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Presidential campaigns had their own calendar: a series of special days, sprinkled throughout the year, determined by certain arcane astrological formulae. Chief among these was Election Day itself, which was the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Another such occasion was Labor Day, which, to most people, marked the end of summer, but which to politicians marked the formal beginning of the presidential campaign - a complete 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 to a 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 on Labor Day and were informed, by solemn anchorpersons, that Tip McLane, the President, and William A. Cozzano had all kicked off their campaigns today.

The shortest point between a camera and a backdrop is a straight line passing through the candidate's head. Who these three candidates were, and how they would run their campaigns, could be 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 renew America.

Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane stood in a lettuce field in California where he and his parents had once stooped at menial labor; behind him rose a mountain vista. This backdrop told the viewing public that 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 Richmond kicked off their independent campaign on the runway of a municipal airport south of Seattle. This was a fairly complicated bit of 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 vast Boeing airplane factory; brand-new 767s were lined up on the apron, each tail fin freshly and brightly painted in the color scheme of a different airline somewhere around the world. Finally, in the deep background, Mount Rainier heaved itself up out of a low, dark line of foothills. It was so vast that it looked like a telephoto lens shot, even through a normal lens, and when the cameramen enhanced it with their telephotos (as none of them could resist doing) it looked like a giant ice-covered asteroid looming over the shoulders of William A. Cozzano and Eleanor Richmond.

Boeing had nothing to do with the Cozzano campaign, of course, or so they said. This whole event was being held on municipal property. The presence of a Boeing facility next door was 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-kickoff address, a new 767, painted with the logo of Japan Airlines, taxied on to the runway. Its tail fin momentarily came between Cozzano and the glaciated slopes of Rainier, then narrowed into a vertical blade as the plane turned onto the runway, revealing the mountain, illuminated by a peach-colored sunrise. The icy clarity of Rainier was muddled by the heat waves rising from the jet's engines. Then those engines glowed bluish-white, the plane accelerated down the runway, directly toward Rainier, shot into the air, banked into a climbing 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 a dim cacophony of whacking noises from the directions of California and of Flint, Michigan, as Cozzano's competitors and their 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 West Virginia. He was not much more than a hundred miles outside of Washington D.C., and yet the location could scarcely have been more remote.

He had been camping out here for a couple of days, just lying low for a time, watching Cozzano on his wristwatch TV-cum-brain-control device, tossing the occasional lure into the stream that ran past his little campsite, draining cans of beer and then shooting 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 backstop for shooting. He had brought two cases of inexpensive beer with him, 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 and over 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 up for a few hours and so the peach-coloured light on the slopes of Rainier looked strange and faky. Vishniak was sure that the lumbering jetliner and the ice-covered volcano looked great on the kind 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 cobbled together by the evil gnomes of Ogle Data Research, who had their secret headquarters just a short distance away, in the mysterious place called Pentagon Towers. What counted was words. So when Cozzano stepped up to the microphones to make the formal campaign kickoff speech, Vishniak emptied his Fleischacker into a hapless beer can, set the safety, put the gun into the shoulder holster under his QUAD CITIES WHIPLASH windbreaker, and sat down 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 his pocket. 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 30 BIKE 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 those hats. They were all saying now that the homburg was some kind of a Fashion Statement, but William A. Cozzano had never felt any need to make such statements until he had gotten that chip stuck into 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 the political 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, to the subject of the economy, at which point Vishniak finally started to pay attention. The economy was the only thing that mattered to him.

"There are those who say that we are doomed to be a secondrate power, subjugated to the Japanese," Cozzano said, just as the big Boeing jet was beginning its takeoff run. Vishniak clenched his teeth and became enraged, as he always did when people said this kind of thing.

"To those people," Cozzano continued, "I have only one thing to say: BEHOLD!" He turned aside and swept out one arm toward the jet, then watched it take off. To shout above the scream of its turbofans would have been futile, would have made him look tiny by comparison. As Vishniak watched the miniature figure of the jet take off on his little screen, saw it bank into its turn, exposing the Rising Sun logo painted on its tail fin, his anger was replaced by a surge of defiant pride. Sure the economic situation looked bleak, but a country that could make airplanes like that could accomplish anything 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 think that 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 same as he did, that his feelings weren't just stupid, blind patriotism. But he was a jittery and suspicious fellow by nature and could not be satisfied with this kind of happy talk for long.

"Now, I would be lying if I stopped there, and left you with the impression that happy talk is going to close the trade deficit," Cozzano said. "Uplifting speeches and slick media images do not an economy make. What we need is to educate our children. But not just to cram their heads with facts and figures - to teach them values as 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 about politicians who always spouted this easy talk about education. Education was great but it wouldn't really help the economy for another twenty years. And it wouldn't help the likes of Floyd Wayne 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. An unemployed, down-and-out factory worker in the Midwest can benefit 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 of Cozzano's speech (Cozzano had now gone on to talk about the need for corporate America to shape up and restructure itself).

Vishniak held the Dick Tracy watch up to his eye and scrutinized the 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 had been noticed and remarked upon by all the papers that Vishniak had been reading over the summer: Cozzano, who in years past had written his own speeches and read them back, hewing closely to a fixed 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 reading Vishniak's brain waves and telling him exactly what he wanted to hear! 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 facing upward, to expose the little button that would release the ratchet and pop the watch off his wrist. All he had to do was take it off and then he would be a free man again, and William A. Cozzano would no longer be able to read his brain waves. He had been wearing it continuously for a couple of weeks, and underneath it his skin was itching fiercely. But he couldn't take it off, no matter what. He had to trust his instincts. He knew that they were watching him and that to remove the wristwatch meant certain death, a nice dose of shellfish 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 to contemplate possible approach vectors to the seat of all evil in the world.