Distraction

8

The abrupt departure of Dr. Felzian gave Oscar a vital window of opportunity. With the loss of his patron Bambakias, he had very little to fall back on. He had to seize the initiative. Their numbers were small, their re-sources narrow, their budget nonexistent. The order of the day was sheer audacity.

During Greta’s first day as Director, her followers formed a Strike Committee and physically occupied the Hot Zone. Strikers commandeered the airlocks overnight, overriding all the police-installed safety locks and replacing them with brand-new strikers’ pass-cards. Seizing the Hot Zone made excellent strategic sense, since the giant ce-ramic tower dominated the facility. The Hot Zone was a natural fortress.

Given this physical safe haven, the second order of business in Oscar’s internal coup was to attack and seize the means of information. The Hot Zone’s computers re-ceived a long-postponed security overhaul. This revealed an appalling number of police back doors, unregistered users, and whole forests of snooping crackerware. These freeloaders were all swiftly purged.

The lab’s internal phone system was still under the control of the Collaboratory police. The lab’s tiny corps of police were something of a comic-opera outfit, but they had been suborned by Huey long ago. They represented the greatest local threat to Greta’s fledgling administration. The lab’s phone system was rid-dled with taps, and beyond secure repair.

So, the strikers simply abandoned the phone system entirely, and replaced it with a homemade network of dirt-cheap nomad cellphones. These semi-licit gizmos ran off relay stakes, hammered into walls, ceilings, roofs, and (in a particularly daring midnight ma-neuver) all across the underside of the dome.

Greta’s first official act as Director was to abolish the Public Re-lations department. She accomplished this through the lethally effec-tive tactic of zeroing-out the PR budget. She then returned the funds to Congress. Given the ongoing federal budget crisis, this was a very difficult move to parry politically.

Within the lab itself, abolishing the PR department was a hugely popular decision. At long last, the tedious jabber of the obnoxious pop-science pep squad ceased to irritate the local populace. There was no more chummy propaganda from on high, no more elbow-grabbing official email, no more obligatory training videos, nothing but blissful quiet and time to think and work.

The Collaboratory’s official PR was replaced by Oscar’s revolu-tionary poster campaign. A Strike, of course, needed effective propa-ganda even more than did the dead Establishment, and Oscar was just the man to supply this. The giant cyclopean walls inside the dome were absolutely perfect for political poster work. Oscar had never run a campaign among people with such extremely high levels of literacy. He took real pleasure in the antique handicrafts involved.

Greta’s postindustrial action was a highly unorthodox “strike,” because the strikers were not refusing to do their work. They were refusing to do anything except their work. The general tenor of the Strike strategy was highly public noncooperation, combined with pas-sive-aggressive cost-cutting.

The scientists were continuing their investigations, but they were refusing to fill out the federal paperwork. They refused to ask for grants, refused to pay rent on their barracks rooms, refused to pay for their food, refused to pay their power bills. They were refusing every-thing except for new instrumentation, a deeply embedded vice that simply could not be denied to scientists.

All the Strike Committee’s central members were also refusing their salaries. This was a deeply polarizing maneuver. Reasonable peo-ple simply couldn’t bring themselves to hold their breath and leap into the unknown in this way. Most of the lab’s “reasonable people” had long since made their peace with the Collaboratory’s institutional cor-ruption. Therefore, they were all on the take. It followed that they were personally compromised, at war with themselves, riddled with guilt. Greta’s stalwart core of dissidents were made of sterner stuff.

So, through this swift and unpredictable seizure of the tactical initiative, the Strike won a series of heartening little moral victories. Oscar had arranged this situation deliberately, in order to build com-munity self-confidence. The rent strike seemed very dramatic, but a rent strike was an unbeatable gambit. There was no internal competi-tion for the rents in the Collaboratory. If the strikers were somehow thrown out of their lodgings, the buildings would simply stay empty.

The power strike succeeded in a very similar way, because there was no effective method to shut off the electricity for nonpayment. By its very nature as a sealed environment, the Collaboratory dome al-ways required uninterrupted power, supplied by its own internal gen-erators. There simply wasn’t any way to shut it off. It had never occurred to the original designers that the dome’s inhabitants might someday rebel and refuse to pay.

Each successful step away from the status quo won Greta more adherents. The long-oppressed scientists had always had many galling problems. But since they lacked a political awareness of their plight, they had never had any burning issues — they’d simply endured a bad scene. Now, organization and action had shattered their apathy. Aches and pains they’d long accepted as parts of the natural order were sear-ingly revealed to them as oppression by evil know-nothings. A new power structure was aborning, with new methods, new goals, brave new opportunities for change. The Hot Zone had become a beehive of militant activism.

Within a week, the dome’s internal atmosphere was charged like a Leyden jar; it crackled with political potential. Greta’s unflinching radicalism had whipped the place into a frenzy.

Having built up a manic pressure for change, Greta took action to shore up her official legal situation. The Directorship had never been a strong executive post, but Greta engineered the forced resigna-tions of all her fellow board members. The original board was, of course, deeply unwilling to leave power, but the sudden resignation and departure of Dr. Felzian had left them stunned. Outmaneuvered and discredited, they were soon replaced by Greta’s zealous fellow-travelers, who trusted her implicitly and granted her a free hand.

The Collaboratory’s party of the status quo had been decimated before they could organize any resistance. Years without serious chal-lenge or controversy had made them fat and slow. They’d been crushed before they could even recognize the threat. Greta still held the initiative. She had excellent operational intelligence, thanks to Os-car’s oppositional research and his plethora of demographic profiles. The forced confession of Dr. Skopelitis had also been very useful, since Skopelitis had spilled his guts in a torrent of email and fingered his fellow conspirators.

Behind these vibrant, stage-managed scenes of unleashed popular discontent, the transition of actual day-to-day power had gone re-markably smoothly. Felzian had always run the lab like a high school vice principal; the real power decisions in the Collaboratory had al-ways rested in the distant hands of Dougal and his Senate krewe.

Now Dougal and his cronies were finished. However, the power vacuum was brief Oscar’s own krewe was a group of political opera-tives who could easily have become a Senate staff. With a little bend-ing and jamming, they slotted very nicely into place, and quietly usurped the entire operation.

Oscar himself served as Greta’s (very unofficial) chief of staff. Pelicanos oversaw lab finances. Bob Argow and Audrey Avizienis were handling constituency services and counterintelligence. Lana Rama-chandran dealt with scheduling, office equipment, and press relations. “Corky” Shoeki, formerly in charge of the Bambakias campaign’s road camps and rallies, was handling the scramble for office space in-side the Hot Zone. Kevin Hamilton was doing bravura work on secu-rity.

Greta was acting as her own press spokeswoman. That would have to change eventually, but it made excellent sense during the Strike crisis. Greta became the only official source of Strike news, and her solo public role made her seem to be handling matters all by herself This gave her heroic charisma.

In point of fact, Greta and her zealous idealists had no real idea how to run a modern executive staff They’d never held power before, so they were anxious to have glamorous jobs with titles and prestige, rather than the gruntwork jobs by which the acts of government were actually accomplished. This charade suited Oscar perfectly. He knew now that if he could simply keep the lab alive, solvent, and out of Huey’s hands, he would have accomplished the greatest feat of his career.

So Oscar took a deeply shadowed backseat, well behind the throne. The new year ground on. Many scientists found the Strike to be an ideal opportunity to quietly resign and leave, but that left the remaining hard-core scientists saturated with revolutionary fervor. Like revolutionaries everywhere, they were discovering that every tri-fling matter was a moral and intellectual crisis. Every aspect of their former lives and careers seemed to require a radical reformulation. These formerly downtrodden wretches spent most of their free hours raising one another’s consciousnesses.

And it all suited Oscar very well. His political instincts had never been sharper and his krewe, frenetic neurotics to the last man and woman, always shone in a crisis.

At this particular moment — January 8, 2045-Greta and her kitchen cabinet were engaged in particularly intense debate. The scientists were anxiously weighing new candidates for the board: In-formation Genetics and Biomedicine. Oscar, accompanied by his ever-present bodyguard Kevin, lurked behind a tower of instrumental clutter. He planned to let them talk until they got very tired. Then he would ask a few pointed Socratic questions. After that, they would accept a solution that he had decided a week ago.

While Kevin munched a set of color-coded protein sticks, Oscar was enjoying a catered lunch. Since Oscar’s krewe had taken over the Collaboratory, they’d been forced to hire a new Texan krewe to run their hotel. Given the tepid economy in Buna, finding new staff hadn’t been difficult.

Kevin stopped tinkering with the microchipped innards of a phone, zipped its case shut, and passed the phone to Oscar. Oscar was soon chatting in blissful security to Leon Sosik in Washington.

“I need Russian Constructivist wall posters,” he told Sosik. “Have Alcott’s Boston krewe hit the art museums for me. I need everything they can get from the early Communist Period.”

“Oscar, I’m glad that you’re having fun at the lab, but forget the big glass snow globe. We need you here in DC, right away. Our anti-Huey campaign just crashed and burned.”

“What? Why? I don’t need to go to Washington to feud with Huey. I’ve got Huey on the ropes right here. We’ve fingered all his cronies in the lab. I’ve got people here who are literally picketing them. Give me another week, and we’ll purge all the local cops, too. Once those clowns are out of the picture, I can get to some serious work around here.”

“Oscar, try to stick to the point. That lab is just a local side-show. We have a national-security crisis here. Huey has a radar hole.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means the North American radar coverage. The Air Force military radar. Part of the Southern U.S. radar boundary was run out of that Louisiana air base. Now that radar’s gone, and there’s a missing overlap between Texas and Georgia. The bayous have gone black. They’ve dropped right out of military surveillance.”

Oscar put his fork down. “What the hell does that have to do with anything? I can’t believe that. How is that even possible? No radar? A ten-year-old child can do radar!” He took a breath. “Look, surely they’ve still got air traffic control radar. New Orleans wouldn’t last two days without air traffic. Can’t the Air Force use the civilian radar?”

“You’d think so, but it just doesn’t work that way. They tell me it’s a programming problem. Civilian radar runs off a thousand decen-tralized cells. It’s distributed radar, on packet networks. That doesn’t work for the Air Force. The military has a hierarchical system archi-tecture. ”

Oscar thought quickly. “Why is that a political problem? That’s a technical issue. Let the Air Force handle that.”

“They can’t handle it. Because those are old federal missile-detection systems, they date back to Cold War One! They’re mil-spec hardware running antique code. That system just isn’t flexible — we’re lucky it still runs at all! But the point is, there’s no federal radar cover-age in Louisiana. And that means that enemy aircraft can invade the United States! Anywhere from Baton Rouge south!”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Leon. It can’t possibly be that bad,” Oscar said. “How could the military miss a problem that size? There must be contingency plans. Who the hell was keeping track of all that?”

“No one seems to know,” Sosik said mournfully. “When the Emergency committees took over the base closures, the radar issue got lost in competing jurisdictions.”

Oscar grunted. “Typical.”

“It is typical. It’s totally typical. There’s just too much going on. There’s no clear line of authority. Huge, vital issues just fall through the cracks. We can’t get anywhere at all.”

Oscar was alarmed to hear Sosik sound so despondent. Clearly Sosik had been spending rather too much time at the Senator’s bed-side. Bambakias became ever more fluent and compelling as his grip on reality faded. “All right, Leon. I agree with that diagnosis, I con-cede your point. I am with you all the way there. But let’s face it — nobody’s going to invade the United States. Nobody invades national boundaries anymore. So what if some idiot Emergency committee misplaced some ancient radar? Let’s just ignore the problem.”

“We can’t ignore it. Huey won’t let us. He’s making real hay out of the issue. He says this proves that his Louisiana air base was vital to national security all along. The Louisiana delegation is kicking our ass in Congress. They’re demanding that we build them a whole new air base from the ground up, immediately. But that’ll cost us billions, and we just don’t have the funds. And even if we can swing the funding, we can’t possibly launch a major federal building program inside Louisiana.”

“Obviously not,” Oscar said. “Roadblocks, NIMBY suits, emi-nent-domain hassles … that’s tailor-made for Huey. Once he’s got federal contractors stuck knee-deep in the swamp, he could rip off a leg and bleed the whole budget to death.”

“Exactly. So we’re stuck. We were trashing Huey big-time on the patriotism charge, but he’s turned the tables on us. He’s wrapping himself in the very same flag that we stitched for him. We’ve played right into his hands. And we can’t ignore his radar hole, because he’s already exploiting it. Last night, French unmanned aircraft started buzzing South Louisiana. They’re flying over the swamps, playing French pop music.”

“French pop music?”

“Multichannel broadcasts off unmanned aerial drones. It’s the Cajun Francophone card.”

“Come on. Even Huey can’t seriously believe that anybody lis-tens to French pop music.”

“The French believe it. They can smell Yankee blood in the wa-ter. It’s your basic culture-war gambit. The French have always loved French-language confrontations. Now they can turn up their amps till we pull every burger joint out of Paris.”

“Leon, calm down. You’re a professional. You can’t let him get you rattled like this.”

“He does have me rattled, damn it. The son of a bitch just doesn’t play by the rules! He does two contradictory things at once, and he screws us coming and going. It’s like he’s got two brains!”

“Get a grip,” Oscar said. “It’s a minor provocation. What are we supposed to do about this so-called problem? Declare war on France?”

“Well …” Sosik said. He lowered his voice. “I know this sounds strange. But listen. A declaration of war would dissolve the Emergency committees by immediate fiat.”

“What!” Oscar shouted. “Are you crazy? We can’t invade France! France is a major industrial democracy! What are we, Nazis? That’s totally out of the question!”

Oscar looked up. He confronted a looming crowd of astonished scientists. They’d left their own discussion and had gathered on the far side of the lab bench, where they were straining to overhear him.

“Listen, Oscar,” Sosik continued tinnily, “nobody’s suggesting that we actually fight a war. But the concept is getting a pretty good float in DC. A declaration of war is a manual override of the federal system. As a domestic maneuver, a foreign war could be a real trump card. France is much too much, I agree with that — hell, the French still have nuclear power! But we could declare war on Holland. Hol-land’s a tiny, unarmed country, a bunch of radical pipsqueaks. So we throw a proper scare into the Dutch, the phony war lasts a week or so, and then the President declares victory. The Emergency is over. Then, once the dust settles, we have a fully functional Congress again.”

Oscar removed the phone from his ear, stared at it with distaste, and replaced it at his ear. “Look, I gotta get back to you later, Leon. I have some serious work to accomplish here.”

“The Senator’s very big on this idea, Oscar. He really thinks it could fly. It’s visionary.”

Oscar hung up. “They’re playing French pop music in Louisi-ana,” he told his impromptu audience.

Albert Gazzaniga scratched his head. “Big deal! So what?”

The crux of the matter was, of course, the money. It had always been the money. Money was the mother’s milk of politics. And although scientific politics were several steps removed from conventional poli-tics, money was the milk of science, too.

All strikes were, at the bottom line, struggles over economic power. All strikers made a bold declaration that they were willing to outstarve their employers, and if they backed it up with enough bad press and moral pressure, they were sometimes right.

So it was lovely to declare that Greta and her cadre were ready and eager to do science for nothing, asking for nothing, and refusing to supply anything but the results they themselves found of scientific interest. It was a holy crusade. But even a holy crusade needed a revenue stream.

So Oscar, Yosh, and the omnipresent Kevin found an empty cor-ner in the hotel kitchen to discuss finances.

“We could hit up Bambakias for a couple of million, just to tide us over,” Pelicanos said. “There’s no question he’s got the funds.”

“Forget it,” Oscar said. “The Senate’s a billionaire’s club, but if they start running the country right out of their own pockets, that’s feudalism. Feudalism is not professional.”

Pelicanos nodded. “Okay. Then we’ll have to raise funds our-selves. How about the standard campaign methods? Direct mail. Rub-ber-chicken banquets. Rallies, garage sales, charity events. Who are the core prospects here?”

“Well, if this were a normal campaign…” Oscar rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “We’d hit up the alumni of her alma mater, Jewish temple groups, scientific professional societies… And of course the Collaboratory’s business suppliers. They’re plenty mad at us right now, but they’ll fall out of the trough completely, if the place ever closes down. We might be able to sweet-talk them into fronting us some cash, if we threaten them with total destruction.”

“Are there any rich, overclass scientists? There have got to be some rich scientists, right?”

“Sure there are — in Asia and Europe.”

“You guys sure don’t think very big,” Kevin chided.

Oscar gazed at him tolerantly. He was growing rather fond of Kevin. Kevin really worked hard; he’d become the heart and soul of the foulest part of the coup. “How big are we supposed to think, Kevin?”

“You guys don’t realize what you have here. You’ve got a perfect nomad rally-ground inside that lab. It’s like you’ve roadblocked the place; you can do anything you want with it. Why don’t you ask all the scientists in America to come down here and join you?”

Oscar sighed. “Kevin, bear with us. You’ve got the problem ex-actly backward. The point is, we’re trying to feed and supply two thousand people, even though they’re on strike. If we get a million of them, we’re sunk.”

“No you’re not,” Kevin said. “If a million scientists showed up here and joined you, that wouldn’t be just a strike anymore. It would be a revolution. You wouldn’t just take over this one federal lab. You could take over the whole town. Probably the whole county. Maybe a big part of the state.”

Pelicanos laughed. “How are we supposed to manage a giant horde of freeloading scientists?”

“You’d use nomads, man. Who else knows how to run a giant horde of people with no money? You throw open your airlocks, and you promise them shelter in there. You give ’em propaganda tours, you show ’em all the pretty plants and animals. You get the cops and the feds off their backs for once, and you give them a big role to play in your own operation. The proles would become a giant support krewe for your egghead contingent. See, it’s people power, street power. It’s an occupying army, just like Huey likes to use.”

Oscar laughed. “They’d tear this place apart!”

“Sure, they could do that — but what if they decided not to? Maybe they’d decide that they liked the place. Maybe they’d look after it. Maybe they’d build it even bigger.”

Oscar hesitated. The construction angle hadn’t occurred to him. He’d always done extremely well by the construction angle. The con-struction angle was the best political wild card he’d ever had. Most politicians couldn’t create luxury hotels out of software and sweat eq-uity, but those who could had an off-the-wall advantage. He was sitting inside the construction angle at this very moment, and it was working out just fine. “How much bigger?”

“How big would we need it?” Pelicanos said.

“Well, how many nomad proles would be joining our construction krewe?”

“You want me to load a spreadsheet?” Kevin said.

“Forget it, it’s too good to be true,” Pelicanos said. “Sure, maybe we could get distributed instantiation to scale-up. But we’d never be able to trust nomads. They’re all in Huey’s pockets.”

Kevin snorted. “The Regulators are in Huey’s pockets, but good Lord, fellas, Louisiana proles are not the only proles around. You guys have spent too much time in Boston. Wyoming was on fire, man! There are proles and dissidents all over the USA. There’s millions of proles.”

With a stern effort of will, Oscar forced himself to consider Kevin’s proposal seriously. “An army of unemployed nomads, con-structing giant, intelligent domes … You know, that’s really a compelling image. I really hate to dismiss that idea out of hand. It’s so modern and photogenic and nonlinear. There’s a lovely carrying-the-war-to-the-enemy momentum there.”

Pelicanos narrowed his eyes. “Kevin, who’s the heaviest prole mob you know?”

“Well, the Regulators are the heaviest. They have state support from Huey, and they just smashed a federal air base. So they’ve got to be the strongest mob around — everybody knows that by now. But, well, there’s the Moderators. The Moderators are big. Plus, they hate the Regulators’ guts.”

“Why is that?” Oscar said, leaning forward with galvanized interest.

Kevin shrugged. “Why do mobs always hate other mobs? Some-body stole somebody’s girlfriend, somebody hacked somebody’s phones. They’re mobs. So they have no laws. So they have to feud with each other. It’s tribal. Tribes always act like that.”

Pelicanos scratched his jaw. “You know, Oscar, there’s no ques-tion that the Collaboratory is a much more attractive facility than some run-down federal air base.”

“You’re absolutely right, Yosh. That dome has real charisma. There’s a definite demand-pull there.”

There was a long, thoughtful silence.

“Time for a coffee,” Oscar announced, rising and fetching some. “Let’s run a reality check, guys. Forget all this blue-sky stuff — what’s the agenda? Our agenda here is to gently embarrass the powers that be, and get them to cut some operational slack for federal researchers. At the end of the day, Congress will fund this place at about half last year’s fiscal levels. But in return, we’ll get more direct power into the hands of the lab people. So we’ll create a workable deal. We’ll keep the lab in business, but without all the pork and the graft. That’s a perfectly decent accomplishment. It’s something we could all be very proud of.”

He sipped his coffee. “But if we let this situation spin out of control like Kevin is suggesting… Well, I actually suspect that it’s possible. What Huey did to the Air Force, that proves that it’s possible. But it’s not doable, because there’s no brakes. There are no brakes, because I can’t control the course of events. I don’t have the author-ity. I’m just a Senate staffer!”

“That’s never stopped you so far,” Kevin pointed out.

“Well, I admit that, Kevin, but… Well, I don’t like your idea because it’s bad ideology. I’m a Federal Democrat. We’re a serious-minded Reform party. We’re not a revolutionary vanguard, we can leave all that to self-marginalizing, violent morons. I’m operating un-der a lot of legal and ethical constraints here. I can’t have huge mobs commandeering federal facilities.”

Kevin sniffed. “Well, Huey did it.”

“Huey’s a Governor! Huey has a legislative branch and a judi-ciary. Huey was elected by the people, he won his last race with seventy-two percent of a ninety-percent voter turnout! I can’t paralyze the country with insane stunts like that, I just don’t have the power! I’m not a magician! I’mjust a freshman Senate staffer. I don’t get my own way just because things are theoretically possible. Hell, I can’t even sleep with my own girlfriend.”

Kevin looked at Pelicanos. “Yosh, can’t you arrange it so this poor bastard can sleep with his girlfriend? She’d understand this sit-uation. He’s getting all mentally cramped now. He’s losing his edge.”

“Well, that’s doable,” Pelicanos said. “You could resign from the Senate Science Committee, and take over here as Greta’s official chief of staff I don’t think anyone would mind Greta sleeping with one of her staffers. I mean, technically it’s workplace sex harassment, but gee whiz.”

Oscar frowned darkly. “I am not leaving the Senate Science Committee! You people have no understanding of what I have been through all this time, massaging those creeps backstage in Washington. It is incredibly hard doing that over a network; if you’re not in the office doing face-time with the Hill rats, they always write you off and screw you. I’ve been wiring flowers to their goddamn sysadmin for three weeks. When I get back to Washington, I’ll probably have to date her.”

“Okay, then we’re back to square one,” Pelicanos said gloomily. “We still don’t know what we’re doing, and we still don’t have any money.”

Oscar was up at three in the morning, examining schedules of up-coming Senate hearings, when there was a tap at his door. He glanced over at Kevin, who was snoring peacefully in his hotel bunk. Oscar fetched his plastic spraygun, checked the squirt chamber to see that it was loaded, and sidled to the door. “Who is it?” he whispered.

“It’s me.” It was Greta.

Oscar opened the door. “Come in. What are you doing here? Are you crazy?”

“Yes.”

Oscar sighed. “Did you check to see if your clothes are bugged? Did you watch to see if anyone was tailing you? Would you not wake up my bodyguard please? Give me a kiss.”

They embraced. “I know I’m being terrible,” she whispered. “But I’m still awake. I wore the rest of them out. I had one little moment to myself. And I thought, I know what I want. I want to be with Oscar.”

“It’s impossible,” he told her, slipping his hand under her shirt. “This is risking everything, it’s really foolish.”

“I know we can’t meet anymore,” she said, leaning against the wall and closing her eyes in bliss. “They watch me every second.”

“My bodyguard’s right in this room with us. And he’s totally trigger-happy. ”

“I only came here to talk,” she said, pulling his shirt out of his trousers.

He led her into the bathroom, shut the door, flicked on the lights. Her lipstick was smeared and her pupils were like two saucers.

“Just to talk,” she repeated. She set her purse on the sink. “I brought you something nice.”

Oscar locked the bathroom door. Then he turned on the shower, for the sake of the cover noise.

“A little gift,” she said. “Because we don’t get to be together anymore. And I can’t stand it.”

“I’m going to take a cold shower,” he announced, “just in case Kevin gets suspicious. We can talk, but talk quietly.” He began unbut-toning his shirt.

Greta dug into her purse and removed a wrapped and ribboned box. She set the box on the bathroom counter, then turned and looked at him thoughtfully. Oscar dropped his shirt on the cold tiles.

“Hurry up,” she suggested, stepping out of her underwear. They threw a pair of towels on the floor, and slid onto them together. He got his elbows into the backs of her knees, bent her double, and went at it like a madman. It was a forty-second mutual frenzy that ended like an oncoming train.

When he’d caught his breath, he managed a weak smile. “We’ll just pretend that incident never happened. All right?”

“All right,” she said, and levered herself up with trembling arms. “I sure feel better though.” She climbed to her feet, pulling her skirt down. Then she fetched the box, and offered it. “Here, this is for you. Happy birthday.”

“I don’t have birthdays,” he said.

“Yes, I know that. So I made a birthday present, just for you.”

He found his pants, stepped back into them, and picked up her gift. To his vague alarm, the little ribboned box felt hot to the touch. He stripped off the gaudy paper and the plywood lid. The box was tightly packed with a gray bag of chemical heating element, surround-ing a small curved device. He plucked the gift from its wedge of hot packing.

“It’s a wristwatch,” he said.

“Try it on!” she said with an eager smile.

He removed his classic Japanese chronometer and strapped on Greta’s watch. The watch was hot and clammy, the color of boiled okra. He examined the greenish glowing numerals in the face. The watch was six minutes slow. “This thing looks like it’s made out of jelly. ”

“It is made of jelly! It’s a neural watch!” she told him. “It’s the only one in the world! We made it in the lab.”

“Amazing.”

“You bet it is! Listen. Every mammal brain has a built-in cir-cadian clock. In the mousebrain, it’s in the suprachiastic nucleus. So we cloned a chunk of suprachiastic tissue, and embedded it in support gel. Those numerals are enzyme-sensitive cells that express firefly genes! And, Oscar, we gave it three separate neural clumps inside, with a smart neural net that automatically averages out cumulative error. So even though that’s a totally organic watch, it supplies accu-rate time! As long as it stays right at blood temperature, that is.”

“Tremendous. ”

“Oh, and you do have to feed it. That little packet there is bo-vine serum. You just boil up a couple of cc’s once a week, and inject it through that little duct.” She paused. “Rat brains do leak some waste product, but just a drop or two.”

Oscar twisted his wrist and examined the translucent strap.

They’d made the tooth and buckle out of some kind of mouse bone. “This is quite a technical feat, isn’t it?”

“And you can’t let it get cold, or it dies. But listen: if you want to reset it, you just flip up that patch in the back and expose it to sunlight. We put retinal cells there. When retinal cells see sunlight, they release glutamate. Which binds to receptors. Which produce ni-tric oxide. Which activates enzymes. Which add phosphate to a nu-clear protein. The protein sends a genetic message, and the genes reset the neurons in the clock!”

“So, is there, uh, documentation with this product?”

She hesitated. “Well, never mind all that. You’re just a layman. You don’t really have to understand how a watch works.”

Oscar looked at the eerie device. It was clinging to his wrist like raw liver. “It’s a homemade birthday watch,” he said. “In the middle of all this trouble, you’ve gone and made me a watch. With your own hands.”

“I’m so glad you’re pleased with it.”

“ ‘Pleased’? This is the finest birthday gift I’ve ever had.”

Her eyebrows twitched just a bit. “You don’t think it’s creepy, do you?”

“Creepy? Heavens no! It’s just a step or two beyond the current cutting edge, that’s all. I could foresee big consumer demand for an item like this.”

She laughed delightedly. “Ha! Exactly. That’s just what I told my lab krewe, when we were putting it together. We’ve finally come up with a mass consumer product that has real market de-mand!”

Oscar was touched. “They’ve been harassing you for years about your ‘pure science,’ haven’t they. As if they had the right to control your imagination, just because they pay your bills. Well, I’ll tell you a secret, Greta. There’s no such thing as ‘pure science.’ ‘Pure science’ is an evil lie, it’s a killer fraud, like ‘pure justice’ or ‘pure liberty.’ Desire is never pure, and the desire for knowledge is just another kind of desire. There’s never been a branch of knowledge so pure and abstract that it can’t get down and dirty. If the human mind can comprehend it, then the human mind can desire it.”

She sighed. “I never know what to make of you when you start talking like that… I wish I could tell you everything I’ve been thinking lately.”

“Try me.”

“It’s that… you want something, but you know it’s bad for you. So you deny it, and want it, and deny it, and want it — but it’s just too seductive. So you give in, and then it just happens. But when it happens, it’s not as bad as you thought. It’s not half bad. In fact, it’s good. It’s really good. It’s wonderful. It makes you better. You’re a better human being. You’re stronger. You understand yourself. You’re in touch with yourself. You’re not in denial. You’re not remote and pure. You’re alive and you’re part of the real world. You know what you want.”

Oscar felt a soaring sense of absolute masculine triumph. It lasted three seconds, crested, and left him tingling with premonitory dread.

“A love affair isn’t always peaches and cream,” he said.

She stared at him in utter astonishment. “Oscar, sweetie, I’m not talking about the sex. That’s all very nice, and I’m happy about it, but you and I could have all the sex in the world, and it wouldn’t change a thing. I mean that you gave me a real and lasting gift, Oscar, because you put me in power. And now, I really know what power means. For the first time in my life, I can speak to people. When they’re all there in front of me, a big crowd of my own people, I can tell them the truth. I can persuade them. I can lead them. I’ve become their leader. I’ve found my own voice. I have real power. I think I always wanted power, but I always resisted it, because I thought it was bad for me — but it isn’t! Now I know what power is, and my God, it’s really good. It’s changing me completely. I just want more and more.”

To end her second week as Director, Greta fired the entire Materials Processing department. This freed up a great deal of valuable lab space in the Materials Lab, which was situated on the eastern wall of the dome next to the Plant Engineering Complex. The long-impoverished botanists were overjoyed at their floor-space bonanza. Shutting down the gluttonous Materials Lab was also a financial boon for the lab itself.

It was also a considerable boon for Oscar’s hotel. His hotel was now crowded with laboratory equipment scavengers, fly-by-night middlemen who’d flocked into Buna as soon as the news of a hard-ware sale hit their net.

Most of the materials scientists sullenly recognized the fait ac-compli. But not Dr. David Chander. Chander had been an early and zealous striker, and he was also a quick study. To resist his own firing, he had taken his tactical cues from the Strike Committee. He had superglued his equipment to the lab benches and barricaded himself inside the research facility. There he sat, in occupation, categorically refusing to leave.

Kevin was in favor of bringing in a hydraulic ram and blasting Chander out. The Collaboratory’s federal police were far too con-fused and sullen to do any such thing themselves. Kevin would have been delighted to play the role of strong-arm vigilante, but Oscar considered this a bad precedent for the lab’s new regime. He couldn’t countenance violent confrontations; they were unprofessional, not his style.

Instead, he decided to talk the man down.

Oscar and Kevin went up to Chander’s third-floor lab, and Oscar announced himself. He waited patiently as Chander unjammed his lab doors. Then Oscar slipped in, leaving a disgruntled Kevin lurking in the hall.

Chander immediately began barricading the doors again. “Let me give you a hand with that,” Oscar volunteered. He helped Chander wedge a dismantled chair leg against a superglued door chock.

Unlike the majority of Collaboratory locals, Chander, as an in-dustrial researcher, wore a business suit and a tie, with a serious hat. His dusky face was ashen and his eyes were puffy with stress. “I was wondering if she’d have the nerve to meet with me herself,” he said, biting his plump lower lip. “I can’t say I’m surprised to see you show up.”

Oscar opened his plastic carry-case. “I brought some supplies for your sit-in,” he said. “A little frozen gumbo, some tasty rice. ”

“You know that I’m on a hunger strike, don’t you?”

“I hadn’t heard that,” Oscar lied.

“Get ’em to turn on my lab phones again, and you’ll hear plenty about all of my problems.”

“But that’s why I came here personally,” Oscar said cheerily. “To hear you out, man to man.”

“I’m not going to put up with this,” Chander announced. “She’s destroying my life’s work, it’s completely unfair. I can wait just as long as the rest of you can. I can do anything that you can do. I’ve got my own friends and supporters, I’ve got industrial backers from out of state. I’m an honest man-but you don’t have a leg to stand on. Once word gets out about all the stunts you’ve pulled around here, you’ll all be indicted.”

“But I’m from the Senate Science Committee,” Oscar said. “Of course the Senate will take an interest in your plight. Let’s have a seat, and you can fill me in on the issues.”

He sat cautiously in a partially wrecked lab chair and produced a paper notebook and a classic fountain pen.

Chander dragged up a plastic lab crate and sat with a groan. “Look, Congress won’t help me. Congress is hopeless, they never understand the technical issues. The point is… I have a break-through here. I’m not just promising a breakthrough. This isn’t just some empty last-minute gambit to get me off the hook. I have a major technical innovation here! I’ve had it for two years!”

Oscar examined his notes. “Dr. Chander… as you know, there’s been a general productivity audit here at the Collaboratory. Every department has gone through the same assessments: Genetic Fragmentation, Flux NMR… your department has been through five reorganizations in four years. Your production record is, frankly, abysmal.”

“I’m not denying that,” Chander said. “But it was sabotage.”

“That’s a remarkable claim.”

“Look. It’s a long, dismal story but… look, basic science and corporate sponsorship have never worked out. My problems aren’t sci-entific at all, they’re all in management. Our agenda here is organic materials processing, we’re looking for new biologically based solu-tions to traditional engineering problems. There’s a lot of room to work there. Our problem was our corporate sponsorship in Detroit.”

Chander sighed. “I don’t know why the automobile industry got involved in sponsoring our work. That wasn’t my decision. But ever since they first showed up, five years ago, they’ve wrecked everything we do. They keep demanding results from us, then shortening our schedules and changing our deliverables. They micromanage every-thing. They send in brain-damaged car executives on sabbaticals, who show up, and steal rare animals, and run goofy futurist scenarios, and talk nonsense to us. We’ve been through absolute hell here: reen-gineering, outplacement, management by objective, total customer service, you name it! Every kind of harassment imaginable.”

“But industry supplied your funding. Those were your corporate sponsors. You couldn’t win complete federal funding for your propos-als. If you can’t make your own sponsors happy, then why are you here?”

“Why am I here?” Chander said. “It’s simple! It’s a very simple, straightforward thing! I’m here because of power.”

“You don’t say.”

“Electromotive power! My krewe and I were researching new power sources for the American transportation industry. And we’ve created a new working model. It’s mitochondrial ATP power genera-tion. With signal transduction, protein phosphorylation, membrane diffusion potentials… Look, do you even know what a ‘mitochondrion’ is?”

“I’ve heard that term, I think.”

“The mitochondrion is the power plant in the cell. It generates energy from adenosine triphosphate, it’s the basic reason we can live and breathe. Mitochondria are microscopic. But imagine they were” — Chander spread his hands violently — “a meter across.”

“So you’ve cloned a piece of a living cell and made it a meter across?”

“I was never any good at explaining science to the layman… No, of course it’s not a meter across. It’s not a mitochondrion at all. It’s a biomechanical device that uses the membranes and the structure of a mitochondrion. They’ve all been scaled up, industrially. It’s a giant waffle of membranes and gelatin matrix. It’s not a living thing, it’s biological hardware, engineered and turned into an electrochemi-cal battery. You could drive a car with it. You could drive a truck! And it runs on sugar.”

“So you’ve created an automobile engine that runs on sugar.”

“Now you’re getting it! That’s it! Sugar, water, and a few trace elements. Totally organic and totally recyclable. No combustion, no emissions, and no toxins! And it runs at room temperature.”

“So this is another new automobile power plant. Sure, fine. There are plenty of those on the market already — flywheels, steam, liquid nitrogen. How is the acceleration?”

Chander punched the air. “It’s like that! It’s like punching my fist! Mitochondria did that! It’s the technology that powers muscle! It’s fast, it’s clean! It really works!”

“What’s the catch?”

“There isn’t one! It works fine! Well, it’ll work better when we get the prototype bugs worked out… there’s some problems with osmotic pressure, and’ even flow-through… oh, and if the battery gets infected, then it rots pretty quickly. But those are just shakedown problems. The real problem is that Detroit doesn’t want our product. They won’t put it into production.”

“So you’ve achieved a great success,” Oscar said. “Then explain something to me. Your lab’s had more private funding than any other Materials facility, but you’ve never shipped a product. You’re the Principal Investigator here, but you’ve had more krewe turnover than any other lab…”

“They were all spies!” Chander said. “They were spies and sabo-teurs! I didn’t have any choice but to fire them.”

“I’ve noticed that the rest of your krewe hasn’t joined your per-sonal industrial action here.”

“Their morale’s been destroyed. They know we’ve been targeted for removal. They know all their hard work will come to nothing. They’re just hoping that someday the memories will fade.” Chander’s shoulders slumped.

“This is a remarkable story. I’ll have to check this story out with your industrial liaison.”

“Sure. Go ahead. His name is Ron Griego, he’s a project man-ager for corporate R D up in Detroit.”

Oscar blinked. “Would that be Ronald K. Griego?”

“You actually know Ron Griego?”

“I think I do,” Oscar said, frowning. “In fact, I suspect we can see this matter properly expedited in short order.”

After leaving Dr. Chander, mollified at least to the point of eating, Oscar and Kevin sought shelter in the lush foliage north of the Ge-netic Fragmentation unit. Oscar then called Griego’s krewe secretary in Detroit.

“Forgive me for cold-calling you, ma’am, but I think Mr. Griego will want to talk to me. Would you please tell Ron that it’s Oscar Valparaiso, class of ’37, and that it’s an urgent federal matter?”

Griego was on the phone within five minutes. He and Oscar traded wary pleasantries.

“Went into the family car business after all, eh, Ron?”

“That’s why Dad sent me to Harvard,” Griego said. “What’s with this awful phone connection?”

“Encryption and rerouting. Sorry. Look, it’s about the Buna Na-tional Collaboratory.”

“I hear you’re shutting the place down,” Griego said cheerfully. “There’s a big workers’ strike going on there. Well, of course that’s a blow to our futuristic research effort, but I don’t want you to worry. We understand labor troubles, here in the auto business. If we can lobby Congress to let us keep this fiscal year’s R D deductions, we think we can survive the loss of our Buna lab.”

“Sorry, but it won’t be quite that easy, Ron.”

“But I’m making it easy for you,” Griego said, wounded. “Shut the place down, fire ’em all. Zero it out, lock the doors, it’s over, they’re history. What could be easier than that?”

“Oh, that’s easy enough for me — I meant to say that it wouldn’t be easy for you.”

“I might have known,” Griego groaned. “Why can’t it ever be easy with you, Valparaiso? What have you got against the rest of us? What is your problem?”

“Just fitting a few loose ends together. Believe me, Ron, I can sympathize. It must have been a nightmare for you — netwarring some krewe of lunatics who built a magic sugar battery.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“Look, Ron, relax. Remember that time I hid those two hook-ers from the campus police? I never outed you on anything, and I’m not planning to out you now. Just level with me. That’s all that I ever ask. ”

There was a long uneasy silence. Then Griego burst out in a fury. “Don’t get all high-and-mighty with me, Mr. Third-in-His-Class. You think it’s easy running corporate R D? It was just fine, as long as the guy didn’t have anything. Jesus, nobody ever thought a goddamn sugar engine would work. The goddamn thing is a giant germ in a box! We build cars up here, we don’t build giant germs! Then they pull this crazy stunt and… well, it Just makes our life impossible! We’re a classic, metal-bending industry! We have in-terlocking directorates all throughout the structure, raw materials, fuel, spare parts, the dealerships… We can’t get into the face of our fuel suppliers, telling them that we’re replacing them with sugar water! We own our fuel suppliers! It’d be like sawing off our own foot!”

“I understand about interlocking directorates and mutual stock ownership, Ron. I was sitting right next to you in business school, remember? Cut to the chase — what about the battery?”

“Batteries have the highest profit margin of any automobile component. We were making money there. You can’t make real money anywhere else in our business. The Koreans are building auto bodies out of straw and paper! We can’t support an industry when cars are cheaper than grocery carts! What are we gonna tell our unions? This is a great American tradition at stake here! The car defines Amer-ica: the assembly line, suburbs, drive-ins, hot rods, teenage sex, every-thing that makes America great! We can’t turn ourselves inside out because some big-brained creep has built an engine out of bug guts! There wouldn’t be anything left of us! The guy is a menace to society! He had to be stopped.”

“Thank you for that, Ron. Now we’re getting somewhere. So tell me this — why didn’t you just pull his damn funding?”

“If only it were that simple! We’re required by federal fiat to invest in basic R D. It was part of our federal bailout deal. We’re supposed to have trade protection, and we’re supposed to catch our breath, and jump a generation ahead of our foreign competitors. But if we jump a generation ahead of the damn Koreans, our industry will vanish entirely. People will make cars the way they make pop-up toast. Proles will build cars out of bio-scrap, and compost them in the backyard. We’ll all be doomed.”

“So you’re telling me that you’ve achieved a tremendous scien-tific R D success, but as a collateral effect, it will eliminate your industry.”

“Yeah. That’s it. Exactly. And I’m sorry, but we just can’t face that. We have stockholders to worry about, we have a labor force. We don’t want to end up like the computer people did. Jesus, there’s no sense to that. It’s total madness, it’s demented. We’d be cutting our own throats.”

“Ron, take it easy, okay? I’m with you here, I’m following your argument. Thanks for leveling with me. I comprehend your situation now. It fits into the big picture.”

Oscar drew a breath. “You see, Ron, the true core issue here is the basic interplay of commerce and science. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to this problem recently, and now I realize that the old-style big-science game is just no longer tenable. Only savages and Con-gressmen could believe that science is a natural friend of commerce. Science has never been the friend of commerce. The truth doesn’t have any friends. Sometimes the interests of science and commerce can coincide for a little while, but that’s not a marriage. It’s a danger-ous liaison. If you’re a working businessman, R D can turn on you with sudden, vicious speed.”

“You got that right,” Griego said fervently.

“Ron, it saddens me to see you jerked around in this way. If you don’t want to finance R D, that ought to be a decision properly left to the industry. You shouldn’t be compelled to take action by distant, uncaring federal bureaucrats who don’t understand the real dynamics of private enterprise. And most of all, you certainly shouldn’t have to waste your time, and mine, running sabotage mind games against a federal laboratory. That’s just a big, counterproductive distraction that puts you and me at unnecessary loggerheads. We’re serious players, Ron. People like us ought to be talking this over as mature individuals and arriving at a modus vivendi.”

Griego sighed into the phone. “Okay, Oscar. You can stop sweet-talking me now. What are you planning to do to me?”

“Well, I could out this whole ugly thing. Then we’d have inves-tigations, and Senate hearings, and possible indictments, and the whole tiresome, unfortunate business. But suppose that never happened. Suppose that I could personally guarantee you that this guy’s miracle battery drops right off the edge of the earth. And all that costs you is a mere fifty percent of your current R D invest-ment.”

“I’d say that’s much too good to be true.”

“No, Ron. It’s the new order, here at the Collaboratory. You just don’t need major scientific advances in the American car industry. You’ve already had more of that than you can stand. You guys are a national historic treasure, like a buffalo herd or Valley Forge. You need protection from the menace of basic research. Instead of paying federal scientists to march your industry right off the cliff, you should be paying scientists protection money not to research your business. That’ll ensure that your industry doesn’t go anywhere.”

“That sounds so beautiful,” Griego said wistfully. “Is it legal?”

“Why not? Your sabotage routine can’t be legal, but you’ve been getting away with that for years. My proposal is a major improvement on the status quo, because now we’re being honest about it. As a gesture of goodwill, I’ll not only overlook your sad little corporate espionage, I’ll cut your R D expenditure in half!”

“What’s the catch?”

“The catch is — the Collaboratory is in a small financial bind at the moment, so you’ll have to ship us an entire year’s corporate R D funding, up front. Given our understanding, can you clear that finan-cial move with your people in Detroit?”

“Well, I’ll have to talk to Dad about it.”

“You have a word with the higher-ups, Ron. Tell Dad and the other board members that if they don’t accept my offer pronto, I’ll turn this entire lab’s brainpower onto that project. And we’ll be ship-ping sugar engines out the doors by next June. In a giant blaze of publicity.” He hung up.

“Did you really mean all that?” Kevin said. He’d been eavesdrop-ping with great interest.

“I don’t know,” Oscar said. “I just came into some luck there. I happened to know the buttons that work on good old Ronnie, and the whole scheme just came to me in a blaze of inspiration. It’s a very weird, lateral move, but it gets us off three or four hooks at once. It wins us a nice financial breathing space. Ron’s happy, we’re happy, everyone but Chander is happy, and Chander was finished anyway. Because Chander got in my face by stealing my moves.”

“You can’t really protect the car industry from a basic scientific discovery like a new power source.”

“Kevin, wake up. You need to stop thinking like a technician. Where did that habit ever get you? Don’t you see what I just pulled here? For the first time ever, we’re getting people to pay us not to do research. That is a genuine new power source. For the first time, fed-eral scientists have a real economic weapon — they can carry the war right to their enemy. Who cares about another damned battery? It’s probably a crock anyway. Did you ever see an atomic-powered car? Just because it’s technically possible doesn’t mean it’s practically do-able. ”

“People will do something with it anyway. You politicians can’t control the flow of technical knowledge. They’ll exploit it no matter what the government says.”

“Kevin, I know that. I am living proof of that phenomenon. It’s what made me what I am today.”

At two in the morning on January 20, there came a tap on Oscar’s hotel room door. It was Fred Dillen, the krewe’s janitor and launderer. Fred was drunk — the krewe had been celebrating the official and long-awaited swearing-in of Senator Bambakias, while drinking many patriotic toasts to the new Administration of President Two Feathers. Fred was accompanied by a chunky Anglo woman in her thirties, who was wearing bright orange medical-emergency gear.

“Party getting out of hand?” Oscar said.

“Oscar, this lady needs to talk to you,” Fred said.

“I didn’t know what room you were in,” the paramedic said sullenly. “Had to bust in on a whole bunch of drunks downstairs.”

“I’m glad you’re here. Is there a problem?” Oscar said.

“Yeah. We have an injured female, mid-thirties. She broke her ankle. But she says she doesn’t want to go to our clinic. She won’t even give us her name and ID. She says she wants to talk with you first.”

“What clinic are you taking her to?” Oscar said.

“Well, we want to take her to the ER in Buna. She wanted to go into the Collaboratory, but we can’t take her in there. They got all these giant airlocks and all this security crap and besides, we’re not legally cleared to do ER services inside a federal facility.”

“What happened to her? How did she have the accident?”

“Well, she says she just happened to be walkin’ over here in the middle of the road, in the middle of the night, and she tripped on something.” The paramedic looked at Oscar with distaste. “Listen, all this is way against regulations. Most people who break a leg are plenty happy to see an ambulance. But she wouldn’t shut up about it. She begged me to find some guy named Valparaiso, so now I found you. You wanna do something about it? Because if you don’t, adios, muchacho.”

“No, please don’t be hasty, I’ll go with you. I very much want to talk to your patient.” Oscar looked at the paramedic’s nametag. “Thank you very much for taking the trouble to find me, Ms. Willis. I know this isn’t orthodox procedure, but I can make it well worth your while.”

Willis settled back onto the worn heels of her white athletic shoes. “Well then,” she said, and smiled. “Then maybe it ain’t so bad after all.”

Oscar found a jacket, his wallet, and a pair of shoes. He glanced at the slumbering Kevin. To observe strict security, he ought to wake his bodyguard and drag him along in the wheelchair — but it was two in the morning, and the hardworking Kevin had been drinking like a pig. Oscar tucked a telephone in his pocket and stepped into the hall. He closed the door silently, then handed Willis a twenty-ecu Euro-pean bill.

Willis tucked the cash into a velcro-tabbed orange pocket. “Muchas gracias, amigo.”

“I hope Greta’s all right,” Fred said anxiously.

“Try not to worry,” Oscar told him. Fred was not the brightest light in the krewe. But Fred was a very loyal and good-hearted sort, a man who repaid a kind word with dogged loyalty. “You can go back to the party now. We really want to keep this little business quiet. Don’t tell anyone. Okay?”

“Oh,” Fred said. “Right. No problem, Oscar.”

Oscar and Ms. Willis went downstairs and through the lobby. Dutch party music echoed down the entrance loggia. “Sure is a nice hotel,” Willis remarked.

“Thanks. Maybe you’d like to check in for the weekend.”

“On my salary? I can’t afford a classy place like this.”

“If you’re discreet about this little incident, ma’am, I’ll treat you and any guest of your choice to a three-day stay with full room service.”

“Gee, that’s a mighty generous offer. This Gretel person must really mean a lot to you.” Willis led him down the paved walkway and into the street. A limo-sized white ambulance waited under the pines, with its lights on and the driver’s door open. Willis waved cheerily at the driver, who waved back in evident relief.

“She’s lyin’ in the back, on a stretcher,” Willis said. “It’s a pretty bad break. You want some good advice, compadre? From now on, don’t make your dang girlfriends sneak around in the dark.”

“I’m sure that’s good advice,” Oscar said. He stood up on the bumper and gazed into the ambulance. Greta was lying on a canvas stretcher in a metal rack, with her hands behind her head.

Willis slapped her hands against Oscar’s rump and gave him a hefty shove. Oscar stumbled into the ambulance, and Willis immedi-ately slammed the double doors. The vehicle went as black as a tomb.

“Hey!” Oscar blurted.

The vehicle left the curb and racketed away with a jounce of hydraulics.

“Greta,” he said. No response. He crawled in darkness to her side, reached out. His questing hand landed somewhere on her rib cage. She was unconscious. But she was alive; she was breathing.

Oscar quickly produced his telephone. He was grimly unsur-prised to see it fail to register a signal. But there was enough feeble glow from the dial face for him to painstakingly scope out his sur-roundings. He brought the faint glow of the phone to her face. She was out cold — and for good measure, they’d glued a membrane strip of adhesive over her mouth. Her hands were cuffed with thin plastic police straps. There was, of course, nothing wrong with her ankle.

The back of the vehicle resembled an ambulance, but only at first glance. It had some battered secondhand stretcher gear, but there was no life-support equipment. It was windowless. To judge by the way it took corners, the phony ambulance was sheathed in solid metal like a bank vault. They’d lured him into an armored thermos bottle, corked him up, and driven away.

By phone light, with his fingernails, he slowly peeled the gag from her mouth. He gave her silent lips a healing kiss. There was no heating inside the evil little vault. Greta felt chilled. He climbed onto the stretcher with her and embraced her. He held her tightly, pressing warmth into her body. He was appalled to discover how much he cared for her. She was so human. So far beyond his help.

They’d been disappeared. It was as simple as that. They had made a little too much trouble for someone, and they had exhausted the patience of some deeply evil player. Now they were heading for an assassin’s graveyard. They were going to be tortured, humiliated, and buried with bullets in the backs of their heads. They would be gassed, rendered, and cremated. Vile and hideous people would replay the videotapes of their secret and lingering deaths.

Oscar rose from the stretcher. He lay on his back on the floor, and began stamping on the forward bulkhead. He industriously kicked his way through paint, a layer of porous plastic, and hit a wall of solid iron. The perambulating coffin now began producing a series of drumlike booms. This was progress. Oscar continued to kick, and with more enthusiasm.

A speaker crackled to life somewhere in the rear of the compart-ment. “Would you knock it off with the noise, please?”

“What’s in it for me?” Oscar said.

“You really don’t want us to get tough, compadre,” the speaker said. It was Willis. “You know, just ’cause you can’t see us, doesn’t mean we can’t see you. We can see every dang move you make back there. And frankly, I wish you wouldn’t feel up the merchandise while she’s unconscious. It’s kinda disgusting.”

“You think that I’m helpless back here — but I still have options. I could choke her to death. I could say you’d done it.”

Willis laughed. “Jesus, would you listen to this character? Listen, vato — you try anything stupid, and we’ll just turn on the knockout gas. Would you take it easy back there, please? We’re not your problem. We’re not gonna do anything to you. We’re just your delivery service.”

“I’ve got a lot of money,” Oscar said. “I bet you’d like some.” There was no response.

He returned his attention to Greta. He searched her pockets, fmding nothing useful for chiseling through solid metal. He tried to ease her position. He put her feet up, chafed her bound wrists, massaged her temples.

After half an hour, she emitted a series of groans and woke up.

“I feel so dizzy,” she said hoarsely.

“I know.”

She stirred. Her wrists drew up short with a hiss of plastic strap.

“Oscar?”

“We’ve been kidnapped. It’s an abduction.”

“Oh. All right. I remember now.” Greta gathered her wits. “They told me you’d been hurt. That you needed to see me at your hotel. So when I left the dome, they just… grabbed me.”

“That’s my story too,” Oscar said. “They used us as bait for each other. I should have been more suspicious, I guess. But why? How on earth could we live like that? There’s no way to outguess something like this. An abduction is completely stupid. It’s such a weird gambit.”

“What are they going to do to us?” Greta said.

Oscar was briskly cheerful. He’d already worked himself through a black pit of terrified despondency, and was properly anxious that she not share this experience with him. “I can’t really tell you, because I don’t know who they are yet. But they haven’t really hurt us, so they must want something from us. They took a lot of trouble, with the disguise and the ambulance and so forth. This isn’t my usual crowd of assassin lunatics.” He lifted his voice. “Hey! Hello! Would you people care to tell us what you want from us?” There was no answer. This was much as he had expected.

“They can hear everything we say,” he told her. “We’re bugged, of course.”

“Well, can they see everything we do? It’s pitch-black in here.”

“Actually, they can. I think they have infrared cameras.”

Greta thought this over for some time. “I’m really thirsty,” she said finally.

“Sorry.”

“This is craziness,” she said. “They’re going to kill us, aren’t they? This is such a mess.”

“Greta, that’s just a speculation.”

“They’re taking us for a gangster ride. They’re going to bump us off. I’m going to die pretty soon.” She sighed. “I always wondered what I’d do, if I knew I was going to die.”

“Really?” Oscar said. “I never gave that issue much thought.”

“You didn’t?” She stirred. “How could you not think about that? It’s such an interesting question. I used to think I’d react like Evariste Galois. You know, the mathematician. I’d write down all my deepest speculations in my math notebook, and hope that somebody understood someday … See, if you think that problem through, there’s an obvious deduction. Death is universal, but knowing when you’ll die is a rare statistical privilege. So since you’ll probably never know, you should take a few hours out of some random day, and prepare your final testament beforehand. Right? That’s the rational conclusion, given the facts. I actually did that once — when I was eleven.” She drew a breath. “Unfortunately, I’ve never done it since.”

“That’s too bad.” He realized that Greta was utterly terrified.

She was babbling. His own fear had vanished completely. He was overwhelmed with protective instinct. He felt elated with it, half-drunk. He would do absolutely anything for the slightest chance to save her.

“But I’m not eleven anymore. Now I know what grown-ups do in this situation. It has nothing to do with big ideas. It really, really makes you want to have sex.”

This was a completely unexpected observation, but it landed on Oscar like a match on oil-soaked rags. It was so utterly and compel-lingly true that he couldn’t think of a thing to say. He felt dual rushes of fear and arousal strong enough to split his brain. His ears rang and his hands began itching.

“So,” she whispered hotly, “if I weren’t all tied up right now…”

“Actually,” he breathed, “I don’t mind that very much…”

The speaker crackled into life. “Okay. Just stop that right now. Knock it off with that. That’s really disgusting.”

“Hey!” a second, male voice objected. “Give ’em a break.”

“Are you crazy?” Willis objected.

“Girl, you never been a combat veteran. On the last night before you go out to get killed — hell yeah, you wanna get laid! You’ll hump anything in a skirt.”

“Ha!” Oscar shouted. “So you don’t like it? Come back’ here and stop us.”

“Don’t try me.”

“What can you do to us? We have nothing left to lose now. You know that we’re lovers. Sure, that’s our big dark secret, but we’ve got nothing to hide from you. You’re just voyeurs. You mean nothing to us. To hell with you. We can do whatever we want.”

Greta laughed. “I’ never thought of it that way,” she said giddily.

“But it’s so true. We’re not making them watch us. They have to watch us. ”

“Hell, I wanna watch ’em,” the male kidnapper said. “I like their attitude! I’ll even play ’em some music.” A radio snapped on, playing a lively Cajun two-step.

“Get your hands off that thing!” Willis commanded.

“Shut up! I can drive while I watch.”

“I’m gonna gas both of ’em.”

“What are you, crazy? Don’t do that. Hey!”

The ambulance veered wildly. There was a loud splattering of mud and the overloaded vehicle yawed and half spun. Oscar was flung from Greta’s side, and thrown bruisingly against the bulkhead. The vehicle ground to a halt.

“Now you’ve done it,” Willis said.

“Don’t get in a twist,” the man grumbled. “We’ll make it on time. ”

“Not if you just broke the axle, you horny moron.”

“Stop bitching, lemme think. I’ll check.” A door squealed open. “I broke my arm!” Oscar yelled. “I’m bleeding to death back here!”

“Would you stop being so goddamn clever?” Willis shouted. “Jesus Christ, you’re a pain! Why can’t you make this easy? It doesn’t have to be this hard! Just shut up and go to sleep.” There was an evil hiss of gas.

Oscar woke in darkness to a violent racket of tearing metal. He was lying on his back and there was something very heavy on his chest. He was hot and dizzy and his mouth tasted like powdered aluminum.

There was a vicious screech and a sullen pop. A diamond-sharp wedge of sunlight poured in upon him. He found that he was lying at the bottom of a monster coffin, with Greta sprawling on his chest. He squirmed, and shoved her legs aside with an effort that brought lanc-ing pain behind his eyeballs.

After a few clear breaths, Oscar grasped his situation. The two of them were still lying inside the ambulance. But the vehicle had tum-bled onto its side. He was now lying flat on one narrow wall. Greta was dangling above him, still handcuffed to the stretcher stanchions, which were now part of the roof.

There was more banging and scraping. Suddenly one of the back doors broke open, and fell flat against the earth.

A crew-cut young man in overalls looked in, a crowbar in one hand. “Hey,” he said. “You’re alive!”

“Yeah. Who are you?”

“Hey, nobody! I mean, uhm … Dewey.”

Oscar sat up. “What’s going on, Dewey?”

“I dunno, but you’re some lucky guy to be alive in there. What’s with this lady? Is she okay?”

Greta was dangling limply by her wrists with her head flung back and her eyes showing rims of white. “Help us,” Oscar said, and coughed. “Help us, Dewey. I can really make it worth your while.”

“Sure,” Dewey said. “I mean, whatever you say. C’mon out of there!”

Oscar crawled out of the back of the ambulance. Dewey caught his arm and helped him to his feet. Oscar felt a spasm of nauseated dizziness, but then his pumping heart jumped on a gout of adrenaline. The world became painfully clear.

The shattered ambulance was lying on a dirt road next to a swampy, sluggish river. It was early morning, chill and foggy.

The air stank of burned upholstery. The ambulance had taken a direct hit from some kind of explosive-maybe a mortar round. The concussion had blasted it entirely from the road, and it had tumbled onto its side in red Texas mud. The engine was a blackened mess of shredded metal and molten plastic. The cab had been sheared in half, revealing the thick, dented armor of the interior prison vault.

“What happened?” Oscar blurted.

Dewey shrugged, bright-eyed and cheery. “Hey, mister — you tell me! Somebody sure shot the hell out of somebody’s ass last night. I reckon that’s all I can say.” Dewey was very young, maybe seven-teen. He had a single-shot hunting rifle strapped across his back. An ancient, rusty pickup truck sat nearby, with Texas plates. It had a smashed motorcycle in the back.

“Is that your truck?” Oscar said.

“Yup!”

“Do you have a tool chest in there? Anything that can cut through handcuffs?”

“I got me a power saw. I got bolt cutters. I got a towing chain. Hey, back at the farm, my dad’s got welding equipment!”

“You’re a good man to know, Dewey. I wonder if I might bor-row your tools for a moment, and saw my friend loose.”

Dewey looked at him with puzzled concern. “You sure you’re okay, mister? Your ear’s bleeding pretty bad.”

Oscar coughed. “A little water. Water would be good.” Oscar touched his cheek, felt a viscous mass of clotted blood, and gazed down at the riverbank. It would feel lovely to wash his head in cold water. This was a brilliant idea. It was totally necessary, it was his new top priority.

He stumbled through thick brown reeds, sinking ankle-deep in cold mud. He found a clear patch in the algae-scummed water and bathed his head with his cupped hands. Blood cascaded from his hair. He had a large, gashed bruise above his right ear, which announced itself with a searing pang and a series of sickening throbs. He risked a few mouthfuls of the river water, crouching there doubled over, until the shock passed. Then he stood up.

Twenty meters away, he spotted another wreck, bobbing slowly in the river. Oscar took it for a half-submerged tanker truck at first, and then realized, to his profound astonishment, that it was a midget submarine. The black craft had been peppered from stern to bow with thumb-sized machine-gun holes. It was beached in the mud in a spreading rainbow scum of oil.

Oscar clambered back up the riverbank, spattered with mud to his kneecaps. On his way to the ambulance he noted that the cab’s windshield had exploded, and that many of the fragments were liber-ally splashed with dried blood. There was no sign of anyone at all. The rain-damp dirt road was furiously torn with motorcycle tracks.

The muffled sound of Dewey’s power saw echoed from inside the smashed ambulance. Oscar trudged to the back and looked inside. Dewey had given up on his attempt to saw through the handcuffs, and was sawing through the slotted metal stanchion of the stretcher frame. He bent the metal frame and slipped the cuffs through.

Oscar helped him carry Greta into daylight. Her hands were blue with constriction and her wrists were badly skinned, but her breathing was still strong.

She had been gassed unconscious — twice — and had lived through a car wreck and a firefight. Then she’d been abandoned in a locked and armored vault. Greta needed a hospital. Some nice safe hospital. A hospital would be an excellent idea for both of them.

“Dewey, how far is it to Buna from here?”

“Buna? About thirty miles as the crow flies,” Dewey allowed.

“I’ll give you three hundred dollars if you’ll take us to Buna right now.”

Dewey thought about the offer. It didn’t take him long. “Y’all hop on in,” he said.

Oscar’s phone couldn’t find a proper relay station this far from Buna. They stopped at a grocery in the tiny hamlet of Calvary, Texas, where he bought some first-aid supplies and tried a local pay phone. He couldn’t get through to the lab. He couldn’t even reach the hotel in Buna. He was able to restore Greta to consciousness with a cautious application of temple rubbing and canned soda, but she was headachy and nauseous. She had to lie still and groan, and the only place avail-able for lying down was the back of Dewey’s truck, next to the sal-vaged wreck of a motorcycle.

Oscar waited in anguished silence as the miles rolled by. He had never much liked the lurking somnolence of the East Texas landscape. Pines, marsh, creeks, more pines, more marsh, another creek; nothing had ever happened here, nothing would ever be allowed to happen here. But something important had finally happened. Now its piney hick tedium crackled with silent menace.

Four miles from Buna they encountered a lunatic in a rusted rental car. He raced past them at high speed. The car then screeched to a halt, did a U-turn, and rapidly pulled up behind them, honking furiously.

Dewey, who had been chewing steadily on a rocklike stalk of sugarcane, paused to spit yellow flinders through his wind vent. “You know this guy?” he said.

“Does that gun work?” Oscar countered.

“Heck, yeah, my rifle works, but I ain’t shooting anybody for no three hundred dollars.”

Their pursuer stuck his head out the window of his car and waved. It was Kevin Hamilton.

“Pull over,” Oscar said at once, “he’s one of mine.”

Oscar left the truck. He checked briefly on Greta, who was dou-bled over in the truckbed, racked with car sickness. He then joined Kevin, who had thrown his door open and was beckoning wildly.

“Don’t go into Buna!” Kevin yelled as he drew near. “It’s hit the fan.”

“It’s good to see you, too, Kevin. Can you help me with Greta? Let’s get her into the backseat of the car. She’s all shaken up.”

“Right,” Kevin said. He gazed at the truck. Dewey had just decamped from the driver’s seat, carrying his rifle under his arm. Kevin reached below his own seat and pulled out an enormous chromed revolver.

“Cool it!” Oscar told him. “The kid’s on the payroll.” He stared at the handgun in alarm. He had never suspected Kevin of possessing such a thing. Handguns were extremely illegal, and a source of endless trouble.

Kevin hid his gun without another word, then limped out of the car. They helped Greta out of the truck, across the dirt, and into the backseat of Kevin’s ratty, ill-smelling rental car. Dewey stood beside his truck, chomping sugarcane and waiting patiently.

“What’s with the handgun, Kevin? We’ve got problems enough without that.”

“I’m on the lam,” Kevin told him. “There’s a counter-coup at the lab — they’re trying to put us all away. I’m not staying there to get busted, thank you. I had a lifetime’s worth of encounters with the properly constituted authorities.”

“All right, forget the handgun. Do you have any money?”

“As a matter of fact, yeah. Lots. I kinda took the liberty of clean-ing out the hotel till this morning.”

“Good. Can you give this kid three hundred dollars? I promised it to him …”

“Okeydoke.” Kevin reached behind the driver’s seat and pro-duced a well-stuffed Yankee carpetbag. He looked at Greta, who was stirring on the backseat in a futile search for comfort. “Where are your shoes, Dr. Penninger?”

“They’re in the truck,” she groaned. She was very pale.

“Let me take care of this,” Kevin said. “You two just aren’t your usual suave selves.” Kevin limped back to the pickup truck, had a few cordial words with Dewey, and presented him with a horse-choking wad of flimsy American currency. Kevin then returned with Greta’s shoes, started the car, and drove away from Buna. They left Dewey standing on the weed-strewn roadside, thumbing through his cash with an unbelieving grin.

As he drove, Kevin examined a cheap Chinese navigation screen, which was stuck to the cracked dashboard with a black suction cup. Then he ceremoniously rolled down his driver’s window and carefully flung both of Greta’s shoes out of the car and onto the side of the road. “I guess it’s time for me to explain how I found you,” Kevin said. “I bugged your shoes, Dr. Penninger.”

Oscar digested this information, then looked at his own feet.

“Did you bug my shoes too?”

“Well, yeah, but just short-range trackers. Not the full-audio bugs like hers.”

“You put listening devices into my shoes?” Greta croaked.

“Yeah. Nothing to it. And I wasn’t the only guy on the job, either. Your shoes had six other bugs planted inside the heels and seams. Very nice devices too — I figured them to be planted by players a lot heavier than I am. I could have removed them all, but I fig-ured … hey, this many? There must be some kind of gentlemen’s agreement going on here. I’ll do better if I just stand in line.”

“I can’t believe you’d do that to me,” Greta said. “We’re sup-posed to be on the same side.”

“You talking to me?” Kevin said, eyes narrowing. “I’m his body-guard. Nobody ever said I was your bodyguard. You ever pay me a salary? Did you ever talk to me, even? You don’t even live in my universe.”

“Relax, Kevin,” Oscar said. He flipped down a windshield visor, examined the cracked mirror, and brushed cautiously at a huge crust of blood in his hair. “It was good of you to show so much enterprise under these difficult circumstances. It’s been a rough day for the forces of reason. However, our options are multiplying now. Thanks to you, we’re regaining the tactical initiative.”

Kevin sighed. “It’s incredible that you can still spout that crap, even with your head knocked in. You know what? We’re in terrible shape, but I feel good, out on the road like this. It’s homey. You know? I’ve spent so much of my life dodging cops in beat-up cars. The old fugitive game … I guess it’s got its drawbacks, but it sure beats having them know your home address.”

“Tell me what’s been going on at the lab,” Oscar said.

“Well, it didn’t take me long to figure out you’d been kid-napped, what with my hotel security videos, and the fact that your phones didn’t answer, and the bugs in the doctor’s shoes. So I get up from my laptop screen, and I check my real-life windows. Sheriff’s department on the prowl outside, three AM. Not healthy … Time for Scenario B, discreet planned withdrawal.”

“So you robbed the hotel and ran away?” Greta said, raising her head.

“He was accumulating capital while enhancing his freedom of action,” Oscar pointed out.

“That was my best move under the circumstances,” Kevin said mournfully. “Because what I just saw — that was a leadership decapita-tion. It’s a classic cointelpro thing. A tribe that’s making big trouble-they’ve gotta have a charismatic leader. If you’re a sensible, modern cop, you don’t want to butcher a crowd in the streets — that’s old-fashioned, it looks bad. So you just target the big cheese. You knock that lead guy out, smear him somehow… Child abuse is a pretty good rap, satanic rituals maybe… Any kind of ugly-paint that’ll stick a little while and really stink… and in a pinch, you just steal him. So then, when all the second-rankers are wondering where King Bee went, that’s when you round ’em up. After that, even if Mr. Wonderful comes back, their big momentum’s over. They just give up and scatter.”

“They wouldn’t do that to us, though,” Greta said. “We’re not a mob, we’re scientists.”

Kevin laughed. “The word’s out already about you two! You’re a major scandal. You eloped together last night, and oh, by the way, while you were doing that, you somehow cleaned out the lab’s trea-sury. Terrible embarrassment for all your friends. While your krewes and your Strike Committee are scratching their heads, the Col-laboratory cops are gonna round everybody up. Because there’s no denying that story they planted. Because you’re not around to deny it. ”

“Well, I’m denying it now!” Greta said, wrenching herself up with her cuffed hands. “I’ll go back there and take them all on face-to-face.”

“ Softly, softly,” Oscar said. “When the timing’s right.”

“So, there I was, in a bad corner,” Kevin said. “I was thinking — who has the gall and the muscle to kidnap two famous people like that? And then spread all this killer disinformation about them…”

“Huey,” Oscar said.

“Who else? So now, it’s little me versus Green Huey, right? And who’s gonna help me against Huey? The lab’s cops? They’re all Huey’s people from way back. Buna city cops? Forget it, they’re way too dumb. Texas Rangers maybe? The Rangers are very scary people, but they wouldn’t believe me, I’m not Texan. So then I thought of Senator Bambakias — he’s an okay guy, I guess, and at least he’s a real sworn-in Senator now, but he’s somewhat insane at the moment. So, I’m ready to cash in my chips and head for sunny Mexico. But then, just before I go, I think — what the hell, what have I got to lose? I’ll call the President.”

“The President of the United States?” Greta said.

“Yeah, him. So that’s what I did.”

Oscar considered this fact. “When was this decision made?”

“I called the White House this morning at four AM.”

Oscar nodded. “Hmmm. I see.”

“Don’t tell me that you actually talked to the President,” Greta said.

“Of course I didn’t talk to the President! The President’s not awake at four AM! I can tell you who’s up at four AM, at the White House national security desk. It’s this brand-new, young, military aide from Colorado. He’s a fresh new transition-team guy. It’s his very first day on the job. He’s working the graveyard shift. He’s kinda twitchy. Nothing important has ever happened to him before. He’s not real streetwise. And he’s not that hard a guy to reach, either — especially if you call him on twenty or thirty phones, all at once.”

“And what did you tell the President’s new national security aide?” Oscar prompted gently.

Kevin examined his navigation console and took a left turn into the deeper woods. “Well, I told him that the Governor of Louisiana had just kidnapped the Director of a federal laboratory. I kinda had to spice up my story to hold his interest — Huey’s gang was holding her hostage, there were French secret agents involved, you know, that sort of thing. I chucked in some juicy details. Luckily, this guy was very up to speed on the Louisiana air base problem. Real aware of the Louisi-ana military radar hole, and all that. See, this guy’s a lieutenant colo-nel, and he happens to come from Colorado Springs, where they have this very massive Air Force Academy. Seems there is, like, extremely irritated Air Force sentiment in Colorado. They hate Huey’s guts for making the Air Force look like weak sisters.”

“So this colonel believed your story?” Oscar said.

“Hell, I dunno. But he told me he was gonna check his satellite surveillance records, and if they backed up my story, he was gonna wake up the President.”

“Amazing,” Greta said, impressed despite herself “They’d have never woken up the old guy for a thing like that.”

Oscar said nothing. He was trying to imagine the likely conse-quences if the President’s national security team pressed their panic buttons at four AM, on the very first day on the job. What weird entities might leap from the crannies of the American military-entertainment complex? There were so many possibilities: America’s aging imperial repertoire of delta forces, swats, seals, high-orbital, antiterrorist, rapid-deployment, pep-pill-gobbling, macho super-goons… Not that these strange people would ever be used, in modern political reality. The military killer elite were creatures of a long-vanished era, strictly ceremonial entities. They would jog around the subterranean secret bases doing their leg lifts and push-ups, reading bad historical techno thriller novels, watching their lives and careers slowly rust away…

At least, that had always been the implicit understanding. But understandings could change. And after his night’s experience, he found himself inhabiting a different world.

“Unless I miss my guess,” Oscar said, “our kidnappers had a rendezvous at the Sabine River last night. They were planning to smuggle us across the state line, to hand us over to some crowd of Huey’s militia. But they were jumped in the dark, by some kind of night-flying U.S. tiger team. Airborne armed commandos of some kind, who surprised Huey’s people on the ground last night, and ab-solutely shot them to pieces.”

“Why on earth would they do such a thing?” Greta said, shocked. “They should have used nonlethal force and arrested them.”

“Airborne commandos aren’t policemen. They’re genuine spe-cial-forces fanatics, who still use real guns! And when they spotted that French spy submarine in the water, they must have lost their tempers. I mean, imagine their reaction. If you’re a heavily armed U.S. black-helicopter ace, and you see a secret submarine sneaking up an American river… well, once you’ve pulled the trigger, you can’t strafe a thing like that just once.”

Greta’s brows knitted. “Did you really see a submarine, Oscar?”

“Oh yes. I can’t swear that it was French, but it sure wasn’t one of ours. Americans don’t build cute, efficient little submarines. We prefer our submarines bigger than a city block. Besides, it all makes sense that way. The French have an aircraft carrier offshore. They’ve got drones flying over the bayous. The French invented the frogman-spy tradition… So of course it was a cute little French sub. Poor bastards. ”

“You know,” Kevin said thoughtfully, “normally, I’m very down on law-and-order issues, but I think I like this Two Feathers guy. The deal is — all you have to do is call him! They wake him up at four AM, and your problem is solved before dawn! This new President is a take-charge guy! The old guy would never have pulled a stunt like that. This is a real change of pace for America, isn’t it? It’s executive authority in action, that’s what it is! It’s like — he’s the Chief Execu-tive, so he just executes ’em!”

“I don’t think that a shooting war between state and federal spooks is what the President had in mind for his first day in office,” Oscar said. “That’s not a healthy development for American democ-racy. ”

“Oh, get over it!” Kevin scoffed. “Kidnapping is terrorism! You can’t take a soft line with terrorists — there’s no end to that crap! The bastards got exactly what was coming to them! And that’s just what we need inside the Collaboratory, too. We need an iron hand with these scumbags…” Kevin scowled mightily, gripping the peeling wheel of the car in uncontrollable excitement. “Man, it chaps my ass to think of those crooked tinkertoy coppers in there, getting ready to bust up those eggheads. And here I am — me, Kevin Hamilton, thirty-two years old — a fugitive again, running scared. If I only had, like, twenty heavy-duty Irish Southies with some pool cues and table legs. There’s only twelve lousy cops in that whole laboratory. They haven’t been doing anything for ten years, except tapping phone lines and taking payoffs. We could beat those sons of bitches into bad health.”

“This is a new you we’re hearing from, Kevin,” Oscar observed.

“Man, I never knew that I could just talk to the President! Y’know, I’m a prole, and a hacker, and a phone phreak. I admit all that. But when you get to be my age, you just get sick of outsmarting them all the time! You get tired of having to dodge ’em, that’s all. How come I have to sneak around in the cracks in the floorboards? I tell you, Dr. Penninger — you let me run your security, you’d see some changes made.”

“Are you telling me that you want to be the lab’s security chief, Mr. Hamilton?”

“No, of course I’m not, but …” Kevin paused in surprise. “Well, yeah! Yeah, sure! I can do it! I’m up for the damn job! Give me the damned cop budget. Give me all the badges and the batons. Hell yeah, I can do anything you want. Make me the federal authorities.”

“Well,” she said, “I’m the lab’s Director, and I’m lying down in your backseat, wearing handcuffs. I don’t see anyone else volunteering to help me.”

“I could do it for you, Dr. Penninger, I swear I could. I could take that whole place over, if there were more than three of us. But as it is…” He shrugged. “Well, I guess we just drive around at ran-dom, makin’ phone calls.”

“I never drive without a goal,” Oscar told him.

“So, man, do you know where we’re going? Where is that?”

“Where’s the nearest big camp of Moderators?”