"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 peo-ple. 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 key-stroke.

"Am I in big trouble, Oscar?"

"Yes you are." NO YOU'RE NOT. "Just tell me what hap-pened." 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 this 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 fol-lowed 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 profes-sional.' "

"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 appre-hend 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. Skope-litis 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 flow-ers, small-talking about water and sunshine, carefully judging the pa-tient'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, try-ing 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 jus-tice . . . 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 Com-mittee 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?"

"Okay."

Oscar poured two cups. Kevin reached companionably into his back pocket and pulled out a square white baton of compressed vege-table protein. "Have a chew?"

"Sure." Oscar gnawed thoughtfully on a snapped-off chunk. It tasted like carrots and foam.

"You know," Oscar ruminated, "I have my share of prejudices--who doesn't, really?-but I've never had it in for proles, per se. I'm just tired of living in a society permanently broken into fragments. I've always hoped and planned for federal, democratic, national reform. So we can have a system with a decent role for everyone."

"But the economy's out of control. Money just doesn't need human beings anymore. Most of us only get in the way."

"Well, money isn't everything, but just try living without it." Kevin shrugged. "People lived before money was invented. Money's not a law of nature. Money's a medium. You can live without money, if you replace it with the right kind of computation. The proles know that. They've tried a million weird stunts to get by, road-blocks, shakedowns, smuggling, scrap metal, road shows. . . . Heaven knows they never had much to work with. But the proles are almost there now. You know how reputation servers work, right?"

"Of course I know about them, but I also know they don't really work."

"I used to live off reputation servers. Let's say you're in the Reg-ulators-they're a mob that's very big around here. You show up at a Regulator camp with a trust rep in the high nineties, people will make it their business to look after you. Because they know for a fact that you're a good guy to have around. You're polite, you don't rob stuff, they can trust you with their kids, their cars, whatever they got. You're a certifiable good neighbor. You always pitch in. You always do people favors. You never sell out the gang. It's a network gift econ-omy."

"It's gangster socialism. It's a nutty scheme, it's unrealistic. And it's fragile. You can always bribe people to boost your ratings, and then money breaks into your little pie-in-the-sky setup. Then you're right back where you started."

"It can work all right. The problem is that the organized-crime feds are on to the proles, so they netwar their systems and deliberately break them down. They prefer the proles chaotic, because they're a threat to the status quo. Living without money is just not the Ameri-can way. But most of Africa lives outside the money economy now--they're all eating leaf protein out of Dutch machines. Polynesia is like that now. In Europe they've got guaranteed annual incomes, they've got zero-work people in their Parliaments. Gift networks have always been big in Japan. Russians still think property is theft-those poor guys could never make a money economy work. So if it's so impracti-cal, then how come everybody else is doing it? With Green Huey in power, they've finally got a whole American state."

"Green Huey is a pocket Stalin. He's a personality cultist."

"I agree he's a son of a bitch, but he's a giant son of a bitch. His state government runs Regulator servers now. And they didn't over-run that air base by any accident. Huey's nomads really have what it takes now-no more of this penny-ante roadblock and wire-clipper nonsense. Now they've got U.S. Air Force equipment that's knocked over national governments. It's a silent coup in progress, pal. They're gonna eat the country right out from under you."

"Kevin, stop frightening me. I'm way ahead of you here. I know that the proles are a threat. I've known it since that May Day riot in Worcester, back in '42. Maybe you didn't care to notice that ugly business, but I have tapes of all that-I've watched it a hundred times. People in my own home state tore a bank apart with their hands. It was absolute madness. Craziest thing I ever saw."

Kevin munched his stick and swallowed. "I didn't have to tape it. I was there."

"You were?" Oscar leaned forward gently. "Who ordered all that?"

"Nobody. Nobody ever orders it. That was a fed bank, they were running cointelpro out of it. The word bubbled up from below, some heavy activists accreted, they wasp-swarmed the place. And once they'd trashed it, they all ducked and scattered. You'd never find any 'orders,' or anyone responsible. You'd never even find the software. That thing is a major-league hit-server. It's so far underground that it doesn't need eyes anymore."

"Why did you do that, Kevin? Why would you risk doing a crazy thing like that?"

"I did it for the trust ratings. And because, well, they stank." Kevin's eyes glittered. "Because the people who rule us are spooks, they lie and they cheat and they spy. The sons of bitches are rich, they're in power. They hold all the cards over us, but they still have to screw people over the sneaky way. They had it coming. I'd do it again, if my feet were a little better." Oscar felt himself trembling on the edge of revelation. This was almost making sense. Kevin had just outed himself, and the facts were finally falling into place. The situation was both a lot clearer and rather more dangerous than he had imagined.

Oscar knew now that he had been absolutely right to follow his instincts and hire this man. Kevin was the kind of political creature who was much safer inside the tent than outside it. There had to be some way to win him over, permanently. Something that mattered to him. "Tell me more about your feet, Kevin."

''I'm an Anglo. Funny things happen to Anglos nowadays." Kevin smiled wearily. "Especially when four cops with batons catch you screwing with traffic lights .... So now, I'm a dropout's dropout. I had to go straight, I couldn't keep up on the road. I got myself a crap security gig in a tony part of Beantown. I put most of the old life behind me .... Hey, I even voted once! I voted for Bambakias."

"That's extremely interesting. Why did you do that?"

"Because he builds houses for us, man! He builds 'em with his own hands and he never asks for a cent. And I'm not sorry I voted for him either, because you know, the man is for real! I know that he blew it, but that's for real-the whole country has blown it. He's rich, and an intellectual, and an art collector, and all that crap, but at least he's not a hypocrite like Huey. Huey claims he's the future of Amer-ica, but he cuts backroom deals with the Europeans."

"He sold out our country, didn't he?" Oscar nodded. "That's just too much to forgive."

"Yup. Just like the President."

" Now what? What's the problem with Two Feathers?"

"Actually, the President's not a bad guy in his own way. He's done some good refugee work out in the West. It's really different out there now; since the giant fires and relocations, they've got nomad posses taking over whole towns and counties. . . . But that doesn't cut much ice with me. Two Feathers is a Dutch agent."

Oscar smiled. "You lost me there. The President is a Dutch agent?"

"Yeah, the Dutch have been backing him for years. Dutch spooks are very big on disaffected ethnic groups. Anglos, Native Americans .... America's a big country. It's your basic divide-and--conquer hack."

"Look, we're not talking Geronimo here. The President is a bil-lionaire timber baron who was Governor of Colorado."