"Do what?"

"Look at him, stupid! He's covered with hives!"

"Those aren't hives," Kevin corrected, staring at Oscar analyti-cally. "It's more like heat rash or something."

"What is this huge bloody lump on his head? You're supposed to be his bodyguard, you dumb bastard! You're killing him! He's only flesh and blood!"

"No he's not," Kevin said, wounded. His phone rang. He an-swered it.

"Yes?" He listened, and his face fell.

"That big stupid cop-dressing faker," Lana growled. "Oscar, what's wrong with you? Say something to me. Let me feel your pulse." She seized his wrist. "My God! Your skin's so hot!"

The front of Lana's dressing gown fell open. Oscar examined a semicircle of puckered brown nipple. The hair stood up on his neck. He suffered a sudden, violent, crazy surge of sexual arousal. He was out of control. "I need to lie down," he said.

Lana looked at him, biting her lip. Her doelike eyes brimmed with tears.

"Why can't they tell when you're coming apart? Poor Oscar! Nobody even cares."

"Maybe a little ice water," he muttered.

Lana found his hat and set it gently on his head. ''I'll get you out of here."

"Oscar!" Kevin shouted. "The south gate is open! The lab is being invaded! There are hundreds of nomads!"

Oscar responded instantly, with whip crack precision. "Are they Regulators or Moderators?" But the emerging words were gibberish. His tongue had suddenly swollen inside his head. His tongue was bloated and huge. It was as if his mouth had two tongues in it.

"What'll we do?" Kevin demanded.

"Just get away from him! Let him be!" Lana shrieked. "Some-body help me with him! He needs help."

Once checked into the Collaboratory clinic, Oscar got the reaction he always received from medical personnel: grave puzzlement and po-lite distress. He was exhibiting many symptoms of illness, but he couldn't be properly diagnosed, because his metabolism simply wasn't entirely human. His temperature was soaring, his heart was racing, his skin was erupting, his blood pressure was off the scale. Given his unique medical background, there was no obvious course of treat-ment.

Nevertheless, a proper head bandage, an ice pack, and a few hours of silence did him a lot of good. He finally drifted into a healing sleep. He woke at noon, feeling weary, sore, and shaken, but back in control. He sat up in his hospital bed, sipping tomato juice and exam-ining news on his laptop. Kevin had abandoned him. Lana had insisted that the rest of the krewe leave him alone.

At one o'clock Oscar had an impromptu gaggle of visitors. Four hairy, booted nomads burst into his private room. The first was Gen-eral Burningboy.

His

three.

young toughs looked impossibly sinister-war-painted, glowering, muscular.

The General had brought him a large bouquet. Holly, yellow daffodils, and mistletoe. The floral symbolism was painfully obvious.

"Howdy," said Burningboy, appropriating a vase and dumping its previous contents. "Heard you were feelin' poorly, so me and my boys dropped by to cheer you up."

Oscar gazed thoughtfully at the invaders. He was glad to see them. It improved his morale to be back on the job so quickly. "That's very good of you, General. Do have a seat."

Burningboy sat on the foot of the clinic bed, which squealed alarmingly under his weight. His three followers, ignoring the room's two chairs, crouched sullenly on the floor. The oldest one set his back firmly against the door.

"Not 'General.' Corporal. I'm Corporal Burningboy now."

"Why the demotion, Corporal?"

"Simple matter, really. I used up all my network trust and credi-bility when I ordered fifty girls into this facility. Those young women have fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters-boyfriends, even. I put those little darlings into harm's way, just on my own recognizance. And, well, that pretty much burned out all my credibility. Years of effort, right down the drain! Now, I'm just some little jasper."

Oscar nodded. "I take it this has something to do with reputa-tion servers and your nomad networks of trust."

"Yup. You got it."

"It seems absurd that you should be demoted, when your paramilitary operation was such a signal success."

"Well now ... " Burningboy squinted. "I might recoup some of my lost prestige-if it could be shown that we Moderators were der-ivin' some benfjit from all this risky activity."

"Aha."

"So far, we haven't gotten a dang thing outta any of this, except a sleepless night for the worried families of our valiant warriors."

"Corporal, you are right. I completely concur with your analysis. Your help was invaluable, and as yet, we've done nothing for you in return. I acknowledge that debt. I am a man of my word. You were there for us when we needed you. I want to see you happy, Corporal Burningboy. Just tell me what you want."

Burningboy, all beard-grizzled smiles, turned to one of his com-panions.

"Did you hear that? Beautiful speech, wasn't it? Didya get all that down on tape?"

"Affirmative," the nomad thug growled.

Burningboy returned his attention to Oscar. "I seem to recall a lot of pretty promises about how we Moderators were going to get a lovely press spin out of this, and how we were going to be knights and paladins of federal law and order, and all about how we were going to embarrass our old rivals the Regulators. . . . And not that I doubt your sworn word for a minute, Mr. Presidential Science Adviser, sir, but I just figured that with four hundred Moderators in-house, that would be . . . how do I put this?"

"You said it was an incentive," offered thug number two. "That's the very word. 'Incentive.' "

"Very well," Oscar said. "The facility is in your hands. Your troops took it over last night; and now you've occupied it with hundreds of squatters. That wasn't a part of our original agreement, but I can understand your motives. I hope you can also understand mine. I talked to the President of the United States last night. He told me he's sending in troops."

"He did, eh?"

"Yes. He promised that a crack brigade of armed paratroops would be flying in this very evening, actually. You might want to take that matter under advisement."

"Man, that's Two Feathers all over," Burningboy sighed. "I'm not sayin'

that old Geronimo actually lied to you or anything, but he's kind of famous for that gambit. We Moderators go back pretty far in Colorado, and back when Two Feathers was Governor, he was always sayin' he'd roust out the National Guard and restore so-called law and order. . . . Sometimes he actually did it, enough to keep you off balance. But just 'cause Two Feathers is wearin' his war paint, that don't guarantee any war."

"So you're alleging that the President won't send troops?"

"No. I'm just sayin' that we don't plan to leave until these so-called troops show up. In fact, we probably won't leave, even after they show up. I'm not sure you grasp this situation, you being from Massa-chusetts and all. But we Moderators have had some dealings with the Governor of Colorado. In fact, he owes us some favors."

"That's an interesting allegation, Corporal."

"We nomads tend to stick around in times and places where nobody else can survive. That makes us pretty useful sometimes. Espe-cially given that Wyoming was on fire recently, and all that."

"I see." Oscar paused. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Well, sir, I hate to badger a man when he's feeling poorly. But frankly, you're the only man I can tell these things to. You seem to be pretty much all there is around here. I mean, we just got a very firm lecture from your so-called Director. The woman just don't listen. She has no idea how people live! We were explainin' to her that we hold all the cards now, and she's totally at our mercy and so on, but she's just not buyin' any of it. She just waits for my lips to stop movin', and then she launches into this nutty rant about intellectual freedom and the advancement of knowledge and Christ only knows what else .... She's really weird. She's just a weird-actin', weird-looking, weird, witchy woman. Then we tried talkin' to your so-called chief of police. . . . What is it with that guy?"

"What do you mean, Corporal?"

Burningboy became uneasy, but he was determined to see the matter through. "It's not that I have anything against Anglos! I mean, sure there are good, decent, law-abiding Anglo people. But-you know-look at the statistics! Anglos have white-collar crime rates right off the scale. And talk about violent-man, white people are the most violent ethnic group in America. All those cross burnings, and militia bombings, and gun-nut guys .

. . the poor bastards just can't get a grip."

Oscar considered this. It always offended him. to hear his fellow Americans discussing the vagaries of "white people." There was sim-ply no such thing as "white people." That stereotype was an artificial construct, like the ridiculous term "Hispanic." In all the rest of the world, a Peruvian was a Peruvian and a Brazilian was a Brazilian-it was only in America that people somehow became this multilingual, multinational entity called a "Hispanic." Oscar himself passed for a "Hispanic" most of the time, though his own ethnic background was best described as "Not of Human Origin."

"You need to get to know my friend Kevin," he said. "Kevin's a diamond in the rough."

"Okay. Sure. I like a man who sticks up for his friends," Burn-ingboy said. "But that's the real reason we're here now, Oscar. You're the only man in this place who can talk sense to us. You're the only one who even knows what's going on."

10.

Oscar now worked for the President of the United States. His new position was enormously helpful in dealing with two thousand naive scientists inside a dome in East Texas. As a practical matter, however, it merely added a new layer of complexity to Oscar's life.

Oscar swiftly discovered that he was not, in fact, the National Security Council's official Science Adviser. A routine security check by the White House krewe had swiftly revealed Oscar's personal background problem. This was a serious hitch, as the President did not currently employ anyone who was a product of outlaw South Amer-ican genetic engineering. Given the circumstances, hiring one seemed a bad precedent.

So, although Oscar had obediently resigned his Sen-ate committee post, he failed to achieve an official post with the National Security Council. He was merely an "informal adviser." He had no official ranking in the gov-ernment, and did not even receive a paycheck.

Despite the President's assertion, no "crack U.S. Army personnel" arrived in Buna. It seemed that a Presi-dential order had been issued, but the Army deployment had been indefinitely delayed due to staffing and budget problems. These "staffing and budget problems" were certainly likely enough-they were chronic in the military but the deeper problems were, of course, political. The U.S. Army as an insti-tution was very mulish about being ordered into potential combat against American civilians. The U.S. Army hadn't been involved in the gruesome and covert helicopter shoot-out on the banks of the Sabine River. The Army wasn't anxious to take the political heat for trigger-happy spooks from the NSC. As a sop to propriety, Oscar was told that an NSC lieutenant colonel would soon arrive, with a crack team of very low-profile Marine aviators. But then the lieutenant colonel was also delayed, due to unexpected foreign-policy developments.

An American-owned fast-food multinational had accidentally poisoned a number of Dutch citizens with poorly sterilized hamburger meat. In retaliation, angry Dutch zealots had attacked and torched several restaurants. Given strained Dutch-American relations, this was a serious scandal and close to a casus belli. The President, faced with his first foreign-policy crisis, was blustering and demanding repara-tions and formal apologies. Under these circumstances, military disor-der within the U.S. was not an issue that the Administration cared to emphasize.

These were all disappointments. However, Oscar bore up. He was peeved to be denied a legitimate office, but he wasn't surprised. He certainly wasn't under the illusion that the Presidency worked any better than any other aspect of contemporary American government. Besides, there were distinct advantages to his questionable status. De-spite the humiliations, Oscar was now far more powerful than he had ever been before. Oscar had become a spook. Spookhood was doable.

Oscar swiftly made himself a factor with the new powers lurking in the basement below the Oval Office. He studied their dossiers, memorized their names and the office flowcharts, and asserted himself in the organization by humbly demanding favors. They were small, easily granted favors, but they were carefully arranged so that a failure to grant them was sure to provoke a turf war in the White House staff. Consequently, Oscar got his way. He resolved one nagging problem by obliterating the local police force. He had the Collaboratory's captive police flown out of Texas in an unmarked cargo helicopter. They were transferred to a federal law enforcement training facility in West Virginia. The Collaboratory's cops were not fired, much less were they tried for malfeasance and bribe-taking; but the budget of their tiny agency was zeroed-out, and the personnel simply vanished forever into the mazes of federal reas-signment.

This left the Collaboratory with no working budget for a police force. But that was doable. Because at the moment, there were no budgets of any kind at the Collaboratory. Everyone was working for no pay. They were living off barter, back gardens, surplus office equipment, and various forms of left-handed pin money.

The days that followed were the most intense and productive of Oscar's political life. The lab's situation was an absolute shambles. Only organizational skill of genius could have retrieved it. Oscar didn't possess the skill of genius. However, he could successfully re-place genius through the simple expedient of giving up sleep and outworking everyone else. The first truly serious challenge was to mollify the giant invasion of Moderators. The Moderators had to be dissuaded from wrecking and sacking the facility. Oscar finessed this through the simple gambit of informing the Moderators that they now owned the facility. Obvi-ously, they could wreck the place at will, but if they did so, the life-support systems would collapse, the atmosphere would sour, and all the glamorous and attractive rare animals would die. The Moderators would choke with everyone else, in an uninhabitable glass ghetto. However, if they came to working terms with the aboriginal scientists, the Moderators would possess a giant genetic Eden where they could live outdoors without tents. Oscar's argument carried the day. There were naturally a few ugly incidents, in which proles abducted and barbecued some espe-cially tasty animals. But the ghastly stench made it clear that open fires within the dome were counterproductive for everyone. The situation failed to explode. As days passed it began to show definite signs of stabilizing.

A new committee was formed, to negotiate the terms for local coexistence between the scientists and the invading dropouts. It con-sisted of Greta, the board's division heads, Kevin, Oscar himself, occa-sional consultant members of Oscar's krewe, and a solemn variety of gurus, sachems, and muckety-mucks from Burningboy's contingent. This new governing body needed a name. It couldn't be called the "Strike Committee," as that term had already been used. It swiftly became known as the "Emergency Committee."

Oscar regretted this coinage, as he loathed and despised all Emer-gency committees; but the term had one great advantage. It didn't have to be explained to anyone. The American populace was already used to the spectacle of its political institutions collapsing, to be re-placed by Emergency committees. Having the Collaboratory itself run by an "emergency committee" was an easy matter to understand. It could even be interpreted as a prestigious step upward; it was as if the tiny Collaboratory had collapsed as grandly as the U.S. Congress.

Oscar canceled his public relations poster campaign. The Strike was well and truly over now, and the lab's new regime required a new graphic look and a fresh media treatment. After a brainstorming ses-sion with his krewe, Oscar decided on the use of loudspeakers. The Emergency Committee's continuing negotiations would be broadcast live on half a dozen loudspeakers, situated in various public areas within the dome. This proved a wise design choice. The loudspeakers had a pleas-antly makeshift, grass-rootsy feeling. People could gently drift in and out of the flow of political agitation. The antiquated technology pro-vided a calming, peripheral media environment. People could become just as aware of the continuing crisis as they felt they needed to be.

Thanks to the use of loudspeakers, the Collaboratory personnel and their mongrelized invaders were placed on an equal informational plane. As an additional gambit, tasteful blue plastic "soapboxes" were set up here and there, where especially foolish and irate people could safely vent their discontents. Not only was this a safety valve and a useful check on popular sentiment, but it made the gimcrack Emer-gency Committee seem very adult and responsible by contrast.

This media campaign was especially useful in finessing the severe image problem presented by Captain (once General, once Corporal) Burningboy. In person or on video, the prole leader looked impossi-bly crazed and transgressive. However, he had a deep, fatherly speak-ing voice. Over the loudspeakers, Burningboy radiated the pious jollity of an arsonist Santa Claus.

It was a misconception to imagine that the Moderators were merely violent derelicts. The roads of America boasted a great many sadly desperate people, but the Moderators were not a mob of hobos. The Moderators were no longer even a "gang" or a "tribe." Basically, the Moderators were best understood as a nongovernmental network organization. The Moderators deliberately dressed and talked like savages, but they didn't lack sophistication. They were organized along new lines that were deeply orthogonal to those of conventional Amer-ican culture.

It had never occurred to the lords of the consumer society that consumerism as a political philosophy might one day manifest the grave systemic instabilities that Communism had. But as those instabil-ities multiplied, the country had cracked. Civil society shriveled in the pitiless reign of cash. As the last public spaces were privatized, it be-came harder and harder for American culture to breathe. Not only were people broke, but they were taunted to madness by commercials, and pitilessly surveilled by privacy-invading hucksters. An ever more aggressive consumer-outreach apparatus caused large numbers of peo-ple to simply abandon their official identities.

It was no longer any fun to be an American citizen. Bankruptcies multiplied beyond all reason, becoming a kind of commercial apostasy. Tax dodging became a spectator sport. The American people simply ceased to behave. They gathered to publicly burn their licenses, chop up their charge cards, and hit the road. The proles considered them-selves the only free Americans.

Nomadism had once been the linchpin of human existence; it was settled life that formed the technological novelty. Now technol-ogy had changed its nonexistent mind. Nomads were an entire alter-nate society for whom life by old-fashioned political and economic standards was simply no longer possible.

Or so Oscar reasoned. As a wealthy New Englander, he had never had much political reason to concern himself with proles. They rarely voted. But he had no prejudice against proles as a social group. They were certainly no stranger or more foreign to his sensibilities than scientists were. Now it was clear to him that the proles were a source of real power, and as far as he knew, there was only one Amer-ican politician who had made a deliberate effort to recruit and sustain them. That politician was Green Huey. Having pacified the Moderators, Oscar's second order of business was reconciling the Collaboratory's scientists to their presence. Oscar's key talking point here was their stark lack of choice in the matter. The Collaboratory's scientists had always had firm federal back-ing; they had never required any alternate means of support. Now there was no federal largesse left. That was bad, but the underlying reality was much, much worse. The lab's bookkeeping had been ruined by a netwar attack. The Collaboratory was not only broke, its inhabitants were fiscally unable even to assess how broke they were. They couldn't even accurately describe the circumstances under which they might be bailed out.

Morale at the lab had soared on the news that the President had taken notice of their plight. The President had even gone so far as to send a prepared speech for the lab's Director, which was duly recited by Greta. However, the speech had a very conspicuous omission: money. The press release was basically a long grateful paean to the President's talent for restoring law and order. Financing the Col-laboratory was not the President's problem. The Congress was in charge of the nation's purse strings, and despite frenzied effort, the Congress had still not managed to pass a budget.

For a federal science facility, this was a disaster of epic magni-tude, but for proles, it was business as usual.

So-as Oscar explained to the Emergency Committee-it was a question of symbiosis. And symbiosis was doable. Having boldly cut its ties to the conventional rules of political reality, the Collaboratory's new hybrid population could float indefinitely within their glass bub-ble. They had no money, but they had warmth, power, air, food, shelter; they could all mind the business of living. They could wait out the turbulence beyond their borders, and since they were also ignoring federal oversight, they could all concentrate on their favorite pet proj-ects. They could get some genuine scientific work accomplished, for once. This was a formidable achievement, a Shangri-la almost, and it was there within their grasp. All they had to do was come to terms with their own contradictions.

There was a long silence after Oscar's presentation. The Emer-gency Committee gazed at him in utter wonderment. At the moment, the Committee's quorum consisted of Greta, her chief confidant and backer Albert Gazzaniga, Oscar himself, Yosh Pelicanos, Captain Burningboy, and a representative Moderator thug-a kid named Ombahway Tuddy Flagboy.

"Oscar, you're amazing," Greta said. "You have such talent for making impossible things sound plausible."

"What's so impossible about it?"

"Everything. This is a federal facility! These Moderator people invaded it by force. They're occupying it. They are here illegally. We can't aid and abet that! Once the President sends in troops, we'll all be outed for collaboration. We'll be arrested. We'll be fired. No, it's worse than that. We'll be purged."

"That never happened in Louisiana," Oscar said. "Why should it happen here?"

Gazzaniga spoke up. "That's because Congress and the Emer-gency committees never really wanted that air base in Louisiana in the first place. They never cared enough about it to take action."

"They don't care about you, either," Oscar assured him. "It's true that the President expressed an interest, but hey, it's been a long week now. A week is forever during a military crisis. There aren't any federal troops here. Because there isn't any military crisis here. The President's military crisis is in Holland, not East Texas. He's not going to deploy troops domestically when the Dutch Cold War is heating up. If we had better sense, we'd realize that the Moderators are our troops. They're better than federal troops. Real troops can't feed us."

"We can't afford thousands of nonpaying guests," Pelicanos said.

"Yosh, just forget the red ink for a minute. We don't have to 'afford them.' They are affording us. They can feed and clothe us, and all we have to do is share our shelter and give them a political cover. That's the real beauty of this Emergency, you see? We can go on here indefinitely! This is the apotheosis of the Strike. During the Strike, we were all refusing to do anything except work on science. Now that we have an Emergency, the scientists can continue their science, while the Moderators will assume the role of a supportive, sympathetic, civil population. We'll just ignore everyone else! Everything that annoyed us in the past simply falls off our radar. All those senseless commercial demands, and governmental oversight, and the crooked contrac-tors . . . they're all just gone. They no longer have any relevance."

"But nomads don't understand science," Gazzaniga said. "Why would they support scientists, when they could just loot the place and leave?"

"Hey," said Burningboy. "I can understand science, fella! Wernher von Braun! Perfect example. Dr. von Braun lucked into a big ugly swarm of the surplus flesh, just like you have! They're heading for Dachau anyway if he don't use 'em, so he might as well grind some use out of 'em, assembling his V-2 engines."

"What the hell is he talking about?" Gazzaniga demanded. "Why does he always talk like that?"