Neal Stephenson and  Frederick George :
                         
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Published in the United Kingdom in 2002 by Arrow Books

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Copyright � Stephen Bury 1994



Neal  Stephenson  and  Frederick  George have  asserted  their  right  under the
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                                    To Wilbur




PART 1

The State of the Union

                            1


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

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

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

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

Each  governor decorated  the office  in his  own way.  Only a  few things  were
immutable: the preposterous fresco on the ceiling, the massive doors with  brass
lions' heads mounted in their centers. His predecessor had gone in for a  spare,
classical nineteenth-century look, filling the  place up with antiques that  had
belonged to Lincoln and Douglas. This impressed visitors and looked nice for the
tour groups who came by every hour to launch flashcube barrages over the  velvet
rope. Cozzano had banned the tour  groups, slamming the doors in their  faces so
that all  they could  see was  the brass  lions, and  turned the  office into  a
cluttered Cozzano family museum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every Italian person  John Cozzano had  ever spoken to  for more than  about ten
minutes had spontaneously warned him of the danger of borrowing money from Jews.
He had accepted these warnings at face value until he overheard Anglo-Saxons  in
Tuscola  warning  each other,  in  exactly the  same  terms, of  the  dangers of
borrowing money from Italians. John borrowed the money and bought the house.  As
soon as he had cleaned all the junk out of the basement and taken care of a dire
flea infestation, he went back up to Chicago and proposed to Francesca.

He bought a ring from  Sam Meyer on credit and  they were married in Chicago  in
June  1934.  After a  short  honeymoon at  the  Grand Hotel  on  Mackinac Island
(photo), they moved into  the big house in  Tuscola. Within eleven months,  John
had repaid all of his    debts to Sam Meyer, and he discovered that, contrary to
legend, it was possible to carry  on a financial transaction with a  Jew without
forfeiting your shirt, or your immortal soul.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diploma from Tuscola High.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cozzano jogging around Camp David with Bill and Hilary Clinton.

An invitation to a White House dinner from the current President.

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

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

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

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

Cozzano reached for the remote control and turned it on to C-SPAN - he could not
abide  the network  anchors -  just in  time to  see the  cameras pan  over the
ritualistic standing ovation given  every president, no matter  how incompetent.
Continuing to thumb buttons on the remote, he caused a little window to open  up
in the corner of the screen, running the Comedy Channels' live coverage.

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

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

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

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

He proceeded to do  some ritual complaining about  the usual topics: the  budget
deficit and the national  debt. Just as predictably,  he blamed it on  the usual
suspects: gridlock in Congress,  the growth of entitlements,  the insurmountable
power of PACs, and,  of course, the need  to pay interest on  the national debt,
which  had  grown  to  something like  ten  trillion  dollars.  The only  mildly
interesting news coming out of the speech so far was that he intended to adopt a
Rose Garden strategy during the coming election year, staying at the White House
and doing battle with the two-headed  monster of the deficit and the  debt. This
was the only responsible  thing he could have  done; but Congress applauded  him
deliriously.

It was  all so  completely predictable,  so politics-as-usual,  that Cozzano was
lulled into a near coma, trapped between boredom and disgust. Which made it  all
the more shocking when the bombshell hit.

We must either cut  entitlements - the payments  made to our senior  citizens on
Social Security, and sick people on Medicare  and Medicaid - or we must cut  the
interest that  is paid  to the  national debt.  Now, granted,  we borrowed  that
money. We must pay it back if we  can. And we most certainly will make our  best
effort to pay it back. But not at the expense of the sick and the old.

(applause and cheers)

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

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

(applause)

Let us not forget that we owe this money to ourselves. Surely we can find it  in
our hearts to repent from our economic foolishness and to forgive ourselves  for
the mistakes that were made by ourselves and by our predecessors.

(applause)

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

(applause, cheers)

Tonight, in  the spirit  of Jefferson,  I call  for a  new social contract. I am
proposing to the Congress, and to the American people, the Declaration of Fiscal
Independence.

(applause)

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

(laughter)

But regardless of the details, the message is the same. Great sins demand  great
forgiveness. Let  us now  forgive ourselves,  so that  we may  go forth into the
brave  new  world  of the  third  millennium  with a  clean  slate  and a  clear
conscience.

(thunderous applause and cheers)

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

(ten-minute standing ovation)

It was an outrage, pure and simple.

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

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

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

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

across the paper, anticipating the pen's course. Nothing. The President spoke on
and on, stopping every few sentences to bask in adulation.

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

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

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

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

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

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


                            2


The State of the Union  was never a big  event in Cacher, Oklahoma.  Forty-eight
year-old Otis Simpson yawned and looked at the wall clock, just for the  record.
It was 02:46:12  Greenwich Mean Time.  He turned the  sound off. The  speech had
devolved into endless  waves of applause.  Commentators were beginning  to break
into  the  sound  track  in hushed,  solemn  tones,  stating  the obvious:  "the
President shaking hands with  congressional leaders as he  makes his way out  of
the room."  Soon the  analysts would  come on  and tell  Otis what  he had  just
watched, and Otis definitely didn't  need that. The only opinions  that mattered
would be coming in via fax and modem  during the next few hours. His job was  to
stay awake in the meantime. So he triggered the other monitor and began to  keep
one eye on an HBO flick, already in progress.

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

Otho Simpson,  eighty-six, had,  as was  his pattern,  gone to  bed at  00:00:00
Greenwich Mean Time. This time was as  good a bedtime as any other and  was easy
to remember. Otho and Otis lived belowground, in a former lead mine, and did not
pay much attention to  the diurnal cycle upstairs.  Their job was to  gather and
respond to information from all over the world, from all twenty-

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

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

In the last half century, especially after the death off his wife in 1948,  Otho
had rarely left  Cacher. Several times  a week he  would hobble on  to the lift,
ride it  several hundred  feet straight  up to  the surface  and go for a stroll
through the ruins of the town, taking in what passed for fresh air in Cacher and
feeling the sun  on his skin.  But he felt  most comfortable down  below, in the
subterranean  capsule that  was his  home, surrounded  by twenty  feet of  solid
reinforced concrete, breathing filtered air and drinking distilled water.

The capsule  had been  built during  the early  fifties by  a huge international
contractor called Maclntyre Engineering. It was built to exactly the same set of
specifications used for the control  capsules of Minuteman silos -  easy enough,
since  Maclntyre had  con�structed most  of those.  Any information  that could
conceivably influence the performance of  the economy - public and  proprietary,
open  and secret,  from hard  data to  vicious gossip  - was  funneled into  the
capsule over a variety of communications  links. Otho read every word of  it and
used it to manage the investments  of the Network. His life was  rather solitary
and he had not seen  a movie in a theater  since The Sound of Music,  but he did
not care; the honor of being the anonymous manager of a significant fraction  of
the assets  of what  used to  be called  the Free  World sufficed  to give him a
value-laden life.

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

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

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

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

"Daddy, the figures for yesterday are in."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Okay, Daddy."

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

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

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

"Investors?"

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

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

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

"Like Senator Wright?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

d.  Suggestions?

He then directed his system to send out the message in encrypted burst-mode  fax
transmissions. Beyond vague geographical indi�cations,  he did not know to  whom
the faxes would go.  When he had taken  control of the Network's  finances fifty
years ago,  it had  been stipulated  that all  communication would  be to  code
identified participants.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The United States of  America had severed its  purpose. It was time  to cash her
in.  Like a  big creaky  old corporation,  her individual  parts, intelligently
liquidated, were worth more than the whole. She still had the best damn military
money could buy, as the Iraqis had discovered during the Gulf War, and she still
came  up with  new ideas  better than  anyone. Under  new, fiscally  responsible
management, she could still perform well, pay her debts, and provide a tolerable
standard  of  living  for her  citizens.  Otho  needed to  make  sure  that that
management was provided by the Network and not by one of the other entities with
which the Network competed.

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

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

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

their little kitchen and  take the bottle of  vodka out of the  freezer. He knew
that he was doing  the right thing here,  that if he didn't  someone else would.
But it hurt.

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

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

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

"They were code words like honesty, hard work, self- reliance . myths, actually,
to  motivate the  people to  accept the  natural inequities  found in  a market
system. In the old days,  contract was sacred: divorce, bankruptcy,  fraud, were
taboos for  the average  people. The  rogues of  course, the  robber barons were
beyond that. We have to return the  country to those values so that there  won't
even be a thought to renege on the debt."

"Daddy . . ."

"Yes, boy?"

"How will you do it?"

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

"Daddy?"

"Yes, boy."

"Good night, Daddy."


                            3


"Look, it's not like this is some kind of a-" Aaron Green said. Then a  cautious
instinct took control and he brought  himself up short. He was looking  over the
epaulets of the  security guard at  a large red  sign on the  wall: DO NOT  MAKE
JOKES OR COMMENTS REGARDING WEAPONS OR EXPLOSIVE DEVISES.

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

Aaron followed the guard over to a  table, just beyond the picket line of  metal
detectors, still within the dreaded security zone. Beyond it lay the  concourse,
a pacifist Utopia  full of weaponless  citizens streaming in  an orderly fashion
toward their gates. In the overpriced bars and overpriced restaurants, business
suited travelers  stood, drinks  in hand,  below television  sets, watching  the
President deliver his State of the Union address.

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

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

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

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

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

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

With the lid of the case open,  the upper half of the faceplate was  visible. It
had no controls, knobs, or anything, just  a single red LED with the word  power
printed underneath it, and, in big letters, the Green Biophysical Systems  logo,
and the acronym IMIPREM.

The power cord was coiled  up in a separate niche  in the gray foam rubber.  Yet
another niche contained an item that  Aaron hoped they wouldn't notice: a  cuff.
Hard plastic  shell lined  with black  foam, for  comfort. He  wondered what the
guards would think of that.

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

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

"What does it do?"

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

"I need to see it work."

"What?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The old guard grinned and guided him to the table.

"Sir," Bristol said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Not at all."

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

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

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

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

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

"Huh?" Aaron said.

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

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

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

"Aaron Green."

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

"Exactly."

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

"Well..."

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

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

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

"Okay. Ready to roll," Aaron said.

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

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

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



BP        RESP        TEMP        PERSP      PULS

GSR        NEUR



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

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

"I'm an undercover agent for the  Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms,"  Cy
Ogle said, "You're under arrest for conspiracy to commit terrorist acts on board
an airliner. Don't move or you'll be shot!"

"What!?" Aaron screamed.

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

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

Blood pressure and just about everything else had suddenly shot way up. As  they
watched, and as Aaron calmed down, the bars subsided.

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

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

Ogle chuckled indulgently. "Looks like the President made a corker of a speech,"
he said. "Maybe we should hook you machine up to them."

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

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

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

"Big presentation," Ogle said.

Aaron heaved a sigh and nodded.

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

"Yeah."

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

"Yeah, that's about right."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What I get paid for," Ogle said.

"You work in the media industry?"

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

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

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

"Biorhythms?"

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

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

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

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

"That's a depressing image."

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

"Okay."

"Consequently you are starved for capital."

"Right!"

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

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

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

"Okay."

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

"Of course."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Well,  thank  you  for  that vote  of  confidence,"  Aaron  said, not  entirely
sarcastically.

The flight attendant came through. They each ordered another drink.

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

"Oh, no, not at all."

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

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

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

"In L.A.?"

"Yeah."

"With the big media moguls?"

"Yeah."

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

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

"Which doesn't mean that your company doesn't have a chance."

"It doesn't?"

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

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

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

"How so?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Not at all. Not with those people. Because you are selling to media people. And
media people are either thugs, morons,  or weasels. You haven't dealt very  much
with media people, have you?"

"Very little."

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

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

"Doesn't mater. Won't help. Because in the end, no matter how you explain it, it
comes down to  fine, subtle technicalities.  Media people don't  like that. They
like the  big,  fabulous  concept."  Ogle  pronounced  "fabulous"  with  a  mock
Hollywood gush.

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

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

"So I'm dead."

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

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

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

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

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

"What are you?"

"A scientist."

"And what is your field of study?"

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

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

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


                            4


Eleanor Boxwood Richmond heard the State of the Union address on the radio,  but
she didn't really listen  to it. She was  driving a borrowed car  down abandoned
streets in Eldorado Highlands, an aborted suburb ten miles north of Denver.  She
had borrowed the car from Doreen, who lived in the trailer next to hers, several
miles to the east, in the town of Commerce City.

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

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

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

Eleanor Richmond had not  seen her husband, Harmon,  in two days. For  the first
day, this had been more of a relief than anything else, because usually when she
did see him, he was half-reclined on their broken-backed sofa in front of the TV
set, drinking. From time to time he would go out and get a McJob, work at it for
a few days, quit or get fired, and then come back home. Harmon never lasted very
long at  McJobs because  he was  an engineer,  and flipping  burgers or  jerking
Slurpees grated on his nerves, just  as talking on the football phone  grated on
Eleanor's.

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

Eleanor and  Harmon Richmond  had purchased  their house  brand new,  before the
carpet was  even installed.  It was  early in  the Reagan administration. Harmon
worked  for a  medium-sized aerospace  firm that  sold avionics  to the  Defense
Department. Eleanor had just finished  raising their two children to  school age
and had reentered the workforce. She had  started out as a teller for a  bank in
Aurora and  been promoted  to customer  service representative  in fairly  short
order. Soon she would be branch manager. Eleanor's mother, a widow, had sold the
ancestral  town house  in Washington,  D.C.,  and  moved out  to a  fairly nice
retirement community a short distance away.

They were  doing pretty  well for  themselves. So,  when the  houses around them
remained empty,  for a  month, then  six months,  then a  year, and the value of
their house began to fall, they didn't get too worried about it. Everyone  makes
a  bum  investment  now  and then.  They  were  well  compensated, the  mortgage
pay�ments  weren't  that  bad,  and  they  could  easily  cover  their expenses,
including the monthly payment to Mother's retirement community.

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

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

They following year, the bank that Eleanor  worked for was bought out by a  huge
California bank  that  already had  millions  of branches  all  over the  area  
including one that  was directly across  the street from  the one where  Eleanor
worked. They closed her branch and she lost her job.

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

Volvo wagon that they had bought used, and a rather old Datsun that did not work
anymore and -was parked, permanently, in front of the trailer. Harmon had  taken
the Volvo with him when he disappeared, stranding Eleanor in the trailer.

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

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

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

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

The house shone tonight in the moonlight. The "White House." They had called  it
that partly because  it was white,  and partly because  moving into it  had made
them feel like they white people.

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

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

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

Someone named Harmon.

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

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

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

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

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

Not that she wasn't tempted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was no answer. He was probably dead drunk in the living room.

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

The door to the broom closet was  open, the tools spilled out on the  floor next
to it. A h