"That's what science is!" Burningboy said. "I can define it. Science is about proving a mathematical relationship between phenome-non A and phenomenon B. Was that so hard? You really think that's beyond my mental grasp? I'll tell you something way beyond your mental grasp, son-surviving in prison. You fair-haired folks might have, like, a bruising collision with nonquantum reality if somebody drove a handmade shiv right through your physics book."

"This just isn't going to work," Greta said. "We don't even speak the same language. We have nothing in common." She pointed dramatically.

"Just look at that laptop he's carrying! It's made out oj straw."

"Why am I the only one who sees the obvious here?" Oscar said. "You people have amazing commonalities. Look at all that no-mad equipment-those leaf grinders, and digesters, and catalytic cracking units. They're using biotechnology. And computer networks, too. They live off those things, for heaven's sake."

Greta's face hardened. "Yes but ... not scientifically."

"But they live exactly like you live-by their reputations. You are America's two most profoundly noncommercial societies. Your socie-ties are both based on reputation, respect, and prestige."

Gazzaniga frowned. "What is this, a sociology class? Sociology's not a hard science."

"But it's true! You scientists want to become the Most Fre-quently Cited and win all the honors and awards. While Moderators, like the Captain here, want to be streetwise netgod gurus. As a further plus, neither of you have any idea how to dress! Furthermore, even though you are both directly responsible for the catastrophe that our society is undergoing, you are both incredibly adept at casting your-selves as permanent, misunderstood victims. You both whine and moan endlessly about how nobody else is cool enough or smart enough to understand you. And you both never clean up your own messes. And you both never take responsibility for yourselves. And that's why you're both treated like children by the people who actu-ally run this country!"

They stared at him, appalled.

"I am talking sense to you here," Oscar insisted, his voice rising to an angry buzz. "I am not ranting. I possess a perspective here that you people, who are locked in the ivory basements of your own sub-cultures, simply do not possess. It is no use my soft-pedaling the truth to you. You are in a crisis. This is a crux. You have both severed your lifelines to the rest of society. You need to overcome your stupid prejudice, and unite as a powerful coalition. And if you could only do this, the world would be yours!"

Oscar leaned forward. Inspiration blazed within him like Platonic daylight. "We can survive this Emergency. We could even prevail. We could grow. If we handled it right, this could catch on!"

"All right," Greta said. "Calm down. I have one question. They're nomads, aren't they? What happens after they leave us?"

"You think that we'll run away," Burningboy said.

Greta looked at him, sad at having given offense. "Don't you always run away? I thought that was how you people survived."

"No, you're the gutless ones!" Burningboy shouted. "You're sup-posed to be intellectuals! You're supposed to be our visionaries! You're supposed to be giving people a grasp of the truth, something to look up to, the power, the knowledge, higher reality. But what are you people really? You're not titans of intellect. You're a bunch of cheap geeks, in funny clothes that your mom bought you. You're just an-other crowd of sniveling hangers-on who are dying for a government handout. You're whining to me about how dirty morons like us can't appreciate you-well, what the hell have you done for us lately? What do you want out of life, besides a chance to hang out in your lab and look down on the rest of us? Quit being such a pack of sorry weasels-do something big, you losers! Take a chance, for Christ's sake. Act like you matter!"

"He's really lost it," Gazzaniga said, goggling in wounded amazement.

"This guy has no grasp of real life."

Flagboy's phone rang. He spoke briefly, then handed the phone to his leader.

Burningboy listened. "I gotta go," he announced abruptly. "There's been a new development. The boys have brought in a prisoner."

"What?" Kevin demanded. As the new police chief, Kevin was instantly suspicious. "We already agreed that you have no authority to take prisoners."

Burningboy wrinkled his large and fleshy nose. "They captured him in the piney woods east of town, Mr. Police Chief, sir. Several kilometers outside your jurisdiction."

"So then's he's a Regulator," Oscar said. "He's a spy." Burningboy put his notes and laptop in order, and nodded at Oscar reluctantly. "Yup."

"What are you going to do to this captured person?" Greta said. Burningboy shrugged, his face grim.

"I think this Committee needs to see the prisoner," Oscar said.

"Oscar's right," said Kevin sternly. "Burningboy, I can't have you manhandling suspects inside this facility, just on your own recog-nizance. Let's interrogate him ourselves!"

"What are we, the Star Chamber?" Gazzaniga said, aghast. "We can't start interrogating people!"

Kevin sneered. "Okay, fine! Albert, you're excused. Go out for an ice cream cone. In the meantime, us grown-ups need to confront this terrorist guerrilla."

Greta declared a five-minute break. Alerted by the live coverage over the loudspeakers, several more Committee members showed up. The break stretched into half an hour. The meeting was considerably enlivened by an impromptu demonstration of the prisoner's captured possessions. The apprehended Regulator had been posing as a poacher. He had a pulley-festooned compound bow that would have baffled Wil-liam Tell. The bow's graphite arrows contained self-rifling gyroscopic fletching and global-positioning-system locator units. The scout also owned boot-spike crampons and a climber's lap-belt, ideal for exten-sive lurking in the tops of trees. He carried a ceramic bowie knife.

These deadly gizmos might have passed muster on a standard hunter, but the other evidence cinched the case against him: he had a hammer and a pack of sabotage tree-spikes. Tree-spikes, which ruined saw blades, were common enough for radical Greens; but these spikes contained audio bugs and cellphone repeaters. They could be hammered deep into trees, and they would stay there forever, and they would listen, and they would even take phone calls. They had bizarre little pores in them so that they could drink sap for their bat-teries.

The Committee passed the devices from hand to hand, studying them with grave attention, much as if they captured saboteurs every day. Producing a pocket multitool, Gazzaniga managed to pry one of the spikes open. "Wait a minute," he said. "This thing's got a mito-chondrial battery."

"Nobody has mitochondrial batteries," objected the new head of the Instrumentation division. "We don't even have mitochondrial batteries, and the damned things were invented here."

"Then I want you to explain to me how a telephone runs on wet jelly," Gazzaniga said. "You know something? These spikes sure look a lot like our vegetation monitors."

"It was all invented here," Oscar said. "This is all Collaboratory equipment. You've just never seen it repackaged and repurposed." Gazzaniga put the spike down. Then he picked up a dented tin egg. "Now this thing here-see, this is the sort of thing you associate with nomad technology. Scrap metal, all crimped together, obviously homemade .... So what is this thing?" He shook it near his ear. "It rattles."

"It's a piss bomb," Burningboy told him.

"What?"

"See those holes in the side? That's the timer. It's genetically engineered corn kernels. Once they're in hot water, the seeds swell up. They rupture a membrane inside, and then the charge ignites."

Oscar examined one of the crude arson bombs. It had been cre-ated by hand: by a craftsman with a hole punch, a ball peen hammer, and an enormous store of focused resentment. The bomb was a dumb and pig-simple incendiary device with no moving parts, but it could easily incinerate a building. The seeds of genetically engineered maize were dirt-cheap and totally consistent. Corn like that was so uniform in its properties that it could even be used as a timepiece. It was a bad, bad gizmo. It was bad enough as a work of military technology. As a work of primitive art, the piss bomb was stunningly effective. Oscar could feel sincere contempt and hatred radiating from it as he held it in his hand. The prisoner now arrived, handcuffed, and with an escort of four Moderators. The prisoner wore a full-length hunter's suit of gray and brown bark-and-leaf camou, including a billed cap. His lace-up boots were clogged with red mud. He had a square nose, large hairy ears, heavy brows, black shiny eyes. He was a squat and heavy man in his thirties, with hands like callused bear paws. He'd suffered a swollen scrape along his unshaven jaw and had a massive bruise on his neck.

"What happened to him? Why is he injured?" Greta said.

"He fell off his bicycle," Burningboy offered flatly. The prisoner was silent. It was immediately and embarrassingly obvious to all concerned that he was not going to tell them a thing. He stood solidly in the midst of their boardroom, reeking of wood-smoke and sweat, radiating complete contempt for them, everything they stood for, and everything they knew. Oscar examined the Regulator with deep professional interest. This man was astoundingly out of place. It was as if a rock-hard cypress log had been hauled from the bat-haunted depths of the swamp and dumped on the carpet before them.

"You really think you're a tough customer, don't you?" Kevin said shrilly.

The Regulator signally failed to notice him.

"We can nuke you talk," Kevin growled. "Wait'll I load up my anarchy philes on improvising interrogation! We'll do hideous and gruesome things to you! With wire, and matchsticks, and like that."

"Excuse me, sir," Oscar said politely. "Do you speak English?

Parlez-vous francais?"

No response at all.

"We're not going to torture you, sir. We are civilized people here. We just want you to tell us why you were exploring our neigh-borhood with all these surveillance and arson devices. We're willing to be very reasonable about this. If you'll tell us what you were doing and who told you to do it, we'll let you go home."

No answer.

"Sir, I recognize that you're loyal to your cause, whatever it is, but you are captured, you know. You don't have to remain entirely mute under circumstances like this. It's considered entirely ethical to give your name, your number, and your network address. If you did that for us, we could tell your friends-your wife, your children-that you're alive and safe." No answer. Oscar sighed patiently. "Okay, you're not going to talk. I can see that I'm tiring you. So if you'll just indicate that you're not deaf . .. " The Regulator's heavy eyebrows twitched. He looked at Oscar, sizing him up for a bloodletting bowshot to the kidneys. Finally, he spoke. "Nice wristwatch, handsome."

"Okay," Oscar breathed. "Let me suggest that we take our friend here and dump him into the Spinoffs building, along with those other Huey scabs. I'm sure they all have a lot of news to catch up on."

Gazzaniga was scandalized. "What! We can't send this character in there to rendezvous with those people! He's very dangerous! He's a vicious nomad brute!"

Oscar smiled. "So what? We have hundreds of vicious nomad brutes. Forget talking to this guy. We don't need him. We need to talk seriously to our own nomads. They know everything that he knows, and more. Plus, our friends actually want to defend us. So can we all knuckle down and get serious now? Boys, take the prisoner away."

After this confrontation, the Emergency negotiations rapidly moved onto much firmer ground: equipment and instrumentation. Here the nomads and scientists found compelling common interests. Their mu-tual need to eat was especially compelling. Burningboy introduced three of his technical experts. Greta commandeered the time of her best biotech people. The talks plowed on into darkness.

Oscar left the building, changed his clothes to shed any cling-on listening devices, then went into one of the gardens for a quiet ren-dezvous with Captain Burningboy.

"Man, you're a sneaky devil," Burningboy ruminated, methodi-cally chewing on a long handful of dry blue noodles. "The tone of that meeting changed totally when you had that goon brought in. I wonder what they'd have done if he'd told 'em that we caught him two days ago."

"Oh, we both knew that Regulator was never going to talk," Oscar said.

"I was reserving him for the proper political moment. There's nothing dishonest about revealing the facts within the proper context. After all, you did capture him, and he is a commando." They lowered their voices and tiptoed to avoid a dozing lynx. "You see, talking common sense to scientists just doesn't work. Scientists despise common sense, they think it's irrational. To get 'em off the dime, you need strong moral pressure, something from outside their expecta-tions. They live with big intellectual walls around them-peer review, passive construction, all this constant use of the third person plu-ral. . . ."

''I'm handing it to you, Oscar-the gambit worked great. But I still don't see why."

Oscar paused thoughtfully. He enjoyed his private chats with Burningboy, who was proving to be an appreciative audience. The Texan Moderator was an aging, disheveled outlaw with a long prison record, but he was also a genuine politician, a regional player full of southern-fried insights. Oscar felt a strong need to give the man a collegial briefing.

"It worked because . . . well, let me give you the big picture here. The really big, philosophical picture. Did you ever wonder why I've never moved against Huey's people inside this lab? Why they're still inside there, holding the Spinoffs building, barricaded against us? It's because we're in a netwar. We're just like a group of go-stones. To survive in a netwar, a surrounded group needs eyes. It's all about links, and perception, and the battlespace. We're surrounded inside this dome-but we're not entirely surrounded, because there's a smaller dome of enemies inside our dome. I deliberately threw that Regulator in there with them, so that now, that little subgroup has its own little nomad contingent, just like we do. You see, people instinctively sense this kind of symmetry. It works on them, on an unconscious level. It's meaningful to them, it changes their worldview. Having enemies in-side the dome might seem to weaken us, but the fact that we can tolerate our own core of dissent-that actually strengthens us. Because we're not totalitarian. We're not the same substance all the way through. We're not all brittle. We're resilient. We have potential space inside. "

"Yes?" Burningboy said skeptically.

"There's a vital fractal there. It's all about scaling issues, basically. Here we are, inside these walls. Outside our walls, Green Huey is lurking over us, full of sinister intent. But the President is lurking over Huey-and our new President is, in his own unique way, a rather more sinister person than the Governor of Louisiana. The President runs the USA, a nation that is all wounded and inward-turning now--a little world, surrounded by a bigger world full of people who grew bored with us. They no longer pay America to tell them that we are their future. And then beyond that world . .. well, I guess it's Greta's world. A rational, Einsteinian-Newtonian cosmos. The cos-mos of objective, observable facts. And beyond scientific understand-ing . . . all those dark phenomena. Metaphysics. Will and idea. History, maybe."

"Do you really believe any of that junk?"

"No, I don't believe it in the way that I believe that two and two are four. But it's doable, it's my working metaphor. What can politi-cians ever really 'know' about anything? History isn't a laboratory. You never step in the same river twice. But some people have effective political insight, and some just don't."

Burningboy nodded slowly. "You really see us from way, way on the outside, don't you, Oscar?"

"Well, I've never been a nomad-at least not yet. And I'll never be a scientist, either. I can recognize my ignorance, but I can't be buffaloed by ignorance-I'm in power, I have to act. Knowledge is just knowledge. But the control of knowledge-that's politics."

"That wasn't the kind of 'outsiderness' I had in mind."

"Oh." Oscar realized the truth. "You mean my personal back-ground problem."

"Yup. "

"You mean I have advantages because I'm outside the entire human race."

Burningboy nodded. "I couldn't help but notice that. Has it always been that way for you?"

"Yeah. It has. Pretty much."

"Are you the future, man?"

"No. I wouldn't count on that. I have too many pieces missing."

Oscar knew that the situation had stabilized when a roaring sex scan-dal broke out. A teenage soldier accused a middle-aged scientist of indecently fondling her. This incident caused frantic uproar.

Oscar found the scandal a very cheering development. It meant that the conflict between the Collaboratory's two populations had broken through to a symbolic, psychosexual, politically meaningless level. The public fight was now about deep resentments and psychic starvations that would never, ever be cured, and were therefore basi-cally irrelevant. But the noise was very useful, because it meant that enormous quiet progress could now be made on every other front. The public psychodrama consumed vast amounts of attention, while the Collaboratory's truly serious problems had become background noise. The real problems were left in the hands of people who cared enough about them to do constructive things.

Oscar took the opportunity to learn how to use a Moderator laptop. He had been given one, and he rightly recognized this gesture as a high tribal honor. The Moderator device had a flexible green shell of plasticized straw. It weighed about as much as a bag of popcorn. And its keyboard, instead of the time-honored QWERTYUIOP, boasted a sleek, sensible, and deeply sinister DHIATENSOR.

Oscar had been assured many times that the venerable QWERTYUIOP keyboard design would never, ever be replaced. Supposedly, this was due to a phenomenon called "technological lock-in." QWERTYUIOP was a horribly bad design for a key-board-in fact, QWERTYUIOP was deliberately designed to hamper typists-but the effort required to learn it was so crushing that people would never sacrifice it. It was like English spelling, or American standard measurements, or the ludicrous design of toilets; it was very bad, but it was a social fact of nature. QWERTYUIOP's universality made it impossible for alternatives to arise and spread. Or so he had always been told. And yet, here was the impossible alternative, sitting on the table before him: DHIATENSOR. It was sensible. It was efficient. It worked much better than QWERTYUIOP.

Pelicanos entered the hotel room. "Still up?"

"Sure. "

"What are you working on?"

"Greta's press releases. And I've got to talk to Bambakias soon, I've been neglecting the Senator. So I'm making some notes, and I'm learning how to type properly, for the very first time in my life." Oscar paused. He was eager to brief Pelicanos on the fascinating social differences he had discovered between the Regulators and the Moder-ators. To the undiscerning eye, the shabby and truculent proles could not be distinguished with an electron microscope-all their real and genuinely striking differences were inherent in the architecture of their network software.

An epic struggle had been taking place in the invisible fields of the networks. Virtual tribes and communities had been trying literally thousands of different configurations, winnowing them out, giving them their all, watching them die . . . .

"Oscar, we need to talk seriously."

"Great." Oscar pushed the laptop aside. "Level with me."

"Oscar, you're getting too wrapped up here. All the negotiations with the Emergency Committee, all the time you spend dickering with those NSC people who won't give you the time of day . . . we need a reality check."

"Okay. Fine."

"Have you been outside the lab lately? The sky is full of 'delivery aircraft' that never deliver anything to anyone. There are cops and roadblocks all over East Texas."

"Yeah, we're generating a lot of sustained outside interest. We're a big pop hit. Journalists love the mix here, it's very provocative."

"I agree with you that it's interesting. But that has nothing to do with our agenda. This situation was never in the plans. We were sup-posed to be helping Bambakias with the Senate Science Committee. The campaign krewe are supposed to be here on vacation. You were never supposed to become a spook who works part-time for the Presi-dent, while you take over federal facilities with the help of gangsters."

"Hmm. You're absolutely right about that, Yosh. That was not plannable. But it was doable."

Pelicanos sat down and knotted his hands. "You know what your problem is? Every time you lose sight of your objective, you redouble your efforts."

"I've never lost sight of the objective! The objective is to reform American scientific research."

"Oscar, I've thought this over. I really hate this situation. For one thing, I don't much like the President. I'm a Federal Democrat. I wasn't joking when we were doing all that hard work for Bambakias and the Reform Bloc. I don't want to work for this President. I don't agree with the man's policies. He's a Communist; for heaven's sake."

"The President is not a Communist. He's a billionaire timber baron with a background in the reservation casino business."

"Well, the Communists are in his Left Tradition Bloc. I just don't trust him. I don't like his speeches. I don't like him picking fights with the Dutch when we ought to be putting our own domestic affairs in order. He's just not our kind of politician. He's cruel, and sneaky, and duplicitous, and aggressive."

Oscar smiled. "At least he doesn't sleep on the job, like the old guy did."

"Better King Log than King Stork, pal."

"Yosh, I know you're not a leftist, but you have to agree that the Left Tradition Bloc is a lot better than those total lunatics in the Left Progressives."