"We are talking Geronimo, Oscar. Take away America's money, and you've got a country of tribes."

Once the charges were dismissed against Norman-the-Intern, Oscar's krewe held a nice going-away party for him. It was very well attended. The hotel was crowded with Collaboratory supporters, who professed heartfelt admiration for Norman and deeply appreciated the free drinks and food.

"This is such a beautiful hotel," said Albert Gazzaniga. Greta's majordomo had arrived in the company of Warren Titche and Cyril Morello-two of the Collaboratory's permanently disaffected activists. Titche fought for perks and cafeteria fare like a radical wolverine, while Morello was the only man in the Human Resources Depart-ment who could be described as honest. Oscar was delighted to see the three of them spontaneously coalescing. It was a sure sign that trends were going his way. Gazzaniga was clutching a hurricane glass with a little paper par-asol.

"Great little restaurant here, too. I'd eat here every day if I didn't have to breathe all this filthy outside air."

"It's a shame about your allergy problems, Albert."

"We've all got allergies in there. But I just had a good idea-why don't you roof over a street between here and the dome?"

Oscar laughed. "Why settle for half measures? Let's roof over the whole damn town."

Gazzaniga squinted. "Are you serious? I can never tell when you're serious."

Norman tugged at Oscar's sleeve. His face was scarlet and his eyes were wet with sentimental tears. ''I'm leaving now, Oscar. I guess this is my last good-bye."

"What?" Oscar said. He took Norman's suit-jacketed elbow and steered him away from the crowd. "You have to stay after the party. We'll play some poker."

"So you can send me back to Boston with a nice cash present, and it won't have to show on the books?"

Oscar stared at him. "Kid, you're the first guy on my krewe who's ever said a word about that sad little habit of mine. You're a big boy now, okay?

You need to learn to be tactful."

"No I don't," said Norman, who was very drunk. "I can be as rude as I want, now that you've fired me."

Oscar patted Norman's back. "That was strictly for your own good. You pulled a major coup, so you're all used up now. From now on, they'd sandbag you every time."

"I just wanted to tell you, no hard feelings. I have no regrets about any of this. I really learned a lot about politics. Also, I got to punch out a professor, and I got away with it. Heck, that was worth it all by itself."

"You're a good kid, Norman. Good luck in engineering school. Try and take it a little easy with the X-ray laser gambit."

"I've got a car waiting," Norman said, shuffling from foot to foot. "My dad and mom will be real glad to see me .... It's okay that I'm leaving. I hate to go, but I know it's for the best. I just wanted to clear one last thing with you before I left. Because I never really leveled with you about the, uh . . . well, you know."

"The 'personal background problem,' " Oscar said.

"I never got used to that. Lord knows I tried. But I never got used to you. Nobody ever gets used to you. Not even your own krewepeople. You're just too weird, you're just a very, very weird guy. You think weird. You act weird. You don't even sleep. You're not exactly human." He sighed, and swayed a little where he stood. "But you know something? Things really happen around you, Oscar. You're a mover and shaker, you matter. The country needs you. Please don't let us down, man. Don't sell us out. People trust you, we trust you. I trust you, I trust your judgment. I'm young, and I need a real future. Fight the good fight for us. Please."

Oscar had time to examine the Director's outer office as Dr. Arno Felzian kept him waiting. Kevin passed the time feeding bits of protein to Stickley the binturong, who had just arrived from Boston by air shipment. Stickley wore a radio-tracking collar; his claws were clipped, his fangs were polished, and he was groomed and perfumed like a prize poodle. Stickley scarcely smelled at all now.

Someone-some kreweman of Senator Dougal's, presumably--had seen fit to decorate the Director's federal offices in high Texas drag. There were wall-mounted rifles, steer heads, lariats, cowhide seats, a host of shiny commemorative plaques.

Felzian's secretary announced him. Oscar hung his hat on a tow-ering antler rack inside the door. Felzian was sitting behind his inlaid oak-and-cedar desk, looking as unhappy as politeness would allow. The Director wore bifocal glasses. The metal-and-glass prosthetic gave Felzian a touchingly twentieth-century look. Felzian was a short, slen-der man in his sixties. He might have been bald and fat in a crueler century. Oscar shook the Director's hand and took a brindled leather chair. "Good to see you again, Dr. Felzian. I appreciate your taking the time to meet me today."

Felzian was wearily patient. "I'm sure that's quite all right."

"On behalf of Senator and Mrs. Alcott Bambakias, I want to present you with this laboratory specimen. You see, Mrs. Bambakias takes a lively personal interest in animal welfare issues. So she had this specimen thoroughly examined in Boston, and she discovered that he has an excellent bill of health. Mrs. Bambakias congratulates the Col-laboratory on its sound animal rights practices. She also grew very fond of the animal personally, so although she's returning him to you now, she's also sending along this personal contribution to help assure his future welfare." Felzian examined the document Oscar proffered. "Is that really a signed, paper bank check?"

"Mrs. Bambakias likes a traditional, personal touch," Oscar said. "She's very sentimental about her friend Stickley here." He smiled, and produced a camera. "I hope you don't mind if I take a few fare-well photos now, for her family scrapbook."

Felzian sighed. "Mr. Valparaiso, I know you didn't come here to dump a stray animal in my lap. Nobody ever returns our animals. Never. Basically, they're party favors. So if your Senator is returning a specimen to us, that can only mean he plans to do us real harm."

Oscar was surprised to hear Felzian speaking so grimly. Given that this was the Director's office, he'd naturally assumed that they were being taped. And bugged. Maybe Felzian had just given up on discretion. He accepted surveillance as a chronic disease-like smog, like asthma. "Not at all, sir!

Senator Bambakias is deeply impressed by this facility. He strongly supports the federal research effort. He plans to make science policy a mainstay of his legislative agenda."

"Then I can't understand what you're up to." Felzian reached into a desk drawer and removed a sheaf of printout. "Look at these resignations. These are veteran scientists! Their morale has been crushed, they're leaving us."

"That would be Moulin, Lambert, Dulac, and Dayan?"

"They're four of my very best people!"

"Yes, I agree that they're very bright and determined. Unfortu-nately, they're also Dougal loyalists."

"So that's it. So they're very much in your way?"

"Yes, certainly. But you know, they're not suffering by this. They're moving out well ahead of the curve. They've all been snapped up by offers from private industry."

Felzian leafed delicately through his papers. "How on earth do you arrange things like this? You've scattered them all over the coun-try. It's amazing."

"Thank you. It's a difficult project, but with modern techniques, it's doable. Let's just take Dr. Moulin, for instance. Her husband's from Vermont, and her son's in school there. Her specialty is endocri-nology. So, we input the relevant parameters, and the optimal result was a small genetics firm in Nashua. The firm wasn't eager to take her on a placement-service cold-call, but I had the Senator's office call them, and talk about their domestic competition in Louisiana. The company was very willing to see reason then. And so was Dr. Moulin, once we queried her on those eccentricities in her lab's expense ac-counts."

"So you deliberately targeted her for elimination."

"It's attrition. It's distraction. It looks perfectly natural. Those four are influential people, they're local opinion leaders. They're smart enough to create real trouble for us-if they had a mind to try it. But since they are, in fact, very smart people, we don't have to beat them over the head with the obvious. We just point out the reality of their situation, and we offer them a golden parachute. Then they see sense. And they leave."

"This is truly monstrous. You're ripping the heart and soul out of my facility, and nobody will know-nobody will even see it."

"No, sir, it's not monstrous. It's very humane. It's good poli-tics. "

"I can understand that you have the ability to do this. I don't understand why you think you have the right."

"Dr. Felzian ... it's not a question of rights. I'm a professional political operative. That's my job. Nobody ever elected people like me. We're not mentioned in the Constitution. We're not accountable to the public. But nobody can get elected without a campaign profes-sional. I admit it: we're an odd class of people. I agree with you, it's very peculiar that we somehow have so much power. But I didn't invent that situation. It's a modern fact of life."

"I see."

"I'm doing what this situation requires, that's all. I'm a Federal Democrat from the Reform Party Bloc, and this place needs serious reform. This lab requires a new broom. It's full of cobwebs, like, let me think . . . well, like that casino yacht in Lake Charles that was purchased out of the irrigation funds."

"I had nothing to do with that matter."

"I know you didn't, not personally. But you turned a blind eye to it, because Senator Dougal went to Congress every session, and he brought you back your bacon. I respect the effort that it takes to run this facility. But Senator Dougal was chair of the Senate Science Committee for sixteen years. You never dared to cross him. You're probably lucky you didn't-he'd have crushed you. But the guy didn't steal just a little bit-he ended up stealing truckloads, and the country just can't afford that anymore." Felzian leaned back in his chair. Oscar could see that he was beyond mere horror now-he was finding a peculiar gratification in all this. "Why are you telling me these things?"

"Because I know you're a decent man, Mr. Director. I know that this lab has been your life's work. You've been involved in some contretemps, but they were meant to protect your position, to protect this facility, under very trying conditions. I respect the efforts you've undertaken. I have no personal malice against you. But the fact of the matter is that you're no longer politically expedient. The time has come for you to do the decent thing."

"And what would that be, exactly?"

"Well, I have useful contacts in the University of Texas system. Let's say, a post in the Galveston Health Science Center. That's a nice town, Galveston-there's not a lot left to the island since the seas have risen, but they've rebuilt their famous Seawall and there's some lovely old housing there. I could show you some very nice brochures."

Felzian laughed. "You can't outplace every last one of us."

"No, but I don't have to. I only have to remove key opinion leaders, and the opposition will collapse. And if I can win your coop-eration, we can get this all over with in short order. With dignity, maintaining all the proprieties. That's in the best interests of the sci-ence community." Felzian crossed his arms triumphantly. "You're sweet-talking me like this because you don't really have anything on me."

"Why should I resort to threats? You're a reasonable man."

"You've got nothing! And I'm supposed to collaborate with you, resign my Directorship, and quietly fall on my sword? You've got a lot of nerve."

"But I'm telling you the truth."

"The only problem I see here is you. And your problem is that you can't do me any harm."

Oscar sighed. "Yes, I can, actually. I've read your lab reports."

"What are you talking about? I'm in administration! I haven't published a paper in ten years."

"Well, I've read your papers, Mr. Director. Of course, I'm not a trained geneticist, so, sad to say, I didn't understand them. But I did audit them. They all received full-scale, nitpicking scans from an op-positional research team. You published seventy-five papers in your scientific career, everyone of them jam-packed with numerical tables. Your numbers add up beautifully. Too beautifully, because six of them have the same sets of data."

"What do you mean by that?"

"I mean that someone got lazy at the lab bench, and skipped the boring gruntwork."

Felzian turned red. "What? You can't prove that."

"Unfortunately for you, yes, I can prove it. Because it's all there in black and white. Back in your publish-or-perish days, you were in a big hurry, you had to cut some corners. And that's bad. It's very bad. For a scientist, it's professionally fatal. Once we out you as a scientific fraud, you won't have a friend left to your name. Your colleagues will break your sword and tear off your epaulets."

Felzian said nothing.

Oscar shrugged. "As I said before, I'm not a scientist. I don't take scientific fraud with the lethal seriousness that you scientists do. Personally, I don't see how your fraud did any great harm, since no one was paying attention to those papers anyway. You were just a fair-to-middling talent in a very competitive field, trying to pad out your resume."

"I was completely unaware of this so-called problem. It must have been my grad students."

Oscar chuckled. "Look, we both know that can't get you off the hook. Sure, you can hide behind buck-passing when it comes to mere financial fraud. But this isn't mere money. These are your lab results, your contribution to science. You cooked the books. If I out you on that, we both know you're through. So why discuss this any further? Let's get to the real agenda."

"What is it you want from me?"

"I want you to resign, and I need your help in establishing the new Director."

"Greta Penninger."

"No," Oscar said at once, "we both know that's just not doable. Greta Penninger has been tactically useful to me, but I have another candidate that will be much more to your liking. In fact, he's an old colleague of yours-Professor John Feduccia, the former president of Boston University."

Felzian was astonished. "John Feduccia? How did he get onto the A-list?"

"Feduccia's the ideal candidate! He's very seasoned in adminis-tration, and he had an early career at the University of Texas, so that gives him the necessary local appeal. Plus, Feduccia is a personal friend of Senator Bambakias. Best of all, Feduccia is politically sound. He's a Federal Democrat."

Felzian stared at him in amazement. "Do you mean to tell me that you've been leading on poor Greta Penninger, while all this time you've been planning to bring in some Yankee who's a personal crony of your boss?" Oscar frowned. "Look, don't be uncharitable. Of course I ad-mire Greta Penninger. She was perfectly suited for the role that she's already played here. She's created a groundswell for change, but she can't possibly run this facility. She doesn't understand Washington. We need a responsible adult for that job, a seasoned hand from out-side, someone who understands political reality. Feduccia's a pro. Greta's naive, she's too easily swayed. She'd be a disaster."

"Actually, I think she might do very well."

"No, she'll do much better where she belongs-back behind her lab bench. We can ease her off the board now, and back to her proper role as a working researcher, and everything will fall neatly into place."

"So that you can continue having an affair with her, and nobody will bother to notice it."

Oscar said nothing.

"Whereas, if she became Director, she'd be right in the public spotlight. So your sordid little dalliance becomes impossible."

Oscar stirred in his seat. "I really didn't expect this of you. This is truly beneath you. It's not the act of a gentleman and scholar."

"You didn't think I knew anything about that business, did you? Well, I'm not quite the helpless buffoon that you take me for! Pen-ninger is the next Director. You and your scurvy krewe can sneak back to Washington. I'm leaving this office-no, not because you're forcing me out, but because I'm sick to death if this Job!"

Felzian banged his desk. "It's very bad here now. Since we lost our support in the Senate, it's impossible. It's a farce now, it's untena-ble! I'm washing my hands of you, and Washington, and everything that you stand for. And keep one thing in mind, young man. With Penninger in office here, if you out me, I can out you. You might embarrass me-even humiliate me. But if you ever try it, I'll out you and the new Director. I'll break you both in public, like a pair of matchsticks.' ,

8.

The abrupt departure of Dr. Felzian gave Oscar a vital window of opportunity. With the loss of his patron Bambakias, he had very little to fall back on. He had to seize the initiative. Their numbers were small, their re-sources narrow, their budget nonexistent. The order of the day was sheer audacity.

During Greta's first day as Director, her followers formed a Strike Committee and physically occupied the Hot Zone. Strikers commandeered the airlocks overnight, overriding all the police-installed safety locks and replacing them with brand-new strikers' pass-cards. Seizing the Hot Zone made excellent strategic sense, since the giant ce-ramic tower dominated the facility. The Hot Zone was a natural fortress.

Given this physical safe haven, the second order of business in Oscar's internal coup was to attack and seize the means of information. The Hot Zone's computers re-ceived a long-postponed security overhaul. This revealed an appalling number of police back doors, unregistered users, and whole forests of snooping crackerware. These freeloaders were all swiftly purged.

The lab's internal phone system was still under the control of the Collaboratory police. The lab's tiny corps of police were something of a comic-opera outfit, but they had been suborned by Huey long ago. They represented the greatest local threat to Greta's fledgling administration. The lab's phone system was rid-dled with taps, and beyond secure repair. So, the strikers simply abandoned the phone system entirely, and replaced it with a homemade network of dirt-cheap nomad cellphones. These semi-licit gizmos ran off relay stakes, hammered into walls, ceilings, roofs, and (in a particularly daring midnight ma-neuver) all across the underside of the dome.

Greta's first official act as Director was to abolish the Public Re-lations department. She accomplished this through the lethally effec-tive tactic of zeroing-out the PR budget. She then returned the funds to Congress. Given the ongoing federal budget crisis, this was a very difficult move to parry politically.

Within the lab itself, abolishing the PR department was a hugely popular decision. At long last, the tedious jabber of the obnoxious pop-science pep squad ceased to irritate the local populace. There was no more chummy propaganda from on high, no more elbow-grabbing official email, no more obligatory training videos, nothing but blissful quiet and time to think and work.

The Collaboratory's official PR was replaced by Oscar's revolu-tionary poster campaign. A Strike, of course, needed effective propa-ganda even more than did the dead Establishment, and Oscar was just the man to supply this. The giant cyclopean walls inside the dome were absolutely perfect for political poster work. Oscar had never run a campaign among people with such extremely high levels of literacy. He took real pleasure in the antique handicrafts involved.

Greta's postindustrial action was a highly unorthodox "strike," because the strikers were not refusing to do their work. They were refusing to do anything except their work. The general tenor of the Strike strategy was highly public noncooperation, combined with pas-sive-aggressive cost-cutting.

The scientists were continuing their investigations, but they were refusing to fill out the federal paperwork. They refused to ask for grants, refused to pay rent on their barracks rooms, refused to pay for their food, refused to pay their power bills. They were refusing every-thing except for new instrumentation, a deeply embedded vice that simply could not be denied to scientists.

All the Strike Committee's central members were also refusing their salaries. This was a deeply polarizing maneuver. Reasonable peo-ple simply couldn't bring themselves to hold their breath and leap into the unknown in this way. Most of the lab's "reasonable people" had long since made their peace with the Collaboratory's institutional cor-ruption. Therefore, they were all on the take. It followed that they were personally compromised, at war with themselves, riddled with guilt. Greta's stalwart core of dissidents were made of sterner stuff.

So, through this swift and unpredictable seizure of the tactical initiative, the Strike won a series of heartening little moral victories. Oscar had arranged this situation deliberately, in order to build com-munity self-confidence. The rent strike seemed very dramatic, but a rent strike was an unbeatable gambit. There was no internal competi-tion for the rents in the Collaboratory. If the strikers were somehow thrown out of their lodgings, the buildings would simply stay empty.

The power strike succeeded in a very similar way, because there was no effective method to shut off the electricity for nonpayment. By its very nature as a sealed environment, the Collaboratory dome al-ways required uninterrupted power, supplied by its own internal gen-erators. There simply wasn't any way to shut it off. It had never occurred to the original designers that the dome's inhabitants might someday rebel and refuse to pay. Each successful step away from the status quo won Greta more adherents. The long-oppressed scientists had always had many galling problems. But since they lacked a political awareness of their plight, they had never had any burning issues-they'd simply endured a bad scene. Now, organization and action had shattered their apathy. Aches and pains they'd long accepted as parts of the natural order were sear-ingly revealed to them as oppression by evil know-nothings. A new power structure was aborning, with new methods, new goals, brave new opportunities for change. The Hot Zone had become a beehive of militant activism.