him, worrying that theymight stress him out and overwork him, and he left that schedulein the dust. First thing in the morning, the physical therapists came in, at first helping him move his limbs, later, when he got the hangof that, running him through exercises. Then the speech therapistcame in and got him to put his tongue and lips in certain positions,got him to make certain sounds, and then to string those soundstogether into syllables and words. Following an afternoon nap, thephysical therapists would come back in and work on the parts of hisbody that they had missed in the morning. During the evenings hecould relax, watch TV, read.

 He exercised his speech during physical therapy and he exercisedhis body during speech therapy. He also exercised both of them while he was pretending to take his afternoon nap, and then he exercised them all evening long when he was supposed to be takingit easy. He even woke up in the middle of the night and exercised.

 Getting up out of the wheelchair was an ambitious goal that hewouldn't attempt for a few weeks. In the meantime there were afew things he couldn't do for himself, such as going to the toilet,taking baths, carrying in wood for the fireplace, and swapping tapesin and out of the VCR. Nurses, aides, and family members had to do these things for him.

 Almost two weeks after the implant, Mary Catherine camedown for another visit. She had been doing so much driving thatthey had gone to the trouble of leasing a car, a brand-new Acuraluxury sedan, so that she could make the trip in comfort and safety.The evening she arrived, she had a conversation with Dad.

 "Vee . . . Cee . . Arrr," he said.

 "VCR. You want me to do something with the VCR?"

 "Yes."

 "Okay. What do you want me to do?"

 Dad aimed the remote shakily toward the TV cabinet and hit theEJECT button. The VCR spat out a tape.

 "You want me to take this out?"

 "Yes."

 "You want me to put a different tape in?"

 "Yes."

 The TV cabinet had a shelf along the top with a few dozenvideotapes in it, mostly old family tapes or favourite movies. MaryCatherine began running her finger along the line of tapes.

 "New!" Dad blurted.

 "You want a new tape?"

 "Blank."

 "You want a blank tape."

 "Yes."

 Mary Catherine rummaged around in the cabinet until she founda six-pack of fresh blank videocassettes. Dad always bought themhalf a dozen at a time at Wal-Mart. He always bought everythingin vast, bulk quantities, dirt cheap, in huge drafty warehouse likestores out in the middle of the prairie.

 She unwrapped one and stuck it into the machine. "Okay, whatshould I do with this old one?" she asked, wiggling the tape she hadjust removed"

 "Label."

 The fresh videotape had come shipped with a number of blanklabels. She peeled a couple of them back and stuck them on to theblack shell of the cassette. Then she dug a small felt-tipped markerout of her purse. "What do you want to call this?"

 Dad rolled his eyes as if to indicate that this was not important,he would remember what it was. Mary Catherine grinned andlooked him in the eye, pen poised over the tape, challenging him.

 He looked her right back in the eye. "Eee . . . lack . . . sun."

 "Election."

 "One," Dad said. The fingers of his hand trembled and jerkeduncertainly. Finally the index finger extended, while the otherfingers clenched into a loose, jittering fist.

 "Election One," Mary Catherine repeated, writing it on to the top and side of the tape. "Does this imply that it's the first in aseries?"

 Dad rolled his eyes again.

 Later, after he had gone to sleep, Mary Catherine curled up on the living room sofa with a bag of microwave popcorn, rewound"Election One," and watched it.

 It was outtakes from election-related news coverage from thepast week or week and a half, ever since Dad's thumb had gottennimble enough to control the machine. Most of it had to do with the peculiar, stereotyped behavior patterns of men competing instate primary elections. It made good training for a neurologist.Hours and hours of men walking around under bright lights,moving with the spasmodic gait of candidates. A candidate walkedon two legs like a normal man, but every time he sensed that he wasin a position that would make a good photograph, he would stopand freeze for a moment as if suffering a petit mal seizure, and turn toward the nearest battery of cameras. No candidate could climb onboard a vehicle or enter a building without freezing for a momentand giving the thumbs-up. Handshakes all lasted for hours, and thecandidate never looked at the person whose hand he was shaking;he looked toward the audience.

 Super Tuesday, Illinois, and New York were history. Californiawouldn't happen for weeks. By this point in the campaign, the nominations were usually settled. But there was nothing settledabout them this year. Both parties were running several candidates.The flakes, the paupers and the weaklings had long since beenweeded out. The remaining strong contenders had been beatingone another mercilessly. By the time the real campaign began onLabor Day, neither of the two surviving candidates would have anyreputation left.

 Maybe the GOP would try to draft Cozzano. But she had toask herself - Dad had to be asking himself - what was the point of parties anyway? All they did was get in the way. Ogle wasright.

 The film crew showed up in Tuscola a few days later. It consistedof a producer, a cameraman, and an audio person who happened tobe female. They rented a couple of rooms at the Super 8 Motel on the edge of town, out near I-57, a short drive from the Cozzanoresidence.

 The producer was named Myron Morris. He came with thepersonal recommendation of Cyrus Rutherford Ogle, whocontinued to phone Mary Catherine at work from time to time,just keeping in touch. She had a series of conversations with him:Ogle on a plane or in a car or hotel room somewhere, and MaryCatherine standing in the hallway at the hospital, usually in the neurology ward, where the comings and goings of various para­lyzed, epileptic, senile, psychotic, or demented patients provided auseful reality check.

 Ogle had first brought up the idea of a film crew just a few daysafter the implant. He had gone about this in typically diplomatic fashion, in a late round of the conversation, after greetings, smalltalk, chitchat about politics, and a little bit of gentle probing intothe Governor's condition.

 "This is like your baby learning how to walk: it's only going to happen once," he pointed out. "And consequently, you're going towant it on film. It might seem like a weird idea now, but believe me, sooner or later, maybe ten years down the road, you and theGovernor are going to wish that you could go back and watch himsaying his first words and taking his first steps."

 "We have a camcorder stashed back in the garage," Mary Catherine said. "I'll get it out."

 "That's an excellent idea," Ogle said encouragingly, "and makesure that when you're finished, you break off the little plastic tab onthe videocassette so you can't record over it by accident."

 "I'll do that," Mary Catherine said, trying to hide the smile inher voice.

 A week later they spoke again. It was the same routine: smalltalk, chitchat, and all the rest.

 "Did you dig up that long-lost camcorder?" Ogle saidknowingly.

 "Yes," Mary Catherine said.

 "But it doesn't work."

 "How'd you know?"

 "Old ones never do," Ogle said. "The first time you put themaway in the garage, you lose half the pieces."

 "There's a little black box that is supposed to charge up thebattery," Mary Catherine said. "I can't find it anywhere. Dadknows where it is, but he can't tell me at this point in his recovery. So maybe I'll go buy a new one."

 "Don't do that," Ogle said. "There's too many camcordersfloating around the world not being used for you to go spend money on a new one."

 "I sense that you have a scheme on your mind."

 "As usual you are right. I know some people. People who arevery good working with film and videotape. Who would be gladto come in to Tuscola and spend some time videotaping yourfather's recovery."

 "Is that right."

 "Yes, it is. We could send out a three-person crew as soon as yougive the okay."

 Mary Catherine laughed. "Well, I must say that is anexceedinglygenerous offer. To think that three people who presumably havejobs and families could come all the way out to Tuscola and donatetheir time and expertise to making some home movies for theCozzano family."

 "Isn't it a remarkable thing?" Ogle said.

 "You realize that this recovery process is going to stretch outover a period of several weeks. Possibly months."

 "Yes, I know that."

 "Don't these people have anything better to do during this partof their lives?"

 "Nope. They sure don't," Ogle said.

 Mary Catherine let a long pause go by. "What's going on here?"

 "I'll tell you," Ogle said. "Your dad's gonna get better. I knowhe is."

 "I appreciate that confidence."

 "At that point he'll be a healthy, strong, middle-aged man witha great deal of popularity, in Illinois and in the rest of the country.And based on his past behavior I have this feeling he's not ready to retire yet."

 "I couldn't say."

 "And I don't know what he'll choose to do with the remaining,best years of his life. But would it be fair to say it's not out of thequestion that he might continue with his current career in politics?"

 "Who knows?"

 "Well, if he does continue in politics - even if he just wants torun for mayor of Tuscola - I would very much like to serve as hismedia consultant."

 "I'm looking at my watch," Mary Catherine said, "and noting the time. I think you just set a new record."

 "For what?"

 "For beating around the bush. You've been talking to me for amonth and this is the first time you've come out and said that."

 "Well, I hate to be direct," Ogle said. "It's just the way I am."

 "Please continue." She sighed.

 "If he were to make that choice, and if he were to hire me, Iwould want to make campaign ads explaining to the voters who William A. Cozzano is and why he would be a good man to votefor. And as a man who understands the media, I cannot think ofanything that would tell voters more about the character of your father than some footage - discreet, dignified - showing his slowand difficult recovery from the terrible, terrible tragedy thatovercame him. And, because it is my job to think ahead, it hasoccurred to me that, if all these things were to come to pass, Iwould not to able to make such advertisements unless I had footageof the real thing."

 "So you're willing to spend, what, tens of thousands of bucks toput a film crew in Tuscola full-time, just on the off chance that hewill recover fully, choose to continue a career in politics, andchoose to hire you as his media consultant."

 "What can I say," Ogle said. "I'm an optimist."

 Ogle was up to something. That was no surprise. MaryCatherine wasn't a professional politician but she wasn't a completemoron either and she had known from the beginning that Oglemust have some kind of agenda.

 Her first reaction was not to trust him, not to get herselfentangled in anything. To play it safe, in other words. She had beennoncommital when Ogle had suggested that Dad might want to continue his career in politics. The fact was, of course, that Dadvery much did want to continue it. She had something of a duty tohelp him. Not to close off any options that he might want keptopen. And if she failed to accept Ogle's suggestion, she'd beblowing an opportunity. Being the overprotective daughter.

 Besides, she still wasn't committing the Cozzanos to anything.There couldn't be any harm in letting some people hang aroundand film Dad. Later, when he had recovered more fully, then he'dbe able to make the command decision. If he didn't like Ogle, thosepeople would be out on their asses.

 Mel wasn't crazy about this. But he had changed his tactics. Heno longer challenged Mary Catherine on every little point, just grumbled and simmered a lot in the background. Just to give himsomething to do, she had him deal with Ogle's lawyers. They drew up an agreement that gave the Cozzanos absolute, permanent,unequivocal control over any films, videotapes, audiotapes, orother media that Ogle's people created on Cozzano property. Mel was good, Mel knew how to make the agreement airtight, and bythe time Myron Morris and his two assistants pulled into Tuscola intheir four-wheel-drive Suburban, Mel was as satisfied as he couldever be that this thing was above board. There was no way theycould pull anything sneaky.

 Mary Catherine was astonished the first time she saw the crew inaction. Myron Morris himself wasn't there; he had hung aroundquite a bit for the first day or two, then excused himself. That leftthe cameraman and the sound woman. The sound woman wascarrying some heavy-duty gear: a big reel-to-reel machine slungover a shoulder strap, with an assortment of microphones. But thecameraman was packing a cheap piece of junk: a home-style VHScamcorder not much different from the one that was rusting away in the Cozzanos' garage.

 "Why are you using a home camcorder?" Mary Catherine askedhim, when he wasn't actively filming Dad.

 He shrugged. "That's what Myron said to use. I don't get iteither."

 "Where's Myron?"

 "Scouting."

 "Scouting?"

 "Locations. He's looking around the area."

 "Why? Is he planning on producing a movie in Tuscola?"

 The cameraman shrugged. "I'm just repeating his words."

 She found him outside of town, at the old Cozzano farm. His giantSuburban was parked along the shoulder of the country road,looking as if it might roll over into the ditch. Morris had jumped a fence into a cornfield and was walking down one of the freshlyplowed rows, his shoes sinking into the soft black earth. Every fewpaces he would stop walking and turn toward the farmhouse,which had been rebuilt by Dad and his cousins after the tornadodestroyed it in the early fifties. He would lift a short, stubby blacktelescope to one eye and peer through it for a few seconds. Two orthree of these devices were hung on ropes around his neck,clacking into one another as he walked.

 Mary Catherine parked behind his Suburban, jumped the ditch,and vaulted the fence. Fence-vaulting was something she hadknown how to do, expertly, since an early age; in the extendedCozzano family, kids who couldn't vault fences got left behind andnever had any fun. In her fancy grownup clothes it was slightlymore complicated, but nowadays she had the advantage of height. Halfa mile away she could see her second cousin Tim out plowingthe field on one of the old tractors.

 Myron Morris noticed her approaching. He stopped, waved, andstood there for a few moments, hands in pockets, watching herapproach. Then he picked up one of the short stubby telescopesand used it to peer at her. He dropped that one and looked at herthrough another. Then another.

 "What are those things?" she asked as she got closer.

 "They simulate what I would see looking through the view-finder of a camera with a particular lens on it. It's just a visual devicethat makes it easier to frame one's shots, figure out where to put thecamera."

 "I've been following you around town" she said. "People said they've seen you out at the park, the high-school playing field, theold train station."

 "I don't get out to Tuscola very often," he said. "So as long asI'm here I thought I'd get to know the place."

 "Don't you think you're getting ahead of the game? Dad'sstaying at home."

 "I won't bullshit you," he said. "Cy Ogle wants to work for yourdad. This is important stuff to him. If anything happens, we'll needto know where are the best places to shoot. And that's what I'mfinding out. Is that okay?"

 Mary Catherine nodded at the little telescopes. "Do any of thosethings work with a video camcorder?"

 "Nah. These are all for professional film cameras."

 "I'm confused," she said. "In some ways, you guys are taking thisthing way too seriously. In other ways, you're goofing off."

 "You want to know why we're using that Kmart special tovideotape the Governor."

 "Yeah."

 "The whole point here is that these things are supposed to behome movies. If the Governor chooses not to use our services, thenyou end up with home movies in a format you can use. But if hedoes hire us, we can make them into ads."

 "Ads that look like shitty home movies."

 "A-ha!" Myron Morris said, holding up one finger. "You wereexpecting something a little slicker."

 "If there's one adjective that's most commonly used inconnection with Cy Ogle, it is slick" Mary Catherine said.

 "Which is why we want to go with the opposite of slick."

 "I don't follow."

 "Imagine it. A television ad showing big moments in the life ofWilliam Anthony Cozzano. We see him horsing around this veryfarm as a child. Scoring a touchdown in the Rose Bowl. We seehim in Vietnam. We see him playing for the Bears. Raising his kids.All of this is going to be trashy, grainy, antiquated film stock.Home-movie stuff. And then we see his recovery from the stroke- some private moments at home - and all of a sudden it looks slick.It's shot on 35-millimeter film stock, the lighting is perfect, he'swearing makeup, all of a sudden it looks like goddamn Lawrenceof Arabia. You think people aren't going to notice that?"

 Mary Catherine didn't have an answer for that one.

 "Americans may be undereducated, lazy, and disorganized, butthey do one thing better than any people on the face of the earth,and that is watch television. The average eight-year-old Americanhas absorbed more about media technology than a goddamn filmstudent in most other countries. You can tell lies to them andthey'll never know. But if you try to lie to themwith the camera,they'll crucify you. Which is why, when we shoot home movies ofyour father, we use exactly the same machine that Joe Sixpack useswhen he sends a tape of his dancing Dalmation toAmerica's FunniestHome Videos. And to tell you the truth, we may actually have to gothrough and process that videotape and make it look worse than itdoes now."

 "Are you sure about this?"

 "Reagan did it in '80. I believe he made out okay." "But everyone will know that Ogle's working for Dad."Myron shook his head dismissively. "That's a verbal thing.Nobody gives a shit about that, as long as the ads don't look slick.Believe me, as long as we stick with half-inch videotape, and aslong as we avoid releasing any images of your Dad standing with one arm around Cy Ogle, nobody who matters will think that he's ever been near a slick media man."

 28

 AsMary Catherine trudged back across the field to whereshe had parked her car behind Morris's Suburban, a third carcruised up the road and pulled on to the shoulder behind hers. Itwas Mel's Mercedes.

 Mel set the hand brake, climbed out, waved to her, and thenambled around on the shoulder for a minute or two, squinting offinto the distance, taking in the vista. Views in this part of Illinoiswere not exciting, but they were vast, and a person like Mel, whospent much time pent up in a city, could come out here and stareat the horizon in the same way that a vacationer in New York orL.A. might go to the ocean and gaze off into emptiness.

 Mel had given up cigarettes by the trick of switching to cigars,which were so noxious that, like nuclear weapons, they could notbe used except in remote, desolate environments. He did notsmoke them in his Mercedes for fear of imparting an eternal reekto the leather and the carpets. Now that he was out on the road,he fished the extinct butt of a fat stogie from the pocket of histrench coat and stoked it into life with a wooden safety match. Bubbles of silver smoke blew out from the corners of his mouth,elongated in the wind, and whipped off across the prairie, pickingup almost palpable momentum as they headed for the Indianaborder.

 After a minute or so, Mel's gaze settled on the farmhouse, whichhe had helped to rebuild. The concept of a Jew learning to use aclaw hammer had been considered revolutionary by both theMeyers and the Cozzanos, and had met with some resistance fromboth groups. But the young Mel enjoyed his trips out of town and had insisted on riding the train down at least once a week duringthe summers to pound nails. Three volumes of the library ofCozzano family photo albums were devoted to the reconstruction of the house, and Mel showed up in a number of pictures, pale,skinny, and bent as a peeled banana, kneeling on the bare plywoodof the new roof among burly, copper-hued Cozzanos, nailingdown the shingles one strip at a time.

 Since then, Mel had always felt a proprietary interest in theCozzano farmhouse. He had only a distant relationship with theCozzanos who lived there now, but he liked to drive out from timeto time and look at it, as he was doing now. Mary Catherine didnot know whether he did this from pure nostalgia or from curiosityabout the durability of his handiwork or both. She did know that photographs of the completed farmhouse had circulated widelyamong the Meyer family, as far away as Israel, as evidence of thewonders that a Meyer could achieve if he was not afraid to braveunknown fields of endeavour.

 "When I was pounding in all those damn nails,whack whackwhack,day after day, I had this terrible fear that I didn't really knowwhat I was doing," Mel said, as Mary Catherine was vaulting thefence again. "I would have nightmares that all of the nails I hadpounded in to that house would suddenly pop loose and all ofWilly's nails would hold fast, and everyone would blame me for thehouse falling down."

 "Well, it's still standing," Mary Catherine said.

 "That it is," Mel said with satisfaction and finality, as if his solepurpose in driving down from Chicago had been to make sure that the house was still there.

 "Have you seen Dad?"

 "Yeah, Willy and I saw each other," Mel said. "So the socialaspect of today's visit has been consummated."

 "Oh. You don't want to socialize with me?"

 Mel looked around them. A farm truck blasted down the road,kicking up dust and rocks with its windblast, inflating Mel's trenchcoat and Mary Catherine's hair for a moment. The red coal on theend of Mel's cigar flared bright orange and caught his eye. He staredinto it as though mesmerized. "This is no place," he said, "tosocialize with a lady."

 She smiled. Mel was old enough, and good enough, to talk thisway without seeming stilted or weird. "You didn't come down tosocialize with me anyway."

 Mel took one last draw on his cigar and then examined itregretfully. He pinched it carefully between the ball of his thumband the nail of his arched forefinger, straightened his arm, aimed itinto the ditch, and snapped the butt into a swampy patch. It diedwith a quick sizzling burst. Mel stood still for a moment, staring atit, and then expelled the last of the smoke from his mouth.

 "Get in," he said. "Let's go get some coffee at the DixieTruckers' Home."

 She grinned. The Dixie Truckers' Home was right out on I-57. Mel had driven by it a million times but never been there; for himit was an object of morbid, sick fascination. Mary Catherine openedthe passenger door and climbed in. Normally Mel would have goneall the way around the car and opened the door for her, but hismind was elsewhere today. As he had implied, this was business, nota social visit, and he wasn't thinking about the niceties.

 The Mercedes was perfect for two, crowded for anyone else. Itwas ideal for Mel, who was unmarried and childless and presumedby many to be gay. He started up the engine and pulled out on tothe road and gave the car a tremendous long burst of accelerationthat took it all the way up past a hundred.

 Mary Catherine's heart melted. Mel had always enjoyed thrillingher and James with the power of his fancy European cars, ever sincethey had been children. She knew that when he put the pedal downand squealed the tires on this country road, he was evoking amemory, for his own benefit as much as for Mary Catherine's.

 "You know that the relationship between our families has beenstrong and will continue to be," Mel said, "even though, over time,it has gone through a lot of different shapes."

 "What's going on?" she said.

 Mel slowed the car down and looked sideways at Mary Catherinefor a moment. He seemed a little surprised by her impatience.

 "Just take it easy," he said, "this is hard for me."

 "Okay," she said. Her vision got a little blurry and her nosestarted to run. She drew a deep silent breath and got the impulseunder control.

 "The reason our families have gotten along together is that theleaders - the patriarchs - have always been wise men who took thelong view of things. And who were willing to do what made sensein the long run. Other people have looked at the strategies of theCozzanos and the Meyers and scratched their heads, but we have always had reasons for what we did."

 "What are we doing now?" Mary Catherine said.

 "Willy doesn't know this, because I didn't want to stress him out," Mel said, "but the shit is finally hitting the fan on what happened in February."

 "What shit? What fan?"

 Mel cocked his head back and forth from side to side, weighinghis thoughts. "Well, you know that we could have just hauled Willy down the front steps of the capitol and the whole thingwould have been splashed all over the evening news. Instead we took a more old-fashioned approach. Like when FDR was in awheelchair, but hardly anyone in America was aware of that factbecause his media coverage was manipulated so well."

 "We concealed the extent of his illness," Mary Catherine said.

 "Right. We let his organization run the state government for a•while instead of just abdicating and turning things over to that putz,the Lieutenant Governor, as we were technically supposed to do." Mel spoke the last phrase in a screwed-up, Mickey Mouse tone ofvoice, as if the question of succession were a finicky bit of fineprint, a mere debater's point. "Well, it might be possible to makethe claim that what we did - what I did - was not, strictly speaking,ethical. Or in some cases, even legal. And sooner or later this wasbound to come out."

 "Let me ask you something," Mary Catherine said. "Did youknow, at the time you were doing this, that it might come out?"

 Mel was pained. "Of course I knew it, girl! But it's like dragginga man out of a burning car. You have to act, you can't think aboutthe possibility that he'll later sue you for spraining his shoulder. Idid what I had to do. I did it well." Mel turned and looked at her,a dry grin coming to his lips. "I was awesome, frankly."

 "Well, what are you getting at?"

 "You know who Markene Caldicott is?"

 "Of course I do!" She was surprised that Mel would even ask thisquestion.

 "Oh, that's right. You're probably the type who listens to RNA all the time."

 Mary Catherine grinned and shook her head. Most people considered Radio North America to be the height of journalisticsophistication, but Mel still had it lumped together with MTV andArena Football. He got his radio news via shortwave, from theBBC.

 "What about Markene Caldicott?" she said.

 "Well, apparently she's some hotshot reporter," Mel saidskeptically.

 "You could say that."

 "She's after my ass. And I don't mean that in the sexual sense,"Mel said. "She's called every single person I've ever worked with. I can read this woman's mind like a fucking cereal box."

 "What's she doing?"

 "She'd really like to shoot down your father," Mel said, "but she can't, because Willy is without flaw, and was incapacitated for the last couple of months besides. So instead, she is going to do a bigexpose where she makes me out to be this sort of Richelieu with ayarmulke. The shadowy power who pulled the strings whileCozzano drooled down his chin. You know the kind of thing."

 "Your basic over inflated election-year scandal."

 "Yeah. She probably figures that Willy is going to get into therace and she wants to be the first to take shots at him. So I'm goingto head her off at the pass."

 "How are you going to do that?"

 "I'm going to drive back up to Daley," Mel said. He and MaryCatherine had both fallen into the habit of using Cozzano'spoststroke jargon. "And have dinner with Mark McCabe. Apolitical reporter from theTrib. And I'm going to spill my guts.Going to lay the whole thing out."

 Mary Catherine was shocked. "You're going to tell himeverything?"

 Mel looked at her with an expression that was somewherebetween fatherly disappointment and pity. "Are you nuts? Ofcourse I'm not going to tell him everything. I'm just going to makeit look like I'm telling him everything."

 "Oh."

 "So McCabe will get a big front-page story. We will release theinformation in the form most favourable to us. Markene Caldicottwill have been scooped, and her story, if she even bothers to air thedamn thing, will have virtually no impact. And the Cozzano familyand administration will be totally exonerated, because I, the runtyJew lawyer, will take all the heat."

 "That's very good of you," Mary Catherine said.

 Mel laughed and slapped the steering wheel. "Ha! Good of me.I like that. You downstaters just kill me. 'Very good of you,'" he mimicked her, not unkindly, and laughed again. Mary Catherinecould feel her face radiating warmth. "Look, kid, this is not aboutgood. This is not a good and evil thing, this is about being smartand taking our losses in the way that is least disadvantageous to us.That's what I am trying to set up here."

 "Okay."

 "I'm going to great lengths to be clever and set this whole thingup the way that is best for us," Mel continued, now starting tosound almost a little peeved, "and it just kills me when you try tocharacterize it as some kind of church-social altruism. It's likeyou're failing to see and appreciate the full artistry that is involvedhere."

 "Sorry. I think it's very devious," she said, now getting a littlepeeved herself.

 "Thank you. That's a compliment I can handle. Now we are on the same wavelength."

 "Good."

 "We're both listening to the same station," Mel said, extendingthe metaphor. "Both listening to the BBC instead of that RNAcrap." He spoke the final word with a resounding, sardonic whip­lash that made them both laugh, albeit nervously. "So let's stayaway from this weepy sentimental shit and do what is best for our families over the next several generations," Mel said.

 "Okay."

 "What is best, for right now, is that I, Mel Meyer, get out ofDodge."

 "What do you mean?"

 Mel sighed, a little defeated, as if he'd been hoping that MaryCatherine would simply get it. "Jesus, girl, I'm going publictonight. Telling the whole world that I did something unethical.I'm going to take the heat for the decisions that I made in Januaryand February. Which were good decisions - but sooner or later, thekarma comes back and hits you. Now, once I've made myself outto be the evil, scheming homunculus that I am, how can I possibly continue to be a close adviser and confidante of the Cozzano clan?The whole point is that everyone throws shit at me, it all sticks, andthen I run away and take all the shit with me. If I stick around youguys, some of it's bound to rub off."

 As Mel explained all of this, the whole situation became clear toMary Catherine, and the cloud of emotion that had obscured thebeginning of this conversation lifted away. She felt calm and relaxed.

 "How far away are you going to run?"

 "Oh, pretty far, at least for a while," Mel said. "I'm formallysevering my relationship with your father, as his attorney, andsending his files over to Ty Addison at Norton Addison GoldbergGreen. Ty'll take good care of you guys. I will stay in touch byphone, but this is the last time I'll show my face in Tuscola for awhile. It's okay for us to see each other when you come up to Chicago, as long as it's something casual, like lunch. Anythingmore than that, and someone in the media will notice it, and makeit out to look like I'm still lurking in the shadows, pulling strings."

 "What about the long term you were talking about?"

 "Long term, nothing has changed. This is a blip on the screen ofhistory."

 During the conversation he had been steering the Mercedesrandomly around the gridwork of roads that covered the area,occasionally zigzagging his way back toward the Cozzanofarmhouse. Myron Morris's Suburban passed them going the otherway and they waved at each other. Finally Mel stopped next toMary Catherine's car, parked along the shoulder, and she realizedthat he meant for her to get out.

 "Do I get a hug?" she asked. "Or is that too sinister for MarkeneCaldicott?"

 Mel just sat there passively, as though suddenly stunned by whathe was doing.

 Mary Catherine unfasted her seat belt, leaned over the gapbetween the seats, and encircled Mel's neck in her arms, nearlylying down sideways across the front of the car. Mel wrapped hisarms around her body and held her tight for at least a minute. Thenhe let go, all of a sudden.

 "Okay, I want to be alone now," he said.

 Mary Catherine pecked him once on the cheek and climbedrapidly out of the car without looking back. She slammed the doorbehind her. Mel's car was moving forward before the door waseven shut. The tires broke loose from the pavement, spun, andsquealed, kicking back twin spurts of blue smoke, and the Mercedes shot down the road past the old farmhouse, just like in the old days.In the windows of the farmhouse, the faces of young Cozzanosappeared, drawn by the noise, then drifted away as they saw that itwas just Mel Meyer, the old lawyer from Chicago who liked todrive fast.

 William A. Cozzano was out for his morning constitutional: out hisback door, through the gate and into the alley, half a block down,through a break in the hedge, and into the Thorsen's driveway.Down the edge of their side yard, waving to ninety-year-old Mrs.Thorsen, who was invariably standing at her kitchen windowwashing dishes, then into the street, another half block up, througha gap in the chain-link fence around Tuscola City park, and fromthere, wherever he wanted to go. It was a route he had beenfollowing since he had learned to walk the first time, and it was oneof the first thing he had done when he learned to walk the second time.

 Nowadays, of course, he was usually accompanied by half adozen support personnel when he did it. Mrs. Thorsen didn't seemto mind all those people traipsing through her yard. She lived alonenow. It was a mystery how she could have so many dishes to wash,but she was always there washing them.

 The trip to the park was a tricky, twisting affair that Cozzano's entourage had to accomplish in single file. Once they reached the broad open spaces of the park proper, they were able to spread outand walk in a group. Usually the entourage consisted of a couple ofnurses, Myron Morris's home-movie crew, and someone from theRadhakrishnan Institute, connected back to a bedroom in theCozzano house by a radio headset. On this particular day, Zeldo came along for the walk.

 "You're walking. You're talking. Congratulations," he said.

 "Thanks. It's nice," Cozzano said.

 "If you keep improving the way you have been, then bysometime in mid June you should be essentially back to normal."

 "Excellent."

 "I'd like to know if you would have any interest in developingsome capabilities that arebetter than normal."

 This was a bizarre suggestion and Zeldo knew it; he was visiblynervous as he spoke the words. He watched Cozzano's facecarefully for a reaction.

 For along time, Cozzano didn't react at all. He kept walking asif he hadn't heard. But he was no longer looking around. He wasstaring down at the grass in front of his feet, trying to scorch a holein the ground with his eyes.

 After a minute, or so, he seemed to reach a conclusion. Helooked up again. But he still didn't speak for another minute or so.He was apparently formulating a response. Finally he looked atZeldo and said, nonchalantly, "I have always been a strong believerin self-improvement."

 "I'm seeing my aunt Mary taking an apple pie out of the oven,"Cozzano said. "It is Thanksgiving Day of 1954 at 2:15p.m. Afootball game is going on the television in the next room. My fatherand some uncles and cousins are watching it. They are all smokingpipes and the smoke stings my nose. The Lions have the ball ontheir own thirty-five, second down and four yards to go. But I'mconcentrating on the pie."

 "Okay, that's good," Zeldo said, typing all of this furiously intothe computer. "Now, what happens when I stimulate this link?" He swiveled around to another keyboard and typed a command into another computer.

 Cozzano's eyes narrowed. He was staring into the distance,unfocused.

 "Just a very fleeting image of Christina at the age of about thirty-five," Cozzano said. "She's in the living room, wearing a yellowdress. I can't remember much more than that. Now it's fading."

 "Okay, how about this one?" Zeldo said, typing in anothercommand.

 Cozzano drew a sharp breath into his nostrils and began to smackhis lips and swallow. "A very intense odor. Some kind of chemicalodor that I was exposed to at the plant. Possibly a pesticide."

 "But you're not getting any visuals?"

 "None whatsoever."

 "Okay, how about this one?"

 "Jesus!" Cozzano shouted. Genuine fright and astonishment had come over his face. He half-slid, half-rolled out of his chair anddropped to the floor of the bedroom, landing on his belly, andcrawled on his elbows so that he was half-hidden under a bed.

 "Let me guess," Zeldo said. "Something from Vietnam."

 Cozzano went limp and dropped his face down on to his arms,staring directly into the floor. His back and shoulders were heaving and sweat was visible along his hairline.

 "Sorry about that," Zeldo said.

 "It was unbelievably realistic," Cozzano said. "My God, Iactually heard the sound of a bullet whizzing past my head." He satup and held up one hand, just above and to one side of his righttemple. "It was from an AK-47. It came from this direction, rightout of the jungle, and shot past me. Missed me by a couple ofinches, I'd say."

 "Is that a specific memory of something that happened to you?"Zeldo said.

 Cozzano's eyes became distant. He was staring at the wall, but hewasn't seeing it. "Hard to say. Hard to say."

 "When you saw the apple pie, it seemed very specific."

 "It was specific. It really happened. This was more of a fleetingglimpse of something. Almost like a reconstruction of a generic type of event."

 "Interesting," Zeldo said. "Would you like to take a break?"

 "Yeah, I wouldn't mind," Cozzano said. "That one really shookme up. How many more do we have to do?"

 Zeldo laughed. "We've done three dozen so far," he said, "andwe could potentially do a couple of thousand. It's up to you."

 By the end of the day, Zeldo had stimulated more than ahundred separate connections into Cozzano's brain. Each oneelicited a completely different response.

  

 AN ENTIRE PASSAGE FROM MARK TWAIN MATERIALIZED INHIS HEAD.

 HE SMELLED THE ROOT CELLAR AT THE OLD FARMHOUSEOUTSIDE OF TOWN.

 HE FELT AN OVERPOWERING SENSE OF  GRIEF AND LOSS,FOR NO REASON AT ALL.

 A COLD FOOTBALL SLAMMED INTO HIS HANDS DURING ASCRIMAGE IN CHAMPAIGN.

 HE BIT INTO A THICKLY FROSTED CHOCOLATE CAKE. A B-52 STREAKED OVERHEAD.

 HE  SAW  A  FULL  PAGE  FROM  HIS  WEEKLY  APPOINTMENTCALENDAR, MARCH 25-31, 1991.

 SNOWFLAKES DRIFTED ON TO HIS OUTSTRETCHED TONGUEAND MELTED.

 HE  BECAME  SEXUALLY  AROUSED  FOR  NO  DISCERNIBLEREASON.

 AN OLD BARRY MANILOW SONG PLAYED IN HIS HEAD.

 HIS CAR SKIDDED OFF AN ICY ROAD IN WINTER 1960 ANDHIT A TELEPHONE POLE; HIS FOREHEAD SLAMMED INTO THEWIND-SHIELD AND CRACKED IT.

 THE TINKLING SOUND OF ICE CUBES IN A GLASS PITCHER OR ICED TEABEING STIRRED BY ONE OF HIS AUNTS.

 HE TRIMMED HIS FINGERNAILS IN A TOKYO HOTEL ROOM.

 MARY CATHERINE DID SOMETHING THATMADE HIM VERY ANGRY; HE WASN'T SURE EXACTLY WHAT.

 "I have to quit," Zeldo said. "I can't type any more. My fingers are dead."

 "I want to keep going," Cozzano said. "This is incredible."

 Zeldo thought about it. "Itis incredible. But I'm not sure if itsuseful."

 "Useful for what?"

 "The whole point of this exercise was to figure out a way to usethis chip in your head for communication," Zeldo said.

 Cozzano laughed. "You're right. I had forgotten about that."

 "I'm not sure how we use all of this stuff to communicate,"Zeldo said. "It's all impressionistic stuff. Nothing rational."

 "Well," Cozzano said, "it's a new communications medium.What is necessary is to develop a grammar and syntax."

 Zeldo laughed and shook his head. "You lost me."

 "It's like film," Cozzano said. "When film was invented, no oneknew how to use it. But gradually, a visual grammar was developed.Filmgoers began to understand how the grammar was used tocommunicate certain things. We have to do the same thing withthis."

 "I should get you together with Ogle," Zeldo said.

 "You should have studied more liberal arts," Cozzano said.

 29

 Eleanor made the mistake of giving out her full name. Sinceher name was listed in the telephone book, she was now reachableby everyone, all the time. She had the impression that her phonenumber must have been spray-painted in digits ten feet tall on thewall of every public housing project in greater Denver. And somehow they had all heard that Eleanor Richmond was a nice lady who would help you out with your problems.

 She began to get calls from constituents in the middle of thenight. When some unemployed mother of three phoned her at one o'clock one night and asked her for a personal loan of a hundreddollars, Eleanor came to her senses and decided that this had to stop.She could not be unofficial mom to all of Denver. She soon gotinto the habit of turning off the ringer on her phone when she wentto bed.

 This was a difficult step for a mother of two teenagers to take,because once she turned off that ringer, she knew that her kidswould not be able to wake her up in the middle of the night andask her advice, or request help, apologize, or simply burst into tearswhenever they got themselves into a Situation. And althoughEleanor's kids were reasonably smart and fairly responsible and kindof prudent, they still had an amazing talent for finding their wayinto Situations.

 But by this point in her mothering career, Eleanor had seenenough Situations that she had begun to suspect that her kids weremore apt to get into them when they knew that Mom would bethere at the other end of the phone line to bail them out. And sureenough, when she got in the habit of turning her phone off atnight, the incidence of Situations dropped. Or maybe she juststopped hearing about them. Either way it was fine with her.

 It didn't help her sleep, though. Turning off the phones pre­vented them from ringing. But she could still hear the mechanicalparts inside her answering machine clunking and whirring all nightlong, as people left messages for her. She put the answeringmachine in the far corner of her trailer and buried it under a pillow,but that didn't help. She still lay awake at night wondering, Whythe hell are these people calling me?

 She had never called anyone. It had never even occurred to her,when she was broke, and her husband had gone on the lam to theAfterlife, and her mother was soiling her pants in the middle of thenight, and Clarice and Harmon, Jr., were out getting intoSituations, to pick up the phone and contact the office of theSenator. It would not have occurred to her in a million years.

 Where had these people gotten the weird idea that thegovernment was going to take care of their problems?

 The answer to that one was pretty simple: the government hadtold them as much. And they had been dumb enough to believe it. When it turned out to be lie (or at least a hell of an exaggeration)they didn't go out and help themselves. Instead they stewed in theirown problems and they got self-righteous about it and startedcalling Eleanor Richmond in the wee hours to vent their outrage.

 She had to stop thinking this way. She was thinking exactly like Earl Strong. Blaming everything on the welfare mothers. As if the welfare mothers had caused the savings and loan crisis, the budgetdeficit, the decline of the schools, and El Nino all at once.

 She would he awake every night for hours, sensing the distantclunking of her answer machine under the pillow in the next room,and run through this series of thoughts over and over again, like arat on a treadmill, exhausting herself but never going anywhere.

 One morning in the middle of April she got up, turned on hercoffee maker, took the pillow off her answering machine, andplayed back the messages, as she did every morning. Today therewere only four of them. The people who had Eleanor's phonenumber written on the walls of their trailers and project flats hadbegun to learn that she never responded to messages and, bit by bit,weren't bothering to call anymore.

 One of the messages was from someone speaking a language thatEleanor had never heard before. He rambled on until the machinecut him off. Then there were a couple of irate voters. And then there came a voice she recognized: it was one of Senator Marshall'spolitical aides, calling from Washington.

 "Hi, this is Roger calling from D.C. at ninea.m. local time."

 Eleanor glanced at her clock. It was 7:15. This message had justcome in while she was showering.

 "We have a major problem that's up your alley. Please call me assoon as you can."

 Eleanor picked up her phone and started punching numbers. Shegot through to Roger in D.C. During her month of working forSenator Marshall she had spoken briefly to this man oncepreviously, and seen his name on a lot of memos.

 Senators were too important to do anything personally. Theywere like sultans being carried around on sedan chairs, their feetnever actually touching the ground. They showed up at the Capitolto make speeches and cast votes, and they made a lot of essentiallysocial appearances, but most of the actual grunge work was delegated to a few key aides. This Roger character was one of thoseaides. He was a highly media-conscious, touchy-feely sort whospent a lot of time worrying about Senator Marshall's image withthe folks at home. When a high-school band made a trip toWashington, D.C., it was Roger who made sure that they got in tothe Senator's office for a photograph and a brief chat.

 "Hi, Eleanor, I'm glad you called back," he said. "Look, I got acall this morning from Roberto Cuahtemoc at the Aztlan Center over in Rosslyn."

 Rosslyn was part of Arlington, Virginia, right across the bridge from Eleanor's hometown. Aztlan was a Hispanic advocacy group.Roberto Cuahtemoc had formerly been Roberto something-elseand had switched to a Nahuatl last name during his college years. He was obscure to northeastern Hispanics, but in the Southwest, particularly among migrant workers, he was revered.

 Naturally, he and Senator Marshall hated each other. At least,they did in public. In private they had apparently reached somekind of an arrangement. When Roberto Cuahtemoc phoned theSenator first thing in the morning it probably meant he was pissedabout something.

 "He's really pissed," Roger said. "He got a call from Ray delValle this morning at sevena.m. our time, which means that ourbuddy Ray was up and at 'em at fivea.m. in Denver."

 Ray del Valle was a Denver-based activist and protege ofCuahtemoc. He was young, smart, and, considering the intensity ofhis convictions, Eleanor had found him easy to get along with.

 "What's Ray up to?" she said.

 "He's convinced that some migrant family is getting screwedover by Arapahoe Highlands Medical Center. There's a little kidinvolved. It's the kind of thing where he could really beat ourbrains out in the media, and believe me, if anyone understand thatfact, it's Ray. So before he makes the Senator out to look likeFrancisco fucking Pizarro or something, please get over there and show the flag and tell everyone how concerned the Senator is. Areyou ready to write down this address?"

 "Shoot," she said.

 Fifteen minutes later she was there. It was a straight shot. She'd used most of her first paycheck to fix up the Volvo. She crept up tothe edge of Highway 2, looked both ways, and punched the gas,spraying dust and rocks back into the Commerce Vista, screaming awild left-hand turn on to the highway, headed southwest towardDenver. She weaved her way through heavy truck traffic, passing onetrailer park after another, eventually getting into the heavy industrialzone of southern Commerce City - all the stuff that Harmon had avoided when he'd first taken her to look at the Commerce Vista.Passing out of the refinery zone, over and under freeways and railwaylines, she entered a flat, hot warehouse region of north Denver thatcatered entirely to semitrailer rigs and the men who drove them. Oneparking lot had been turned into a makeshift bus station where you could catch a bus straight to Chihuahua. Finally she passed underInterstate 70 and into the area she was looking for.

 Her destination was a tiny brick bungalow in a neighborhood oftiny brick bungalows. The neighborhood was entirely Mexican-American and it seemed like 90 percent of its population wasclustered around this particular house. She had to park her car acouple of blocks away and excuse her way through the crowd untilshe reached the epicenter.

 The center of attention wasn't the house itself; it was a pickuptruck parked in its driveway. A yellow Chevy pickup, at leasttwenty years old, rusted in many places, with a white fiberglasscamper cap attached to the back, held on to the box by means of four C-clamps. The truck's tailgate and the rear window of thecamper cap was spread open like a pair of jaws to provide a viewinside: a couple of bulging Hefty bags filled with clothes, and aflannel sleeping bag, zipped open to expose its colorful lining(mallards in flight over a northern wetland) and spread out flat onthe rusted steel floor to soften its corrugations. There were a coupleof pillows shoved into the corners and some wadded-up sheets andblankets.

 And there were a lot of flowers too. A number of bouquets hadbeen tossed in on top of the sleeping bag. More bunches wereleaning against the side of the truck or resting on the roof of thefiberglass cap.

 At the very center of the action were two men whom Eleanorrecognized. One of them was a tall, good-looking young man injeans and a blazer. With his black ponytail he could have passed fora full-blooded Apache. This was Ray del Valle. He was talking to a local newspaper reporter who covered the Chicano affairs beat.

 Eleanor didn't pay much attention to them. She just made herway through the crowd, trying to suppress a gag reflex that was gradually rising in her throat. She got close enough that she waspractically standing in between the two men, staring into the mawof the pickup truck.

 Last night, the four children of Carlos and Anna Ramirez hadlain down on that sleeping bag to sleep while their parents, sitting up front in the truck's cab, had driven them across the high plainssoutheast of Denver. They had gone to sleep quickly, and sleptwell, not because it was cozy but because the back of the truck wasfull of carbon monoxide leaking from the truck's exhaust. Three ofthe children had died. One was in the hospital in critical condition,with irreparable brain damage. Carlos and Anna Ramirez had not known what was going on until they had arrived here, early this morning, at the home of Anna's sister.

 She knew all these things from her phone conversation with Roger. He had run through the story quickly and tersely and shehad listened in much the same spirit, looking at it as a politicalproblem to be solved. But now that she was here in the middle ofa sniffling and wailing crowd, looking into the bed where the innocents had died, the emotional impact suddenly hit her like a truck. Eleanor put her hand over her mouth, closed her eyes, andtried to suppress the urge to become physically ill.

 "Eleanor," Ray del Valle said, "come on, let's talk somewhere else. You don't want to dwell on this." Eleanor felt Ray's arm tightening around her shoulders. He led her around the truck andinto the backyard, gently but surely, like a ballroom dancer leadinghis date around the floor.

 She took the opportunity to rest her head on his chest for just amoment. She didn't exactly cry, though tears were in her eyes.

 "It's a hard thing for a parent to look at, isn't it?" Ray said. "It'sour worst nightmare come to life. Like an image from theHolocaust."

 Eleanor took a half step away from Ray and drew a few deepbreaths. "Are the parents inside?" she said.

 "Yes. Anna has been sedated. Carlos is drinking a lot and vowing to kill himself. Anna's family is trying to keep him on an even keel.It's very difficult."

 "I heard that there is a problem with the surviving child'smedical care and I am here to inform the Ramirez family thatSenator Marshall is at their service in whatever capacity is needed.Do you think that you could go in and relay that message to them?"

 Ray snorted with just the tiniest hint of amusement and glanceddown at his wristwatch. "The Senator runs a tight ship. As always."

 Ray went into the house and came out a couple of minutes laterwith Anna's sister Pilar. From a distance Pilar seemed utterly stonefaced, but from arm's length her eyes were swollen and redand she looked stunned, rather than impassive.

 "I told her what you said," Ray said. "She has authorized me to explain the child's medical situation."

 "Okay."

 "When they arrived this morning and found their four children unresponsive, they called the ambulance. Three children were pronounced dead at the scene. The fourth, the eight-year-old girlBianca, still had a pulse. The ambulance took her straight toArapahoe Highlands Medical Center."

 "Why there?" Highlands was a private hospital, well endowed,certainly not the closest to this bungalow. Not the kind of placewhere migrant workers ended up.

 "Carbon monoxide poisoning was obviously the culprit here.And Highlands has a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. It is the besttreatment. So that's where they went. The emergency room staff atHighlands treated Bianca but they refused to admit her forhyperbaric oxygen treatment. Instead they dumped her back toDenver County, where she is now."

 "How can they justify that?"

 Ray just shrugged. "As we say in the Third World,Quién sabe?"

 Something clicked in the back of Eleanor's head. Maybe it washer temper breaking. She squared her shoulders and flared hernostrils. "Would you please come with me, Ray?" she said.

 "Okay. Where we going?"

 Eleanor realized that she didn't even know. "We're just going to take care of a few things, that's all."

 The two of them got into Eleanor's car and headed in thedirection of Denver County Hospital, were Ray knew somedoctors.

 "This happens hundreds of times every year," Ray said. "All over North America."

 "What happens?"

 "Exactly this situation. Remember what a migrant worker is:someone who migrates. These people cover a lot of territory andthe vehicle of choice is a pickup truck. It's always the same: theparents sit up front in the cab and the kids lie down in the back andtry to sleep. The exhaust comes up through holes in the floor, orelse it leaks through the crack under the tailgate. In warm weatherthey open the windows and survive. But if it's chilly, like it was lastnight, they close the cab up and suffocate."

 "You'd think that they would have gotten some indicationbefore. That their kids would have gotten headaches or feltwoozy."

 Ray snorted. "If you drove for eight or ten hours in the back ofa truck, you'd feel that way even without carbon monoxide."

 At the county hospital, Ray tracked down Dr. Escobedo, ayoung internist who was looking after Bianca. They all sat arounda table in the corner of the cafeteria.

 "Should Bianca be here, or at Arapahoe Highlands?" Eleanorsaid.

 "At Highlands," Dr. Escobedo said without hesitation, and without rancour.

 "Why?"

 "They have a hyperbaric oxygen chamber."

 "And that is the standard treatment for this kind of thing?"

 "Not exactly," he said. "That's the problem."

 "What do you mean, not exactly?"

 "Well, for example, there are a lot of migrant workers up inWashington State, and this kind of thing has happened up there ona fairly regular basis. Now, there is a hospital in Seattle that has a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, which is basically used to decompressdivers with the bends. When you put a patient with carbonmonoxide poisoning into such a chamber, it helps get oxygen into their tissues, which is what such a patient needs. So people up there have learned that when an unconscious kid is pulled out of the backof a pickup truck, you send them straight to the one hospital withthe hyperbaric chamber. But this is kind of a new practice, and inthe eyes of some, it's experimental."

 "And that's what the people at Highlands think."

 "Exactly. If this treatment were standard medical practice, they'dhave no excuse not to admit Bianca. But because they can label it experimental, there's no way they'll admit her. Because they knowthey'll lose money."

 "Why does Denver have a chamber like this?" Ray said. "Wedon't have many scuba divers around here."

 "It's used for diabetics and other people with poor circulation,"Escobedo said. "So it's popular in areas with a large middle-agedand elderly population that's well insured. It's an expensivetreatment with a high profit margin for the hospital. Which is whythey don't want to tie up the chamber with a charity case."

 "Okay, I get the picture," Eleanor said. "Now, who is in charge of Arapahoe Highlands Medical Center?"

 "The chief administrator is Dr. Morgan," Escobedo said.

 Eleanor stood up and yanked her jacket off the back of the chair."Let's go kick his white ass," she said.

 Ray and Escobedo looked astonished and glanced at each other, a bit nervously. "You might want to call ahead and find out wherehe is first," Ray suggested.

 "I'm sure that an important man like Dr. Morgan has a secretarywho is very good at putting people like me off- over the phone," Eleanor said. "The more I get in that secretary's face, the morehelpful she'll be."

 "This may not be an appropriate time for me to get political," Raysaid, after they had been driving in silence for a few minutes,humming down Broadway toward the rolling, prosperous southernsuburbs. "But this is going to be a long drive and I can't helpmyself."

 "Shoot," Eleanor said. " It would be unlike you not to getpolitical."

 "Okay. Well, there is one question you have forgotten to ask meabout this whole affair."

 "What question is that?"

 "Why did the Ramirezes suddenly jump into their truck andtake a six-hour drive across the prairie in the middle of the night?"

 Eleanor thought that one over, feeling slightly embarrassed. "Ithought you said this was what migrant workers do. They migrate."

 "They're human beings," Ray said.

 "I know that," Eleanor said, somewhat testily. Ray had atendency to be a little too obnoxious in his political correctness.

 "So they have to sleep. They generally do it at night. And theydrive during the daytime, like everyone else."

 "Okay. So tell me, Ray, why did the Ramirezes suddenly get itinto their heads to jump into their truck and go on a long nightdrive?"

 "Because a couple of months ago, after the State of Unionaddress, there was a stock market crash."

 Eleanor looked over at Ray. He was smiling back at hermysteriously.

 "I'll bite," she said.

 "The capital markets crashed. People sold their stocks andneeded somewhere else to put their money. In times of economicuncertainty, people tend to invest in commodities. So, on theChicago Board of Trade, the price of beef went up. Raising cattlebecame a money-making proposition. But it takes time to raise cattle, you don't make a full-grown steer overnight. So cattlemenin this state began to raise a larger number of calves than usual.

 "In the expectation that they'd be able to make more money off them when they were full-grown," Eleanor said. She did not knowthe first thing about ranching but this concept seemed simpleenough.

 "Right. Well, by now, these calves are starting to get big andstarting to need more food - you know how growing children are.In this part of the country, cattle graze - they eat grass out on therange. Much of the range land is owned by the federalGovernment, and cattlemen are allowed to graze their cattle on thatland.

 "There is a nice patch of BLM land that I know about six hoursfrom here. It's in the basin of the Arkansas River, so it always has plenty of green grass, but unlike a lot of the other land around thereit hasn't been converted to truck farming yet."

 "Truck farming . . . that means vegetables and so on?"

 "There's a lot of that stuff down there along the Arkansas," Raysaid. "Migrants work there, picking vegetables for shipment toOklahoma and Texas."

 "Okay. Go on."

 "Last year, when the price of beef was low, no one wanted to usethis land and so a number of migrant workers - including theRamirezes - went there and parked their trucks and trailers on itand started living there. Set up a little community. Planted some little gardens and so on. Waiting for the next harvest to come in."

 "But last week, a cattleman in that area found that he wasrunning out of land on which to graze all of these calves that he started when the price of beef got high. And now, in place of the community of migrant workers that used to be on that land, thisman's cattle are there, eating the lush green grass."

 "You're saying that the Ramirezes were kicked off the land."

 "They and all the other people living there were evictedyesterday," Ray said. "The closest place for the Ramirez family to stay was Anna's sister's house, here in Denver. So they put the kidsin the back of the truck and came here."

 "Oh."

 "Hundreds of people are on the road today, all over the HighPlains, because some cattle got hungry," Ray said. "And I wouldn'tbe at all surprised if there were several more cases of carbonmonoxide poisoning in the backs of pickup trucks that we haven'theard about yet."

 "If I am a cattleman," Eleanor said, "and I want to use a piece ofBLM land, and some migrant workers happen to be living on it,then what is the mechanism? How do I make those workers goaway? Call the cops?"

 "No you don't call the cops. There are a number of approachesone could take," Ray said, "but if I had the right connections, myfirst choice would be to make a phone call to the Alamo."

 Eleanor thought this one over for a minute.

 "Ray, if nothing else, you just guaranteed Bianca Ramirez a spotin the hyperbaric chamber," she said.

 Eleanor was right. Dr. Morgan did have a very capable secretary.

 She could tell just by looking at the woman that she knew herbusiness.

 "Good morning, my name is Eleanor Richmond and I just gotoff the phone from talking to my boss, Senator Marshall," she lied,"and based on the results of that conversation I think I can promiseyou that the single most important thing that your boss Dr. Morganwill do this whole month, possibly this whole year, will be to have a conversation with me right now."

 Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Ray and Dr.Escobedo grinning at each other. This was like a carnival ride for them.

 Dr. Morgan's secretary was cheerful enough about it. If she was pissed off, she was good enough not to show it in front of Eleanor.She reached Dr. Morgan on his car phone; he was on his way in.

 Within fifteen minutes, Dr. Morgan, Eleanor, Ray and Dr.Escobedo were all sitting around a table in Morgan's office. They made small talk about what kind of additives they wanted in theircoffee and what a nice day it was. Then things got quiet, andEleanor found that everyone was looking at her expectantly. She folded her hands in her lap and composed herself for a moment.

 "I'm not very good at this sort of thing," she said, "so maybe the best way for me to proceed is just to come out and say something."

 "Shoot," Dr. Morgan said.

 "This is an exercise in raw political brute force. You will giveBianca Ramirez treatment in the hyperbaric oxygen chamber orelse the Senator, I'm sure, will make it his mission in life to turn this medical centre into a smoking hole in the ground."

 "Consider it done," Dr. Morgan said cheerfully. "Dr. Escobedo,you'll make the arrangements to send Bianca over?"

 "Yes."

 "Excellent," Dr. Morgan said. He seemed pleased and cheerful, as if he woke up every morning of his life and got slapped aroundby a U.S. Senator. "Now, is there anything else on the agenda?"

 "God," Eleanor said, an hour later, over breakfast with Ray, "Ireally overdid it. I'm so embarrassed."

 Ray shrugged. Significantly, he didn't try to disagree with her."Don't worry about it," he said. "You got what we wanted."

 After she had dropped Escobedo off at the county hospital; it hadcome to their attention that neither one of them had had anybreakfast. So now they were at a little family place not far from the Alamo. Eleanor was having huevos rancheros. Ray was licking hislips over a huge steaming bowl of tripe.

 "I tend to forget how powerful a senator is," Eleanor said. "I probably could have just made a phone call and gotten the sameresult. Instead I came in like Rambo. Used a flame thrower whereI could have flicked a Bic."

 "Hey, if nothing else it was great theatre," Ray said. "That's your genius, you know."

 "Huh?"

 Ray was studying her face interestedly. "You don't know, doyou?" he said. "You just do it on instinct."

 "Do what on instinct?"

 Ray shook his head flirtatiously. "I don't want to make you self-conscious and ruin it."

 "What are you talking about?"

 "I really admire what you did to Earl Strong, you know," hesaid, changing the subject none too subtly.

 "Yeah, you tell me that every time we see each other."

 "Now what we need to do is get that flame thrower aimed at theright target."

 "Aha," she said. "The hidden agenda comes out."

 "I told you I was paying for breakfast. What did you think?"

 "And an excellent breakfast it is," she mumbled, chewing herfirst mouthful. They ate in silence for a minute. Both of them wereravenous. Emotion burns calories.

 "I talked to Jane Osborne," Ray said. "I was all ready to be pissedat her, but she's nice."

 "Here's the part where I ask who Jane Osbourne is."

 "She's a forest ranger out in La Junta."

 "A forest ranger? In the prairie?"

 "Funny, that's exactly what she said when she was assignedthere," Ray said. "She likes forests. She went into the ForestService hoping she would end up in one."

 "Logical enough."

 "She didn't count on the fact that the Forest Service owns a lotof grassland. Including the piece of land where the Ramirez family was living until yesterday. And they need people to look after thatland. These people are called forest rangers. They wear SmokeyBear hats and everything. So Jane Osbourne is stuck out there, nota single tree, much less a forest, for a hundred miles, in this shitty, dead-end GS-12 position, driving around in a pickup truck chasingdirt bikers and replacing signs that have been shotgun-blasted bythe local intellectuals."

 "Must be disappointing."

 "Yeah. But it's not as bad as what comes next."

 "And what's that?"

 "She's about ready to turn in for the evening when she gets a callfrom On High and she is ordered to personally evict about ahundred migrant workers from this patch of grazing land."

 "How does a single woman do that?"

 "She called in a few other rangers and brought in some federal marshals too, as a show of force."

 "Who gave the order?"

 "Her boss. Who got it from Denver. And they got it fromWashington. I'm sure."

 "Correct me if I'm wrong," Eleanor said, "but I'm sure that thiswasn't the only patch of federal land in Colorado that was housingsquatters."

 Ray smiled. "You got that right."

 "Have any other such communities been evicted?"

 Ray shook his head.

 "Just this one," Eleanor said.

 "Just this one."

 "So this wasn't a blanket order from Washington. It was targetedat this one piece of land."

 "Sure looks that way."

 "And why," Eleanor said, "do you suppose that some bureaucratin D.C. would suddenly take an interest in this one parcel?"

 Ray shrugged. "I can only speculate."

 "Please do."

 "This bureaucrat probably went to law school with one ofSenator Marshall's aides. Or was his college roommate. Or their kids go to the same day care. Something like that."

 Eleanor waggled a finger at Ray. "There you go makingassumptions. How do you know there's a connection to CalebRoosevelt Marshall?"

 "The piece of land in question adjoins the Lazy Z Ranch," Ray said, "and the cattle grazing on it now all wear the Lazy Z brand."

 "Say no more." Eleanor said. "You win."

 The Lazy Z ranch was owned by Sam Wyatt. Sam Wyatt was Caleb Roosevelt Marshall's biggest private contributor. And thepresident of Senator Marshall's PAC. Sam Wyatt was one of adozen or so constituents who could get through to the Senator onthe phone whenever he wanted to.

 But in this case, he probably hadn't. This was too much of a dirtydetail for the Senator to mess around with personally. He hadprobably just called one of the Senator's aides. He had probablycalled Shad Harper, that underaged son of a bitch who had theoffice across the hallway from Eleanor's.

 Ray was watching her in fascination. "You have this look onyour face like you're plotting an assassination," he joked.

 "Something like that," she said.

 30

 When little Bianca Ramirez was finally released fromArapahoe Highlands Medical Centre after one week of hyperbaric oxygen treatment, a dozen television crews, four satellite uplink trucks, one Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker,thirty print reporters, a hundred supportive protesters, the Mayorof Denver, staffers from all of the local senators' and representatives'offices, and a few lean and hungry lawyers were waiting for her.The only question was whether or not her parents, Carlos andAnna Ramirez, would actually show up to collect her.

 Her progress from nameless refugee to media star could betracked by checking the headlines on a local newspaper, which hadbeen sliding in the direction of out-and-out tabloid journalism fora number of years, and which had been driven completely beyondthe pale by the Bianca Ramirez story.

 "TRUCK OF DEATH"

 had been the first headline concerning the Ramirez family.Slightly less hysterical coverage of the tragedy had actually made iton to a couple of national network newscasts, which was unusualto say the least; plenty of Chicano kids had suffocated in the backsof trucks without even being mentioned in the local newspapers.But this time around, several national Hispanic organisations gotinto the act and managed to stir up some interest on a national level.The case of the Ramirez family was a good one for TV. The truckof death per se was sitting in a driveway in Denver and anyone could go and videotape it. There had been one survivor, whohappened to be an adorable little girl, and although this didn't getreported right away, there was, as the saying goes, more to thestory: a failure of responsibility by a major, rich, private hospital, and hints of potential scandal involving one Sam Wyatt, wealthy cattleman, golf partner of senators and CEOs.

 "LET HER DIE!"

 was the headline on Day 2. The story about Highlands' refusal to treat Bianca had been leaked to the press by Ray del Valle.Leakedwas a deceptive term. A leak was a tiny seeping crevice. In this case,blowoutmight have been more accurate. Ray made sure everyonewith a minicam, laptop, pen, or pencil knew about the story. More sober journalists just viewed it as another example of "dumping,"the refusal of some hospitals to treat indigent patients. If they knew their business at all, it was an issue that they had already covered.Much more melodramatic examples of it happened in other cities.

 "HANG ON BIANCA!"

 was the headline for Day 3. This was somewhat meaningless. Day 3 was a Sunday and not much was going on. And Bianca'sability to hang on had never really been in question. The fact thatshe was still breathing when she was pulled from the Truck ofDeath, and when the ambulance crew had taken her to Highlands, where they had been told Let Her Die, meant that the parts of herbrain that controlled breathing and heartbeat still worked. She was,in other words, stable, albeit in a coma. There was nothing to hangon to. But it made for a great headline, and it gave the tabloid (andthe television journalists who functioned at the same journalistic level) a bit of breathing room. For a couple of days they had beenaccumulating a great mass of basically irrelevant human-interest material: pictures of the big-eyed Bianca, testimonials from familyand playmates, descriptions of her favourite foods and toys. Sundaygave them a chance to unload all of that stuff on the public. Ifnothing else, Sunday was the day that Bianca became an officialpublic figure, someone who could be referred to by her first name in a tabloid or on a TV broadcast, like Madonna or Di. As such, sherepresented a money factory for the tabloid; for at least the nextcouple of weeks, whenever they needed to goose their circulationfigures they just printed any headline containing the name Bianca.

 But Sunday was not a day of rest for everyone. A bleary-eyedRay del Valle led a caravan of half a dozen journalist-laden vehicleson a drive across the prairie, headed for the patch of Forest Service grazing land where the Ramirez children had played their last gameof soccer. The reason that Ray was bleary-eyed, even though the caravan departed at the civilized hour oftena.m., was that he hadspent the entire night driving from Denver to the site and back. Onhis drive out to the site, his car had been full of used toys and house-wares, which he had purchased for a few dollars at Goodwill. Onhis drive back to Denver, the car had been empty.

 When the caravan of journalists arrived at the site in mid-afternoon they were treated to the blindingly photogenic sight ofcattle grazing over the remains of a hastily evacuated migrant settle­ment. Remains of human tragedy were strewn everywhere:Raggedy Andy dolls, overturned cooking pots, baby clothes, a battered, well-loved Malibu Barbie or two.

 None of it had been there the day before; the migrant workershad had plenty of time to pick up their things before they'devacuated the site, and were not so wasteful as to leave perfectly good pots and toys strewn around. But it looked great, especiallywhen the handsome, pony-tailed Ray del Valle squatted down inthe grass to ponder an abandoned soccer ball as fat cattleemblazoned with the Lazy Z brand grazed contentedly nearby. Soit was no big surprise when a photograph along those lines took upmost of the front page of the next morning's tabloid, accompaniedby the headline:

 "WYATT: 'THROW 'EM OUT!'"

 It would be an understatement to say that Sam Wyatt, his veryclose friends in Senator Marshall's offices, and most of the Denvermedical establishment were, so far, not amused by the way theRamirez situation had been covered in the media. And although Ray del Valle had begun the new week with a crushing suckerpunch, afterward it became the Week of the Backlash. The"THROW 'EM OUT!" headline had been on the newsstands forless than six hours when two cars full of INS agents pulled up infront of the home of Pilar de la Cruz, nee Ramirez, and came tothe door with the intention of arresting Carlos and Anna Ramirez,who both happened to be illegal aliens. If these agents had beenreading their tabloids, they would not even have stopped; theywould have known that Carlos and Anna were not there by the factthat the TRUCK OF DEATH was not parked in the driveway. But they made the mistake of going to the door anyway. Pilar,alerted to the fact that Immigration was after her sister and brother- in-law, telephoned Arapahoe Highlands Medical Centre, wherethey were visiting Bianca, and warned them. They cut their visit short, jumped into the Truck of Death, and vanished from the faceof the earth.

 "MOMMY HAS TO GO, BIANCA!"

 graced the newsstands the next morning, accompanied by aphoto of the tearful Anna bidding farewell to her daughter, whowas bottled up inside the giant pressurized chamber where she hadbeen receiving her treatment. A photographer had been present inthe room when Anna and Carlos received the warning from Pilarand had snapped pictures of them bidding a hasty farewell.

 None of which made the Powers That Be look especially goodto the public. Which is why social workers from Health andHuman services started paying very close attention to Bianca at the same time, and a motion was filed in court for the state of Coloradoto become Bianca's legal guardian. The gist of this legal documentwas that Carlos and Anna Ramirez, by driving their kids around ina truck full of lethal gases and killing three of them, had clearlydemonstrated their unfitness as parents and should not be allowedto take care of Bianca anymore. The district attorney let it beknown that his staff was actually investigating the possibility offiling charges against the Ramirezes and that, with every fibre of hisbeing, he was refraining himself from issuing an arrest warrant for Carlos and Anna. It was all well and good to put public serviceannouncements on TV begging people not to drive their kidsaround in the back of pickup trucks, but what would really put astop to this sort of thing was punitive legal action against parents who did it. So the headline for Wednesday morning was

 "STATE: BIANCA IS OURS!"

 But all of this legal squalor was obscuring an interesting medicalstory. When Bianca arrived in the hyperbaric chamber she hadbeen in a deep coma and totally unresponsive. But in the photoaccompanying the "BIANCA IS OURS" story, a state socialworker stood outside the hyperbaric chamber, smiling and wavingthrough its thick pressure-proof window at the unseen Biancainside. And there wasn't much point smiling and waving to avegetable. It seemed that Bianca had staged a miraculous recovery.She was far from being back to normal, but she was awake, alert,responsive to verbal communication, and mumbling a few words.

 This gave Arapahoe Highlands Medical Centre's new PRDirector the ammunition he needed to thunder into the media fray.His predecessor and former boss had been sacked with astonishingdispatch as soon as "LET HER DIE!" had hit the streets. The newman had spent the first few days just trying to get on his feet. By thetime Wednesday rolled around, he was ready. He brought in aselect troop of journalists to videotape and photograph Bianca through the window of the chamber; she obliged by smiling andwaving to them. Since she had all but been written off as avegetable a few days earlier, this was certainly going to have anelectrifying effect on the public.

 There followed a news conference in a hospital meeting room,where all of Bianca's doctors, nurses, therapists, and court-appointed guardians stepped up to the microphone to deliver a few bright, upbeat sound bites praising Bianca's plucky nature andemphasising the incredible nature of her recovery. A few cynicaljournalists tried to spoil the day by asking difficult questions, e.g.:"Does Bianca know that the INS is trying to deport her parents?" But the new PR Director was standing by the mike at all times,trying to anticipate any line of questioning that might lead toanother headline along the lines of "LET HER DIE!," and when­ever these issues came up he would do something about protectingthe patient's privacy and then point to some other journalist with a less acute critical facility. In general, the PR Director was findingthat bald, middle-aged print journalists with nicotine stains on theirfingers were troublesome, and beautiful twenty-five-year-old TVjournalists who had arrived at the hospital carrying stuffed bunniesfor Bianca were good people to call on. So the headline forThursday morning was:

 "BIANCA: MIRACLE GIRL!"

 accompanied by a picture of her smiling her gap-toothed kid's grin through the window of the chamber, cuddling a bunny to herchest.

 Anyone who bothered to read the complete news story aboutBianca, all the way to the end, could find out that her treatment inthe chamber was essentially complete, and that Arapahoe HighlandsMedical Centre was going to release her the following day, onFriday.

 Which meant that by the time the "MIRACLE GIRL" headline began to circulate on Thursday morning, all of the participants ofthe Ramirez affair, from Denver to the Lazy Z Ranch toWashington, D.C., were gearing up for the end-game.

 Most of Friday would be taken up with logistics: getting all theplayers to the hospital on time and keeping in touch with everyoneon the phone. So Thursday was the last day for actually makingmoves. Ray del Valle kicked off the final round by arranging a pressconference, in a "safe house" somewhere in greater Denver, inwhich Carlos and Anna Ramirez stepped before the court of PublicOpinion to defend themselves from charges that they were illegalaliens and bad parents.

 The illegal alien part was difficult, because they were, in fact,illegal aliens. But in America, no issue was so clear-cut that it couldnot be obfuscated beyond recognition by a talented lawyer. TheRamirezes now had one: a nationally famous hell-raising San Francisco lawyer who liked to do pro-bono work if lots of TVcameras were present; he insisted that he was going to get thesepeople green cards real soon.

 The part about being bad parents was different. The Ramirezeswere actually known in their community as very good parents. Carlos was a teetotaler who spent every minute of his free timewith his children, and Anna was a domestic saint. Ray had arranged for character witnesses to show up at the safe house and say asmuch.

 Eleanor Richmond's part in the endgame was a different matter. She snuck into, and ransacked, the office of her young colleagueShad Harper. This was easily enough to get her fired and possibly even enough to get her thrown into jail. She understood this clearlyand had already typed up a letter of resignation for SenatorMarshall. She had been working at this job for exactly one monthand had received exactly one pay check.

 It was completely insane for her to be doing this. If she had beenlooking for snippets of information that she could have kept toherself and used discreetly, that would have been one thing. But herentire goal was to dig up some dirt that she could turn around and release to the media. Eleanor Richmond had gone native. She wasout of control.

 She had lost it sometime over the weekend. The realisation that Sam Wyatt, her boss' main man, had triggered this whole chain ofevents was bad enough by itself. For a day or two she had wavered,mostly because she was turned off by Ray's tactic of planting toysin the grass for photographers. When the INS had come aroundlooking for Carlos and Anna, she had been annoyed. But when thestate had tried to take Bianca away from her parents, Eleanor Richmond had gone nuts. That was no fair. She'd rather be a baglady than a conspirator in an affair that involved breaking apart afamily.

 So on Thursday, whenever Shad Harper left his office for morethan ten minutes, Eleanor went in and made herself at home. Itwould be worth destroying her own career if she could findanything to bring Shad down along with her. It would have been nice to find something on Sam Wyatt, or on the aide in D.C. whohad made the fateful phone call to the Forest Service, or even onSenator Marshall himself. But she was willing to settle for ShadHarper's head on a platter.

 Somewhat to her own astonishment, she didn't get caught. Onceor twice, someone poked their head into Shad's office while shewas there, and she explained that she was looking for a stapler thatShad had borrowed. This explanation worked because Shad wasalways borrowing stuff, including money, and not returning it.

 Shad himself spent most of his day out of the office, deeplyenmeshed in some kind of plot involving the Ramirez family.

 By the time the sun rose on Friday morning, illuminating thenew headline:

 "BIANCA: I WANT MY MAMA!"

 nothing had really changed. Arapahoe Highlands MedicalCentre was going to release Bianca at 6:05p.m. By an astonishingcoincidence, this put her release just a few minutes into the localevening news programs, making it an ideal candidate for live TVcoverage. Their new PR Director, who had been on the job forfive days and had already received a raise and a bonus, insisted thatthis was just a coincidence and that the time of the release had been set for purely medical reasons.

 He deserved his raise. From a media/PR standpoint, Highlandshad started out the week gut-shot and had made a miracle recoveryof their own until they now looked like archangels in white coats,their arms brimming over with fuzzy stuffed animals. At 6:05, theywould roll Bianca Ramirez out into the horseshoe drive wheretheir uniformed valet parking attendants stood guard twenty-fourhours a day, and release her into the world. This would be good fortwo reasons: it would cement their reputation as medical geniusesand it would clear out the hyperbaric chamber so that heavilyinsured middle-aged diabetics could get into it again.

 The question was: who was going to take charge of Bianca whenher wheelchair reached the curb? The fact that no-one knew theanswer to this question turned the entire scenario into a certified Real-Life Drama and insured vast saturating media coverage.

 Colorado was still trying to get a court order making Bianca award of the state, but the Ramirezes' high-profile lawyer and histeam of young legal ninjas had thrown this action into a proceduralsnafu that would take weeks to un-tangle. Barring any last-minuteaction by the judicial branch, Carlos and Anna would still beBianca's legal guardians as of 6:05.

 But Carlos and Anna were illegal aliens and the INS was still looking for them. As a matter of fact, the INS was right there at the hospital, and had been for three days, waiting for them to show up.

 So if Bianca's parents actually showed up at 6:05 to take custody of their daughter, they would immediately be taken off to the slammer and someone else would have to step in to take care of Bianca. This would probably end up being Anna's sister Pilar, but there had beenrumours that the state might use the arrest of Carlos and Anna as apretext to seize Bianca, in which case the media could look forwardto a tearful three-way Solomonic showdown right there in thehorseshoe drive.

 All the networks showed up, and as early as six o'clock on Fridaymorning, twelve hours before the Big Event, Highland's new PRman was already out in the horseshoe drive with a thick piece ofblue chalk, marking out camera position: ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN,CHAN 4, CHAN 5, CHAN 7, and more.

 As one journalist could be heard remarking to another journalistwhile they waited in the car-rental line at Stapleton Airport: "It'sgot a coma baby. It's got a miracle recovery. Weepy parents. Acrooked senator. And it's even got a fucking cowboy!"

 By itself, the story was plenty, but things got even better, if thatwas possible, in the middle of the day, when rumours began tocirculate that one of Senator Marshall's staff members haddocuments incriminating another staff member in the Lazy ZRanch grazing scandal that had triggered this whole mess, and thatshe was going to be there this evening to lay the whole thing outbefore the massed forces of the national press. And when thisrumour was embellished a little, to the effect that the woman inquestion was the famous bag lady who had recently cut EarlStrong's nuts off in public, journalists all over Denver had to putdown their drinks and breathe into paper sacks for a while.

 Eleanor Richmond strode like a gunslinger into the horseshoedrive at 5:55p.m. cradling a three-inch-thick stack of xeroxedhandouts. Before she said a word, she held out one of the handoutsup next to her face and stood motionless for a few seconds. She hadlearned this from watching pros in action. It gave the video people a chance to adjust the white balance on their cameras so that she,and everyone who followed her into the centre of the maelstrom,would not look pink or green on television. At the same time, itwas a great pose for the still photographers. Dozens of motor driveswhined, clearly audible in the astonishing silence that had suddenlyfallen over this makeshift technological amphitheatre.

 If the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had chosen thismoment to gallop through the horseshoe drive on their fierymounts, the journalists would have chased them out of the shotwith verbal abuse, and possibly interviewed them later, after themain event. The only figure who dared break into the frame was a helpful reporter from theWashington Post who scurried up toEleanor, relieved her of the stack of handouts, and frisbeed them wildly into the crowd.

 "My name is Eleanor Richmond. I am the Denver health andhuman services liaison for Senator Caleb Roosevelt Marshall. I have held that position for one month.

 "When I began working for the senator I was convinced, basedon his past records and statements, that he was a racist. I am nowconvinced that he does not have a racist bone in his body. I have never met a man more willing to judge people on their individual merits, or lack thereof.

 "However even the most perceptive judge of human nature canoccasionally be fooled by ambitious persons who practice todeceive. It is my unpleasant duty to report to you that several suchpeople have risen to positions of influence on the Senators' staffand, unbeknownst to Senator Marshall, have abused the power ofhis office for private gain.

 "Going direct to the media is not the best way to handle this situation. I should have met with the Senator first. I have maderepeated efforts to try and reach him but he has been unavailable. Unfortunately I cannot wait any longer to release this information,because it has a bearing on the matter of Bianca Ramirez, and if, byinaction, I were to cause damage to her family, I could neverforgive myself. So I am releasing the information now and I am alsooffering my resignation to Senator Marshall at the same time."

 "Eleanor!" shouted all of the journalists at once, raising theirhands.

 "Excuse me, excuse me, but I think that I should be given anopportunity to speak," someone said, coming up behind Eleanor.

 She turned around and looked directly into the face of ShadHarper.

 And then she hesitated. She had her back to the lights andcameras now; he was facing them, every pore in his face exposed totheir pitiless illumination. She felt like an interrogator as she stoodthere staring into his face, weighing the situation, trying to makeup her mind.

 He didn't look good. Shad was just a boy, after all, not very wellseasoned, and although he had a few on-camera skills, he was hardlya master of the game. And right now, he was really, really upset.

 She knew that if she let Shad talk, he'd cut his own throat. He'ddo it because he was a man and he had been conditioned. All hislife, to deny his fear, to act before thinking, to get in over his head.A women, or an older man, would have backed off, thought itover, chosen the right time. Not Shad; Shad had to confront her right now, he couldn't let her win even a single skirmish.

 "Be my guest," she said, and stepped away from the microphone.

 "I'm Shad Harper," he said, his voice cracking. "BLM liaison forSenator Marshall. And since I'm still on his staff, unlike Eleanorhere, who has apparently resigned - and if she hasn't resigned -which I can't say for sure either way, since I have not seen and donot have any independent knowledge of any letter by which she might have resigned - if she hasn't resigned then she will probablybe fired, and in any case no longer speaks for Senator Marshall, ifindeed she ever did - I do speak for Senator Marshall and so, since it appears that very damnable allegations are being made about himthat I should step up and say something."

 "She's not making allegations about the Senator," one of the journalists shouted, glancing through the handout. "She's making allegations about you personally, Mr Harper."

 Harper's mouth fell open. "Well, I haven't seen these alleged allegations yet, but-"

 "Is this your handwriting?" said another journalist, a womanfrom theL.A. Times, holding up one page of the handout.

 It was a photocopy of a sheet of stationary printed, at the top,with the words FROM THE DESK OF SHAD HARPER. It wascovered with handwritten notes.

 "I'd have to take a better look-

 "Let me just read you some of this and maybe you can explainwhy you were writing some of these things down," the womansaid. "'State of Washington versus Garcia 1990.' That sounds likea court case."

 "I don't remember," Shad said.

 "I looked it up," Eleanor said. "It was a case in which somechildren died of carbon monoxide poisoning in the back of apickup truck and the state of Washington successfully took custodyof the surviving children on the grounds that their parents hadneglected them."

 "Why were you looking up that case, Shad?" the woman fromtheL.A. Times said. "How does that relate to your job as BLMliaison for the Senator?"

 "First and foremost, I am a servant of the people," Shad said. Theprotestors gathered off to one side hooted derisively. The sound threw Shad off balance and he stumbled for a moment. "Uh, I'm entitled to look up court cases in the privacy of my own office."

 "You were trying to assemble material with which to blackmailAnna and Carlos Ramirez," Eleanor said. "By threatening themwith the loss of their only remaining child, you could coerce theminto silence, and reduce the intensity of the spotlight on the cozyarrangement between you and Sam Wyatt - which never drew anyattention in public until a freak accident exposed it to public view."

 "This is just, just - a terrible thing you are saying."

 "What is terrible is to live in a time when saying things isconsidered worse than doing them," Eleanor said.

 "You seem to be forgetting here that people in this state, and inthis country are damn tired of these unemployed welfare motherillegal aliens coming into this country and stirring things up!"

 "Why don't you call them spies and wetbacks, the way you dowhen you're speaking on the telephone to Sam Wyatt?"

 "That is a totally  unprovable allegation!"  Shad yelped.  Helooked shocked, horrified, to hear these words spoken in public, as if he and Sam Wyatt had invented the words for their personal use."Listen. I am not a person with any kind of ethnic bias or bigotry.I limit my concern to those people, of whatever ethnic group, whotake advantage of the system. Who are like parasites on theprosperous economic system that has been built up over the yearsby the hard work of productive citizens the likes of Sam Wyatt."

 "Sam Wyatt," Eleanor said. "Sam Wyatt, who grazes his cattleon Government-owned land. Land that was occupied by NativeAmericans until the Government paid soldiers to come out hereand kill them. Sam Wyatt, who irrigates his ranch with water froma Government-built dam. And you think that Anna Ramirez is awelfare queen? I've got news for you, cowboy. Everyone in thestate of Colorado is a welfare queen. We all live and feed off thelargesse of taxpayers in other parts of the country. It's just that someof us, like Sam Wyatt, have been here longer than others, and havehad time to pile up more government welfare checks in their bankaccounts and funnel more of that money into big campaigncontributions. So don't stand here in Denver, a metropolis built ona creek, the capital of Colorado, a state that would dry up and turn back into a prairie without the continuing help of the government,and bray about the bad moral qualities of welfare queens. Becausethese people who come north across the border may not have gelin their hair and may not have ostrich-hide cowboy boots, butunlike you, they have something a lot more important. They have values."

 The hospital doors slid open and Bianca Ramirez rolled out in awheelchair, pushed along by a smiling nurse, escorted by her entire medical team.

 A disturbance moved through protesters and suddenly Carlosand Anna Ramirez emerged from the crowd, smiles on their faces,tears streaming down their cheeks. They moved across thehorseshoe drive, unhindered by journalists or INS agents or Shad Harper or anyone else, and engulfed their daughter in their arms.And they were engulfed, in turn, by hundreds of their supporters.

 The whole thing was a lot warmer and calmer than anyone hadexpected. The only real disturbance was off to the side, where anINS van, a paddywagon with steel grilles over all the windows, hadbegun rocking from side to side. The driver jumped out, leavingthe van empty, and a broad open space suddenly appeared in thecrowd. Then a dozen men, their arms and backs burly fromstooping in Arkansas Valley truck farms, rolled it all the way overon to its roof and left it there like a turtle upended on a highway.

 31

 Eleanor was in the middle of cleaning out her office. Thiswasn't much of a job since she had barely moved into it and theempty boxes were still stacked conveniently in the corner. Bentover with both hands in a file drawer, she didn't notice CalebRoosevelt Marshall coming into her office until he got herattention by tossing a keychain on to her vacant desktop.

 "I'm taking you on a ride, lady," he said.

 She straightened up, startled to see him standing right in front ofher, dressed in a blue work shirt and chinos, leaning on a cane. "Ihave my best conversations when I'm driving flat out into themountains," he said, nodding at the keychain. Eleanor picked it up;it was a set of keys to a rented Cadillac. "But now I'm getting tooold to drive. Can't even see the goddamn hood ornament."

 "Allow me, then," Eleanor said.

 It was a nice Cadillac, a convertible, parked in the Senator'sprivate space in back of the Alamo. The Senator had apparentlydismissed his security detail, so Eleanor offered her arm and helpedhim out of the building and into the passenger seat. Then she gotin and cranked it up. The car had a nice sound system with a tape player, and although the Senator complained that he wanted to getgoing, Eleanor decided to rummage around in the hollow centerarmrest for one of his tapes.

 "What are you going to play? Rap music?" he said as she poppeda tape out of its case and shoved it into the dashboard.

 "Resurrection Symphony," Eleanor said, as the opening barscame from speakers hidden all over the car.

 "Good," Marshall said. "I been listening to it a lot. Figure I'dbetter become expert in the subject. Now let's get going, damn it."

 The Senator had a particular, highly detailed route he wanted tofollow through Denver and up into the mountains. He eschewedthe newfangled foolishness of freeways in favor of a devious route that took them down alleys, through parks, along curvy residential streets. For a while, as she followed his barked and seeminglyimprovised instructions, she was afraid that he had gone completelyoff his rocker and was getting them hopelessly lost. But they never got stuck at a slow stoplight, never had to make an impossible leftturn, and in time the city began to spread out and undulate as the landscape awoke from the thousand-mile slumber of the prairie.

 "Thanks for saving my ass," Senator Marshall said, when he wasn't giving directions.

 She smiled. "I was wondering whether you'd see it that way."

 "Course I do. I'm not senile," he said. "Sooner or later a senatorhas to rely on someone like you."

 "How do you figure?"

 "A senator has a big staff. He has to, in order to carry out thebasic functions of his office, and to get reelected. Normal peopledon't take those kinds of jobs. If I could take people off the street, I would. That's how I got you. But normally I gotta hire the kinds of people who angle and maneuver for such work, which meansweasels like Shad Harper. And almost the moment they get into thejob, they start spinning their own goddamn agenda. Some of themknow what they're doing and some are just complete assholes. Andwhen the assholes get themselves into trouble, like Shad did, thena senator has to have some way to get rid of them without bringingdown his whole career. And you served that purpose admirably in the affair of Shad Harper."

 "Did you get my letter?"

 "What letter? The resignation?"

 "Yes."

 "Yeah, I got that damn letter. I don't accept your resignation. Iwant you working for me. Hell, woman, you're like a pit bulltrained to attack white men. I want you on my side."

 Eleanor laughed. "I don't attack anyone."

 "Well you sure do leave a lot of corpses in your wake."

 The smile fell away from Eleanor's face and she drove in silence for a while.

 She and Harmon hadn't spent a lot of time driving into themountains. She was not really a mountain person. They looked dangerous to her. For years she'd felt trapped, in a way, betweenthe mountain wall on one side and the endless plains on the other. The devil and the deep blue sea. Now that they were getting closerto the first real range of mountains, a ridge of red stone that sweptsmoothly up out of the grassland and broke off jaggedly hundreds of feet above their heads, she was beginning to remember that themountains had their attractions, that they were a lot moreinteresting when you got up close instead of viewing them throughmiles of brown Denver smog.

 "Sorry," Caleb said, "that was a real stupid thing for me to say." Clearly, the Senator was not a man who apologized very often, andhe found it difficult.

 "It's okay," she said. "I know what you meant."

 "If I intended to run for another term, I'd have to sack you," hesaid, after they had drawn closer to the base of the first ridge andturned parallel to it along a rolling and winding road. They werenow completely out in the country.

 "You don't say."

 "When one of my staffers steps up in front of the single largestcollection of journalists ever assembled in Denver and announcesthat everyone in the state of Colorado is a welfare queen, it makesthings a little awkward for me."

 This time Eleanor didn't laugh. She smiled, but it was a sheepish kind of grin. This was a Monday morning. She had spent yesterdaymorning reading scathing editorials and rebuttals in the editorialsections of the newspapers. To say that she had hit a nerve didn't do justice to the level of indignation.

 "How many death threats have you gotten?" Senator Marshallasked.

 "I stopped listening to my messages after the third one," Eleanorsaid.

 "They actually put them on tape? They must have been reallypissed."

 "Yeah."

 "I can have the Secret Service check them out."

 "It just sounds to me like a bunch of ranchers blowing offsteam," she said.

 "It ain't just Colorado. You're the most hated woman in theWest," Senator Marshall said. "A lightning rod."

 "I know it."

 "People wouldn't be so vehement unless your words werelargely true," Senator Marshall said.

 She gave him a searching look. "What's your opinion?"

 The Senator winced, as if he wished she hadn't asked thisquestion. He looked out the window for a while, appalled.

 "Well, of course you're right," he finally said. "The economy ofthis whole region is built on subsidies and federal programs. Butpeople refuse to admit that because they want to believe in the cowboy myth. That their ancestors came out and made the desertbloom solely through their own hard work and pluck.

 "Now, they were plucky, and they did work hard. But thereare a lot of plucky, hard-working people in other places who havegone down the toilet anyway just because they were pursuing a fool's errand, economically speaking. The people who came heresort of lucked into a situation of cowboy socialism. Withoutfederal programs they'd go broke - no matter how hard theyworked."

 "Federal programs that are kept alive by senators."

 "Yeah. Colorado's small state population-wise. Our delegationin the House can't do diddly. But in the Senate, every state is equal.When one senator, like me, gets some seniority, works his way up into a few key committee chairmanships, then some states are moreequal than others. My job - myraison d'être -is to keep certain federal programs alive that prevent this region from turning backinto the buffalo farm God intended it to be.

 "It's a feedback loop. This is high-tech lingo that I picked up inthe sixties when some goddamn ecologist was raving to me. I keepthe programs alive. The economy thrives. People move toColorado and vote for me. The cycle begins again.

 "As long as those programs continue to exist, no one notices.They are part of the landscape. They are forces of nature, like the wind and the rain. The people who live off them, people like SamWyatt, have come to think of them as natural and divinelyordained. To them, living off of federal largesse is no different inprinciple than, say, fishing salmon from the Gulf of Alaska ortapping maple syrup from trees in Maine. So, when someone likeyou steps in front of the TV cameras and points out the obvious -that these people are no different in principle from people who liveoffof welfare checks - it just drives them crazy. It strikes at the heartof who they are."

 Eleanor listened to this numbly. She couldn't believe thatSenator Marshall was saying these things. "So, why aren't yougoing to accept my resignation?" she said.

 "My whole career I've been doing things because I had to. Nowthat I'm in my last term, I get to do all the things I always wished Icould do but was afraid to."

 "Well, the press should have a field day with that."

 "The press can fuck themselves. Now I can say that. Take a righthere."

 Eleanor turned right on to a road that cut due west, straight intothe mountains. Finally she understood what Caleb had been doing:steering them toward a cut through the mountain wall, the onlyplace within miles you could get through it. The sight of it made her want to go fast and she punched the gas and surged toward it.It was a narrow gap with almost vertical sides that revealed a cross section of the ridge, normally hidden under grass and sage, its pinkand peach and salmon and maroon strata fluorescing in the late afternoon sun.

 "You must be getting a lot of pressure to sack me."

 "To hell with that. They'll forget all about it in a week, believe me. What I'll do is give you an internal transfer."

 "Oh. So I'm getting a new job?"

 "Yeah. You're getting a new job. I'm getting you out ofColorado before someone lynches your ass. Or mine."

 "Oh, my god."

 "That's right. You are going to Washington, D.C., lady. Back toyour hometown. And if you thought Denver was a nest of vipers,you just wait."

 They both shut up for a moment driving through the gap. Calebgroped out with his left hand and turned the ResurrectionSymphony up to the point where it was loud even to his leatheryears, and they cut through and suddenly found themselves in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. Once it passed through the gap, theroad split off in three or four directions, and none of the signs meantanything to Eleanor. "Which way do I go now?" she said.

 "I got you here," Caleb said. "Now you're on your own."

  

  

 PART 3

 Vox Populi

 If, though unjust, I acquire the reputation of justice, a heavenly life ispromised to me. Since then, as philosophers prove, appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of happiness, to appearance I must devote myself. I will describe around me a picture and shadow of virtue to be the vestibuleand exterior of my house; behind I will trail the subtle and crafty fox . . . But I hear someone exclaiming that the concealment of wickedness isoften difficult; to which I answer, nothing great is easy. . . . With a viewto concealment we will establish secret brotherhoods and political clubs.And there are professors of rhetoric who teach the art of persuading courtsand assemblies; and so, partly by persuasion and partly by force, I shallmake unlawful gains and not be punished.

 Plato,Republic

 32

 On a gentle summer evening back during the Eisenhoweradministration, Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane had once watched hisuncle Pervis beat a man up with a sharpened motorcycle chain. Ithappened outside of a very inexpensive and dangerous bar in northcentral California that catered to agricultural laborers. Okies.

 Nimrod's grandfather, James McLane, had obtained a piece ofland in Oklahoma during one of the land runs in the late 1800s. Hecommenced to work that soil literally within the hour, scoopingout shallow graves along the Cimarron River in which to place thebodies of the previous occupants, who had arrived shortly before hehad, with faster horses but not quite so many guns.

 A few decades later, that stream dried up and all the topsoil blew away to Arkansas. James had long since died, and so had his eldestson Marvis, who had gotten into an altercation with a piece ofnewfangled farm machinery and spectacularly lost. James'ssurviving sons, Elvis and Purvis, abandoned the land and went toCalifornia, following a rumor of jobs. Elvis married another Okie- actually, an Arkie - named Sheila White, and they started to have kids. Purvis joined the Navy and came back from World War II fullof lies, liquor, and shrapnel. Half of him was covered with tattoos and the other half with burn scars. For the next few years of life,until he discovered some exciting new career openings in thebenzedrine trade, he shuttled back and forth between short-term,low-paying jobs on the waterfront in Oakland and in the vegetable fields of the Valley. Purvis later obtained a sinecure of sorts, as afounding member of the Hell's Angels.

 Elvis and Sheila, by contrast, were stay-at-home types. Elvisstuck to the one thing he had talent for, which was stoop labor, andover the years, more because of his reliability than because of brainsor skill, he managed to work his way up into a position as foremanfor Karl Fort Enterprises, Inc.

 Karl Fort was also an Okie who had gone west in the 1930s, buthe was different: he was from Tulsa, and he had gone west withmoney in his pocket and connections in Washington. His money bought him land. The money went a long way because at the timehe bought the land, it was worthless. His connections inWashington knew that the federal government was soon to estab­lish huge irrigation projects in the area. As soon as water reachedKarl Fort's land, it became worth a hundred times what he had paid for it. Fort established agricultural Gulags where his fellow Okieslabored under the watchdog gaze of Fort guards, occasionallygetting enough of a paycheck to keep them and their families alive.

 Elvis McLane was not really cut out for management. He didn'tunderstand that when you made the cut and moved up to the nextrank, you had to stop drinking next to the people you were givingorders to, hiring, and firing. His brother Purvis sat him down andtalked to him about it. Purvis had been in the military andunderstood the concept of fraternization and why it was a bad idea.But he never really got through to Elvis, who (it was rumored) had,while still in the womb, lost a wrestling match with his ownumbilical cord.

 It was only a matter of time before Elvis went into a bar and raninto someone he had fired, yelled at, or otherwise humiliated, andtrouble broke out. Actually, it happened several times, but the mostmemorable case involved a sullen, dangerous broccoli pickernamed Odessa Jones. He was named after the city in Texas wherehe had been abandoned by his mother.

 Nimrod McLane, who among other distinctions had a Ph.D. inphilosophy from Notre Dame, despised liberal hand-wringingtypes who were always whining about America being a violent society. These people had read too many poorly written accountsof bar fights that turned grisly.

 The standard newspaper account of a grisly bar fight contained adeeply buried assumption: that people participated in bar fights because they were stupid. Some minor slight, such as looking atanother man's girl or jumping the line for the pool table, woulddegenerate into meaningless, pointless violence. Liberals wouldread about it in the paper the next morning, wring their hands, andadvocate better education and gun control.

 Nimrod McLane had seen a lot of these altercations as a child.After his voice changed he participated in a few. He had a prettyclean understanding of how bar fights started and why they turnedugly. Americans participated in bar fights for exactly the samereason they had joined, with such gusto, in the Civil War: becausethey had values and considered violence and mayhem a small priceto pay.

 Odessa Jones was a case in point. He was a proud, hard-workingman who had been fired by Elvis McLane because of whatamounted to a personality conflict. So when he walked up to Elvisin that bar and went upside his head with a glass beer pitcher, hewasn't doing it because he was a stupid low-class drunk. He wasdoing it because his honor had been violated and because honorwas more important to him than temporal, earthly considerations, such as keeping his front teeth or staying out of jail. Odessa Jonesprobably had ancestors who, like him, were rootless white trash, but who had picked up rifles and gone North to fight the Yankeesanyway, not because they believed in slavery but because they wereincensed that the Northerners refused to stay at home and mindtheir own business. They were willing to have their legs shot off inPennsylvania because principle, to them, was more important than flesh. This was what made America such an ethereal society.

 Sprawling out on the floor of the bar, Elvis's eyes fell on theunderside of a nearby table, and he realized that he could probably rip one of its legs off and use it as a cudgel. Which is what he did;but the much larger Odessa Jones beat the shit out of him anyway,or at least continued to until both of them were thrown out of thebar, and he ran afoul of Purvis McLane and his motorcycle chain.Years after this event, when Nimrod was pursuing hisphilosophy degree, he spent a lot of time contemplating thefollowing question: if Odessa Jones was fighting for a principle, andElvis McLane was fighting out of a defensive reflex, then what wasPurvis McLane up to?

 Purvis McLane was engaged in long-range strategic thinking. Heacted calmly and dispassionately. Uncle Purvis, Navy veteran and cofounder of the Hell's Angels, simply did what was needed to lookout for the overall welfare of his family unit. Nimrod McLane hadcome to believe that all persons could be divided into Odessas, Elvises, and Purvises, and he considered himself a Purvis all theway.

 Representative Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane values. He went tochurch, he studied the Bible, he read Aquinas. All his life he haddespised materialistic people who could only think about money. He had made himself famous and got on the cover ofTime by becoming The Conservative Who Hated Yuppies. Which was whyhe wanted to become president: so he could clean up America.

 Tip McLane watched his chief rival for the nomination, NormanFowler, Jr., sign his own political death warrant, with a flourish, atprecisely twelve o'clock noon on the day after Memorial Day. Norman Fowler, like Dan Quayle and a few others, belonged to afourth category of humanity: he was a Marvis.

 McLane was late for a luncheon in Bel Air and had stopped by his hotel suite in downtown L.A. for a quick change of clothingwhen he happened to notice the digital clock turning over 12:00.Reflexively he turned on his television, which was already set toone of the local network affiliates, and was treated to the never-to-be forgotten sight of Norman Fowler, Jr., at Disneyland, shaking hands with Goofy.

 "My god," said his media consultant Ezekiel ("Zeke") Zorn.

 "Is this something fromSaturday Night Live?" asked his campaignmanager Marcus Drasher.

 "He's a dead man," was the only comment Tip McLane wouldmake.

 "Jesus, the man is worth billions," Drasher said. "He can affordto hire the best. And what do they do? They sent him toDisneyland. And they let Goofy shake his hand!"

 "This has got to be Cy Ogle's work. Ogle has a Goofy fetish. It's a known fact," Zorn said suspiciously.

 "Are you crazy?" Tip McLane said.

 Zeke Zorn was a high-intensity sort of guy. He was an Elvis -he reacted but he didn't think much. For all this, he has a basically sunny, open, California personality, and it was unusual to hear thiskind of paranoia coming from him. This was the third time he hadbrought up the subject of Cy Ogle, apropos of nothing, in the lastweek.

 "I would bet you money," Zorn said glaring suspiciously at thescreen, "that the man in that Goofy suit is none other than Cy Oglehimself. It's just what he would do."

 "You're off your rocker," McLane said.

 "Well, let me just say that if this campaign ever went toDisneyland - which it never would - I would have half a dozensnipers following you around with orders to blow Goofy's head off if he came within half a mile. Because this is just the kind of thingthat Ogle would cook up."

 Drasher watched this startling performance and then burst outlaughing. Drasher was a Purvis. Like McLane, he had grown uppoor and become a highly educated conservative. He was black andhad grown up in Mississippi; but he and McLane had much morein common with each other than they did with Zeke Zorn, a man who dressed so finely that they did not even know the names ofmany of the articles of clothing that Zorn wore every single day.

 "You're serious," Drasher said in wonderment. "You think thatCy Ogle sent Goofy in to do a political hit on Fowler."

 "It's just too perfect," Zorn said. "When these perfect things happen, you have to look for a guiding hand somewhere. It's likeDukakis and the tank helmet in '88. I suppose you thinkthat justhappened."Zorn said these words almost contemptuously."Someonenoticed that Dukakis looked like Snoopy.Someone put the Snoopyhelmet in his hands. Mark my words - somewhere out there is acartoon character with your name on it, Nimrod McLane."

 "Yosemite Sam," Drasher suggested.

 "Sounds paranoid to me," McLane said.

 "Hey," Zorn said, throwing up his hands, "once NormanFowler has shaken hands with Goofy, no force in the universe can stop us. But" - he shook his finger accusingly at the television, "once the presidential campaign gets underway, this is the kind ofthing that we have to look out for."

 "Let's not get cocky," Drasher said. "There is still one force inthe universe that can keep us from the nomination."

 "What's that?" McLane said.

 Drasher suddenly raised his voice into a polished baritone with awhite southern accent, rendering a flawless imitation of theReverend Doctor William Joseph Sweigel. "The power ofJEEEEE - zuss!" he said.

 "Good point," Zorn said. "Let's get our butts over to that damn picnic."

 33

 "I was spreading some of this fancy gourmet mustard on myfrankfurter just now," the Reverend Doctor Billy Joe Sweigel said,holding a jar of the savory condiment up so that all the people atthe luncheon could see it, "when I noticed that there were somesmall flecks of material mixed in with the mustard. Now, in the partof the country where I come from, mustard is bright yellow andperfectly smooth and homogeneous in its composition. But since Ihave come to California..."Having telegraphed the joke, hepaused briefly to allow laughter to build, and then subside. Then,as only a politician could, he went ahead and delivered it anyway. "Let's just say that I have spread some things on my frankfurtershere in Southern California that were labeled as mustard, but in mypart of the country probably would have been confiscated andanalyzed in a police laboratory." The crowd laughed dutifully, forthe second time, but Rev. Sweigel would not let go of the theme. "I engaged one of my staff in a lighthearted conversation about thismustard, or MOO-tard as it says on the jar, and he informed methat these flecks of material that I had alluded to were, in fact, actualseeds of the mustard plant. Mustard seeds."

 The crowd went dead silent, like Sunday school children whoknow that they are about to be told that they stand a high chanceof burning in Hell. All of the people here at the Southern CaliforniaRightist Coalition who had been brought up Christian (which wasmost of them) knew what was coming. The non-Christians werealready so alienated by the heavily pork-oriented meal that theyweren't talking much anyway.

 Sweigel continued. "Now our lord JEEE-zuss once spoke of mustard seeds. He said that all one needed in order to performmiracles was to have faith the size of a mustard seed.

 "This is a piece of Scripture that I have known since I was just alittle boy. But I never really understood what it meant until today.You see, in all of my life, this is the first time that I have everactually seen a mustard seed. My mustard has always been the brightyellow substance to which I earlier alluded. So I did not know,frankly, whether a mustard seed was a very small thing, like a poppyseed, or a very large thing, like a coconut. So when I read these words of our lord JEEE-zuss, I did not know whether he was sayingthat we needed just a tiny little bit of faith, or a whole lot of faith."But today the LORD has seen fit to educate me in thesematters and I have had my first taste of expensive SouthernCalifornia MOO-tard, and I have seen actual mustard seeds. And I can report to you that they are neither extremely small, as seeds go,nor are they extremely large."

 Ten feet away from the lectern, Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane wassitting with his hands folded in his lap, trying to resist thetemptation to order another hot dog. He knew exactly where this was going and he had to keep his wits about him.

 The Reverend Doctor Sweigel was an Odessa. He did things outof pure, dumb principle, and for that reason he was about to goupside Tip McLane's head with a little bit of JEEE-zuss, as he hadbeen doing for about the last couple of weeks - ever since WilliamA. Cozzano had begun to make television appearances.

 The media had given Sweigel a free ride all the way throughSuper Tuesday. They liked having a goofball in the campaign; it put variety in their tedious, ink-stained lives. When he had donewell on Super Tuesday, they had turned on him in Illinois.

 McLane had turned on him too. As part of their Illinoiscampaigns, all of the candidates had made ritual visits to the bedsideof William A. Cozzano, who was still hospitalized at that point.McLane, like the others, had been shocked to see how badCozzano looked.

 Billy Joe Sweigel had become a wealthy and powerful TV evangelist by claiming to heal people through the power of faith.

 He would heal anyone of any disease in return for a ten-dollar contribution. So the question had naturally arisen: as long as he'dbeen in the room, why hadn't he just healed William A. Cozzano? It seemed like a fair enough question to Tip McLane and he hadrepeatedly raised the issue in public, and during debates. It seemedsafe as anything, like asking Sweigel to heal the craters on the moon.

 Then Cozzano had put on a miraculous recovery.

 Sweigel continued, "So what our lord JEEE-zuss was saying wasthat in order to move mountains, one need not have a great deal offaith - one need not be some kind of a paragon - but a teeny littlebit of faith won't do it either. We have to have a reasonable amountof faith. A sort of in-between amount of faith.

 "Now, some people have more faith than others. I don't thinkthat it's unfair to say that. And I can remember a night a couple ofmonths ago, in an auditorium in Illinois, when one of myopponents didn't seem to have very much faith at all."

 A stir ran through the crowd. In the corner of his eye, McLane could see long lenses swinging in his direction, zeroing in on hisface for reaction shots.

 "And a certain candidate who shall go unnamed expressed skepticism that I could, through the divine power of JEEE-zuss, heal the terrible affliction that had descended upon a certain prominent Illinoisan. And I will admit that on the night of thatdebate, my faith was much smaller than a mustard seed. I went backto my hotel room and asked, as JEEE-zuss did on the cross, 'God, why hast thou forsaken me.' But it came to me that it was not Godwho had forsaken me, but the other way around. Gradually myfaith returned and waxed until it was the size, not just of a mustard seed, but of a sunflower seed, or maybe even a Brazil nut. And just a few short weeks later I was astonished to turn on my television setand see this prominent Illinoisan suddenly looking the very pictureof health. Praise the Lord!"

 About three people in the audience, widely spaced, shouted,"Praise the Lord!" Everyone else just looked embarrassed.

 "Truly doth the Lord work in mysterious ways," Sweigel said.

 That's for sure,McLane said to himself, thinking of Goofy.

 Norman Fowler, Jr., the Goofmeister himself, the reincarnationof Marvis, had not been invited to this little get-together, in thefootball-field-sized backyard of the Markham estate in Bel Air. TheSouthern California Rightist Coalition was not the kind of outfit that would let a moderate like Fowler anywhere near their cam­paign events, or their coffers. Tip McLane was a shoo-in, and the group had a large enough evangelical Christian wing that Sweigelhad gotten an invite too.

 After the debacle in Illinois, followed by severe drubbings in thenortheastern states where television evangelists had a bit of an image problem, Sweigel had stayed in the race anyway, as a brokerfor the evangelical vote. He was a political vampire. His broad­casting network in the Bible Belt served as an inexhaustible sourceof funds, and in every city he had a hard core of supporters who could be relied on to sustain his campaign.

 The incredible recovery of William A. Cozzano had caused asudden surge in Sweigel's popularity. Because of the number ofpeople who believed that Sweigel had cured Cozzano, his numberswere now climbing up into double digits, and he was starting tobecome a major annoyance to McLane.

 But nothing more than an annoyance. Sweigel was frighteningenough that he served as his own worst enemy, his own personalGoofy. Whenever he rose in the polls, he started to get moretelevision coverage, people started having bad dreams about him,and he sank again.

 The hot dogs said everything about this luncheon. Hollywoodpeople would not have served hot dogs. They would have servedcaviar, fine wines, California cuisine and all that, to show how richand tasteful they were. But this luncheon was full of people whohad come to California and staked claims to real estate prior to theinvention of the movie camera, which was to say that they tendedto be very old and endowed with a level of wealth that far transcended the petty plane of movie stars. Much of this wealth wasnot in liquid assets; all together, the territory owned by the peopleat this luncheon probably composed an area larger than manynorth-eastern states. But however you looked at it, they wereloaded, and this was one invitation you did not turn down.

 The man who had invited McLane to speak was none other than Karl Fort himself. Fort was now in his nineties. He had long sincecashed in his agricultural holdings. Those original investments hadmade him a rich man, but they only produced steady dividends as long as Fort was right there on the ground, personally dispatchingthugs with ax handles. This kind of micromanagement had grownwearisome, and so Fort had moved into less earthy forms ofinvestment.

 This had left him with a great deal of free time, only some of which could be taken up on the golf course. Karl Fort had begundabbling in politics during the sixties, supporting the likes of Caleb Roosevelt Marshall, Goldwater, and Wallace. He had been a majorplayer in the California conservative movement of the seventiesand eighties. He had given lots of money to the conservative thinktanks that had provided Tip McLane with his first few jobs.

 And when the Markhams had begun making plans to host thisluncheon, Karl Fort had called Tip McLane personally and actuallyreminisced about the good old days back in the Depression, andTip McLane had actually called him "sir."

 Sweigel eventually concluded his sermon with a prayer. A few people clenched their hands and bowed their heads fervently.Everyone else just looked restless or embarrassed. And then it wasTip McLane's turn to speak.

 They applauded generously. The nervous silence that hadreigned during Sweigel's performance was finally broken. McLanegot up from his seat at the high table in the front and waved andnodded to the crowd: a hundred and fifty of the richest people in the West, seated at a few long tables with their paper plates andplastic wineglasses. To one side, the press corps was corralledbehind a red plastic ribbon, like wild animals.

 This was going to be a piece of cake. These people loved him;he could do no wrong here. "Thank you very much. And thanksto Mr. and Mrs. Markham for making the backyard of theirmagnificent home available for this event. In a few months I hopeto return the invitation - though I'm afraid that you'll have to fly all the way to Washington, D.C."

 A few men in the crowd barked out laughter and there was asmattering of applause.

 "I have a dirty little secret for you: I'm sick to death of cam­paigning. I think everyone in America has heard my message bynow. Most people who have heard it seem to agree with it. Myopponents don't, but, expecting Reverend Sweigel here, I'vealways found my opponents to be just a little bit on the goofy side."

 About half a dozen people - those who had already seen theFowler/Goofy image on TV - laughed loudly at this. Everyone elsetittered uncertainly. The line wasn't intended for them. It wasintended to be used on the evening newscasts, at the appropriatemoment.

 "So I'm not going to harangue you with my usual stump speech.Instead I'd like to speak, very briefly, about some of the ideas that I intend to put into action once I get settled into the White House next January."

 At this point McLane paused for a moment and pretended tofiddle with his note cards. He was doing this because some kind ofa distraction had arisen at one of the tables, and he didn't want to try and shout his way through it. He assumed it was somethingminor, like a glass of lemonade that had spilled into someone's lap.But it didn't die away. It kept building.

 Several people had stood up now. They were all facing inward, looking at an elderly man who was leaning way back in his chair,almost lying down, pressing one fist into his breastbone. His mouthwas open, he was gasping for breath.

 "Are there any doctors present here? This man is in distress,"McLane said.

 Something caught his eye: Zeke Zorn, standing up, waving himaway from the lectern with both hands, like one of those guys at the airport directing the jetliners. McLane moved quickly awayfrom the lectern. Only later would he understand that this had beengood advice. There were very few things a man could say into a microphone at such a time that would make him look as though he had handled the situation presidentially. There were many ways toscrew up.

 No one had responded to the call for a doctor. All of the lensesand microphones in the makeshift press gallery had swung over andbrought themselves to bear on the man in distress.

 People were doing the normal sorts of folksy first-aid things. A couple of men cleared off a table in one instant by yanking at thetablecloth, sweeping all the plates and glasses off on to the ground,and then four people gathered around the stricken man and liftedhim up on to the table's clean surface. They loosened his tie.Someone offered him a glass of water. None of it was doinganything for his life expectancy, which clearly was measurable inseconds or minutes.

 Mr. Markham approached the lectern, pulled down the micro­phone, and spoke into it. "I'd like to ask everyone to please remainin their seats for now. Give Karl some air."

 The stricken man was Karl Fort.

 McLane couldn't keep his eyes off the man. Fort had ruled overthe McLanes' portion of California like a demon king. McLane hadknown the man's name and face since he had been a toddler. Hehad been fearsome and omnipresent to those Okies who workedfor him, who suffered beatings from his goons and who wondered,each week, if Fort would see fit to sign their paycheck. UnclePurvis had, for a period of three or four decades, personally vowed to kill Karl Fort with his bare hands at least once a day. And now,after all that, Karl Fort was dying right in front of Nimrod McLane'seyes. If only Purvis could have been here to see it.

 There was sudden motion off to McLane's left. Someone hadvaulted the high table and now was striding confidently across thelawn toward Karl Fort. Tip glanced over and realized that it was theReverend Doctor William Joseph Sweigel.

 In the same instant the entire press corps realized it too.

 Karl Fort's attack had been an unfortunate coincidence. Butwhen Rev. Sweigel stepped in to lay on his hands, it becamesomething else: a campaign event. The plastic ribbon snapped. Itwas like a dam breaking. The journalists charged toward Karl Fort.There were three long rows of tables. Karl Fort was in themiddle row. The first row formed a low barrier standing in the way of the journalists. The vanguard - nimble print reporters - made anend run. The second wave - burdened by minicams - simply rolleddirectly over the top of it, their knees nearly buckling from theweight as they jumped to the grass on the far side, and headed theprint reporters off in the narrow pass between the first and middlerows.

 Three minicam operators, with their instinct for seizing the highground, jumped to the top of the middle row. One of these threeplanted his foot in the midst of a paper plate heaped with baked beans and slipped; his boot shot off to the side and slammed into the chest of the fifth richest man in California so hard that it senthim toppling backward on to the ground. The cameraman slitheredto his knees and then his feet, trashing a few more plates of food ashe tried to accelerate in pursuit of the two other minicam operatorswho were now well ahead of him. His boots got traction on thetablecloth but the tablecloth slipped over the table, and so for thefirst few moments he actually ran in place, like a cartoon character,his feet churning madly and his body going nowhere as thetablecloth, with its burden of plates and cups, accordioned down toone end of the table, depositing a slippery obstacle course of beans,ketchup, MOO-tard, and ice cubes as it went.

 Finally he got traction and pursued the others, who had run into an obstacle of their own. Between them and Karl Fort was an icesculpture, an intricately carved bowl of ice filled with pinklemonade. It had gone unnoticed by the cameraman who hadmomentarily taken the lead. His only concern was getting Karl Fortand Billy Joe Sweigel into his viewfinder as quickly as possible, andso he was running with one eye squinted shut and the other eyepressed into the neoprene cup of his eyepiece. Seeing the world inout-of-focus, black-and-white tunnel vision, he missed the ice sculpture entirely and slammed into it at a full sprint, catching itwith both knees. The impact knocked his legs backward. Theweight of the minicam on his shoulder jerked his body forward. Hespun in midair, appeared to become completely horizontal, andthen fell straight down on top of the ice sculpture. Half of thelemonade went up in the air and then all of it burst down andsideways as the cameraman's body crushed the sculpture into con­venient bite-sized fragments. Nearby luncheon-goers caught thetsunami of ice and lemonade full in the face.

 The second cameraman was only a pace or two behind the first,he tried to stop, his feet got ahead of his body, and he landed on his ass in the midst of the ice storm, sliding to a halt and then careeningoff the edge of the table and landing full-length in the laps of threeconsecutive luncheon-goers.

 The third cameraman, also suffering from video tunnel vision,planted one foot in the small of the first cameraman's back. That legbuckled. He caught his full weight on the other leg, hopped on it three times like a wide receiver trying not to go out of bounds, planted that foot on some ice, and skidded on one rigid leg for adistance of several feet, now looking perfectly like a figure skater.He finally got the other foot down on the edge of a serving platter,catapulting a dozen fresh grilled burgers into the chest of aprominent comedian-turned-real-estate magnate.

 At which point he realized, finally, that he was about to run overKarl Fort's body. He planted both feet and once again created an accordion effect on a tablecloth. This carried him forward until hereached the edge of Fort's table, where his rubber-soled bootscontacted solid, clean, dry formica, and stopped dead. Thisslammed him forward on to his knees, which was perfect: hestopped in a kneeling position with the lens of his camera aboutfour feet away from Karl Fort, looking straight down on his body.

 Unfortunately, from a strictly media-conscious point of view, Fort's face wasn't visible; the view was blocked by the beefy arms of a young man, possibly a security person, who had the heels of both hands in the middle of Fort's naked breastbone and wasrhythmically shoving off it, compressing his entire ribcage, makinghis bony thorax bulge outward around the sides like a stepped-onballoon. Even if this man had not been there, Fort's face still wouldhave been obscured by another man who was gripping Fort's chinin one hand and his temples in the other, holding his mouth open in a yawn, bending forward to fasten his mouth over Fort's.

 The Reverend had just arrived by Fort's side; despite all of theabove-mentioned hindrances, most of the journalistic corps hadactually beaten Sweigel to the scene of the action.

 "Please step aside, please make way," Sweigel was saying, in therising, chantlike intonation of a preacher quoting Scripture. Sincemost of the people in his way were journalists who had come speci­fically to see what Sweigel was going to do, they made way willingly.

 Sweigel stood belly-up to the table, only inches away from Fort,and clasped his hands together for a moment, praying with his eyestightly clenched shut. Then he held out both hands, palmsdownward, and laid them gently on Fort's bare skin: one on the shoulder, one down on the belly, where they didn't interfere withthe CPR. Billy Joe Sweigel knew how to hedge his bets.

 Twenty feet away, Tip McLane stood numb with horror.

 He had been fighting the primary campaign for almost a year. It had been very much like an Okie bar fight: desperate men wielding brass knuckles, ice picks, and broken bottles in a dark back lot. InIowa, New Hampshire, Super Tuesday, New York, he had takenon all comers. He had not made many friends, but, with Drasherproviding the strategy and Zorn providing the media kidneypunches, he had thrashed all of his adversaries into bloody, inertsides of meat. Norman Fowler had hung on all the way toCalifornia and then taken his own political life. He had come here,to safe, comfortable ground, to celebrate victory.

 And now he was being dry-gulched. Sweigel was going to nailhim right between the eyes.

 If the CPR worked, if the ambulances got here in time, if thedoctors arrived to deliver their miraculous clot-dissolving miracledrugs, then Sweigel would be two for two on national TV: firstCozzano, and now Karl Fort.

 Between his memories of Fort in the old days, and the prospect that the old son of a bitch might, by surviving, now torpedo his political career, Tip McLane had never wanted anyone to die quiteso badly.

 "It's fake," Zorn said, standing very close to him and mutteringinto his ear. "Fort's not really having a heart attack. Cy Ogle set thiswhole thing up."

 "You're a lunatic," McLane said. But Zorn's words had madehim nervous anyway.

 "Lord, hear our prayer," Sweigel said. "This man has beenstricken. We pray that, in the name of JEEE-zuss, he may behealed, and walk among us once again."

 Then he prayed silently, while the two men continued with CPR and mouth-to-mouth, until the ambulance showed up andthe EMTs took over the job.

 McLane was a little surprised. He had expected that the EMTswould bundle Fort up and whisk him straight back to theambulance as fast as possible. But instead they set up someequipment and worked on him for a few minutes, right there onthe table, doing CPR with a sort of large plungerlike object andsqueezing air into his lungs with a resuscitator.

 The attention of the guests, of the media, and especially of BillyJoe Sweigel could hardly have been more focused on Karl Fort. Standing at the periphery of the crowd, Tip McLane realized that, for once, absolutely no one was paying attention to him.

 From a media standpoint he was just like Gyges, ancestor ofCroesus, who was able to become invisible. This was a story mentioned in Plato'sRepublic. Gyges, being invisible, could getaway with anything. If he used his power to do evil, but no one sawhim, and he was thought to be a just man, then did he ever sufferfor his crimes? Tip McLane decided to ponder this issue as he wentfor a bit of a stroll around the Markham estate.

 They were in the backyard, hemmed in between a sheer cliffwall on one side and the almost equally massive Markham mansionon the other. Perfectly manicured gardens wrapped around themansion on both sides - neat paths winding between trellises ofroses. Mrs. Markham adored her roses. Tip McLane walked intothe fragrant and colorful jungle, quietly at first, then with longstrides as he became confident that his departure had goneunnoticed.

 Within a few seconds he had worked his way around the side of the house to the front. He stood for a moment, framed in an arched trellis groaning with peach-colored roses, and took in a broad viewof the horseshoe drive, which was paved with little interlockinggeometric tiles.

 A few minutes ago this drive had been clogged with limousinesand media vans. When the ambulance had been called, all of the drivers had pulled out of the horseshoe, down the long driveway,through the twelve-foot-high gate, and parked on the road. Nowthe whole front of the house was empty except for the ambulance,square in the middle of the horseshoe, doors open, engine running.

 Representative Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane sauntered out of therose garden and into the horseshoe, trying to look like a man whowas just out for a stroll, trying to clear his head and get away fromthe chaos out back. He looked carefully in all directions: into the garden, into the windows of the mansion, into the front seat of theambulance itself. He saw no one. Everyone was out back.

 He had one or two incredible habits that he had picked up whenhe was just a boy, working in the broccoli fields, and that had remained unbroken through years of parochial education, Ph.D.study, conservative theorizing at various think tanks, White Housedinners, and service in the House of Representatives. One habitwas that he always carried a pocketknife. It was amazing how oftena pocketknife came in handy.

 He squatted down against the left front tire of the ambulance,unfolded the small blade of his pocketknife, which he always keptsharp as a scalpel, and paused for a moment to ponder his nextmove.

 As Socrates had pointed out, the highest reach of injustice was,like Gyges, to be deemed just when you were not. Karl Fort was Gyges. He went to White House dinners, gave money to charities,spent half his life at various testimonial dinners where the mostimportant people in the country stood in line to gush about what awonderful man he was. No one ever said a word about the axhandles.

 But did that justify slashing the tires of his ambulance? McLanecontinued to thumb his way mentally through Plato'sRepublic, looking for guidance.

 Plato advocated dividing the republic into three categories:rulers, warriors, and tradesmen. Tradesmen were allowed tobecome rich. Rulers and warriors were to live simply and to receivethe best possible education, in the hopes of producing philosopherkings.

 Tip McLane was a philosopher king. Karl Fort was a tradesman.And according to Plato, the worst form of injustice occurred whenpeople tried to force their way into a class where they did notbelong - e.g., when warriors tried to seize political power (theSoviet coup), or politicians meddled in military campaigns(Vietnam War), or in the affairs of private enterprise (burdensomegovernment regulation).

 Or when tradesmen tried to use their wealth to gain political power, which could lead to the degenerate form of governmentknown as oligarchy.

 Representative Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane inserted the blade of his pocketknife deep into one of the treads. The rubber was tough,but so was Tip McLane, and eventually it gave way and he felt theblade penetrate into the tire. Then all he had to do was twist, andair began to hiss out, feeling cold and wet as it flowed over his hand.

 The ambulance settled, almost as if it were going to roll over ontop of him. He was startled by a popping noise that came from the flaccid tire as its bead popped loose from the rim. That was extragood; it would make the tire much more difficult to reinflate.

 He withdrew the knife, folded it back into his pocket, and then strolled back through the roses to the backyard.

 The EMTs transferred Karl Fort on to a gurney and wheeled himacross the yard, through the Markhams' house, and out to theambulance, chased the whole way by journalists who left a trail ofbaked-bean footprints across the polished-granite floors and theoriental rugs. The ambulance traveled about ten feet down thedrive, veering uncontrollably to the left, and then stopped.

 Someone ran inside and called another ambulance. Two of theEMTs jumped out and began to change the tire. Shooting throughthe rear windows of the van, the media were able to get beautifulshots of another EMT, on his knees next to Fort, holding up theelectric paddles, preparing to administer the sacrament ofdefibrillation.

 Karl Fort lingered in the hospital for five days. According totracking polls commissioned by the McLane campaign, the Rev. Sweigel's support climbed all the way up to the 20 percent markwhen Fort's condition was upgraded from critical to serious.But when Fort's kidneys went, on the Saturday before the big vote, the voters began to show disillusionment, and when he finally diedon Sunday evening, just in time for the eleven p.m. news, the Reverend's standing collapsed like a popped balloon.

 Tip McLane and his crew had already gotten the news, throughprivate channels. He and Zorn and Drasher went down to theirhotel bar for a drink and watched the coverage of Fort's death, andthen of the day's campaign events. They were joined by a coupleof writers for major East Coast newspapers, men who had been assigned to the McLane campaign for the last few months andwhom they had gotten to know well. They bought each otherdrinks and talked off the record late into the night. Though no onecame out and said it, they all knew that the primary campaign wasover.

 34

 Eleanor Richmond rented a town house in the Rosemontneighborhood of Alexandria. It had actually been part of D.C. atone point and had been ceded back to the state of Virginia in 1846,so she could weakly maintain that she was back living in herhometown once more.

 This historical argument was completely lost on all of herrelatives in the District, who had been delighted when sheannounced she was coming home, and then hurt and angry whenshe chose to live in Virginia. But Eleanor had already seen her songet shot in the back, and as far as she was concerned, D.C. didn'thave anything to offer her kids except for a few museums and a whole lot of ways to get shot.

 She was in a nice, mixed-race neighborhood near Alexandria'seighteenth-century waterfront. If she went uphill she got into anaristocratic neighborhood of big houses, bordering on mansions. Ifshe went downhill, toward the Potomac, she got to the proverbialother side of the tracks in just a few minutes. Straddling theboundary, on the tracks themselves, was the Braddock Metrostation, from which she could ride into D.C. in about ten minutes. Braddock's modest parking lot was ringed by nice new yuppiecondos, shops, and office buildings. Beyond that was a floodplain between the tracks and the river, filled with dingy town houses andprojects, bounded by the outskirts of National Airport on the northand the swank cobblestones of Old Town on the south. Comparedto the bad parts of D.C., it didn't deserve the description of ghetto; it was just a lower-middle-class neighborhood. It was somethingEleanor could point to when her relatives in D.C. made cattyremarks to the effect that she had sold out and fled to white suburbia.

 She still hadn't gotten used to being respectable again. When shelooked at real estate, she kept expecting people to glare at hersuspiciously and say, "Have you ever been a bag lady?" But all shehad to do was say that she was senate staff and all the doors wereopen to her: nice new apartments, charge accounts at PentagonPlaza, auto loans. It astounded her when she was able to go into aToyota dealership and drive out an hour later with a brand-newCamry.

 Harmon, Jr., and Clarice stayed behind in Denver long enoughto finish out the school year and then followed her out toAlexandria. In the fall they would go to T.C. Williams HighSchool, just a mile or two up the street. In the meantime, over thesummer, there was a lot for them to do. The nearby Metro stationmeant that they could get around town easily (which they liked)and safely (which Eleanor liked). And, after a bit of looking around,Eleanor found a nice extended-care facility (what used to be calleda nursing home) where she could put Mother.

 Mother had no idea, really, that she was back home, but as shelooked out the windows of the car on her way in from the airport and smelled the air of the late Virginia spring, Eleanor imaginedthat, at some level, she knew where she was, and that she was gladto be back where she belonged, not out in the middle of Coloradosharing a room with some rancher's widow. Whether or notMother knew what was going on, bringing her back here was good for Eleanor's heart, and made her feel that she was doing right byher mom.

 When Eleanor showed up for her first day of work, a weekbefore Memorial Day, she had no idea what she was doing; SenatorMarshall still had not defined her responsibilities or even provided her with a job title. She was both excited and intensely curious. Shewalked to the Braddock Metro station at seven. Her neighbor­hood's sidewalks were filled with commuters headed for the Metrostation. As Eleanor entered this stream of suit-and-tie-wearing,newspaper-reading professionals, carrying her very proper attachecase, wearing her Reeboks, and holding on to herWashington Post,she felt like a spy testing out a new undercover identity.

 From the raised platform of the Metro station she looked acrossthe public housing toward National Airport, the 727s plunging in at forty-second intervals, and across the Potomac to D.C. Thepleasant, scented spring air was still cool, and as she looked throughthe haze, she could see the monumental structures that were nowpart of her world. The Metro glided into the station, eerily cleanand high-tech compared to The Ride. She boarded, found a placeto stand where she could look out the window, and watched the progression through Crystal City, Pentagon City, Pentagon, andthen out into daylight across the Potomac. She saw the NationalCathedral drawing the light of the sun, peeked in at ThomasJefferson, and got to L'Enfant Plaza, where she transferred to theOrange Line for two stops over to the Capitol. Since she was a fewminutes early, she chose to be a tourist, and strolled through theCapitol on her way over to the Russell Senate Office Building.

 She was greeted at the gate of the Russell Building by ahandsome, very young-looking black man from Senate Security. "If you'll follow me, Mrs. Richmond, we'll get your credentials in order."

 Eleanor was still new enough at this that she was surprised whenpeople recognized her. "Thank you," she said. "I didn't expect someone to meet me at the door. I thought I'd be standing in linesall day."

 "When Senator Marshall speaks, we move," the man said."We're taught that all senators are equal, but we love SenatorMarshall. He's not one of your blow-dry wonders, if you get mydrift."

 They took an elevator down two levels and entered an officewhere Eleanor was photographed, finger-printed, asked to sign herofficial signature, and then take the oath as an employee of theUnited States. A petite, perhaps sixty-year-old woman read theoath.

 She proceeded into the next office and was given her holo­graphic badge, complete with innumerable codes implanted in thestrips on the back of the badge. She wondered what she was goingto do with a Top-Secret Alpha clearance.

 "That's it," her guide said. "Now you have one very cranky senator waiting to put you to work."

 The Russell was the oldest and most prestigious of the three senateoffice buildings. It had the aura of fine old wood, penetrated by decades of good tobacco smoke. It was the building of choice and Marshall had the office of choice, with a commanding view of theCapitol out one window and down the Mall and ConstitutionAvenue down the other. Entering the office, Eleanor was struck bythe profusion of Native American art, mission decor, and numerouswatercolors painted by Marshall before his arthritis had made itimpossible for him to hold a brush. His secretary of thirty years, Patty McCormick, turned and said, "Hello darlin', welcome to the last frontier."

 From around the corner, the familiar husky voice shouted,"Goddamn it Patty, don't scare her away. Come on in, Eleanor."

 Eleanor edged into the Senator's office and found him workinghis way through a breakfast sent up from the cafeteria. "Have aseat," he said, waving at one of the heavy leather chairs.

 "Good morning, Senator, how are you feeling?"

 "Shitty, as usual, but that's nothing new. I'll be god-damned ifI'll take pain medication. I haven't got an awful lot of brain cells leftand I want them to work."

 They made a little small talk about her move to Alexandria.Caleb seemed surprisingly unhurried, for a senator. Eleanor keptwondering when he was going to tell her why she'd been hired.Finally she came out and asked.

 "Should we talk about what you want me to do?'

 "Sure, why not. What do you want to do?"

 "I don't know, I'm still slightly overwhelmed to be here."

 "How'd you like to be my spokesperson?"

 Eleanor couldn't help laughing. At first she chuckled politely because she assumed it was a joke. Then she laughed out loud in shock, realizing he was serious. "Senator, you are one crazy fool."

 "You ever see one of those stupid old Westerns where the badguys come riding into town and they just start shooting ateverything? They shoot out all the windows, they shoot holes inthe water barrels, they pick off people on the balconies. I alwaysthought that looked like fun. Well, I'm out of here soon and I havea lot to say and I want to have somebody to say it who will makean impression, not one of these generic press mavens who keepmassaging messages and doing sound bites. You and I, young lady,are going to shoot a few holes in this goddamn town before I end this ride."

 As he talked, Marshall was unable to hide his extreme pain. Hebecame so angry about the pain and so intense in his conversationthat he accidentally knocked over his coffee, spilling the contentsall over the top of the desk. "God-damned son of a bitch," hescreamed.

 Patty poked her head around the corner and said, "Did it again,Your Grace?"

 "Bitch," he said, throwing the coffee drenchedWashingtonTimesat her. Then he grimaced, doubled over in his chair, andrested his forehead against the desktop for a moment, hisshoulders heaving.

 Eleanor, horrified, looked at Patty for a cue. Patty didn't seem tonotice. She winked at Eleanor and said, "We have a very formaloffice."

 While Patty cleaned up the mess, Eleanor helped Caleb to a smallconference room next door and let him collapse in a chair. Thenshe sat down across the table from him.

 Marshall, slumped down low in his chair, said, "In all seriousness,Eleanor, I thought long and hard about this appointment. I havevery little time left. My problem is not arthritis. It's galloping bonecancer. I have, maximum, three months of useful activity left."

 "Oh, god, Senator, I'm so sorry-'

 "Spare me. And call me Caleb."

 "Is there anything-"

 "Yes. Shut up and listen for a second."

 "Okay," Eleanor said.

 "I'm stuck in a party that was once for the individual, and nowit's dedicated to controlling the individual. The Bible thumpers andthe single-issue people and all of those other control freaks have noidea of what the United States is all about. And they are going towin. But I will make my contribution. And here it is."

 Resting on the table was a book, bound in leather, Western-style. Imprinted on the cover in gold leaf was:

 POLITICAL WILL AND TESTAMENT
SEN. CALEB ROOSEVELT MARSHALL

 Marshall put his hand on the book and shoved it across the tableat Eleanor. She caught it before it tumbled into her lap. "I have apress secretary, of course," Marshall said. "And he has a wholegoddamn staff of flacks. I'll continue to use them for the run-of-the-mill announcements and contacts with local bubble heads. Iwant you to work on this and wait for the phone to ring."

 "Senator, I thought you were going to bury me in a corner ofyour staff somewhere."

 "Well, I'm not."

 "But your constituents are going to hate you."

 "Eleanor, I don't give a good fuck. Get to work."

 Eleanor carried the book into an adjoining office, a small butnice one with a view of the Capitol. Patty was already in there, straightening a few things up. Eleanor's stuff had been moved in and unpacked. Her personal things all looked humble and shabby in the magnificent building.

 Patty was sniffling. "I love that man, Eleanor," she said. "He'sthe most decent person in this town, and he's dying."

 "How many people know?"

 "Most of the Hill."

 Eleanor settled into her leather chair behind the immensewooden desk and looked at the walls, decorated with Hopi and Navajo art. On one corner of the desk was a recent photo of boththeir kids, and on the other corner, from Ray del Valle, a dozenroses with the note, "Knock 'em dead, tiger."

 Before she could open the Senator's book, the phone rang. It wasPatty.

 "Dr. Hunter P. Lawrence on the line for you, Eleanor."

 "Okay, put him through."

 Eleanor heartily disliked the professor. He was one of the newbreed of talking heads who had turned civilized shows likeMeet thePressinto the intellectual equivalent of the World WrestlingFederation. The format of Lawrence's show was simple: a victimwould be invited to sit in the center chair and then twocommentators from the alleged left wing and two from the allegedright wing would abuse them. If they weren't abusive enough, theProfessor would step in and stir them up. It got great ratings.

 "Hello?" she said.

 "Ms. Richmond, this is Dr. Lawrence ofWashington Hot Seat.Welcome to town."

 It was strange to hear that famous voice coming out of hertelephone. She felt as if she knew the man, even though she didn't."Thank you Dr. Lawrence. How may I be of service to you?"

 "We'd like you to appear on our show next week," he saidcheerily.

 "Oh, that's very flattering, but I'm sure that I wouldn't be ofmuch interest."

 "Oh, on the contrary. You gained great visibility when you took the neo-Nazi apart. Your advocacy for the Hispanics also was impressive. Your relationship with that troglodyte Marshall is asubject of conversation. And let's be blunt, there aren't that manyhighly visible black women. We're so tired of the usual suspects."

 Eleanor had come to work in a state of new-job euphoria. If Dr.Lawrence had reached her a few minutes earlier, she might nothave taken offense. But hearing about the bone cancer had changedher mood. She hadn't even had time to process the bad news yet;she felt edgy and deranged.

 "What's the matter, Dr. Lawrence? Did Aunt Jemima cancel atthe last minute?"

 A long silence. "Uh-"

 "If all you want is a black female, why don't you just go east of Rock Creek Park for once in your life, and just pick one off thestreet? Some of those girls clean up real nice."

 "We don't really want just anyone."

 "I could recommend a few nuns from my old school whomight be able to give you some pointers on treating otherpeople with common courtesy. Once you've learned all aboutthat, why don't you call my token black female ass back up andtalk to me again." Eleanor hung up so hard that the telephonebounced.

 Marshall, in the conference room next door, howled andwheezed with agonized laughter.

 "You have a problem, Caleb?" Eleanor shouted.

 "You're some P.R. whiz," he shouted. "He even called youpersonally - he usually has one of his munchkins do thescheduling."

 "You got me in a bad mood."

 "It was perfect. This story will spread all over town and you'll beeven more in demand than you are now. You couldn't have donebetter."

 "Whom should I be nice to?"

 Marshall hooted, "Not one of those cold-blooded, cock-suckingsons a bitches. They crank out these talking-heads programs likebad sausage. They have to fill air time every night. Their Rolodexesare full of white men and everyone nags them about it. If they putyou on TV, then they can point to you and prove how radicallydiverse they are."

 "Oh. I thought it was because of my cogent analysis."

 "That too," Senator Marshall said.

 The phone rang again a few minutes later. This time it was AnitaRoss of the Style section of thePost. "Ms. Richmond, we've heard how you stiffed Dr. Lawrence. We'd like to do a feature on you forthe Style section."

 Marshall was still sitting within earshot, apparently havingnothing better to do with his time, so Eleanor hit the mute button and shouted, "It's thePost."

 "Fuck 'em."

 "Ms. Ross," Eleanor said, "why not call me in a couple of weeks,when I've had the chance to get settled in. Why, the ink on mybadge is hardly dry."

 "You'd better know that by taking on the Professor, you couldbecome an instant culture hero. But only if the story getspublished."

 "A culture hero in five minutes? Not bad."

 "Some have come and gone here in fifteen minutes," Ms. Rosssaid pointedly.

 "Well, its been nice talking to you," Eleanor said. "Call back intwenty minutes and see if I'm still around."

 "Nicely done," Marshall said. "What do you think of mythoughts?"

 Eleanor realized that Marshall was waiting for her to look into the book. "I really can't say. I haven't had a chance to open it upyet."

 Marshall tottered into her office, audibly grinding his teeth frompain. "Go ahead, have a look, I'll just stretch out here on thiscouch."

 Eleanor picked up the book and opened it. The first page wasblank, and the second, and the third. She riffled through the pages.They were all blank.

 "Senator, what is this?"

 "It is mytabula rasa. A work in progress. You're going to ghost­write it for me. Just like the old song says, 'Ghost writers in thesky.'"

 "What do you want me to write?"

 "Don't trouble me with details, woman. I don't have much timeleft."

 "But I can't just go out and write it."

 "Listen to me. When you made the 'Colorado is a welfare queenstate' speech you set me to thinking. I am as much a part of theproblems as Jesse is or Ted Kennedy or for that matter that poor little Shad Harper son of a bitch you nailed in Denver. You know,I love this country. I never had much trouble with money becausemy dad left me a lot of property and I had the privilege of being amaverick. The one thing I noticed in forty-eight years of publicservice, forty-four up here, is that the rarest thing in life is a personwho speaks the truth. The most dangerous thing in life is a person who constantly refers to 'values.' If I was going to write down my testament, that is it. None of us has the right to tell anyone else howto live. None of us has the right to hold back anybody else for anyreason - race, religion, income, or what have you. The rest of lifeis an open field, a crap shoot. The role of government is to make itan equal crap shoot for everybody. Not real profound, but real effective."

 "So what do you want me to do?"

 "If you feel able to adhere to the general message I just laidout-"

 "I do."

 "Feel your way through this P.R. maze, go out and represent meon TV, and keep writing your best thoughts down in this goddamn book. Represent freedom and honesty - whoops, there I go talking about values again."

 "You really think that someone like me is the person to representa card-carrying member of the power structure, like you."

 "You're goddamned right. I never get co-opted by nobody.Nobody is ever going to co-opt you. And in this auto-erotic, skill to stay in the Beltway town, that's a huge advantage."

 "When I go public, how do I identify myself?"

 "Why, as Eleanor Richmond."

 "If you want to. Lady, you're my last gift to the country."

 By the end of the day, Eleanor's calendar had been filled for thesummer. One major interview show a week, and two printjournalists a week. Her first interview would be with theAlexandriaGazetteon Friday. Even Dr. Lawrence called up, full of contritionabout his lack of sensitivity, and tried to take Eleanor out on a date to the Maison Blanche. Eleanor was a hot topic for the rest of May and June.

 It didn't take her long to figure out why: she was close to SenatorMarshall, and everyone in town had heard rumors that SenatorMarshall was dying. They would pump her for information aboutthe Senator, in more or less subtle ways. She would ward off theirquestions and then talk about whatever she wanted - which is whatWashington people always did with the press anyway.

 35

 "Floyd Wayne Vishniak," said the digitized voice from thecomputer, and an array of fresh windows popped into life on AaronGreen's high-resolution video screen. One of the windows was aphotograph, a head shot of a white man with lank blond hair, not short enough to be short and not long enough to be long, stickingout from beneath a blue baseball cap that were turned down at thecorners, giving him a sad and bedraggled appearance, and his skin was flushed and glossy under the blaze of an electronic flash. This was not a posed shot. It had been taken from a low angle as Floyd Wayne Vishniak rode down an escalator at a shopping mall some­where. He was staring down into the camera with a blank and baffled expression that had not yet developed into surprise. He waswearing a tightly stretched, inside-out, navy blue T-shirt with acouple of holes in it and he had the ropy muscles of a man who gotthem by doing physical labor and not by working out at any healthclub.

 This image was not the only window on the computer screen.There was a small one next to it, this one showing a brief video clipthat kept looping back and replaying. It showed Floyd WayneVishniak sitting in the cheap seats at a sports arena somewhere, leaping to his feet along with all of the other people in his vicinity to shout abuse at some miscreant down below. In this clip, Vishniakwas wearing a tremendously oversized, bright yellow foam rubberhand over his real hand. The long finger of the hand was extended. Just in case this message was not clear, it had been printed with thewords FUCK THE REF. And in case the ref did not happen to belooking in his direction, Vishniak could clearly be seen mouthingthe same words - chanting them over and over - in unison with all of the other sports fans in his section. In Vishniak's other hand hewas holding a plastic beer cup the size of the Louvre. While he waswaving his giant yellow digit in the air, beer sloshed over the rimand splashed down on the shoulders of the fan in front of him, who reacted, but either did not care or was afraid to make a big deal outof it. Floyd Wayne Vishniak was not a person that most peoplewould consider picking a fight with. He was not especially big, buthe was tightly wound in the extreme.

 Other people were waving giant foam rubber hockey sticks and other hockey-related paraphernalia. Though the action below - thesource of the controversy - was not shown on this video clip, it wasevidently a hockey game, and at least one of the teams wasapparently named the Quad Cities Whiplash.

 Another window, below the video loop, showed a map of thefifty states with a blinking red X superimposed on the MississippiRiver, between western Illinois and eastern Iowa. Under theblinking X was the label DAVENPORT, IOWA (QUADCITIES).

 There were two other windows on the screen, both of themcarrying textual information. One of them was a brief c.v. of FloydWayne Vishniak. He had grown up in the Quad Cities, straddlingthe Illinois-Iowa border, dropped out of high school to get a job in a tractor factory, and been laid off and rehired six times in theintervening fifteen years. During the past year he had barelymanaged to earn his weight in dollars.

 The remaining window was a tall narrow one that ran down theside of the computer screen. It was a list containing exactly onehundred items. Each item consisted of a phrase describing a subsetof the American population, followed by a person's name.

 As this presentation - this computerized dossier - proceededfrom one name to the next, the corresponding item on the list washighlighted, a bright purple box drawn over it so that the user couldsee which category he was dealing with at the moment. Thehundred categories and names on the list were as follows:

  

 IRRELEVANT MOUTH BREATHER

 400-POUND TAB DRINKER

 STONE-FACED URBAN HOMEBOY

 BURGER-FLIPPING HISTORY MAJOR

 SQUIRRELLY WINNEBAGO JOCKEY

 BIBLE-SLINGING PORCH MONKEY

 ECONOMIC ROADKILL

 PENT-UP CORPORATE LICKSPITTLE

 HIGH-METABOLISM WORLD DOMINATOR

 MIDAMERICAN KNICKKNACK QUEEN

 SNUFF-HAWKING BASEMENT DWELLER

 POSTADOLESCENT ROAD WARRIOR

 DEPRESSION-HAUNTED CAN STACKER

 PRETENTIOUS URBAN-LIFESTYLE SLAVE

 FORMERLY RESPECTABLE BANKRUPTCY SURVIVOR

 FROSTY-HAIRED COUPON SNIPPER

 CYNICAL MEDIA MANIPULATOR

 RETICENT GUN NUT

 UFOS ATE MY BRAIN

 MALL-HOPPING CORPORATE CONCUBINE

 HIGH-FIBER DUCK SQUEEZER

 POST-CONFEDERATE GRAVY EATER

 MANIC THIRD-WORLD ENTREPRENEUR

 OVEREXTENDED YOUNG PROFESSIONAL

 APARTMENT-DWELLING MALL STAFF

 TRADE SCHOOL METAL HEAD

 ORANGE COUNTY BOOK BURNER

 FIRST-GENERATION BELTWAY BLACK

 80'S JUNK-BOND PAR VENUE

 DEBT-HOUNDED WAGE SLAVE

 ACTIVIST TUBE FEEDER

 TOILET-SCRUBBING EX-STEEL WORKER

 NEO-OKIE

 SHIT-KICKING WRESTLEMANIAC

 SUNBELT CONDO COMMANDO

 RUST-BELT LUMPENPAOL

  

 and others . . .

 Aaron hit the space bar on the Calyx workstation's keyboard. Allof the windows disappeared except for the long skinny one withthe list of categories. The next item on the list was highlighted andspoken aloud by the digitized computer voice: RETICENT GUNNUT -JIM HANSON, N. PLATTE, NEBRASKA.

 Another set of windows appeared, just like the last set butcarrying different images and information. The photo was in blackand white this time, reproduced from a newspaper, showing JimHanson, a lean-faced man of about fifty, wearing an adult BoyScout uniform and standing out in the woods somewhere. Asbefore, there was a short loop of videotape. It showed him standing by a picnic table in a backyard somewhere, tending a barbecue andacting as eminence grise to a crowd of small children, presumably his grandkids. The map window was the same except that now the red X had moved to the middle of one of those states in the middleof the country; apparently this was Nebraska.

 Jim Hanson didn't look very interesting. Aaron hit the space baragain, moving on to the next item on the list: HIGH-METABOLISM WORLD DOMINATOR     CHASE
MERRIAM, BRIARCLIFF MANOR, N.Y. This time, thephoto was a glossy color studio shot. The video clip showed ChaseMerriam teeing off at a very nice golf course somewhere along withthree other high-metabolism world dominators.

 Aaron started whacking the space bar, paging through the list,flashing up the hundred photos one at a time. When it worked its way down to the bottom, it cycled back up to the top again, so hecould keep it up forever if he wanted to. The red X on the maphopped back and forth across the country, tracing out a perfectly balanced demographic profile of the United States.

 Floyd Wayne Vishniak was sitting in his trailer, watchingWheel,when he heard the sound of tires on gravel. He went to the frontdoor, glancing over to make sure that his sawed-off shotgun wassitting in its secret place; it was there all right, craftily concealed inthe narrow gap behind three stacked cases of beer, right next to thedoor. Having thus established his parameters, he looked out thewindow to see who had come all the way out here to pay him avisit. If it was another bill collector, he was not going to get a veryfriendly reception.

 From initial appearances, it could very well be a bill collector. Itwas a little skinny dark-haired man with glasses and he got out ofthe car wearing a button-up shirt and a tie. First thing he did wasopen the back door of his gray Ford LTD Crown Victoria andunhook his suit jacket from the little hook that was above the back door.

 Floyd Wayne Vishniak had been driving around in cars since hewas tiny, of course, and he had seen those little hook thingies abovethe doors and someone had told him a long time ago that they were to hang coats off of. But this very moment was the first time in hisentire life that he had actually seen one used.

 A seed of resentment was germinated in his mind. Garment hooksin the back seats of cars. Always there, never used. A mysteriousvestige of other times and places, like spittoons. Nobody used them;that's how it was. Nobody wore suits to begin with, unless theywere going to a wedding or a funeral. When they did wear suits, ifthey absolutely had to take off the jacket for some reason, theywould toss it out flat on the backseat. To hang it up that way - whatwas this little geek trying to say, exactly? That the lint or whatever on the backseat of his fancy luxury car (which was spotless) couldnot be allowed to touch the fabric of his fancy suit jacket?

 It was a nice car all right, brand new and probably costing inexcess of fifteen thousand bucks. Its beautiful gray finish had beenstreaked, below the beltline, with dark brown mud thrown up bythe wheels as it had come up the gravel road from the highway.Floyd had been kicked out of his apartment in Davenport so thatthe landlord could rent it out to a big family of African-Americanscome from Chicago to steal away a few more of Davenport's non­existent jobs. Fortunately he knew someone who had this farm justoutside of town, and was willing to let him live here in this trailer.

 The man put his suit jacket on. The satin lining flashed in thehorizontal sunlight of the early evening. He shrugged his shoulders

 a couple of times so that the jacket would fall into place and lookpretty on him. The jacket had padding in the shoulders that madethe man look bigger than he really was. He reached into thebackseat and pulled out a briefcase.

 As soon as he saw that briefcase, Floyd opened the door of histrailer and stood there leaning against the doorframe and smokinghis cigarette and looking down the full height of the jury-rigged,mud-tracked staircase at this little man.

 "Hello, Mr. Vishniak," the man said, looking up at him.

 "That's funny, I ain't introduced myself yet. How'd you knowmy name? I don't know you. I don't know anyone like you. All my friends drive pickup trucks with a lot of rust on 'em. Who the hellare you?"

 The visitor seemed taken aback. "My name's Aaron Green," he said. He looked like he really didn't want to be here. That actuallymade Floyd more sympathetic to the man because Floyd didn'twant him to be there either. So that was a start anyway.

 "What do you want?" Floyd said.

 "I want to give you ten thousand dollars."

 "You got it with you?"

 "No, but I have a down payment of one thousand."

 Floyd stood there in the doorway for a while and smoked hiscigarette and pondered this unusual situation. A man, very likely a Jew from Chicago, had just driven up to his trailer and offered him ten thousand dollars.

 "This a Publishers Clearinghouse thing? You a friend of EdMcMahon or something?"

 "No, it's not a sweepstakes. I represent ODR, which is a poll-taking organization based in Virginia. We've identified you as being a typical representative of a particular part of the UnitedStates population."

 Floyd snorted derisively. He could just imagine.

 "We would like to keep track of your reactions to the currentpresidential campaign. What you think of the different candidatesand issues."

 "So you want me to go to Virginia?"

 "No. Not at all. We want you to change your lifestyle as little aspossible. That's crucial to the system."

 "So you're going to call me up every couple days and ask mequestions."

 "It's even easier than that," Green said. "Can I step inside and show you?"

 Floyd snorted again. "My little abode ain't much to look at."

 "That's okay. I'll only take ten or fifteen minutes of your time."

 "Come on in then."

 Aaron Green and Floyd sat down in front of the TV. Floydturned the volume down a little bit and offered his visitor a beer, which he declined. "I have to drive to Nebraska tonight," he said,"and if I have a beer now I'll be pulling over to urinate all nightlong."

 "Nebraska? What, you taking one guy from each state?"

 "Something like that," Aaron Green said. Obviously he did not believe that Floyd Wayne Vishniak, a dumb uneducated factoryworker, would ever be smart enough to understand the details.

 "You ever read Dick Tracy comics?" Aaron Green asked.

 "They don't have it in the paper here," Floyd said. "You everread Prince Valiant?"

 Again, Aaron Green stumbled. He was having a hard timebuilding up his momentum. "Well, you might have heard of thewristwatch television set."

 "Yeah, I heard of that."

 "Well, here's your chance to have a look at one." Aaron Greenpulled something out of his briefcase.

 It looked like a super high-tech watch or something. Like somekind of secret military thing that a commando in a movie wouldwear.

 The band of the watch was not just a strip of leather or anything like that. It was made of hard black plastic ventilated with lots of holes. It was huge, about three inches wide. It consisted of severalplates of this hard black plastic stuffhinged together so that it would curve around the wrist.

 Instead of having just one clockface on the top surface, it had awhole little screen type of thing, just like on a digital watch except that it wasn't showing anything right now, just gray and blank. Andin addition to that there were a few other raised black containersmolded to the outer surface of the watchband, but they didn't have any screens or buttons or anything like that, they were just blank,and must have contained batteries or something.

 "Shit," Floyd said, "what the hell is it?"

 "Most of the time it's a digital watch. Part of the time, it's atelevision set, complete with a little speaker for sound."

 "Can I get Whiplash games on it?"

 "I'm afraid not. The TV will only show one type of program and one type only, and that is political programming having to do withthe election."

 "Shit, I knew there was a catch."

 "That's why we're offering you the money. Because this is notall fun and games. Some responsibility falls on your shoulders as partof this deal."

 Floyd Wayne Vishniak thought that if Aaron Green were not trying to pay him ten thousand dollars, he might throw him downthe stairs and jump on him out in the yard and mess him up a littlebit. He did not appreciate the fact that this little man, who wasabout the same age as him, and maybe a bit younger, was lecturinghim about responsibility. It was the kind of thing his dad used tosay to him.

 But for now he was going to be cool. He put his feet up on thetable next to the briefcase, sat back, raised his eyebrows, peered atAaron Green through the smoke of his cigarette. "Well, for tenthousand bucks I guess I could be responsible."

 "Think of it as a part-time job. It'll take maybe ten minutes ofyour time every day. It doesn't prevent you from having other jobs.And it pays very, very well."

 "What do I got to do in this job?"

 "Watch TV."

 Floyd laughed. "Watch TV? On this little wristwatch thing?"

 "Exactly. Now, most of the time, it'll just act like a digitalwatch." Green pressed a button on the face of the wristwatch andthe screen began to show black numerals on a gray background,giving the current time and date. "This is just a convenience foryou," he explained. "But from time to time, something like thiswill happen."

 The watch emitted a piercing beep. The numerals on the tinyscreen disappeared and were replaced by a color-bar test pattern.

 "Whoa, it's in color!" Floyd said.

 "Yeah. Of course, you can't see any color when it's pretendingto be a wristwatch. But in TV mode, it's just like a small colortelevision set."

 After a couple of seconds, the test pattern was replaced by avideotape of John F. Kennedy giving his "Ask not what yourcountry can do for you" speech.

 "This is just a little canned demonstration. Once the programgets underway, it'll show you coverage of campaign events.Debates, new conferences, and so on."

 "Why don't I just watch 'em on my own TV set?"

 "Because we're going to pipe our own coverage directly to you,through this watch. We might want you to see some events that thenetworks wouldn't cover, so we have to generate the programmingourselves. Besides, we think we'll get better compliance this way."

 "Compliance?"

 "Suppose you're out of the house. Like maybe going to aWhiplash game. You wouldn't be able to watch normal TV. Butwith this PIPER watch, you can watch it wherever you are."

 "PIPER?"

 "That's the name of this program."

 "How much of this stuff do I have to watch?"

 "Many days there won't be anything at all. We might show youfifteen minutes or half an hour of programming a few times a week.Sometimes it'll be a little more intense. The only time when we'll really give you a lot of stuff to watch will be during the conventionsin July and August."

 "What else do I gotta do? You call me up and ask me questionsabout this stuff, or what?"

 "That's it. Just watch the TV programs."

 "That's it?"

 "Yes."

 "Then how do you know what my opinion is? I thought thewhole idea was to get my opinion."

 "It is. But we can do that electronically."

 "How?"

 "Through the PIPER watch." Green reached into his briefcaseand pulled out a videotape. "I see you have a VCR in here. You should watch this tape. It'll explain how everything works."

 "I don't get it."

 "The PIPER watch does more than just show you campaignevents. It also monitors your reactions. You ever go to a mall or anamusement park and see one of those machines where you drop ina quarter and it gives you your biorhythms, or your emotional state,or something like that?"

 "There's one down at Duke's Tavern that gives you your sexrating."

 "Oh." Green seemed embarrassed. "How does that work?"

 "You grab this big rod sticking out of the top and it measuresyour sex quotient and flashes it up on the screen. I always get a realhigh score."

 "Okay, it's probably a galvanic skin response device."

 "Say what?"

 "This PIPER watch has the same kind of thing built into it asyour sex quotient machine. So it could provide a twenty-four houra day readout of your sex quotient, if that was what we wanted."

 "Why would you want my sex quotient?"

 "We probably wouldn't to tell you the truth - no offense!"Green laughed nervously. "But by using the same type of detectors,we can get a sense of how you are reacting to the programmingshown on the TV screen. That information is piped directly back to us over the radio."

 "So, it gives you my emotions. Tells you what my body'sthinking."

 Green smiled. "That's a good way to describe it. What yourbody is thinking. I like that."

 "What about my opinions, though?"

 Green shook his head and frowned. "I'm not sure quite whatyou mean."

 "Well, this tells you how my emotions respond, right?"

 "Yes."

 "But that's not the same as an opinion, is it?"

 Green seemed to be baffled, lost. "It's not? I'm not sure whatyou're getting at."

 "Well, maybe I watch some guy giving a speech. Maybe he's realgood at giving speeches and so my emotions are good. Then, I'mlying awake in bed in the middle of the night, thinking about whathe said, and suddenly it doesn't seem so logical any more, and I cansee all kind of holes in his argument and I change my mind anddecide he's just another pencil-neck, media-slick son of a bitch outto take my money and send the jobs to Borneo. So my final opinionof the guy is that he's a bastard. But all you know is that I had a good emotional response to his speech."

 Floyd knew that he had Green now. Clearly Green, the big-city, high-paid intellectual, had never thought about this. He had neveranticipated that someone might make this objection. He did notknow what to say. "We don't have the technology to read that sortof thing," he finally said, speaking very slowly and carefully. "Wedon't have any way to read your mind in the middle of the nightand find out that you think Senator So-an-so is going to send yourjob to Borneo."

 "Humph," Floyd said, shaking his head.

 "But PIPER is just one way we have of getting information," Green said, picking up momentum now. Floyd had the distinctimpression that he was just trying to talk his way out of the tightcorner that Floyd had backed him into. "Needless to say, we arereceptive to any kind of input that you might want to give us. So if you have these thoughts in the middle of the night-"

 "I do," Floyd affirmed, "all the time. They come to me like athief in the night."

 "-in that case, you would be more than welcome to providethose to us."

 "My phone service got cut off," Floyd said. "But I could writeyou letters.

 "That would be absolutely fine," Green said. "Our address is printed right there on the videotape. You go ahead and send us asmany letters as you like. We'd like to hear your opinions on anysubject."

 "So I gotta wear this thing twenty-four hours a day?"

 Green shrugged. "Just when you're awake."

 "And what else do I gotta do to get this ten thousand bucks?"

 "Absolutely nothing."

 "Absolutely nothing?"

 "Just get up in the morning and put it on, every day from nowuntil Election Day. If you agree to this, I give you a thousanddollars right here and now. We'll be able to tell, by monitoring thesignals from the watch, whether you're wearing it or not. As longas you keep it on during all of the programming segments that webroadcast, we will continue to send you a thousand dollars a month.On Election Day, we send you the remainder of the ten thousand."

 Floyd grabbed the PIPER watch. The two halves of thewatchband were spread wide apart. He put it on his wrist, wrapped his other hand around it, and the watchband tightened down firmlybut comfortably.

 "To take it off, just push that little button right there and theratchet will be released," Green said.

 "We got a deal," Floyd said. "Where's my thousand?"

 36

 "Ths isit, baby," Cyrus Rutherford Ogle said, sitting in thebig chair and twiddling the joysticks. "This is the moon shot. T minus half an hour and counting." That is what Aaron Green sawas he was climbing into the back of the big GODS truck out in backof the Decatur Civic Center in Decatur, Illinois. It was 7.30p.m.on Flag Day.

 "My god," Aaron said. That was all he could force past his lipsfor the first several minutes.

 It looked just like a plain flatbed semitrailer truck with a shippingcontainer on the back. The shipping container, a steel box aboutthe size of a mobile home, was brand new and slickly painted withthe three-colored logo of Global Omni-present Delivery Services. These days, as the U.S. Postal Service continued to go the way ofGreyhound, the logo had become as ubiquitous as a mailbox. Mostpeople wouldn't notice this thing unless it was parked in their driveway. Out behind the Decatur Civic Center, sandwiched inbetween a food delivery truck and a video truck from TelevisionNorth America, it was invisible. The only indications that it carried something other than mail were a soft humming noise and a glassy twist of heat waves coming from a small opening on its top. Itcarried its own power plant.

 Aaron entered through a door in the rear, passing directly into anarrow aisle, some ten feet in length, between racks of electronicsand heavier equipment that stretched from floor to ceiling. Nuclear submarines must be like this, Aaron thought, as he peered into the racks, picking out the familiar shapes and logos of various top-of-the-line Pacific Netware computer systems.

 The aisle finally opened up into sort of an office and com­munications center. Countertops ran along both walls for severalyards and a couple of desks sat in the middle. These surfaces werestrewn with telephones, scrawled yellow notes, staplers, laptopcomputers, a miniature photocopier. Higher up, at head level,heavy shelves and racks were mounted to the walls, loaded withvideo stuff: three-quarter-inch and half-inch tape machines,monitors, and other rack-mounted goodies that Aaron recognizedas being parts of a television editing suite.

 The front third of the trailer belonged to Cy Ogle. It lookedtotally different. The other parts of it were nice, high-tech expen­sive, but they hadn't even started to spend money until they'dreached this part.

 The trailer was eight feet wide. They had built a hollow sphereeight feet in diameter, put Cy's big chair in the center, and thenpaneled the inner surface of the sphere with monitors. Eachmonitor was about the size of the ones used in notebook com­puters. They were in full color and they were very sharp. The only feature that broke this sweep of tiny little color monitors was a twelve-inch television screen, dead center, right in the middle ofeverything.

 "Welcome to the Eye," Ogle said. "Welcome to the Eye of Cy."

 Now that he mentioned it, it did look as though Cy Ogle weresitting in the center of an eight-foot eyeball, lined with computer monitors, with the TV screen in the middle serving as the pupil.

 Aaron already knew the answer, but he had to do it anyway: hestarted counting the monitors. There were exactly one hundred of them. Each one of those monitors was running the software that Aaron Green had spent the last couple of months developing. Allof the experience they had gathered from all of those focus groupsat Pentagon Towers - all of the mock shootings, fire drills, movie clips, hunchbacked janitors, staged marital disputes, and every otherscenario that had come from the fevered imagination of ShaneSchram - had been distilled into the animated graphs and charts andcolored bars on those hundred screens.

 By examining those graphs in detail, Ogle could assess theemotional status of any one of the PIPER 100. But they providedmore detail than Ogle could really handle during the real-timestress of a major campaign event. So Aaron had come up with a very simple, general color-coding scheme. The background colorof each screen fluctuated according to the subject's general emo­tional state. Red denoted fear, stress, anger, anxiety. Blue denoted negative emotions centered in higher parts of the brain: disagree­ment, hostility, a general lack of receptiveness. And green meantthat the subject liked what they saw. Green was good. Regardless of color, the brightness went up with the intensity of the emotion.

 Stepping a little closer and scanning the screens, Aaron could seethat a good eighty or ninety of the PIPER 100 were wearing theirwristwatches, as per their agreement with Ogle Data Research.There were a few stragglers. Almost all of them were women. Oneof the problems that had come up with the PIPER program was that the bulky watches looked clumsy on a woman's wrist, andmost women didn't want to wear them all the time. Hopefully, they were carrying them around in their purses, and would take them out and put them on as soon as the program started.

 If they didn't, they'd forfeit the rest of their money, and theirwristwatches would be given to someone a little more reliable. For this, the first test of PIPER, a 90 percent compliance rate would bepretty decent.

 "So, what's the mood of America?" Aaron said. He couldn'tresist asking. He stepped as far forward as he could and stood rightnext to Ogle's chair, so that the panorama of screens completely filled his peripheral vision. The effect was like hanging in outerspace, in the center of a dynamic young galaxy: against a backdropof velvety black, bursts of colored light flared unpredictably inevery direction, in hues of red, green, blue, and mixtures thereof.

 "Hard to say, since we don't know what any of these people arereacting to," Ogle said. "I been keeping an eye on this poor guyright here." He pointed to a screen that had been consistently red ever since Aaron had come into the room. "I think this guy must be right in the middle of a bar fight or something."

 Aaron leaned closer to the red screen and squinted to read thelabel at the bottom. It read, TRADE SCHOOL METALHEAD/KENT NISSAN, MT. HOLLY, N.J.

 "His blood pressure is through the roof," Aaron said. "Maybeyou're right."

 He couldn't help checking out his five participants. FloydWayne Vishniak seemed to be in a quiescent state, probably sackedout on his couch watching television. Chase Merriam was in anexcellent mood; probably getting lubricated at a cocktail party in the Hamptons.

 "Hey, this looksgreat!"another voice exclaimed. "Jesus! Look atthis thing! It's virtual reality, man!"

 It was a tall man in early middle age, with a neatly trimmed beardand a ponytail: the controlled hippie look. He was wearing shortsand sandals and a Hawaiian shirt, and was just tossing a weather-beaten leather satchel on to one of the counters.

 "Evening, Zeldo," Ogle said.

 Zeldo's gaze was fastened upon the Eye of Cy. "This thing iskiller,"he said. "Does it work?"

 "The input side works," Ogle said, "as you can see for yourself.Now that you're here, we can run some tests on the outputside."

 "What's the output side?" Aaron said.

 "Okay, I'm up for it," Zeldo said. He ran over to the nearestCalyx workstation and started to sign in. "I just came over fromArgus's dressing room. He's waiting."

 "Who's Argus?" Aaron said.

 A faint beeping noise sounded from the direction of Cy Ogle.His big chair, in the middle of the Eye of Cy, had a telephone built into it, and he was punching in a number.

 "Good evening, this is Cy Ogle," he said. "Is there anypossibility that I could speak to the Governor? Thank you so verymuch." Ogle was actually capable of delivering this kind ofdialogue as though he meant it.

 "I have acquired Argus," Zeldo said. The screen of his Calyxsystem had come alive with a multiple-window display showingthe status of some incredibly complicated system.

 "Evening, Governor. You mind if I put you on the speaker-phone?"

 One of the windows on Zeldo's screen was a rapidly fluctuatingbar graph. It had been dead for a little while, but now it put on aburst of colorful activity.

 "Okay," Ogle said, and punched a button on his phone.

 "I hate these speakerphones," said a deep voice. When he spoke,the bar graph on Zeldo's screen came alive.

 "They make me feel like I'm in a box," the voice continued.Aaron had finally recognized it: it was the voice of Governor William A. Cozzano.

 "We want to test our communications link," Ogle said.

 "That's what Zeldo told me," Cozzano said. "Go ahead and dosomething."

 The armrests of Ogle's chair were huge, like the captain's chair on the bridge of theEnterprise. The right one was covered withsmall keys, like on a computer keyboard. Each key was labeled insmall letters.

 The left armrest contained a row of several joysticks or slidersthat could individually be moved back and forth, left to right,between two extremes. Aaron stepped forward, leaned over Ogle's shoulder, and read the labels on the joysticks:

  

 LIBERAL                1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 910         CONSERVATIVE

 LIBERTARIAN       1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 910         AUTHORITARIAN

 POPULIST             1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 910         ELITIST

 GENERAL               1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 910         SPECIFIC

 SECULAR               1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 910         RELIGIOUS

 MATERIAL             1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 910         ETHEREAL

 KIND/GENTLE        1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 910         BELLIGERENT

 Right now, all of the joysticks were set close to the middle exceptfor GENERAL/SPECIFIC which had been set to 1 (GENERAL)and stuck in place with a piece of duct tape.

 Ogle punched a button on his armrest.

 "Bullet whizzing past my head," Cozzano said.

 "Correct," Ogle said. "That means that you're under attack andyou'd better take cover and defend yourself."

 "Got it," Cozzano said. "Do another one."

 Ogle punched another button.

 "Apple pie," Cozzano said. "Which means American values."

 Ogle punched another button.

 "Ice cubes. Which means I should cool it."

 Ogle punched another one.

 "A B-52. A strong national defense."

 They went on in this vein for several minutes. Ogle had a few dozen buttons on his armrest.

 "Argus is Cozzano," Aaron said.

 "Right," Zeldo said. "Argus was the mythological figure who had a hundred eyes. With Ogle's help, and with the PIPER 100 feeding him their emotions, Cozzano becomes the new Argus."

 At first, Floyd Wayne Vishniak didn't know what it was: a burst oftinny music with sort of a patriotic brass-band sound to it. It surewasn't coming from his TV set, which was tuned to a fishingprogram. Finally a flash of red-white-and-blue color caught his eye.It was coming from his wrist. From the big fancy wristwatch that he was being paid to wear. It was showing a logo, a computerized American flag image.

 Finally they were doing something. He'd been wearing thedamn thing for two weeks and hadn't seen anything on it exceptfor occasional test patterns. He turned off the TV - the fish didn'tseem to be biting anyway - cracked open a beer, and sat down to watch.

 Chase Merriam was out on the lawn of his brother-in-law's housein East Hampton, Long Island, savoring a mint julep and enjoyingthe cool night air, when his watch came to life. It didn't muchbother him, since this was a dull party anyway. The sound of themusic attracted the attention of several other partygoers, and by thetime the program got underway, he was in the center of half adozen people, standing on tiptoe, staring at his wrist in fascination.

 "This is ridiculous," he said. "Why don't we all just watch it onC-SPAN."

 Dr. Hunter P. Lawrence, pundit extraordinaire, moderator of theWashington Hot Seat,and nemesis of Eleanor Richmond, was aveteran of the Kennedy glory days. He had come down fromHarvard to serve as an Undersecretary of State for Cultural Affairs,"liasing" with Ed Murrow's USIA. After putting in his three years,he had returned to Harvard to take a joint appointment in thePolitical Science Department and as an administrator at theKennedy School. He had a Savile Row tattered professionalelegance with a hint of dandruff around the shoulders of his darkgray pinstriped suit. His graying hair, cut long in the back to com­pensate for its gradual retreat in front, defied the best efforts of sprayand gel to get it to lie down, and the backlights of the set turnedthem into silvery scratches against the dark blue background. As thehouse filled up and the media consultants fussed over their candi­dates and the technicians ran around barking into their headsets, hesat in his chair, legs crossed, flipping listlessly through some papers.

 In a normal debate, tickets would have been distributed equally among supporters of each of the three candidates. But William A.Cozzano was not technically a candidate at all, even though aspontaneous ground swell had put his name on the ballot in forty-two states. The President of the United States was continuing to pursue his Rose Garden strategy and would not be in attendancetonight, though some of his handlers were already cruising the pressroom, buttonholing journalists and trying to apply some prespin tothe event. The only "real" candidate was Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane. A reasonable number of tickets had therefore beenhanded out to the McLane campaign. Other than that, it was open seating; but given that the event was happening thirty miles awayfrom Tuscola, the place was dominated by Cozzano supporters. TipMcLane was coming into the lion's den tonight, which was exactlythe kind of situation in which he excelled.

 Most politicians were soulless tools, windup dolls; but these twoguys, Cozzano and McLane, could more than hold their own inintellectual combat. This was going to be a hell of a confrontation,and Dr. Hunter P. Lawrence was just the man to act as ringmaster and lion tamer.

 As Dr. Lawrence was engaged in this rather self-satisfying seriesof ruminations, the voice of the set direction scratched from hisearplug, "One minute to air." Lawrence set his papers down,sipped some water, did a phlegm check, walked unhurriedly toeach of the debators and shook their hands warmly and firmly. Attimes like this, he had to consciously resist his normal tendency to apply what an overly honest colleague had referred to as his "fishkiss" handshake.

 The theme of "Campaign '96" rose in the earplug, unheard bythe audience, and on the monitors he could see the nifty computergraphics in which the globe segued into the United States which inturn segued into the flag which in turn blended into a rather niceestablishing shot of the Decatur Civic Center, still brightlyilluminated by the late evening sun of midsummer. The buildingwas surrounded by buses and cars. People were streaming into theentrances. Most of them were students who had been bused in fromlocal colleges and high schools.

 Superimposed over these images were some credits. The logos ofvarious sponsoring corporations were flashed up as the godlikevoice of an announcer, prerecorded weeks ago in New York,intoned: "Tonight's debate is brought to you by MacIntyreEngineering, bringing American technological excellence to the world. Global Omnipresent Delivery Systems, the world leader inphysical communications technology. Pacific Netware, creator ofthe industry-leading Calyx computer system. Gale Aerospace, providing new solutions for a changing world. And the CooverFund, investing in America for a prosperous tomorrow.

 "Tonight, from Decatur, Illinois, the presidential town forum.Joining our moderator, Dr. Hunter P. Lawrence, will beRepresentative Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane of California andGovernor William A. Cozzano of Illinois."

 Dr. Lawrence was enough of a self-consciously stodgy eccentricthat he had actually armed himself with a gavel. As the voice-overbegan, he started to whack it. Audience members moved towardtheir seats and the buzzing clouds of aides and well-wishers that hadsurrounded the two debaters began to disperse. The noise leveldropped and the house lights came down, leaving the three men down below in pools of halogen light, TV-bright. As backdrops,they had tall floor-to-ceiling banners - colorized images of turn-of-the-century politicians: Teddy Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan,and William McKinley.

 Dr. Lawrence loved this moment, loved the notion that millions of people were watching, loved the fact that, unlike so many other people, he performed without notes or a teleprompter, in short, heloved his own glibness - what open field running was for BarrySanders of the Lions, extemporaneous and clever speech was for theprofessor. It was his chance to go and say "in your face" to thetongue-tied masses. It was as good as the first fuck with a newgraduate student.

 "I will be blunt: this country is on the verge of disaster."

 That was good; that shut them up. Dr. Lawrence cleared histhroat unnecessarily and took another sip of water.

 "This may be our last free presidential election. I make thisalarming statement for the following reasons.

 "Our national debt has now reached the level of ten trilliondollars, the surest sign of a society in disequilibrium, even free-fall.

 "Our political leaders in the past few decades have shown noability to address the problems facing our aging, failing democracy.

 "Our federal leadership works only in response to pollsters and spin doctors; the sheer mediocrity at the executive, legislative, and judicial levels has driven away the most talented civil servants.

 "The only sign of life is at the level of state government, andthese officials are burdened to the point of paralysis by the albatrossof Washington.

 "The values that made this country what it once was - hard workand honesty, or as Emerson put it, 'self-reliance' - have, like ourfinances, gone to hell."

 Dr. Lawrence paused to allow his words to sink in. "Are any ofyou in this audience convinced that the picture is anything butbleak for the future? I am sorry to be so blunt, but a lifetime of studyof and love for this country compels me to set the stage for this debate with these thoughts.

 "One century ago, a candidate looking back on events of the last decade would have seen feverish activity in the realms of tech­nology, art, and politics. During that period, men with names such as Diesel, Benz, and Ford had been hard at work perfecting a new device called the automobile. The first telephone switchboard hadbeen installed, the first subway system was under construction in Boston, and Thomas Edison had opened something called a kineto­scopeparlor - the first movie theater. The gramophone, the rocket engine, the radio, and X rays had all just been invented. And, as ifthese innovations were not important enough, the first professionalfootball game had been played in Latrobe, Pennsylvania."

 A murmur ran through the crowd and gradually bloomed intolaughter. Cozzano and Dr. Lawrence exchange smiles. This was typical for Dr. Lawrence: a subtle jibe that could have been inter­preted as either a dig or a compliment. Cozzano chose to treat it as the latter.

 "But despite this rapid technological progress, the politicalpicture a hundred years ago was far from rosy. Foreign interestscontrolled our economy; an unfeeling business class brutallyexploited the people of the United States; the political structure ofthis country was shot through with the most shocking corruptionfrom top to bottom; divisiveness characterized the relationshipbetween sections of this country, and between races; foreignersnewly arriving to work in our country suffered attack simply forwanting to come to this blessed land to improve themselves.Beginning in the late 1880s the poorest farmers and workers in theWest and South united to form the Populist movement. Theyfailed to reach the middle classes and the cities; their messagebecame shrill. But out of that movement came the Progressivemovement, one of whose most eloquent spokesmen was William Jennings Bryan, who spoke in this town a century or so ago. Hismessage was simple: government is for the people. The effect was profound. The Progressive movement spread across this part of thecountry with the speed and fury of a prairie fire. Progressivism blended the skills of the best of this country with the ambitions of the middle 70 percent - the middle classes - to remake the systemand allow this country to endure through the twentieth century.

 "We need a new populism and a new progressivism and a newway to remake the system so that the values of honesty and hardwork can once again have a nurturing environment in which togrow, and self-reliance can once again take its place.

 "Tonight we will discuss these problems from many differentdirections. But I would like to begin by discussing a concrete issue:the trade imbalance.

 "It is January of next year and you have just taken the oath of office. The economy remains uncertain. It seems as though theJapanese lead in the automotive sector has become insurmountable.How do you, as President, tackle that problem? RepresentativeMcLane?"

 37

 Tip McLane had already adopted his characteristic pose,leaning forward toward the camera, head down, staring intentlyinto the lens. As soon as the red light came on, he unloaded: "First of all, Dr. Lawrence, let me say that I would like to thank you, andthe people of Decatur, for the opportunity to come here andparticipate in this forum."

 A few hundred yards away, Cy Ogle was crowing. He hadthrown his head back and broken into triumphant, falsettolaughter. All around him the Eye of Cy had gone into variousshades of blue. It had happened the moment the phrase "first of all"escaped from Tip McLane's lips.

 "Lemme just jot that one down," Ogle said, making a note. "Never begin with 'first of all.'"

 Ogle was also happy because only three of the screens wereblank. They were getting 97 percent compliance. Back in FallsChurch, Virginia, three ropers were on the phones, trying to get through to the three delinquent members of the PIPER 100. Overthe next few minutes, two more screens came to life.

 Almost thirty seconds had gone by, and Tip McLane still hadn'tbegun to answer the question: ". . . people who say that presidentialcampaigns are all style over substance obviously haven't beenpaying attention to fine, substantial programs like the one that weare participating in tonight."

 "Thank you, Tip," Ogle said, "I did my very best."

 "Now, as far as the auto industry. There are a lot of so-calledconservatives who would disagree with me on this and say that weshould just let the Japanese come in and walk all over us. Thatsomehow, this constitutes free trade. Well, it's not free trade. It's aneconomic Pearl Harbor, is what it is. And I'll be damned if I'mgoing to stand by and let it happen to American on my watch. Andthat is why, when I am President-"

 "-thank you, Congressman McLane, your time has expired,"Dr. Lawrence said, amused but firm.

 "-we should deal with this in a tough, but not protectionistway-"

 "-thank you, Congressman McLane."

 "-and even out this trade balance-"

 "-your time has expired and we must now move on toGovernor Cozzano."

 The verbal duel between Representative McLane and Dr.Lawrence petered out gradually. By that point, the screens werelargely bluish and reddish. "Well, that just makes them all look likeassholes," Ogle said. "I can't tell if they're reacting to McLane orLawrence." He turned and caught Aaron's eye. "Can you give me a breakdown by economic bracket?"

 Aaron grabbed the mouse attached to his Calyx workstation andchose a couple of items from menus. A graphic flashed up on hisscreen and he bounced a copy of it to one of Ogle's screens.

 "What this tells me is that everyone dislikes Tip McLane just about equally," Ogle said.

 "That's about right. Which is interesting, coming from theupper income brackets."

 "Yeah," Ogle said. He held one index finger up in the air. "I amabout to make a prediction," he said.

 "Shoot," Aaron said.

 "I predict that we are going to see a whole lot more data to the effect that people think Tip McLane is too rough. Too coarse todance with the Queen of England."

 The Eye of Cy grew brighter and took on a decidedly greenishtinge. "Hot damn," Ogle said. "Now just hold it, baby, don'tsquander this." As he spoke, he was pressing a couple of buttons onthe pad that he used to communicate with Cozzano.

 Cozzano looked great on TV. The stroke had aged himsomewhat. He had lost some weight without becoming gaunt. It had brought out his features, which were worth bringing out. Hehad a serious, thoughtful, rock-solid look about him now. Hecould probably win a lot of votes simply by doing what he wasdoing now: sitting in front of a camera and not saying anything.

 This was new behaviour for him. Cozzano loved to argue. Heloved competition in any form. He had always been the first toshow up for football practice. Whenever he appeared in one ofthese debates he always leapt into the fray as soon as his turn cameup.

 But you didn't become president by seeming eager. Ogle under­stood this perfectly well, and so, as soon as Cozzano's name cameup, he began to stroke that keyboard, sending calm, solid, quiteimages into Cozzano's brain. Cozzano just sat there, quite, solid,contemplative. The longer he sat there, the brighter, and greener, the Eye of Cy became.

 "Getting good results here," Zeldo said, looking at the readouts of Cozzano's blood pressure. "He's calming down. He was a littlenervous before."

 "Perfect," Ogle said. "I just invented a new form of politicalrhetoric: don't say a damn thing."

 It was perfect, Aaron realized, sitting there staring at Cozzano onthe TV. He had seen a lot of these debates. The candidates always came off as high-strung, bickering game show contestants. But Cozzano had a solid dignity that was way above all that. He gavethe impression of a man who had been deeply absorbed in thinkingprofound thoughts, not paying any attention to his surroundings,who had suddenly been interrupted by the nervous, carpingmoderator of the debate. Who was now giving the matter some serious thought before he blurted anything out.

 Aaron felt as though he should jump to his feet and saluteCozzano. He felt that way even though he was sitting ten feet awayfrom Ogle and knew damn well this was a manipulated image.

 "I have certain values that I am not willing to play games with,"Cozzano said. Then he paused for quite a while, thinking. Theaudience was dead silent. Even the inside of Ogle's trailer was deadsilent. The whole universe seemed to be revolving aroundCozzano. "One of the things I value is dignity and self-respect. These things are our birthrights. Some squander them. Once youhave lost them, you can't get them back. And one way to squanderyour dignity and self-respect is to whine and carp and beg."Cozzano pronounced these words with almost palpable disgust."My attitude is that I don't care how unlevel the playing field is.I'm going to play by the rules anyway." At this point Cozzanoseemed to become visibly pissed off. He leveled his gaze directly into the camera for the first time, held up his meaty right hand,pointed into the lens. "I will never crawl on my knees to Japan orany other country and cry uncle, the way George Bush did in 1992.I'd rather die." Cozzano sat back in his chair, held his gaze on thelens for a few more seconds, then looked away.

 The Eye of Cy had become blindingly bright: America wasfeeling strong, conflicting emotions.

 There was silence and then confusion. He had only used up a small portion of his allotted time. Dr. Lawrence wasn't sure whathe should do. The TV feed cut uncertainly back and forth betweenGovernor Cozzano and Dr. Lawrence.

 "You still have thirty seconds," Dr. Lawrence said. "Would youlike to elaborate?"

 "What's to elaborate?" Cozzano said.

 A definite pattern was now noticeable when the feed cutbetween Dr. Lawrence and Cozzano. People had generally madeup their minds that Dr. Lawrence was a jerk.

 "That was wild," Ogle said. He sounded a bit uncertain. Hegrabbed the POPULIST-ELITIST joystick and shoved it a little closer to POPULIST. "That took balls. Aaron, don't we have atoilet-scrubbing ex-autoworker?"

 "Yeah," Aaron said, choosing a line of the same name from amenu on the computer screen. A graphic came up summarizing theway that this particular member of the PIPER 100 had reacted toCozzano's speech.

 It was all jaggedy contrasts and mood swings. Clearly this man'sfeelings had been hurt. But it wasn't all negative either. Toward theend of Cozzano's statement, the ex-autoworker's emotional statehad swung sharply upward.

 "Huh. That's interesting," Ogle said. "The appeal to pride seemsto work. But it's not old-fashioned jingoism. It's a question ofpersonal, individual pride. Core values."

 On TV, Dr. Hunter P. Lawrence was explaining that the candi­dates could now rebut each other's statements.

 McLane flashed up on the screen with a bit of a stunned,nervous, beady-eyed look, as if he wanted to stare at Cozzano butcouldn't. "Well, it seems to me that, uh, the best ticket to self-esteem and dignity is to have a steady job. Everything else followsfrom that. Under my administration, I'll be pursuing policies thatwill stimulate the vigor of our free enterprise system and lead to jobgrowth in general. After all, it's hard to be dignified when you'reliving on welfare."

 The Eye of Cy pinkened briefly as the word "welfare" was spoken. "Cheap shot," Ogle mumbled.

 "It's easy to scoff at the concept of the unlevel playing field whenyou have been born into an affluent family and haven't sufferedfrom massive layoffs the way our auto workers have," McLanecontinued. "But for those people in Detroit-"

 The Eye of Cy displayed a few brief flashes of green as severalpeople took pleasure in McLane's personal attack on Cozzano. Butmost people didn't like it. They didn't like it at all.

 Cozzano had turned slightly in McLane's direction. He lookedlike a great man, alone in his study, busy with important matters, who has to get up and discipline a puppy who has just piddled onthe rug.

 "My family is affluent because we love each other and we work hard," Cozzano said. "And I can promise you, Tip, that if you seekto gain the esteem of the American public by running my familyinto the ground, I will make you regret it on many levels. When aman makes cracks about my family, my natural response is to invitehim to step outside. And I'm not above doing that here and now." Ogle rocketed half out of is chair and started screaming. "CUTTO TIP! CUT TO TIP! CUT TO TIP!" Aaron could hardly seeanything; the Eye of Cy had become blindingly intense, like aparabolic dish pointed directly into the sun. But the image in the middle changed and Tip came on the screen; his mouth was halfopen, his eyebrows somewhere up in the middle of his forehead, his eyes darting back and forth nervously. The Eye of Cy turnedblue (people who, as of three seconds ago, hated Tip McLane),with a few angry red screens (people who wanted Cozzano to punch McLane right here and now).

 "Knockout punch," Ogle said. "Tip's out of the race." But justin case, he shoved the KIND/GENTLE-BELLIGERENT joysticktoward KIND/GENTLE. Then he moved the MATERIAL- ETHEREAL joystick a lot closer to ETHEREAL.

 It was almost possible to see the wheels turning in McLane'shead. The look of surprise gradually faded, until he lookedimpassive, then calm and almost coldly defiant. "It wouldn't be thefirst time I had settled an argument that way," McLane said.

 "Ouch," Ogle said.

 "But one of the first things a president has to learn is to separatehis personal feelings from the affairs of the nation, and-'

 Colors shifted all over the Eye. "Damage control!" Ogle said,and slammed one of the buttons on the armrest.

 "-as for the issue of the auto industry," Cozzano said,continuing his own sentence as if McLane had never opened hismouth, and blithely running him off the road, "it is simply wrongto say that people get jobs first and then feel good about themselves.That is a shallow view of human nature. Dignity can't be boughtwith a paycheck. Your student deferments kept you out ofVietnam, Tip, so you never saw what I saw: stooped peasants in therice paddies who never made a dime in their lives but who hadmore dignity in the last joint of their little finger than a lot of highlypaid lawyers and chief executives I can name. It goes the other way:if you have dignity, if you respect yourself, you will find a job. Idon't care how bad the economy is. When my great-grandfathercame to this part of the country, there weren't any jobs. So he cameup with his own job. He had only been in America for a few weeks,but in that time he had become thoroughly American. He hadcome to believe that he could change his own life. That he couldtake charge of his own destiny."

 "Very inspiring. But when my family came to California-"McLane began.

 "Some think that unemployment hurts because ofmoney,"Cozzano said. "Because you can't afford to buy Nintendo gamesand fancy sneakers. That is shallow and cheap. Americans are notpure, money-grubbing materialists. Unemployment hurts people'sfeelings far more than their pocketbooks."

 In the past few seconds all the graphs had veered downward, thecolors turned bluish. "I fuckedthat up!" Ogle said, whacking keys and sliding joysticks furiously. "Bad move!"

 Suddenly Tip McLane was on the screen. It was too late forCozzano to dig himself out.

 "Shit!" Ogle hissed. "Where does he get off saying thatAmericans are not shallow materialists?"

 McLane was amused. He knew he had Cozzano. "Apparentlythe Governor of Illinois thinks that we'd all be happier being fully employed...in rice paddies!"

 The audience laughed. The Eye warmed suddenly to Tip McLane.

 "Damn!" Ogle said. "Why'd he have to get profound on us?"He scratched his chin nervously, thinking hard, and fussed with thecontrols. "We have to suppress that urge to philosophize."

 "Maybe the Governor hasn't been seeing a full cross section ofthe American public from his backyard in Tuscola," McLane said."But I have, because I've visited all fifty states during the longprimary campaign - even smaller states that my campaign managerbegged me not to visit because he said they weren't important. Ihave talked to a lot of people. And over and over again, I get theimpression that the people of America don't like being talked downto by politicians."

 "That's for damn sure," Ogle said, punching a key that caused ahallucinatory bullet to whiz past Cozzano's head.

 "They know what they want: jobs. Good jobs," McLane said."What they don't need is vague talk about how to feel moredignified."

 Ogle groaned. The PIPER 100 were showing strong support forMcLane now. "They're killing us," he said, and slammed a big redbutton that said, simply, FLIP FLOP.

 "When the forces of freedom and democracy stormed Hitler's Fortress Europe on D day," Cozzano said, "the elite spearhead ofthat invasion rained down out of the sky on parachutes. Parachutes made of nylon that was manufactured about half a mile away frommy house in Tuscola, by my family. The nervous paratroopers, standing in the open doorways of those airplanes, looking down atthe landscape of France thousands of feet below them, were puttinga lot of trust in those folds of nylon."

 "What does this have to do with anything?" Aaron said,mirroring the feelings displayed on the Eye of Cy: a state of chaoticflux.

 "Shut up," Ogle mumbled. "This is good material. Reaganesquein its cloying nostalgia - with the metaphorical punch of Ross Perotbefore he went batshit."

 "When you jump out of an airplane flying over a war zone, youneed more than self-esteem to get you safely to the ground,"Cozzano said. "You need a solid, well-made parachute. Youngpeople leaving high school and college within the last few weekshave a lot in common with those troopers jumping out of thatairplane. And if you think that William A. Cozzano intends to sendthem out that door with nothing more than some feel-good talk,you're dead wrong."

 "But that's the opposite of what he just said," Aaron said.

 "Just shut up," Ogle said. "I think he's got them going." As Cozzano's analogy started to become clearer, the monitor screenshad stopped fluctuating and begun settling down into a dimgreenish pattern. "We need to get Anecdote Developmentworking on that D day thing."

 Cozzano continued. "Just as nylon replaced silk in parachutes,new technologies have to replace the old ones in our job market. And I can promise you that no country in the world is better thanAmerica when it comes to inventing new technologies."

 McLane interrupted him. "And no country is better capitalizingon those inventions than Japan," he said, "which is why I'm goingto make sure that America, not Japan, reaps the benefit of her creative powers, unique among all the nations of the world."

 Ogle slapped his face and groaned. "That McLane son of a bitchis a vampire. Give me a projection."

 Aaron worked at his computer for a minute, running somestatistical routines. "Based on the reactions of the PIPER 100,allowing for a typical seventy-two-hour debate bounce, correctingfor their likelihood to actually cast a ballot, we get 27 electoral votesfor the President, 206 for Cozzano, and 302 for Tip McLane."

 "We have a long way to go," Ogle said.

 "Seems pretty good to me," Aaron said, "considering he's noteven running for president."

 "Details!" Ogle scoffed.

 38

 It took WilliamA.Cozzano nearly an hour to fight his wayfrom the dressing room, where his TV makeup had been spongedoff, to his car in the parking lot of the Decatur Civic Center. Along the way he had to shake what seemed like every hand in downstateIllinois, and kiss a fair percentage of the babies. His car, a four-wheel-drive sport-utility vehicle with every luxury feature and antenna known to science, showed up regularly on downstatetelevision (every time he changed the oil in his driveway) and soeveryone knew where he was going. Meanwhile, Tip McLaneskulked from an obscure fire exit into his waiting Secret Servicemotorcade.

 The Decatur Civic Center was equipped with loading docks andramps that would have enabled Cozzano's driver to pull straightinto the building and pick him up, but it looked a lot better for him to fight his way through a crowd of supporters. Ogle's men had set up a double rope line to hold them back, providing a clear corridoracross the asphalt from the building to Cozzano's car. Cy Ogle hadpersonally walked the length of this corridor with a tape measure,making sure it was just narrow enough to allow the crowd to nearlysurge in on Cozzano as they bent over the ropes and waved babies and pens and papers in his face. Banks of lights had been erected on mobile jackstands, illuminating the scene like a high-school footballfield on a Friday night, and network camera crews gladly availedthemselves of the platforms Ogle had set up for their use.

 "It was not half-bad," Cozzano said. He was sitting in thebackseat of his car, next to Zeldo. His driver and an Illinois StatePatrolman were in the front. They were driving down a two-laneblacktop road at eighty miles an hour, accompanied by one ofOgle's vehicles, a Secret Service car, and a few Highway Patrolcruisers. It had taken them several hours to get to Decatur thismorning because they'd taken a circuitous route throughChampaign and Springfield. But on the direct route, at this speed,Tuscola was minutes away.

 Zeldo's brain was practically overloaded by everything that hadjust happened, but to him the most marvelous thing about thewhole night was that they were driving eighty miles an hour - witha state patrolman right therein the car with them.

 He shook his head and tried to concentrate on matters at hand. Cozzano had turned on a little courtesy light that shone a pool of golden light into his lap, and was jotting down some notes. Zeldo watched the Governor's right hand, gripping the thick barrel of anexpensive fountain pen so tightly it looked like it might burst andspray ink all over the car. He wrote in shaky block letters, one at atime, like a first grader. His recovery had far exceeded their wildesthopes, and a person who did not know of his stroke would nevernotice anything was wrong - except when he tried to write.Cozzano knew this, it infuriated him, and he spent a lot of timepracticing his penmanship, trying to erase this last vestige ofweakness.

 "We've got a lot of data to crank through. We're going to do acore dump on this whole night," Zeldo said. "Analyze it every which way. Then we'll go over the results with you."

 "Good," Cozzano said, thinking about something else.

 "I just have one question," Zeldo said. Cozzano looked up athim expectantly, and Zeldo hesitated for a moment.

 Even after all the time they'd spent together, Cozzano made him nervous. Zeldo always got thick-tongued and self-conscious whenhe was about to ask the Governor something personal, somethinghe suspected that Cozzano might not appreciate. Like a lot ofpowerful men - like Zeldo's boss, Kevin Tice - Cozzano didn'tsuffer fools gladly.

 "What was it like?" Zeldo said.

 "What waswhat like?" Cozzano said.

 "You're the only person in history who's ever done this, so Idon't know how to ask. I know it's a vague question. But somedayI'd like to get an implant of my own, you know."

 "So you've said," Cozzano said.

 "So I'm trying to get some sense of what it's like to communicate in that way - transmissions from outside, bypassing all the sensorysubsystems, going directly into the brain's neural net."

 "I'm still not sure if I follow," Cozzano said.

 Zeldo started to grope. "Normally we get input through oursenses. Information comes down the optic nerve, or through thenerves in our skin or whatever. Those nerves are hooked up toparts of the brain that act like filters between ourselves and ourenvironment."

 Cozzano nodded slightly, more out of politeness than anything else. He was still nonplussed. But one good thing about Cozzanowas that he was always game for an intellectual discussion.

 "Ever seen an optical illusion?" Zeldo said, trying a new tack.

 "Of course."

 "An optical illusion is what we computer people would call a hack - an ingenious trick that takes advantage of a defect in ourbrain, a bug if you will, to make us see something that's not really there. Normally our brains were too smart for that. Like, when youwatch something on television, you understand that it's not reallyhappening - it's just an image on a screen."

 "I think I'm following you now," Cozzano said.

 "The inputs you were getting from Ogle tonight didn't passthrough any of your normal filters - they went straight into yourbrain, kind of like an optical illusion does. What's that like?""I'm not sure what you mean by inputs," Cozzano said.

 "The signals he was sending you from his chair."

 Suddenly Cozzano's face crinkled up in amusement and hechuckled. "Oh, that business," he said. Then he shook his head indulgently. "I know you guys have a lot of fun with that stuff. It's all just parlor tricks. Was Cy doing any of that nonsense tonight?"

 "He was doing it more or less constantly," Zeldo said.

 "Well, then you can tell him to stop wasting his time," Cozzano

 said, "because it didn't have any effect. I didn't notice a thing,Zeldo, have you ever been in a situation like that? Debating on livetelevision before millions of people?"

 "I can't say that I have," Zeldo said.

 "You get into a sort of zone, as the football players like to say. Every minute seems to last an hour. You forget about all the lightsand cameras and audience and become totally focused on the event itself, the exchange of ideas, the rhetorical counterplay. I can assureyou that if Cy Ogle were to walk on to the set during one of thosedebates and throw a bucket of ice water over my head, I wouldn'teven notice it. So none of that silly business with the buttons andjoysticks has any effect."

 "Didn't it stimulate memories and images?"

 Cozzano grinned paternally. "Son, the mind is a complicated bitof business. It is a churning sea of memories and images andeverything else. My mind is always filled with competing ideas. IfCy wants to toss in one or two extras, then he's welcome to do so,but it's kind of like pissing in the ocean."

 Cozzano stopped talking and got a distant look in his eyes.

 "What's going on?" Zeldo said.

 "For example, right now my mind is full of images, an over­whelming flood of memories and ideas - you have any idea howmany memories are buried in the mind? Fishing for bluegill onLake Argyle with my father, the hook caught in his thumb, forcing it through the other side and cutting it off with wirecutters, thesevered barb flying dangerously into the air spinning its cut facet gleaming in the sun and I jerking back for fear it would plunge intomy eye, squinting protectively, opening my eyes again it is mud, allmud, a universe of mud and the mortar shell has just taken flight,my fingers jammed into my ears, the smell of the explosionpenetrating my sinuses making them clench up and bleed, the shellexploding in the trees, a puff of white smoke but the trees are stillthere and the gunfire still raining down like hailstones on the cellardoor on the day that the tornado wrecked our farmhouse and we packed into my aunt's fruit cellar and I looked up at the stackedmason jars of rhubarb and tomatoes and wondered what wouldhappen to us when the glass shattered and flew through the air likethe horizontal sleet of Soldier Field on the day that I caught five foreighty-seven yards and put such a hit on Cornelius Hayes that hetook five minutes to get up. God, I can see my entire life! Stop thecar! Stop the car!"

 Then William A. Cozzano froze up entirely, except for his eyes which were jittering back and forth in their sockets, irises opening and closing sporadically, focus changing in and out as they tried tolock on to things that weren't actually there.

 They pulled on to the shoulder, opened the back doors of thecar, and laid Cozzano out full-length on the backseat. But then he sprang back up, slid out the open door into the roadside ditch, andbegan to march into a field of eight-foot-high corn, bellowing inItalian. At first it was just inchoate noise, but then it settled downinto a passable rendition of an aria from Verdi, baritone stuff, a bad-guy role. The state patrolmen did not know what to do, whetheror not they should try to restrain him, so they did what cops dowhen they feel uncertain: they shone lights on him. He hadthoughtfully removed his suit jacket and so his white shirt, neatlytrisected by suspenders, stood out brilliantly among the cornstalks.He was walking across the field, leaving trampled stalks in his wake,followed at a respectful distance by a couple of the patrolmen. Hiscourse zigged and zagged, but he seemed to be settling on oneparticular direction. He was headed for the only landmark in thevicinity: a tall narrow tower that rose from the field several hundredfeet from the road, with blinking red lights.

 "The red lights," one of the patrolmen said. "He's attracted bythe lights!"

 But Zeldo just shook his head. Right now his brain was almostas overloaded as Cozzano's, and it was all he could do to force an explanatory word out: "Microwaves."

 Cozzano finally collapsed a stone's throw from the microwaverelay tower. The patrolmen rushed inward, converged on him, hoisted him into the air, and began to hustle him back.

 By the time they got him back to the car he was thrashing aroundagain, but the spittle and blood around his mouth told Zeldo thathe'd had a seizure and probably bitten his tongue. "Let's get out ofhere!" Zeldo said.

 Zeldo had already folded down the rear seat of Cozzano'ssport/utility vehicle and opened the tailgate. They threw him inback like a heavy roll of carpet. "Go! Go!" Zeldo shouted, and thedriver pulled off the shoulder and down the road, all four tires burning rubber.

 Cozzano relaxed and, apropos of nothing, quoted a lengthypassage, verbatim, from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades. Then he was silent for a while.

 Then he said, "Why the hell is the tailgate open? You want usto end up like Bianca Ramirez?"

 Floyd Wayne Vishniak wanted to sleep but his thoughtswould not let him. He lay on his mattress having an imaginary discussion inside of his head, moving his lips and gesturing withhis hands in the air as he debated politics with William A.Cozzano and Tip McLane. The more he went over the discussionin his head, the clearer his thoughts became, and he kept findingways to explain them. Finally he decided that he would writethem down.

 The light over the kitchen table hurt his eyes. He held one hand over his face as a visor and tripped around the kitchen looking for something to write with. Eventually he located the stub of a pencilon top of the fridge. Back next to his mattress was his weight bench and underneath that was a box full of weights and dumbell parts. Inthe bottom of that, under all the weights, was an old spiral note­book with half the pages missing, which he had used to record hisprogress when he was sticking to his weight-lifting program. Heturned it to a fresh page and tossed it on to the kitchen table;directly under the light, the white page was very bright and madehim squint. He grabbed a beer from the fridge and sat down tocollect his thoughts.

 He took the address from the videotape, as Aaron Green had toldhim to do.

  

 Floyd Wayne Vishniak

 RR. 6 Box 895

 Davenport, Iowa

  

 Aaron Green

 Ogle Data Research

 Pentagon Towers

 Arlington, Virginia

 Dear Mr. Green:

 I am writing this letter to you to express my additionalthoughts and opinions, which you said you wanted to hear all about. Maybe you have already forgotten about me since I amjust a nobody who lives in a trailer. But we have seen eachother face-to-face once, and maybe we will again. This isabout the Debate that was tonight in Decatur, Illinois, not so very far from where I live.

 It is real interesting that one hundred years ago people werethinking the same things they are now about the Wall Street financial kingpins running the country. How ironic that stillnothing has changed. I wonder why that is. Maybe it isbecause all of the politicians run on money, money, money.

 McLane is power-grubbing scum and you can see it in hisface and in how he acts, like a stiff. That is because if he actsnatural and tells the truth he will probably offend someone who is feeding him money.

 But Cozzano is an honest man and he tells it straight. He isthe only honest man up there because he is the only one who is not running for anything. To me, the favorite part of thedebate was when he invited McLane to step outside. I felt good when I heard Cozzano speak words of righteousness,like out of the Bible, and I truly wanted to see his fist smashinginto McLane's face.

 I bet that you got some good reactions off my wristwatch atthat moment. I bet the readings all went off the scale. Now you probably think that I am some kind of a violent person.

 But in my heart that is not the real truth. When I lay in bed I felt ashamed to think that I had felt such violent thoughts.Even if Tip McLane is a shithead it would not be OK topunch him out because that is not the basis of our democratic system. So I think that I would not vote for Cozzano aftertonight's debate, no matter what your computer system saidabout me. Please make a note of it.

 You will be hearing again from me soon, I am sure.

 Sincerely, Floyd Wayne Vishniak

 39

 Dr. Mary Catherine Cozzano finished her neurologyresidency during the last week of June. She spent a couple of daysin Chicago celebrating with her fellow graduates, but during thepast four years they had forgotten how to goof off, and it took apositive effort to have fun. Then she moved back into her oldbedroom in Tuscola. She wasn't crazy about moving back home atthe age of thirty, but she needed a quiet place in which to study forthe board exams. She didn't have a job lined up yet, and probablywouldn't, at least until things settled down, which would not beuntil Election Day.

 Besides, the house was still partly occupied by technicalpersonnel from the Radhakrishnan Institute, their computers wereall over the place, and so she could almost convince herself that shewas actually living in an advanced neurological research center. Shespent an hour or two each day going over the records of Dad's recovery, learning about the therapy and how it worked. As Dadhad gotten the basic rehab out of the way - learning to walk,learning to talk - his staff of therapists had withered away to a hand­ful who helped him with things like writing. In the same way, the hard-tech people had dwindled, going back to the RadhakrishnanInstitute and leaving high-bandwidth communications links intheir place, so that they could monitor the biochip from the otherside of the country. Zeldo had told her at the beginning of Junethat he too would be leaving soon, but he was still here, sleeping on the floor of James's old bedroom, which had become a weirdmixture of James's adolescent decor (ILLINI pennants and MichaelJordan posters) with appallingly pricey, high-powered computergear. When Mary Catherine asked Zeldo why he was still here, hebroke eye contact and muttered some hacker aphorism about howhard it was to chase down the last few bugs.

 She wasn't sure what to make of the fact that her father was nowright-handed.

 On the night of the State of the Union address, the blood clothad shot up Dad's aortal arch, the giant superhighway that carried almost all of the heart's output. It had spun off into two separate fragments. One had gone up each of the carotid arteries, left andright. The one on the right had caused paralysis on the left side ofhis body, and the one on the left had nailed that hemisphere'sspeech centers, causing aphasia.

 Then, a couple of months later, in the den, the second stroke had caused more damage to the left side of his brain, causing paralysison the right side of his body.

 Dad's soul could make the decision to move, and his brain couldissue the order to his arm or leg, but the order never got therebecause the links had been severed by the stroke. Dr.Radhakrishnan had implanted two chips, one on each side of thebrain. Their function was to replace those broken links so that the orders to move could get out to his body again. Now that the chipshad been trained to convey messages to the correct body parts,Dad's paralysis was gone.

 But aphasia was a different thing. It wasn't just paralysis of thetongue. It went deeper than that. And you couldn't stimulate itwith baboons. It was uncanny that this therapy had worked so wellthe first time out. Dad sounded like Dad, and said the things thatDad would say, but sometimes when he was talking, she suddenlybecame disoriented, stopped listening to him, and began to wonderwhere his words were coming from, whether they were passingthrough the biochip. Dad could tell when Mary Catherine wasdoing this; he called it "going neurologist" and it drove him crazy.

 She felt flaccid and out of shape after four years of residency. Everymorning she would rise at five and go for a run. Any later in theday, and it would get so warm and sticky that she couldn't really geta good workout. Besides, she had done much worse things to her sleep schedule during residency and so she didn't mind getting upearly to do something she felt good about.

 Her usual route took her down the street to the city park, whereshe would take a couple of laps around the Softball diamond and dosome stretching on the infield. Then she would head out of town,crossing U.S. 45 and the Illinois Central, and run along one of thefarm roads, measuring her distance by counting the crossroads,which came at one-mile intervals. Central Illinois in July wasstiflingly humid, and as often as not she found herself runningthrough fog and mist. The early morning sunlight, shining in low, threw a clammy metallic haze over the landscape.

 On the morning of the Fourth of July, a shape materialized in front of Mary Catherine as she jogged down the country road. Atfirst she thought it was a car coming toward her in the wrong lane,but then she realized that it was not moving. She thought it mustbe a car that had broken down. As she got closer she could see a dark shape standing next to the car, motionless, waiting. She unzipped her belt pack and reached into it, making sure that that the stun gun was in there.

 It was a small car, low to the ground. A sporty little Mercedes. Abig hand-lettered sign was leaning against the rear bumper, printedon a square of poster board. It said, MARY CATHERINE -DON'T MAKE A SOUND!

 The figure leaning against the car was Mel Meyer. As MaryCatherine approached, Mel straightened up and turned to face her,holding one finger up to his lips, shushing her.

 It was not exactly a warm and affectionate reunion. Mel pulled asmall black box from the pocket of his black raincoat. He walkedtoward Mary Catherine, clicked a switch on the box, and thenwaved it up and down the length of her body, watching an LEDgraph built into its top. Every time the box passed near hermidsection, the graph shot up to its peak level. Mel moved the littlebox in a narrowing orbit until he finally zerowed in on her beltpack.

 The pack was still unzipped. Mel pulled it open and peered intoit, his bald head grazing Mary Catherine's bosom. He nudged thestun gun out of the way and carefully pulled her key chain out. The world's largest keychain had shed a couple of pounds since MaryCatherine had left the hospital, but it was still formidable. Melturned it over in his hand, waving his little black box over it, and finally zeroed in on the miniature Swiss Army knife.

 He disconnected it from the keychain and held it right up nextto his black box. The LED graph was pinned at its highest reading.

 Then he walked across the road, wound up, and flung the knifeoff into the middle of a cornfield. He made one more pass overMary Catherine's body with the little black box. This time the LEDmeter did not flicker.

 "Okay," Mel finally said. He spoke quietly, but it was easy tohear him in the absolute silence of predawn. "You're clean."

 "What-"

 "If anyone asks, tell them that, uh- " Mel closed his eyes andstood motionless for a few seconds, "you noticed a dog that hadbroken away and gotten its collar tangled up in a barbed wire fenceand you had to take out your knife and cut through his collar to gethim loose. In the process you dropped your knife on the ground and forgot to pick it up."

 "Hardly plausible."

 "It doesn't have to be plausible. Just good enough that no one can call bullshit on you without bring down the wrath of theGovernor."

 "What was in the knife?"

 "A listening device."

 "Must have been a small one."

 Mel was disappointed. "Are you kidding? Don't be a sap. Theycan make them the size of fleas now."

 "Oh. Sorry."

 "Mary Catherine, some heavy shit is going on, and we need to talk. What time you usually get back to the house?"

 "Around six."

 "Okay, I'll drop you off by the park about then," Mel said. "Hopin."

 The passenger door of the Mercedes was already ajar. MaryCatherine, a little shell-shocked, climbed into it. Mel sat downbehind the wheel, started the engine, drove thirty feet up the roadand turned on to a gravel farm road, a tunnel into the corn. Hedrove for a quarter of a mile, until the main road was shrouded inthe mist.

 "Where are we going?"

 "Partly we're just getting off the road so people won't see us,"Mel said. "Partly I want to show you something." Mel let theMercedes coast to a stop, set the hand brake, and popped his door open.

 A short distance away from the lane was a tree, one of themagnificent, solitary oaks that sprouted from the cornfields everyfew miles and that was allowed to remain there by the farmers, justbecause it was beautiful.

 "Now I'm totally lost," Mary Catherine said, getting out of thecar. She faced Mel over the hood. "You're acting kind of paranoid,Mel, if I can offer a professional opinion."

 "I'm fully aware of that," Mel said. "Now, check this out. You might be surprised to know that I have become quite the observerof nature on my little drives down here."

 "Nature? I didn't know there was any nature left in downstate."

 "Well, you have to look for it, but it's there. Watch the tree."Mel turned toward the oak, cupped his hands around his facelike a megaphone, and then did something incredibly un-Mel-like: he made a high-pitched screeching sound, three sharpfalsetto cries.

 The tree rose into the sky. That's what it looked like, for amoment. A thousand black birds rose from its branches in unisonand soared across the cornfield, holding for a moment the shape ofthe tree, then forming into a tightly organized cloud that twistedaround itself, turned inside out, changing directions and leaders butalways staying together.

 Mel was grinning at her. "You didn't know those birds werethere, did you?"

 Mary Catherine shook her head no.

 "Look at 'em," Mel said. "I've been watching them from my car.Watch how the flock can vanish."

 Every bird in the flock snapped into exactly the same bankingturn. At a certain point they were all coming directly toward Meland Mary Catherine, and the flock became nearly invisible as eachbird was viewed edge-on. Then Mel made his screeching noiseagain and they all turned sideways, the hidden flock snapping backinto existence, much closer to them, almost merging into a solidwall.

 "You know, Mary Catherine, that I have spent my career as an integral part of the military-industrial complex. Whatever the hellthat is." Mel waved his arm toward a patch of mist at about threeo'clock. "Right over there is Willy's nylon factory, where theymade parachutes for the Army. You can't get much more military, or industrial, than that. So I have always scoffed at people whoblamed all the world's troubles on the military-industrial complex.But I can't escape the idea that something very big is going oninvolving our Willy. Something that involves spending an ungodlyamount of money."

 "The biochip implant is definitely a big deal," Mary Catherinesaid. She was still mystified by the business with Mel's little black box, and the bird thing made no sense at all, but she decided to playalong for now. "The Radhakrishnan Institute definitely has a lot ofmoney behind it. We knew that from the beginning. And we'vealways been realistic enough to understand that there's an economic dimension to this therapy. If it goes well, the instituteand its backers will have a gold mine on their hands."

 "Yeah, yeah, yeah," Mel said, waving his hand dimissively, "thatis all a given. That's the Invisible Hand argument - that we'reseeing free enterprise in action here. I've been thinking about that argument ever since you came back from your inspection trip. Itdoesn't hold up under scrutiny."

 "Why not?"

 "Sure, a lot of people have brain damage. But there are a million diseases. Cancer, muscular dystrophy, car crashes. Now, there's agood example - car crashes. For decades, a ridiculous number ofpeople died in car crashes. Still do. But even simple things like seat belts took a long time to develop. The car makers had to be draggedkicking and screaming into air bags. The Invisible Hand didn'twork then."

 "What other possible reason could there be?"

 "That this therapy was developed specifically for one patient -William A. Cozzano."

 But you're talking about a vast expenditure," Mary Catherinesaid. "Billions of dollars."

 "Right," Mel said, "which means two things: first of all, thepeople who did this are loaded. In fact, it can't be a single entity. Ithas to be a group of separate entities working in tight formation -like that flock of birds. And secondly, they expect to get a hugereturn on their investment."

 "What could possibly be worth that much money?"

 "Only one thing I can think of. The presidency of the UnitedStates," Mel said.

 At the intellectual level, Mary Catherine thought this whole conversation was ridiculous. But at some deeper level she wascoming down with a severe case of the creeps. She had cooled offfrom her running now and the sweat on her limbs was suddenlyreplaced by goosebumps. She said, "And you think that thisexplanation is actually more believable than the Invisible Handtheory?"

 "I have insufficient data to answer that," Mel said, "but as longas it's a possibility, I have to consider it. Maybe you can help gathermore information for me, so that I can rule out this ridiculoustheory and buy into a more respectable explanation."

 "What should I do?" Mary Catherine said.

 "First of all, assume it could be true," Mel said. "Assume that youmight be enmeshed in a very large conspiracy. Assume that you arebeing listened to and watched, all the time. I already found a bug in my car, and I just found one on you," Mel said.

 Mary Catherine was stunned. "Are you sure?"

 Mel clenched his jaw and actually looked a little peeved. "Don'task me if I'm sure when I say something like this. Of course I'mfucking sure. I have connections you don't know about, kid. Mywhole life is not this fucking corncob business."

 "Sorry."

 "I went out of town for a couple of days. Came back. Got in mycar. Pushed the button for WGN and got some Jesus station fromDeKalb. All my station presets were screwed up. So I took it to a friend of a friend who used to work in the Agency, and he found abug. Then we did a full sweep and found bugs in my house too."

 "My god," Mary Catherine said. If Mel was telling the truth,then there really was some heavy shit going on. If he wasn't, he wasdemented. Either way, this was starting to get serious.

 "They weren't Radio Shack special either," Mel said, "theywere very good bugs. KGB-level technology."

 "Okay, I'll assume I'm bugged. Then what?"

 Mel sighed. "Hell, I don't know. The problem with you down-staters is that everything has to be spelled out."

 "Sorry."

 "Just keep your eyes open. Is that too general? You want aspecific question from me? I can't provide you with a specificquestion."

 "I'll keep my eyes peeled for signs of the military-industrialcomplex," Mary Catherine said.

 "It's not that. It's something else," Mel said. He turned to lookat the flock of birds, which was still careening across the fields,turning this way and that according to some plan that Mel andMary Catherine couldn't puzzle out, vanished and then snappingback into full view, each bird somehow knowing what all the otherbirds were doing. "Let's call it the Network."

 This discussion was crystallizing a number of vague ideas andperceptions that had been floating around in Mary Catherine'smind for a few months. The outlines of an idea were beginning to emerge, much as Mel and his car had materialized from the fog.

 "There is something going on, now that you mention it," shesaid.

 "What can you tell me about it?" Mel asked. He had suddenlyrelaxed and softened.

 "I don't know. It's just that the same few names keep coming up.Gale Aerospace, Pacific Netware, GODS, Genomics, Ogle DataResearch, MacIntyre Engineering. They're independent, yet theyact in a coordinated fashion."

 "Can you give me names of any people who work for theNetwork?"

 Mary Catherine leaned her forearms on the roof of the car,watching the birds, trying to bring things into focus. "A lot ofpeople workfor the Network. Including me, I guess, in a way. CyOgle, Dr. Radhakrishnan, Pete Zeldovich, are all in that category. But I've only seen one person who seems to be of the Network.Does that make any sense?"

 "Sure. Who is this person?"

 "He is called Mr. Salvador," Mary Catherine said. "He stops infrom time to time. Like he's on an inspection tour or something.From the way people act around him, I'd say he's definitely the onein charge."

 "Of the whole Network?"

 "No."

 "How do you know?"

 "Just a feeling. He acts like a guy who has a boss. I think he's incharge of everything pertaining to Dad."

 "So Salvador is an ops man," Mel said. "He manages one of theNetwork's projects - Willy. Who is this boss of Salvador's?"

 "I don't know," Mary Catherine said. "I've had a bare minimumof contact with Salvador. His boss doesn't even enter the picture."

 "Can you give me any clues at all? Does he make phone callswhen he's there?"

 "Yeah. But he uses the phone in his car."

 "Does he get phone calls, or letters, at the house?"

 Mary Catherine suddenly remembered something. She stood upstraight and stared intently at nothing in particular, her eyesjumping back and forth as she tried to reconstruct the memory."Yesterday morning when I was coming back from my run, aGODS van pulled up in front of the house. The driver had an envelope for Mr. Salvador. But he wasn't in; he was due to showup a few hours later. So I signed for the envelope. Salvador showedup later and ripped it open. And threw it away."

 "You're saying that the envelope is still in the garbage?" "They're too security-conscious to throw things in the garbage.They only throw away things like McDonald's wrappers. Every­thing else goes into a burn bag, or straight to a shredder."

 "My god, it's just like the Agency," Mel said.

 "I think that they shred thecontents of envelopes. But theenvelopesthemselves go into the burn bag - and those only getcollected once or twice a week. So I may be able to dig it out."

 "I need that envelope. It has tracking codes and stuff on it," Melsaid.

 "I'll do some looking around later," Mary Catherine said.

 Mel looked ever so slightly crestfallen. Apparently she had notshown enough enthusiasm for this cloak-and-dagger assignment.

 He had a Bruckner symphony going on the CD player in thetrunk of the Mercedes. He climbed back into the driver's seat andturned it up. Mary Catherine climbed in too. They sat in the carand listened to it for a few minutes.

 "Listen to me," Mel said, turning it down again, "I'm waybehind the curve in dealing with this thing."

 "How's that?"

 Mel laughed. In another man it would have been a laugh devoidof humor. But Mel had a talent for finding humor in strange placesand he seemed genuinely amused, though he was not exactlyhappy. "I'm supposed to be Willy's trusted adviser. I'm supposed totell him whether it's a good idea to run for president. And nowlook. He's announcing in a few hours. And I'm still trying to figureout what the hell's going on."

 Mary Catherine had nothing to say to that. She waited for Melto continue.

 "I take my job very seriously and right now I'm failing at it," Mel said. "I have to get my ass in gear. I have to do stuff. To take steps.Some of what I do may not make me very popular with theNetwork. So let me ask you something: do you want to work withme? Or not? Either way is fine."

 It was Mary Catherine's turn to laugh. "Either way isnot fine,"she said. "We're talking about Dad."

 "No, we're not," Mel said gently, "we're talking about whatyour dad became when that chip went into his head. And I'm not sure it's the same thing."

 This was such a disturbing comment that Mary Catherinedecided not to let it sink in just now. "Well, even if he were justanother presidential candidate - one way I'm doing good and oneway I'm doing evil."

 "Leave it to a farmer to see things in those terms," Mel said."Okay, are you going to do good or evil?"

 "Good," Mary Catherine said.

 "That's a nice girl," Mel said.

 "I think that Dad wants to do good also - whatever you mightthink," Mary Catherine said.

 Mel turned and looked at her face. "What's that supposed tomean?"

 "You know," she said, "there are many cases of people who havehad strokes and recovered from them."

 "I thought the brain tissue was dead. How can you recover frombeing dead?"

 "The dead tissue doesn't recover. But in some cases, other partsof the brain can take over for the parts that died. It takes a lot ofwork. A lot of therapy. And some luck. But it's been known tohappen. There are people who had half of their brains blown outin Vietnam who are walking and talking normally today."

 "You don't say. Why didn't you try this with Willy?"

 "We did," Mary Catherine said, "but when the chance of aquick fix arose, he opted for that. There's no telling where hewould have gone with normal therapy."

 "You think he might have come back?"

 "The chances are very low," she said. "But remember, he'smixed-brain dominant. People like that have a knack forrecovering from these injuries."

 "So what are you saying exactly - about Willy wanting to do good?"

 "I'm saying that the Network may be able to exert greatinfluence over him through the biochip," she said, "but that under­neath, his brain may be struggling to reassert control. And that if hepursues the proper therapy, we can increase the chances that thiswill eventually happen."

 "What kind of therapy?" Mel said.

 "He just has to use his head. That's all," Mary Catherine said."He has to exercise his brain and his body, in a lot of different ways,and retrain his neural pathways."

 "Hell," Mel said, "a presidential campaign's not exactly the placefor that."

 "Granted," she said, "unless the candidate travels with, dines with, and rooms with a neurologist."

 She and Mel locked eyes for a moment.

 "You sure?" Mel said.

 "Of course I'm sure."

 40

 "Last year at about this time I accepted an invitation fromthe chairman of my party to deliver the keynote speech at theirconvention, a couple of weeks from today," William A. Cozzanosaid. "Last night, I telephoned him from my home here in Tuscolaand expressed my regrets that I would be unable to participate inthat convention in any way, shape, or form - as a keynote speaker, a delegate, or a nominee. And he was gracious enough to accept myapology for this sudden change of plans."

 Cozzano finally paused long enough to allow the crowd todetonate - something that they were primed to do, since they hadbeen practicing it under the eye of Cy Ogle's crowd handlers for the last hour and a half. When he finally paused for breath, thefreshly painted bleachers surrounding the Tuscola High Schoolfootball field suddenly bloomed with signs, banners, balloons,confetti, and all the other bright insubstantialities of a politicalcampaign.

 "It's not that I bear a grudge against my party, because I don't.In fact, I am still a card-carrying member and expect to remain one,assuming they'll still have me after today."

 This line triggered a laugh that developed into a cheer, which built into another flag-waving crescendo.

 It looked great. It looked great to Cozzano, to his close friendsand family seated around him on the field, and to the three dozencamera crews that had come in from all the networks, major urbanmarkets, and several European and Asian networks.

 Until about a month ago, this field had only had one rank oflow-rising bleachers, on one side of the field. That was adequate forjust about any crowd that the Tuscola Warriors were likely to draw.Then a big donation had come in from the Cozzano family and thebleacher space had been quadrupled, with brand-new ranksinstalled on both sides of the field. The lighting system had beenbeefed up to the point where it lit up half the town. Tuscola nowboasted the best football field of any town of its size in Illinois.

 For today's festivities, a huge podium had been built straddlingthe fifty-yard line, raised about six feet off the ground. There wasenough space for a couple of hundred folding chairs, heavy media support, and one great big red-white-and-blue lectern, massivelyconstructed but nevertheless groaning under the weight of nearly ahundred microphones. Amazingly enough, most of those mikeshad arrived preattached to the lectern, were not actually connectedto anything, and bore the logos of networks and TV stations that were imaginary or defunct.

 Mary Catherine was especially interested to note that Dad nowrated a Secret Service detail. Half a dozen of them were clearly visible on and around the podium, which probably meant morecirculating through the crowd.

 Ogle had arranged the thing in concentric circles. The innercircle consisted of VIPs, friends and family in the folding chairs upon the podium. A few select camera crews and photographers had also been allowed to circulate up here, getting closeup shots. Surrounding the podium was an inner circle of especially hystericalCozzano fans, sort of an all-American cross section, spiced with afew dozen astonishingly beautiful young women who were notwearing very much in the way of clothing but who were careful to hold up their Cozzano signs and point to their Cozzano skimmerswhenever photographers and cameraman pointed lenses in theirdirection, which was constantly. Banks of high-powered bluish-white floodlights, similar to stadium lights but only a couple ofyards off the ground, had been erected on the edges of this crowd, pointed inward so that their light grazed the heads of the Cozzanosupporters. At first Mary Catherine had thought that this must be amistake, and that the technicians would turn the lights toward thepodium. But then the Cozzano supporters had held their whiteCOZZANO FOR PRESIDENT signs up above their heads and the light had caught them brilliantly, making them glow likesnowflakes in a car's headlights.

 Beyond was a broad sweep of open turf where most of the media were stationed, including a raised platform for the TV crews,arranged so that every time they aimed their cameras at the lecternthey had to shoot over the unnaturally brilliant field of wavingsigns, flags, soaring skimmers, mylar balloons, and pumping fists.

 The outermost circle, surrounding everything, was a vast sweatycrowd consisting of all the population of Tuscola and then some.Their function here was to hurl up a barrage of noise wheneverCozzano said something mildly interesting, and to provide acolorful backdrop rising up behind him. In fact, the geometry ofthe bleachers, the lectern, and the main media area was such that it was impossible to get a shot of Cozzano without taking in severalhundred supporters in the bleachers behind him, all waving hankiesand signs, just like fans seated behind the goalposts at a footballgame. To make sure that the level of enthusiasm never dropped,the Tuscola High School cheerleading squad had been deployed, infull uniform, in front of one set of bleachers, and the squad from Rantoul was egging on the opposite set of bleachers. Cy Ogle hadpromised a free set of new uniforms to whichever squad elicited themost noise from their half of the crowd. The Tuscola High Schoolmarching band was lined up behind the podium, primed to burstinto music whenever the mood seemed right. All of this, combinedwith the reckless Cozzano supporters setting off strings of fire­ crackers amid the crowd; the giant vertical Cozzano bannerhanging from the soaring sign of the Dixie Truckers' Home; thecircling airplanes trailing more banners; the hovering choppers; theteam of three precision skydivers who had skimmed over thepodium in formation just before Cozzano was introduced, trailingplumes of red-white-and-blue smoke; and the appearance ofWilliam A. Cozzano himself, landing in the home team's end zonein a National Guard chopper and jogging-jogging - across the field,through a tunnel of supporters, slapping hands on either side thewhole way - it all added up to a show the likes of which had neverbeen seen in downstate Illinois, and which Guillermo Cozzano could not have imagined when he first came down to toil in thecoal mines.

 Mary Catherine had the seat closest to the lecturn. She was wearingbrand new clothes purchased for her by her personal shopper atMarshall Field. The personal shopper and the clothes were bothpaid for by Cy Ogle. The personal shopper was a fifty-five-year-oldSunday school teacher and had chosen the clothing accordingly.Except, that is, for the underwear, which Mary Catherine hadpicked out herself, and which probably would have gotten her in big trouble if she got into a car accident.

 It had already become obvious that for purposes of the campaign,Mary Catherine would serve as a kind of surrogate wife. This wasan awkward notion, to say the least, and as she sat there boiling andsweating under the July sun she made up her mind that she was going to have to have a talk with Ogle about it. The fact that shewas now acting as a secret agent for Mel Meyer made it a little morepalatable.

 James was next to her, very handsome in a new suit that hadobviously been chosen by a personal shopper of his own. Shehadn't seen much of him lately, which was probably a good thing.His book project seemed to have added years to his age - in a goodsense. Somehow he looked taller, leaner, more confident. Helooked like a grown-up.

 The remainder of the front two rows was completely occupiedwith family. The Cozzano family, after a dodgy first couple ofgenerations during which a lot of people had fallen victim to warof influenza, had begun to multiply ferociously during the lasttwenty years. The distribution of ages up here on the podium - afew oldsters, a few more middle-agers, and half a million kids - was a visible demonstration of the exponential growth concept. Inaddition, her mother's family, a prosperous clan of blue-eyedmidwestern engineers, had shown up in division strength. TheCozzanos still had deep roots in the Chicago Italian community. A lot of them were here. And so were a bunch of Meyers.

 It was the biggest family reunion ever. She had kissed a hundredpeople on her way to her seat. She must have half an inch ofpowder caked up on each cheek from bussing all those old ladies.Roughly one thousand people had come up to her and told her that she looked beautiful.

 Mary Catherine was glad that this campaign hadn't yet gotten soslick and controlled that kids had been banished from these bigevents. The podium was an absolute riot. A little toddler girlwandered around behind Cozzano with her diaper peeking out from under her dress. A Domenici boy and a Meyer boy, bothwearing suits that were a size too small, jumped and ducked aroundthe rows of chairs, sniping at each other with squirtguns, occa­sionally picking off an old lady by mistake. Some of the motherswith young kids had folded up a bunch of chairs, tossed them off the platform, spread out blankets, and set up an impromptu day-care center. With their wide-brimmed hats and their spreadingskirts, all in light hues of yellow and white, they looked like a field of daffodils, the toddlers running around from one to the other likefat little bees. Inspired by the bleacher crowd, the extended familyup here on the podium had become rowdy. A dozen ex-Bears had showed up and were seated in a massive phalanx at the very backof the podium, where their shoulders wouldn't block anyone else'sview; they had started passing a hip flask very early and were now beginning to lead the podium crowd in cheers.

 It was a blast. Mary Catherine was having a great time. She couldhardly hear a word Dad was saying. All of the kids in all of thoseextended families looked up to her, she was like a goddess, rolemodel, and honorary big sister to dozens. She had the special statusaccorded to big girls who know how to drive, are skilled at kissingowies, and aren't afraid to throw and catch a football. Consequentlyshe was visited by a never-ending stream of perfectly dressed-uplittle kids who came up to her to pay homage, admire her dress,show her their owies, give her presents, have their shoes tied,display important baseball cards, and ask for directions back to theirmommies.

 Consequently she had no idea what was going on when,suddenly, the entire crowd - bleachers, podium, everywhere -suddenly jumped to its feet and burst forth in wild exaltation. Ten thousand helium balloons launched themselves from the end zoneand headed for Mars. Tremendous barrages of firecrackers went offall over the place, releasing skeins of acrid smoke into the air. Boathorns screeched all over the place as if all the world's seagulls weredying at once, the podium reverberated with the thumping bass drums of the marching band, and from somewhere - a helicopter,maybe? - a thunderhead of confetti descended upon the scene, sodense that for a few moments you could hardly see your own hand.Mary Catherine instinctively looked to her father, who was justvisible through the confetti as a glowing outline, limned by thetelevision lights, blurred by the red-white-and-blue blizzard.

 It seemed like he was a thousand miles away from her. Not ahuman being, but an electronic figment conjured up from thecomputers of a media laboratory. Ronald Reagan had been anactor. At times, William A. Cozzano had begun to seem like aspecial effect.

 Then the blizzard of confetti cleared and he was just standingthere, letting the waves of sound roll over him, and he turnedtowards her, his eye searching through the faces, the smoke, thestreamers and balloons, and he found her, caught her eye, andsmiled a smile that was for her and for her alone.

 She smiled back. She knew that both of them were thinkingabout Mom.

 She wasn't sure what she was supposed to do. She didn't evenknow what was going on, really. But she wanted to be with Dad,and so she walked across the podium and climbed the steps to theraised lectern. He caught her up with one arm around her waist asshe reached the top step and crushed her to his side. The noise levelwent up by another few decibels, if that was possible, and she didwhat she was supposed to do: she looked not at her father, but outon to the crowd, into the battery of lenses, and waved. She felt terrified and forlorn, but with Dad holding her up she knew she'dget through it. It was so good to have him back.

 A huge banner had unfurled from the top of the bleachers and itsaid, COZZANO FOR PRESIDENT. This was not the first timethat Mary Catherine had seen those words, but when she saw themup there, ten feet high, on the Tuscola High School bleachers, sheknew it was for real. And she finally realized what had touched offall of this tumult: Dad had done it. He had announced. He was running for president.

 The rest of the day was completely out of control. It was likebeing stuck in the middle of a riot in which no one got hurt. It waslike the biggest, rowdiest, most drunken wedding of all time, to thetenth power; and instead of a single photographer telling everyonewhat to do, there was an army of photographers. So many flashes went off in Mary Catherine's eyes that she began to see things thatweren't there, as if the electronic flash was a gateway to a hidden dimension. The rally developed into an open-air hugging, kissing,handshaking, and sweating festival and, assisted by shuttle buses,gradually migrated across town to the Tuscola City Park, wherehalf of the pigs in the Midwest were revolving on spits inside giant,rusted, smoking, portable barbecue pits. Green fiberglass portabletoilets were lined up in ranks at one end of the park, like ceremonialguards at a coronation. A linear mile of picnic tables had been setup with red-white-and-blue tablecloths and loaded up withlemonade, iced tea, punch, water, coffee, and beer.

 Mary Catherine made her way through all of this one step at atime, stooping every yard or so to greet someone new. After the first thousand or so people, she completely lost her ability to remember faces. A nice lady came up and shook her hand andchatted with her for a while; Mary Catherine had her pegged as herold Sunday School teacher until she realized that this woman was,in fact, the wife of a Supreme Court justice. She said hello to AltheaCoover, DeWayne Coover's granddaughter and an old collegemate of hers. As the hours went on, she saw a great many peoplewhom she recognized, but oddly enough they were people she hadnever met before. They were movie stars, professional athletes, senators, and musicians. She knew their faces as well as she knew the faces of her own aunts and uncles, and so it didn't seem strangeat all to see them wandering around Tuscola, to see the Senatorfrom Wyoming swapping jokes with the coach of the Bulls.

 At one point she even ran into Cy Ogle and had the presence ofmind to tell him that she wanted to talk to him when he got achance. He couldn't talk to her right away because he wasaddressing the two squads of cheerleaders, Tuscola and Rantoul,who had all gotten a chance to take showers and get pretty. He wasconfessing his total inability to choose which squad had donebetter, and promising to buy new uniforms for both squads.Consequently he didn't talk to Mary Catherine until about an hour later, when he finally tracked her down on the edge of the festival.

 She was standing at home plate on the softball diamond. She hadhung her blazer up on a nail sticking out of the wooden backstop. She had an aluminium bat in her hands and she was knocking flyballs and grounders to half a dozen preadolescent boys, arrayedthroughout the infield and outfield, playing a game called fivehundred. In honor of her high birth, superior muscles, and pinpointplace-hitting ability, they had named her All-Time Batter. Shepunched the balls out. They caught them, keeping track of theirown scores, and threw them back. By hitting the balls in the rightplaces, she was able to keep their scores pretty closely bunchedtogether. After a while, a Japanese TV crew showed up and began to film her. She didn't mind.

 "I detect some bias here," someone drawled, just after she hit aneasy grounder to a small boy who had just entered the game.

 She turned around. It was Ogle, watching her through thebackstop. "How long have you been watching?" she said.

 "Couple minutes. I was going to come out and catch for you.But that'd spoil the visual," he said, nodding toward the Japanese video crew. She could not tell, from the way he said this, whetherhe was serious or making fun of himself.

 "They've got their visual," she said. "Why don't you come outand catch before I break a nail and spoil that visual."

 "Okay, kids!" Ogle shouted, emerging from behind the back­stop, "Now y'all got an all-time catcher too! First one who bopsme in the head gets two hundred points!"

 A ball came sailing from left field, directly toward Ogle's head.

 He pretended not to notice until it was nearly there, then suddenlyheld up his hands and grabbed it inches away from his face."Wow!" he said, looking frightened and shaking his head inastonishment. The kids went nuts.

 Ogle underhanded the ball gently to Mary Catherine. She one-handed it, then turned to survey the field. All the kids jumped up and down and punched their gloves. Little Peter Domenici wascurrently trailing the field, so she tossed the ball lightly up in the airand punched a pop fly to him. He didn't even have to move inorder to catch it, but he dropped it anyway.

 "We need to talk about a couple of things," she said.

 "I'm all ears," Ogle said, pulling on his ears ridiculously. Theywere prominent ears at the best of times. A hard pitch from PeterDomenici was sailing directly toward his right temple and at the lastminute he let go of his ear and clawed the ball out of the air. Amoan of disappointment went up from the fielders.

 "This whole thing is so vast that I don't know where to begin," she said. "I have so many questions."

 "There's no way you can understand everything," Ogle said,tossing the ball to her. "That's my job. Why don't you just tell meyour main concerns."

 Mary Catherine knocked a difficult grounder out to one of herTuscola cousins. "Whose idea was it to have Dad jog from thehelicopter to the podium?"

 Ogle squinted into the sun, thinking that one over. "I'd be hard put to remember who came up with that one first. But your dadenjoyed doing it. And I didn't try to discourage him."

 "Do you think it's advisable, given his medical problems?"

 "Well, he's been jogging three miles a day."

 "Yeah, but wearing a suit, under all that stress, and in front of allthose cameras - what if he had some kind of a problem? Evenhealthy people like Bush and Carter have had problems whilejogging."

 "Exactly," Ogle said "that's exactly why it works."

 "What's that supposed to mean?"

 "You know and I know, and your dad knows, that it's perfectlyokay for him to run that short distance. My god, the man is like ahuman steam locomotive. But most people don't know that. All they know is that Cozzano is supposed to have been sick. Theyhave developed this image of him as a frail, faltering invalid. Whenthey see him jog across that football field, they see vivid evidencethat this is a wrong impression, and they watch very carefully, because there's an element of danger."

 "Could you run that last part by me again?" Mary Catherine said.She and Ogle had gotten into a smooth rhythm now, knocking hit after hit out to the little kids with their baseball gloves.

 "The skydivers," he said. "We had three skydivers come in lowover the podium and land on the grass. Now, why on earth did we do that?" Ogle sounded mystified.

 "I don't know. Why did you?"

 "Because everyone knows that sometimes skydivers break legs.They can't help watching. Same deal with those idiots who weresetting off firecrackers."

 "They worked for you?"

 "Sure they did. Oh, those were just tiny little ladyfingers. Youcould set one off in the palm of your hand and you'd be fine. Butit sure looked dangerous. So people watched. And that's why it wasa great visual when your dad ran across the field."

 Mary Catherine sighed. "I don't know how I feel about that."

 Ogle shrugged. "Everyone's entitled to feelings."

 "Speaking of that whole safety issue," she said, "when did the Secret Service start following Dad around? I didn't know he had a Secret Service detail."

 "He doesn't," Ogle said. "Those were just actors."

 She dropped the tip of the bat down on to home plate and staredat him. "What did you say?"

 "They were actors dressed up like Secret Service."

 "Hired by you."

 "Of course."

 She shook her head uncomprehendingly. "Why?"

 "For the same reason we built extra bleachers, and put extramicrophones on the lectern."

 "And what reason is that?"

 "Being a third-party candidate has big, big advantages," Oglesaid. "But it has some disadvantages too. One of the disadvantages,as Perot found out, is that people may not take you seriously. That is the single most dangerous thing we have to worry about. So atevery step along the way, we need to surround your father with thevisible trappings of presidentiality. Chief among those is the SecretService detail."

 Mary Catherine just shook her head. "I can't believe you," shesaid.

 "Sometimes I can hardly believe myself," he said, turning to face her. A soft, arcing throw was headed toward Ogle from a five-year-old stationed on the pitcher's mound. Ogle deliberately took it inthe back of the head and went into a staggering pantomime of a sillyman with a mild concussion, wobbling around home plate, rolling his eyes, bouncing drunkenly off the backstop. The kids went completely out of their gourds and a couple of them actually felldown on the grass, tossing their gloves up in the air, screaming with uncontrollable laughter. Mary Catherine shook her head, smiling in spite of herself. She looked at the kids who were still strong enoughto remain on their feet and twirled her finger around her ear.

 "When you've recovered," she said, "I have one or two morethings."

 "I think I feel a little better now," Ogle said. "Shoot."

 "I feel like I'm being set up as some kind of a surrogate wife. It'screepy."

 "Yes, it is," Ogle said.

 "It borders on the perverse. I'm not going to do it anymore."

 "You don't have to," Ogle said. "The only reason it happenedtoday was that this is a formal event, kind of like a wedding. In a wedding, you know, the father is supposed to give away the bride.But if the father of the bride is dead, or if he hit the road twentyyears ago with some white trash floozy and a fifth of Jack and neverwas heard from again, then that place must be filled by some otherindividual - it doesn't matter who - anyone with a Y chromosome.Could be a brother, an uncle, even the bride's high-schoolbasketball coach. It just don't matter. Well, a campaign announce­ment is the same deal except that normally the wife is there in hersilly hat and her sensible shoes. You performed that role today; it'sjust that you happened to look a hell of a lot better."

 "Thanks," she snapped, rolling her eyes.

 "Now that the ceremony is over, you can go back to being whoyou are. No more creepy stuff at least until he gets inaugurated."

 "One more thing."

 "What's that?"

 "I'm the campaign physician."

 Ogle was a bit startled. "We already hired-"

 "I'm the campaign physician."

 "We need you for other-"

 "I'm the campaign physician," she said.

 This time it sunk in. Ogle shrugged and nodded. "You'reobviously the best person for the job."

 The direct hit to Ogle's head had put the little kid on thepitcher's mound over the five-hundred-point mark. MaryCatherine thought about starting another game, but her attentionhad been drawn by a great deal of cheering and hilarity from one of the other playing fields. She headed in that direction.

 A football game was in progress. Two teams of at least fifteenplayers each had taken the field. The ex-Bears were evenly dividedbetween those two teams. Cozzano was, of course, the quarterbackof one team. The opposing quarterback wore two Super Bowlrings. The ages of the teams ranged from ten years old up to theearly seventies. Some of the players were farmers and some ranmajor corporations. Mary Catherine recognized Kevin Tice, thefounder of Pacific Netware, serving as a wide receiver; in person, he was bigger and more athletic than his nerdy image would leadone to believe. Zeldo was in the trenches on the defensive line,being blocked by none other than Hugh MacIntyre, CEO ofMacIntyre Engineering, who must have been in his early sixties butlooked as strong and healthy as Dad.

 The game was an extremely loose and goofy affair, with playersof both teams constantly circulating on and off the field to getrefreshments or visit the portable toilets. It was too hot to play hard.Still, each team had a hard core of adult men with highly com­petitive natures, and as the game wore on, all the little kids and thedilettantes dropped out and left behind half a dozen or so guys oneach side, playing football that verged on serious. They didn't havea formal timekeeper, but they did have a deadline: a formalreception was taking place later at the Cozzano residence and theyall had to quit playing at six o'clock.

 At the end, the game actually got exciting. Cozzano's team wasdown by three points with time left for only one play. They cameout in shotgun formation; the ball was expertly snapped by a Nobellaureate from the University of Chicago and Cozzano droppedback to pass, faking repeatedly in the direction of a very tall retiredCeltic who was running toward the end zone, waving his armsfrantically. The defense shouted in unison "ONE MISSISSIPPITWO MISSISSIPPI THREE MISSISSIPPI!" giving Cozzano alittle bit of time, and then they attacked. Zeldo defeated theblocking efforts of Hugh MacIntyre, despite the fact the MacIntyreillegally held on to his belt and began to chase Cozzano around thebackfield. Cozzano scrambled expertly and wildly, evading tackleafter tackle; he was older and slower than Zeldo, but he waswearing shoes with rubber soles. Finally, Zeldo managed to bring Cozzano down near the forty-yard line, just as Cozzano launcheda desperation pass known as a Hail Mary. To no one's surprise, theex-Celtic grabbed the bull out of the air high over the outstretchedhands of the defenders and then fell into the end zone, winning thegame.

 Mary Catherine applauded and cheered along with the rest of thecrowd, then looked back up the field at her father and Zeldo. Theywere lying on the grass next to each other, propped up on theirelbows, watching the action, laughing the deep, booming laughterof men completely out of their mind on a potent cocktail of dirt,football, male bonding, and testosterone.

 41

 Mary Catherine extricated herself from the receptionaround midnight and snuck upstairs to her room. Once inside, shestuck a bent paper clip into the keyhole of the old door hardwareand shot the bolt, a skill she had picked up through long practice atthe age of eight. Now that most of the techies and therapists hadleft, she had her room back the way it was supposed to be, with herold single bed with the handmade quilt on it, family pictures, herown little TV set on a table at the foot of the bed. She kicked her shoes off and stretched out full length on top of the old quilt. Forthe first time she realized how completely exhausted she was.

 The red digits of the bedside clock flipped over to 12:00. Abarrage of firecrackers went off all over town, ringing out theFourth of July. "God forgive me for this," Mary Catherine said,reaching for the remote control on her bedside table, "but I have to see how this looked on TV."

 It was the top story on CNN. And it looked fantastic. MaryCatherine had always known, vaguely, that things looked differenton TV than they did in reality. But she didn't understand that wellenough to predict how something would turn out on the smallscreen.

 Ogle, obviously, had the knack. The rally had been impressiveenough in person. But on television, you didn't see any of theboring, grungy stuff around the edges. All you saw was the goodstuff. They covered the smoke divers. They showed most ofCozzano's run across the football field, and even a brief glimpse ofa string of firecrackers being set off. The shower of confetti looked incredible.

 Andshe looked incredible. She almost didn't recognize herself, but was embarrassed anyway. Could it be that she was destined to wear this sort of clothes?

 The CNN report didn't last long. They hit all the high points ofthe rally, airing all of the shots that Ogle had handed them on asilver platter, and then tossed in a few shots of the picnic, includingsome great footage of Cozzano throwing the Hail Mary.

 CNN moved on to other topics. Mary Catherine picked up the remote control again and wandered up and down the electro­magnetic spectrum, catching glimpses of fishing shows, Home Shopping Network, Weather Channel, andStar Trek before finallylocating C-SPAN, which was playing Dad's speech back in its entirety. For the first time, she got a chance to hear what he hadbeen saying while she was looking around and chatting with all thelittle kids.

 "About half a mile from here there's a factory that my fatherbuilt, largely with his own capital and with the sweat of his brow,during the 1940s. The Army wouldn't let him fight - his mother had already lost one son to a German torpedo - but he wasdetermined to get into the war one way or the other."

 This was not true. He didn't build it with his own capital. TheMeyers raised most of the money.

 On the TV, Dad continued. "That factory made a new productknown as nylon, which was an inexpensive replacement for silk -the main ingredient in parachutes. When the D day invasion wasfinally launched, my father couldn't be there. But the parachutes that he manufactured right here in Tuscola were strapped to the backs of every paratrooper who ventured into the skies of Franceon that fateful day."

 He didn't make the chutes. Just the nylon fiber. The Armybought nylon from a whole bunch of suppliers.

 "After V-E Day, a young man showed up in my father's factoryone beautiful spring morning, asking to see Mr. Cozzano. Well, ina lot of places he would have gotten the brushoff from thereceptionists and the P.R. people but in my father's company youcould always go straight to the top. So in short order this man wasushered into John Cozzano's office. And when he finally cameface-to-face with my father, this strapping young lad becamepositively choked up with emotion and couldn't bring himself tospeak for a few moments. And he explained that he was a para­trooper who had been in the very spearhead of the D day invasion.A hundred men had parachuted down from his unit and a hundredof them landed safely and took their objective with a minimum lossof life. Well, it seemed that these troopers had noticed the Cozzanolabel printed on to their chutes and decided that they liked that name and they had begun to call themselves the Cozzano gang.That became their rallying cry when they would jump out of theairplane. And at that point, my dad, who never shed tears in my presence in his entire life, well, he just burst out crying, you see,because that meant more to him than any of the money or anythingelse that he had gotten out of his factory-

 The TV set went dark. Mary Catherine was sitting up in bed,holding the remote control, aiming it at the screen like a gun. Shewas frozen in place.

 The man she had been watching on the TV set wasn't her dad.Everything he'd just said was an out-and-out fabrication. And Dadwould never tell a lie. Mel was right.

 A familiar feeling came back. It was the clammy fear that hadgripped her on the night of her father's first stroke. For weeks she had thought it would never go away. Then it had begun to relax itshold over her mind and her heart, and as Dad had recovered after the operation, it had gone away completely. She had thought thatshe and her family were out of the wood.

 She'd been wrong. They weren't out of the woods. They hadjust walked through a little clearing. Now she found herself in theheart of a deeper and vaster forest than she'd ever imagined.

 The party noise downstairs had faded to a low murmur. Shecould hear a new sound from the next room. James's old room. Itwas the sound of fingers whacking a keyboard with the speed andpower of a drumroll.

 Zeldo was sitting at his workstation. He had turned off the lightsand inverted the screen so that it was showing white letters on ablack background. He had a huge high-resolution monitor with atleast a dozen windows open on it, each one filled with long snakinglines of text that Mary Catherine recognized, vaguely, as computercode.

 "Hi," she said, and he almost jumped out of his skin. "Sorry to startle you."

 "That's okay," Zeldo said, taking a deep breath and spinning hischair around to face her. "Too much Jolt. You can turn on a light if you want."

 "It's okay," she said. She grabbed another swivel chair and satdown.

 "Thanks. I'm running in blackout mode here," Zeldo said,"been on this damn machine too long and my eyes won't focus anymore."

 "What's going on?" she said. She had to assume, from what Melhad told her, that they were probably being listened to right now.For that matter, Zeldo himself was presumably part of theNetwork, though he seemed like a nice enough guy. And today, inthe football game, she had seen a side of Zeldo that he didn't normally show. She could tell that, whatever devious schemesZeldo might be involved in, he genuinely liked William A.Cozzano.

 "We've had interference problems when your father goes nearmicrowave relay stations," Zeldo said. "We're going to keep himaway from those things, maybe work up some kind of a hat with EM shielding in it."

 "But TV trucks use microwaves, don't they?"

 "Exactly. And he spends a lot of time around TV trucks. So as alast line of defense, I'm building some safeguards into the softwareso that when the chip starts getting stray signals; it'll be smart enough to realize that there's a problem."

 "Then what?"

 "It'll go into Helen Keller mode until the interference goesaway."

 "What happens then? Dad goes into a coma?"

 "Not at all," Zeldo said. "The chip will keep doing what it'ssupposed to do, filling in for the damaged parts of his brain. It's justthat it won't be able to send or receive data anymore."

 "That's not an important function anyway, is it?" MaryCatherine said. "You only send signals into his brain when you arefixing a bug in the software. Right?"

 There was a long pause, and Mary Catherine wished that she hadturned on the room lights. She suspected that she might be able toread some interesting things on Zeldo's face right now.

 "As we mentioned before the implant," Zeldo finally said, "the biochips do more than just restore his normal capabilities."

 This struck Mary Catherine as evasive. "You hackers aren't very good at playing these kinds of games, are you?" she said.

 "No comment," Zeldo said. "I didn't spend half my life learningwhat I know so that I could get tangled up in politics."

 The snappy technical patter had been replaced by a completelydifferent sort of conversation. Both of them were now speakingelliptically with long pauses between sentences. Suddenly, MaryCatherine realized why: both of them knew that they were beinglistened to. Both of them had things to hide.

 She had said something to Mel earlier in the day: Zeldo was in the Network but not of the Network. His fear of speaking freely inthe bugged room was confirmation.

 "As Ogle may have told you, I'm the campaign physician," shesaid.

 "Yes," Zeldo said. "Congratulations. It's going to be a grind."

 "Nothing like residency, I'm sure," Mary Catherine said.

 "Because of. . . because of these pesky bugs and glitches," Zeldo said, framing the words carefully, "I've been assigned to travel withthe campaign, at least for a while. So let me know if there'sanything I can do to help you out."

 "For starters you could tell me exactly what happens when hegoes near a microwave relay station."

 Zeldo answered without hesitation. Now that they had gottenaway from dangerous topics he had relaxed again. "He has aseizure."

 "That's all?"

 "Well . . . before that there are other symptoms. Disorientation. A flood of memories and sensations."

 "When these memories and sensations enter his mind, can he tellthat they are just hallucinations from the chip?"

 This question made Zeldo pause for a long time.

 "You shouldn't grind your teeth. Bad for the enamel," MaryCatherine said, after at least sixty seconds had gone by.

 "That's a profound question," Zeldo said. "It gets us into someheavy philosophical shit: if everything we think and feel is just apattern of signals in our brain, then is there an objective reality? Ifthe signals in Argus's brain happen to include radio transmissions,then does that mean that reality is a different thing for him?"

 Mary Catherine held her tongue, for once, and did not ask whyZeldo was referring to her father as Argus. It was most definitely aslip of the tongue, a glimpse into something that Mary Catherinehadn't been allowed to see yet. If she got inquisitive, Zeldo would just clam up again.

 Another, more interesting, possibility occurred to her: maybe Zeldo had slipped the word in deliberately.

 "And if so," Zeldo continued, "who are we to say that one form of reality is preferable to another form?"

 "Well, if he says things that simply aren't true, and seems tobelieve them, I would say that that was a problem," MaryCatherine said.

 "Memory is a funny thing," Zeldo said. "None of our memoriesare really accurate to being with. So if he's got a memory that works a little differently from ours, and is otherwise healthy and happy, isthat better than being aphasic in a wheelchair? Who's to say?"

 "I guess it's up to Dad," Mary Catherine said.

 Clearly she had to find the GODS envelope. The events of the dayhad convinced her beyond doubt that Mel was right: there was aNetwork, and it was up to something. Mary Catherine went backto her room, changed out of her daughter costume, put on abathrobe, and walked downstairs. The caterers were at work in thekitchen, cleaning up the aftermath of the party; all of the guests hadgone home except for a few old Vietnam buddies of Cozzano'swho sat around the coffee table in the living room having a fewdrinks and reminiscing about the war, alternately laughing andcrying.

 Mary Catherine avoided them and went out on to the backporch. A row of black plastic garbage bags were lined up against thewall, waiting to be collected. She opened one of the bags, sortedthrough a few loose pieces of paper, and found the brightly colored enveloped, still intact except for the broken seal. The mailing labelwas a bewildering panoply of numbers, code words, and bar codes;the inscrutable mutterings of the Network. Mary Catherine folded the envelope, stuffed it into her bathrobe, closed up the burn bag,and called it a day.

  

 Floyd Wayne Vishniak

 R.R. 6 Box 895

 Davenport, Iowa

  

 Aaron Green

 Ogle Data Research

 Pentagon Towers

 Arlington, Virginia

 Dear Mr. Green:

 Just for starters, I figured out your game that you are playing.When you came here you gave me some shit about workingfor that Ogle Data Research. Like you were some scientist writing a dissertation. But now I have figured out what youreally are: you are working for William A. Cozzano. He mustbe paying you money to work on his campaign.

 How did I figure it out? By just noticing what things youput on the little TV set on my wrist. You always showCozzano but you don't show the other candidates as much.

 Well, I watched Cozzano announcing that he would runfor president this afternoon. I did not watch it on the littlewristwatch. I went down to Dale's, which is a bar, andwatched it on the big-screen TV there with some other guys. And I can tell you for your information that just about all theguys who were in that place thought it was real impressive.

 I thought it was impressive too. But now it is two o'clocka.m. and I can not get to sleep. Because I am thinking aboutsome of the things that Cozzano said and it troubles me.

 When he was in that debate in Decatur, Illinois, he spokeabout his dad's parachute factory and how important it was tothe men on D day standing in the open door of the plane. Buttoday, he told a whole story about a bunch of paratroopers andhow one of them came to personally thank his dad. This is astrange discrepancy, don't you think?

 My opinion: something got scrambled up inside Cozzano'shead when he had those troubles. And now, either he hasmemory troubles or else he can't tell right from wrong. Sodon't expect me to vote for him.

 You will be hearing again from me soon, I am sure.

 Sincerely, Floyd Wayne Vishniak.

 42

 Mel Meyer drove into Miami, Oklahoma, in his blackMercedes 500 SL at 4:30 on a hot mid-July afternoon. The sky wasa sickening, yellowing white. He stopped at the Texaco station tofill up with gas and check his oil. He checked his oil religiously -though the car used none to speak of- because thirty years ago theCozzanos had made fun of him for not knowing how.

 He also needed to ask for directions. As he opened the window to talk to the attendant, the 103-degree heat poured in on him likeboiling water. He ordered ultrapremium from the Texaco pumpand popped the hood for the oil check. "How far to Cacher," heasked the grease-streaked, acne-ridden kid smearing his windshieldwith an equally appetizing-looking rag.

 The kid had never seen anything like Mel Meyer - dapper,intense, clad in a perfect black silk suit - nor had he seen many 500SLs. "Why d'ya wanna go to Cacher? Nobody lives in Cacherexcept some crazy old farts," he said. He went to the front of the car, could not figure out how to raise the hood, looked pleadinglyat Mel.

 Mel did not like the kid, did not like Miami, Oklahoma, andwould have given anything to avoid being there. But this was the closest thing to a lead he had come across in four months ofinvestigating the Network. He could have hired a private investi­gator in Tulsa or Little Rock and had him drive out to the placeand look around. But he knew that, whatever this Network might be, it was good at hiding itself. A private investigator, who madehis living watching unsubtle people commit marital infidelities in cheap motels, could not be trusted to pick up the nearly invisiblespoor of the Network. In the end Mel would have to come out and look around himself. He might as well get it over with.

 "Why do you think people in Cacher are crazy?" Mel asked,thinking to himself that he had no right to ask that question, sittingin a black silk suit in a black car in July in Oklahoma.

 He had found precious little in absolute terms as he chased downlead after lead: the institutional roots of the RadhakrishnanInstitute; the fascinating pattern of stock trades surrounding thetakeover of Ogle Data Research and Green Biophysical Systems in March; the interlocking directorates of Gale Aerospace, MacIntyreEngineering, Pacific Netware, and the Coover Fund; and the even more shadowy group of very private investment funds that held majority shares in them.

 He had even placed intercepts on the lines and numbers ofvarious people, hiring monitors placed in vans near microwaverelay towers. Nothing had come up. He had gone through financialreports, he had gone to friends in the FBI, he had tried everything,but he could not find the Network. He had hired privatedetectives, he had hired investigative accountants. He had spent awhole month pulling strings and working various connections in order to get his hands on some IRS data that he thought would be promising. It had turned out to be worthless.

 The one lead that he had was the GODS envelope that Mary Catherine had pulled from the Cozzanos' burn bag on the night ofJuly fourth. Mary Catherine was the one to blame for his beinghere.

 The envelope did not bear anything as obvious as a returnaddress. It had code numbers instead. GODS was a well-run com­pany, highly centralized, and was not interested in helping Mel decipher those codes. He had provided some financial aid to afinancially troubled GODS delivery man in Chicago and eventuallygotten the information that the envelope appeared to have been routed through the Joplin Regional Airport in extreme southwestMissouri, near where that state came together with Kansas andOklahoma.

 Mel had spent four days living at a Super 8 Motel on Airport

 Drive outside of Joplin. He claimed to be a businessman from SaintLouis, working on a big project of some kind. He spent severalhundred dollars express-mailing empty packages to an address inSaint Louis, and quickly became a familiar sight to the three peoplewho worked at the Joplin GODS depot.

 One of them had informed Mel that he was now their biggestcustomer. Mel pursued this line of conversation doggedly and got the man to say that they had another fellow across the border inOklahoma who mailed almost as much as Mel did. Finally, yester­day afternoon, Mel had gotten them to specify a town: Cacher,Oklahoma.

 He snapped back to the steamy reality of Miami. The gas stationkid was peering at him. "You okay, mister?"

 "Yeah. How's the oil?"

 "Fine." Then, continuing to pursue his endemic insanity theory,he said, "It's the lead."

 "Lead?"

 "Yeah. Even though the lead mines are shut down, Cacher issoaked through with lead pollution, and like we learned in school,that will make you crazy."

 Mel muttered genially, as if this information were fascinating,and handed over his credit card. The kid took it into the batteredold station and swiped it through the electronic slot. Their buildingdidn't look like much but they had the latest point-of-purchaseelectronics.

 "You got something else, buddy?" asked the kid with a satisfiedleer on his face, waggling the card in the air. "You've got to payyour bills from time to time, you know . . . just kiddin'."

 Mel was too surprised to be embarrassed. He compulsively paidevery bill within twenty-four hours of receipt, especially thenational ones. You didn't let bills get overdue. Unlike the people who ran Washington, Mel understood that an overdue bill was aclub that other people could wave over your head.

 "It's a mistake," he said, "but why don't you try this one." Hehanded the kid another credit card. Once again, it was rejected.

 "Shit buddy, don't you every pay your bills? What about cash?"

 Mel looked in his wallet. It contained several hundred-dollarbills, a ten, and a five. The bill was $16.34.

 "Can you break a hundred? Mel asked, already feeling he knewthe answer.

 The kid yukked it up for a little bit. "I can't remember the lasttime I saw a C-note. We never got more than a few bucks inchange."

 Down the street, set anachronistically into the sandstone facadeof an old bank, was an ATM machine with a familiar logo. Meltook off his jacket, ambled slowly down the street, trying not to get hotter than he was, and stuck his bank card into the slot.

 The video screen said PLEASE WAIT.

 An alarm bell began ringing on the side of the bank.

 A siren began to sound from the direction of the police station in downtown Miami, two blocks away.

 Mel lurched back down the street, got to the car, and turned on the ignition.

 "Hold it right there, hot shot," said the kid. Mel looked over andwas astounded to see a twelve-gauge pump shotgun cradled in thekid's hands. "You might as well wait for Harold to come."

 The Miami P.D. patrol car, an aging Caprice, swung around thecorner. Mel knew that he could easily outrun it. But it wouldn't bea good idea. Instead he shut off the ignition, and, as a good faithgesture, took the keys out of the ignition and tossed them up on the dashboard, in plain sight. He rolled the window back down and putboth hands on the steering wheel.

 A lean, small, pox-faced cop emerged reluctantly from the Caprice, winced from the heat, and walked over toward Mel,moving with exaggerated slowness.

 "Harold, I presume." Mel said, when he got close enough.

 "What we got here li'l buddy?" Harold said to the kid.

 "Looks like it's credit card fraud to me," said the kid.

 "Come on out of there, fellow," said Harold, shooting a mean,judgmental look at Mel. "Don't make a bad thing worse for you."

 Mel was pissed off, hopelessly out of any chance to controlthings. He eased out of the car, frustrated, frightened, feelinghelpless for the first time in years, and said, "I don't know what thehell has happened."

 "Nothing yet, and nothing will, unless you do somethingstupid."

 "All I want is to pay for my gas and go to Cacher."

 Harold looked at the kid and said, "Why in the name of Godwould anybody want to go to Cacher?" Mel knew what wascoming next, Harold said it anyway. "Ain't nobody there, but abunch of loony-tunes."

 Mel said, "Let me talk to you straight." He had spent enough time downstate to know that this attitude might be appreciated."I'm not trying to pull a fast one, and I don't know why none ofmy cards don't work. Look, take the AMEX, call the eight hundrednumber and you'll see I've got a huge line of credit, and Texaco'sbeen all paid up, and I don't know why the ATM went crazy."

 Harold looked at him and then at the kid. "He broke any laws?"

 "Not exactly."

 "Fella, you look decent enough. Let's go rescue your bank cardand send you on your way out of town."

 They strolled down to the bank, which had closed at threeo'clock. Harold banged on the front door, and a Big Hair Girl peered out the door.

 "Honey, your machine's done eaten this man's card. Think youcould dig it out so's he could leave to go to" - and here Haroldcould not keep a straight face - "Cacher."

 "Cacher," she shrieked, "who the hell would want to go there?" Mel by this time had heard all he wanted to about the deficienciesof Cacher and simply said, "I've got some relatives out there."

 Honey retreated into the bank, opened up the machine from theback side, and retrieved Mel's card. "Before I can let you have this,mister, I got to make sure you're who you say you are," she said.She sat down at a desk, called Chicago, asked a few questions,whistled, shook her head in wonderment.

 "Buddy," she said, handing the card over, "I'm going to treat you with a lot more respect. You're one rich sucker."

 Mel relaxed, realizing for the first time that he was probablygoing to get out of Miami alive. "Could I get change for a hundredso I can pay off boy wonder over at the Texaco?"

 Harold didn't like that. "Now slick, you just be careful. That's my nephew over there, and you bad-mouth any of my kin, youmight be spending a night in jail."

 Mel fumed at his own stupidity, considered a number of replies,and decided to shut up.

 Honey gave him his change. Mel thanked her and resolved to get out of Miami as quickly as he could, saying as little as possible. Hehanded boy wonder a twenty.

 "Seriously mister," the kid said, getting Mel's change, "take careof yourself. We had people go out there and not come back. Those shafts go down a couple of miles, and those crazy people are notaccountable."

 Mel got back in the Mercedes and drove carefully out of town, accompanied by Harold and his radar gun. That's all I need, he thought, to fall into one of Harold's speed traps. As soon as he gotout of radar range, he turned the car toward Cacher and put thehammer down.

 As he drove, the vegetation thinned away and vanished, and the rolling hills took on a steep, foreboding quality. The road itself was potholed asphalt that shook the Mercedes' frame. In the distance hecould see the malevolent tips of the mine tailings, looking muchlike the Welsh coal tips that periodically unloaded and coveredsmall villages in sad valleys. There were no farms, no ranches, onlyancient weather-beaten abandoned shacks, a legacy of the thirties. Running along the road was a single telephone line. There was noevidence of electricity. On the road was regional roadkill:armadillos, 'possums, the occasional dead cat. As the eveningapproached, the whole scene made Mel want to turn around andgo back home.

 And as he approached the scattered buildings of the town, he didjust that. He stopped half a mile short of Cacher, turned directlynorth on to a section line road, and drove north at a hundred miles an hour, turning up a rooster-tail of yellowish lead-saturated dust.Mel prided himself on being a rational man. Usually that meantcontrolling his fear. Today it meant giving into it.

 The faster he drove, the more frightened he became, and as the crossroads flashed by every six miles, he did not look either way.He was convinced that he was being pursued, and not until hecrossed the Kansas line did he begin to slow down. His heart waspounding dangerously and his forehead was stiff from sweat, whichpoured out of his body and was dried to a crust by the airconditioner running full blast.

 Cacher was made up of an old two-story brick school tilted at aprecipitous angle, undermined by a mine shaft that went to close,or a water table that was drained. There was no sign of life, no dogs,no cats, no lights. Gas stations were boarded up. The only inhabitedbuilding was a shabby general store, the paint long since blisteredaway from its rough, knotty wooden siding. In front was a set ofthirties-style, manually powered gas pumps, and, as an afterthought,a U.S. post office zip code sign bearing the WE DELIVER FORYOU emblem.

 Inside the store, it was as dry and hot as a sauna. The heatstrengthened the smell of stale urine that emanated from OthoStimpson, who was sitting in an old wooden swivel rocker with thecanes busted out. His son, Otis, was standing by the entranceholding a small 9mm automatic weapon with a long clip. It was acrude and awkward device, almost as clumsy as Otis himself, but hehad gotten good at using it. He would take it out among the minetailings and fire clip after clip, lead thudding into lead. No one wasaround to complain about the noise.

 If Mel Meyer had pulled into Cacher, the gun would haveturned his Mercedes into scrap metal in seconds. Otis would havepushed the car down a mine shaft. It would have fallen a mile ortwo into the earth and never been seen again.

 "Looks like the little Jew got scared," Otis said. "Got some sensein his head. Won't have much more trouble with him."

 Otho said nothing. A couple of decades ago he would havesighed hopelessly at the racial slur, but he had long since reconciled himself to the fact that his son was a product of his environment andwould never be as cosmopolitan as Otho was, with his fancyeducation at the Lady Wilburdon School for MathematicalGeniuses on the Isle of Rhum. "He's good," Otho said. "He's gotten closer to us than anyone."

 Otho was shaken. No one had ever come to Cacher before. Thevery fact that Otis had been placed in this position - standing in thedoor of the old general store with a machine gun, locked andloaded - was disastrous. If the Network knew that they had beenreduced to such methods, they would probably be cut off, andOtho's responsibilities transferred to someone else. Otho knew thatthere were others - like Mr. Salvador - waiting to take his place assoon as he slipped up.

 "Should we kill him?" Otis said. It was a painfully stupidquestion, but it was good that Otis had come out and asked it. Otis had spent an unhealthy amount of time watching spy movies and thrillers on HBO. Since he had become aware of the nature of thecurrent undertaking, he had let his imagination run away with him,thinking that they were in the middle of some asinine James Bondmovie.

 "That's not what this is about," Otho said. "This is not violence, son. It's not war. It's not espionage. The whole point here is to getthis country back to basics: contracts, markets, keeping yourpromises, meeting your responsibilities. Meyer's an honorable manand if we killed him we'd cut the ground out from under our feet."Otho paused for a moment and stared through a dusty window-pane. "If we were killers, I'd kill Mr. Salvador."

 "How come?" Otis said, astonished. "I thought he was doing areal good job."

 "If he was doing a real good job," Otho said, "Mel Meyer neverwould have come here. He wouldn't even have known thatanything was going on."

 43

 WilliamA.Cozzano's National Town Meeting, which took place in Chicago in August, was the equivalent of a political con­vention. But because it was a pure media event, with no proceduralnonsense to gum up the works, it was a lot more entertaining.

 The opening event was held in Grant Park, a green swath thatran between the towering center of downtown Chicago and thelake. At the cost of permanently alienating the animal-rights andanticombustion constituencies, Cozzano's campaign managers hadset up a huge Sunday evening barbecue. The ten thousandparticipants in the town meeting had been streaming into Chicago all weekend, checking into the big downtown hotels and gettingthemselves settled in the rooms where they would spend the nextweek. The Grant Park barbecue was an informal way for everyoneto get together and goof around before the scheduled events gotunderway at the convention center on Monday morning.

 From the balcony of her hotel suite along Congress Plazaoverlooking the heart of Grant Park, Mary Catherine could see thebarbecue developing through most of the day. Around fivep.m., when the afternoon heat was starting to subside, the smoke risingup from all of those barbecue pits began to look appetizing, and so she put on a sundress. It was rather prim by the standards of anurban beach on a hot summer day, but racy by the standards ofcandidates' wives and daughters. Furthermore, it was light andloose enough that she could play Softball in it, though sliding intobase would be out of the question. Since her display of place-hitting acumen in Tuscola on the Fourth of July, being spunky and athletichad become part of her job description.

 She took the elevator down to the street and strolled through thepark. Mary Catherine could now stroll anywhere in Chicago,wearing any clothing she wanted, at any time of the day or night,because she was always followed by Secret Service agents. She haddecided that armed guards were a great thing and that every girlshould have a few.

 The barbecue couldn't just be a plain old barbecue. It had to bebuilt around some kind of a central media concept. In this case, theconcept was that all of the various regions of the United States werecompeting to see where the best barbecuing was done. MaryCatherine strolled among the smoking beef pits, from Texas, NorthCarolina, Kansas City, and decided that, beyond providing herwith a quick take-out dinner, comparative barbecue was not veryinteresting to her.

 Flocks of black birds, just like the ones Mel had raved about,swirled around the grassy areas scavenging the ends of french fries.One of Dad's favorite sixties rock bands was playing in thebandshell to the north, but she found their songs just one step aboveMuzak. To the south, on Hutchinson Field, a number ofimpromptu games were underway: touch football, frisbee, softball,volleyball. She didn't feel like getting sweaty just yet, and stayedclose to the footpaths, which were lined with double rows of shadetrees.

 Across Lakeshore Drive, along the border of the yacht basin,things were much quieter and several degrees cooler. The basin wasdotted with numbered white-and-blue buoys where recreationalboats could tie up. There was no beach here, just a stone seawall with one or two depressed platforms where boats could take on ordischarge passengers. A couple of big tour boats were circulatingbetween these sites and the open lake, taking people on free rides so that they could appreciate the splendour of the Loop as seenfrom Lake Michigan. That looked cool and relaxing, so Mary Catherine climbed on board one of the boats, sat down in a deckchair, and took her freshly barbecued hamburger out of its wrapper. She and her Secret Service agents were the last persons to cross thegangplank; within a few moments the boat was motoring outthrough a broad avenue between the white buoys, headed for a gapin the breakwater.

 As she was polishing off the last of her hamburger, a womanseparated herself from the crowd of people standing along the railing of the boat and approached her. She was black, nicelydressed, probably in her forties but capable of looking younger. She" moved with unusual confidence through the loose picket fence ofSecret Service agents, giving each of the guards a knowing smileand a nod. She had a nice face and a nice smile. "Hello," she said,gesturing to an empty deck chair next to Mary Catherine. "Is thistaken?"

 "Go ahead," Mary Catherine said. "You're not from aroundhere, are you?"

 The woman laughed. "Eleanor Richmond. It's nice to meetyou, Ms. Cozzano," she said, extending her hand.

 "Nice to meet you," Mary Catherine said, shaking it. "I'm sorryI didn't recognize you right away - I've seen you several times onTV."

 "Several times. Well, you are one attentive TV watcher. Ihaven't been on that many times."

 "I watch Dr. Lawrence's program pretty regularly," MaryCatherine said, "and he seemed to like you."

 "He hates me," Eleanor said, "but I do wonders for his ratings. And, I suspect, for his fantasy life."

 "I was so sorry to hear about Senator Marshall," Mary Catherinesaid.

 "Thank you," Eleanor said graciously.

 Caleb Roosevelt Marshall had gone back to his ranch in south­eastern Colorado "to clear some brush" in the third week of July. The doctors, aides, and bodyguards who traveled with him all thetime had arisen early one morning to find his bed empty.Eventually they had found him on the top of a mesa. He had riddenup there before dawn, watched the sun rise over the prairie, and then blown his heart out with a double-barrelled shotgun.

 He left letters addressed to several people: his staff, various senatecolleagues, old friends, old enemies, and the President. Most of thecontents of these letters were never revealed, partly because theywere private and partly because many of them were unprintable.The President read his letter - two lines scrawled over a piece ofsenate stationery - threw it into the fire, and ordered a doubleScotch from the White House bar.

 Eleanor's note said, "You know what to do - Caleb. P.S. Watchyour back."

 They flew his body back to the Rotunda, where it lay in state fortwenty-four hours, and then they flew him back to Colorado,where he was cremated and his ashes spread over his ranch. As perMarshall's written instructions, Eleanor ran the office for the nexttwo weeks, while the Governor of Colorado debated whom toappoint to replace Marshall.

 He ended up appointing himself. The polls indicated that manyColoradans took a dim view of this, seeing it as naked opportunism.But his first official act was to fire Eleanor Richmond. Thatannouncement sent his approval rating sky-high.

 "I hope you get a good job," Mary Catherine said, "you deserveone."

 "Thanks," Eleanor said. "I've had some feelers. Don't worryabout me."

 "You know, as a person who was raised Catholic, I have to takea dim view of suicide," Mary Catherine said, "but I think that whatthe Senator did was incredibly noble. It's hard to imagine anyWashington person having that much backbone."

 Eleanor smiled. "Caleb felt the same way. And apparently he saidso in some of the notes he left behind."

 Mary Catherine threw back her head and laughed. "Are you kidding? He taunted people-

 "-for not having the guts to commit suicide," Eleanor said,"which would be the only decent way out for some people inD.C."

 "Are you here as an observer," Mary Catherine said, "or are youa participant?"

 "This whole thing is so slick I'm not sure there's a difference,"Eleanor said.

 "I hear you," Mary Catherine said.

 "But to answer your question, I was invited here for the debate."

 "Debate?"

 "Yes. Thursday night. AfterThe Simpsons and beforeL.A. Law.All of the potential running mates are going to fight it out."

 "He's considering you as a running mate?" Mary Catherineasked. She was embarrassed to have been so surprised. Eleanor waslooking at her knowingly and indulgently. "I mean, don't get mewrong, you'd be great," Mary Catherine said. "You'd be fantastic.But I hadn't heard any of this."

 "Honey, remember how this works," Eleanor said. "Neitheryour dad nor any other candidate is going to pick a black womanas a running mate anytime soon - and if they did, they'd never pickme. But he does get some brownie points - as it were - for puttingone in the final four. And that's why I'm invited."

 "Well, I'll definitely look forward to the debate."

 "How about you? What's your role in all this?" Eleanor said, sweeping her hand across the smoking panorama of the barbecue.

 Mary Catherine looked at the view and considered this question.She knew now why she had chosen to go on the boat ride: to getaway, to stand back from things, to look at her life from a distance.The same impulse had probably struck most of the people on theboat. This conversation with Eleanor was just what she had been looking for.

 She trusted Eleanor instinctively and wanted to tell her the truth:that something was wrong with her father. That during the last couple of months she had watched his every move, listened to hisevery utterance, used every scrap of her neurological training to piecetogether the puzzle of what was happening inside his brain. That she was spending a couple of hours a day with him in intensive, privatetherapy, trying to bring him back. And that the further she got into this thing, the lonelier she got, the more scared she became.

 But she couldn't quite say that yet. So she had to play theairhead. "Who the hell knows?" she said.

 Eleanor put one hand over her mouth, in a gesture that wasincongruous and cute in a tough middle-aged woman, andlaughed.

 Mary Catherine continued, "My role is to be pretty, but not too pretty; smart, but not too; athletic, but not too. I think what theyreally wanted was a nice college girl. You know, the kind of girlwho could go to college campuses in jeans and a sweater and sit cross-legged on the floor in dorm loungers and rap with her peers.They got a neurologist instead. And there's only so many AIDSbabies I can kiss before that gets kind of old. So my life is on holdfor a while until things settle down."

 "Well, we all go through transitions," Eleanor said. "This sort ofthing - a big campaign - is a kind of upheaval that can be useful."

 "Useful how?"

 "It shakes everything up. Everything's in flux for a moment, youhave the chance to go off in new directions, fix old problems inyour life. Believe me on this."

 Mary Catherine smiled. "I believe you," she said.

 Ever since the beginning of William A. Cozzano's National TownMeeting, the high-tech wristwatch strapped to Floyd WayneVishniak's arm had been flaring into action several times a day,confronting him with live coverage of the events that were takingplace only a couple of hundred miles away. He welcomed the freeentertainment, which took his mind off the stupid work he wasdoing.

 He had lived for quite some time now on a meager unemploy­ment check, and had long since given up trying to find himself ajob. But now, Floyd Wayne Vishniak, by virtue of the PIPERwatch on his arm, had become, in effect, a personal adviser toGovernor Cozzano. It was a weighty responsibility. He was notgoing to sit around in his trailer drinking beer and acting like some kind of a buffoon. He was going to educate himself. He was goingto start paying attention to the presidential campaign and learnabout all of the candidates and the issues.

 A week or two after he had first donned the PIPER watch, backin June, Vishniak had been in downtown Davenport to take care ofa bit of business, and he had seen a cluster of newspaper machineson a street corner. In addition to the Quad Cities paper andThe DesMoines Register, these included theChicago Tribune, USA Today, TheNew York Times,andThe Wall Street Journal. As it happened, hispockets were heavy with quarters, and so he brought a copy ofeach, blowing two and a half dollars. He took them all back to histrailer and read them. There was some interesting stuff in there.

 Since then it had become a habit. Two and a half bucks a day,six days a week, added up to fifteen bucks, plus an additional fivebucks on Sunday made twenty bucks a week. Eighty dollars amonth. On Floyd Wayne Vishniak's budget it was a lot of money.He had cut back on his beer consumption, and, as the summerwore on and the tassels began to sprout from the corn, he had takena job detasseling.

 Detasseling was a common practice in Iowa; it was the masscastration of corn plants by the forcible removal of their tassels. Theactual yanking was done by hand, by individual detasselers walkingup and down the rows, endlessly, beneath the hot August sun.

 Floyd Wayne Vishniak would drive out to the fields early eachmorning to put in a couple of hours before the sun became hot, go back into Davenport to feed rolls of quarters into the newspaper machines, read the papers and drink Mountain Dew all day, thendrive back out to the fields in the cool of the evening to continuehis work. For the first couple of weeks of the detasseling season, theevening shift had been rather dull, but things perked up whenCozzano's National Town Meeting finally got started, and hebegan to get coverage two or three hours a night.

 The Town Meeting had seemed a little bit hokey when theyannounced it, but in practice it turned out to be damn impressive. Some very important people were showing up at this thing. Theyhad a couple of so-called surprise appearances every evening, asmovie stars, ex-football heroes, captains of industry, and even a fewrenegade politicians began to show up at the Meeting and throwtheir support behind Cozzano.

 By the third or fourth evening, a clear pattern emerged in thecoverage. At sevenp.m. the PIPER watch would come on, withthe familiar logo and theme music. For fifteen minutes or so itwould show an edited broadcast of that day's events at McCormickPlace, Chicago's huge lakeside convention center, the site of the National Town Meeting. Then there would be fifteen minutes ofanalysis from a team of pundits, some pro-Cozzano, some anti-. Then half an hour of taped stuff, like a speech by Cozzano fromearlier in the day. Then the program would cut to a hotel suitesomewhere, a living-room-type environment, and Cozzano wouldsit down with various groups of Americans who wanted to bitchabout their problems: unemployment, lack of heath insurance,shitty public schools, and so on. Cozzano would sit there and listento them ventilate, jot down the occasional note, ask the occasional question, and then he would usually deliver some kind of a littlesermon that was intended to calm them down and make thembelieve that he cared about their problems and would certainly dosomething about them at the White House.

 The PIPER watch beamed out these little images as he made his way across a vast flat cornfield, completely alone, the only thingmoving within several miles. His hands bobbed up and downrhythmically as he shuffled down the mile-long rows, reaching outwith both arms to grip and yank the tassels, and when somethingespecially interesting came on the screen - a surprise appearance bya major star, for example - he would stop for a minute and standmotionless, staring at his wrist. At the beginning of these eveningshifts, the images on the little screen were pale and washed-out, butas he inched his way across the field, and the sun sank into the flat horizon, the light from the watch became brighter, its colors purer,until finally the moon and the stars came out and Vishniak wasgroping his way across the field in darkness, the images of theNational Town Meeting radiating in pure intense colors as though the wristwatch were a bracelet of rubies, emeralds, and sapphires.

 Tonight, Governor Cozzano was meeting with a group of blackpersons who had organized themselves out of the undifferentiatedmass of Americans gathered together for the National TownMeeting. They had got together and formed their own littleorganization which had then promptly splintered into little groupswho all hated each other. Now, the leaders of the little factionswere meeting with Governor Cozzano over a nice dinner in hishotel suite. They were eating tiny little miniature chickens anddrinking wine.

 One of the black people was using an analogy to explain why black people were not becoming successful executives in large enough numbers. In the game of football, he pointed out, blackpeople were often valued as wide receivers and running backs, butcoaches were resistant to making them quarterbacks. GovernorWilliam A. Cozzano listened to this analogy soberly and thought­fully, chewing on a morsel of the miniature chicken and noddinghis head from time to time, never taking his gaze off the face of theman who was speaking. When the man was done, Cozzano satback in his chair, took a sip of wine, and went on a little stroll downmemory lane.

 "You know, that business about quarterbacks really hits home tome. I can remember back in about 1963 when I was on the Illinoisteam, and we traveled to Iowa City to play a game against theHawkeyes. They had a starting quarterback and two others on thebench, all of them white, and they also had a few black playersrecruited from across the river, here in Illinois. In particular they had a young man named Lucullus Campbell, who had been thestarting quarterback for his high-school team in Quincy, Illinois, ariver town. He had been splendid in that role - an incredible passerwho could also run the ball. Well, before the game even started, theHawkeyes' starting quarterback was out with the stomach flu. They started their second-string quarterback, and sometime in the secondquarter of the game, he took a very serious hit and went down witha knee injury that knocked him out of the game. And so they putin their third-string quarterback.

 "And let me tell you, that young man - with all due respect tohim - was just no good as a quarterback. He dropped the ball. Hethrew interceptions. He tried to hand off the ball to people who weren't even there." Cozzano paused for a moment and dabbed athis mouth with his napkin while the people around the table laughed. "Now, I was an offensive player, and so, when theiroffense was on the field - while this poor fellow was making all ofthese mistakes - I was on the sidelines, looking straight across thefield at poor Lucullus Campbell. He was watching this third-string quarterback in disbelief. I could clearly read the frustration on his face. Finally he got up and approached the coach and spoke to him.I couldn't hear his words, but I knew what he was saying. It's auniversal plea: 'Put me in, Coach. I can do it.' And you knowwhat? The coach didn't even look up at him. He wouldn't lookLucullus Campbell in the eye. He just shook his head no and keptgoing through his clipboard. And I remember thinking that thatwas just about the most unfair thing I had ever seen. I went up tohim after the game and I told him so, and I'd like to think that hetook a bit of comfort in my words." Cozzano had delivered the firstpart of this story with kind of a wry humorous tone, then turnedsad. But at this point he became angry at the memory, sat upstraight in his chair, and began pounding his index finger into thedinner table. His guests sat riveted. Cozzano, pissed off, was aformidable presence. "Ever since that day, I have found it heart­rending to see talented, ambitious black people, willing and able tocompete in whatever field, held back by tired old white men whodon't want to give them a chance. And I vow to you that I will never become one of those tired old white men - and I won't allowany of them to serve under me either."

 The dinner guests broke into spontaneous applause. Floyd WayneVishniak, standing two hundred miles away in a cornfield, who didnot give a damn about black persons, got a lump in his throat.

 The next day, after he had bought all of his newspapers and readthem over a bottomless cup of coffee in a diner, he went to thepublic library and, with some assistance from a librarian, looked upthe microfilms forThe Des Moines Register during the fall of 1963.He searched back and forth, the photographed pages zoomingacross the screen of the microfilm reader, until he found theaccount of the Illini-Hawkeye game.

 An hour later he was out on the road in his truck, headed southalong the river, toward the town of Quincy.

 After he returned from his night detasseling shift, he sat down athis kitchen table with a beer and a fresh white piece of paper andrelayed the results of his research activities to the one man who could make the best use of the information.

  

 Floyd Wayne Vishniak

 R.R. 6 Box 895

 Davenport, Iowa

  

 Aaron Green

 Ogle Data Research

 Pentagon Towers

 Arlington, Virginia

 Dear Mr. Green:

 Yesterday night your friend and mine Governor Cozzano tolda very interesting dinnertime story about the 1963 Illini-Hawkeye football game and one Lucullus Campbell. Thisstory put a lump in my throat and so I went down to thepublic library to read more about it, as they often encourageus to do at the end of important TV shows.

 Imagine my surprise to discover that the young William A.Cozzano did not even participate in the 1963 game because hewas suffering from the stomach flu. He did not even set footin Iowa City on that day.

 Perhaps he just got the year wrong. Well, I checked 1962,'61, and '60 also. In '60 and '62, the game was held inChampaign. In '61, it was held in Iowa City. Cozzano wasthere all right, but according to theDes Moines Register, thestarting quarterback played the whole game.

 Perhaps it happened in Champaign? Well, in '60, thestarting quarterback for the Hawkeyes got hurt and the second-string quarterback played very well for the entire game. And in '63, the starting quarterback played the entire game.

 There was no Lucullus Campbell playing for Iowa ever.

 I took a little drive down to Quincy and found out thatthere was a Lucullus Campbell who played for their highschool and who was on the 1959 Illinois Ail-Star team. Thatwas the same year Cozzano was an All-Star. He was ahalfback. He never played college ball because he got killed ina car crash on the night of his graduation from high school.

 So a person might think that William A. Cozzano is makingup lies. That he is a dishonest politician like all the others.

 But I do not agree with this idea because I believe inCozzano and I could see the strong emotion on his face whenhe told that story. No doubt, he believed in the sincerity of hisown words.

 Then how to explain it? Is Cozzano crazy?

 No, I do not think so. But it is a well-known fact thatCozzano had a stroke earlier this year and that his Jew lawyercovered it up and secretly ran the state of Illinois for sometime.

 Then Cozzano went and had him a special hightechoperation and got better. OR SO THEY SAY. But maybethings aren't completely fixed inside of his head. Maybe hisbrain's memory banks have been scrambled. Maybe that newchip or whatever that they used to fix up his brain is actually playing tricks with his memory!

 I trust that you will provide this info to Governor Cozzanoas soon as possible so that he can take steps to have theproblem fixed before he becomes President and begins to runthe entire country with his faulty brain. This is a matter of totalimportance.

 I cannot sleep anymore.

 You will be hearing again from me soon, I am sure.

 Sincerely, Floyd Wayne Vishniak

 44

 Chase Merriam, the High-Metabolism World Dominator andsquire of Briarcliff Manor, New York, actually knew some peoplewho seriously thought that the way to beat the crime problem in New York was to drive a junky old car. Most of these misguided people were rather young - kids who had come up in the eightiesand had a lot of cleverness but no real intelligence, when it came tomoney. At a certain point along their sharply rising income curves,they had all gone out and bought BMWs or the equivalent. Not top-of-the-line BMWs, but mediocre ones. Sports sedans. And,inevitably, within a couple of weeks, someone smashed out awindow, the alarm went off, they had to get up in the middle ofthe night, sweep up the glass, call the insurance company - thewhole ritual.

 Then they pontificated. It was easy enough to understand thepsychology of it: all of these people were still young enough tothink that life was terribly meaningful, that every little event hadsome role to play in the tightly written plot-line of the universe. You were supposed to learn from these things. Smash went thewindow,whoop-whoop-whoop went the car alarm, and then theyuppie came out of his brownstone, put his chin in his hand, and thought deep thoughts. The conclusion they always came to wasthat, by buying a nice car, they had somehow offended God with their dirty materialism, and now they were being punished. As ifthe dumpster colonists who roamed the streets at threea.m.,punching out windows and scooping up people's tollbooth changeto buy crack, were righteous angels dispatched by an avengingGod.

 Chase Merriam drove a Mercedes-Benz the size of an aircraftcarrier and he made no apologies for it. It had a built-in alarmsystem, but he had no idea how to work it. He never used it. Infact, he never even bothered to take the keys from the ignition orlock the doors, because he never parked it more than fifty feet awayfrom a good man with a gun. His parking space in Manhattan cost more than a three-bedroom split-level in the upper Midwest andwas probably a better investment.

 A really, really expensive car emitted a powerful psychologicalforce field of its own. Smashing out the driver's-side window of a BMW 535i was a routine and insignificant New York gesture, onthe level of vaulting a turnstile. Chase Merriam himself was oftentempted to give it a try, to wrap his jacket around his hand and pokeit through the glass just to see the little blue diamonds spray. Butpeople were still awed by a big Mercedes sedan, Rolls Royce, orFerrari. They respected these things intuitively. Maybe theyharbored just a bit of fear, deep inside their hearts, that such carswere owned by Mob bosses or Colombian drug lords. But ChaseMerriam liked to think that it wasn't just the fear of retribution. Heliked to think that deep inside their battered, blackened hearts,people still harbored a respect for Quality.

 Merriam had seen the Mercedes-Benz side-impact simulator in action on the promotional videotape that the Mercedes dealership had given to him. It was a naked automobile chassis with a hugeblock of concrete projecting out the front end, painted withdangerous black-and-yellow diagonal stripes. Like a rifle bullet,exploding balloon, or hummingbird's wings, it was a thing neverseen by the naked eye; it was visible only in high-speed moviefilms, drifting in from the side with ghostly clarity, utterly silent,seeming to move only at a snail's pace. But when it drifted into the side of the big Mercedes-Benz sedan, like a cloud scudding acrossthe summer sky, the side of the car caved in and the head of thedummy snapped sideways and you realized, for the first time, justhow fast that black-and-yellow juggernaut was moving.

 Those side impacts could be vicious. It didn't take manyviewings of the side-impact videotape to figure that out. The sideof your head always whacked into something. And that's where allof the good stuff was. The front of your head held your personality,and if the rim of the steering wheel happened to punch through itat sixty miles per hour, the worst you could expect was maybe a divorce and then you had to throw out your ties and buy new ones. Big deal. A personality change, after all these years of having thesame old one, would be kind of interesting. But the side of your brain held all the good stuff. That's where you did your thinking.The left side, which was the one at risk during a side impact,contained your logical, rational, spatial capabilities, and if you got ahunk of imploding door frame jammed into that, you'd be out of ajob. You would have to start taking pottery classes.

 The Mercedes people were intelligent enough to realize this andso they had plowed their big black-and-yellow slab of concretethrough a few million dollars' worth of rolling stock, gone over the creepily silent high-speed films, and made a few changes. Which meant that the left hemisphere of Chase Merriam's cerebral cortex was about as safe as it could ever be inside of a moving car.

 These factors put together - the guarded parking space, his safehaven up in Westchester, where crime was still illegal; themysterious psychological force field; and the high-speed films - allcombined to give Chase Merriam a feeling of invulnerability.Which was a good thing, because he liked to work late, long pastthe dinner hour in his office in lower Manhattan. And hewouldn't have been able to do that if he drove a Subaru andparked it on the street. He would have been too terrified toventure out after dark, he would have slept on the leather couchin his office and scurried out at daybreak to find that his Subaru was now a stripped frame.

 He did some of his best work late at night. Which, in any givenmonth, more than paid back the cost of the big car. The onedrawback to working late was that, lately, his damn wristwatch keptinterrupting him. But in a way, he didn't mind all that much. Heenjoyed keeping up with political events. This thing on his wrist only came to life once or twice a day, and it was always withsomething important. It was like having a personal assistant who didnothing but screen the political coverage for him, letting him knowwhen to tune in.

 Cozzano's National Town Meeting was about halfway throughits one-week life span when Chase Merriam worked rather late onenight, watched the eleven o'clock news just long enough to get thebaseball scores, and then headed down to the parking space wherehis Mercedes-Benz awaited, keys in the ignition, gleaming and polished under the brilliant homeboy-chasing lights in his private parking ramp. The guards washed and polished the car during theday. They didn't have much else to do.

 Chase Merriam thought that his car looked especially clean and nice tonight and so he slipped a few greenbacks to the guard as heopened the driver's-side door for him. He sank into the ergonomicleather and twisted the key and the tachometer needle lifted off thepin and settled in at a comfortable idle. Short of getting down onyour hands and knees behind the car and sticking your tongue intothe tailpipe, this was the only way to tell that the engine wasrunning. He was out on the West Side Highway, northbound,almost instantly.

 The West Side Highway was not much of a highway at all untilyou got a little bit farther north and it became a proper limited-access affair with on-ramps and so on. At this hour it was alwayssurprisingly free from traffic. The only people out tonight were a few nocturnal taxi drivers and one or two heavily burdened third­worldish vehicles, the lifeblood of the New Economy, out runningerrands.

 Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center towered above thehighway on concrete buttresses, like a hydroelectric projectaccidently constructed in the wrong place, appallingly large. ChaseMerriam weaved through some complicated ramps and lanes under the George Washington Bridge, almost out of Manhattan now, and pulled up short behind a rickety, windowless gray-and-rust-coloredvan, bouncing along on bald tires and dead shocks, with a wholelot of shit piled on top of the roof. The driver was badly confusedby all of those lanes, splitting and converging inexplicably under thedistracting sight of the mighty bridge. Chase Merriam could haveroared past him to one side or the other, but the driver of the vankept changing his mind as to which lane he should be in, making violent changes in his course, and each time he jerked the wheeltoward this lane or that, his van, top-heavy with scrap metal,rocked dangerously on its overmatched suspension.

 The gloom-slicing headlights of the Mercedes-Benz illuminatedthe rear bumper of the van, some kind of a home-made numberwelded together from diamond-tread steel plate. The owner, whowas quite obviously in the scrap business, had manufactured the bumper himself. It was hardly less imposing than the black-and-yellow ram of the sideways impact simulator, and so ChaseMerriam resolved to keep the gleaming perfection of his Mercedes far away from it.

 The maker, upon finishing the structural part of the bumper, hadturned his torch to decorative purposes. He had laid down a thick bead of molten iron on the back surface of the bumper, inscribingthe following message on it in careening, heavy-metal cursive:SOLO DIOS SABE HACIA DONDE VOY.

 Chase Merriam, who did not speak Spanish but who haddeveloped a basic level of skill in Romance languages during his prep years, was mentally translating this phrase (ONLY GODKNOWS something . . .) when a sleek aluminium-alloy wheel rim, freshly stripped from a hapless Acura Legend somewhere on thestreets of the naked city, slid off the roof of the van, bounced once on the pavement, and plunged directly through his windshield,catching him in the forehead.

 In the instant that the rim had taken its fateful bounce, glittering in his headlights like a meteor, the whole world had become aMercedes-Benz crash-testing laboratory. Chase Merriam, ofcourse, was the dummy. But he experienced it with the eerie clarityof the white-coated Teutonic engineers in the safety of theirscreening room, going over the silent videotapes. It all happenedsilently and very, very slowly, and when the car, at some pointseveral minutes into the crash, slammed into some sort of a momentous object - he wasn't sure exactly what, but he had thesense that he was a great distance from the roadway proper at thispoint, and that the car hadn't been properly horizontal for a long,long time - he actually saw the air bag unfurl before him, flutteringlike a white flag raised in a hurricane.

 The car kept skidding and rolling and plowing through things fora long time, repeatedly changing direction, like the Magic Bullet meandering through Kennedy and Connally. Each little scrape and secondary impact probably did about five thousand dollars' worthof damage. After a while, it almost got boring; he must be leavinga trail of torn-up sod and flattened road signs all the way toYonkers. But eventually, he stopped. His inner ear still told him hewas riding the Tilt-a-Whirl, but by now his left arm had flopped outward, through the place where the double-glazed window wassupposed to be, and was resting limply on some kind of a surface -hard-packed, inorganic New York dirt - and that surface sure wasn't moving.

 So far he had not experienced even the smallest bit of physical pain, but something about the car just didn't feel right. Because hiseyes got smeary with blood and then swelled shut pretty quickly, he had to figure out using other sensory inputs. But the upshotseemed to be that his Mercedes-Benz was upside-down now andhe was hanging by the safety belt and the shoulder harness, his legs supported by the steering wheel, his knees poked uncomfortably bythe turn-signal levers.

 The phone was right there, he could find it by groping for it, heknew which button turned it on. Then all he had to do was dial 911. But he couldn't see the number buttons. He punched one ofthe presets, the one that dialed his home number. He would tellElizabeth to call the NYPD. But it was now past eleven thirty andElizabeth had turned off the ringer on the phone and gone to bed;all he got was his own answering machine.

 He considered dictating a last message to the world. Elizabethwould find the light blinking on the machine tomorrow and listento it; she would call the NYPD and they would at last find him,dead from boredom. They would play the tape at his memorial service. It would be dry, calm, witty, noble, and brave.

 But he could always call back later and do that. So he hung upto consider his options. All the other presets were businessnumbers. No one would answer them at this time of the night.Dialing 911 was harder than it sounded, because the phone had toomany buttons and they all felt the same."You okay?" a voice said. A man's voice."Hello?" Chase Merriam said.

 "Shit, man, that was incredible," the man said. "I can't believe you alive. That is a bitchin' car, man!"

 He couldn't seem to move his left arm, which was still danglingon the ground. He reached across the body with his right handand stuck the phone out the window. "Would you please dial911?"

 "Sure," the man said. Chase Merriam heard him shuffling thephone around in his hands, figuring out which way was up, thenhe heard the three electronic beeps.

 "Hello, Officer," the man said, "I would like to report a car crashin Fort Washington Park. Down by the river. This car jumped theguardrail on the highway and now it's upside down. And I thinkyou better get here real quick, because this dude is stuck inside the car, and this is a real bad area. It's full of bad criminals man, peoplewho would cut this guy's heart out for a dollar, and they are allgathering around the vehicle right now, like jackals around awounded beast, waiting for the right moment to strike. Huh? No,I'm sorry, I won't give you my name. Okay. Bye."

 "Thank you," Chase Merriam said.

 "No problem,"

 "That business about the jackals - that wasn't for real was it?"

 "Shit man, where do you think you are? Cape May?" the mansaid. "We are, like, just a couple of blocks from the biggesthomeless shelter in New York City. The only ones here are thepeople they wouldn't let into the shelter because we're too big andbad and scary."

 "Take whatever you want," Chase Merriam said. "I don't care."

 "Okay. We'll begin with the watch," the man said. He pickedup Merriam's arm, which instantly began to hurt, and after a littlebit of fiddling around, figured out how to detach the watch. "Whatkind of watch is this, anyway? Looks like some cheap piece ofdigital shit."

 "It's a long story."

 "Well, if a guy was going to look for your wallet-"

 "Beats me," Chase Merriam said. "I have to assume it fell out."

 The man reached in the window and patted Merriam down,finding no wallets in the usual places. "Does this thing have a domelight?" he asked.

 "I believe a dome light is standard on the big Mercedes. It'sprobably broken."

 "Yeah," the man said, crestfallen. "I guess I'll just have to gropearound."

 He picked up Merriam's left arm and moved it out of the way, gently and firmly. Then he lay down on his belly and crawledforward, shoving his arms, head, and shoulders in through thecrumpled window frame, shoving Merriam back against the set, and began to feel around on the ceiling of the car, now the floor.

 "Damn!" he said. "It ain't anywhere. You sure you had awallet?"

 "Positive. Maybe it was thrown out of the car."

 "Shit!" the guy said. He crawled into the car even farther, all theway up to his waist, the bulk of his body pinning Merriam tightly back. To judge from his breath, it had been a few decades since thisguy had laid hands on dental floss.

 The insides of Chase Merriam's eyelids glowed a warm pinkish-orange color.

 "Shit!" the guy said again, and began to thrash around wildly,trying to extricate himself from the car. In the process he did a littlebit more damage to Chase Merriam, but by now it was all kind ofsuperfluous. "They never come this fast!"

 "Freeze!" shouted a nearby voice that could only belong to acop. "You are under arrest!"

 After that it was all footsteps. The man ran away. A cop followedhim; they crashed into some brush and then receded into thedistance. And then another set of footsteps approached the over­turned car. Slowly, calmly.

 "Nice car," the cop said. "Didn't know these babies were four-wheel-drive."

 The debate would be starting in less than five minutes. In additionto the cavernous exhibition space where most of the TownMeeting was happening, McCormick Place had its own theater,which was currently filling up with audience members chosen atrandom from Ogle's ten thousand typical Americans.

 Eleanor Richmond, sitting in a dressing room backstage, havingher face fixed by a professional makeup artist, was startled to realizethat she wasn't nervous at all.

 That was strange because she was about to go on nationaltelevision. She had been on national television quite a bitrecently, but this time she was going to engage in verbal combatwith three other people who were better at this kind of thingsthan she was. Had she become so jaded that she didn't even careanymore?

 Someone knocked on the door and pushed it open beforeEleanor could tell them to get lost. It was Mary CatherineCozzano. She slipped quickly into the room, glancing nervously behind her, and leaned back against the door, pushing it shut. She was carrying a bouquet of blue flowers.

 "Sorry, I didn't want to be seen coming in here," she said."People would say I was playing favorites."

 "Did you get those from a boyfriend, or just some politicalweasel?" Eleanor said, eyeing the flowers. "They're nice."

 "I got them from a florist," Mary Catherine said. "They're foryou."

 "Well, how nice! Thank you!"

 "I got blue ones, to symbolize the truth," Mary Catherine said,"because you always tell the truth."

 "Well, not always," Eleanor said, "but often enough to givepeople the willies."

 "You look great," Mary Catherine said. "I hope you knock 'emdead."

 Eleanor didn't figure out the real reason for her lack of nervousness until she went out and sat down on the set. She was the lastone to get there. The other debaters were a white man; a somewhatAnglicized Hispanic man; and a middle-aged woman, blond andblue-eyed. And all of them were perfect. They were good-looking,with large, clear features that looked good on television. They werepoised, coiffed, made-up, dressed, prepped. She felt like she hadblundered into the Academy Awards.

 She was here as a token. Nothing more. She didn't have a chanceof becoming William A. Cozzano's vice-presidential candidate,even if she and Mary Catherine did have a mutual admirationsociety. That's why she wasn't nervous.

 Less than a hundred yards away from the debate set, CyrusRutherford Ogle was settling into the comfy swivel chair at thecenter of the Eye of Cy. For purposes of the National TownMeeting, the GODS container had been driven into the very heartof McCormick Place and everything else constructed around it; theplatform where Cozzano and his guests stood every night wasdirectly above his head.

 Compliance was good tonight. Ninety-eight of the hundredscreens were lit up. The PIPER 100 had started out as a somewhatdisorganized and unreliable group and, through practice, had nowbecome steady and disciplined.

 That was comforting, because Cy Ogle was scared. The v.p.thing was the hardest of all. Practically everyone screwed this up.For the last week, Ogle had not been able to close his eyes at nightwithout seeing the ghostly faces hanging before him. Nixon,Agnew, Eagleton, Bush, Quayle, Stockdale.

 The best that Ogle could do was round up the four best peoplehe knew of- that is, the four people who made the best impressionon television - put them up on the tube, side by side, and chartpeople's reactions to them. Of course, he would have to bring in a moderator to ask them some questions. What kinds of questionsdidn't really matter. Neither did the answers. The important thingwas just to get their faces up on the tube, get their voices working.The hard part was going to be interpreting the data. Because thedeeper he got into this, the more weird little angles he began tonotice inside the minds of the PIPER 100.

 Mae Hunter was sitting not far from the banks of the HudsonRiver, applying lipstick and watching the sun go down on NewJersey. She had discovered the lipstick earlier today, in awastebasket in the women's room at the New York Public Library,and decided that it was a good shade for her. It was a pretty niceone, and brand new; some fickle shopper must have picked it up inone of the nice stores on Fifth Avenue, ducked into the library totouch herself up, and decided that under that light, it didn't look so hot.

 Mae Hunter admired that decisiveness, the ability to fire a brand-new lipstick directly into the wastebasket because it was the wrongshade. Most women would have taken it home and put it on theirdresser and left it there for the next twenty years. But here in NewYork, you met all kinds. People had higher standards. They did not tolerate imperfections quite so easily. This lipstick had obviouslybeen thrown away by a woman of breeding.

 She had found a lot of interesting things in the restrooms of theNew York Public Library. They didn't let you bring food into thebuilding, so the wastebaskets were cleaner. Almost everything thatwas in there was paper. Actual merchandise like the lipstick stoodout prominently.

 Mae Hunter spent a great deal of time in the library because shedidn't have a job, family, or home to distract her from her realmission in life, which was to improve her mind. For the past fewmonths she had been working her way through Gibbon'sDeclineand Fall of the Roman Empire.She was halfway through the fifth ofseven volumes.

 Reading was the most important thing in her life. She had found,over the year and a half since her husband died, that she could handlesleeping out of doors and dumpster-diving for food. She couldhandle the uncertainty and fear. She had been raped twice and shecould even handle that. But the one thing that drove her nuts wasthe ignorance. She saw these people all around her, sleeping in theparks, spare-changing at Port Authority, checking themselves in tothose awful homeless shelters, and none of them made any effort toimprove their minds. You could hardly walk ten paces in New YorkCity without coming across a discarded copy ofThe New York Times,the world's finest newspaper, but none of these people bothered toavail themselves. As a former elementary-school teacher, she foundthat this really irked her. All that wasted brainpower.

 Another thing that annoyed her was people's failure to take careof themselves, which is why she was being so exquisitely careful toget this lipstick on correctly. That done, she found a comfortable place and settled in against the base of a small embankment withsome shrubs growing on top of it.

 She jumped as a burst of music sounded from nearby. Someone was listening to a transistor radio behind her, back in the bushes."Hello?" she said. "Is someone back there?" But there was noanswer.

 There was still barely enough light to see. She stood up and peered into the bushes. "Hello?"

 The music faded out and was replaced by the sound of anannouncer. "From the National Town Meeting, four contendersfor the vice presidency debate the issues..."

 She was almost positive that no one was back there. She walkedback and forth in front of the bushes, peering in through gapsbetween the leaves, trying to see. Something was glowing backthere. It looked like a little TV set. And no one was anywhere nearit. She found a sort of gap through the little thicket where it lookedas though someone had charged through it, flattening down thebranches. She followed it in and picked up the source of the noiseand light: a Dick Tracy watch.

 She debated whether to take it. It had obviously been stolen anddropped here by some criminal who might come back later to lookfor it.

 She looked at the screen. It was showing a TV program: a debatefeaturing four people who wanted to be William Cozzano's vice-presidential candidate. One by one, the announcer introducedthem as they nodded into the camera.

 "Brandon F. Doyle, former U.S. Representative from Massa­chusetts, currently on the faculty of Georgetown University . . ."This was a handsome, youngish man, probably in his late forties butyoung-looking for that age. He smiled a tight little smile into thecamera and nodded. She didn't like him.

 "Marco Gutierrez, Mayor of Brownsville, Texas, and a found­ing member of the international environmental group ToxicBorders..."This was a burly Latino man with a mustache andlarge, intense black eyes. He was leaning back in his chair,stroking his mustache with one finger. He raised his hand away from his face as his name was called and waved at the camera.

 Mae Hunter snapped the Dick Tracy watch into place aroundher wrist. She wanted to see at least this one program.

 The TV image cut to a blond, blue-eyed woman with one ofthose professional-looking haircuts that Mae always saw on the young women in midtown. She stared directly, and almost coldly,into the camera. "Laura Thibodeaux-Green, founder and CEO ofSanta Fe Software, who, two years ago, came within a thousand votes of being elected senator from New Mexico."

 Finally, to Mae Hunter's surprise and delight,she appeared onthe screen!

 "And Eleanor Richmond of Alexandria, Virginia, assistant to thelate Senator Caleb Marshall."

 The woman was so cool. She didn't even look at the camera,didn't react to the introduction at all. She was looking at somepapers in her lap. Then she glanced up and looked around a littlebit, calm, alert, but not paying any attention to the announcer orthe TV cameras. She was so like a princess.

 What a terrible introduction that was! It didn't do justice to the life and times of Eleanor Richmond at all. Mae Hunter knew allabout her, she had followed her career in the discarded pages ofTheNew York Times.She was a modern-day hero. Mae pushed her wayout through the bushes and went on to the broad open bank of the Hudson to watch her girlfriend Eleanor.

 The moderator was Marcus Hale, a grizzled ex-anchorman whohad gotten to the place in his career where he could write his own job description. He did a lot of work for TV North America now,because there, he didn't have to keep stopping in midparagraph to pimp hemorrhoid remedies to the American public. And now that the candidacy of William A. Cozzano had developed into a media-certified Important Phenomenon, he had been all too eager to serveas the moderator of this vice-presidential showdown. He opened things up, in typical Marcus Hale style, with a lengthy editorial,though he probably would have preferred to call it analysis.Eventually he worked his way around to asking a question.

 And it was a doozy. "All of you are young people, in your forties.Chances are you'll be around for at least another twenty-five years.One or more of you may even become president during that time.By then, people who are being born today will just be coming into the adult job market, and their success in that market will depend largely on the economic and educational initiatives that are takenduring the next decade. These will be most important to thepoorest people, who today face the most restricted opportunities.And without putting too fine a point on it, you know and I knowthat what I'm really talking about here is inner-city blacks. My question is: twenty-five years from now, what will life be like forthese people, and what will you have done to make that lifebetter?"

 Brandon F. Doyle of Massachusetts went first, and he lookedscared. It was easy enough for an old man like Marcus Hale to drag these scary and difficult issues into the limelight. It was a lot harderfor someone like Doyle to deal with the resulting mess, especially considering that he was sharing the stage with a black person whocould shoot him down whenever she wanted.

 "Well, first of all, Marcus, let me say that opportunity - for allpeople, white or black - is a function of education. This is amessage that we have always taken to heart in Massachusetts, whichhas a long heritage of brilliant institutions of higher learning. It's myhope - and my intention - that twenty-five years from now, a lotof the people you're talking about will be entering graduate school, or law school, or medical school, and they'll be doing it with thefull assistance and support of a government that takes these thingswith the utmost seriousness. Which is not to support big-spendinggovernment programs. I prefer to think of education as aninvestment, not an expense."

 Next came Marco Gutierrez, who had a heavy, stolid, calmaffect. That and his hair and his clothes had all been developed tomake him seem like a cool norteamericano, not the jumpy,emotional Mexican that blue-eyed Duluth voters were afraid of."Well, I would second a lot of what my friend Brandon said, but where we differ is at the end. Look. Government has a moral dutyto educate its children. No matter what it costs. To say thateducation is a good investment misses the point. Even if it costevery penny in the Treasury, we should educate our kids to the best of our ability, because it's the right thing to do."

 It was Laura Thibodeaux-Green's turn. "Kids spend seven hoursa day in front of the television. Seven hours a day. Just think aboutthat for a second. That's a lot more time than they spend in the classroom. Well, my opinion is that TV doesn't have to be mind-rotting garbage. It has the ability to educate. And the digital, high-definition TV that's just starting to be introduced to the livingrooms of America can be the most potent educational tool ever devised. I advocate a massive program to develop educationalsoftware that can run on these TV sets of the future, so that those seven hours a day spent in front of the TV can turn our little kidsinto little Shakespeares and Einsteins instead of illiterate couchpotatoes."

 Finally, Eleanor Richmond got her chance. "Look," she said,"Abe Lincoln learned his lessons by writing on the back of a shovel.During slavery times, a lot of black people learned to read and writeeven though they weren't allowed to go to school. And nowadays,Indochinese refugee kids do great in school even though they gotno money at all and their folks don't speak English. The fact thatmany black people nowadays aren't getting educated has nothing todo with how much money we spend on schools. Spending moremoney won't help. Neither will writing educational software torun on your home TV set. It's just a question of values. If yourfamily places a high value on being educated, you'll get educated,even if you have to do your homework on the back of a shovel. And if your family doesn't give a damn about developing your mind, you'll grow up stupid and ignorant even if you go to thefanciest private school in America.

 "Now, unfortunately, I can't give you a program to help developpeople's values. Personally, I'm starting to think that the fewerprogrammes we have, the better off we are."

 For the first time, the live audience broke into applause.

 "Amen to that!" Mae Hunter shouted, her voice echoing out across the gray Hudson. A couple of passing joggers glanced at her, thenlooked away quickly and pretended not to notice the crazy lady.

 Cy Ogle saw a screen flare bright green in the corner of his eye,and turned to look. The name at the bottom of the screen wasCHASE MERRIAM.

 It was amazing. Out of all these candidates, Merriam's clearfavorite, so far, was Eleanor Richmond. Between the poor peopleand minorities on the bottom, and the women and people likeChase Merriam on the top, an astonishing number of people likedEleanor Richmond.

 But on second thought, Ogle reflected, maybe it wasn't sosurprising after all. Months ago, when she had confronted EarlStrong in the shopping mall, he had pointed his finger at her imageon the screen and pronounced her the first female president of the United States.

 45

 Eleanor went straight to her hotel room after the debate,talked to her kids in Alexandria, watched some TV, went to bed,and slept until ten Friday morning. When she opened her eyes, sheknew without looking at the clock that she had lost control ofherself and overslept massively. The red light on her phone wasflashing like a police car, the blackout curtains on her hotel roomwindows were limned with the hot, hysterical white light ofmidday. She felt wizened and dehydrated and headachy.

 She opened her curtains about six inches, letting a slab of aridlight into the room, ordered some room service (yogurt, a largeinfusion of juice, and lots of coffee), and took a shower. The yogurt arrived with a stack of message slips from various journalists, mostof whom had deadlines that had already expired. She was still sittingon her bed in her hotel bathrobe, trying to get the coffee into hersystem as fast as possible, sorting these messages into stacks, whensomeone knocked at her door. Shave and a haircut, two bits.

 It was her girlfriend Mary Catherine Cozzano, turned out in asmashingly professional navy blue ensemble. Mary Catherine wasdoing some major grinning, showing some serious dimple actionthis morning.

 "I'm not worthy," Eleanor said, placing one hand to the breast of her white terrycloth bathrobe.

 "My daughter costume," Mary Catherine explained.

 "Well, I knew I overslept," Eleanor said, ushering her into theroom, "but looking at you I feel like I amway behind the curve."

 "You don't know how right you are," Mary Catherine saidprovocatively. She groped for the curtain pull and yanked itdecisively, flooding the room with light. Then she turned aroundand sat down on the unmade bed, facing Eleanor, who wassquinting between her fingers.

 "You have this look on your face like you are in possession ofimportant state secrets that you can't wait to blab," Eleanor said."So let me assure you that I have a Top-Secret Alpha clearance.Coffee?"

 "No thanks," Mary Catherine said. "I had breakfast four hours ago."

 Eleanor laughed and pretended to be ashamed of herself. "InAlexandria my neighbor's dog starts barking at fivea.m. sharp," shesaid, "so I never get the opportunity to sleep in."

 "Well," Mary Catherine said, "I think you'll find that the accommodations are much quieter on the grounds of the Naval Observatory."

 "Naval Observatory?"

 "Yeah," Mary Catherine said innocently.

 The Naval Observatory was a circular patch of land alongMassachusetts Avenue, northwest of downtown D.C., in a part oftown that Eleanor had rarely visited while growing up there. Itsfunction was to provide very nice housing to a few important Navytypes who needed quick access to the White House. And itcontained the official residence of the Vice President of the UnitedStates.

 She inhaled sharply and looked at Mary Catherine's face. MaryCatherine was sucking in her cheeks, trying not to break outlaughing.

 "I'm going to be made an admiral?" Eleanor said.

 Mary Catherine shook her head.

 The idea was too stunning. Eleanor couldn't speak. It couldn't be.

 If Cozzano were a fringe candidate, she'd understand it. A purelysymbolic candidacy, like the Libertarians or the Socialists, mightpick someone like her as a running mate. But Cozzano was nofringe candidate.

 Hell, Cozzano was theleader. All the polls had him out in front.It was impossible.

 "You're playing with me, girl," Eleanor said.

 Mary Catherine just shook her head. She put one hand over hermouth, trying to contain herself.

 That one gesture finally brought it home to Eleanor. This wasn'tjust some nice young lady she had made friends with at aconvention, after all. This was the daughter of the candidatehimself. And the way she was dressed-

 "You came here to do some serious business," Eleanor said.

 Mary Catherine nodded.

 "You came here toNOTIFY ME!" Eleanor said, and finally shecouldn't hold back any longer; she slid forward out of her chair, onto her knees, put both hands over her face, and started screaming. Mary Catherine, laughing hysterically, wrapped Eleanor up in her arms and held her tight.

 In some deep, remote part of her soul, Eleanor knew that she wasacting just like the winning contestants on the game shows that sheused to watch when she was unemployed. But she didn't care.Come to think of it, it wasn't a bad analogy. She had gone on the biggest quiz show of all time and won the penultimate prize.

 The results were so odd and yet so important that CyrusRutherford Ogle ran one more test, shortly before the announce­ment. They were starting off the broadcast with a round-tablediscussion among the four metapundits whom Ogle had hand-picked from Central Casting.

 One of them was a gruff, grandfatherly old man who projectedtraditional American family values. He had made a comfortableliving playing a cowboy patriarch in various Westerns and anadmiral onStar Trek: The Next Generation. Another was a tweedyacademic (lab-coat wearing pseudoscientist on a couple of drugcommercials). Then there was a middle-aged, professional-lookingyoung women whose role was to puncture the egos of the two men(occasional lawyer onL.A. Law). Finally, they had a stylish,younger black woman with a Hispanic surname and genericallyprogressive politics (roommate/best friend to better-knownactresses in various films). All four of the metapundits would gatherevery evening and engage in a spirited discussion of political issuesthat had come up during the day's events at the National TownMeeting. All four of them had, at one time, worked in soap operasand had the ability to memorize dialogue rapidly, which came inhandy since Ogle and his staff scripted the discussions.

 During tonight's discussion, the tweedy academic metapunditdelivered a bombshell several minutes into the program byannouncing that he had spoken with a high-level Cozzanooperative minutes before the program and that this person hadconfirmed that Eleanor Richmond would be the vice-presidentialcandidate.

 Cy Ogle was ensconced in the Eye of Cy at the moment his linewas delivered, and the results were intense and striking. There werea few discrepancies between the new information and last night'sdebate results, but they were not big discrepancies. Richmond hada hard core of support that would never change. There was also a smaller but strong anti-Richmond segment, led by Byron Jeffcote(Trailer-Park Nazi, Ocala, Florida) and by a few others like thePost-Confederate Gravy Eater and the Orange County BookBurner.

 But reaction among more moderately conservative whites wasnot half-bad. And the big surprise was still there: Chase Merriamloved Eleanor Richmond. Cy Ogle picked up the phone and gothis press secretary.

 "Go ahead and announce it," he said. "The demographics areperfect."

 "Richmond?" the secretary said, still a little uncertain about thiswhole idea.

 "Eleanor Richmond," Ogle said.

 On the other end of the line, he heard keys whacking on acomputer keyboard. The press release was now being transmitted digitally to the wire services, computer-faxed to every press outletin the Western world. Cozzano's state and local campaignmanagers, in all fifty states, were receiving information packets onEleanor Richmond - pictures, videotapes, and canned sound bitesfor them to toss off to the local media. It all happened in an instant.

 "It's done," his press secretary said.

 "Good" Ogle said. "White House, here we come. I gotta go,"he concluded. "I have a call on another line."

 It wasn't just any old phone line. This was a special line that Oglehad agreed to keep open. The only person who had this phonenumber was Buckminster Salvador. Cy Ogle's boss. Rarely heard from, rarely seen, but always there.

 "Ogle," Ogle said.

 "Hold everything!" said the voice of Mr. Salvador, which wasbarely recognizable; his throat was tense to the point of strangula­tion. "Don't move! Don't push any buttons or make any phonecalls or let anyone do anything!"

 "I am alone. Alone and powerless," Ogle said. "You have myundivided attention."

 "Thank god I reached you in time," Salvador said. "I knew therewas something wrong with that whole Eleanor Richmond thing."

 "What do you mean?"

 Salvador spent most of his time hanging out in ODR's fakeheadquarters in the office tower above Pentagon Plaza, so that he could monitor all of the PIPER 100 data at the same time as Ogledid. And he did so constantly, as Ogle had learned; scarcely a singlecampaign event went by that Bucky Salvador didn't phone him up right in the middle of it and provide his own commentary on how the PIPER 100 were reacting. He fancied himself something of anexpert. And, dilettante that he was, he completely failed to grasp the mediagenic advantages of Eleanor Richmond.

 "Chase Merriam called me just a few minutes ago. He just got out of the hospital."

 Ogle laughed. "Haw, haw, haw," he said, "don't tell me. He hadan operation. He was on laughing gas or something during thedebate."

 "Worse than that. He was in a car crash. Wednesday night. Somehoodlum stole his watch. We have no idea who's wearing thatthing!"

 "A late-middle-aged black female homeless person with goodeducation and traditionalist values," Ogle said.

 Salvador was caught off guard. "Oh. You've found the watch, then?"

 "Nope," Ogle said, "just an educated guess."

 "Well," Salvador said. "Well."

 "Well what?"

 "This changes everything!" Salvador said, shocked by Ogle's seeming indifference. "The statistics are completely fouled up!"

 "If all the PIPER 100 got together and traded watches, thatwould foul up the statistics," Ogle said. "One person doesn't foulthem up too bad."

 Deep in his heart, Ogle knew Salvador had a point. But he didn'twant to agree with him. He did not really get along with Salvadorvery well.

 "That's ridiculous!" Salvador said. "You told me yourself last night that the single strongest thing in Richmond's favor was thefact that Chase Merriam loved her. You said it was a key factor inmaking your decision."

 "Hey," Ogle said, "try to keep this in perspective. We'retalking about the goddamn vice presidency here. It just doesn'tmatter."

 "So you admit that Richmond is the wrong choice. Salvador saidtriumphantly.

 "From here on out, she's the right choice. She's a brilliantchoice. A daring, incisive, masterstroke of leadership on Cozzano'spart," Ogle said, "because she's a choice we already made."

 "Not true," Salvador said, "the formal announcement doesn'thappen for another hour."

 "The formal announcement doesn't mean diddly," Ogle said."We already unleashed the cascade. Stories have already been filed.Hell," Ogle said, grabbing a remote control and clicking channelson a nearby TV monitor, "I got Koppel on screen right now with a picture of Eleanor Richmond over his shoulder. And whenEleanor's peering over Ted Koppel's shoulder on national TV, andKoppel's got that smirky know-it-all look on his face, it's just too goddamn late."

 "Good lord." Salvador sighed, sounding quiet and defeated.

 "When I got into this thing, I never realized how complicated itwas going to be."

 "Cheer up," Ogle said, turning his attention back toward theEye of Cy. "Look at the screens. I am seeing a generally green colorthis evening. The electorate is mellow and satisfied. If Richmondturns out to be a wrong choice, we'll just send her to kiss babies inGuam."

 "I see a case of measles," Salvador said. "I see a lot of red screens.Look at Economic Roadkill! Economic Roadkill is a key bloc. Andtonight, Economic Roadkill is frightened."

 Ogle looked at the screen labeled FLOYD WAYNEVISHNIAK. As Salvador had pointed out, it was bright red. "It's nothing," Ogle said. "He does that all the time. He's in another bar fight."

 Suddenly, Vishniak's screen turned bright green. Ogle andSalvador both laughed. "Ha ha!" Salvador said, I'll wager his opponent is out cold on a barroom floor in Davenport, Iowa!"

 46

 Floyd Wayne Vishniak strode intoMcCormickPlace andheaved a tremendous sigh of relief. A cascade of sweat fell out of hishair and showered his face. He had made it through the metaldetectors!

 The Fleischacker had performed as advertised. It was a ceramic-and-plastic gun, made in Austria, that didn't trigger metal detectors.After cashing in his latest check from Ogle Data Research, pickingup his paycheck from detasseling, and pawning all of his other weapons, he had finally raised the capital he needed to purchase theFleischacker at a gun store in Davenport and to top his truck's fueltanks. That done, he had made the trip across northern Illinois in two hours flat, blasting across the nearly empty pavement of I-88 atan average velocity of eighty-five miles per hour. He had wantedto leave himself an adequate time cushion upon reaching Chicago,because he wasn't sure how to locate McCormick Place. But thatturned out to be a snap. He just took the interstate into town and, to his astonishment, began to see signs for the damn place. A wholeseries of big signs that took him straight where he wanted to go.

 This kind of thing did not happen to Floyd Wayne Vishniak veryoften, because usually he went places where no one else wanted to go: cornfields that needed detasseling, riverfront bars, and defunctfactories. He had been forced to develop a certain amount ofnavigational cunning over the years. He had assumed that once hetrespassed upon the borders of Chicago, he would, as usual, spend a considerable amount of time idling on the shoulder of various roads and in the parking lots of convenience stores, pouring over his Chicago map collection.

 But it wasn't like that. All he had to do was pay the tolls andfollow the signs. And as he was doing so, it dawned on him that thiswas natural and logical, because if he had the correct understandingof it, a convention was a thing where a whole lot of people came together at once for a purpose. Which meant that a whole lot ofpeople were having to find their ways to McCormick Place all thetime, every day.

 Like most of the other new ideas that entered Floyd WayneVishniak's head, this one came in the form of a pang of bitterresentment. It hit him straight between the eyes and made himgrind his teeth and mumble indistinct profanities.

 The whole world was set up for the benefit of the rich folks.That interstate, four beautiful lanes of pavement cutting straightacross the state of Illinois, had been put there just to ferry the wealthy and privileged into Chicago so that they could go to conventions and meet with others of their kind and plot newconspiracies to keep the common man in his place: on the bottom.Far be it from these people to find their own way to McCormickPlace. Oh no, these people were too busy and dignified andimportant to actually buy maps and find their own way. No, theyhad to have special signs.

 It was easy enough to reach the convention center, but difficultto park in its vicinity; the lots were jammed. Not making it anyeasier was Vishniak's own extreme nervousness. He was afraid to slow down, so he just orbited the target zone like an Indian circlinga wagon train. He shot right past a few perfectly good spots.McCormick Place was the southern end of a whole chain of bigcivic projects, including Soldier Field, some museums, and Grant Park, and parking lots were strung for several miles up the shore ofthe lake. Vishniak ended up parking way the hell and gone up inthe vicinity of Grant Park and then walking for half an hour, whichwas fine because it helped him burn off adrenaline.

 Grant Park, he realized, must be named after General Grant. Asin Grant and Sherman. Vishniak had learned all about those two guys on TV. One was drunk and one was crazy, he could neverremember which, but the thing was that both of them kicked assfor their country. When the war started Grant was living in Galena, which was just a few miles up the river from where Vishniak lived.And he was working in a livery stable, which was equivalent to working in a car wash nowadays, or detasseling.

 He walked south past Soldier Field, where William A. Cozzanohad attained glory in an earlier life, and then took a pedestrianoverpass across Lakeshore Drive into the extreme northern end ofthe McCormick Place parking lots. The first thing he encountered was a line of portable toilets. On the theory that you should neverpass up a chance to make water or take water, he went into one of these, wiped the seat with a wad of toilet paper, and sat down. Allhe really had to do was take a leak - the series of thirty-two-ouncecoffees he had picked up at various Chicagoland 7-Elevens washaving an effect - but as long as he was here he flicked his Bic andhad one last good look at the Fleischacker. He popped themagazine loose from the grips, checked it, shoved it in.

 Someone pounded on the fiberglass door of the portable toilet. "Is anyone in there?"

 "Fuck you," said Floyd Wayne Vishniak reflexively. His heartwas pounding; he was afraid it was a cop. But it wasn't. Just anotherCozzano supporter. Vishniak reholstered his gun under his wind-breaker and started getting himself together, wondering whetherthis rude person had any friends, whether he was big, whether hewould be worth picking a fight with. But when he came out he sawit was just a little man in a suit, accompanied by a little kid who washolding his crotch and jumping up and down.

 Fuck it anyway, Vishniak realized. He had abandoned his trailer and hit the road with a pocket of cash, a pickup truck, and a plasticgun. He had to get used to the idea that he was a different kind ofman now, a man who had risen above the common crowd, whocould not trouble himself with meaningless hassles over toiletaccess.

 McCormick Place was a huge rectangular black thing with amuch larger black slab of a roof that overhung the building quite abit on all sides. As Vishniak walked toward it through the parkinglot, Lakeshore Drive was on his right and a little backwater of Lake

 Michigan on his left; beyond that was a peninsula with a private airport on it, small planes taking off and landing and taxiing. Theyachts of the rich and powerful were tied up in the water only yardsaway from the private jets of the even more rich and powerful, and Vishniak could plainly see that if you were the right kind of person,you didn't have to waste your time with parking lots, or even cars.

 All the way from Grant Park southward, the pedestrian traffichad been getting heavier. At the southern end of the parking lot, allthe people were funneled down a wide staircase and intoMcCormick Place's subterranean entrance. The floor was backedup a little bit, the crowd milled rather than streamed down thestairs. Working his way slowly down the steps, Vishniak was ableto get a clear view of the metal detectors bracketing the doors.

 He immediately got scared shitless. His heart was going so fast itwas more of a vibration, like an idling truck engine, than a beat, andhe was sweating like a pig. But it was a warm humid night and he was wearing a windbreaker, so he had every excuse to sweat.

 Looking up, he could see into the underside of McCormick Place's huge flat overhanging roof, which was supported andstiffened by a latticework of black girders. Laced through the structural members was a barely perceptible network of thin redlines - a system of pipes carrying water to the automatic sprinklersystem. As Vishniak worked his way down the steps, swept alongby the eager Cozzano supporters, he wondered whether anyoneelse ever bothered to look up in the air and take notice of thesethings, these hidden connections and networks that were lacedimperceptibly through the structure of everything.

 Then he was there, confronted with the metal detector, peoplepushing him from behind, and all he could do was give himself upto the force of the crowd, the pressure of history, and walk on through.

 Nothing happened. As he kept on walking with the crowd now filling the main floor of William A. Cozzano's National TownMeeting, becoming invisible and anonymous, he was overcome with relief, which showed up as a vivid green on the monitors inthe Eye of Cy and ODR headquarters in Pentagon City.

 The National Town Meeting was a political convention in all butname, and it followed some of the same protocols. One of thesewas the hierarchy of introductions. It wouldn't do just to have the nominee stroll out on stage and start talking. He had to be intro­duced by someone. Preferably by someone very, very important.And anyone who was important enough to make that introduction was, likewise, too important to step out in front of an ice-coldaudience and just start talking. He would have to be introducedby someone else. That person had to be important enough that hisrole as introducer did not seem to belittle the stature of theintroduced . . .

 Suffice it to say that the first person who stepped out in front ofthe microphones that evening was as completely anonymous as anyperson could be. His job was to get the attention of the crowd. Tosever all of the conversations that had sprung up among the peoplestanding shoulder to shoulder on the convention floor. Then heintroduced an alderman, who introduced a former mayor ofChicago, who introduced a former Governor of New York, who introduced a movie star, who introduced a former Secretary of State, who introduced Governor William A. Cozzano. At eachstage of the hierarchy, the dull roar of bored conversation diminished and the excitement of the crowd built.

 Twenty thousand people were in the hall. The original roster ofthe National Town Meeting had been ten thousand but thesepeople were just statistical abstracts who had been snatched off thestreets and transported into town to spout their opinions andrepresent their demographic groups. Many of them supported Cozzano, many didn't, and the ones that did, did so in the same moderate, reasonable way that most average people supportedpolitical candidates. Which was to say that, while they might votefor Cozzano, they would not be willing to paint his name acrosstheir foreheads and jump up and down screaming at every mention of his name.

 Consequently, Cy Ogle had brought in an additional tenthousand people who would do exactly that. They tended to standcloser to the dais, crowding the National Town Meeting partici­pants into the back of the hall. The fact that these riotous supporters were not the same as the ten thousand average Americans who had been appearing on TV all week was not, of course, explained to thenationwide television audience, which was watching on no fewerthan eight networks.

 This was a good thing for Floyd Wayne Vishniak, because, untiltonight, you couldn't have gotten into the convention center with­out a special National Town Meeting photo ID. Vishniak didn'thave one. But neither did any of the other ten thousand fanatical Cozzano supporters who had packed the hall tonight.

 Tables had been set up at the back of the hall and piled high withCozzano paraphernalia: signs, bumper stickers, skimmers, buttons. Vishniak scored an armful of stuff and festooned himself like thehard-core Cozzano supporter that he, in fact, was. He even filledout a little COZZANO FOR PRESIDENT stick-on name tag:HELLO, MY NAME IS Sherman Grant. He was amid relativelyglum, drab National Town Meeting participants who had nowbeen relegated to the outer darkness. As the hierarchy ofintroductions rose toward its peak, he shouldered his way throughthem, working toward center stage.

 Like a lot of other secretaries of state, the one who introducedCozzano had not been allowed to die a natural political death. Hehad resigned or been forced out, or something like that, in themiddle of a term. Everyone concerned had agreed that it was overa question of principle on which reasonable people could honestlydisagree, which gave this man the image of a person who waswilling to stake his job on a matter of principle. As such, he was exactly the right guy to introduce Cozzano.

 He delivered a lengthy and somewhat less than thrilling addressabout his career in big-time Washington politics and how disgustedhe had been by the decadence and corruption of it all. He talkedabout the need for change. Finally, his voice began to rise in pitch,he started to pump the crowd back up out of the comatose stateinto which he himself had placed them, to pull them back in fromthe lines at the rest rooms, and by the time he bent forward to shoutthe name of William A. Cozzano into his microphone, he wascompletely inaudible, even to himself: thousands of people were screaming the name.

 Cozzano appeared on the stage, holding hands with EleanorRichmond. Behind them were four younger people: MaryCatherine and James Cozzano, and Clarice and HarmonRichmond, Jr., all holding hands.

 The screaming, and the sound of the air horns, seemed loudenough to split the molecules in the hot sweaty air from theconvention hall. The candidates and their families stood in a poolof blue carbon-arc light that set them apart from everything else, which now looked dim and yellowish by comparison, like a TVscreen blaring in the middle of an antique living room.

 It was just like when the Quad Cities Whiplash scored a winninggoal with one second remaining in a playoff game, thought FloydWayne Vishniak, standing just below the dais, a stone's throw fromWilliam A. Cozzano.

 He had a clear shot from here. But shooting him was not reallypart of the plan. The idea was not to hurt Cozzano, but to protecthim.

 Cozzano was a great man. A hero. The only honest politician in the United States. But even a great man could be led astray by the forces of evil, and Vishniak had been forced to the conclusion thatit was happening to Cozzano right now.

 Why couldn't anyone else figure it out? It was so obvious. They were all stupid. The world was full of morons. In all of the UnitedStates, only a tiny number were capable of seeing the truth.

 They knew, of course. The people who were manipulatingCozzano had access to all kinds of secret FBI and CIA files. They could use their computers and satellites to pry into people's schoolrecords, police records, and bank accounts. They had figured out that Floyd Wayne Vishniak, and a few other people around thecountry, would see through the charade and would represent athreat to their conspiracy.

 The couldn't just send out hit men to kill Vishniak and theothers. No, that was just a little too obvious. Instead they weretaking the subtle approach. All the way across Illinois, Vishniak hadbeen laughing at himself. To think he had actually believed theridiculous story that the little Jew had told him! "We're doingresearch on public opinion and we want you to wear this DickTracy watch."

 Research on Floyd Wayne Vishniak's brain waves was more likeit. They were watching him. Waiting for him to figure out theconspiracy and make his move. And he had played into their hands.He had worn the watch. He had even sent them letters, explaininghis opinions in detail, and in these letters, he had made theincredibly stupid mistake of tipping them off to the fact that he wassuspicious.

 He could have just taken the watch off his wrist and been free ofit, but he was a little smarter than that. To take the watch off hiswrist at this point would probably mean certain death. They wouldsend out a hit man to get him.

 To hell with a hit man. The watch probably was booby-trapped.It probably had a little needle coated with shellfish toxin, and if hetried to take it off now, that needle, activated by a satellitetransmission from ODR headquarters, would jab into theunderside of his wrist and shoot the poison straight into his vein. But as long as he kept wearing the watch, they'd think he had still been duped. He could continue his careful reconnaissance of theCozzanocampaign.

 This was the first step: to get close to Cozzano, to get a goodlook at his security apparatus, and so memorize the faces of thepeople who were close to him. Not the obvious ones like EleanorRichmond and Mary Catherine - they were just pawns too - butthe men in suits who hovered around the edges, just out of reachof the arc light's rainbow-tinged border.

 The platform was huge, as big as the stage for a major rockconcert, and it was hollow, and all of the mysterious men in suitshad special access to the cleverly concealed doors and stairways thatled beneath. All the doors were guarded by uniformed cops whoWould only let certain people through; you had to have a specialbackstage pass around your neck. But from time to time whensome bigshot went in or out, a door would swing open for a fewseconds, giving Vishniak a glimpse into the hidden world underCozzano's feet. What he saw confirmed everything he'd beenthinking: thick black cables snaking everywhere, and banks oftelevision monitors, men wearing radio headsets, talking on phonesand typing on computers. And in the center of it all, hard to glimpse through the tangle of technicians and cables and structural supports,sitting right in the middle of the web, was a semitrailer rig, a nicenew one. He couldn't see enough of it to read the words on its side, but he didn't have to; you could recognize it from its color scheme;it was a GODS truck.

 He took a good look at the people under the platform wheneverthose doors opened up. These were the ones who were controllingCozzano's mind. The ones who, sometime between now andElection Day, were going to be taking nine-millimeter bulletsbetween the eyes, fired from Floyd Wayne Vishniak's plastic gun.

 Vishniak jumped up and down and screamed along with thecrowd. "I'll save you, Governor Cozzano! I'll get you out of this conspiracy or die trying!" But his words of encouragement werelost in the tumult.

 47

 Eleanor didn't get a real chance to talk to WilliamA.Cozzano until several hours after the announcement. She had methim once, briefly, prior to the debate, and spoken with him informal circumstances, in a conference room full of flacks andadvisers, before the announcement. After the announcement theyhad spent most of their time partying in the ballroom of Cozzano'shotel. This had not been a real party, of course, any more than atalk show appearance was a real conversation; it had been a stagedevent, and she had had to stay on her toes the entire time. Sheknew, without being told, that she was going to have to get in thehabit of holding her tongue more than she was used to, and try toavoid making gaffes.

 Finally, shortly before midnight, she and Cozzano and Mary Catherine got together in Cozzano's hotel suite, on the top floor of the hotel, naturally. The women changed out of their party dressesand into comfortable, casual clothes, and they had a nightcap up onthe balcony.

 She had known about William A. Cozzano for many years andshe had always been a bit put off by the hypermacho foundations of his image: war and football. He had always seemed like the typewho'd be great for smoking cigars and shooting wild game withcorporate CEOs, but who wouldn't be able to handle the subtlenuances of national politics, who wouldn't really grasp women'sissues.

 After about five minutes on the balcony with him, she decided she was wrong. He wasn't a macho shithead at all. He was courtlyin an almost European way and he had a fine, self-deprecating senseof humour. He had an easy rapport with his daughter that toldEleanor everything about what kind of man he was.

 They ended up conversing for more than an hour. Cozzano hada penchant for anecdotes and he told several of them. Toward theend of the evening, Eleanor could tell that this was beginning tomake Mary Catherine slightly uneasy. She would shift in her chair and say, "Oh, Dad!" when he was beginning to launch into a story.And as he was telling these stories, she would watch his face intentlyand occasionally frown or bite her lip.

 Eleanor wasn't quite sure why. Cozzano liked to talk, but thiswas not senile rambling by any means. It didn't make Eleanoruncomfortable. He told his stories concisely and they always had apoint that was germane to the conversation. But all they did wasmake Mary Catherine agitated.

 It looked to Eleanor as though father and daughter had sometalking to do, and so finally, a little after one in the morning, sheexcused herself, insisting that she could find her own way down tothe lobby and back to her own hotel. She wanted to enjoy her last evening of freedom before her fulltime Secret Service contingentkicked in the following morning.

 The elevator came quickly - demand was low at this time of themorning - and she climbed on and punched the button for thelobby. When the doors closed, she found herself alone in a roomfor the first time since Mary Catherine had come to see her earlierthat day. She was exhausted. She dropped her tote bag on the floor, sagged against the wall of the elevator, closed her eyes, and heavedan enormous sigh.

 This was the type of pressure she'd never known before. Sinceher first meeting with Cozzano earlier today, not a second had goneby without her photograph being taken. It boggled the mind tothink about a lifestyle in which you could never pick your nose,never allow your hair or your face to get messy.

 The elevator slowed. Eleanor opened one eye a crack andsaw that they were passing the tenth floor. She closed her eyes again, content to spend another few minutes relaxing before sheexited back into public life again - no doubt, photographerswould be waiting on the sidewalk.

 The doors opened and Eleanor sensed someone climbing onboard. Remembering that she was now a role model, she forced herself to open her eyes and stand up straight. It was a thin man in a suit. He had very short hair and burning, hyperactive eyes. Hewas staring at her. His eyes dropped to her tote bag.

 "Whatcha got there?" he said, brusquely.

 "My stuff," she said, unable to come up with anything moreeloquent at this time of the morning.

 "What's this?" he said, bending over and reaching for it.

 The tote bag was just a cheap freebie given to by her travel agentin Alexandria. Eleanor had brought it along precisely because it wasso flimsy that it could be wadded up and stuffed into other luggage.Tonight it had come in handy for carrying a change of clothes.Right now she was wearing jeans and an old sweatshirt withTOWSON STATE printed across the front. Her party dress,jewelry, and purse were all in the tote bag. The purse was on top.As the man in the suit bent down, she followed his gaze, and sawthat the strap of the purse - a heavy gold-plated chain, a la Chanel- was dangling out. His hand reached out, quick as a snake, grabbed the chain, and yanked, taking the purse out with it.

 "Hey!" she said, and grabbed at the chain. But he yanked thepurse away as her hand was closing around it, ripping it out of herhand and bending a couple of nails back.

 She'd heard of these guys: well-dressed thieves who wanderedaround in posh hotels late at night, snatching purses and pickingpockets. They'd be in the lobby any second and then this guywould be in trouble. "Goddamn it," she said, and kicked him in theknee.

 "You bitch," he said. He bent down, got one shoulder into hersolar plexus, and used the thrust of both legs to body-slam her intothe wall of the elevator. Her head snapped backward against thewall, which didn't cause any serious damage but did leave her disoriented; she slid down the wall and collapsed to the floor with her legs sprawling, and realized that she could not draw a breath.

 The man loomed in front of the elevator's control panel. He hadpulled out a huge keychain, the kind that's attached to a spring-loaded reel on the belt, and shoved a tubular key into the switch atthe base of the panel. He rotated the switch one notch and thenpressed the button beneath the one for the lobby.

 The door opened a moment later. This was not the lobby of thehotel: she saw barren concrete walls, harshly illuminated with cheapindustrial lights, and steel doors with numbers painted on them.The man turned the key switch one more time and the elevatorfroze in position with the doors open. She still couldn't hardlybreathe. This was the first time she'd had the wind knocked out ofher since the second grade.

 "Get out," the man said, reaching down to grab her wrist. He yanked hard and trudged out into the corridor. He wasn't so muchhelping her to her feet as he was dragging her over the floor.Eleanor hardly cared; the lack of oxygen was a more immediateconcern than this guy's bad manners. She ended up tumbled in a heap on the floor next to a steel door in the corridor, close to theelevator. The keychain jingled once again, the door swung open ona big room with a few people in it.

 Finally she drew in a breath. Her lungs had constricted, herairway was clenched shut, and the air passing through it made anugly sobbing noise. But it felt good. She forced that breath outand drew in another one. Color vision returned. Her panicsubsided.

 In the meantime, a couple of other men in suits had stepped tothe door, grabbed her arms, hauled her up off the floor, anddragged her into the room. They sat her down on a chair. Theroom contained four cheap steel desks, chairs to go with them, a couch, and a table with a coffee machine. In the corner was somekind of communications setup: a phone switchboard and a two-way radio.

 Eleanor closed her eyes and just concentrated on breathing for awhile. But when she closed her eyes, her head began to swimaround; she was still dizzy from having been slammed into the wall.She kept her eyes open just enough to get a strong visual fix on oneobject: a cheesy pinup of a woman with huge breasts, dressed halfin a cop uniform and half in sexy lingerie, a pistol stuck into theband of her fishnet stockings, dangling a set of handcuffs from herfinger.

 Finally she recovered enough to get pissed. "What the hell isgoing on here?" she said, and rose from her chair. But someone gripped the collar of her sweatshirt from behind, twisted it tightaround her neck, and jerked her back down into the chair. "Shutup, sister," a voice said. "You should know better than to maketrouble."

 Then they grabbed her arms and pulled them around behind her back, behind the back of the chair. She heard a high zipping noiseand felt something go tight around her wrists: plastic handcuffs. Shecouldn't move her arms.

 "Would you guys mind telling me who the hell you are?" shesaid.

 They ignored her. The man in the suit who had confronted her in the elevator went over to the telephone, punched a couple ofbuttons, and spoke: "Yeah, this is Moore in Security. We have apprehended a black female carrying a bag with someone's purse and some jewelry. She is intoxicated, violent and disorderly. Haveyou had any complaints of missing property from any of your gueststonight?"

 He listened for a moment. "Okay. Well, it's possible she hit oneof the other hotels on the block and just got here. You want tophone some of the others and see if they've had any problems?"

 By now, the entire contents of Eleanor's tote bag had beenspread out across the table, and the hotel dicks were pawingthrough them, making lewd comments about her underwear andappraising her jewelry.

 Eleanor knew she should have been chewing them out. Sheshould have been calling down the retribution of heaven above.But she was so stunned that it was almost more interesting to standback and observe.

 A television set was going on the coffee table, showing a late-night news program. Her face flashed up on the screen right nextto Cozzano's. What happened next was the most gratifyingmoment she had experienced since the birth of her last child."Look at the TV," she said.

 Mr. Salvador reached Cy Ogle by sky phone the next day. Oglewas on one of the Cozzano campaign planes.Cozzano 1 carried the candidate, his Secret Service detail, staff, and immediate hangers-on;Cozzano 2, was a press plane, andCozzano 3, which hardly anyone knew about, was a GODS cargo plane. It carried a GODSshipping container, the Eye of Cy. Ogle was onCozzano 1 whenhe got the call from Mr. Salvador, who was upset. "Did you see themorning papers?"

 "Of course I did," Ogle said.

 "It's exactly as I predicted. Eleanor Richmond is a loosecannon."

 "Now, why would you say that?"

 "Are you kidding? The first thing she does is go out and getherself arrested."

 "Detained. Not arrested."

 "And then, immediately, without consulting you, she begins torun her mouth. Yap yap yap, racists here, racists there, lynch mobmentality, all the usual radical Afro-American buzzwords."

 "You can't blame her for being pissed."

 "I can blame her for being strident. Did you see her on TV thismorning? In front of the hotel?"

 "Yes."

 "Who authorized her to throw a street rally?"

 "I don't think she threw it, per se," Ogle said. "It just sort ofhappened. A bunch of people came up from the South Side andwanted to burn the hotel down. She came out and cooled themoff."

 "Well, itlooked like a rally."

 "I know it did."

 "And the last thing we need is some kind of outspoken radicalblack woman running through the streets with a megaphone."

 "Mr. Salvador," Ogle said, quietly and forbearingly, "EleanorRichmond, as we speak, is on a plane to Cashmere, Washington,to pick apples with migrant farm workers. Then she's going to gowhite-water rafting and read a scripted speech about theimportance of wild rivers. Then she's going to fly to San Diego to mend fences with those Mexican people who run up the centerlineof highways. Then-"

 "Okay, I get the picture," Mr. Salvador said.

 "So does she, I think," Ogle said.

 48

 Presidential campaigns had their own calendar: a series ofspecial days, sprinkled throughout the year, determined by certainarcane astrological formulae. Chief among these was Election Dayitself, which was the first Tuesday after the first Monday inNovember. Another such occasion was Labor Day, which, to mostpeople, marked the end of summer, but which to politiciansmarked the formal beginning of the presidential campaign - acomplete surprise to almost everyone in America.

 So television viewers across the land, who for the last year had not been able to settle into their recliners without being exposed toa scene of red-white-and-blue balloons and flawlessly coiffed candidates standing in front of blue curtains in hotel ballrooms,were generally befuddled when they checked the evening news onLabor Day and were informed, by solemn anchorpersons, that TipMcLane, the President, and William A. Cozzano had all kicked off their campaigns today.

 The shortest point between a camera and a backdrop is a straightline passing through the candidate's head. Who these threecandidates were, and how they would run their campaigns, couldbe inferred from the things they stood in front of.

 The President stood in front of an empty Buick plant in Flint,Michigan. This informed the viewing public that he was a serious,taking-care-of-business type who cared about the downtrodden (unlike, for example, Tip McLane) and that he intended to renewAmerica.

 Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane stood in a lettuce field in California where he and his parents had once stooped at menial labor; behindhim rose a mountain vista. This backdrop told the viewing publicthat Tip McLane had not forgotten his humble roots, that he was a grass-roots, back-to-basics conservative who was not afraid to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty.

 William A. Cozzano and his running mate Eleanor Richmondkicked off their independent campaign on the runway of amunicipal airport south of Seattle. This was a fairly complicated bitof multileveled background engineering. The immediate back­ground consisted of a runway, outlined in colored lights and streaked with tire marks, conveying a strong sense of motion(Cozzano is taking off!). The next thing down the line was a vastBoeing airplane factory; brand-new 767s were lined up on theapron, each tail fin freshly and brightly painted in the color schemeof a different airline somewhere around the world. Finally, in thedeep background, Mount Rainier heaved itself up out of a low,dark line of foothills. It was so vast that it looked like a telephotolens shot, even through a normal lens, and when the cameramen enhanced it with their telephotos (as none of them could resistdoing) it looked like a giant ice-covered asteroid looming over theshoulders of William A. Cozzano and Eleanor Richmond.

 Boeing had nothing to do with the Cozzano campaign, ofcourse, or so they said. This whole event was being held onmunicipal property. The presence of a Boeing facility next doorwas a convenient accident.

 Cozzano looked snappy in his homburg, the sort of old-fashioned men's hat that had gone out of fashion when JFK had refused to wear one, and that Cozzano was now single-handedly bringing back into fashion. In the middle of his campaign-kickoffaddress, a new 767, painted with the logo of Japan Airlines, taxiedon to the runway. Its tail fin momentarily came between Cozzano and the glaciated slopes of Rainier, then narrowed into a verticalblade as the plane turned onto the runway, revealing the mountain,illuminated by a peach-colored sunrise. The icy clarity of Rainierwas muddled by the heat waves rising from the jet's engines. Then those engines glowed bluish-white, the plane accelerated down therunway, directly toward Rainier, shot into the air, banked into aclimbing turn, and headed west, bound for Japan. It happened just as Cozzano was making a point about the trade deficit; and as the roar of the jet engines died away, it was almost possible to hear adim cacophony of whacking noises from the directions ofCalifornia and of Flint, Michigan, as Cozzano's competitors andtheir campaign managers smacked their foreheads in anguish.

 Floyd Wayne Vishniak watched this lovely spectacle in a cool, dark hollow set in the folds of the Monongahela National Forest in WestVirginia. He was not much more than a hundred miles outside ofWashington D.C., and yet the location could scarcely have beenmore remote.

 He had been camping out here for a couple of days, just lyinglow for a time, watching Cozzano on his wristwatch TV-cum-brain-control device, tossing the occasional lure into the streamthat ran past his little campsite, draining cans of beer and thenshooting them full of big starburst holes with his nimble Fleis­chacker. His truck was stopped on a gravelly floodplain, the floor of a ravine with nearly vertical sides that made a perfect backstopfor shooting. He had brought two cases of inexpensive beer withhim, going out of his way to obtain cans rather than bottles. You could only shoot a bottle once, but you could shoot a can over andover again until not much was left of it; this was how a man had to pinch his pennies nowadays.

 Out here in the Eastern time zone, the sun had already been upfor a few hours and so the peach-coloured light on the slopes ofRainier looked strange and faky. Vishniak was sure that thelumbering jetliner and the ice-covered volcano looked great on thekind of thirty-nine-inch Trinitron that rich people would own, but on his postage-stamp wristwatch it didn't really look so hot.

 That was okay. Images were all fakery and manipulation cobbledtogether by the evil gnomes of Ogle Data Research, who had theirsecret headquarters just a short distance away, in the mysteriousplace called Pentagon Towers. What counted was words. So whenCozzano stepped up to the microphones to make the formalcampaign kickoff speech, Vishniak emptied his Fleischacker into ahapless beer can, set the safety, put the gun into the shoulder holsterunder his QUAD CITIES WHIPLASH windbreaker, and satdown on the tailgate of his pickup to listen to the murmuring of the stream and the speech that William A. Cozzano was delivering to him and the rest of the American people. As the introductions were being made, Vishniak pulled a small reporter's notebook out of hispocket. The last page read:

 COZZANO'S HATS (CONTD.)

 SUN AUG 25           CHICAGO CUBS BASEBALL CAP

 MON AUG 26       HARD HAT (STEEL MILL VISIT)

 TUE AUG 27           NO HAT - BUT HE STAYED IN-DOORS!!!

 WED AUG 28          THE HOMBURG

 THU AUG 29         U.S. FLAG BASEBALL CAP

 FRI AUG 30BIKE HELMET (ORLANDO BIKE-A-THON)

 SAT AUG 31           THE HOMBURG

 SUN SEP 1              NO HAT - WENT TO CHURCH

  

 and now he added a new line:

 SUN SEP 2              THE HOMBURG AGAIN

 Some kind of spooky shit was definitely going on with thosehats. They were all saying now that the homburg was some kind of a Fashion Statement, but William A. Cozzano had never felt anyneed to make such statements until he had gotten that chip stuckinto his brain. It obviously had something to do with brain waves.

 In his speech, Cozzano covered the usual bases: the corruption of big-party politics, the need for change. Change not only in thepolitical system but in the values system of the entire country. Change that would renew our commitment to education and to long-term investment in the future. This topic led, inevitably, tothe subject of the economy, at which point Vishniak finally startedto pay attention. The economy was the only thing that mattered tohim.

 "There are those who say that we are doomed to be a secondrate power, subjugated to the Japanese," Cozzano said, just as thebig Boeing jet was beginning its takeoff run. Vishniak clenched his teeth and became enraged, as he always did when people said thiskind of thing.

 "To those people," Cozzano continued, "I have only one thingto say: BEHOLD!" He turned aside and swept out one arm towardthe jet, then watched it take off. To shout above the scream of itsturbofans would have been futile, would have made him look tinyby comparison. As Vishniak watched the miniature figure of the jettake off on his little screen, saw it bank into its turn, exposing theRising Sun logo painted on its tail fin, his anger was replaced by asurge of defiant pride. Sure the economic situation looked bleak,but a country that could make airplanes like that could accomplishanything if it just set its mind to it.

 Cozzano turned to the microphones and said, "No matter how bleak the economists and the pundits say our situation is, I thinkthat any country that can make airplanes like that one can, with hard work and determination, accomplish anything."

 Vishniak felt relieved that a great man like Cozzano felt the sameas he did, that his feelings weren't just stupid, blind patriotism. But he was a jittery and suspicious fellow by nature and could not besatisfied with this kind of happy talk for long.

 "Now, I would be lying if I stopped there, and left you with theimpression that happy talk is going to close the trade deficit,"Cozzano said. "Uplifting speeches and slick media images do not aneconomy make. What we need is to educate our children. But notjust to cram their heads with facts and figures - to teach them valuesas well, values of hard, steady work."

 That was a little better. Cozzano was talking some sense there. Although Vishniak was beginning to get a little skeptical aboutpoliticians who always spouted this easy talk about education.Education was great but it wouldn't really help the economy foranother twenty years. And it wouldn't help the likes of FloydWayne Vishniak at all.

 "People think that when I speak of education I mean kinder­garten, elementary school and high school," Cozzano said, "but

 education is more than that. Education is a lifelong process. Anunemployed, down-and-out factory worker in the Midwest canbenefit from education just as much as a five-year-old child."

 "Wait just a goddamn minute," Floyd Wayne Vishniak said, out loud.

 It was just a little too much - that bit about the down-and-out midwestern factory worker. He rewound his mental tape of the last few minutes and played it back inside his head, ignoring the rest ofCozzano's speech (Cozzano had now gone on to talk about theneed for corporate America to shape up and restructure itself).

 Vishniak held the Dick Tracy watch up to his eye and scrutinizedthe scene carefully. Cozzano didn't have any notes up there on the lectern. And it didn't seem like he was using a TelePrompTer. He was looking around naturally, seemingly speaking off-the-cuff, making everything up as he went along. This was a habit that hadbeen noticed and remarked upon by all the papers that Vishniakhad been reading over the summer: Cozzano, who in years past hadwritten his own speeches and read them back, hewing closely to afixed script, had, in the last few months, taken to speaking extemporaneously.

 Floyd Wayne Vishniak was beginning to understand why.William A. Cozzano was reading his mind. He was readingVishniak's brain waves and telling him exactly what he wanted tohear! How was he doing it? Through the wristwatch, no doubt.That was the key to the whole thing.

 Vishniak rotated his forearm, the palm of his hand facingupward, to expose the little button that would release the ratchetand pop the watch off his wrist. All he had to do was take it off andthen he would be a free man again, and William A. Cozzano wouldno longer be able to read his brain waves. He had been wearing itcontinuously for a couple of weeks, and underneath it his skin wasitching fiercely. But he couldn't take it off, no matter what. He hadto trust his instincts. He knew that they were watching him andthat to remove the wristwatch meant certain death, a nice dose ofshellfish poison straight into his arm. He'd never get that thing off.He was on a suicide mission.

 He jumped off the tailgate, climbing into the cab of his truck,dug his road atlas out from under the seat, and began tocontemplate possible approach vectors to the seat of all evil in theworld.

 49

 Shortly after Floyd Wayne Vishniak entered the greaterWashington metropolitan area, something completely shockingand unprecedented happened to him: he got a job.

 It happened in Pentagon Plaza, of all places. He had gone thereexpecting to stage a bloodbath and ended up filling out jobapplications. The unpredictability of life in America was a constantsource of amusement to him.

 He had spent half a day doing recon. Pentagon Plaza, heconcluded after driving around it at high speed several dozen times,was a single building that just happened to look like a whole bunchof different buildings very close together. There was a parking ramp (the rich and powerful had to have their parking spaces!) and a low,squat, enormous structure mostly concealed behind that, and rising up from it were a couple of skyscrapers - Pentagon Towers. But they were all part of the same complex. The fortress of darknessowned and opened by Ogle Data Research.

 How best to make his approach? His maps told him that therewas a Metro stop beneath Pentagon Plaza. That would be a goodway to get in close. But in the end he decided against it. He had noidea what was going to happen. If he didn't get killed, he wouldwant to get out of there fast, and taking the subway wasn't the wayto do it. Better to have his truck handy.

 He could park outside and walk in or - daring idea - he couldactually drive on to the parking ramp. This latter idea, while itmight seem impossibly audacious, held major advantages. It wasworth checking out. He drove past the entrances to the parking ramp several times, going very slowly, his window rolled down,and observed people driving into the place. Everyone got inwithout hassle. They pulled up to a little machine, slammed abutton, and pulled out a ticket. The gate rose up and they drove onin. No one inspected them. You didn't have to show any kindof ID.

 It was worth a try. The worst thing that could happen was that he'd have to crash through the gate. He pulled into the chute. Somuch adrenaline was pumping through his system now that histeeth hurt and his gums felt hot and swollen.

 He stopped by the little machine, and, trying to look nonchalant,like he did this every day, he reached out and punched the button.A cardboard ticket spat out of the machine. He jerked it out. Thegate rose up.

 Calmly, like he belonged here, Floyd Wayne Vishniak pilotedhis pickup truck into the bowels of Pentagon Plaza.

 The parking ramp held no secrets. He found a space and backedinto it. This unorthodox maneuver caused consternation and horn-honking among several other would-be parkers, but (a) they couldall fuck themselves, (b) he had a gun, and (c) he needed to park thisway so he could pull out rapidly when the time came.

 The Fleischacker was hanging in his armpit. He had purchasedseveral overly long thirty-round magazines for it. Loaded withteflon armor-piercing bullets, these were secreted in the long cargo pockets built into the thighs of his trousers. By reaching down andunsnapping the flaps on the tops of these pockets, he could whipout a new magazine in a fraction of a second. One magazine was already stuck into the handle of his Fleischacker, making the gunhuge, unwieldy, and L-shaped. His QUAD CITIES WHIPLASHwindbreaker hid the weapon adequately as long as he kept it zippedup most of the way, and kept his arm down to his side.

 He locked up his truck (wouldn't do for his getaway vehicle to get ripped off while he was busying himself inside) and then followed afew other people toward the sky bridge and a set of glass doors thatjoined the parking ramp to the huge, squat building next to it.

 The headquarters of Ogle Data Research was cleverly disguisedas a fancy department store!

 Vishniak forced himself to keep calm. He walked through themiddle of a huge display of women's shoes, trying to act just as coolas all the other people, like he came through here all the time. Hedid this on the assumption that the department store was just a false-front operation like the onesof Mission: Impossible and that it wouldbe all of about thirty feet deep. Once he passed through this shoe display he would begin to see the brain-wave monitors and satellitedishes. Then the Fleischacker would come out and Ogle's eviloperation would come to an end. Vishniak would die, probably,and Cozzano would be released from electronic bondage.

 But when he made it through the shoe display, he came to a section full of purses. Then more women's clothes. Perfume.Cosmetics. He went up an escalator (Keep walking! Don't stop and look!) and found a display of television sets, then a little gourmetrestaurant. It went on and on and on.

 He kept walking. His brain was reeling. He went up and downthe escalators several times and eventually walked out through thehuge doorway and into something that looked very much like ashopping mall. But not like any shopping mall that Vishniak hadseen in the Quad Cities. For him, a mall was a single narrowconcourse, one story, lined with tiny shops, a few benches, and maybe a fountain in the middle.

 Compared to the malls he was used to, this place was like - well,like Washington, D.C., compared to Davenport, Iowa. It was fourstories high. The floors were gleaming white marble. A central atrium was filled with light streaming down through a glass ceiling;looking up through it, Vishniak could see the sky, and airplanes taking off from the airport, and the office skyscrapers towering overhead.

 It went on forever. Thousands of people were here, visiting hundreds of stores. Some of the stores were tiny rinky-dink ones,but a lot of them were huge and fancy. It was no longer possible to support the belief that this was all a false-front operation for OgleData Research. This was a real, honest-to-god shopping mall, albeitan incomprehensibly vast and rich one.

 He kept walking. On the one hand, he was confused and a bitdisappointed that he had failed to locate Ogle Data Research. Onthe other hand, he was relieved, and breathing easily for the firsttime since he had entered the city. This business was clearly muchmore complicated than he'd thought at first. He was going to haveto settle in and put a lot more thought into the intelligence-gathering phase of the operation.

 Before long, he came to a big electric sign: a color-codeddirectory of the Pentagon Mall. It contained floor plans of each ofthe four levels, each store identified by number with a listing of allthe stores by category.

 It was almost too much to hope for that he could find ODR inthis way, but he gave it a shot. The stores were arranged bycategory: WOMEN'S APPAREL, MEN'S APPAREL,RESTAURANTS, JEWELRY, GIFTS, and so on. Vishniak wasunclear about which category described Ogle Data Research, and so he just began at the beginning and read through the names ofevery single business in the mall, which took several minutes.There was no Ogle Data Research listed.

 Inspiration came in the form of a HELP WANTED sign in thewindow of one of the stores. Applying for jobs was one goodexcuse to get into a store and check it out without actually spendingmoney. And - unthinkable as it might seem - if he could actuallyget a job here at Pentagon Plaza, he would be able to spend all histime here, and recon the place in detail. An inside job was alwaysthe best way to do a crime.

 He had filled out enough job applications in his day to knownthat you had to have an address. So he exited the mall the way hehad come, paid an outrageous fee for parking, and, under the nameSherman Grant, rented a room at a motel near National Airport,only a mile or two from Pentagon Plaza. Then he found a postoffice where he was able to rent a box, giving him that all-important mailing address, by this point his money was beginning to run low, but he had spent the summer accumulating credit cardsthat had been mailed to him, unasked-for, by fatuous banks inplaces like Delaware and South Dakota, and these went a long way.

 Thus did Floyd Wayne Vishniak set up his own little base ofoperations in the nation's capital, joining every other person,company, pressure group, trade association, and maniac with anational agenda. A second trip to Pentagon Plaza that evening (thistime via the less expensive Metro) netted a dozen more job applications. He stayed up until one in the morning filling them out in his best sixth-grade penmanship, and was down at the mall brightand early the next morning, as soon as the stores opened up, tohand them all in. And on this, his third trip to the mall, he didn'teven bother to bring his gun.

 Success came surprisingly quickly; the mall management offeredSherman Grant a job working in the food court, clearing andwiping down tables. A yuppie bastard interviewed him for the job,just to make sure that he, who had formerly assembled giant tractortransmissions for a living, was intelligent enough to pick garbage offof tables and wipe them with a damp rag. Vishniak swallowed hisresentment and averred that he would try his very best to handlethe unprecedented challenges of the job.

 He considered holding out to see if any other jobs were offered tohim, but decided to take the first one that came along. He had to keephis eye on the ball here. The purpose of this trip was not to developnew career paths. The purpose was to put bullets in the heads of the top management stratum of Ogle Data Research and then destroy asmuch of their high-tech brain-wave equipment as he could get intohis gunsights before he himself was gunned down by the SWATteams that showed up, so inevitably, at these kinds of events.

 He started immediately. They issued him an apron and a hat.The training period lasted for about ten seconds and then he wasworking. The food court at Pentagon Plaza was on the groundfloor, filling up a big open space in the floor plan that, in higherstories, was occupied by a hole with a railing around it: a hugeatrium that looked down on the sea of tables and chairs shared byall of the fast-food places lining the food court. The atrium and the court were vaulted by a huge glass ceiling that let in so much light that Vishniak often wore sunglasses.

 At first he was humiliated to take the job. He was the only English-speaking person doing it. He never felt good about the job itself, but after a short while he began to understand that, from areconnaissance standpoint, it could hardly have been more perfect. Vishniak ambled across a large territory all day long, sizing upthousands of people, overhearing snatches of their conversations,learning where they worked and what they did. It was exactly thejob he needed.

 One day, after he'd been there for about a week and scanned tensof thousands of faces, he actually saw one he recognized: AaronGreen. Green was all by himself at one of the stand-up tables, eatingraw fish - sushi, they called it - and reading a computer magazine.He was wearing a suit. On the floor, a briefcase stood up between his legs. Vishniak circled around him once or twice, watching hisface, and confirmed an ID.

 Vishniak got that adrenalized feeling again for the first time sincehe'd made his first approach to Pentagon Plaza. If Aaron Greenlooked up and recognized him, he was as good as dead. Fortunatelyhe was wearing his sunglasses. And since he had begun workinghere he had taken the precaution of wrapping an Ace bandagearound his wrist every morning to conceal the wristwatch Green had given him.

 Vishniak watched Green through his sunglasses the same way thathe watched babes down along the river on hot summer days: hishead turned sideways to the target, his eyes swiveled in their socketsso the women didn't know they were being watched. EventuallyGreen finished eating his sushi, flipped through the last few pages of his computer magazine, and picked up his briefcase. He maneuveredthrough the crowded floor of the food court and climbed on the upescalator. Vishniak followed him, climbing on to the bottom of the escalator just as Green was getting off at the top.

 Green went up a couple of floors and then began to walk through the mall, skirting the edge of the atrium. Vishniakfollowed him at a distance. Finally Green stopped at a pair ofelevator doors set unobtrusively into the wall, between a leatherstore and an electronics place. He took a key out of his pocket and shoved it into a wall switch. The elevator doors opened and Green climbed on board and disappeared.

 Vishniak gave the elevator doors a closer inspection, cursinghimself for having been so dense. He had walked past these doors ahundred times and never really noticed them. He had assumed thatthey were a freight elevator or something else - not a secretentrance to Ogle Data Research.

 This discovery did not help him much; you had to have a key toget on the elevator. But still, a lead was a lead. That day, Vishniaktook an early lunch, went to a haircutting place in the mall, andspent his day's salary getting his long hair cut short and his beardshaved off. He couldn't risk being recognized by Aaron Green.With the new hair and the sunglasses he was unrecognizable.

 Not far from the elevator doors was a bench where tiredshoppers could rest their legs. During his off hours, Vishniak tookto spending a lot of time on that bench, watching the elevatordoors.

 Most of the people who went in and out of the elevator weretypical office workers, all nicely dressed. But very soon Vishniakbegan to notice a pattern: certain of these office workers would habitually come out of the elevators, always in pairs. One of themwould stand by the elevator doors with a key. The other would go off into the mall. Within a few minutes, unfamiliar people would begin to gravitate toward the elevator doors - plain, old, off-the-street types. The person stationed by the elevator doors, would usethe key to open the doors and dispatch them up to the eleventhfloor. An hour or two later, these people would emerge again and then go their separate ways.

 Vishniak was curious as to what was being done to these regularpeople during the hour or two that they spent up on the eleventhfloor. Was it some kind of brain surgery? Were they all beingturned into robots like Cozzano?

 After a while he came to recognize the people who went into the mall to rope these people in, and he took to following them aroundto see what they were doing. They always carried clipboards; theclipboards always had lists on them, and as they persuaded differentpeople to come up to the eleventh floor they would cross an itemoff the list. And they did not go up to people at random; theywould go to particular stores, or busy intersections in the mall, andscan the faces of the shoppers, looking for particular types.

 Vishniak overheard an interesting bit of conversation on oneoccasion, as he was trailing a young woman with a clipboard. Shehappened to run into another clipboard-toting woman who wasout in the mall trolling for subjects.

 "Marcie! Hi!"

 "Oh, hi, Sherry. What are you looking for?"

 "The usual - a mall concubine and a porch monkey. How about you?"

 "I've got everything on my list except for a Post-ConfederateGravy Eater."

 "Oh. You know what you should do? See that newsstand overthere?"

 Sherry gave some instructions to Marcie. Marcie thanked herand went to the newsstand, where she found a long-haired youngman, wearing a T-shirt and a confederate flag on the back, leafingthrough a copy ofGuns & Ammo. After a short conversation, thisyoung man nodded, put the magazine back on the rack, andfollowed Marcie out of the store.

 Pentagon Plaza was not the kind of mall where you could come byConfederate flags easily, but there were many such places in the lessaffluent stretches of northern Virginia, and that night Floyd Wayne Vishniak hit a few of them. He also stopped in at a newsstand andbought a few gun magazines - a subject that interested him anyway.The next day, after finishing his shift wiping tables, he went to the men's room, locked himself into a stall, and took off his apronand his hat. He pulled on a Confederate T-shirt. Over that he puton his shoulder holster. He was wearing his cargo pants with the ammo clips in them. Finally he pulled on a bright red windbreakerwith the Confederate flag on the back and zipped it up just enough to hide the gun. Then he went upstairs and sat on the bench nearthe elevators and settled in comfortably to read his gun magazines.He was going to have to come up with a new name - Lee Jacksonor something.

 In the end, he read those magazines pretty thoroughly, and gotto know everything a man could know about the latest in weaponstechnology, because he ended up spending three solid eight-hourshifts on that bench before he was finally noticed.

 "Excuse me, sir?" a young woman said.

 Vishniak looked up. It was Marcie. She had her clipboard.

 "I work for an opinion research company called Ogle DataResearch," she continued, "and I was wondering if you'd mind ifI asked you a few questions? Are you in the twenty-six to thirty-five age group?"

 "Yes, I am," he said.

 "Are you from the South, and do you consider yourself to be aSoutherner?"

 "Proud of it too," he said.

 "And would you consider yourself unemployed or under­employed?"

 "Absolutely."

 "Well, how would you like to make fifty dollars? It'll take aboutan hour?"

 "Fifty bucks in an hour?" Vishniak said. "Well, yee-ha! This is my lucky day."

 50

 This was where he'd have to be careful. He still had no ideawhat the Ogle Data Research people were actually doing to theirtest subjects up there on the eleventh floor. If it was some kind of brain surgery, then Vishniak would have to open fire before they could get him under anaesthesia. Otherwise he would become oneof the living dead, a robot slave like Cozzano.

 To outward appearances, everything seemed real nice. They hada big lobby by the elevators. It was all decorated. A nice youngwoman, whom Vishniak recognized from his reconnaissance, greeted him and led him around past the big curving desk wherethe receptionist sat with her space-age headset. Two security guardsstood by, shifting their weight from one tired foot to the other; oneof them was about ninety years old and the other one wasoverweight. Vishniak considered picking them off right here andnow but decided against it; as long as they kept leading him deeper into the bowels of ODR, there was no reason to get feisty.

 The girl offered him coffee but he refused; maybe that was howthey knocked people out. She ushered him into a room with half adozen chairs, all facing a big fancy TV set. Made in Japan, naturally.Three other people were already sitting there, and Vishniakrecognized them as the sort of typical mall-cruising Americans thatthe ODR agents were always trying to recruit. A couple of themwere drinking coffee but seemed to be suffering no ill effects so far.

 Vishniak took a seat and waited for the usher gal to leave theroom. Then he stood up, ambled over to the door, and stuck hishead out into the hallway, trying to get a sense of the layout. Theywere not far from the receptionist's station. In the other direction,the hallway led past a line of offices. All the offices had big picturewindows to let in the light, and so Vishniak could tell from adistance which doors were open and which were closed. Glancingback the other way he saw that the fat security guard was eyeballinghim. He withdrew into the room and went over to the windows.

 They had an incredible view. A fellow could probably makemoney, Vishniak reflected, by renting out an office in this buildingand charging mall shoppers a quarter to ride the elevators up andlook out the windows. They were so close to the Pentagon thatyou could probably hawk a loogie into its central courtyard. Off tothe left of the Pentagon was a huge cemetery with millions of whitegravestones. This juxtaposition made good horse sense in that thePentagon had to do with killing people. Beyond these landmarkswas a river, and on the far shore of that river, Vishniak looked rightinto the heart of Washington. He didn't recognize it at firstbecause, compared to Chicago, it was sparse and low-slung, like a farm or a park.

 A long, narrow strip of grass ran off into the distance and it waslined with white buildings. In the middle of it was a tall spiky thing.At the far end of it was a dome that Vishniak recognized as beingthe Capitol. Beyond that, he could not really tell one building from another: there were a million of them, they were all white, they had lots of columns and the occasional squat dome. The only other onethat looked familiar was located on the far side of the strip of grass,off the main drag: he thought it was the White House.

 But it didn't look exactly right. He had seen the White Houseon TV a million times, always with a TV reporter standing in front of it, and thought it had a simple crackerbox shape with a verandahbulging out from the long side of it, but from this vantage point hecould see that this thing he had always thought of as the WhiteHouse was just the central unit in a sprawling, far-flung affair. Thething had wings sticking out to both sides, and the wings hadadditions tacked on to them. It was like a simple crackerbox house that the owner kept adding rooms to, until it rambled crazily all over the lot.

 Seeing this, Vishniak felt betrayed. He had been raised to believethat the White House was just the President's house. His familylived there and his kids hunted Easter eggs on the lawn. It was bigand nice by house standards, but still a house. But now he could seethat the White House wasn't a real house at all. It was a false frontfor a rambling complex of sinister-looking additions that werecleverly concealed behind trees and bushes. And a fellow had to askhimself what happened in those additions, and what kind of peopleworked there, that their existence was so carefully kept hiddenfrom the American public.

 "Excuse me, sir?" someone was saying. He felt a hand placedgently on his arm, and startled away from it. It was one of the ODRgals. "Would you like to have a seat? We're about to get started."

 "Sure," he said, and took a seat, one that had a good view of thedoor. While he had been standing at the window analyzing thestructure of the U.S. Government, two other mall folk had come into the room, making a total complement of six.

 What happened next was kind of amusing: they passed out wristcuffs, one per customer. They were just like the one that Vishniak was already wearing, except that these didn't have the built-in TVscreens. Playing dumb, Vishniak watched the gal explain how toput them on your arm, and followed her instructions with artificialclumsiness. Now he had one on each wrist.

 Then she closed the blinds, turned off the lights, and showedthem about fifteen minutes of television. Most of it consisted ofadvertisements but there were a few news stories in there too. Allof it had to do, one way or another, with William A. Cozzano.Some of the ads were fuzzy-warm, touchy-feely numbers showingpast events in Cozzano's life, including some grainy home videos of Cozzano recovering from his stroke that made Vishniak get chokedup. Some of the ads were attacks on the President or Tip McLane.And then there were news stories - excerpts from what looked likenetwork broadcasts. But the anchormen were unfamiliar toVishniak. And the news events being reported had not actually happened.

 Watching the anchorman read the stories, Vishniak sensed,somehow, that he was familiar. But not as an anchorman. Assomething else. Then it came to him: this man had played thecaptain of a starship - not theEnterprise - in an episode ofStar Trek:The Next Generation.He was an actor. And this news story was afake. It hadn't really happened. It was justa potential news story.

 "Huh. Getting some interesting reactions from our Post-Confederate Gravy Eater," Aaron Green said. He was sitting in thenext room, looking at half a dozen monitor screens. Next to himwas Shane Schram.

 "What's this guy's problem?' Shane Schram said. He looked at the TV monitor showing the face of the Post-Confederate GravyEater, who was staring fixedly at the screen, jaw muscles throbbing.

 "Incredible cortex activity," Aaron said, scrutinizing thereadout.

 "What does that mean?"

 "It means his mental gears are spinning at a million rpm. He'sthinking way too hard about everything."

 "Can't have that. We'll just throw out his results," Schram said.

 The videotape came to an end. Schram got up, walked nextdoor, and turned on the lights in the focus group room. Then hedelivered his usual self-introduction, which Aaron Green had nowlistened to a million times.

 The door opened and Mr. Salvador came into the room, joiningAaron. Everyone called him Mr. Salvador because he had a kindof intercontinental breeding that inspired un-American levels offormality and because he was their boss. Even Cy Ogle's boss. Buthe wasn't just some figurehead who golfed and went to theoccasional board meeting. He was very much a hands-on type. Hespent days at a time holed up in the room where they had set up allof the monitors for the PIPER 100.

 "We're doing a PIPER broadcast in a couple of minutes,"Mr. Salvador said. "I'd like you to join me and give me youranalysis."

 "What's up?"

 "Cozzano's giving an address to a convention of gun nuts in Tulsa," Salvador said. "It's going to be his major statement on thegun control issue. Which, in this country, seems to be hystericallyemotional."

 "That's for sure."

 "I'm just sick of all this gutter politics," the lady said. She was asolidly built, bifocal-wearing woman with a conservative mid-western haircut, wearing a lavender jogging suit. Fresh off a tourbus from Indiana, no doubt. "I just don't want to see any more ofthis trash."

 "I think youdo want to see it," Schram said, "I think you arefascinated by this kind of thing. I think that, when you go to thegrocery stores, you deliberately stand in the longest checkout lineso that you will have time to pull the tabloids off the racks and leaf through them. And then you put them back on their racks. Becauseyou're not the kind of person who would read sleazy tabloids - areyou?"

 The woman was utterly dumbfounded. "How - how did youknow that? Have you been following me around or something?"

 "Stop messing with her brain waves!" said the Post-ConfederateGravy Eater. Contrary to his assigned stereotype, he did not have asouthern accent. More midwestern.

 "How's that again?" Schram asked.

 "You get into people's brains. I know you do. Can't you see you're bothering that woman?"

 Schram shrugged innocently and held up his hands, palms up."Hey. I'm just here having a conversation with her. I don't knowanything about brain waves."

 "Oh, yeah?" the man said, yanking the cuff off his wrist. "Then what's this?"

 "That's already been explained," Schram said.

 "Your explanations are all lies and cover-ups," the man said.

 "Look," Schram said, "let me be honest. We're done with yourinterview, sir. Why don't you go ahead and take off. You can pick up your fifty dollars at the desk."

 "What about these others?"

 "I'd like to talk to them a little bit more."

 "Why don't you want to talk to me? Isn't my opinion important?"

 "We had a bug in our equipment," Schram said. "It didn't workin your case. So to keep you here any longer would be a waste oftime. Thank you for coming in."

 The man stood up out of his chair, facing the door, and thenhesitated. He had grabbed the zipper pull on his red Confederateflag windbreaker with his left hand and was nervously zipping it upand down. He seemed to be deep in thought.

 "Sir? That's all we need from you," Schram said. "You can gohome now. Thanks for coming."

 "Okay," the man said, finally zipping his zipper all the way up tohis neck. "Okay, I think I'll go back home now. Thanks. It was realinteresting. I learned a lot."

 "You're welcome," Schram said.

 The man started for the exit. Then music began to come out ofhim, as if he were carrying a transistor radio in his pocket. Hestopped and froze for a moment.

 The music was tinny and compressed, as if coming from a very small speaker. It was a patriotic fifes-and drums number. Shane Schram stared in astonishment.

 The man took his hands out of his pockets. One wrist had an Acebandage wrapped around it. The music became louder. He rippedthe Ace bandage off. The sound of applause was now coming fromhis wrist.

 William A. Cozzano stepped to the lectern and waved down theapplause and cheers of the attendees at the Tulsa Gun and KnifeShow.

 "My Secret Service people wanted to provide additional security for me today," he said, "because I was addressing a bunch of gun owners, and for some reason that made them nervous. Well, I haveone thing to say to you gun owners: if any one of you really wantsto take a shot at me,here I am!"

 Cozzano stepped back from the lectern and held his arms outwide. The hall was filled with stunned murmuring for a fewmoments. Then the gun owners exploded. Peals of cheers,applause, and foot-stomping overwhelmed the sound system on thePIPER watch.

 Floyd Wayne Vishniak was staring into Shane Schram's face, sizinghim up. Schram's eyes were jumping back and forth between thelittle TV and his face.

 "You're Economic Roadkill," Schram said. "You're FloydWayne Vishniak!"

 Floyd Wayne Vishniak unzipped his windbreaker and reachedinside. "That was a really stupid thing for you to say," he said. Thenhe pulled out a handgun and pointed it at Schram. Everyone else inthe room collapsed out of their chairs.

 "I can see that you're very upset," Schram said.

 "How many times do I have to tell you," Vishniak said, "to staythe hell out of my brain waves!" Then he fired a single round thatentered Schram's head through the bridge of his nose and leftthrough an exit wound, in the back of his skull, that would haveaccommodated a grapefruit.

 "Don't worry," Vishniak said to the five people on the floor,who could scarcely hear a word he was saying because their ears were ringing from the incredible blast of the handgun. "You don'thave to worry about these bastards anymore!"

 "What the hell was that?" Mr. Salvador said. He and Green were in the PIPER monitor room, watching Cozzano shake his handstogether above his head, basking in the waves of applause.

 "Nothing," Green said. "Another one of Schram's psychologicalexperiments."

 "I thought we were finished with the calibration phase," Mr.Salvador said.

 "Believe me," Green said, "this place is like Dodge Citysometimes. It's all fake."

 Vishniak popped his head into the hallway and withdrew it beforeanyone could get off a shot. But the precaution was unnecessary.No one was there.

 He chanced a second look and saw the fat security guard in thelobby, looking back at him with only mild concern, as if high-ranking executives at ODR got their brains blown against thewalls every day. Vishniak drew back into the room, his back tothe doorway. He gripped the Fleischacker in both hands, spunaround into the hall while bringing the gun downward, steadiedhis arm against the door frame for a second, and fired three quickshots. The first two hit the guard in the chest and the last one washigh.

 Now he had to move fast. He ran toward the lobby, spunthrough the doorway, and took aim at the old guard, who was inthe act of unsnapping his holster. He fired two rounds into theman's head and upper body from a distance of about six feet. Thenhe spun toward the receptionist's desk.

 She had already vaulted her desk and was cowering andscreaming on the far side. That was okay, she was just a gnome. Thekey was to take out the switchboard. Vishniak fired a spread ofsome half-dozen bullets into her computer and her telephoneswitchboard.

 He turned back into the hallway, reached down with one hand,and unsnapped the flaps on the tops of his cargo pockets. He tucked the flaps down into the pockets, as he had practiced many times, sothat they would not get in the way when he reached down to pullout more clips.

 Then it hit him: though it was a bit early in the day to be gettingcocky, he was doing an incredibly good job so far. He had wiped out their pathetic security detail and blown their communicationsto shreds. Now he'd be able to clean out the remainder of theeleventh floor in a thorough and methodical way.

 "Generally good results so far," Mr. Salvador said. "Of course, thegun control advocates will never like this kind of thing."

 "Yeah. But check out some of our gun owners," Green said."Look at Vishniak?"

 "Who?"

 "Economic Roadkill," Green said, tapping a screen that hadsuddenly gone brilliant emerald. "He's one of my guys. And you can see how happy he is with the speech so far."

 He had gone almost completely deaf from the blasts of theFleischacker and could barely hear the voice of William A.Cozzano coming from his PIPER watch:"...would go out in thefields with my father, each of us with a shotgun tucked under hisarm, and look for the pheasants that would go through theharvested fields for loose corn. Our retriever Lover wouldaccompany us, often staying well back because he had learned thatthe blasts of the shotgun hurt his ears."

 At this point Cozzano paused in his speech as the audiencelaughed indulgently. It wasn't really that funny, but he had delivered it in the cadence of a joke, and they knew their cues.

 Vishniak kicked open an office door and saw nothing but a desk,and the knees and elbows of a man in a suit who was coweringbehind it. This was not much to go on, but he was able to use hismind's eye to reconstruct the approximate shape and position of theowner of those knees and elbows, and pumped several rounds intothe probable locations of his vital organs. When he saw whatlooked like an appropriate quantity of blood on the floor, he leftthe office, leaving the door ajar as a reminder that he had alreadyvisited this particular room.

 "This is a bit excessive, wouldn't you say?' Mr. Salvador said. "Ishall have to speak with Dr. Schram about this. It's too late in thecampaign for these distractions."

 "There is an incredible amount of gunfire," Green said, a littlenervous.

 On the central TV screen. Cozzano continued: "On one of myfirst trips, after Lover had flushed a pheasant, I swung my gun in itsdirection, as I had practiced so many times with clay pigeons. Butsuddenly the barrel swung up in the air and I held my fire. My father had suddenly reached out and pushed the barrels up in theair, ruining my aim, and I was very upset.

 "By way of explanation, he pointed to our neighbor's house,which had been directly in my line of fire - almost a mile awayfrom us! I protested that there was no way that birdshot could travelfor such a distance. 'Better safe than sorry,' he said."

 Vishniak moved on to the next room. This one contained half adozen TV screens and an equal number of computer monitors.One of the computer monitors was dead and the other five wereglowing a brilliant red color. He put a bullet into each. This clipwas running low, so as long as he was in a safe room, he ejected it,put it in his trouser pocket, and put in a fresh one. Cozzano's voicewas still coming from his wristwatch. "When I first learned that there were some people in Washington who wanted to take ourguns away from us, I were more astonished than offended. The ideaseemed ludicrous. My father - and all the other gun owners I knew- practiced firearm safety, and were at pains to pass those practices on to their children. The notion that some person in Washingtoncould come out to Tuscola, Illinois, and take our guns away from us, because we were not, in their view, fit to own them, wascompletely baffling to me. And it still is."

 The audience laughed; the laugh deepened into a cheer.

 "Something's definitely going on out there," Aaron Green said."I'm going to lock the door."

 "Good idea," Mr. Salvador said, picking up the phone, holdingit to his ear. "It's dead. The phone's dead."

 Aaron had almost reached the door when the knob rotated andit opened. A man with a gun was standing in the hallway looking him in the eye.

 The man's eye was drawn to the enormous racks of computermonitors that covered every wall of the room, the banks ofcomputer systems. His jaw dropped open as he took it all in. Whilethe man was gaping, Green had time to recognize him: it was FloydWayne Vishniak with a haircut.

 Vishniak's gaze finally returned to Aaron's face. And it was clearthat the presence of Aaron Green, here in this room, was the finalpiece in some kind of mental puzzle that Vishniak had beenassembling in his head. "This is it," Vishniak said, talking way tooloud, as if he was deaf. "Isn't it?"

 Never argue with a man with a gun. "Yes," Green said, "this isit." He turned to Mr. Salvador for support. "Isn't it?"

 "Yes, this is it," Mr. Salvador said, climbing very gingerly out ofhis chair, holding his hands together in front of his chest, fingertipto fingertip, in an attitude halfway between contemplation andprayer. He had the presence of mind to look over at Vishniak's monitor screen; it had gone pale and colorless.

 Then it turned brilliant green.

 "You're the Big Boss of it all!" Vishniak said. He steppedforward, shoved Aaron out of the way, leveled his gun at Mr.Salvador, and began to pull the trigger. He pulled it over and overagain and the muzzle flashed like a strobe. Mr. Salvador wasbacking across the room with his hands dangling numbly at his sides, and before long he collapsed against a window.

 But the window wasn't there anymore; it had long since beenblown out of its frame, and the only thing there was a closedVenetian blind with a lot of holes in it, flopping outward into thewind, betraying the warm Virginia sunshine. Suddenly, Mr.Salvador was no longer in the room.

 "Jesus, where'd he go?" Vishniak said. He stepped forward intothe room, looking around suspiciously. He went over to thewindow, pushed the blind out with one hand, and looked down.

 But by that point, Aaron Green was already in the elevator.

 The lunchtime crowd in the foodcourt at Pentagon Plaza had firstbeen alerted by a loud rattling noise on the glass overhead. The roarof conversation mostly drowned this out, but a few perceptivediners looked up to see fragments of broken glass sparkling in thesun as they bounced on the greenhouse roof.

 Then the body came toward them in a smooth silent arc andpunched through the ceiling without any perceptible loss in speed. When it hit the glass it lost its sharply edged silhouette as a lot ofstuff was forced out of it by the impact. It continued through thecentral atrium of the mall, now more a cloud of loosely organized

 remains of a corpse, and burst across four separate tables. A coupleof seconds later, the broken glass came down in a hailstorm.

 Floyd Wayne Vishniak, esq.

 Parts Unknown

 United States of America

  

 Letters to the Editor

 Washington Post

 Washington, D.C.

 Dear Mr. (Or Miss, Mrs., or Ms.) Editor:I have a bone to pick with you. Your coverage of my shootingspree (your way of describing it, not mine!) was the mostbiased and inaccurate piece of newspaper reporting I ever saw.All this year I have been reading a lot of newspapers (morethan $300 spent so far) so that I could be an informed votercome November. But when I read a piece of garbage like your articles of 14, 15, and 16 September it makes me wonder if Ihave been informing myself at all. Or was I just filling up my head with all kinds of trash that your reporters just made upwhen they decided it was too much work to just go out andfind out the Real Truth?

 1.     It was not a "bloodbath," as you have called it over andover. Only five people got killed. And the injuries to thediners in the food court do not count as this part was anaccident. Just today you had an article about a car accident onthe Beltway where five people got killed, but you never saidit was a bloodbath.

 2.     You said I "roamed through the office suite firing indiscriminately." This is totally biased. I was not roaming. And Iwas not firing indiscriminately, or else why didn't I kill thefive people who were in the brain-washing room with me? Iwill tell you why: because these five were average all-American citizens who I was trying to protect, not kill.

 3. The part about the "spray of gunfire" really made myblood boil. There was no spraying. I decided what to shootand I shot it.

 4.    Then in the article on 16 Sept. you said that I calmly andmethodically went through the office suite executing people.If I was so calm and methodical then why did you write all that stuff about roaming, spraying, firing indiscriminately, etc. Thisshows the bias that is in your writing.

 5.    I am not a reclusive loner. As you would understand ifyou had to WORK for a living, it is cheaper to live out in themiddle of nowhere. This does not make me a loner, just apoor honest working man.

 6.    Finally (this is the BIG POINT of my letter), every single word of your coverage makes me out to be a psycho. Like youwould never even consider the idea that I might ACTUALLYBE RIGHT!

 WAKE UP AMERICA! The so-called election of thepresident is a SHAM controlled by the MEDIA MANIPU­LATORS who have turned Cozzano into a ROBOT byplanting a CHIP IN HIS HEAD that receives secret codedtransmissions from SATELLITES. These same MEDIAMANIPULATORS have also put BRAIN WAVEMONITORS on average people's wrists disguised as DICKTRACY WRISTWATCHES.

 One day I will be recognized as the hero I am foruncovering this secret conspiracy. Then you, theWashingtonPost,will be exposed for what you are: A TOOL OF THECONSPIRACY that helps to control people's brains byputting out BIASED SO-CALLED NEWS.

 You will be hearing from me again soon, I am sure.

 Sincerely,

 Floyd Wayne Vishniak

  

 51

 The Cozzano campaign was a third-party effort, which meantthat it had to fight for every voter and every state. It had gotten offto a relatively late start in July and hadn't really gotten rolling untilAugust; then Cozzano had suffered in the polls for a couple ofweeks from his surprising choice of Eleanor Richmond as runningmate.

 Since then, Cozzano had crushed everything in his path. In cityafter city he strode up to the microphones, utterly relaxed and con­fident, shrugging off his aides, ignoring the notes and tele-prompters, and spoke. The words poured out of him effortlessly.He wasn't speaking to the journalists; he seemed to be speakingdirectly to the American people. In his homburg he looked like afigure from the middle of the century, like one of the men who haddefeated Hitler and charted the course of empires and alliances. Compared to the sniping, weasely sons of bitches who had been leading America for the last few decades, he seemed like a throw­back to the days when leaders were leaders, when there was such athing as a great man. He looked as if he would have been right athome at the Yalta Conference, sitting with Roosevelt, Churchill,and Stalin. Whether he was meeting with foreign leaders or tipping a hotel doorman, he conducted himself with surefooted dignity and gentlemanly grace mixed with a kind of earthy, scab-knuckledvigor.

 He did not seem to be running for anything at all. He seemed tobe going around the country just being himself.

 Mary Catherine didn't know a lot about presidential politics, butshe knew it was significant when they ended up in Boston for anovernight stay. Massachusetts never went to anyone except Demo­crats; the fact that Cozzano was there meant that it was now up forgrabs. It meant that her father was heading for a fifty-state sweep.

 They stayed at a magnificent hotel along the waterfront with ahuge arch that opened up like a gateway on Boston Harbor. Thiswas, of course, Ogle's choice; the arch made a great backdrop fortelevision appearances, and the proximity to the harbor made iteasier to bash the Democrats on environmental issues.

 The campaign had rented out a floor of suites. Mary Catherine and William A. Cozzano shared a two-bedroom suite, which wasnormal. She came straight from the airport and got settled in while her father hit a number of campaign stops, including tours of somehigh-tech firms in Cambridge.

 The Cozzanos traveled with a lot of luggage, which was an easything to do when you never had to carry it yourself, and you hadyour own airplane. Not all of it was clothing. Some of it wasequipment that Mary Catherine had bought for use in her father'stherapy. Early in the campaign this had been simple stuff, like wadsof stiff putty that Cozzano would squeeze in his left hand todevelop strength and dexterity. By this point in the campaign, latein September, he was way beyond the putty-squeezing stage. He was now almost completely ambidextrous. In fact, he could sign hisname with both hands at the same time. The left-hand signature looked similar to his pre-stroke version, albeit bigger and lazier.The right-hand signature was completely unfamiliar, though shehad to admit it looked more presidential.

 They had flown into Boston's Logan Airport from a string ofcampaign appearances in Arizona. Mary Catherine had insisted thatsince it was going to be a long flight, Dad should write her a letter,and he should do it with his left hand. He had grumbled at thissuggestion and tried to find ways to avoid it, but she had insisted, and finally he had buckled down to the job, ejecting all journalistsand aides from his private cabin and sitting down with the big fountain pen gripped securely in his left hand and a pad of linedpaper on his lap, writing the letters carefully, in block capitals, oneat a time like a schoolboy.

 She had left him alone to the task. But when she came back anhour later, he was typing on a laptop computer.

 "Dad!"

 "Peanut," he said, "it was driving me crazy. I thought my headwas going to split open."

 "But you need to work on your right-hemisphere-"

 "Spare me the neurobabble," he said. "Please observe that I amtyping. I am typing a letter to you. And I am using both hands."

 Now, alone in the hotel, she turned on Dad's laptop and openedup the file named "Letter to MC."

 Ddeeaarrest 3Maarryee Ccaattheerine,

 3As eyqowuals claentter sle3e my therapy is progressing well.I have you to thank

 wfaovres rtahveage gdraedast sbterlifdreese I have made sinceyou signed onto the

 tcearmapfaeiegn. wlrtcs whealsl been a constant joy havingyou with me. As you

 hdaavde pfreoabrasbly naovteirceeed Ibad carmew havingsome involuntary twitches in the

 fdiandgers aodfres emwye left hand, but under your super­vision I have no doubt

 tgheatt stchriasbble small problem will clear up sooner or laterand then I can

 tgeoll b3aeclk to my old southpaw ways. I hope that thisletter is long

 eenroausgeh Ifeotrter me to receive at least a gentleman's C.

 Yxoxuxrs affectionately,

 ydoaudr Father

 She spent a while looking it over. The letter consisted of elevenlines. The first few words of each line were garbled, but she couldusually puzzle them out from the context. For example, the wordcampaignat the beginning of line 4 was spelledtcearmapfaeiegn. It hadbeen contaminated by several extra letters. Mary Catherine openedup a new window on the computer's screen and teased out theextra letters: they spelled terafee.

 Terafee didn't mean anything. If you said it fast, it almostsounded like therapy. While Mary Catherine was typing it into thenew window, she noticed that all the letters were on the left handside of the keyboard.

 The letter complained of involuntary twitches in the fingers ofthe left hand. As he was typing, Dad much have noticed his leftfingers pounding out a few unwanted letters and been unable to control it.

 It was interesting that the twitches only occurred toward thebeginning of each line. Mary Catherine went through the letterline by line, teasing out the left-hand letters and leaving behind only the ones that made sense. The letter her father had intendedto write went like this:

 Dear[est] Mary Catherine

 As you can see my therapy is progressing well. I have you tothank for the great strides I have made since you signed on to the campaign. It has been a constant joy having you with me.As you have probably noticed I am having some involuntarytwitches in the fingers of my left hand, but under yoursupervision I have no doubt that this small problem will clearup sooner or later and then I can go back to my old southpawways. I hope that this letter is long enough for me to receiveat least a gentleman's C.

 Yours affectionately,

 your Father

  

 The letters that had been typed by the "involuntary twitches" ofWilliam A. Cozzano's left hand read as follows:

  

 DEAREST 3AREE CATE

 3 EQWAlS 1ETTER13

 WAVES RAVAGE DADS BE1FREE

 TERAFEE WRCS WEll

 DAD FEARS A VEREE BAD CREW

 DAD ADRES EWE

 GET SCRABBlE

 TEll 3El

 ERASE 1ETTER

 XXX

 DAD

 Someone knocked on the door of the suite. Mary Catherinejumped.

 It had to be someone in the campaign, or else they would havebeen stopped by the Secret Service. Unless it was Floyd Wayne Vishniak, of course. But the famous spree killer of Pentagon Plazawould have made a lot more noise.

 She went to the door and peered through the peephole. Thenshe opened it up.

 "Hello, Zeldo," she said. "I thought you'd be with Dad."

 He rolled his eyes. "Touring high-tech firms," he said, "is notmy idea of an interesting time."

 "Would you like to come in?"

 He seemed uncertain. Maybe a little wistful. "I have to catch aplane," he said. He nodded toward the window of the suite."Going to take the water taxi over to Logan and fly back to the LeftCoast."

 "You're done with the campaign, then?"

 "For now," he said. "I've been called back. Your dad's beenperfect for the last couple of weeks, there's no point in my taggingalong anymore . . . we have other patients to work on inCalifornia." Zeldo reached into his satchel and pulled out anunmarked manila envelope, half an inch thick. "I've put togethersome data that is relevant to your efforts," he said, "and I thoughtyou might like a hard copy."

 "Thanks," she said, taking the envelope.

 She sensed that something was going on. Something in Zeldo's tone of voice, his careful and vague phrasing, reminded her of theconversation in James's bedroom on the Fourth of July.

 "Well, stay in touch," she said.

 He seemed inordinately pleased by this offer. "Thank you," he said. "I will. I respect your activities very much and I respect you too. I can hardly say how much," he added, looking significantlyover his shoulder. "Tell your dad I'm going to take a few liberal artscourses, as per his suggestion. Good-bye." Then he turned around, slowly and decisively, as if forcing himself to do it, and walked toward the elevators.

 The envelope was full of laser printer output. Almost all of it wasgraphs and charts tracking various new developments in William ACozzano's brain. There was a cover letter, as follows:

 Dear Mary Catherine,

 Burn this letter and stir up the ashes when you are finishedwith it. Your suite has a working fireplace that will be suitable.Let me make a few general statements first.

 Politics is shit. Power is shit. Money is shit. I became a scientistbecause I wanted to study things that weren't shit. I gotinvolved with the Radhakrishnan Institute because I wasexcited to take part in a project that was at the leading edge ofeverything, where neurology and electronics and information theory and philosophy all came together.

 Then I learned that you can't escape politics and power andmoney even at the leading edge. I was about to resign whenyou came back to Tuscola and insisted on being made thecampaign physician. This did not make Salvador happy butthey had no choice but to let you in.

 I knew what you were up to before you even started: youwere putting your father through therapies designed to createnew pathways in his brain that by-passed the biochips. Ivolunteered to stay on and follow you and your father on the campaign because I knew that otherwise Salvador would putsomeone else in my place, and he would eventually figure out your plan, and tip off the bad guys.

 For the last three months I have been tracking your work,following developments in your father's brain through thebiochip. I have not said anything because I didn't want to tipthem off, so I will say it now: you are on the right track. Keep it up. In another four months (Inauguration Day) he should beable to function without the biochip, not perfectly, but goodenough.

 I have enclosed a schematic for a small device you can soldertogether using parts from Radio Shack. It will emit noise inthe microwave band over small ranges (<100 ft.). This noisewill cause your dad's biochips to put themselves in HelenKeller mode. You might find it useful.

 Let me know if I can be of further use. I am fond of you andI hope, perhaps fatuously, that one day if we cross pathsagain you will allow me to take you out to dinner orsomething.

 Pete (Zeldo) Zeldovich

 Mary Catherine wandered out on to the suite's balcony. Theharbor view was magnificent. Immediately to the north she couldsee the skyscrapers of downtown Boston's financial district standingout against the brilliant blue sky of the New England autumn. Logan Airport was just a couple of miles away, directly across theharbor, and beyond that she could see the Atlantic stretching away so far that the curvature of the earth was almost visible.

 The airport water taxi was just pulling away from the hotelwharf. Zeldo was standing in the back, his Hawaiian shirt blazingamong dark business suits. He had his legs planted wide against therolling of the small boat, and he was looking directly up at her.

 She waved to him. He raised his fist over his head in a gesture ofsolidarity, drawing stares from the men in suits. Then he turnedaway.

 Mary Catherine went back to the suite, burned the letter fromZeldo in the fireplace, and erased the files on her dad's computer.

 The schematic for Zeldo's microwave transmitter was buried in the middle of a stack of graphs. He had hand-drawn it in ballpointpen on a sheet of hotel stationery. It was a network of inscrutableelectronic hieroglyphs: zigzags, helices, stacks of parallel lines, eachone neatly labeled with Radio Shack part numbers. MaryCatherine folded it up and put it in her wallet.

 52

 Eleanor's motorcade steamed across the Woodrow WilsonBridge, and then immediately on the Maryland side, took the exit to the Inner Loop. To the left was the sewage plant, Boiling AirForce Base, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Navy Yards. Tothe right, wooded hills, and then the projects, and then the decayof Southeast - one of the great free fire zones in urban America.Eleanor had been for three funerals of friends and relatives who hadbeen shot to death there, and on her way to the third one she hadalmost been run off the road by a careening SWAT van.

 D.C. was a great, historically black city that had been colonized,in a few places, by rich whites. Lacking a traditional organizedcrime network, it had become the battleground of a drug waramong competing groups: Jamaicans, Haitians, New Yorkelements, and home-grown Washingtonians competing for thelucrative trade to service the insatiable demand of the Beltwayprofessionals. The police could only wait until the "market workeditself out," as one police official put it. Once turfs and boundarylines had been established, the murder, it was thought, would stop.

 Instead the violence had infected a whole new generation withthe notion of the cheapness of human life, and the flow of weaponsinto the region that made semiautomatics available to evenpreteens. The doctors who worked emergency rooms in theDistrict had become some of the world's leading experts on the treatment of gunshot wounds. During the Gulf War they had been sent straight to the front lines, where they felt right at home.

 Awaiting Eleanor was the Lady Wilburdon Gunshot WoundInstitute, an ugly, brand-new, fortresslike structure built on thebulldozed foundations of the first of the War Against Povertyprojects. Its architecture reflected its function, which was to treatpeople involved in deadly combat. The place had been made secureand bulletproof to discourage shooters from coming by to finish off their victims while they were being worked on by the doctors.

 The only shooters here now were carrying cameras. Eleanor gotout of her limo and followed her advance person through a wall ofphotographers and cameramen. She made her way, along with herSecret Service escort, to a small auditorium in the institute. Alreadypresent on the stage were the Mayor of D.C.; the medical directorof the institute, who was a young black Gulf War veteran namedDr. Cornelius Gary; and the founder and namesake, an imposingEnglishwoman named Lady Guenevere Wilburdon. An empty seat awaited Eleanor.

 "Ms. Richmond," Lady Wilburdon said, extending her hand,"it's a pleasure to meet you. I look forward to your inauguration."

 "Thank you so much, Lady Wilburdon, but we do have to gothrough the election."

 "Pfft," Lady Wilburdon said, and waved her hand as if shooingflies away.

 Eleanor repressed an urge to laugh. This was exactly the kind ofattitude that she had sported, back before she was a candidate.

 They were not able to converse anymore before the ceremonybegan. It opened with a presentation of songs by the massed choirsof several local churches, a lengthy, involved oratory-cum-prayerby the Mayor, and the presentation of Dr. Cornelius Gary, the executive director of the institute. Who in turn presented LadyWilburdon, who said nothing except to introduce Eleanor, whodedicated the institute.

 "It was nice to have met you, Lady Wilburdon," Eleanor said afterit was over.

 "Not so fast, Ms. Richmond," Lady Wilburdon said. "We aregoing to have a chat."

 "I would like nothing better, but my schedule-"Arrangements have been made," Lady Wilburdon said firmly.

 On their way out the front doors they had to jump out of theway of an incoming gurney: the institute's first patient, a thirteen-year-old boy who had been gunshot with a .357 Magnum.

 Eleanor's advance person explained it to her in the motorcade.Eleanor's next two engagements had both been cancelled at the lastminute. She had a couple of free hours. Nature abhors a vacuumand Lady Wilburdon had rushed in to plug the gap. They would behaving lunch at the Willard.

 It was a small lunch too - just Eleanor, Lady Wilburdon, and her secretary, Miss Chapman. Lady Wilburdon used both force ofpersonality and sheer physical bulk to eject all of Eleanor's hangers-on from the room. Then they sat at the table together and lunchedon tiny sandwiches.

 "I should explain that I knew Bucky," Lady Wilburdon said.

 "Bucky?"

 "Salvador. The fellow who was shot by the madman across the river and exploded in front of the sushi bar. It is tasteless, I know,but I have become inured."

 "I didn't know him myself," Eleanor said. "All I know is that heran the company that does media consulting for our campaign. Andthat Cy Ogle has taken over from him."

 "Bucky was the very embodiment of low cunning," LadyWilburdon said. "Impressive in a superficial way. But flashy." She said this word with the same intonation she might have used if she were calling him a child molester. "In a way it is surprising that theNetwork hired him. Normally we have higher standards. But weare in an age when high standards are no longer fashionable."

 "Network? He worked for one of the television networks?"

 Lady Wilburdon rolled her eyes. "Certainly not. Not evenBucky would do that. You need to know about this, as you will bespending the next eight years - possibly the next sixteen - in aposition of great responsibility."

 "We have to win the election."

 "You will," Lady Wilburdon said. "We have solved the problemof elections."

 It was somewhat later in the afternoon. Lady Wilburdon haddipped into a bottle of sherry and held forth at some length on thesubjects of Bucky, Ogle, Cozzano, and the functioning of thePIPER 100. Eleanor listened politely, soaked it all up, and made upher mind that she would not try to figure out until later whetherthis woman was completely out of her mind or telling the truth.

 It would be easy enough to pass her off as a dingbat. But herwords explained a lot. From time to time Eleanor would feel anuncomfortable shock of recognition as Lady Wilburdon's explana­tions matched up perfectly with what she herself had noticed. Consciously she kept an open mind. Subconsciously she had longago decided that everything Lady Wilburdon said was true.

 "If what you're saying is true," Eleanor said, "an unbelievableamount of money has been spent."

 "It's all relative," Lady Wilburdon said. "It's all part of a long-range strategy."

 "How long-range?"

 "Centuries."

 "Centuries?"

 "There are only five entities in the world with sufficient wisdomto pursue consistent strategies over periods of several centuries," Lady Wilburdon said. "These entities are not national or govern­mental in nature - even the best governments are dangerouslyunstable and short-lived. Such an entity is self-preserving and self-perpetuating. A world war, or the rise and fall of an empire or an alliance such as the USSR or NATO, is no more serious, to it, than a gust of wind buffeting the sails of a clipper ship."

 "What are these entities?" Eleanor said.

 "In no particular order, one is the Catholic Church. One is Japan- which is nothing more than a group ofzaibatsus, or majorindustrial combines. The third is a loose network of shtetls. After the expulsion from Spain in 1492, they forcibly realized theimportance of long-range planning, and in the intervening yearshave accumulated formidable assets. The fourth one we don'tknow much about; it seems to connect many of the recalcitrantlytraditional cultures of the Third and Fourth Worlds and to beheadquartered somewhere in Central Asia. And the fifth is the Network. It is an alliance of large investors, both individual andinstitutional, predominantly European and American. You mightthink of it as the legacy, the residue, of the East India Company, theHudson's Bay Company, the American railway companies,Standard Oil, and the technological empires of our time. It is themost decentralized of the five entities - really just an effort topursue investments, and certain other activities, in a coordinatedfashion. Before the war its funds were managed by a lovely Scottishgentleman who lived in an old castle near Chichester. Afterward itwas moved to the interior of the States and placed in the hands ofan American fellow, a mathematical prodigy who attended the Lady Wilburdon School for Geniuses on the Isle of Rhum."

 "The Network owns Ogle Data Research?"

 "Yes."

 "And by implication, Cozzano?"

 "Yes."

 "So you're saying that the Network is going to take over theUnited States?"

 "The Network wouldn't want it," Lady Wilburdon said."Governments, as I mentioned, are dodgy. All the Network wants is to stabilize the return on its investment in the national debt."

 "Wait a minute. You're saying that the Network would puttogether this incredible conspiracy just to get a couple of extrapoints on a loan?"

 The idea did not seem troubling to Lady Wilburdon. She seemeda bit surprised that Eleanor didn't accept it. "My dear lady," she said, "do you have any idea how much money your governmenthas borrowed?"

 "A lot," Eleanor said. "Ten trillion dollars." It was a figure she had to cite regularly during campaign debates.

 "Well, you certainly can't expect to borrow that much money from someone without incurring certain obligations, can you?"Lady Wilburdon said, as if it were all perfectly obvious. And it was,in fact, perfectly obvious.

 "Of course, not," Eleanor said, "you're right."

 "When a business borrows money from a bank, and does so irresponsibly, and is profligate and incompetent, what happens?"

 "It goes bankrupt. And the bank takes it over."

 "Yes. The bank simply wants what is best for the business. It getsrid of the dead wood, fires the miscreants who drove the businessto ruin, cleans it out, and sets everything right, so that the business is once again able to meet its obligations."

 "And I'm one of the people who is supposed to set everything right."

 "You and Mr. Cozzano, yes. And I'm sure you'll do a splendidjob of it."

 "You are? Are you kidding?"

 "Of course not. I've been following your career, Ms.Richmond. Everything you've been saying in the last year aboutthe failure of American politics is correct," Lady Wilburdon said."Without going round and talking to them personally, I daresay that most of the people in the Network consider you something of a folk hero."

 Eleanor's mind was whirling, and not just because she had takentwo glasses of sherry. She had to see Mary Catherine. Andprovidentially, one of her assistants broke through and signaled itwas time to go. Eleanor had been listening with such rapt attentionthat she had not moved for an hour. One of her legs had gone tosleep, and the sherry also had reduced her coordination. When shestood up, it showed.

 "You need to do some stretching exercises," Lady Wilburdonsaid. "Take it from me - I travel even more than a presidential candidate."

 "I'll keep that in mind, Lady Wilburdon. Thank you for anilluminating chat."

 "It was my pleasure, I assure you," Lady Wilburdon said, seeingher to the elevators. Eleanor had now been enveloped by hercampaign staff.

 "Good-bye," Lady Wilburdon said, as the elevator arrived, "Ishould enjoy paying a call on you at the Naval Observatory, if youwould have me. I love telescopes."

 53

 The Prince of Darkness arrived at Dulles Airport at one p.m.on the ninth of October, in a chartered Learjet with the windowspainted black. He was met on the end of the runway by a black limousine that gave the terminal building a wide berth as it swungon to the Dulles Access Road. The limousine made its way into thestream of traffic, headed directly in toward the District ofColumbia, trailed by a dark sedan full of men in sunglasses and suits.

 Within half a mile the limousine had changed lanes all the wayover to the left edge of the roadway and was traveling in excess ofninety miles per hour. In the back of that limousine, an astonish­ingly loud, grating voice was egging on the driver, like a hot pokershoving him in the ass. There were only two men in the vehicle,the driver and the passenger, they had been together for less thansixty seconds, and the driver was already fighting a nearly uncon­trollable urge to pull on to the shoulder, vault the seat, and wrap hisfingers around the Prince of Darkness's neck.

 They were less than a mile from the airport when the limousine'sbrake lights flared and it suddenly veered on to the shoulder. Theblack sedan grumbled to an emergency stop directly behind it,spraying gravel. The high-speed traffic in the left lane of theroadway veered, screeched, and honked, nearly rear-ending this strange little caravan.

 The door of the limousine had been flung open before the limohad come to a full stop. Jeremiah Freel, the Prince of Darkness,climbed out and jerked the driver's side door open before the drivereven had time to set the parking brake.

 "Out out out out!" he screeched in his terrible, grinding voice.

 People who had run afoul of the Prince of Darkness vied for waysto describe the sound of his voice: "like a cattle prod in the armpit,"one had said. Like snorting pure Mace from the can. Like puttinga single crystal of Drano in the corner of each eye. Having a killerbee stuck in each ear.

 "Get out, you nigger!" Jeremiah Freel screamed at the driver,which was an interesting choice of words since the driver was awhite boy.

 He was a white boy with a southern accent. A rural, uneducatedsouthern accent. And as Freel had obviously figured out, simply bylistening to this man say, "Good afternoon, sir," the single mostinsulting thing you could call him was nigger. So he got out of thatdriver's seat in a big hurry and drew himself up face-to-face with Freel, or chest-to-face, actually, since Freel was short enough to sleep comfortably on an ironing board.

 "You-" the driver began, but before he could get anything elseout, one of the burly suits from the trailing vehicle had come upbehind him, grabbed both his elbows, and swung him away,shoving and dragging him into the median strip.

 Which was fine with Jeremiah Freel. With the driver removed from his path, he made a direct line for the steering wheel of thelimousine.

 He was blocked by three other men who had jumped out of thedark sedan and who were now standing on tiptoe, as close to himas they could get, spreading their jackets wide open like wings toform a pinstriped curtain that blocked all view of his face from thecars screaming down the roadway. It was imperative that no one recognize the face of Jeremiah Freel, which stared out from somany wanted posters in so many post offices that it had actually been made into a poster, popular in the dorm rooms of cynicalcollege students.

 "Mr. Freel-" one of these men said, moving into position to block the door. The sentence ended there because Freel, takingadvantage of the man's spreadeagled posture, reached up with both hands, gripped the tips of the man's nipples through his white linenshirt, twisted, and pulled. The man screamed, collapsed in onhimself, and fell back against the side of the limousine. Instantly.Freel was sitting in the driver's seat, the doors all closed andelectrically locked. The rear tires of the limousine began to spinwildly in the gravel. One of the other guys in suits lunged forward, grabbed his stunned comrade by the neckline, and jerked him awayfrom the side of the car as it peeled out, fishtailing, on to the road,nearly causing a chain reaction smashup in the three leftmost lanes."Shit!" everyone was saying. Two of them ran back, jumped intothe sedan, and took off, stranding the limo driver, the man who wastrying to calm him down, and the man who had made the mistakeof getting in Jeremiah Freel's way, who now had a pair of symmetric­ally placed two-inch bloodstains soaking through his white shirt.

 "So that's what tertiary syphilis does to a man," said the driver ofthe sedan, screaming down the Dulles Access Road at ninety milesper hour in hot pursuit of the limousine. "They said he was anasshole but I had noidea."

 "Shut up and drive," said the one in the passenger seat. "Youhave any idea how badly we screwed this up? Anybody catchessight of his face and we're finished."

 They drove very fast, but they had a hard time catching up withJeremiah Freel in his limousine. In theory the big limo wassupposed to be the slower vehicle. The difference between them,though, was this: the Prince of Darkness was not afraid to ram. Not only was he not afraid to ram, he was practiced. Any vehicle in hislane not going as fast as he was got rear-ended and that was that.Lane changes were accomplishedby force majeure. They passed atleast three vehicles that had veered into the ditch or the medianstrip. In the end, the only way to catch up with Jeremiah Freel wasto pull on to the shoulder and floor it. Which is pretty much what they did, though by the time they actually caught up with him, hewas screaming across the Potomac River on the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge, vectored into the heart of the Capital like apoisoned dum-dum from a sniper's rifle.

 "You know what he's doing?" the driver said. "He's going to the goddamn Watergate!"

 "Head him off," the passenger said.

 Once they realized where Freel was going, they were able to doa bit of deft curb-hopping, lawn-driving, and zooming downoncoming lanes, and pull their sedan directly across Freel's path justa few yards short of the entrance to the Watergate. Freel rammedthem anyway, caving in the side of the sedan, but both of theoccupants saw it coming and dove and rolled out of the other sideof the car just before impact.

 The suit who had been sitting in the passenger seat pulled a gunout of his armpit and used the butt of the weapon to smash the driver's-side window of the limousine. The black glass dissolvedinto tempered fragments held together by the plastic sheet that had been used to blacken the window. When this debris was pulled outof the way, Jeremiah Freel was exposed, slumped against thesteering wheel with a big laceration across his forehead, bloodstreaming out and dripping off the horn button into his lap. He was barely conscious, mumbling deliriously.

 "Drive much?" he said. "Where'd you get your fuckinglicense? K mart? Get the fuck out of my way, asshole, I got anequalizer in the glove compartment and more lawyers thanyou've got friends."

 They shoved Freel across the seat on to the passenger side and then climbed in after him. The driver backed the limousine awayfrom the wrecked sedan. A steady wisp of steam was piping fromits radiator but it was still drivable. The passenger wriggled hishands into a pair of latex gloves and then set about tying JeremiahFreel up with plastic handcuffs. Only when he was finished with that did he begin applying direct pressure to Freel's forehead.

 Waiting at a stoplight, the two men in suits exchanged looks androlled their eyes at each other. "Campaign consultants," the driver said, "gotta love "em."

 "Oh, this is a good one," said the chairman of the RepublicanNational Committee, inspecting a sheet of paper he had just pulled from a file folder marked FREEL. "During a campaign visit toMinot, North Dakota, you ran a school bus off a road, causingthirty-six injuries, ten of them serious. The parents sued you for a hundred million dollars and won."

 "Fuck you," Jeremiah Freel said. "Fuck your mother too." Freel had a nice dark line of stitches across his forehead, tracing a long welt that perfectly matched the curved of the limousine's steeringwheel.

 "When we add that to the libel and slander judgments from thelast three presidential campaigns - let me see, those alone add up toalmost another hundred million dollars, which you owe to a dozenand a half different people, including, by the way, myself. You oweme four million."

 "Eat my shit," Jeremiah Freel said.

 Several other distinguished-looking and well-dressed men weresitting around the conference table. They were in a suite in a veryprivate hotel a few blocks north of the White House. They hadrented a whole floor, covered the windows with black stuff,disabled the elevators, and posted guards with submachine guns byall the stairwells. Jeremiah Freel was sitting in a luxurious paddedleather chair in the middle of the table. Standing behind him weretwo men with a combined weight of six hundred pounds, wearinglatex gloves and clear plastic face shields.

 The other men sitting around the table were all glaring coldly atFreel. One by one, they began to raise their hands and speak up.

 "You owe me three million plus legal fees," said the chairman ofthe Democratic National Committee.

 "One point five," said another man, holding up his hand.

 "Eight hundred thousand," barked another man.

 "One point one."

 "Half a mil and a printed apology inThe Miami Herald."

 "What the hell is this, a fucking star chamber?" Jeremiah Freelsaid. "Why don't you just tell me what the hell you're after?"

 "We're after Cozzano," the GOP chairman said.

 "Fine. You got him. He's a dead man," Freel said. "By the time I'm finished with that wop son of a bitch, he'll curse his mother for every having given birth to him. He won't be able to cash a checknorth of the Equator. Children will spit on his knees. His dog willclimb on to his bed in the middle of the night and try to tear hisface off and he'll beg for it to happen."

 There was an awed silence in the room.

 "Don't you want to hear what we are prepared to offer you in exchange for your services?" the Democratic chairman saiduncertainly.

 "Fuck that," Freel said. "You guys have no imagination. Youthink I do this shit to make money. But that's not true. I beensitting down there in Rio waiting for something like this. I do it forthe pure joy of a job well done. Now, did you assemble my A-Team, or not?"

 "We got 'em."

 "All of 'em?"

 "All the ones who aren't dead, in prison, or running othercampaigns," said the Republican chairman.

 54

 A bit later than a month before election day, a flatbedtruck carrying a GODS shipping container could be seen fightingits way through the bewildering vortex of Boston's KenmoreSquare, on the eastern fringes of Boston University. The truckeventually broke through by asserting the divine right of semitrailerrigs to go anywhere they wanted, and entered the campus.

 This area swarmed with Boston cops, campus police, men in darksuits, and nicely dressed young persons wearing COZZANO FOR PRESIDENTbuttons. An impressive minority carried walkie-talkies. These people had been seizing parking spaces for the betterpart of the day. They did it by the power vested in them by varioushigh authorities; by sheer chutzpah; and in some cases by the brutallysimple expedient of placing their bodies in those places and refusingto move when motorists tried to bluff them out. When the bigGODS truck arrived, it found nine consecutive parking spaceswaiting for it, which in Boston happened about as often as a Grand Alignment of the planets, or, for that matter, a World Series victory.

 Not long afterward, a motorcade sliced through the Gordianknot of Kenmore Square and pulled up near Morse Auditorium, asquat, domed synagogue-turned-lecture-hall that was already about half full of media personnel and politically conscious students.

 William A. Cozzano emerged from one of the cars, wavedcheerily to a number of supporters who had gathered in back for a brief sight of the Great Man, and followed an advance person intothe back of the hall. A dressing room had already been staked out behind the stage. He changed to a fresh shirt and had his hair and makeup fixed by trained professionals.

 Then he walked on to the stage. From here he could see a wall of television lights and, dimly, a dark auditorium beyond it. Theauditorium was full of students who applauded him when heemerged from the wings. Two chairs had been set up in the middleof the stage, angled toward each other, a table between them set with a glass water pitcher and two tumblers.

 William A. Cozzano was going to talk politics with the chairmanof the Political Science Department, a long-time Washingtonfigure who had taken an academic appointment that gave him thefreedom to do pretty much whatever he wanted with his time; in return, he lent prestige to the university. The whole idea was thatthe discussion would be loose and unscripted, and Cozzano wouldbe open to questions, both from the audience (mostly students) andthe local media. This was a daring maneuver, exactly the kind ofthing that Tip McLane probably couldn't pull off without offend­ing half of the ethnic groups in the United States.

 Cozzano ascended the stage a few minutes before air time,unbuttoned his jacket, and sat down in his chair. A technicianassisted him in clipping a microphone to his lapel, and asked him tosay a few words so that they could adjust their sound levels.Cozzano quoted the "To be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet,which raised a smattering of applause from the students and even from a few of the TV people.

 The host, looking professional, sat in his chair and went through a sound check of his own. At five seconds before eightp.m., a manin a headset gave them a digital countdown (he used his fingers) andthen the host delivered some prepared remarks, reading them froma TelePrompTer. Then he turned toward Cozzano and asked hima question about Middle East policy.

 This was a hard pitch. The politics of the Israeli/Palestinianquestion had been dissected and analyzed to an impossibly minutedegree, over decades, by persons whose sole function in life was toknow everything about these issues. Every squiggle and jog in thecontour of Israel's border had its experts, who knew abouteverything that had happened in that place since the time of thepharaoh. West Bank settlement and the status of the PLO hadbecome more arcane than the concept of the Trinity in the earlychurch: every conceivable idea had already been come up with, andits ramifications worked out and analyzed. Of all the millions of possible opinions one could have on these subjects, there were only a few that a presidential candidate could get away with having, andin order merely to explain these opinions the candidate had tomaster a new vocabulary and even a new form of logic that did notreally apply anywhere else. The best way to trip up a governor whowas running for president was to ask him a seemingly simple,innocuous question about the Middle East and then wait for him tohang himself.

 Cozzano maneuvered through it perfectly, delivering an answerthat was seemingly erudite; that hit all the key buzzwords thatwould prevent him from being vilified by Jewish organizations; andyet was so vague and imprecise that it said practically nothing at all.Like compulsory figure in an ice-skating competition, it was devoidof content and not much fun to look at, but to the initiate, it wasan extremely impressive display of technical skill.

 By the time he was finished, it was time to break for a com­mercial. The host made a witty, self-deprecating remark about howdull the show had been up to this point and then promised that therest would be more lively. The students applauded. The director, staring at a monitor, turned to the performers and said, "You'reclear."

 Cozzano turned toward the table and poured himself half a glassof water. He was just about to jump into some small talk with the host when a voice came out of the darkness behind the televisionlights.

 "Governor Cozzano, Frank Boyle fromThe Boston Globe. I'msorry to be the one to tell you this, but I just got a call on myportable phone here from our correspondent who's following yourdaughter in Minnesota. He called from the lobby of the hotelwhere she is staying in Minneapolis. Apparently, Mary Catherinewas late for an appearance at Macalester College. All the press wentback to her hotel, and the floor where her room was is swarmingwith cops and detectives. Our correspondent talked to one of thesedetectives on background, and he said that apparently she wasassaulted in the hallway by Floyd Wayne Vishniak. He managed toget past her Secret Service men and put a bullet into her head andMary Catherine bled to death right there in the hallway."

 A hundred feet away, Cy Ogle, perched in the Eye of Cy, sat and watched William A. Cozzano's bio readouts go ballistic.

 The television monitor in the Eye of Cy was patched into the pool feed from the cameras in the auditorium, and Ogle couldn'thelp watching it. Cozzano's face had turned deathly pale as FrankBoyle of theGlobe told his story, and had now gone red. His eyeshad become red and glistening too. And Ogle could see from thebio monitors that Cozzano's heart rate had gone up to 172, almostthree times the norm. His blood pressure was explosively high.

 "Jesus Christ," Ogle said out loud, "this could only be the workof Jeremiah Freel!"

 He looked back at the television monitor, but Cozzano wasn'tthere anymore. Just an empty chair. Then the camera wheeledaround, spinning past the host and then past an array of lights,cameras, technicians, and other stuff that was never supposed to beon camera. Finally the camera centered itself on the back ofWilliam A, Cozzano, who was striding into the crowd of TVpeople, print reporters, campaign aides, and Secret Service whofilled the space between the stage and the front row of seats. Mostof these people jumped out of his way instinctively. But a coupleof men in suits, displaying considerable physical bravery, closedranks in front of Cozzano and prevented him from charging into the auditorium.

 In the background, a disturbance was making its way up the aisle as a man shoved his way toward the exit. Apparently this was FrankBoyle of theGlobe. Cozzano had gone after him, and he haddecided to get out of the building.

 Throughout the campaign, Ogle had prided himself on beingready for anything. But he hadn't been ready for the return of Freel.Ogle took a deep breath, tried to still his own heart, and then puthis hands on the control panel and set about calming Cozzano.

 Cozzano was in front of the stage having a conversation with hisSecret Service men. They were all talking into their shirt cuffs andholding their hands over their earpieces, trying to hear each otherover the murmur of the shocked and scared students.

 A woman with press credentials stepped close to Cozzano. "Governor? I'm with theGlobe. And we don't have anyone named Frank Boyle."

 The head of the Secret Service detail, listening to his earplug, shook his head conclusively and caught Cozzano's eye. "It was atotal fabrication," he said. "Mary Catherine showed up atMacalester College on time and is speaking at this moment."

 Cozzano, suddenly, was calm and collected. He shook his head,seemed to forget that anything had happened, and returned to hisseat on the stage.

 "Would you like to delay-" the host said, as the sound man wasfixing Cozzano's microphone.

 "No," Cozzano said. "Let's continue as planned."

 "Are you sure? You must be very upset."

 "I'm fine," Cozzano said. "Why should I be upset?"

 The headline of the next day's edition of theNew York Postread,

 "WHY SHOULD I BE UPSET?"

 COZZANO NOT BOTHERED BY "MURDER" OF HISOWN DAUGHTER.

 The President, delivering off-the-cuff remarks in the aisle ofAirForce One,said that he was shocked and disgusted by the impostorwho had delivered the fake news to Cozzano.

 At the same time, though, he could not help but find it strange,and just a bit disturbing, that a man who, to all appearances, had justlost his own daughter, would agree to continue with what was,after all, nothing more than a campaign event, the sole purpose ofwhich was to scrape up more votes. Surely, he said, there werelimits that should be observed, for the sake of decency.

 Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane made a surprise appearance in ahotel bar where a number of reporters had gathered - not just todrink, but because they had received a tip from McLane staffers thatTip might feel a bit thirsty around eleven o'clock.

 Coincidentally, the evening news happened to be running onthe big projection TV over the bar at the time. A football game hadbeen on until a few minutes previously, but money had changedhands between Marcus Drasher and the bartender, and now thenews was on - to the chagrin of several fans along the bar who hadnot brought nearly as much cash as Drasher.

 McLane and the reporters engaged in some friendly banter, buteveryone turned toward the television set when the image ofWilliam A. Cozzano appeared on the screen. The cameras had caught the entire thing and the feed had gone out all over thecountry. They watched Cozzano going into shock as he heard thefalse story about his daughter. They watched him jumping out of his chair in a blind rage, and they watched him sitting back downa minute later, calm and collected. The actual content of the two-hour discussion received no coverage whatsoever.

 All of the reporters looked at McLane. McLane turned awayfrom the TV and looked nonchalant. Finally a reporter asked himwhat he thought of the whole thing.

 "Well, I don't really want to talk about it," he said, "the whole episode is really distasteful. But now I see that the media havegrabbed on to this whole thing - in the typical way that they do -looking for the sensational and paying no attention to content. . . and I can see that now the media are trying to take this event andturn it into some kind of a test of Cozzano's psychological fitness tobe president."

 "Do you think he looked presidential?" asked a reporter from arabidly conservative Catholic magazine.

 McLane shrugged. "People say I'm a hothead," he said. "Peoplesay I'm out of control and that I can't handle the pressure of thecampaign. So maybe I shouldn't be the one to talk, but I've learned that the world is full of crackpots who will shout crazy stuff at you.I mean, they are everywhere. And you can't let them get underyour skin. If you're going to physically assault every lunatic whobabbles some nonsense to you, then you're not going to makemuch of a president - and if that's how you handle a nut case, thenhow are you going to deal with foreign leaders?"

  

 55

 Tuesday, October22,two weeks before Election Day, thestandings looked like this:

  

 COZZANO          59%

 PRESIDENT            8%

 MCLANE                18%

 UNDECIDED           10%

 OTHER                   5%

 An obscure Washington D.C.-based organization called theAmerican Association of Physicians, Surgeons, and Osteopathsstaged a press conference at which a videotape was shown to thepress and then disseminated to all of the networks. The videotapewas a series of outtakes from Cozzano's campaign, a blooper film ifyou will. It started out with some excerpts from an interview inwhich he was still suffering from some speech impediments. Fromthere it moved onward through the campaign, showing Cozzanoduring commercial breaks, bantering with reporters on airport runways, walking down the aisle of his campaign plane to thebathroom, doing sound checks before debates, and so on. The onething that all of these takes had in common was that, in each ofthem, Cozzano did something wrong: slurred some words ortripped over his own feet. One particularly striking clip showedCozzano working a crowd at a rally in Newark. A woman handedher baby to Cozzano for a kiss and he nearly dropped it, seeminglyovercome by a temporary seizure. "I-I-I-I'm sorry," he stuttered,and handed it back to her. The conclusion reached by the expertsof the American Association  of Physicians, Surgeons, andOsteopaths was that Cozzano was still suffering from "severeneurological deficits" and was not fit to be president.

 Excerpts from the videotape were broadcast repeatedly onvirtually every television news program in the United States, inmany cases as the evening's top story.

 Wednesday, October 23:

  

 COZZANO          51%

 PRESIDENT            10%

 MCLANE                21%

 UNDECIDED           13%

 OTHER                   5%

 In Chicago, a press conference was held by Tommy Markovich,a venerable Chicago sportscaster who had been well known tosports fans in that city during the late sixties and early seventies. Hehad retired in 1980. Markovich said that his conscience had beentroubling him about something. He showed an excerpt of a Bears-Vikings game from the year 1972. Late in the game, the Vikings were leading by ten points and the Bears were driving from theirown thirty with only one minute left in the game. William A.Cozzano, who was a tight end, went out on a screen pass, caught theball, and found himself out in the open with nothing between him and the goal line except for hard-frozen turf. He ran unobstructedall the way to the Viking ten, where, inexplicably, the ball squirtedloose from his arms and dribbled back upfield for a few yards, where a pursuing Viking fell on it. It had been a famous gaffe at the time,not so much because it was significant to the outcome of the game(it wasn't), but because Cozzano was known for being a steady and reliable sort of player who didn't make mental mistakes.

 Now, a couple of decades later, the shriveled old man who hadcalled that game on TV wanted to point something out: theVikings had been favored to win that game by ten points. Bydropping the ball, Cozzano had preserved the point spread.

 Thursday, October 24:

  

 COZZANO          45%

 PRESIDENT            12%

 MCLANE                25%

 UNDECIDED           14%

 OTHER                   4%

 In an exclusive interview with CBS Sports, a noted author ofbooks on the Mob said that Nicodemo ("Nicky Freckles")Costanza, an important Chicago Mob figure who ran a huge illegal sports betting operation during the sixties and seventies, had madesomething like twenty million dollars off the 1972 Bears-Vikings game - money he would have forfeited if William A. Cozzano hadsimply held on to the ball long enough to reach the goal line.

 A local TV reporter for one of the network affiliates in Chicagoreleased the results of a two-month investigation into connectionsbetween the Cozzano family and the Mafia. The centerpiece was avast family tree - actually, several family trees intertwined into athicket - so big that it had been drawn, in minute letters and lines,on a four-by-eight foot sheet of plywood. The extended Cozzanofamily was shown in blue. Mob families were shown in red. Thefamily trees went all the way back to the twelfth-century Genoaand showed that William A. Cozzano, John Gotti, Al Capone, and Benito Mussolini were all distantly related.

 The Cozzano campaign issued a press release stating that theAmerican Association of Physicians, Surgeons, and Osteopaths hadnot existed until some two weeks previously, and appeared to have a membership of three, all of whom had shown up at the press conference two days ago as experts urging Cozzano to withdrawfrom the race. One of these three was a former Army doctor whohad been discharged under other than honourable circumstances.One of them no longer practiced because he could no longerobtain malpractice insurance. The third had declared bankruptcyafter fifty of his patients filed a class-action suit against himcomplaining of botched breast implants.

 The Cozzano campaign also issued a blooper reel of its own,showing the incumbent President and Tip McLane tripping overtheir shoelaces and slurring words, and suggested that these twomight want to have neurological exams of their own.

 Finally, a video expert was trotted out to state that the videotapeof Cozzano nearly dropping the baby in Newark had evidentlybeen doctored; other videotapes made of the same event did not show him doing anything unusual.

 Friday, October 25:

  

 COZZANO          40%

 PRESIDENT            14%

 MCLANE                29%

 UNDECIDED           13%

 OTHER                   4%

 Acting on an anonymous tip, a reporter for a Chicago networkaffiliate tracked down Alberto ("Stitches") Barone, ninety-six yearsof age, who was living in a dingy convalescent home on Chicago'ssouth side. Stitches agreed to have the nurses unbutton his shirt sothat he could display the numerous scars that he had receivedduring an epochal knife duel with John Cozzano, William's father,some sixty years  earlier,  for the hand of the fair FrancescaDomenici. Over time, the scars had contracted and become evenmore grotesque than they had been to begin with. Stitches Barone,fortified with a few injections, managed to sit up in bed and deliveran unrehearsed, four-hour statement to the TV cameras, telling theentire story of his ten-decade life and times. Of these four hours,one hour was devoted to his childhood in Italy, one hour to hisheyday in the Al Capone organization, one hour to his physicalailments, and one hour to recounting the antics of his favorite dog,Bozo, who had died of vehicular trauma in 1953. The reportertook the videotape home and culled the one sentence devoted to the subject of John Cozzano: "he was a vicious man who wouldstop at nothing to get what he wanted, and I was afraid of him."

 William A. Cozzano appeared at a press conference in New Yorkwith a number of leading Italian-Americans, including the daughterof Nicodemo ("Nicky Freckles") Costanza. The Italian-Americanleaders blasted the media for defaming Cozzano, and Costanza'sdaughter, in particular, stated that there had never been anyconnection between her father and Cozzano. A family tree wasbrought out to show that Cozzano was also related to Leonardo da Vinci and Joe Dimaggio.Saturday, October 26:

  

 COZZANO          36%

 PRESIDENT            14%

 MCLANE                31%

 UNDECIDED           14%

 OTHER                   5%

 Campaigning in the state of Washington, William A. Cozzanovisited Seattle's Pike Place Market, where a number of SoutheastAsian immigrants had been able to set up thriving businesses sellingproduce that they raised on truck farms outside the city. Making hisway down the center of the market, surrounded by a high cloud ofmedia, Cozzano stopped at one stand and bought an apple from the attractive young Laotian-American woman on the other side of thecounter.

 Just as he was biting into the apple, he was assaulted, and nearlyknocked down, by a tiny, rabid, screaming person who had chargedin underneath the radar of the Secret Service men. It was an oldwoman, not much more than four feet tall, wearing a conical hat,screaming hysterically in Vietnamese, pummeling and clawing atCozzano with both hands.

 By the time the Secret Service dragged her off of the shockedCozzano, roughly a hundred dollars' worth of assorted produce hadbeen destroyed by the feet of video cameramen and stillphotographers who leapt up on to the high ground as soon as theyheard trouble, running back and forth along the tables looking fora camera angle, churning the opulent displays of fresh strawberries,asparagus, basil, chanterelles, blackberries, and sweet corn intosuccotash. Most of them just barely had time to zero their camerasin on the contorted face of the old Vietnamese woman before shebegan to scream, in English: "You killed my baby! You killed my baby! You are an evil man!"Sunday, October 27:

  

 COZZANO          35%

 PRESIDENT            15%

 MCLANE                34%

 UNDECIDED           12%

 OTHER                   4%

 A front-page exclusive in the Sunday editions ofThe DallasMorning Newstold an interesting story of about Cozzano's son, James. James Cozzano had spent most of the spring and summerfollowing the primary campaigns as part of a research project for hisdoctoral dissertation. During this period he had made contacts withLawrence Barnes, a wealthy Dallas businessman who was a bigsupporter of the candidacy of the Reverend Doctor William JosephSweigel. After Sweigel's loss to Tip McLane, Lawrence Barnes had approached James Cozzano and offered him a position on the boardof directors of an import-export business, based in Houston, inwhich Barnes held a majority interest. The business dealt mostly inequipment related to oil exploration and drilling.

 It was now revealed that this company did most of its businesswith Iraq and Libya, and that minority interests were owned byshady offshore companies that were known to be controlled by thegovernments of those countries.

 Monday, October 28:

  

 COZZANO          32%

 PRESIDENT            16%

 MCLANE                34%

 UNDECIDED           13%

 OTHER                   5%

  

 Fifty newspapers across the United States ran the same photo­graph on the front page, a wire service photo taken on a small lake a few miles south of Tuscola, Illinois. The photo showed a local farmer out on a little rowboat, examining the surface of the lake,which was covered with dead fish. The farmer said that the fish killwas almost certainly caused by a spill of toxic waste originatingfrom the CBAP plant in Tuscola - the economic foundation of theCozzano fortune.

 The Cozzano campaign held a press conference in Seattle, in whichleaders of the local Vietnamese-American community stated that no one had ever seen, or heard of, the little Vietnamese lady whohad accused Cozzano of war crimes. The woman herself had goneinto seclusion after having been released by the police, and was nolonger speaking to the press; but her family insisted that Cozzanohad rolled a hand grenade into their hut in Vietnam and blown upthree small children.

 Tuesday, October 29:

  

 COZZANO          30%

 PRESIDENT            17%

 MCLANE                38%

 UNDECIDED           11%

 OTHER                   4%

  

 A retired nurse who had once been hired to work in theCozzano home, during the prolonged illness of Christina Cozzano, said that during the last few weeks of her life, Cozzano's late wifehad become addicted to painkilling drugs.

 The wife of Tip McLane's vice-presidential candidate, during a speech to a conservative Christian group, stated that EleanorRichmond's overbearing and "unusually aggressive" personalityhad played a significant role in driving her husband to suicide.

 James Cozzano resigned from the board of directors of the import-export company in Texas and stated that he had been takenfor a ride.

 Wednesday, October 30:

  

 COZZANO          29%

 PRESIDENT            18%

 MCLANE                38%

 UNDECIDED           12%

 OTHER                   3%

  

 The farmer who had accused CBAP of polluting the water and killing the fish retracted his statement, saying it had been based upon information given to him by an unknown "expert" who hadsince disappeared. Chemical analysis of the bodies of the fishshowed that they had been killed by a common agriculturalpesticide, which was available at any farm supply business, andwhich was not produced at CBAP.

 The retired nurse who had told the story about ChristinaCozzano's drug addiction was found dead in her garage in Peoria; she had committed suicide by breathing car exhaust.

 The wife of Tip McLane's running mate stated in an interviewthat she had not meant, in any way, to say negative things aboutEleanor Richmond.

 William A. Cozzano canceled all of his campaign appearances forthe rest of the week, saying that he needed to prepare for the big debate on Friday night.

 Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane, in an informal interview withMarkene Caldicott on his campaign plane, deplored the way the presidential campaign had gone negative.

 The President of the United States, addressing a Boy Scout jamboree in Arizona, said that he didn't blame young people forsometimes losing faith in politics, and promised that, whenreelected, he would appoint a presidential commission to look into the state of America's elections.

 The anchorman of the CBSEvening News, in a rare editorial, saidthat the presidential campaign had reached new depths this year,and stated that his organization was taking steps to make sure thatit would not happen again.

 At the private hotel that serves as Jeremiah Freel's headquarters, security remained tight. The elevators were turned off except whensomeone very important was expected, or three times a day whenroom service was brought up from the kitchen.

 For the fourth morning in a row, the waitress named Louellabrought Jeremiah Freel his dish of stewed prunes. This did not gounnoticed by Freel. Louella was a hard woman not to notice. It wasalmost inconceivable that any woman, clad in the dowdy uniformof a hotel waitress, could appear sexy. But Louella managed. Shemust have taken her uniform home and modified it somehow,dropped the neckline, raised the hem. Every day, she was showinga little more cleavage, and every day, when she placed the breakfasttray on the table in front Jeremiah Freel, she bent down a little bitlower, gave him a longer and deeper look down into the front ofher dress.

 Today he could no longer restrain himself. His hand darteddown into her blouse, quick as a striking cobra, and caught hernipple. Not hard enough to hurt. But hard enough to keep herwhere she was.

 "Mr. Freel," said one of his minders. One of the hated men insuits who surrounded him at all times.

 "Shut up, asswipe!" Freel said.

 Louella was staring straight into Freel's eyes. She wasn't angry atall. She was almost amused. She was interested. She licked her lipsand said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Freel, but fresh fruit isn't on today's menu." Her face was about four inches from Freel's. She waswearing a lot of perfume and Freel could smell it wafting up fromthe middle of her hot cleavage.

 "Then what do I have here?" Freel said, squeezing her nipple.

 "You don't have a damn thing," Louella said, "unless you canget us a little bit of privacy." She looked around accusingly at all ofthe men in suits: four of them in this room alone.

 "Get the fuck out!" Freel shouted.

 "I'm sorry, Mr. Freel, you know we can't allow that!" said thehead honcho, a guy who would only identify himself as Al. Al wasclearly getting a little nervous. "Ma'am," he said to Louella, "I'mafraid you'll have to leave."

 "But I can't," Louella said, "until Mr. Freel lets go of me. And I can tell you he's not the kind of man who lets go until he gets whathe wants."

 "Get the fuck out," Freel said, "or this whole campaign goes upin flames. Can't you see I need to get laid?"

 This appeal to simple, basic human needs got through to Al. Hebroke eye contact and thought about it for a second. "Well, okay,"he finally said. "Come on guys, let's leave them alone."

 All of Freel's minders got up and backed out of the room staring fixedly at Louella's backside. Louella turned around and yelled atthem on their way out. "And I don't want you standing outside the door listening, either. You get back to your own rooms and watchTV of something."

 Al, and the rest of the minders, left the room and closed the door.

 They were still standing there, nervously, a minute later, whenLouella stuck her head out the door. "I knew it!" she said. "Youguys are all perverts. Get back to your rooms!"

 Al posted one of his men by the elevators, just down the hall, andthen the rest of the men retreated to their rooms, leaving the doors open.

 A minute later, the guard by the elevators heard the little bellchime. The down arrow lit up. The elevator door opened toreveal a pair of brawny men, both wearing gas masks and earprotectors, who were just in the perfectly timed act of burstingout the doors; one of them grabbed the guard by the collar and jammed a thick wad of cloth over his mouth as the other reached out with a small but dense blunt object and took it upside of hishead.

 Louella emerged from Freel's room, stark naked, pursued closelyby Freel himself. She was laughing and screaming; he was shouting,"You dirty bitch! Get back here!"

 Louella made for the elevator. She reached it, and hit the lobbybutton, just as Al and the rest of Freel's guards were emerging intothe corridor. They saw nothing but Jeremiah Freel diving into theelevator, and two large, unfamiliar men strewing stun grenades upand down the length of the hallway.

 Twenty seconds later, staff and guests in the lobby were treated to the sight of Louella, a former Miss April, sprinting out of theelevator doors stark naked, still laughing and giggling, and runningtoward the front entrance, pursued the entire way by an old manwith his erect penis sticking out of his fly.

 A doorman, reflexes honed by years of practice, cleared the way.Louella ran through the open door, into the horseshoe drive, andjumped into the back of a windowless van. The door slammed shut,the van burned rubber and shot forward out of the drive, revealingsomething that had been hiding on the other side of it: Cyrus Rutherford Ogle, flanked by two dozen TV cameramen and still photographers, all of whom were busily recording the quicklychanging facial expressions of Jeremiah Freel, and his vanishingpenis.

 "Come back to lose another election, Jeremiah?" Ogle said.

 Freel's mouth dropped open and his nose wrinkled into a snarl.His eyes jumped back and forth between Ogle and the cameraman.

 Then he charged.

 Cy Ogle stood his ground, hands in the pockets of his trenchcoat.

 Freel dove the last six feet, wrapped his arms around Ogle'sthighs, and bent his head back, mouth open to bite into Ogle'sgenitals.

 Ogle took his hand from his pocket, holding a small cylindricalobject. His index finger twitched and fired a long stream of Macedirectly into Freel's open mouth. Freel went into violent convul­sions and fell to the horseshoe drive, thrashing, foaming, andhowling like a wounded animal.

 "Welcome to public relations hell," Ogle said, and then climbed into a waiting car. As it drove away, he was able to look back andwatch Freel convulsing on the drive in front of the hotel,surrounded now by photographers and cameramen who were allaiming their lenses downward.

 56

 The final, and by far the most important, debate of thepresidential campaign was held on the evening of Friday,November 1, four days before Election Day, in a lecture hall atColumbia University. The participants were the President of the United States, William Anthony Cozzano and Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane. The moderator was the president of the hosting univer­sity. He fielded questions among the three presidential candidatesand a panel of four journalists, who were all of the first rank.

 All three of the candidates had spent the last couple of daysmostly in seclusion, honing their skills in mock debates. McLaneand the President had both brought in mimics to simulate the other two candidates, and spent hours in exhausting practice sessions,during which simulated journalists would throw out the mostdifficult, vicious, twisted questions imaginable.

 The advance people had been at the auditorium for a solid day.Lecterns had to be arranged on the stage. Lights had to be focused and adjusted. Camera placement had to be worked out. All of thesewere subject to intensive negotiation. A wrongly placed spotlightin '84 had emphasized the bags under Mondale's eyes and madehim look older than Reagan. The height of each lectern had to beadjusted relative to the height of the candidate. The color of the setand the color of the lights affected what kind of suits would lookbest; standins had to be brought onstage, wearing different suits, inorder to decide which looked best. Makeup had to be tried out;makeup artists had to have rooms in which to work, and no one candidate's could be bigger, better equipped, or closer to the stagethan any other's.

 Though an audience was going to be present in the hall, its onlyreal function was to provide a bit of ambient noise: applause (to bekept under control as much as possible) and possibly the occasionaloutburst of laughter, though using humor in these circumstances was probably too risky to be considered. In the current political climate, humor wasa zero-sum game. The impression that thecandidates made on the live audience was unimportant. A hugevideo screen was erected above the stage so that the people and thejournalists in the hall could see the TV feed, which was the onlything that mattered.

 The same feed was piped into a large, low-ceilinged roombeneath the auditorium and displayed on a couple of dozenmonitors. This room was filled with long tables where journalists could set up their laptop computers, plug into telephone lines, andfile their stories. This was the room where the spin doctors from thethree campaigns would circulate before, during, and after thedebate, explaining to the reporters what was happening.

 It was the single largest gathering of explosively tense people onthe face of the earth. Tense people don't like surprises. Therefore, there was a great deal of shock and unhappiness in that hall when, ten minutes before air time, just as the President and Tip McLanewere emerging from their makeup rooms and taking their positionson the stage, Cyrus Rutherford Ogle appeared, walked up to the moderator, and informed him that William A. Cozzano would notbe participating in tonight's debate because he had more importantthings to do.

 Pandemoniumwas a term coined by Milton to refer to the capitalof Hell, where all of the demons were together in one place. Fromthis it naturally came to mean any central headquarters of wicked­ness. Over time, though, as happens with many good words, its meaning had been diluted to mean any place that was noisy andchaotic. Nowadays, a person could speak a pandemonium at abirthday party full of two-year-olds.

 Cy Ogle preferred the old definition of the word. No otherword could possibly have described the situation in the auditorium after he strolled on to the stage and made his announcement. Therewas no doubt in his mind that if not for the presence of witnesses,the campaign staffs of the President, Tip McLane, the panel ofjournalists, and the organizers of the debate would drag him outsideand hang him from a stately tree on the Columbia campus. Outsideof an actual lynching, never had so much hostility been directedagainst one man by so many people for so many reasons.Consequently he could scarcely prevent himself from grinningthrough the whole thing.

 There was an initial phase during which people merely screamedat him, then ran off into the wings to spread the news to otherpeople, who ran out to scream at him some more. This probablywould have gone on for quite some time if not for the fact that airtime was rapidly approaching. So it got compressed into a veryintense couple of minutes. A tone of emotional restraint wasimposed by the technical types, who had a show to put on.

 "Well, I can't give you Cozzano in person," Ogle said, "and I'mdeeply sorry for that. But to make amends, we did blow quite abindle buying some satellite time. Be can bring you Cozzano livefrom his home in Tuscola."

 This announcement brought of Pandemonium into a state ofstunned silence. Cozzano could participate via TV? And Ogle was paying for the satellite time? We can live with that.

 "Only thing is," Ogle said, after they had bit on that, "that wewill need to make one small change in the format. Cozzano has animportant announcement to make. A very, very importantannouncement. And with your forbearance, we would like to have a minute or two at the beginning of this program for him to makethat announcement."

 Absolute silence reigned on the stage.

 Pandemonium had relocated downstairs, into the press room,where a couple of hundred reporters were screaming into theirtelephones. Most of them were screaming the same thing:Cozzanois withdrawing from the race!

 They managed to launch the program on time. The moderatortook these last-minute changes calmly, made a few changes to hisnotes, and sat down in his throne, unruffled. McLane and thePresident met in the middle of the stage and shook hands (thisencounter had been choreographed during an hour-long summitconference between their campaign staffs) and Cozzano's lecternremained unoccupied.

 Out in the parking lot behind the auditorium, several semitrailerrigs were parked in parallel slots. There were some satellite uplinktrucks, one GODS container on a flatbed rig, and a mobile studiofrom one of the networks, which was the nerve center of the wholedebate: this was where the pool feed originated. Feeds from all of the cameras on the stage converged on this vehicle and showed upon small monitors. A director sat in front of them and decidedwhich camera was going on the air. Now, the director had a newfeed patched into his system, which came directly from a satellitedownlink. This feed originated in Tuscola, Illinois.

 When he had learned about the business with Cozzano, thedirector had been expecting just a simple, live, one-camera feed, probably Cozzano sitting in his living room by the fire, or some­thing. It would be there all night long, and whenever Cozzano'sturn came up, he would push the appropriate button and the imageof Cozzano would go out.

 Naturally, it turned out to be a lot more complicated than that.The feed from Tuscola, when he first saw it, consisted of a long shotof Cozzano's house as seen from the street. Obviously, Cozzano'shouse wasn't going to participate in the debate. They would haveto have at least one more camera, inside the house. Which meantthat somewhere in Tuscola there was another director who wassitting in another studio like this one - a director who worked forCy Ogle and William A. Cozzano. That director was managingfeeds from at least two cameras, deciding which one was going tobe fed up to the satellite.

 The director, in his trailer behind the auditorium, was the firstperson in the United States to figure out that Ogle had taken themfor a ride. The choreography of this debate, which had beenhammered out through many hours of negotiations, over a period of weeks, had just been torn to shreds and replaced by something totally new, entirely Ogle's.

 The moderator began the debate with a few introductory remarks.On TV, you always had to explain the obvious, over and overagain: "In four days, Americans go to the polls to select the manwho will be their next president. This is a profoundly significantchoice..."

 ". . . this debate was originally intended to include all three majorcandidates. Tonight, we have two of them. The President of theUnited States. And Representative Tip McLane of California."

 As the moderator introduced the two men, the directory, outsidein the trailer, caused their faces to appear on air. Neither one ofthem seemed to be ready for it. Ever since Ogle's announcement, no one had really known what the hell was going on, what wouldhappen when, who would be introduced in what order. McLaneand the President had both spent a lot of time in front of televisioncameras in the last few days, in the privacy of their campaignheadquarters, practicing what they would do at the moment theywere introduced; now, neither one of them did the right thing.They looked agitated, sweaty, shifty-eyed, and when they realizedthey were on TV, they both looked surprised.

 "The third candidate, William A. Cozzano, Governor of Illinois,announced a few minutes ago that he could not participate."

 The director cut to a camera that had been set up to show allthree of the candidates' lecterns in a single shot. McLane and the President looked stiff and self-conscious. The empty lectern madeboth of them look foolish.

 "Instead, he will be addressing us from his home in Tuscola,Illinois."

 Cut to the shot of Cozzano's house with the sun setting behindit. It looked inviting and refreshing compared to the stale tenseatmosphere of the auditorium.

 "Now, the format of this debate has been established in advance,by consensus between campaign staffs and the sponsoring organiza­tions, and I intend to adhere strictly to that format. But there is onedeviation that needs to be made, and we will do that right awaynow and get it out of the way. I understand that Governor Cozzanohas an important announcement that he needs to make, and that he is going to make it now. So I will offer the floor to him at this time.Governor Cozzano, are you there?"

 "Here goes nothing," said the director, out in his trailer, and cutfrom the image of the moderator back to the feed from Tuscola.

 The feed remained steady on the image of the house for aminute. Lights were coming on inside as the sun set spectacularlybehind it. It looked cheery and welcoming and it broke the rigid,lockstep schedule of the debate. Then the Tuscola feed cut to a shotof William A. Cozzano. But it was not the expected picture ofCozzano in a suit, sitting by the fire reading a book and smoking apipe.It was totally different. For a few moments, it was difficult tomake out. Cozzano appeared to be lying on his back in a crampedspace, staring upward, reaching up above him with one arm."Good evening," he said, "I'll be with you momentarily."

 Cut to another angle of the same thing. Whatever Cozzano wasdoing, and wherever he was, they had at least two cameras on him.

 This angle was a closeup of Cozzano's hand. It was dirty and greasy and flecked with a small drop of blood where he had tornone of his knuckles. He was spinning some small metal objectaround between his fingers. Then he yanked his hand away and astream of black fluid shot out of an opening and into a metal traybeneath.

 Cut to yet another angle, this one showing Cozzano's legssticking out from beneath a car. He was lying on the floor of hisgarage.

 Actually, he was lying on a mechanic's creeper. He slid out fromunderneath the car, sat up, and rose lightly to his feet. He pickedup an old rag and began to wipe oil from his hands, addressing thecameras. "My apologies. I wanted to participate in tonight's debate,but I've been very busy lately. A few days ago I stopped flyingaround the country for the first time in a couple of months andcame back here to my home, the house that my father bought back during the Depression to impress a young woman named FrancescaDominica, who became his wife, and my mother.

 "And, you know, I decided that I liked it here. And lookingaround the place I saw that there was a lot to do here that I hadleft undone." Cozzano nodded at his car. "For example, changingthe oil in my car. I just took it for a quick drive through thecornfields, out to the old family home farm and back, to warm upthe engine so that the oil would flow out. It was a nice drive. Somepeople think that the landscape here is boring, but I think it'sbeautiful."

 Cozzano had begun to walk toward the camera, which backedaway from him. It backed out of the garage door and intoCozzano's yard. Nearby was a large garden.

 "This garden was in disgraceful shape. Hadn't been weeded inquite some time, and the weeds were bigger than the vegetables. SoI took care of that. You can see it looks a little better now."Cozzano plucked a red ripe tomato from a vine and bit into it likean apple. Juice ran down his chin and he wiped it with the sleeveof his mechanic's overall. "Of course, home is more than just doingchores. Home means being with your family too."

 Cozzano had now reached a patio, which was illuminated. Apicnic table had been spread with a nice tablecloth and set withfresh vegetables from the garden and a platter of hamburgers.Sitting at the table was Mary Catherine Cozzano, pouring iced teafrom a pitcher into three glasses. At the end of the table, James wasmanning a sizzling barbecue, flipping burger patties and hot dogs.

 "This is my daughter, Mary Catherine. You may have heard ofher recently, as media manipulators hired by my opponents havemade strenuous efforts to assassinate her character. She has beennothing short of noble in the face of this mudslinging." MaryCatherine smiled and nodded at the camera.

 "And this young man at the barbecue is my son, James, who hasbeen working his tail off all year long, writing a book about thisyear's presidential campaign. He has just signed a deal with a majorpublisher in New York, and that book is going to be published onInauguration Day."

 Mary Catherine stood up, threw one arm around her brother'sshoulder, and kissed him on the cheek.

 In the auditorium, the audience went, "Ahhhh."

 Tip McLane did not. He stepped away from the lectern andbegan to shout at the moderator: "I demand that this be stopped! This is no announcement! This is a free campaign commercial!"

 The moderator looked at Cy Ogle, who was standing in thewings. "I have to agree. Mr. Ogle? I'm going to have to pull the plug."

 "This ain't no campaign commercial," Ogle said, "because thereain't no campaign."

 On the giant TV screen above their heads, Cozzano wasbeaming delightedly at his daughter and son. He turned backtoward the camera. "When I came back here a few days ago, myintention was to prepare for the debate. But the home and familythat I rediscovered here delighted me so much that I could notbring myself to look at the huge briefing books and the endlessposition papers that my campaign staff had prepared for me. I foundthat I would rather dig potatoes in the garden or sit on the front porch swing reading Mark Twain.

 "Now, these are perfectly good things to do. But in a modernpolitical campaign, it's regarded as improper, somehow, to act likea normal human being. And this brought me to the realization thatthere is something evil and twisted about the campaign process: thetraveling, the speechifying, the television spots. The mudslinging.Wearing makeup sixteen hours a day. And most of all, the debates,with their false and pompous trappings."

 In the production trailer, the director could not restrain himselffrom punching the button that cut away to a long shot of theauditorium stage. At the moment, it consisted of a number ofstuffed shirts, arguing, consulting with aides, and staring in shock attelevision monitors.

 "And I made up my mind," Cozzano said, "that the entire thing was corrupt. Only a scoundrel can participate in such a campaign;only a cipher can win. I am neither. So I have decided that I am no longer interested in campaigning for president of the United States.

 "Earlier today, I drove my car down to Sterling Texaco, down on the corner. It's a place I've been buying gas and tires ever since

 I bought my first car back in high school. And old Mr. Sterlingcame out to fill up my tank, wash my windshield, check my oil.This is kind of an old-fashioned town, and that's still how we do things here.

 "Well, Mr. Sterling, who sold me my very first tank of gas backin the early sixties, took one look at my dipstick and he told me to get out of the car and come and have a look. I did so. And sureenough, the end of that dipstick was coated with the darkest,grimiest, sludgiest coat of oil I have ever seen. It was disgraceful,and Mr. Sterling didn't have to say so. I knew it. I knew I'd gonetoo long without changing my oil. So I bought five quarts of fresh oil along with my tank of gas, and drove them home."

 As Cozzano told this story, he was strolling back into his garage,where his car was angled up on a pair of ramps. He kneeled besidethe car, reached underneath with one arm, and slid out the metalbasin, which was now filled with black oil.

 "Just a few minutes ago, as I was crawling under the car to letthat old sludge out of the system, I realized that there was apowerful metaphor for politics. Our political system is basicallysound, but over the years it has gotten all fouled with dirt andsludge."

 Cozzano carried the basin over to a counter, where an empty plastic milk jug sat with a funnel stuck into the top. He held thebasin up and tipped it, pouring the oil down the funnel and into theplastic jug.

 "Of course, that kind of thing rubs off. It permeates everythingafter a while. And I realized that being a presidential candidate hadfouled and stained my life in many ways, some obvious, some a little more subtle."

 Cozzano set the basin down. He took a metal oil spout off a pegboard on the wall, then picked up a fresh can of oil. He shoved the spout into the can, piercing its top, then tilted it just a bit andspilled a few drops of clean, clear, golden oil into the palm of his hand. "Now, that's more like it," he said. "This is how my life usedto be. And this" - he set the oil can down and slapped the milk jugfull of sludge - "is how my life was after a few months ofpresidential politics. Of course, the President and Tip McLane havebeen in the same game for much longer than I have. I don't knowhow they do it."

 Cozzano pulled the rag out of his pocket and wiped his hands. "Well, I've got some burgers to eat. A son and daughter to getreacquainted with. Some new oil to put in the car. Then I thinkwe'll go for a stroll around town, maybe take in a movie. And I know that the President and Tip have got important things to do also. So I'll let you attend to those things. Best of luck to you all,and good night."

 The Tuscola feed cut back to the long shot of Cozzano's house,now just a silhouette against an indigo sky, lights shining warmlyfrom every window.

 In the press room, Zeke Zorn was standing on a table shouting.Important blood vessels were showing on his forehead, which, likethe rest of his face, had turned red.

 "This is an absolute disgrace!" he screamed. Then he took a deepbreath and got himself under control. "This is the most dirty,underhanded, filthy campaign trick ever devised."

 Al Lefkowitz, the President's chief spin doctor, was calmer,paler, seemingly almost distracted, like a man who has been hit onthe head with a two-by-two and whose consciousness has with­drawn into a deeper neurological realm. He was speaking morequietly than Zorn, with the result that reporters, fleeing in fear ofbeing struck by a loose drop of saliva ejected from Zorn's mouth, had clustered around him. "It's very disappointing. It's an act of political vandalism, really. If he just wanted to withdraw from therace, that would be one thing. But he went beyond that andattacked the candidates. And more importantly, he attacked theAmerican electoral process itself. It's very sad that his career has toend this way."

 Zeke Zorn suddenly grabbed the floor by howling. "THEREHE IS!" and pointing toward the entrance. Cy Ogle had juststrolled into the room and was now blinking and looking aroundhimself curiously, as if he had wandered in while searching for themen's room, and could not understand all the commotion.

 Zorn continued, "Maybe you would like to explain how you'regoing to get Cozzano's name off the ballots in all fifty states in justfour days!"

 Ogle looked perplexed. "Who said anything about ballots?"

 "Cozzano did. He claims he's withdrawing from the race."

 "Oh, no," Ogle said, shaking his head, and looking a little shocked. "He never said anything about withdrawing from therace. He just said he didn't want any morecampaigning."

 Zorn was speechless.

 Lefkowitz was not. "Excuse me, Cy, but I think we have aproblem here. We negotiated the terms of this debate in good faith. Then you came in with a last-minute change. You said you wantedsome free time for Cozzano to speak from Tuscola. And yourexcuse was that he wanted to make an important announcement. Am I right!"

 "Yes, you're right. These were my words," Ogle said.

 "The only reason that Cozzano was granted that free time wasbecause of this important announcement. He wouldn't have beengiven that time if all he wanted was to make editorial comments."

 "True," Ogle said.

 "So we all construed his words to mean that he was dropping outof the race."

 "Oh, I'm sorry," Ogle said, "he didn't mean to say that."

 "But if he wasn't dropping out of the race," Lefkowitz said,"then he wasn't making any important announcement - which means that you obtained that free air time under false pretenses.You committed a fraud against the American people! And I amsure that this fraud will be covered extensively by those here inthe press room, and that you and Cozzano will be judged for itby the American people, who have grown sick of dirtycampaigning."

 "But he did make an important announcement. Just as I said hewould. There's no deception here," Ogle said. "Just a mis­understanding.

 "What are you talking about?" Zorn shouted.

 "You heard him," Ogle said, "he announced that his son waspublishing a book. Doesn't that seem like an important announce­ment to y'all?"

  

 PART 4

 Resurrection Symphony

  

 57

 Four days after Cozzano's landslide victory, the Speaker ofthe House suffered a stroke during a party in a private Washington' club, while sitting on the toilet in the men's room. On the recom­mendation of the President-elect, the Speaker's family sent him. tothe Radhakrishnan Institute for therapy.

 The house across the street from the Cozzano residence inTuscola had become vacant a couple of months previously, and theCozzanos had bought it. Cy Ogle and some of his best people nowmoved into it and made it into the headquarters for the transition.If the Cozzano house was the Tuscola White House, then the placeacross the street was the Tuscola Executive Office building.

 Cy Ogle had a big leather La-Z-Boy set up in the living roomand spent much of mid-November lying in it "like a sack of shit,"as he put it, recovering from a cold, watching TV, and enjoying his first chance to relax in the better part of a year. It was a wonderfultime for him. He had devastated not only the opposition candi­dates, but also his competitors in the election business. Even thefearsome Jeremiah Freel was in jail. And besides, he was a suckerfor Christmas.

 After Election Day, Ogle, as leader of the transition team,declared a three-week moratorium on all official activities for thePresident-elect. Eleanor Richmond likewise stuck close to home -her Alexandria apartment - attending a couple of T.C. Williamsfootball games (Harmon, Jr., had become a star punter) andshopping for inaugural clothes with her daughter, Clarice.

 At the beginning of December, Ogle issued a press release listingthe members of the Cozzano transition team. Ogle claimed, ofcourse, that he had hand-picked these men, but nothing could have been further from the truth. Whoeverhad chosen them had donean excellent job: they were professional, experienced, nonpartisan,and classy in a nonintimidating way. They had impeccable credentials and were universally regarded as ethical and trust­worthy. It was claimed that these people had spent the last year behind the scenes, working on position papers for the Cozzanocampaign. This was patently untrue, but Ogle had to admit that itsounded great. All the serious press agreed, and praised the skills ofthe Cozzano team. The rest of the media was content with photo-ops of Cozzano and his family and entourage shoveling snow inTuscola.

 Ogle knew that the people, whose consciousness he hadpummeled and abused so relentlessly for the previous year, neededa rest. They needed to concentrate on the NFL, sitcoms, andChristmas. They needed to recharge their batteries because whatwas to come in the Cozzano administration would be tough. Aquick glance at the aforementioned position papers proved thatmuch. The waffling and pathetic efforts of the previousadministration were to be replaced by calm, cool decisiveness. No one knew what the plan was, beyond the endless evocation of the return to values, and its fiscal corollaries: cut the deficit, pay backevery penny on the debt.

 Ogle knew that his role in this operation would end as of January20. He had two major tasks left to organize, and this was the kindof thing he liked best - public displays without elections.Spectacles. On December 1 he gathered his staff together to launchthe final push on the Cozzano Family Christmas Special. The buildup for the special would run until December 21. He woulddrop names out in the media like lures for hungry trout. Names for potential cabinet officers, names for White House staff. Names forpossible judicial appointments. The idea was partly to show what fine people would be working for Cozzano, partly to build upsuspense for the Christmas Special, and partly to avoid the tedious and demeaning sight of wannabes trudging back and forth between the Champaign-Urbana airport and Tuscola.

 Instead he had a parade of foreign dignitaries make the same trip.It looked more impressive, and the sight of Brazilians and Saudismaking snowmen on the front lawn was great television. Ogletoyed endlessly with the sequence of their arrivals. He also foundways to make use of the soaring stock market, inspired by theCozzano victory, the knowledge that the debt would not beforgiven, and all of the feel-good symbolism that was radiating fromTuscola like heat from an old-fashioned wood stove.

 Starting on the twenty-first he would begin to throw more logson the fire. Mary Catherine had taken a job at Brigham andWomen's Hospital in Boston, and Dad was giving her a cozybrownstone apartment to move into; while its exact location wasnot mentioned,Today show viewers were given a video tour of theplace, complete with blazing fires, oriental rugs, and antiquefurniture.

 On the twenty-second an affirmation of Cozzano's strengthwould be made: he would do a guest shot on a special live editionof a popular woodworking show. The pipe-smoking, suspender-wearing host would interview Cozzano working in his shop, steamcoming out of his mouth, as the President-elect fixed a busted chestof drawers.

 Scheduled for the twenty-third was the official launch of JamesCozzano's new book, Kingmakers. The Inside Stories of Ogle, Zorn, and Lefkowitz and How They Created a President. Thepublisher was throwing a launch party at the Hay-Adams Hotel,across the park from the White House. Rich and powerful peoplewould be present. So would TV cameras. The rave reviews had already been written.

 The twenty-fourth would feature the Cozzanos at midnightmass. And the twenty-fifth would make the country feel good.Real good.

 The seven weeks after the election were glorious for MaryCatherine. No more travel. Minimum of interviews, speeches and other campaign hassles. Maximum of time with Dad. Most of thetime was strictly business, though. As she had been doing for thelast six months, she spent several hours a day putting him throughtherapeutic exercises, mostly concentrating on the left hand.

 She had a lot of free time. Part of it she spent hanging around with her old high-school friends and driving up to Champaign or over to Decatur for Christmas shopping. She also took up a newhobby: electronics.

 She had purchased a book on the subject months ago in Bostonand had been reading it in free moments, learning about all themysterious hieroglyphs that made up a circuit diagram: resistors,capacitors, and inductors. She didn't reckon she could design herown circuits now, but she could certainly put one together from adiagram.

 The week before Christmas she made a stop at the TuscolaRadio shack, which doubled as an Ace Hardware store. She picked up a set of gloves and some tools for her father, and then she wentinto the little nook where all of the resistors, capacitors, andinductors hung in bubble packs. Reading part numbers from awrinkled sheet of paper she'd taken from her wallet, she selected acouple of do/en items and paid for everything in cash.

 Her father already had a soldering iron, of course; he had everytool known to the industrialized world. Mary Catherine let it beknown that she was going into Dad's workshop to assemble a secretChristmas present and that her privacy had better not be disturbed.She locked the door, pulled down the windowshades, and crankedup the cast-iron stove that Dad used to heat the place up. When it was warm enough that her fingers worked again, she plugged in thesoldering iron and went to work, soldering the little bits and piecesfrom Radio Shack on to a breadboard - a slab of plastic with holespunched through it. When it was finished the whole thing fit intoa black plastic box about the size of a paperback book. A toggleswitch and a red light protruded from one end.

 President-elect Cozzano himself seemed to blossom under theperiod of rest and relaxation. Aside from receiving his daily CIAbriefing and eyes-only presidential briefing, he was basically onvacation. He evinced no desire to have a hand in collecting namesfor his cabinet, being content to work with the same corps ofadvisers that had brought him here. Football season blended intobasketball season at Tuscola High School, and periodically Cozzanowould slip out to the football field or into the gym to watch thetown's young student-athletes compete.

 Cozzano had developed a new passion in the last months of thecampaign: Scrabble. It had been his idea that they start playing the game, but Mary Catherine encouraged it because (as she explainedto her father's curious handlers) it was a great form of therapy. Because it was a word game, it helped to exercise the parts of Cozzano's brain that handled verbal communication. But becauseno speech was involved, it bypassed the speech centers of his brain- which were now partly silicon. Mary Catherine insisted thatCozzano play it with his left hand. At first, Cozzano had found itsurprisingly difficult to persuade his left hand to spell words; thenecessary neural connections had been severed by the stroke.

 Mary Catherine mocked him for being so inept. That was allCozzano needed. He started playing to win. He was tenacious, andover the months, became good. He played once a day with MaryCatherine. He played it so often that even the Secret Service folksand the people at control stopped noticing it.

 Cozzano's cabinet members were announced. They were mostlyyouthful and in good physical shape, their names indicated apleasing and politically correct distribution of ethnic groups and genders, they had gone to the best schools, they had outstanding records. They were all perfect.

 A day later, Mary Catherine got a Christmas card from Zeldo. Itincluded several photos: a couple of Zeldo riding his mountain bikeon the bluffs above the Pacific and a few of Zeldo at work.

 One of the photos showed Zeldo sitting in the courtyard of theRadhakrishnan Institute, enjoyingcaffélatteand typing away on hislaptop. In the background, seated at another table, was one of theinstitute's patients. Mary Catherine recognized the man: he was thesecretary-designate of Defense.

 She went through the other photos very carefully, and saw threemore patients "accidentally" caught in the background: thesecretaries-designated of State, Treasury, and Commerce, and theSpeaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

 Early on the afternoon of December eighteenth, Mary Catherinewent cross-country skiing. Three inches of new snow had fallen thenight before. By the standards of post-greenhouse effect Illinois, itwas a winter wonderland. She tossed her skis and poles into theback of the family's four-wheel-drive pickup truck, checked her arsenal of waxes, and took off. A few minutes' drive took her to theold Cozzano farm. She got out, locked the front hubs, shifted intofour-wheel-drive, pulled on to a dirt lane between fields, and drovefor half a mile or so. Then she put her skis on and took off.

 After a mile or so she was able to coast down into the gentle cleftof a river valley, lightly forested with skinny ironwood trees. Shefollowed the river for another half mile until she came upon a beat-up, ramshackle old cabin, really more of a glorified duck blind thana dwelling. Parked beside it was a big Chevy pickup truck, and asshe approached from downwind she could smell cigar smoke andhear subdued conversation.

 Mel Meyer, ludicrously clad in a heavy insulated farmer'scoverall, emerged from the building, walked up to Mary Catherine, and ran a bug detector over her body. This time he got a faint radiosignal from one of the buttons on her shirt. Mary Catherine skiied a couple of hundred feet away from the shack and left the buttonunder a log. Then she came back and gave Mel a long hug.

 Inside the shack were a bulky, round-shouldered black man inhis fifties, and a huge white guy with bushy eyebrows and a salt-and-pepper hair and beard. Mary Catherine knew them bothalready. Respectively, they were Rufus Bell, USMC Retired, and Craig ("the Crag") Addison, Chicago Bears, Retired. "How's he doing?" Bell asked.

 "He's doing great," Mary Catherine said, "this is all boyadventure stuff. Just the kind of thing he likes."

 Mel, Rufus, and Craig ("the Crag") all looked slightlyembarrassed.

 "Okay," Mel said, "now listen carefully, because I'm freezingmy ass off, and because this is important. These two guys Rufus andCrag can provide the bodies we need. With a little help from someof Eleanor's friends and supporters in D.C., we can even make itlegal. And I can provide the paperwork. Mary Catherine?"

 "I've got the black box ready. And I've got some information foryou. The secretaries-designate of Defense, Treasury, Commerce,and State, and the Speaker of the House, have all spent time at theRadhakrishnan Institute in the last few months."

 Mel shook his head. "Tragic," he said. "A tragic epidemic ofstrokes. Anyone else?"

 "Not that I know of."

 "Well, that will be useful knowledge," Mel said. "Now, MaryCatherine, there's only one thing we need from you."

 "My father," Mary Catherine said.

 "Right. Can you give me Willy?"

 "I have a plan, Mel," she said. "I have a scam."

 That night after supper, Cozzano called Mary Catherine in foranother game of Scrabble. She'd had two or three glasses ofChianti, she was in a good mood, and she spoke without restraint."Dad, it's the most boring game ever invented."

 "If only you would play it right," he groused, "and not cheat."

 They went into the study and sat down at the desk in front of theworks of Mark Twain.

 Mary Catherine always started the same way: she reached into the heap of tiles and spelled out ARE YOU STILL THERE. Theyhad a fancy Scrabble board mounted on a turntable and so when shewas done, she spun it around so he could read it.

 Cozzano frowned. "Stop playing around," he said. "You knowthe rules." Both of his hands were active. It was a bizarre sight: withhis left hand he was breaking up the sequence that she had spelledout, rearranging the letters, plucking more of them out of theoverturned box top. With his right hand, he was picking seven tilesat random and placing them neatly on his little rack. He continuedto speak at the same time. He seemed genuinely annoyed andappeared not to notice what his own left hand was doing. "Youhave to pick seven tiles. And you can only spell one word at once.

 Why do I have to explain this to you every time? Are you teasingme, girl?"

 Mary Catherine was accustomed to strange neurological ticsbecause of her work, and she had grown accustomed to her father'speculiarities over the months that she had been putting himthrough daily therapy. She had to remind herself just how bizarrethis would look to anyone else.

 Cozzano's left hand spun the board so that Mary Catherine couldread the words DID YOU SEE MEL.

 She looked into his eyes. He was frowning, staring down at theScrabble board, befuddled. "How did those letters get there?" heasked.

 Mary Catherine messed them up with her hand before his eyescould read them. Then she combed some more tiles out of the heapand spelled out the word YES.

 He got the same look on his face as when she had come homefrom school with Bs on her report card. "Is that the best you coulddo? A three-letter word?"

 "Sorry," she said. "I got bad letters."

 "Thanks for giving me that big fatY ," he said. "That's four easy points for me. You need to think harder about strategy." As he wastalking, both hands were again active on the Scrabble board. Hisright hand was turning herY into the world YTTRIUM. His lefthand was spelling out HOW IS HE on the bottom left corner ofthe board.

 Mary Catherine spun the board around. Again, Cozzano's eyespicked out the letters that had been laid down by his left hand. "How did those letters get on there?" he said. "For god's sake,peanut, we need to make sure the board is clear before we start. Getrid of those."

 She had already read them, so she swept them away. Then sheused theI in YTTRIUM to spell out the world PLANNING. Inorder to do it, she had to rummage through the box top for somemore letters. Cozzano frowned and grumbled about this cheating.

 The conversation went back and forth like that for several morerounds, the Scrabble board spinning round and around.

  

 Cozzano: FOR WHAT.

 Mary Catherine: INAUGDAY

 "I defy you to find that word in any dictionary," Cozzano said.

 DuLafayette Webster, Heisman trophy winner for the Elton State Comanches, scored three touchdowns singlehandedly in the first half of the Fujitsu Guacamole Bowl on Christmas Night. As soon as the first half clock ticked down to zero, the broadcast cut awayto the cheerful theme music of the Cozzano Family ChristmasSpecial.

 A live shot from a hovering chopper zoomed down on thetwinkling Christmas lights of Tuscola, which had begun billing itself as "America's hometown." The Christmas decorations hadbeen heavily enhanced by the largesse of Ogle, and coordinated byhis designers. The camera panned across church steeples, smallbusinesses, and the city park, all decked with boughs of electricholly, and then settled on the now-familiar Cozzano residence. A street level camera peered through the large front window to viewthe roaring fire and the happy, smiling group gathered around theeggnog. "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. From Tuscola,Illinois, America's hometown, we bring you an address by thePresident-elect, William Anthony Cozzano. Governor Cozzano."

 Cut to a shot of Cozzano, James, and Mary Catherine sitting together on the sofa. Zoom into a talking-head shot of Cozzanoalone.

 The President-elect made a heartfelt statement of thanks to theAmerican people, expressed his happiness with his daughter's careerplans and his son's excellent book, and incidentally, announced hiscabinet nominees.

 Then he stood up and introduced them personally. The cabinet-to-be were all gathered around the huge dining room table, dressedin cozy sweaters, drinking cider. They interrupted the convivial routine for a moment as Cozzano introduced them, one by one, tothe American people. They were good-looking, confident,bipartisan, and multicultural.

 Finally Cozzano returned to his seat by the fire to address a few last words of greeting and holiday cheer to the American people.Cozzano had developed a sense of timing that was positively eerie. He brought his little speech to a close just in time to cut back to theScoreboard clock at the bowl game.

 On the eighteenth of January, the Cozzanos climbed on to achartered plane and flew to Washington, D.C. Journalists fromaround the world were converging there at the same time. So weremembers of the incoming administration and transition team, all ofCy Ogle's top people, several big GODS trucks full of electronics,Floyd Wayne Vishniak, and an irregular caravan of buses, cars, andairplanes carrying old teammates and Marine comrades-in-arms ofWilliam A. Cozzano.

 58

 At eight o'clock on the morning of Inauguration Day, acluster of Secret Service agents burst from the elevators and into thelobby of the Georgetown Four Seasons Hotel, striding calmly butimplacably across hardwood floors, green oriental carpets, andweathered brick. At the same time, a motorcade of three dark cars was spiraling out of a parking garage down the street. The motor­cade pulled into the brick driveway at the front entrance just as thecluster of agents, and the dignitaries hidden among them, wasbursting through the brass front doors. Within a few seconds, thecars and the people were gone, trailed by a few journalists who hadbeen quick enough to notice that the President-elect was on themove.

 At the same time, William A. Cozzano himself was emerging quietly from an elevator tucked into a dimly lit corridor near the restaurant on the next floor down. He was accompanied by his sonand daughter and two Secret Service agents. The Cozzanos were dressed in running clothes. They padded down a gray-carpetedstairway and exited on to a brick patio behind the hotel, two storiesbelow street level, which led directly on to a herringbone-brickjogging path. Beyond the path was the C&O Canal, a narrowtrench of stagnant water lined with massive, moss-covered masonryblocks.

 The President-elect wanted to go for a damn jog with his family.Was it too much to ask? It would be his last opportunity to do soas a private citizen. He wanted to do it in Rock Creek Park, whichwas where he normally jogged when he was in D.C., but the SecretService didn't like that idea. They had gotten positively jumpyabout Floyd Wayne Vishniak, who was still at large. During hisescapade at Ogle Data Research, Vishniak had displayed cunningand well-developed marksmanship skills. He was still firing offdemented manifestoes to various newspapers and magazines.Everyone knew that Cozzano liked to jog in Rock Creek Park, and with its dense vegetation and myriad ways in and out, it would belike the happy hunting grounds for Vishniak.

 Cozzano was a demanding sort. He didn't merely want to gojogging in an incredibly dangerous place: he was insisting onprivacy too. He wanted to stage a diversion and send the journalistson a wild goose chase so that he could just run with his son anddaughter.

 The Secret Service agreed to a compromise. If Cozzano wouldgo running in Arlington - in an area that was not quite so Floyd-friendly - then the Secret Service would stage the diversion forhim. So far it was working perfectly.

 Fifty feet away, the canal passed underneath the Rock Creek Parkway and joined up with Rock Creek itself. Three more Secret Service cars were idling on the side of the Parkway, wheels up onthe curb, waiting for them with doors open. This little motorcadewould spirit them away to Arlington, where they could go joggingon the flawlessly groomed parade grounds of Fort Myer, next to theNational Cemetery, under the protection of military police andSecret Service.

 Cozzano had been talking football with the Secret Service menall the way down the stairs. As they crossed the brick patio, MaryCatherine drew close to her brother and said, "James, this isimportant. Remember when we were kids? Remember Follow theLeader?"

 "Sure," James said sunnily, mistaking this for idle nostalgia.

 "We're about to play the world's most important game ofFollow the Leader. Don't screw it up," Mary Catherine said.

 "Huh?"

 They were stepping on to the jogging path. Mary Catherinereached into the open top of her belt pack and flipped the toggleswitch on the end of her black plastic Radio Shack contraption.

 William A. Cozzano stopped dead for a moment and shouted,"Hey!"

 He was staring off into the distance, focusing on something thatwasn't there.

 "Dad?" James said. "Are you okay?"

 Cozzano shook his head and snapped out if it. He looked atJames and Mary Catherine for a moment, thinking about some­thing. Then he glanced at the Secret Service men as if noticingthem for the first time. "Nothing," he said. "I just remembered something. Déjàvu, I guess."

 The family, trailed by the two agents, began to jog down thepath, which angled up and away from the canal toward the edge ofthe parkway. A few yards short of the waiting cars, Mary Catherinebroke sharply to the right, thrashed through some brush, and skittered down the jumbled pile of boulders that made up thecreek's bank. She was followed by her father and, somewhatuncertainly, by James.

 "Sir" one of the Secret Service men said. They had fallen wellbehind the Cozzanos and were watching them pick their waytoward the confluence of the canal and Rock Creek.

 "Just stay there," Cozzano said. "We're going to pick up someof this litter. It's a national disgrace."

 The whole family disappeared beneath the parkway. The Secret Service men stood dumfounded for a few moments, then ran down the bank, awkward in their suits and trench coats and leather shoes,trying to regain sight of the Cozzanos. But all they saw was thecreek.

 Three of them charged under the bridge, but ran into anobstacle: several homeless men. They had apparently beenawakened by the Cozzanos. Now they were up on their feet andfeeling frisky. These men occupied a bottleneck: a rocky stretch ofbank between the buttress of the bridge and the bank of the creek.One of them was even standing in the water, thigh-deep.

 There were harsh words and some shoving. The Secret Service men did not fare well in the shoving match, because, as they had started to notice, all of the homeless men were astoundingly large,and, considering their lifestyle, inhumanly strong. By the time the Secret Service got around to pulling guns, and the homeless men held up their hands apologetically and let them pass, they had completely lost track of the Cozzanos.

 Above them, tires were squealing out on the Rock CreekParkway. The noise was made by half a dozen large rental carsskidding sideways, across both sets of lanes, blocking all traffic.

 The drivers of these vehicles, an unexceptional lot of reasonablywell dressed, middle-aged men, seemed to be the least excitedpeople in all of Washington. They ignored the honking horns andshouted obscenities from the instant traffic jam that hadmaterialized behind their roadblock. With the calm self-possessionof a combat veteran, each driver strolled around his vehicle and jabbed a knife into each of the four tires before turning his back onhis crippled vehicle and sauntering into the park.

 If any of the furious drivers in the traffic jam had bothered to look up at the Four Seasons, which stood at the intersection of Mand Pennsylvania like the cornerstone of the whole neighborhood,they would have seen Cy Ogle looking back at them from thewindow of his suite.

 He had just received a telephone call from the man on duty inthe closest GODS truck, informing him that a sudden burst ofmicrowave noise had broken their link with Cozzano, and thatthey were unable to reestablish the connection. "Argus is notreceiving any inputs," the man said. "Repeat: Argus is on his own."

 The stream channel was shallow and lined with large blocks ofbrown rock. As soon as they got past the "homeless" men, theCozzanos plunged into it, picking up their knees as they ran,Walter Payton style, to keep them up out of the icy water, andforded Rock Creek. Far above their heads was another bridge,much larger and higher: Pennsylvania Avenue. As soon as they gotpast the buttresses of the bridge they scrambled up on to the easternbank, which even in winter was covered with a mixture ofbamboo, ivy, and reeds. This was difficult territory, but Williamand Mary Catherine had been training hard for this and they didn'tobject to getting wet. Mary Catherine had been using all the slingsand arrows of sibling rivalry to get James to whip himself intoshape; he couldn't really keep up with them, but he had the minor advantage of being in a state of shock.

 Rock Creek now ran between them and the parkway. This sideof the park was more heavily wooded and had no road or bicyclepath, just a little footpath paralleling the bank. All of them were stillrunning as hard as they could, Mary Catherine leading the way,James bringing up the rear, still trying to gasp out questions whenhe wasn't sucking wind. His confusion was only deepened when henoticed that his father and sister had begun to rip off their clothes as they ran, dropping a trail of sweatshirts and tank tops in his path.Mary Catherine looked over her shoulder, into his eyes, and heknew that he was supposed to do the same. The world had gonecrazy anyhow, why not run around Washington D.C., stark naked?

 They paused somewhere between N and P streets. MaryCatherine and William had gotten all the way down to gym shortsand running shoes, and James was able to catch up as soon as theystopped running.

 William crashed down the bank. A cube of solid masonryprojected from the bank and into the stream, carrying a storm seweroutfall a couple of feet in diameter. William A. Cozzano, thigh-deep in icy water, leaned into it for a moment with his left arm and shoulder, and emerged carrying a couple of plastic garbage bagsweighted with stones. He threw them up on to the bank and thenclimbed up after them.

 Mary Catherine was stark naked by this point. She ripped openone of the bags to expose folds of dark green cloth, and a few pairsof running shoes. The shoes were labelled in magic markers:WILLY, M.C., and JAMES. She tossed the appropriate pairs to James and William, then hauled the clothing out: three identicalsweatsuits.

 The change of clothes ate up about thirty seconds and then theywere running down the footpath again. Mary Catherine wascarrying a small black plastic box in her hand; the blazing red lighton one end danced up and down as she pumped her arms. She haddropped to a slower, sustainable pace. They passed under severalmore towering stone bridges, at one point fording the creek againin order to keep it between them and the Parkway.

 The path dead-ended at the fence of Oak Hill Cemetery, whichran downhill from Georgetown and all the way to the creek's edge. They made a left and ran parallel to the fence, following a footpathin the red, rocky soil, terraced by innumerable exposed tree roots.A few stray gravestones poked askew from the carpet of ivy.

 Cemetery gates loomed on their right and they had emerged into the city again. They were in Montrose Park. It was two blocks longand a couple of hundred feet wide, bordered on one side by thewoods and on the other by an alley that ran behind a row of oldfour-story red brick apartments. This was a bad stretch of blacktop,patches on top of older patches, covered with mud, leaf litter, and parked cars with the usual odd D.C. mixture of license plates. Adelivery van, painted with the logo of a ubiquitous local diaper service, was sitting there with its motor running.

 Mary Catherine ran up to it, hauled open the back doors, andmotioned James and William in. They climbed in the back and shefollowed, pulling the doors shut behind them. They all collapsed, unable to do much more than suck in oxygen. But Mary Catherine was laughing, James was sputtering and starting to ask questions, and William's mind was elsewhere.

 Mary Catherine was thinking that, no matter what else happenedtoday, they had all gone out for a vigorous run together, just likethe old days, and they had gotten wet and messy and enjoyedthemselves. Now she was ready for all hell to break loose. Shecaught her father's eye for a moment and realized he was thinking the same thing.

 They drive for fifteen or twenty minutes, not really knowingwhere they were, and then the truck stopped, and they could heara garage door grinding shut behind them.

 They staggered upstairs and found themselves in an old townhouse with plywood windowpanes. Mattresses and a few pieces ofjunk furniture were scattered around. But it had a few touches thatmade them feel at home: a coffeemaker on the floor, its red lightshining cheerfully, and a sack of bagels next to a stack of paperplates, and, sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, chewingon a bagel and going over some papers, one Mel Meyer.

 "Willy, if you can hear me, get your left hand over here and grabthis pen. You have a hell of a lot of papers to sign before we getyou dressed," Mel said.

 "James," Mary Catherine said, "grab some coffee. I have a fewthings to tell you."

  

 59

 In downtown Rosslyn, Virginia, a man in a nice suit and atrench coat, wearing a neatly trimmed beard, and hair so short thathis scalp almost showed through, emerged from a Metro station andwalked up the street to a mailbox. He removed a standard legal-sized envelope from his breast pocket, held it between his hands,and contemplated it for a few moments. Then he dropped it into the mailbox. He continued down the street, turned a corner, andwalked downhill toward Key Bridge. Ahead of him, on the far sideof the Potomac, he could see Dixie Liquors, which was on MStreet, which would take him through the center of Georgetown and on to Pennsylvania. You could fire a bullet straight down thecenterline of Pennsylvania and it would pass through the middle ofthe White House and continue down to the presidential lectern on the reviewing stand on the Capitol steps.

 Unfortunately Floyd Wayne Vishniak's Fleischacker was notquite powerful or accurate enough for that. He would have tofollow much the same route on foot. But that was okay. He hadplanned this thing pretty well, had left himself plenty of time to getthere. As he walked across Key Bridge, pounded by a coldcrosswind that found every leak in his trench coat, he mentallyreviewed the contents of the letter, which he had written at oneo'clock this morning in the front seat of his pickup truck, parked inthe holler in West Virginia.

  

 Floyd Wayne Vishniak, esq.

 Parts Unknown

 United States of America

  

 Letters to the Editor

 Washington Post

 Washington D.C.

  

 Dear Mr. (or Miss, Mrs., or Ms.) Editor:

 As of yesterday A.M.I have spent, or maybe the right word iswasted, a total of $89.50 on your worthless rag, and this is notcounting money spent on the other papers and magazines Ihad to buy just to cross-check all of the so-called facts youprinted and find out which were true and which were false.

  

 So I know full well that you will screw everything up. So hereis some information. The name is spelled V-I-S-H-N-I-A-K(see top of page). I am not a psycho. Just a concernedAmerican citizen.

  

 And please don't screw this up: I - me - Floyd - did this ALLBY MYSELF. I did not get help from anyone - no co-conspirators, foreign governments, terrorist groups, or anyoneelse.

  

 Yes, hard as it might be for you smug East Coast bastards tocomprehend, a hick from the sticks is actually capable of doingsomething ALL BY HIMSELF.

  

 See you in Hell - where we can look forward to manyinteresting conversations.

  

 You will be hearing from me again soon, I am sure.

 Sincerely,

 Floyd Wayne Vishniak

  

 By the time he had made it across Key Bridge he had decided that it was a good letter. He turned right underneath the red neon sign of Dixie Liquors and headed for the center of Washington.

  

 On the southeastern fringe of Capitol Hill, just beyond theboundary between the yuppified zone and the ghetto, a tour busmade a difficult turn into a narrow alley running through the centerof a block. Facing on the alley was a long, low, one-story cinder-block building, a former box-printing plant. Air burst from itsbrakes and the bus settled to a stop in the alley. The door openedup and men began to climb off. They walked in single file aroundthe front of the bus and entered the building through a wide steel door, which was flanked on the inside and the outside by middle-aged men with nervous eyes and guns in their armpits.

 Most, but not all, of the men were enormous. They ranged in agefrom their early thirties to their mid-fifties. Some of them werewearing dark suits already and some were carrying them in garment bags. They filed into the building, which was a single huge room. It was mostly empty; its concrete floor was scarred where huge piecesof machinery had been uprooted and dragged away. Most of theillumination was provided by skylights. But when all of the men hadcome inside, the door had been closed, more lights were turned on.

 Already in the room was a busload of more men matching thesame general description, drinking coffee from a couple of bigindustrial percolators set up on a folding table, eating vast quantitiesof doughnuts. A lot of these men knew each other and so in someways the atmosphere was like that of an old class reunion. But theywere generally subdued and serious. This was especially true ofthose men who weren't huge.

 The huge ones were former professional football players. Theothers were Vietnamese veterans. They instinctively formed upinto two separate groups, on opposite ends of the room. TheVietnam veterans had served with Cozzano in the mid- to late-sixties and were, for the most part, older than the football players,and from a wider economic range: this group included corporate presidents, highly paid lawyers, janitors, auto mechanics, andhomeless people. But today they were all dressed more or less thesame, and they greeted each other wordlessly, with hugs and long,intense, two-handed handshakes.

 A few minutes after the second bus had arrived, one of theveterans, a big, round-headed, round-shouldered black man,walked to the center of the room, whistled through his fingers, andshouted, "Listen up!"

 The conversation rapidly dropped to zero. All of the men movedto the edges of the room, facing inward. "My name is Rufus Bell.For today, you can call me Sarge," said the man. "I have threepeople to introduce. First of all, the woman who will be our newVice President in an hour and a half: Eleanor Richmond."

 She had been standing by the coffee table. Now she walked tothe center of the room. Scattered applause started up and rapidlyexploded into an ovation. Rufus Bell whistled again.

 "Shut up!" he yelled. "We don't want to bother the neighbors."

 "Thank you all," Eleanor said.

 Bell continued. "I would also like to introduce Mel Meyer, whowill be the acting Attorney General of the United States."

 Mel acknowledged by removing the cigar from his mouthmomentarily.

 "Finally," Bell said, "the Chief of the District of ColumbiaPolice, who's going to swear you all in."

 The Chief was snappy in full dress uniform. He walked to themiddle of the room and got no applause at all; his appearance, andhis bearing, radiated no-nonsense authority. He turned to face themen around the edges of the room and examined them closely forseveral moments, making individual eye contact with every man inthe room.

 "This is some serious shit," the Chief said, "not some kind of afun little field trip. If you're not willing to lay down your life in thedefense of the Constitution of the United States, right now, then stay in this building for the next three hours and you'll be fine."

 He stopped for a while to let that sink in, and surveyed the men'sfaces again. They all stared back at him, like statues. A couple ofthem couldn't hold the eye contact, and glanced away.

 If you are willing to take that risk," the Chief said, "then repeatafter me." He held up his right hand, palm facing forward.

 All of the men in the room did the same. Then the Chief sworethem all in as deputies of the District of Columbia PoliceDepartment.

 In the meantime, Mel had taken Eleanor aside and was talking toher in a corner of the room. "You ever bought a house?" he asked.

 "Once or twice," she said, surprised and mildly amused.

 "Remember all those fucking documents they pulled out for you to sign?"

 "I remember them well."

 "That's nothing compared to what we're doing today," he said.He opened up a time-worn leather satchel that was resting on thefloor. "I have two sets of documents for you," he said, "dependingon what happens. I have spent the last several months holed up in themiddle of nowhere with a word processor, a laser printer, and a wholelot of law books, drawing these things up. Some of them you need to sign. Some of them Willy has already signed. It's all organized."

 Mel pulled a white nine-by-fifteen envelope out of the satchel."This is in case we're lucky," he said. "In that case, there's notmuch for you to do - most of your duties will pertain to your roleas President of the Senate."

 Mel reached back into the satchel and pulled out a blackenvelope. This one was the expanding type, with bellows on thesides. It was two inches thick. "And this," he said, "is in case we'renot so lucky."

 "I see," Eleanor said. "White is good and black is bad."

 "No," Mel said. "White is Willy and black is Eleanor."

 The Chief had finished deputizing the men by now, and RufusBell was beginning to stride up and down the room, perusing a listof names, ordering men this way and that, forming them up intoseveral groups of various sizes.

 Eleanor opened up the envelopes, took a black ball-point pen(SKILCRAFT U.S. GOVERNMENT) out of her purse, andstarted signing her name to documents. All of the documents in thewhite envelope said:

 Eleanor Richmond

 Vice President, United States of America

  

 All of the documents in the black envelope said:

  

 Eleanor Richmond

 President

  

 Rufus Bell and Mel Meyer were dragging cardboard boxes acrossthe floor and shoving them across the concrete in the direction ofthe various platoons that Bell had organized. The men began to ripthe boxes open and pull out T-shirts. They were all black, 100 percent cotton, extra large. On the front was a white star and thewords DEPUTY - D.C. POLICE. And on the back of each shirtwere the words

 DEPT. OFJUSTICE

  

 60

 Lines of authority were never especially clear in Washington,D.C., where the jurisdiction of a dozen different law-enforcementagencies all overlapped. The presence of so many people with gunsand badges made it impossible to figure out who was in charge ofwhat. So when men with guns and badges had gone to severallocations in the District of Columbia during the last few days andlaid claim to numerous parking spaces - some on the street, some inparking lots  of federal buildings - there  had been disputes, arguments, even threats. But the issues raised could not have been untangled short of calling a convention of Constitutional scholarsand locking them all in a room until they made up their minds. The people who had the parking spaces won the argument. The decisionwas sealed when those parking spaces were occupied by flatbedsemitrailer rigs with big GODS shipping containers on their backs.One of them took up a position in front of the headquarters ofthe Teamsters Union on Louisiana Avenue, only a block north ofthe Capitol Building. From there, it had a direct line of sight acrossTaft Park and Constitution Avenue on to the Capitol grounds; aperson could climb on to the roof of the truck and get a clear, side-on view of President Cozzano delivering his inaugural address, notmuch more than a thousand feet away.

 Another GODS truck seized a position along Lafayette Park,across the street from the White House. Others parked onFourteenth Street, in the shadow of the Commerce Department;on C Street, in front of the State Department; in front of theTreasury Department on Fifteenth Street; and in the parking lot ofthe Pentagon.

 Once the trucks were in place, they weren't likely to move. The owners - and the mysterious people who went in and out of thecontainers on their backs - seemed to have an infinite fund ofbewildering paperwork, from various D.C. and federal agencies,justifying their presence. Any authority figure, at any level, who tried to move those GODS trucks, would soon find that each onehad a lawyer living in the back, on call twenty-four hours a day,complete with cellular phone and portable fax machine. Thesewere not just plain old lawyers either; they were asshole lawyers, ready and willing to issue threats and talk about their friends in highplaces at the slightest provocation.

 And if things escalated beyond that level, each truck also had acouple of imposing plainclothes security guards who wouldemerge, crack their knuckles, flex their muscles, and glare threaten­ingly when anyone tried to get them to move. The only people inthe world who had the guts to confront these people were D.C.meter maids, and so the GODS trucks stayed where they were,accumulating stacks of D.C. parking tickets under their windshieldwipers but incurring no further retribution.

 At eleven o'clock on the morning of Inauguration Day, Cyrus Rutherford Ogle could be found in the truck that was parked infront of the Teamsters Building, a thousand feet from the inauguralpodium. He was seated in the Eye of Cy, keeping tabs on thePIPER 100, and trying to reestablish radio contact with the chips in Governor Cozzano's head.

 The radio transmissions were short-range, line-of-sight affairsand so they were used to breaking contact whenever Cozzanostrayed more than a couple of thousand feet from the truck. But Cozzano had gone out of his way to be elusive this morning. Thelistening devises secreted in his clothing and in that of this childrenwere not transmitting any sounds other than the soothing burble ofrunning water. The Secret Service had converged on Rock CreekPark, hindered by a nightmare traffic jam, and found no sign of theCozzanos other than the abandoned clothes.

 It looked a hell of a lot like a kidnapping. But the outgoingPresident, and several news outlets, had received brief, untraceabletelephone calls from Mary Catherine Cozzano, assuring them thateverything was okay. She promised that her father would show upfor the Inauguration.

 Ogle had been planning to reinstate contact with Cozzano'sbiochip from the truck in Lafayette Square when he paid a call atthe White House, which was traditionally what an incomingpresident did on Inauguration morning. Then, as the outgoing andincoming presidents made their way down Pennsylvania for theinaugural parade, control would be relayed to the truck at Treasuryand then at Commerce. Then there would be a blackout of several minutes as the motorcade proceeded down Pennsylvania.

 But those moments of freedom were useless to Cozzano. Hewould have to come to the Capitol eventually. As the motorcadeemerged from the shadow of the U.S. Courthouse, the truck atTeamsters - Cy Ogle's truck - would be able to establish contactwith the biochip. From that point onward, Cy Ogle would havefull control through the inauguration.

 William A., James, and Mary Catherine Cozzano emerged fromthe Farragut West Metro station at eleven o'clock. They hadreached Pennsylvania Avenue before anyone recognized them.

 The person who did was a well-dressed man in a trench coat,with a neatly trimmed beard and very short hair, proceeding weston Pennsylvania. He was standing at a street-corner waiting for thelight to change when he saw the Cozzanos coming toward him."Good morning President Cozzano," he said.

 The light changed and all of them crossed Seventeenth Streettogether. The Old Executive Office Building was on their right, the White House a stone's throw away.

 "Good morning. How are you today?" Cozzano said.

 "Just fine, sir, and you?"

 "I'm great, thank you," Cozzano said.

 "How's your head?" the man asked, as they reached the east sideof Seventeenth Street. They stopped at the corner and waited for the light to change. Across Pennsylvania, in front of the WhiteHouse gates, was a mob of cops and Secret Service. One of themnoticed the Cozzanos. Binoculars swiveled in their direction. ASecret Service detail broke from the gates and ran toward them, plunging directly into traffic.

 Cozzano looked at the man quizzically. "My head's fine," hesaid, "why do you ask?"

 "I need to know if they're controlling your brain with radiowaves," the man said, as the WALK light came on. "It's veryimportant for me to know this."

 Mary Catherine's and James's faces fell into expressionless masks.Crossing the street, they got between Cozzano and the man in thetrench coat, and stared at the man coldly. But Cozzano laughedindulgently. "You know, there was a movie that I saw, at theTuscola Main Street Theater, when I was a kid, about mindcontrol. Some mad scientist had taken over people's brains andturned them into zombies..."

 "Don't tell me another anecdote!" the man said. "I don't wantto hear any of your stupid anecdotes!"

 "I'm just trying to answer your question," Cozzano saidcheerfully.

 "Ever since they started controlling your brain, you can't thinkany more - all you do is tell those heart-warming stories!" the manin the trench coat said.

 They were approaching the south side of Pennsylvania. Jamespulled up close to the man and stared at him coldly. "You're out ofline," he said.

 The man in the trench coat stared back at James, not intimidatedin the slightest. "I'm out of line, huh?" he said. His total lack of fearunnerved James a little bit. James almost tripped over the curb.

 Suddenly, the Cozzanos were surrounded by men in suits andtrench coats. Mary Catherine was startled for a moment before sherealized that they were Secret Service men.

 Then she looked back at the strange man. But he was gone. "Thatwas weird," she said. "That man didn't show any of the external symptoms of an active psychotic. But he sure talked like one."

 The presidential motorcade pulled out of the White House gates onto Pennsylvania Avenue at 11:30a.m., hung a right and headed for the Capitol. Inside, distributed among several cars, were theoutgoing President, his wife, the outgoing Vice President and hiswife, Cozzano, Mary Catherine, James, Eleanor Richmond, andher two children Clarice and Harmon, Jr. Eleanor's mother wasalready in her place at the Capitol, attended by a couple of nurses.

 The outgoing and incoming presidents sat across from each otherin the back of the presidential limousine and made small talk. Themotorcade wound around a couple of corners, getting past theTreasury and Western Plaza, and finally pulled on to the longuninterrupted stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue that ran straight tothe Capitol. William A. Cozzano bent down and peered throughthe window, across the front seat, through the windshield, anddown to the Capitol, where the temporary podium was clearly visible. Federal Triangle was on the right; half a bloc ahead rose thetowering spire of the Old Post Office.

 Cozzano reached across his body with his left hand, grabbed thelimousine's door handle and popped the door open.

 "What are you doing?" the outgoing President said.

 "Quite frankly, I have no idea," Cozzano said. He jumped outof the limousine, which was traveling at a slow jogger's pace. Thedriver, seeing what was happening, braked the limousine to a stop.

 "But-"

 Cozzano leaned into the open door. "Don't worry," he said, "I think everything's going to be okay." Then he slammed the doorand strode southward across the intersection.

 By now the entire motorcade had come to a halt. Mary Catherineand James had jumped out of their limousine and run forward tojoin Cozzano, who plunged directly into the crowd lining theparade route. He was followed by a number of Secret Service agents;but although the crowd opened wide to accept the Cozzanos, itclosed ranks behind them, forming a dense wall of bodies.

 Large bodies. It seemed that this entire section of the paraderoute was lined with men no shorter than six foot six, and no lighterthan two hundred and seventy-five pounds. The Secret Servicemen tried to elbow their way through, but elbows had no effect onthese guys.

 Eventually they got through by drawing guns. By that time, theCozzanos had disappeared. Again.

 The Federal Triangle Metro station was half a block away onTwelfth Street. Like all of the stations in the D.C. Metro system, it included an elevator for wheelchair users. Rufus Bell was standingin that elevator, leaning against the door to keep it from closing,and he had an empty wheelchair with him.

 The Cozzanos arrived at a dead sprint, pursued only by a few autograph seekers. James and Mary Catherine got on first, thenCozzano followed, spinning around as he came through the doorand slamming down ass-first into the wheelchair. Bell let the doorslide closed and then the elevator began to drop.

 Mary Catherine was standing to the left of the wheelchair, aheavy purse slung over her shoulder. She unclasped it and openedit up.

 "Here goes nothing," Cozzano said.

 His left hand reached into Mary Catherine's purse, rummaged around, and pulled out a black box with four metal prongs on theend. He squeezed the trigger once, testing it, and a purple lightningbolt snapped between the prongs.

 "I already tested it, Dad," Mary Catherine said affectionately, hervoice already getting thick with emotion.

 "I know you did, peanut," Cozzano said.

 Then he shoved the prongs into the side of his head and pulledthe trigger.

 His body convulsed so violently that it threw him half out of the wheelchair. James and Mary Catherine stood well away until the high-voltage current had stopped blasting through Cozzano's body. His arm snapped out into a stiff-arm position, as though fending offa linebacker from Arcola or Rantoul, and the stun gun flew across theelevator car, bounced off the wall, and clattered to the floor. Rufus Bell picked it up and shoved it back into Mary Catherine's purse.

 Mary Catherine had gone into an unemotional, doctorly mode.She grabbed one of her father's arms and got James to take the otherone, and they righted his limp body in the wheelchair, thenbuckled the lap belt.

 The elevator doors opened; they were on the platform of theMetro station. A Blue Line train bound for Addison Road wassitting on the tracks, waiting for them; the doors had beenphysically blocked open by more members of the Cozzano crew,and the D.C. Chief of Police himself, still resplendent in his fulldress uniform, was standing at the head of the train, talking to the conductor.

 Bell wheeled Cozzano out of the elevator, across the platform,and on to the train. The doors closed behind them and the trainbegan to move. They had a whole car to themselves; sheets ofnewsprint had already been taped up along the insides of thewindows so that none of the shocked tourists on the platform couldcapture an image of the unconscious President-elect in film orvideo.

 Mary Catherine pulled a stethoscope out of her purse, stuck it inher ears, and held it up to her father's chest. "He's got a normalrhythm," she said. "It sounds good."

 Cozzano was not unconscious, just dazed. Mary Catherinepulled a small white tube out of her pocket, snapped it in half, andheld it up under Cozzano's nose. Cozzano's brow furrowed, hiseyes rolled around in their sockets, and he snapped his head awayfrom the smell.

 Lights flashed by, illuminating the papered-over windows. Theyhad rolled through the Smithsonian station without stopping andwere now swinging through the broad curve that would take themeastward into L'Enfant Plaza.

 Two Yellow Line trains, pointed in opposite directions, werebeing held for them at L'Enfant Plaza. One of them was anorthbound train that could take them straight back up to the Archives station, right along the parade route. They could re-emerge at that point and continue on to the Capitol as if nothinghad happened.

 The other train was southbound. It could take them to NationalAirport, where a private jet was waiting for them. It would takethem far away, if that was necessary. Hopefully, it would take themsomewhere with good hospitals.

 The train doors opened to reveal L'Enfant Plaza. Their way out on to the platform was lined with large and serious-looking men.Standing right in the middle was Mel Meyer.

 Bell wheeled Cozzano out on to the platform and right up toMel, who kneeled down and looked Cozzano in the face. Hegrabbed one of Cozzano's limp hands and squeezed it, then reachedup and patted his friend gently on the cheek. His face was tight, astudy in controlled intensity. "Willy," he said. "Willy, do you feellike being President today? Or do you feel like going to a nicerehab center in Switzerland? You have to give me some indicationeither way."

 Cozzano's head had been rolling around loosely. Finally, withsome effort, he raised it up and looked Mel in the eye.

 "Let's take this thing downtown," he said

 Mel stood up. His eyes were glistening. He turned toward one of the crew. "You heard the President," he said, "tell the guys atthe airport we won't be needing them."

 The escalator at Archives brought the Cozzanos up into thesunlight only a few minutes after the presidential motorcade hadgone by. A phalanx of some thirty-six ex-NFL players, hand-picked by Rufus Bell for their height and bulk, materialized aroundthem. Cozzano was on his feet now, still a little unsteady, supportedon either side by ex-Bears. The phalanx got itself organised andthen accelerated to a slow jog, moving en masse into the middle ofPennsylvania Avenue and heading straight for the Capitol, two-thirds of a mile away. The crowd along Pennsylvania had begun todisperse, believing that all the important people had already gonepast them, and none of them knew what to make of the solid blocof beefy men - some of them quite famous in their own right -who ran down the center of the avenue in right formation, headedstraight for the Inauguration, surrounded by M-16-toting outriders on foot, car, and motorcycles.

 But it was a strange enough sight that it was picked up by thetelevision cameras. The media were on their toes. They were awarethat Cozzano had done something highly unusual during hismorning jog, that he had arrived at the White House on foot -contrary to the planned itinerary - and that he had abandoned themotorcade at Twelfth Street. When their cameras on the paraderoute picked up the phalanx, it went out over the networks.Nothing interesting was going on anyway; the outgoing Presidenthad already reached the Capitol, and was now in the Rotunda, awaiting the change of power.

 Cy Ogle, seated in his truck in front of the Teamsters Building, sawCozzano's Praetorian Guard jogging down Pennsylvania and had a pretty good idea of what it meant. He had watched on television asthe motorcade had passed in front of the U.S. Courthouse - thepoint at which radio signals from his truck should have been able to reach Cozzano's biochip. It hadn't worked. Nothing was there.He'd known then that Cozzano wasn't into the motorcade.

 He was still telling himself that it didn't matter. By one route oranother, Cozzano had to show up at the Capitol. Sooner or later they would reacquire the chip. The only question was when.

 The appearance of the phalanx moving down Pennsylvaniaanswered that question. The cameras were kind enough to track it all the way through its slow, thundering, five-minute march on theCapitol. When it passed in front of the U.S. Courthouse, Ogle triedonce more to reestablish the radio link.

 Nothing. Cozzano wasn't in the phalanx; it was just a diversion.Either that, or the biochip wasn't responding anymore. Which wasimpossible. Cozzano had only been missing for about ten minutes,from his disappearance at the Old Post Office to the reemergenceof the phalanx at Seventh Street. You couldn't do major brainsurgery in ten minutes.

 Ogle kept watching the TV. There was nothing else to do. Eventually the phalanx reached the Capitol and converged on asmall entrance on the northern end. No one had been expectingthis particular entrance to be used; no camera crew was anywherenear it. But one intrepid minicam operator from CNN managed to get close enough to zoom in on the doorway, just as William A.Cozzano himself entered the building. There was no mistakinghim.

 Ogle tried the radio link again. Nothing.

 The phones in the truck were ringing like mad. He had turnedoff the ringers a long time ago, but he could tell they were ringingby all the flashing lights. The people at the Network were paranoid: they were into micromanagement, they wanted Cozzano moni­tored twenty-four hours a day. Which was totally unnecessary.Cozzano was a good politician. He knew how to handle this.

 There was nothing more Ogle could do today. In the breastpocket of his suit was a personal invitation, and a pass that wouldget him a seat on the inaugural platform - the hottest ticket intown. He had been dreading the idea of spending all day sitting in the Eye of Cy. Now he had an excuse to go out there and sit a fewchairs away from the Cozzanos and bask in their glory. He grabbedhis coat, said goodbye to the guards and to the twenty-four-houron-site lawyer, and headed into Taft Park, aimed at the West Front of the White House.

 It did not take a genius to figure out that the entire Inaugurationhad been set up for the benefit of a tiny minority of rich people. Floyd Wayne Vishniak had arrived well ahead of time and made one complete circuit of the Capitol grounds, strolling down thewest bank of the Capitol Reflecting Pool, east on Independence,north on First Street between the Capitol and the Library ofCongress, and now westward again on Constitution.

 Up to certain point, an ordinary citizen could walk anywhere hefelt like walking, especially if he got all gussied up in nice fancy-looking clothes as Vishniak had. If you wanted to watch theInauguration from two miles away at the far end of the Mall, that was no problem at all. But if you wanted to actually stand close enough to make out the figure of the new President with the naked eye, you had to enter special zones that were cordoned off andpatrolled by cops.

 Vishniak had traveled to many parts of the United States, seenmany different types of police officers, and even been arrested by afew of them. But he had never seen anything like the variety ofcops that were running around this place. It was like a cop zoo orsomething. Some of the cops had uniforms and some didn't. Someof them looked like souped-up Park Rangers. Some of themlooked like glorified mall cops. They had all staked out differentparts of different border zones whose sole function was to separatethe common people from the rich and powerful scum.

 It did not look like there was any way to get within a quartermile of the inaugural platform without shooting a whole lot ofthose different cops. This was bound to attract attention, bring ineven more cops, and scare away his intended victims. So Vishniakhad himself something of a conundrum here. The closest he could get to the platform was on the north side, in a little park north ofConstitution. He spent a while reconnoitering this area, looking forgaps in the security, and found none.

 Instead he found something even better: a GODS truck. Just likethe one he'd glimpsed under the stage at McCormick Place -except this one was practically right across the street from theCapitol. Vishniak began to walk across the park, and even as he did,the door in the back opened and a man climbed out of it.

 Something about the man with the close-cropped hair and theneatly trimmed beard seemed vaguely familiar to Cy Ogle. He fitthe profile for a Secret Service agent. But this man did not behavelike Secret Service. He was not scanning the crowd. He waslooking straight at Cy Ogle.

 Ogle had already reached into his breast pocket and pulled out his engraved invitation. The man in the trench coat was reachinginto his breast pocket too. But he hadn't pulled anything outyet.

 "Hey," the man said.

 "Morning," Ogle said, "excuse me, but I got a party to attend."

 "Hold on a sec," the man said, "I recognize you from that articlethey did about you inThe New York Times Magazine in 1991. Andalso from the little article inTime magazine last year. They both ranphotos of you."

 "That's nice," Ogle said. By now he had realized that the mancould not possibly be Secret Service.

 "Don't you recognize me?" the man asked. "You should. I'm avery important person in your life."

 Ogle took a good look at the man's face.

 At the face of Floyd Wayne Vishniak.

 His lips parted and he felt stunned and weak in the legs, as if hehad been struck on the head.

 Vishniak grinned and turned sideways to Ogle. He moved hishand inside his trench coat and Ogle could see the barrel of the gunpressing on the fabric from the inside. "I'm covering you with thesame gun I used before," he said, "and if you say anything, I'll pullthe trigger."

 "What do you want?" Ogle said.

 "I want your truck," Vishniak said, nodding towards the park."You know us farmboys. We're just crazy about big ol' trucks."

 Ogle turned his back on the Capitol and started walking backacross Taft Park. Every few paces he would look back behindhimself hoping that Vishniak would have disappeared. But he was always right there. Almost as bad, he never shut up. "I figured youhad to have some kind of secret transmitter to control Cozzano'sbrain. Because when I busted up your control room at the shoppingmall over there, it didn't make any difference at all. Let's go on overthere and take a look around."

 Ogle crossed Louisiana, climbed up the temporary steps behindthe truck, and opened the door to the Eye of Cy. He was thinkingof trying to slam it in Vishniak's face, but Vishniak shoved himthrough and closed the door behind him.

 The security men and the lawyer were climbing to their feet.

 Ogle saw a white light flashing in the corner of his eye and felt,did not hear, a quick series of explosions pounding him on the sideof his head. The three men in front of him jerked, crumbled, andcollapsed to the floor; behind them, blood was showering all overthe equipment.

 Ogle couldn't hear anything except a pure tone in his ear. Hesagged against a wall and closed his eyes, feeling faint.

 Vishniak cuffed Ogle's hands behind his back, stepped over thecorpses, and proceeded to the Eye of Cy. Ogle could see his lipsmoving as he commented upon it, but couldn't hear what he wassaying.

 Vishniak looked around the trailer. His eyes landed on a fireextinguisher mounted to a wall. Vishniak holstered his gun, picked up the fire extinguisher, and then used it as a blunt object to smashall of the screens in the Eye of Cy. At first he worked slowly andmethodically, but after a few minutes he really got into it and beganto pound away at them in a frenzy. Finally he threw theextinguisher on the floor, battered and scraped.

 He turned to Ogle with a triumphant look on his face and said something else. Then he approach. He reached into Ogle's pocket and pulled out the personal invitation. He shoved it into his ownpocket. Then Floyd Wayne Vishniak walked out of Cy Ogle's life.

 61

 WilliamA.Cozzano took the oath of office at twelve noon.Holding the Bible was Mary Catherine. Administering the oath was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. After a very intense quarterof an hour running and subwaying across D.C., the Cozzanos hadreached the Rotunda in plenty of time and been able to hit thebathrooms and freshen up a little. They looked great and showed little trace of the earlier excitement; television viewers who hadheard rumors of wild goings-on up and down the length ofPennsylvania Avenue were comforted to see the Cozzanos lookingcalm, relaxed, and happy.

 Only one detail seemed out of place: as Cozzano had emergedfrom the West Front of the Capitol and walked through thepassageway in the center of the stands, he had moved slowly andwith a limp. He moved like an old man, not the spry athlete whohad become so famous during the campaign. And then he raised hishand and recited the oath of office, his voice sounded different:deeper, slower, not as distinct. He tripped over a few words, something he had never done during the campaign.

 But it didn't matter. He looked great. He smiled confidentlythrough the oath, presenting a strong profile for the cameras,towering over the Chief Justice. His daughter was facing directlyinto the cameras and her face was suffused with joy and pride. Shewasn't bothered by her father's gait, or his voice; why should America be?

 It was over. President Cozzano shook hands with the ChiefJustice and bent down to kiss Mary Catherine on the cheek.

 Then he stepped up to the Presidential lectern, still movingslowly and carefully. Before him, the Mall was covered withpeople, all the way to the Lincoln Memorial, and all of them were applauding. The applause from the invited guests on the platform,and from the lucky few just below, around the Capitol ReflectingPool, was distinct. Beyond that it merged into a generalized hissingroar, coming from the horizon.

 President Cozzano reached into his breast pocket, pulled out afew typewritten sheets folded in half down the middle and flattenedthem out on the lectern. He waited for a few moments, smiling tothe crowd, as the applause died down.

 "Thank you," he said, "thank you." That brought the applauseto a close. Then he began to read from the notes on the lectern,calmly, pronouncing the words with conspicuous precision, like adrunken man who is trying not to sound drunk.

 "My first act as President is to declare martial law in the Districtof Columbia and to suspend the following constituted bodies: the Secret Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureauof Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the U.S. Marshals Service, the Park Police, and the Capitol Police. The CIA is reminded that theiractivities begin at the water's edge. Any violation of martial lawmay be penalized by summary execution. In their place, tomaintain order among executive branch and the government, Ifederalize the police force of the District of Columbia for a periodof one week and place it at the disposal of the Department ofJustice."

 At this moment, half of the men on and around the platformstood up and stripped off their jackets and dress shirts to reveal blackT-shirts emblazoned with white stars on the front and "Dept. ofJUSTICE" across the back. As Cozzano continued his address,these men converged on all of the uniformed Capitol police officersin the area, and on anyone who looked like a Secret Service agent.

 The men in the black T-shirts - the Justice Posse - looked as though they were ready for a fight, and they were. Some of them actually got into fights. But most of them didn't. The President's words could not have been any clearer.

 The Posse men were not very discriminating. They went afteranyone in a uniform and anyone who looked like Secret Service:that, is, men with earplugs. Unfortunately that included one or twojournalists. The journalists put up a scuffle. The scuffles endedpretty quickly.

 All of these movements took place against a backdrop of deadsilence. Everyone else, within a quarter-mile radius of PresidentCozzano, was utterly motionless and perfectly silent. Everyone wasin shock. Beyond that, out on the Mall, it was possible to hearmurmuring from the crowd, and even a few screams. But most ofthe people in the vicinity of the President were directly, personally,massively affected by the words coming out of his mouth. Theydidn't want to miss anything. Especially since a misinterpretationcould lead to summary execution.

 Cozzano continued without pause. "The FBI, one of the fewfederal agencies to live up to its oath to protect, defend, and upholdthe Constitution and laws of the United States, will coordinate allsecurity arrangements at all levels during the period of martial law.I hereby designate Melvin Israel Meyer the acting Attorney General and place the FBI and the D.C. Police under his direct authority.In my capacity as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, Ihereby suspend the authority of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a periodof one week and place all military forces under my directcommand. I order the Air Force and all other military aircraft in thecontinental U.S. grounded immediately and until further notice. Iorder the Federal Aviation Administration to ban all air traffic overthe District of Columbia, effective immediately, and to closeNational Airport until further notice. This air traffic moratorium is to be enforced by the new Attorney General."

 Men had already begun to appear on the roof of the Capitol andatop other buildings around the Mall, carrying long, bulky equip­ment cases. They nipped the cases open and pulled out four-foot-long, tubular objects with flat, slotted antennas that unfolded ontheir tops: Stinger missile launchers.

 "I assure our allies and promise our adversaries around the world that this is a purely domestic affair and that the global balance ofmilitary power will not be affected."

 "I declare a one-week holiday on all banks and stock exchanges. I call upon our financial leaders to cooperate with me so that calm can be restored to the markets as soon as possible."

 "Finally, I ask the indulgence of the American people in this timeof crisis. While the steps I have just taken are unprecedented andsevere, I can assure you all that the peak of the crisis has passed, andthat within hours, or at the most days, the government will be returned to an even keel."

 "A complete explanation of what has happened to me, myfamily, and the electoral process of this country would fill a lengthybook. I cannot give you a full account here. But the people deservean explanation, and so, at this moment, a summary of these events is being transmitted over all wire services worldwide. The same information is being provided to all governmental offices and majormilitary bases. Videotape cassettes are arriving at all major networksand television stations."

 Cozzano finally paused for a moment, to draw a breath and toshuffle his notes around. Finally, the silence broke, and a murmurbegan to sweep through the crowd.

 People began to move. The in-crowd on the inaugural platformincluded a number of high-ranking military officers; several ofthem got to their feet and strode to the passageway leading backinto the Capitol. As soon as they thought they were out of sight of the TV cameras, they broke into a run. A number of nonuniformedofficials did the same thing.

 Members of the Justice Posse now entered the front row of chairsand converged on four men: the secretaries-designate of Defense,State, Commerce, and Treasury. Each of the four men was stronglyencouraged to rise to his feet and then hustled out. Their family members were not allowed to come along; some of them were toostunned to move, some burst into tears, and some tried to getphysical. An initial tremor of panic propagated down the Mall.

 Floyd Wayne Vishniak was watching Cozzano from the crowdbelow. Ogle's special invitation had gotten him through severallayers of security. But he had not actually climbed up on to theinaugural platform itself. His invite supposedly would have gottenhim through the final cordon. But he had watched a few of thebigwigs and seen that the final layer of security was especiallystringent. He didn't want to take a chance on that, and it wasn'teven necessary. From down below, he had a clear view of the entire platform.

 He could have picked off any of the bigwigs sitting up there. Anyof the people who were controlling Cozzano's mind. It would have been easy. But it would have been pointless. Vishniak had come toan astonishing realization as he had listened to Cozzano's speech: hewas too late. Cozzano was lost.

 Vishniak had personally demolished the computer control roomwhere Ogle and the other media manipulators were controllingCozzano's mind. He had set Cozzano free. But Cozzano hadstarted his term as President by declaring martial law and threaten­ing to execute people in the streets. Cozzano was staging a coup d'etat. He was turning America's great democratic system into a dictatorship. Right before Vishniak's eyes.

 "My fellow Americans, I come to you at a moment of great peril," Cozzano said, trying to use the authority of his voice toquiet the rising anxiety - the ugly fights going on behind him, themurmuring that had grown into a low roar. "We have narrowly averted a disaster. I am speaking to you, now, as a free man, for thefirst time in a year. Exactly one year ago, as you may know, I was struck down by a stroke. I have been away for a while. Today, I amhere to tell you that I am back!"

 It was the first thing Cozzano had said, all day long, that soundedlike what a triumphant new president should say. The crowd was enormously relieved. The shrill chattering and nervous buzzing wasoverwhelmed by a cheer that started in the throats of the JusticePosse and grew explosively until it rang up and down the length of the Mall.

 And it did not die down; it grew into an ovation. Those listeningto Cozzano had experienced more anxiety during the last couple ofminutes than they had since the Cuban Missile Crisis or theKennedy assassination. Now, Cozzano was telling them thateverything was going to be fine. He told them this, not just with his words, but with the deep resonant tone of his voice and withhis posture, his facial expression.

 No one really knew what was going on. But hearing his wordsand watching his face, they came to know one thing beyondquestion: President Cozzano was doing what he had been electedto do. Finally, a leader was in the White House, and he was leading.

 The people on the inaugural platform were the last ones to riseto their feet and join in the ovation.

 Cozzano was about to resume his speech, but he realized that there was no way to talk over the voices of half a million people.He paused, smiled at the crowd, waited for a couple of moments.The cheering continued. He stepped back away from the lectern,now just a couple of paces in front of his daughter and Eleanor Richmond and her family, and raised both of his arms in the air asif he had just scored a touchdown.

 The first bullet did just what it was supposed to do. Its tefloncoating took it smoothly through the seven layers of bullet-proof-fabric making up President Cozzano's bulletproof vest. After that,momentum and plain old-fashioned lead did the rest. It passed intohis thorax a couple of inches below the right nipple and explodedagainst a rib, spraying fragments of lead, bone, and teflon throughCozzano's chest cavity. Most of his right lung was turned into hash.Numerous holes were blown through the heart and a major vesselpierced in his left lung. Nothing emerged from the other side ofCozzano's body; the bullet, which was specifically designed to killhuman beings wearing bulletproof vests, had been totally efficient in transferring all of its energy into Cozzano's flesh.

 Vishniak saw a jet of steam and blood spurt from the entrance wound and knew that Cozzano was dead. He angled the weapon a couple of degrees to the right and took aim at Eleanor Richmond.But just as he was pulling the trigger, a bulky man in a black T-shirtjumped in front of her.

 Darryl Garfield, an offensive linesman for the Skins, took thesecond bullet in his massive upper arm, which was nearly as big asEleanor's waist. The bullet ricocheted off his humerus and endedup shattering a window in the Rayburn Building, a thousand feet due south, whence it was later recovered. As the bullet exitedGarfield's arm it drove before it a shock wave of blood andpulverized muscle tissue that burst out of his body in a crudelyhemispherical pattern, spraying Eleanor Richmond with blood.

 Vishniak lowered his weapon a bit, surprised by Garfield'ssudden intervention, and did not see the precipitous approach ofRufus Bell. Bell threw all of this momentum behind the heel of hisright hand, which impacted on the bridge of Vishniak's nose andcollapsed the bone structure of his entire face, driving a number ofsmall bone fragments all the way into Vishniak's brain. Vishniakwas a vegetable before he hit the ground. Ten minutes later he wasdead.

 Most of the people on the platform knew only that DarrylGarfield had been shot, because his wound had been so spectacular.In the ensuing confusion, Mary Catherine was the first person tonotice that President Cozzano was sitting down behind the lectern,looking stunned and pale.

 At first they thought he was just stunned by the near miss. But a look at his face proved otherwise. Pink foam had collected at the corners of his mouth. Mary Catherine, James Cozzano, and Mel allconverged on Cozzano at the same moment and helped him to lieon his back. Within a few moments they were surrounded by thePosse.

 A few moments after the shooting, Eleanor Richmond hadvanished, completely surrounded by huge Posse members whopractically encased her in bulletproof vests. The guests on theinaugural platform drained back into the Capitol as though a plughad been pulled and they were being sucked back into the building.Eleanor and her escort were swept along.

 Mary Catherine ripped Cozzano's shirt open down the middleand discovered the entrance wound on his thorax. Her eyes methis.

 "I'll be okay," Cozzano said.

 "One of the guys has called for a chopper," Mel said. "Hang inthere, buddy."

 Cozzano didn't pay any attention to Mel. He was looking atJames and Mary Catherine, kneeling next to him side by side.

 "Listen, peanut," the President said. "James will stay with you.You stay with Eleanor."

 "No!" Mary Catherine said.

 "They have no choice but to kill Eleanor," Cozzano said."They'll try to do it now. Natural causes. Go! By order of the President."

 Tears burst over the rims of Mary Catherine's eyes and cascadeddown her face. "I love you more than anything, peanut," Cozzanosaid.

 "I love you too, Dad," Mary Catherine said.

 "Now go and do your job," Cozzano said.

 Mary Catherine bent down and kissed her father's cheek. Thenshe stood up, turned, and ran into the Capitol.

 The Rotunda had gone nuts. Several dozen Capitol Police hadbeen herded into one corner and were being guarded by a coupleof Posse members carrying M-16s with fixed bayonets. Morejustice men, and several men wearing FBI windbreakers, werestationing themselves around the entrances, trying to establish somecontrol over who came in and who left. A couple of media crews were here, unable to make up their minds what they should be pointing their cameras at; several radio and television reporterswere running around seemingly at random, shouting a stream-of- consciousness narration into their microphones. It didn't matterwhat they said as long as they said it with authority.

 But most of the people in the Rotunda were invited guests who had been seated in the rows of chairs on the inaugural platform. It was easy to tell them apart. The men were all wearing intenselyformal garb and the women were dressed, coiffed, and bejeweledto the nines. These people had gathered into knots scattered aroundthe floor of the Rotunda. Each knot consisted of a few peopleturned inward, slack-faced with shock, jabbering at one another,and a few people, mostly men, constantly craning their necks in alldirections, eyes wide and staring, trying to get some sense of whatwas going on. One or two men were jabbing at cellular phoneswith stiff index fingers, screaming into them, getting nothing butstatic. A man in black tie and morning coat slammed his cellularphone on to the floor in frustration and it slid across the polishedstone like a hockey puck.

 Mary Catherine couldn't see Eleanor anywhere. A Possemember walked in front of her in his black Justice shirt. MaryCatherine jumped forward and put her hand on his shoulder."Where's Eleanor?" she said.

 As soon as he recognized her, he told her: "She went to theladies' room to clean up. She's got blood on her." "Who's with her?"

 "I dunno," the man said, "we don't have any female deputies inthis outfit."

 "Where's that bathroom?" Mary Catherine said kicking off hershoes.

 The man pointed. Mary Catherine headed across the floor of theRotunda, building up to a full sprint.

 It wasn't hard to find the bathroom where Eleanor was holed up: the entrance was almost obscured by a knot of black-shirted Possemembers. Mary Catherine just aimed at the door and relied on them to recognize her, and to get out of the way.

 They did, but she had to slow down to a brisk walk. She enteredthe women's lounge. The first thing she saw was Eleanor's dress spread out across a couch near the entrance, spattered with blood. She rounded a corner and saw a row of sinks. Eleanor was bent over one of the sinks, hot water blasting. She had stripped down toa camisole and panties. Her arms were wet up to the shoulders andshe was bent over the sink splashing water on her face; flecks of blood were still visible in her hair.

 One other woman was in the bathroom: from her appearance, obviously one of the invited guests. Mary Catherine had spentenough time with people of the advanced upper crust to know onewhen she saw one.

 She even recognized this woman. It was Althea Coover.DeWayne Coover's granddaughter. She and Mary Catherine hadgone to Stanford together and attended a lot of the same parties.Because of Coover's support of the Radhakrishnan Institute, hisfamily had gotten several invitations to the Inauguration.

 Althea Coover was standing at the sink next to Eleanor's. Shehad put a few small cosmetics containers out on the shelf beneaththe mirror, as though she were here to fix her face. But just as MaryCatherine was rounding the corner, althea was pulling something else out of her bag: a capped hypodermic needle.

 Mary Catherine headed straight for her.

 Althea saw Mary Catherine and startled. Her eyes jumped to thehypodermic needle, then Eleanor, then up to Mary Catherine'sface. She pulled the cap off, exposing the hair-thin needle, andraised it like a dart, aiming it at Eleanor's exposed shoulder.

 Then Mary Catherine shoved her stun gun into the side ofAlthea Coover's neck and pulled the trigger.

 Althea dropped the needle, collapsed, and smacked her head intothe marble floor with a shocking thud. Eleanor straightened up, blinked water out of her eyes, and jumped to see Mary Catherine suddenly standing there with lightning in her hand, and AltheaCoover gone.

 When Mary Catherine and Eleanor returned to the Rotunda, now surrounded by very nervous and trigger-happy men in black T-shirts, they discovered that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court had not been as lucky. He was collapsed on the marble floor,unconscious and unresponsive. Immediately before his collapse hehad been seen talking to another invited guest who had made ahasty exit; later, an empty hypodermic syringe was found in an ashtray by the door. The Chief Justice was being attended to by acouple of old and distinguished doctors who had made it on to theguest list. A few Posse members picked him up and carried him intothe Capitol infirmary.

 Anyone wearing white tie or a formal gown was now beingviewed with intense suspicion by the Posse. Mary Catherine andEleanor found themselves dead center in the Rotunda, surroundedby Posse members facing outward, as the remaining guests wereherded toward the outside of the room.

 Between the knot in the center and the people crowded to theedges, there was a broad, doughnut-shaped, empty space, nowoccupied by a grand total of three people: a minicam operator fromCNN, his sound man, and a bald, middle-aged man in a long blackrobe. The robe was a flimsy thing made of synthetic fibers andlooked as though it had been wadded up into a ball and then sat onfor a few days. It was unzipped to reveal a bulletproof vestunderneath; beneath the vest, a black T-shirt could be seen. Thisguy was a member of the Posse.

 In his right hand he was carrying a thick black book with thewords HOLY BIBLE printed on the cover in gold letters. A single sheet of typing paper was clasped in the front cover.

 "Excuse me," said the man in the black robe, standing up ontiptoes trying to see over the shoulders of the bodyguards, "but Icould not help but notice that the Chief Justice has beenincapacitated. Can I be of some assistance here?"

 "Who are you?" Mary Catherine said, peering at him between acouple of Posse members.

 "Stanley Kotlarski, Fifth Circuit Court Judge, Cook County,Illinois," the man said. "Mel asked me to hang around in casesomething happened to the Chief Justice. Are you ready to do the honours, or are we going to stand around here all day?"

 The circle of bodyguards opened up to admit Judge Kotlarskiand the camera crew. Judge Kotlarski pulled the sheet of paper outof the Bible and then handed the Bible to Mary Catherine. "Youknow the drill," he said.

 She did know it. She had just done it about fifteen minutesbefore. Now, tear-streaked, blood-stained, barefoot, anddishevelled, she did it again: held the Bible out in front of thePresident-to-be. Eleanor Richmond didn't hesitate. She put onehand on the Bible and held up the other one.Judge Kotlarski looked at the cameraman. "You ready?"

 "We're live to planet Earth," the cameraman said.Judge Kotlarski began to read from the sheet of paper. "Repeatafter me.In the middle of the oath of office, Eleanor and the Judge had toraise their voices; they were nearly drowned out by the sound of amedevac chopper setting down out front, then, within a fewseconds, lifting off again.

 Mary Catherine didn't pay much attention to the oath. She waslooking out the windows, watching the chopper carry her fatheraway. The first thing she really heard was the voice of the Presidentissuing her first order: "Evacuate and seal the Rotunda."

 Then President Richmond bent down, pulled a thick blackenvelope out of her bag, and ripped it open.

 William A. Cozzano arrived at the Lady Wilburdon GunshotWound Institute via helicopter, roughly fifteen minutes after the bullet had entered his body. By that point, he had lost roughly half of his blood supply. He was trucked straight into a trauma room,where his chest was split open by Dr. Cornelius Gary. ThePresident was in good hands: between his service in the Gulf Warand the trauma centers of D.C., Dr. Gary had personally treatedmore gunshot wounds than any other physician in the UnitedStates.

 Before going under anaesthesia, Cozzano's last words to his son,James, were: "You're free now, son. Go out and be a good man."

 Dr. Gary worked to mend Cozzano's shattered organs for thirtyminutes. William A. Cozzano died on the operating table at12:58p.m., having been President for just under one hour.

 62

 The first document in the black envelope was a one-sentenceexecutive order that continued in force all of the orders made byCozzano from the inaugural platform.

 President Richmond moved her temporary headquarters to theSenate Press Room, which was easier to secure than the Rotunda,and well equipped with communications gear. She ordered aconfirmation from all elements affected by Cozzano's orders thatthey had received, understood, and would obey. She faxed a message to the ops center on the seventh floor of the StateDepartment and told them to send a copy to every other countryin the world. The message stated that today's violence was strictlya domestic affair, things were in order, and full disclosure would bemade soon.

 She called in the Senate and House leadership. Each wasexamined by a physician. The Speaker of the House, who hadsuffered a stroke in November and been rehabilitated at theRadhakrishnan Institute in California, was declared to be medicallyincapacitated - the document stating so was already drawn up inside the black envelope; the senior whip of the majority partytook over as acting House Speaker.

 She sent out messages to all four network anchors requestingtheir presence in the Rotunda. They and their crew members wereall carefully frisked and then ushered up to the Senate Press Room,where they interviewed President Richmond, who was flanked bythe Senate majority leader and the acting Speaker. The most junior Justice on the Supreme Court had by now been rustled up andbrought into the room.

 The broadcast went live to all the networks at 2:08p.m. Eleanor led off by making the first official announcement of PresidentCozzano's death.

 Then she said, "You see before you the three branches of theUnited States government. Our purpose in being here is to reassureyou of the continuity of the basic institutions of this governmentand to respond to the questions of these journalists, which willhopefully reflect the concerns of the nation."

 A network anchorwoman raised her hand. Eleanor nodded toher.

 The anchorwoman said, "Madame President. How do youfeelatthis moment?"

 Cyrus Rutherford Ogle, handcuffed in the back of the GODStruck, had no idea what was going on until about 2:30, at which point the doors were suddenly thrown open and he was blinded by a rectangle of pure white light.

 Framed in the white rectangle was a man in a black suit. Behindhim were several men wearing dark FBI windbreakers. "Ogle,"said the man in the black suit, "I've been looking for you."

 "Howdy. Who are you?" Ogle asked.

 "I'm the new Attorney General of the United States," the mansaid.

 "I've been out of touch the last little while,"  Ogle saidapologetically.

 "Oh. I'm sorry. My name is Mel Meyer."

 Ogle was deeply mortified. Not to mention confused. "Ithought that President Cozzano was going to appoint-

 "Change of plans. When you weren't there to keep things inhand at the crucial moment, we had to do a little improvising. I had to step in and fill the vacuum. You know all about filling vacuums,don't you, Mr. Ogle?"

 "Well, I've done my share."

 "But I think you'll be happy with the results," Mel Meyer said.He waved his hand at the FBI men. "I've directed the FBI to arrestyou. I'm sure you understand."

 Ogle didn't understand at all. "On what charge?""Turning the Attorney General's best friend into a degradedslave," Mel said. "And a number of other charges which I havewritten out at great length, and which we can discuss in the fullnessof time. President Richmond has ordered you held for a few daysuntil we can sort things out.""PresidentRichmond?"

 The FBI agents grabbed Ogle's arms and hauled him up out ofthe chair where he'd been sitting for the last two hours. His feet almost slipped out from under him on the blood-slickened floor;they gripped his arms tightly and ushered him out the door anddown the steps. An FBI chopper was idling on the ground in TaftPark.

 "I hope you're not going to use the power of your office topursue some kind of personal vendetta," Ogle said, shouting back over his shoulder as the agents took him across Louisana Avenue.

 "Oh, on the contrary," Meyer said. "I've gone to great troubleto arrange a cell for you that I think will be to your liking." "You're not putting me in with crack dealers, are you?""Absolutely not," Meyer said. "You'll be with people much likeyourself."

 "I thank you for that courtesy," Ogle said. They loaded him on to the chopper, strapped him into the seat,and lifted off, cutting forward across Constitution at a low angle. Ogle had a spectacular view of the Capitol dome out his window.He had gotten damn close. And now, in some way that no onehad bothered to explain to him yet, he had lost.

 It was okay. He was tied into the Network now. The Networkneeded him. As long as that was the case, he'd never have to worryabout anything.

 The chopper headed due south, crossing over the SoutheastFreeway and then over Fort McNair, on the point of land where thePotomac and the Anacostia rivers came together. They cut down thecenter of the Potomac until they were south of National Airport,then banked into a gentle right turn and headed south-southeast,passing near the spire of the Masonic Memorial in Alexandria.

 "Where are we going?" he asked twice. But the FBI agentseither couldn't hear him or pretended they couldn't.

 They flew for several miles across the suburban sprawl ofnorthern Virginia, roughly paralleling I-395. The broad grassylawns of Fort Belvoir were visible on the left. Perhaps they wereusing Fort Belvoir as a temporary camp for political prisoners. Thatwouldn't be so bad; folks in the Army called Belvoir the CountryClub.

 Instead, they came down in a yard amid enormous, drabbuildings, surrounded by tall fences topped with swirls of razorribbon.

 Lorton. They were putting him in Lorton Reformatory. TheDistrict of Columbia was so small and so full of criminals that therewasn't room to build a big enough prison; they had built one outin Virginia instead. And now Ogle was going to be an inmate.

 He reckoned they would put him in a minimum-security wingsomewhere, maybe out in a nice wooded area. But they took him straight into one of the big prison buildings. Straight to amaximum-security wing, where all of the prisoners were locked intheir cells all day long.

 The prisoners hung on their bars and watched Ogle hungrily ashe was led down the corridor in his nice suit and his polished shoes.They shouted things to him. Disgusting things.

 Ogle was almost paralyzed with fear. Meyer had lied to him.

 Finally they reached a cell that was empty. Maybe he'd be put there.

 But they passed right on by it and continued to the next cell. Thiscell had one man in it, curled up on the upper bunk, not moving.Ogle just got a quick glimpse of him before he was shoved in throughthe door: his new roommate was small, stoop-shouldered, latemiddle-aged, wearing a dress shirt and slacks just like Ogle.

 The massive iron door thudded shut behind him.

 Ogle turned to greet his new cellmate. The man had risen up to his hands and knees and was now looking down at Ogle from theupper bunk like a jaguar perched in a tree. He was breathing rapidlyand raggedly.

 A huge bubble of mucous grew from Jeremiah Freel's left nostriland popped.

 Freel launched himself from the bunk headfirst, trying to sink histeeth into Ogle's cheek. Ogle instinctively turned his head awayand snapped his head back. The impact slammed him back againstthe bars. Freel tumbled to the floor.

 Freel reached for Ogle's groin. Ogle bent over and shoved hisfinger into one of Freel's eyes. Freel moved his head at the lastmoment and sank his teeth into Ogle's finger. Ogle stomped onone of Freel's hands.

 And then they started fighting. In cells all around them, theconvicts from D.C. flocked to the bars shouting, laughing, andpumping their fists in exultation.

 Several hundred feet beneath Cacher, Oklahoma, Otis Simpsonwas sitting in a swivel chair in the Communications Center, staring at a wall of dead screens. He had been staring at them ever sinceroughly 19:08 Greenwich Mean Time. At that moment, PresidentRichmond had gone live to the world, flanked by the leaders of thelegislative and judicial branches. Then all the screens had goneblack. The faxes had gone silent. The computer links had been cut off. He had tried sending messages to the Network, but all theencryption keys had been changed.

 Finally he stood up, harvested a few remaining faxes that hadcome out of the machines earlier that day, and fed them into theshredder. He typed a command into the computer system thatwould cause it to re-format all of its disks seven times in a row,destroying all of the information in the system.

 Otho was lying in his bed. He had been lying there since earliertoday and was now beginning to go into rigor mortis. Otis bentover him and closed his eyes and smoothed back what was left ofhis hair.

 Then he climbed on the lift and took it up to the surface. It wasa bleak midwinter day, a strong steady wind coming out of thenorthwest prairie, whistling and gusting between the heaps of leadtailings as it picked up a load of toxic metal dust. Otis put on hiswarm coat and his mittens and his hat with the earflaps. Then hestarted to walk down the shoulder of the highway, headedsouthward, where he thought it might be warmer.

 Dr. Radhakrishnan V.R.J.V.V. Gangadhar was poised above his anaesthetized patient, just about to flick the power switch on hisbone saw, when the first tendrils of noise began to infiltrate the reinforced-concrete walls of the Radhakrishnan Institute. It was anoise that was senses through the soles of the feet - not so much anactual sound as a change in the way the ground felt. Perhaps therehad been another earthquake up in Uttar Pradesh. He flicked theswitch and pressed the madly vibrating blade of the bone sawagainst the freshly peeled skull of Sasha Yakutin, a promising youngup-and-coming Russian politician who had just been cut down inthe prime of his life by a tragic stroke.

 When he finished cutting a hatch through Mr. Yakutin's headand turned off the saw, the room became quiet - but not entirelyquiet. A palpable noise was penetrating the walls of the operatingroom.

 A nurse entered the operating theater. "Your brother Arun in onthe telephone," she said.

 "Can't you see I am in the middle of an operation?"

 "He says it's an emergency. He says you should get out of thecountry."

 A tremendous impact reverberated through the structure of thebuilding, causing the steel instruments to vibrate against their trays.Down the hallway, someone screamed.

 "Continue the operation," Dr. Radhakrishnan said to Toyoda,one of his most promising young proteges."

 "Doctor?" Toyoda said.

 Dr. Radhakrishnan stripped off his gloves and tossed them into a rubbish can.

 When he stepped out into the corridor, the noise became louder; but it was still indistinct. He had heard something like this once inElton. He had been awakened early in the morning by the mostfrightening noise, a noise that could peel paint from walls, the noisethat madmen must hear in their nightmares, and had shivered under the covers for a few moments, thinking it was the end of the world;finally he had peered out under a windowshade and discovered that the trees in his front yard had been taken over by a vast flock of starlings, millions of them, all screeching at the tops of their lungs.

 Dr. Radhakrishnan was approaching a closed door at the end ofa hallway. The noise was coming through that door, seepingaround its edges.

 He opened the door. The sound was crushing, maddening, anoise that could cave your skull in. This room was a third-storyoffice with a picture window that faced on to a major street. But the window had been smashed out. Slivers of smoked glass hadbeen strewn explosively all over the room. A few rocks and brickslittered the floor, looking crude and dirty in this clean high-tech space. Hot polluted air streamed in through the window and blewover Dr. Radhakrishnan's face. He stepped forward, walkingcarefully on the broken glass, and looked out the window.

 The Radhakrishnan Institute had been surrounded by twomillion people.

 They were all pumping their fists in the air and chanting. Like starlings. They covered the ground for miles in every direction,flowing in a smooth carpet around buildings and vehicles, like themonsoon floods.

 The mob seemed to have no particular center. But a fewhundred yards away, he could see a kind of vortex, a swirling centerof activity, moving slowly through the crowd. Moving toward theinstitute.

 It was an elephant. Unlike the mob, most of whom were poorly, minimally clad, the elephant was stunningly clothed in gold and brightly colored, embroidered silk. A man was sitting on the backof the elephant. Sitting in a chair on the animal's back. Tied intothe chair, actually, so he wouldn't flop out.

 Dr. Radhakrishnan recognized the man. He was an ex-patient.And then, at last, he figured out what the crowd was chanting.

 WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBAWUBBA WUBBA WUBBA.

 Zeldo's telephone rang again in the late afternoon; probablyanother one of his friends calling to ask him if he had heard aboutPresidents Cozzano and Richmond. Zeldo didn't have time for itnow. He had been at the California branch of the RadhakrishnanInstitute for almost twenty-four hours, going over some data fromone of their newest patients - one Aaron Green. Green had beencommitted here around the time of Election Day, plagued bypsychological troubles - posttraumatic stress from the PentagonTowers bloodbath. Finally, he had volunteered to have several chips implanted in his head.

 Zeldo jerked the phone out of its cradle. "What?"

 "It's me." Zeldo would have known the voice anywhere: it wasMary Catherine Cozzano. "They're covering their tracks. We'vebeen hearing some weird stuff from the Pentagon and we think you're in trouble. Get on that bike of yours and pedal like your lifedepends upon it, because it does. See you at dinner."

 Something in Mary Catherine's voice got Zeldo up out of his chair. He grabbed his backpack, skittered down the stairs, andyanked his mountain bike from the employee bike rack out front.He rode across the small parking lot of the Radhakrishnan Instituteand into the entrance of the bicycle path.

 He was about half a mile away from the Institute when some­thing caught his eye: an airplane. Usually you didn't noticeairplanes, they were part of the scenery. But this one drew his attention because it was flying incredibly low. He thought maybeit was coming in for a landing at the airstrip. But it was going waytoo fast to make a landing. It was streaking across the landscape,actually kicking up a dust trail from the ground. It was very small,and dark.

 Zeldo recognized the shape. He had seen a documentary aboutthese things once, on60 minutes, a few years ago. It was a GaleAerospace Stealth Cruise Missile. It had achieved great notorietyfor going way off course during its test flights.

 The cruise missile shot over the airstrip, made a minor coursecorrection, and then headed directly toward the Radhakrishnan

 Institute, making no effort to slow down. Finally, to Zeldo's relief,it popped up in the air. It was going to miss the building and flyharmlessly out to sea.

 But it didn't. It shot up several hundred feet, then nosed downinto a power dive. It covered the last mile of its trajectory in a few seconds and finally entered the Institute through a skylight, whichtook it straight down a central atrium.

 Vast surges of white flame vomited out of every door andwindow in the Institute. The image was burned on to Zeldo'sretina in an instant and then he was blinded for a moment. Theshock wave knocked him off his bicycle and sent him sprawling offthe bike path, into the dust.

 He didn't feel a things. His mind was stuck on the last thing she'dsaid:See you at dinner.

 President Richmond traveled up Pennsylvania Avenue and took possession of the White House at fivep.m., bringing the party andcongressional leaders with her. The first thing she did was to fire all of the administrative assistants and transition team, who had movedinto the place during the change of power. Several of these people were also taken into custody by the formidable FBI contingent that was now following her around, under the direction of the Attorney General, scooping up conspirators and loading them into buses enmasse.

 There was a lot to do. She ensconced herself in the Oval Office even while the FBI men were scanning it for listening devices. Atseven o'clock, all the important people in Washington came intothe office: the Congressional leaders, party leaders, several of the Joint Chiefs, all of the acting Cabinet members, heads of variousmajor agencies including the CIA and the NSA. She was not in anymood, or any position, to be ceremonious; these people piled into her office like a tour group from Oskaloosa and stood around theedges of the room staring at her. She stared back at them over a desk piled with cardboard boxes and loose documents from the blackenvelope.

 "I know what you're thinking," she said. "This can't behappening. This bitch can't possibly be our president. It won't last. Well, it is happening. I am the President. And I will continue to befor the next eight years. You'd better get used to it. Thank you forcoming in. Now go out there and do your jobs."

 There were boxes all over the place. Cozzano's boxes had been moved in this morning. Eleanor's boxes had been moved in at the Naval Observatory. Now Cozzano's boxes were being taken away and Eleanor's boxes were being hustled down and brought into theWhite House.

 She had one of the movers keep his eye out for one item inparticular: a very long, skinny one. An eight-foot cardboard tube.Eventually he showed up carrying the tube over his shoulder like aspear. He got the tape off the end for her and then she pulled outwhat was inside: a strip of cheap wooden moulding with a few nailssticking out of it. Eleanor borrowed a hammer from the WhiteHouse maintenance people and put it up herself, nailing it rightinto the wall of the Oval Office, to the shock and chagrin of the housekeeping staff, who came running when they heard thosepounding noises. It looked flimsy and cheap, and it was. Butanyone who came closer could see horizontal lines drawn across itin ballpoint pen, with dates and the names of her children written next to them. Eleanor liked it.

 It wasn't until about nine o'clock that she was able to keep her date with Mary Catherine. They met on the steps of the JeffersonMemorial, accompanied by the motley assortment of footballplayers and graying Vietnam vets who had been following themaround all day.

 The area was checked out and cleared. Eleanor and MaryCatherine climbed up the steps of the Memorial, turned around,and looked out across the Tidal Basin toward the White House, amile and a half away, brilliant under the lights.

 Eleanor and Mary Catherine sat together on the top step,huddled together against a chilly wind coming off the Potomac.Mary Catherine put her head on Eleanor's shoulder and cried for awhile. Eleanor held her patiently, stroking her hair in the way ofmothers, and waiting for her to get it all out.

 Then she waved her arm toward the Mall. "Look. It's beautiful,"she said.

 The air-traffic moratorium was still in place over D.C. National Airport, just across the river and it was quiet for the first time indecades. Consequently the Tidal Basin was the way it was supposedto be: placid, undisturbed by the shrieking and thundering of 767sveering in for their slam-dunk landings. The sky was cobalt blueand Venus was out, looking exactly like a diamond over the curved towers of the tall buildings in Rosslyn. The ring of half-staffedAmerican flags around the Washington Monument flickered their silhouettes, lower than usual, against the white limestone.

 "It is nice," Mary Catherine said, feeling better all of a sudden."But I'm freezing."

 "Me too," Eleanor confessed. Then she nodded across the Malltoward the White House. "Would you like to come over to myplace and help me unpack?"

  

  




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