“You really think so?” Oscar said, surprised. “You know, I’m so close to it I can’t really judge anymore.”
A bicycle messenger stopped them. “I’ve got a packet delivery for a Mr. Hamilton.”
“You want that guy in the wheelchair,” Oscar said.
The messenger examined his handheld satellite readout. “Oh yeah. Right. Thanks.” He pedaled off.
“Well, you were never his chief of staff,” Pelicanos said.
“Yeah, that’s true. That’s a comfort.” Oscar watched as the bike messenger engaged in the transaction with his security chief. Kevin signed for two shrink-wrapped bundles. He examined the return addresses and began talking into his head-mounted mouthpiece.
“You know that he eats out of those packages?” Pelicanos said. “Big white sticks of stuff, like straw and chalk. He chews ’em all the time. He kind of grazes.”
“At least he eats,” Oscar said. His phone rang. He plucked it from his sleeve and answered it. “Hello?”
There was a distant, acid-scratched voice. “It’s me, Kevin, over.”
Oscar turned and confronted Kevin, who was rolling along in his chair ten strides behind them. “Yes, Kevin? What’s on your mind?”
“I think we have a situation coming. Somebody just pulled a fire alarm inside the Collaboratory, over.”
“Is that a problem?”
Oscar watched Kevin’s mouth move. Kevin’s voice arrived at his ear a good ten seconds later. “Well, this is a sealed, airtight dome. The locals get pretty serious about fires inside here, over.”
Oscar examined the towering gridwork overhead. It was a blue and lucid winter afternoon. “I don’t see any smoke. Kevin, what’s wrong with your telephone?”
“Traffic analysis countermeasures—I routed this call around the world about eight times, over.”
“But we’re only ten meters apart. Why don’t you just roll up over here and do some face-time with me?”
“We need to cool it, Oscar. Stop looking at me, and just go on walking. Don’t look now, but there are cops tailing us. A cab in front and a cab behind, and I think they have shotgun mikes. Over.”
Oscar turned and threw a companionable arm over Pelicanos’s shoulder, urging him along. There were, in point of fact, some laboratory cops within sight. Normally the cops employed their “Buna National Collaboratory Security Authority” trucks, macho vehicles with comic-opera official seals on the doors, but these officers had commandeered a pair of the Collaboratory’s little phone-dispatched cabs. The cops were trying to be inconspicuous.
“Kevin says the cops are tailing us,” Oscar told Pelicanos.
“Delighted to hear it,” Pelicanos said mildly. “There were three attempts on your life in here. You must be the most excitement that these local cops have had in years.”
“He also says there’s been a fire alarm.”
“How would he know that?”
A bright yellow fire truck emerged from the bowels of the Occupational Safety building. It set its lights flashing, opened up with a klaxon blare, and headed south, off the ring road.
Oscar felt an odd skin-creeping feeling, then a violent huff of atmospheric pressure. An invisible door slammed shut in his head. The Collaboratory had just fully sealed its airlocks. The entire massive structure had gone tight as a drum.
“Jesus, it is a fire!” Pelicanos said. Acting on instinct, he turned and began jogging after the fire truck.
Oscar thought it more sensible to stay with his bodyguard. He tucked his phone in his sleeve and walked over to join Kevin.
“So, Kevin, what’s in those delivery packets?”
“Heavy-duty sunblock,” Kevin lied, yawning to clear his ears. “It’s an Anglo thing.”
Oscar and Kevin left the ring road, heading south past the Computation Center. Their police escorts were still dutifully trailing them, but the little cabs were soon lost in a curious pedestrian crowd emerging from their buildings.
The fire truck stopped outside the Collaboratory’s media center. This building was the site of Greta’s public board meeting. Oscar’s carefully drummed-up capacity crowd was pouring from the exits, loudly milling in confusion.
A fistfight had broken out on the steps at the eastern exit. A gray-haired man with a bloody nose was cowering under the metal handrails, and a young tough with a cowboy hat and shorts was struggling to kick him. Four men were grappling reluctantly at the young man’s arms and shoulders, trying to restrain him.
Kevin stopped his wheelchair. Oscar waited at Kevin’s elbow and examined his watch. If all had gone as planned—which it clearly hadn’t—then Greta should have finished her speech by now. He looked up again to see the cowboy lose his hat. To his deep astonishment he recognized the assailant as his krewe gofer, Norman-the-Intern.
“Come with me, Kevin. Nothing that we want to see here.” Oscar turned hastily on his heel and walked back the way he’d come. He glanced over his shoulder, once. His police escort had abandoned him. They had dashed forward with gusto, and were busy arresting young Norman.
__________
Oscar waited until he received official notification from the police about Norman’s arrest. He then went to police headquarters, in the east central side of the dome. The Collaboratory’s police HQ was part of a squat fortress complex, housing the fire department, the power generators, the phone service, and the internal water supply.
Oscar was quite familiar with the internal routines of the local police headquarters, since he’d visited three of his would-be assailants in custody there. He presented himself to the desk officer. He was informed that young Norman had been charged with battery and disturbing the peace.
Norman was wearing orange coveralls and a wrist cuff. Norman looked surprisingly spiffy in his spotless prison gear—he was rather better dressed than most Collaboratory personnel. The cuff was a locked-on shatterproof bracelet studded with tiny mikes and surveillance lenses.
“You should have brought a lawyer,” Norman said from behind the cardboard briefing table. “They never turn off this cuff unless there’s attorney-client privilege.”
“I know that,” Oscar said. He opened his laptop and set it on the table.
“I never knew how awful this was,” Norman mourned, rubbing at his monster cuff. “I mean, I used to see guys on parole wearing these things, and I’d always wonder, you know, what’s with this evil scumbag…But now that I’ve got one myself…They’re really demeaning.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Oscar said blandly. He began typing.
“I knew this kid at school once who got into trouble, and I used to hear him spoofing his cuff…You know, he’d sit there in math class muttering ‘crime drugs robbery murder assault…’ Because the cops run voice recognition scans. That’s how these cuffs surveil you. We thought he was totally nuts. But now I get why he did that.”
Oscar turned his laptop screen to face Norman, showing a dimly legible set of 36-point capitals. WE’LL KEEP UP THE SMALL TALK AND I’LL LEVEL WITH YOU ON THIS.
“You don’t have to worry about the local law enforcement people. We can talk freely here,” Oscar said aloud. “That device is meant for your own protection as well as the safety of others.” JUST KEEP YOUR ARM DOWN IN YOUR LAP SO THE CAMERAS CAN’T READ THIS SCREEN. He erased the screen with a keystroke.
“Am I in big trouble, Oscar?”
“Yes you are.” NO YOU’RE NOT. “Just tell me what happened.” TELL ME WHAT YOU TOLD THE POLICE.
“Well, she was giving one heck of a speech,” Norman said. “I mean, you could barely hear her at first, she was so nervous, but once the crowd started yelling, she really got pretty worked up. Everybody got really excited…Look, Oscar, when the cops arrested me, I lost my head. I told them a lot. Pretty much everything. I’m sorry.”
“Really,” Oscar said.
“Yeah, like, I told them why you sent me there. Because we knew from the profiles who was likely to make trouble, and that it would probably be th
is guy Skopelitis. So that’s who I was casing. I was sitting right behind him in the fifth row…So every time he got all ready to stand up and really give it to her, I ran a preemption. I asked him to explain a term for me, I got him to take off his hat, I asked him where the rest room was…”
“All perfectly legal behavior,” Oscar said.
“Finally he screamed at me to shut up.”
“Did you stop conversing with Dr. Skopelitis when you were asked to stop?”
“Well, I started eating my bag of potato chips. Nice and crunchy.” Norman smiled wanly. “He sort of lost his head then, he was trying to find cues in his laptop. And I was shoulder-surfing him, and you know, he had a whole list of prepared statements there. He went in there loaded. But she was really tearing through her material by then, and they were applauding, and cheering, even…lots of major laugh lines. They couldn’t believe how funny she was. He finally jumped up and yelled something totally stupid about how dare she this, and how dare she that, and the place just went ape. They just shouted him down. So he walked out of the meeting in a major huff. And I followed him.”
“Why did you do that?”
“Mostly just to distract him some more. I was really enjoying myself.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, I’m a college student, and he’s just like this professor I had once, a guy I really couldn’t stand. I just wanted him to know that I had his number. But once he was outside the briefing room, he took off running. So then I knew he was up to something bad. So I followed him, and I saw him trip a fire alarm.”
Oscar removed his hat and set it on the table. “You say you actually witnessed this?”
“Heck yeah! So I had it out with him. I ran up to him and I said, ‘Look, Skopelitis, you can’t pull a dirty stunt like that! It’s not professional.’”
“And?”
“And he denied it to my face. I said, ‘Look, I saw you do it.’ He panics and takes off. I run after him. People are pouring into the halls because of the fire alarm. It gets really exciting. I’m trying to apprehend him. We get into a fight. I’m a lot stronger than him, so I punch his lights out. I’m running down the hall after him, jumping down the steps, he’s got a bloody nose, people are yelling at us to stop. I pretty much lost my temper.”
Oscar sighed. “Norman, you’re fired.”
Norman nodded sadly. “I am?”
“That’s not acceptable behavior, Norman. The people in my krewe are political operatives. You’re not a vigilante. You can’t beat people up.”
“What was I supposed to do, then?”
“You should have informed the police that you saw Dr. Skopelitis committing a crime.” HE’S FINISHED! GOOD WORK! TOO BAD I HAVE TO FIRE YOU NOW.
“You’re really going to fire me, Oscar?”
“Yes, Norman, you are fired. I’ll go to the clinic, I’ll apologize to Dr. Skopelitis personally. I hope I can persuade him to dismiss the charges against you. Then I’m sending you home to Cambridge.”
__________
Oscar went to visit Skopelitis in the Collaboratory clinic. He brought flowers: a lushly symbolic bouquet of yellow carnations and lettuce. Skopelitis had a private room, and with Oscar’s sudden arrival, he had hastily returned to his bed. He had a black eye and his nose was heavily bandaged.
“I hope you’re not taking this too badly, Dr. Skopelitis. Let me ring the nurse for a vase.”
“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Skopelitis said nasally.
“Oh, but I insist,” Oscar said. He went through the agonizing ritual, shuttling the nurse in, accepting her compliments on the flowers, small-talking about water and sunshine, carefully judging the patient’s growing discomfort. This shaded into open horror as Skopelitis glimpsed Kevin in his wheelchair, stationed outside in the hall.
“Is there anything we can do to assist in your convalescence? A little light reading matter, maybe?”
“Stop it,” Skopelitis said. “Stop being so polite, I can’t stand it.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Look, I know exactly why you’re here. Let’s cut to the chase. You want me to get the kid off. Right? He assaulted me. Well, I’ll do that on one condition: he has to stop telling those lies about me.”
“What lies are those?”
“Look, don’t play your games with me. I know the score. You had your dirty tricks team in there. You set up that whole thing from the very beginning, you wrote that speech for her, those slanders against the Senator, you planned it all. You waltzed into my lab with your big campaign machine, muckraking all the tired old stories, trying to wreck people’s careers, trying to destroy people’s lives…You make me sick! So I’m giving you one chance, straight across: you shut him up, and I’ll drop the charges. That’s my best offer. So take it or leave it.”
“Oh dear,” Oscar said. “I’m afraid you’ve been misinformed. We don’t want the charges dropped. We intend to contest them in court.”
“What?”
“You’re going to twist in the wind for weeks. We’re going to have a show-trial here. We’re going to squeeze the truth out of you under oath, drop, by drop, by drop. You have no bargaining position with me. You’re sunk. You can’t pull a stunt like that on an impulse! You left DNA traces on the switch. You left your fingerprints on it. There’s an embedded vidcam inside the thing! Didn’t Huey warn you that the lab’s alarms are bugged?”
“Huey has nothing to do with this.”
“I could have guessed that. He wanted you to disrupt the speech, he didn’t want you to fly totally off the handle and send the whole population into the streets. This is a science lab, not a ninja academy. You dropped your pants like a circus clown.”
Skopelitis had gone a light shade of green. “I want a lawyer.”
“Then get one. But you’re not talking to a cop here. You’re just having a friendly bedside chat with a U.S. Senate staffer. Of course, once you’re questioned by the U.S. Senate, you’ll surely need a lawyer then. A very expensive lawyer. Conspiracy, obstruction of justice…it’ll be juicy.”
“It was just a false alarm! A false alarm. They happen all the time.”
“You’ve been reading too many sabotage manuals. Proles can get away with urban netwar, because they don’t mind doing jail time. Proles have nothing much to lose—but you do. You came in there to shout her down and cover your own ass, but you lost your temper and destroyed your own career. You just lost twenty years of work in the blink of an eye. And you’ve got the nerve to dictate terms to me? You dumb bastard, I’m gonna crucify you. You just pulled the bonehead move of your life. I’m going to make you a public laughingstock, from sea to shining sea.”
“Look. Don’t do that.”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t do that to me. Don’t ruin me. Please. He broke my nose, okay? He broke my nose! Look, I lost my head.” Skopelitis wiped tears from his blackened eye. “She never acted like that before, she’s turned on us, it was like she’d gone crazy! I had to do something, it was just…it just…” He broke into sobs. “Jesus…”
“Well, I can see I’m distressing you,” Oscar said, rising. “I’ve enjoyed our little confab, but time presses. I’ll be on my way.”
“Look, you just can’t do this to me! I only did one little thing.”
“Listen.” Oscar sat back down and pointed. “You’ve got a laptop there. You want off the hook? Write me some mail. Tell me all about it. Tell me every little thing. Just between the two of us, privately. And if you’re straight with me…well, what the hell. He did break your nose. I apologize for that. That was very wrong.”
__________
Oscar was studying the minutes from the latest Senate Science Committee meeting when Kevin walked into the room.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” Kevin said, yawning.
“No, not particularly.”
“I’m kind of gathering that.” Kevin dropped his cane and sat down in a sling chair. Oscar had a rather spartan room at
the hotel. He was forced to move daily for security reasons, and besides, the best suites were all taken by paying customers.
Oscar shut his laptop. It was quite an intriguing report—a federal lab in Davis, California, was sorely infested with hyperintelligent lab mice, provoking a lawsuit-slinging panic from the outraged locals—but he found Kevin very worthwhile.
“So,” Kevin said, “what happens next?”
“What do you think happens next, Kevin?”
“Well,” Kevin said, “that would be cheating. Because I’ve seen this sort of thing before.”
“You don’t say.”
“Yeah. Here’s the situation. You’ve got a group of people here who are about to all lose their jobs. So you’re gonna organize them and fight back politically. You’ll get a lot of excitement and solidarity for about six weeks, and then they’ll all get fired. They’ll shut the whole place down and lock the gates in your face. Then you’ll all turn into proles.”
“You really think so?”
“Well, maybe not. Maybe basic research scientists are somehow smarter than computer programmers, or stock traders, or assembly-line workers, or traditional farmers…You know, all those other people who lost their professions and got pushed off the edge of the earth. But that’s what everybody always thinks in these situations. ‘Yeah, their jobs are obsolete now, but people will always need us.’”
Oscar drummed his fingers on his laptop. “It’s good of you to take such a lively interest, Kevin. I appreciate your input. Believe it or not, what you’re saying isn’t exactly news to me. I’m very aware that huge numbers of people have been forced out of the conventional economy and become organized network mobs. I mean, they don’t vote, so they rarely command my professional attention, but over the years they’re getting better and better at ruining life for the rest of us.”
“Oscar, the proles are ‘the rest of us.’ It’s people like you who aren’t ‘the rest of us.’”
“I’ve never been the rest of anybody,” Oscar said. “Even people like me are never people like me. You want a coffee?”
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