At 11:15, Oscar and Greta took a cab to Bambakias's office in Cam-bridge.

"You know something?" she told him. "This suit isn't as stiff as it looks. It's really very cozy."

"Donna's a true professional."

"And it fits me perfectly. How could it fit so well?"

"Oh, any smart surveillance scanner can derive body measure-ments. That was a military-intelligence app at first-it just took a while to work its way up to haute couture."

They sped across the Longfellow Bridge, over the Charles River basin. Yesterday's snow was already half gone to slush on the slopes of the Greenhouse dikes. Greta gazed out the taxi window at the distant pilings of the Science Park. Donna's hired girls had done the eye-brows. Sleek, arched eyebrows gave Greta's narrow face a cast of terri-fying intellectual potency. The hair had real shape to it now, and some not-to-be-trifled-with gloss. Greta radiated expertise. She really looked like she counted.

"Things are so different here in Boston," she said. "Why?"

"Politics," he said. "The ultra-rich run Boston. And Boston's rich people mean well-that's the difference. They have civic pride. They're patricians."

"Do you want the whole country to be like this? Clean streets and total surveillance?"

"I just want my country to function. I want a system that works. That's all."

"Even if it's very elitist and shrink-wrapped?"

"You're not the one to criticize there. You live in the ultimate gated community. It's even airtight."

The office of Alcott Bambakias was in a five-story building near Inman Square. The place had once been a candy factory, then a Por-tuguese social club; nowadays it belonged to Bambakias's international design and construction firm.

They left-the cab and entered the building. Oscar hung his hat and overcoat on a Duchampian bottle-rack tree. They waited for clearance in the first-floor reception area, which boasted six scale models of elegant Chinese skyscrapers. The Chinese were the last na-tion still fully alive to the rampant possibilities of skyscrapers, and Bambakias was one of the very few American architects who could design skyscrapers in a Chinese idiom. Bambakias had done extremely well for himself in the Chinese market. His reputation in Europe was similarly stellar, long preceding his rather grudging fame at home in America. He'd done swooping Italian sports arenas, stolid German dike complexes, a paranoid Swiss eco-survivalist compound. . . . He had even done a few Dutch commissions, before the Cold War had made that impossible.

Leon Sosik arrived to escort them. Sosik was a portly man in his sixties with prizefighter's shoulders, red suspenders, a silk tie. Sosik rarely wore a hat, since he proudly sported a fine head of hair--successfully treated male pattern baldness. He looked Oscar up and down. "How are tricks, Oscar?"

"Tricks are lovely. May I introduce Dr. Greta Penninger. Dr. Penninger, this is Leon Sosik, the Senator's chief of staff."

"We've heard so much about you, Doctor," said Sosik, gently gripping Greta's newly manicured fingertips. "I wish we were meet-ing under better circumstances."

"How is the Senator?" Oscar said.

"Al has been better," Sosik said. "Al is taking this hard. Al is taking this very hard."

"Well, he's eating, isn't he?"

"Not so you'd notice."

Oscar was alarmed. "Look, you announced he was eating. The hunger strike is over now. The guy should be wolfing raw horsemeat. Why the hell isn't he eating?"

"He says his stomach aches. He says . . . well, he says a lot of things. I gotta warn you, you can't take everything Al says as gospel right now." Sosik sighed heavily. "Maybe you can talk some sense into him. His wife says you're great at that." Sosik reached absently into his trouser pocket.

"Dr. Penninger, do you mind if I debug you? Normally we'd have our new security guy doing this, but he's still in Washington. "

"That's quite all right," Greta said.

Sosik swept the air around her body like a weary bishop sprin-kling holy water. His device registered nothing in particular.

"Debug me too," Oscar said. "I insist."

"It's a hell of a thing," Sosik said, pursuing the ritual. "We've had Al bugged top to bottom for weeks. His nervous system's bugged, his bloodstream's bugged, his stomach is bugged, his colon is bugged. He did public MRI scans, he did PET-scans, he drank tagged apple juice-the inside of his carcass was a goddamn public circus. And when we finally got him off all the monitors, that's when he goes haywire."

"The hunger strike got great coverage, Leon. I'm giving you that." Sosik put tile scanner away. "Sure, but what is it with that crazy scumbag in Louisiana? How the hell did that ever get on the agenda? Al is an architect! We could have stuck with public-works issues, and done just fine."

"You let him talk you into the idea," Oscar said.

"I knew it was a goofy idea! It's just ... Well, for Al it made sense. Al's the kind of guy who can get away with that kind of thing." Sosik led them up a glass-and-plastic elevator. Bambakias had caused the former fifth floor to cease to exist, leaving a cavernous contemporary hangar with exposed water pipes, airducts, and elevator cabling, all tastefully done-over in tangerine, turquoise, peach, and Prussian blue. Thirty-five people lived within the offices, Bambakias's profes-sional krewe. It was both a communal residence and a design center. Sosik led them past ergonomic office chairs, platelike kevlar display tables, and twitching heaps of cybernetic Archiblocks. It was cold out-side, so squishy little rivulets of tame steam warmed the bubbled membranes underfoot. A corner office had been outfitted as a combination media room and medical center. The health monitors were inert now, and lined against a wall, but the screens were alive and silent, flicking methodi-cally over their feeds.

The Senator was lying naked and facedown on a massage table, with a towel across his rump. A krewe masseur was working at his neck and shoulders.

Oscar was shocked. He'd known that the near-total hunger strike had cost Bambakias a lot of weight, but he hadn't realized what that meant to human flesh. Bambakias seemed to have aged ten years. He was wearing his skin like a jumpsuit.

"Good to see you, Oscar," Bambakias said.

"May I introduce Dr. Penninger," Oscar said.

"Not another doctor," the Senator groaned.

"Dr. Penninger is a federal science researcher."

"Oh, of course." Bambakias sat up in bed, vaguely adjusting his towel. His hand was like a damp clump of sticks. "That's enough, Jackson. . . . Bring my friends a couple of . . . what have we got? Bring 'em some apple juice."

"We could use a good lunch," Oscar said. "I've promised Dr. Penninger some of your Boston chowder."

Bambakias blinked, his eyes sunken and rimmed with discolor.

"My chef's a little out of practice lately."

"Out of practice on the special chowder?" Oscar chided. "How can that be? Is he dead?"

Bambakias sighed. "Jackson, see to it that my fat campaign man-ager gets some goddanm chowder." Bambakias glanced down at his shrunken hands, studied their trembling with deep disinterest. "What were we talking about?"

"Dr. Penninger and I are here to discuss science policy."

"Of course. Then I'll get dressed." Bambakias tottered to his bony feet and fled the room, exiting through a sliding shoji screen. They heard him call out feebly for his image consultant.

A fluted curtain shriveled upward like an eyelid, revealing a lucid gush of winter sunlight through the glass blocks. The corner office was a minor miracle of air and light; even half-empty, the space some-how felt complete and full.

A small furry robot entered the office with a pair of plastic pack-ets in its tubular arms. It placed the packets neatly on the carpet, and left. The abandoned packages writhed and heaved, with a muted in-ternal symphony of scrunches and springs. Geodesic sticks and cabling flashed like vector graphics beneath the translucent upholstery. The packets suddenly became a pair of armchairs.

Greta opened her new, executive-style purse and touched a tissue to her nose. "You know, the air is very nice in here."

Bambakias returned in gray silk trousers and undershirt, shad-owed by a silent young woman, her arms laden with shoes, shirt, and suspenders.

"Where's my hat?" he demanded querulously. "Where's my cape?"

"These are very interesting chairs," Greta told him. "Tell me about these chairs."

"Oh, these chairs of mine never caught on," Bambakias said, jamming one scrawny arm through the ruffled sleeve of his dress shirt. "For some reason, people just don't trust computation enough to sit on it."

"I trust computation," Greta assured him, and sat. The internal spokes and cables adjusted beneath her weight, with a rapid crescendo of tiny guitar-string shrieks. She settled daintily in midair, a queen on a tensile throne of smart chopsticks and spiderweb. Oscar admired responsive tensegrity structures as much as the next man, but he sat in the second chair with considerably less brio.

"An architect gets the credit for design successes," Bambakias told her.

"The failures you can cover with ivy. But weird decor schemes that just don't work out-well, those you have to keep inside the office." A silent group of krewepeople removed the massage table and replaced it with a folding hospital bed. The Senator sat on the bed's edge, pulling up his gaunt bare feet like a giant seabird.

"I noticed another set of these armchairs on the way in," Greta said. "But they were solid."

"Not 'solid.' Rigid. Spray-on veneer."

" 'Less is more,' " Greta said.

A spark of interest lit the Senator's sagging face as his dresser saw to his shoes and socks. "What did you say your name was?"

"Greta," she told him gently.

"And you're, what, you're a psychiatrist?"

"That's close. I'm a neuroscientist."

"That's right. You already told me that, didn't you." Greta turned and gave Oscar a look full of grave comprehension and pity: Since her makeover, Greta's expressions had a new and shocking clarity-her flickering glance struck Oscar to the heart and lodged like a harpoon.

Oscar leaned forward on his thrumming piano-wire seat, and knotted his hands. "Alcott, Lorena tells me you're a little upset by developments."

" 'Upset'?" Bambakias said, lifting his chin as the dresser tucked in his ascot. "I wouldn't say 'upset.' I would say 'realistic.' "

"Well . . . realism is a matter of opinion."

"I've triggered a state and federal crisis. Four hundred and twelve million dollars' worth of military hardware has been looted by anar-chist bandits and has vanished into the swamps. It's the worst event of its kind since Fort Sumter in 1861; what's there to be upset about?"

"But, Al, that was never your intention. You can't be blamed for those developments."

"But I was there," Bambakias insisted. "I was with those people. Yeah . .

. I talked to all of them, I gave them my word of honor. . . . I have the tapes to prove it! Let's run through all the evidence just one more time. We should see this together. Where's my sysadmin? Where's Edgar?"

"Edgar's in Washington," the dresser told him quietly. The Senator's hollow face tightened drastically. "Do I have to do everything myself?"

"I followed the siege situation," Oscar said. "I'm very up to speed on developments."

"But I was there!" Bambakias insisted. "I could have helped. I could have built barricades. I could have brought in generators. . . . But when that gas hit them, they lost their minds. That's when it all really hit me. This wasn't a game at all. It was no game. We weren't players. We'd all gone mad." There was an evil silence.

"He spent a lot of time on the net with those Air Force people," the dresser told them meekly. "He really was almost there with them. Practically." Suddenly her eyes brimmed with tears. ''I'll find his hat," she said, and left with her head hung low.

A lunch trolley arrived, set for two. The chowder was served. Oscar moved his featherweight responsive chair and flicked a linen napkin ostentatiously. "This is not a defeat, Al. It's just a skir-mish. There's still plenty of space on the old go board. A Senate term lasts six years."

"A lot of good that does them. They're in camps now! Can you believe that our government is that cynical? They've left our soldiers in the hands of the man who gassed them!" Bambakias waved a hand at the flickering screen behind him.. "I've been watching him spin this. Huey. As if he'd rescued them. The son of a bitch is their public savior!"

"Well, it was a very ugly incident, but at least there were no fatalities. We can put that behind us now. Tomorrow's another day." Oscar lifted his gleaming soup spoon and creamed off a layer of chow-der. He sipped it pretentiously. It was, as always, superb.

"Hold on," he told Greta, who had made no move to eat. "This isn't right." He sat up. "What's with your chef, Alcott? Canned chowder ?" Bambakias scowled. "What?"

"This is not your special chowder."

"Of course it is. Has to be."

"Try it," Oscar insisted.

Greta nodded permission, unneeded since the Senator had lunged from his bed and grabbed at her spoon. He sampled the bowl.

"Kind of a coppery undertaste," Oscar alleged, squinting. Bambakias had two more spoonfuls. "Nonsense," he growled. "It's delicious."

The two of them ate rapidly, in rabid silence. "I'll find another chair," Greta murmured. She rose and left the room.

Bambakias settled into Greta's vacated chair and crunched half a handful of oyster crackers. His dresser arrived again, and set the Sena-tor's hat and cape nearby. Bambakias ignored her, bending over his bowl with a painful effort. His hands were badly palsied; he could barely grip his spoon.

"I could sure do with a milk shake right now," Oscar mused. "You know, like we used to have on the campaign."

"Good idea," Bambakias said absently. He lifted his chin, ges-tured with two fingertips, and spoke into apparently empty air. "Vince; two campaign power milk shakes."

"Did Sosik show you the latest polls, Al? You've done a lot better by this episode than you seem to think."

"No, that's where you are both totally wrong. I've ruined every-thing. I provoked a major crisis before I was even sworn into office. And now that I'm a stinking criminal just like the rest of them, I'll have no choice-from now on I'll have to play the game just the way they like it. And the Senate is a sucker's game."

"Why do you say that?" Oscar said.

Bambakias swallowed painfully and raised one bony finger.

"There are sixteen political parties in this country. You can't govern with a political culture that fragmented. And the parties are just the graphic interface for the real chaos underneath. Our education system has collapsed. Our health system is so bad that we have organ-sharing cliques. We're in a State of Emergency."

"You're not telling me anything new here," Oscar chided. He leaned over and stared enviously into Barnbakias's chowder. "Are you going to finish that?"

Bambakias hunched over his bowl with a wolfish glare.

"Okay, no problem." Oscar raised his voice to address the hid-den microphones. "Vincent, hurry up with those shakes! Bring us more chowder. Bring dinner rolls."

"I don't want any damn dinner rolls," Bambakias muttered. His eyes were watering and his face was flushed. "Our wealth disparities are insane," he mumbled into his soup. "We have a closed currency and a shattered economy. We have major weather disasters. Toxic pol-lution. Plunging birth rates. Soaring death rates. It's bad. It's really bad. It's totally hopeless, it's all over."

"Vincent, bring us something serious. Quick. Bring us teriyaki. Bring us some dim sum."

"What are you rambling on about?" Bambakias said.

"Alcott, you're embarrassing me. I promised Dr. Penninger some good food here, and you've gone and eaten her lunch!"

Bambakias stared at the dregs of chowder. "Oh my God ... "