"Of course 'Huey do that,' dammit! Go aboard a nice French submarine-I know you got a dozen of 'em lurking offshore. Have 'em take you to a nice villa, on Elba, or St. Helena or something. Take a few pet bodyguards. It's doable! You eat well, you write the mem-oirs, you're tanned, rested, and ready. Maybe . . . maybe even, someday . . . if somehow things get much, much worse here in America . . . maybe you'll even look good. It sounds insane, but I'm not sure I can even judge anymore. Maybe, someday, deliberately im-posing schizoid states of mind on unsuspecting human beings will become politically fashionable. But it sure as hell isn't now. Read to-morrow's opinion polls. You're toast."

"Kid, I'm Huey. You're toast. I can destroy you, and your un-grateful bitch girlfriend, and your entire research facility, which, in point of fact, is, and always will be, my research facility."

"I'm sure you can try that, Governor, but why waste the energy? It's pointless to destroy us now. It's too late for that. I really thought you had a better feel for these things."

"Son, you still don't get it. I don't need any 'feel' for it. I can do all that in my spare time- whil e I pat my head and rub my belly." Huey hung up.

Now the dogs of War were unleashed on the psychic landscape of America, and even as rather small dogs, with blunt, symbolic teeth, they provoked political havoc. No one had expected this of the Presi-dent. An eccentric billionaire Native American-for a country ex-hausted by identity crisis and splintered politics, Two Feathers had seemed a colorful sideshow, an Oh-Might-As-Well candidate whose bluster might keep up morale. Even Oscar had expected little of him; the governorship of Colorado had never given Two Feathers much chance to shine. Once in the national saddle, however, Two Feathers was rapidly proving himself to be a phenomenon. He was clearly one of those transitional American Presidents, those larger-than-life figures who set a stamp on their era and made life horribly dangerous and interesting.

Unfortunately for Green Huey, the American political landscape had room for only one eccentrically dressed, carpet-chewing, authori-tarian state Governor. Two Feathers had beaten Huey to the White House. Worse yet, he correctly recognized Huey as an intolerable threat that could not be co-opted. He was resolved to crush Huey.

A war of words broke out between the President and the rogue Governor. Huey accused the President of provocative spy overflights. This was true, for the sky over Louisiana was black with surveillance aircraft-feds, proles, military, Europeans, Asians, private networks, anyone who could launch an autonomous kite with a camera on board.

The President counteraccused the Governor of treacherous col-laboration with foreign powers during wartime. This was also true, though so far the premier effect of the Dutch War had been to saturate America with curious European tourists. The Europeans hadn't seen anyone declare a War in absolute ages. It was fun to be a foreign national in a country at War, especially a country that sold bugging devices out of brimming baskets at flea markets. Suddenly everyone was his own international spy.

The President then upped the ante. He sternly demanded the swift return of all the federal weaponry stolen from the ransacked Louisiana Air Force base. He threatened unnamed, severe reprisals.

The Air Force weapons were, needless to say, not forthcoming. Instead, the Governor accused the President of plotting martial law and a coup d'etat.

Huey's Senators launched a marathon procedural war within the U.S. Senate, with double-barreled filibusters. The President de-manded impeachment proceedings against the two Louisiana Senators. He also announced criminal investigations of all of Louisiana's Repre-sentatives. Huey called for the President to be impeached by Congress, and for antiwar activists to take to the streets in a general strike and para-lyze the country.

Faced with the prospect of a general strike, the President counterannounced his unilateral creation of a new, all-volunteer, civil defense force, the "Civil Defense Intelligence Agency." On paper, this seemed a very strange organization-a national debating club of so-called "civil activists," loyal only to the President. The CDIA had no budget, and its head was an aging, much-decorated war hero, who happened to live in Colorado. He happened to know the President personally. He happened to be a very high-ranking Moderator.

A closer analysis showed that the "Civil Defense Intelligence Agency" was the Moderators. The CDIA was a gigantic prole gang with the direct backing of the nation's chief executive. At this point, a Rubicon was crossed. This stroke made it obvious that the Governor of Colorado had been cultivating his own prole forces for years. Huey had used his Regulator proles as a deniable proxy force, but the Presi-dent was boldly bringing his own private mafia into the open, and brandishing it like a club. The President was a day late and perhaps a dollar short, but he had a great advantage. He was the President.

Now, for the first time, the President began to look genuinely powerful, even dangerous. This was a classic political coalition: it had worked in medieval France. It was the long-forgotten bottom of the heap, allied with the formerly feeble top, to scare the hell out of the arrogant and divisive middle.

The President's first deployment of his semilegal forces was against the now-illegal Emergency committees. This was a stroke of brilliance, because the Emergency committees were universally de-tested, and even more feared than the proles. Besides, the Emergency committees had lost all their legal backing, and were already on the ropes. Attacking a newly illegal force with a newly legitimized, for-merly illegal force struck the American public very favorably. The maneuver had a nice unspoken symmetry to it. It was a player's move. The President's ratings went up sharply. He was accomplishing some-thing tangible, where nothing had been accomplished in years.

The new CDIA, for its own part, revealed some impressive new tactics. The CDIA lacked the legal power to arrest anyone, so they pursued Emergency committee members with nonviolent "body pickets." These were armbanded bursars who methodically stalked committee members for twenty-four hours a day. This tactic was not difficult for a prole group.

"Body picketing" was basically an intelli-gence stakeout, shadowing; but it was not surreptitious. It was totally open and obvious, and like all paparazzi work, it was extremely an-noying to its victims.

The proles took to this job like ducks to water. They had always been organized much like intelligence agencies-small, distributed, surreptitious networks, living on the fringes of society through shared passwords and persistent scrounging. But as a national goon squad, ordered from above, the prole networks suddenly coalesced into a rigid, crystalline substance. For the President's enemies, they became a human prison of constant surveillance.

Or so it seemed. It was still too early to tell whether the Presi-dent's CDIA would have any staying power as a New Model Army. But the mere threat of its deployment sent a shock wave through the system. A new era was clearly at hand. America's Emergency was truly and finally over. The War was on.

Oscar followed these developments with great professional care, and reacted to catch the popular tide. He had Greta formally declare the Emergency over at the Collaboratory. There was no more Emer-gency. From now on, it was Wartime.

"Why are you doing this to us?" Greta demanded, in yet another bone-grinding late-night committee session. "What possible differ-ence does it make?"

"It makes all the difference in the world."

"But it's all semantic! We're all the same people. I'm still the lab Director, God help me. And we still have the Emergency Committee as the only people who can run this mess."

"From now on, we're the War Committee."

"It's just symbolic!"

"No it isn't." Oscar sighed. "I'll explain it to you, very simply. The President has seized power in a time of crisis. He bypassed the Constitution, he undercut the Congress, he annihilated the Emer-gency committees. He did that by recruiting large gangs of organized social outcasts, who derive their new legitimacy strictly from him, and are loyal to him personally."

"Yes, Oscar, we know all that. We're not blind. And I'm very unhappy about what the President did. I certainly don't see why we have to imitate his radical, bully-boy tactics."

"Greta, the President is imitating us. That is exactly what we did, right here. The President is doing it because you and I got away with doing it!

You're very popular because you did that, you're famous. People think it's exciting to seize power with prole gangs, and to throw all the rascals out. It's a very slick move."

Greta was very troubled. "Oh . . . Oh my God."

"I admit, this isn't great news for American democracy. In fact, it's bad news. It's terrible news. It might even be catastrophic news. But it's wonderful news for the lab. This news means that we're all much, much less likely to get arrested or indicted for what we've done here. You see? We're going to get away with it. It's a wonderful political gift from our chief protector and patron-the President. We're home free! All we have to do from now on is change our shirt whenever the President changes his shirt. From now on, we have protective color-ation. We're no longer crazy radicals, on strike at a federal lab. We're loyal citizens who are fully and mindfully engaged in the grand exper-iment of our President's new social order. So from now on, that's why we're the War Committee."

"But we can't be the War Committee. We don't have our own war."

"Oh yes, we do."

"No, we don't."

"Just wait."

Two days later the President sent federal troops to Buna. The U.S. Army was finally responding to his orders, despite their deep institutional distaste for coercive violence against American citizens. Unfor-tunately, these soldiers were a marching battalion of Special Operations/Low-Intensity Conflict specialists.

The American military, at the historical tag end of traditional armed conflict, knew that they had entered an era where the pen truly was mightier than the sword. The sword just wasn't much use in an epoch when battlefronts no longer existed and a standing army could be torn to shreds by cheap unmanned machinery.

So, the U.S. m.ilitary had downgraded their swords and upgraded their pens. The President's U.S. Army Seventy-sixth Infowar and So-cial Adjudication Battalion were basically social workers. They wore crisp white uniforms, and concentrated on language skills, disaster re-lief measures, stress counseling, light police work, and first aid. Half of them were women, none of them had firearms, and, as a final fillip, they had been ordered into action without any federal funding. In fact, they were already four months behind on their salaries. They'd had to sell their armored personnel carriers just to make ends meet.

The Collaboratory was now seriously overcrowded. Poaching and eating the rare animals became a commonplace misdemeanor. With a battalion of five hundred mooching soldier/psychoanalysts, plus their camp-follower media coverage, the long-suffering Col-laboratory was seriously overloaded. The interior of the dome began to fog over with human breath. To keep the newcomers usefully occupied, Oscar deputized the Infowar Battalion to psychologically besiege Huey's loyalists, who were still stubbornly on strike, holed up in the Spinoffs building. They did this with a will. But the Collaboratory was beginning to resemble a giant subway. The ideal solution was to build more shelter. The Moderators, in uneasy symbiosis with the feds, set up tents on the Collaboratory's spare ground outside the dome. Oscar would have liked to build an-nexes to the Collaboratory. Bambakias's emergency design plans sug-gested some quite astonishing methods by which this might be done. The materials were available. Manpower was in generous supply. The will to do it was present. But there was no money. The Collaboratory was surrounded by the city of Buna, and its privately owned real estate. The city of Buna was still on friendly terms with the lab, even proud of them for having won so much publicity lately. But the lab couldn't commandeer the city by force of arms. Besides, all of Buna's available rental shelter had already been taken, on exorbitant terms, by European and Asian me-dia crews, and nongovernmental civil-rights and peace organizations.

So they were stymied. It always boiled down to money. They just didn't have any. They had proved that the business of science could run on sheer charisma for a while, a life powered by sheer sense of wonder, like some endless pledge drive. But people were still peo-ple; they ran out of charisma, and the sense of wonder ate its young. The need for money was always serious, and always there.

Tempers frayed. Despite the utter harmlessness of the federal SO / LIC troops, Huey correctly took their presence on the border of Lou-isiana as a menacing provocation. He unleashed a barrage of hysterical propaganda, including the bizarre, and documented, allegation that the President was a long-time Dutch agent. As Governor, and as a timber businessman, the President had had extensive dealings with the Dutch, during happier times. Huey's oppo-research people had com-piled painstaking dossiers to this effect.

It didn't matter. Only a schizoid with a case of bicameral con-sciousness could seriously contend that the President was a Dutch agent, when the President had just declared War on Holland. When the U.S. Navy was steaming for Amsterdam. When the Dutch were screaming for help, and getting none.

This spy allegation not only went nowhere, it convinced many former fence-sitters that Huey had utterly lost his mind. Huey was dangerous, and had to be pried from public office at all costs. And yet Huey held on, publicly drilling his state militia, conducting purges of his faltering police, swearing vengeance on a world of hypocrites and liars.

Oscar and Greta had reached the end of their rope. They began to argue seriously and publicly. They had had tiffs before, spats before, little misunderstandings; but after so many hours, days, weeks of diffi-cult administration work, they began to have bruising public combats over the future of the lab, over the meaning of their effort.

The end of the Emergency and the beginning of the War neces-sitated the creation of yet another media environment. Oscar shut down the public loudspeakers that monitored Emergency Committee discussions. Wartime was about loose lips sinking ships, about blood, sweat, toil, and tears. It was time to stop propagandizing the people of the Collaboratory. They already knew where they stood and what was at stake. Now they had to defend what they had built; they should be in the trenches with shovels, they should be singing marching songs.

And yet they could do no such thing. They could only wait. The situation was out of their hands. They were no longer masters of their own destiny, they no longer held the initiative. The real struggle was taking place in Washington, in The Hague, in a flotilla of Navy ships somberly crossing the storm-tossed Atlantic, about as slowly as was physically possible. The nation was at War.

No sooner had they resigned themselves to their own irrelevance than the situation took a lethal head spin. The leader of the CDIA arrived in Buna. He was a Moderator from Colorado named Field Marshal Munchy Menlo. Munchy Menlo's original name was Gutier-rez; in his distant youth, he had been involved in some nasty anti-insurgency shoot-'em-ups in Colombia and Peru. Munchy Menlo had become something of a lost soul in civilian life; he'd had drinking problems, he had failed at running a grocery. Eventually he'd drifted off the edge of the earth into Moderator life, where he had done very well for himself.

Field Marshal Menlo-he boldly insisted on retaining his "road name"-was a creature of a different military order than any Oscar had met before. He was plainspoken, bearded, and reticent, modest in his manner. He radiated a certain magnetism peculiar to men who had personally killed a lot of people.

With the outbreak of War, Oscar himself had had a promotion; he was now an actual, official member of the National Security Council. He had his own hologram ID card, and his own NSC letter-head proclaiming him to be a "Deputy Adviser, Sci-Tech Issues." Oscar was naturally the local liaison for Field Marshal Menlo. When the man arrived from Washington-on a lone motorcycle, and with-out any escort-Oscar introduced him to the War Committee.

Menlo explained that he had come on a quiet, personal recon-naissance. The new CDIA was considering a military attack across the Louisiana border.

The Collaboratory's War Committee met in full to hear Menlo out. Thre were fifteen people listening, including Greta, Oscar, Kevin, Albert Gazzaniga, all the Collaboratory's various department heads, along with six Moderator sachems. The Moderators were de-lighted at this news. At last, and with federal government backing, they were going to give the Regulators the sound, bloody stomping they deserved! Everyone else, of course, was appalled.

Oscar spoke up. "Field Marshal while I can appreciate the mer-its of a raid on Louisiana-a lightning raid . . . a limited, surgical raid-I really can't see that a military attack on our fellow Americans gains us anything. Huey still has a grip on the levers of power in his state, but he's weakening. His credibility is in tatters. It's just a matter of time before internal dissent drives him out."

"Mmm-hmmm," said the Field Marshal.

Gazzaniga winced. "I hate to think what the global media would make of American soldiers shedding American blood. That's ghastly. Why, it's civil war, basically."

"It would make us look like barbarians," Greta said. "Economic embargo. Moral pressure. Net subversion, informa-tion warfare. That's how you handle a problem like this," Gazzaniga said with finality.

"I see," said the Field Marshal. "Well, let me bring up one small, additional matter. The President is very concerned about the missing armaments from that Air Force base."

They nodded. "They've been missing quite a while," Oscar said. "That scarcely seems like an urgent issue."

"It's not widely known-and of course, this news isn't to leave this room-but there was a battery of specialized, short-range, sur-face-to-surface missiles in that Air Force base."

"Missiles," Greta repeated thoughtfully.

"Aerial reconnaissance indicates that the missile battery is hidden in the Sabine River valley. We have some very good human intelli-gence that suggests that those missiles have been loaded with aerosol warheads. "

"Gas warheads?" Gazzaniga said.

"They were designed for deploying gas," Menlo said. "Non-lethal, crowd-control aerosols. Luckily, their range is quite short. Only fifty miles."

"I see," said Oscar.

"Well," said Gazzaniga, "they're nonlethal missiles and they have a short range, right? So what's the big deal?"

"You people here in Buna are the only federal facility within fifty miles of those missiles."

No one said anything.

"Tell me how those missiles work," Greta said at last.

"Well, it's a nice design," Menlo offered. "They're stealth mis-siles, mostly plastic, and they vaporize in midair in a silent burst dis-persion. Their payload is a fog: gelatin-coated microspheres. The psychotropic agent is inside the spheres, and the spheres will only melt in the environment of human lungs. After a few hours in the open air, all the microdust cooks down, and the payload becomes inert. But any human being who's been breathing in that area will absorb the payload."

"So they're like a short-term, airborne vaccination," Oscar said.

"Yes. Pretty much. That's well put. I think you've got the picture there. "

"What kind of insane person builds things like that?" Greta said in annoyance.

"Well, U.S. military biowar engineers. Quite a few of them used to work at this facility, before we lost the economic war." Field Mar-shal Menlo sighed. "As far as I know, that technology has never been used."

"He's going to bomb us with those things," Oscar announced. "How do you know that?"

"Because he's hired those biowar technicians. He must have picked 'em all up for a song, years ago. He's stuffed 'em down a salt mine somewhere. Psychotropic gas-that's just what he used against the Air Force base. And airborne vaccinations, he used that to kill mosquitoes. It all fits in. It's his modus operandi."

"We agree with that assessment," Menlo said. "The President asked him to give those gas weapons back. No go. So, he must mean to use them."

"What's the nature of this substance in the micro spheres?" Greta said.

"Well, psycho tropics seem likeliest. If they hit a place the size of Buna, you could have the whole town basically insane for forty-eight hours. But those microbeads could hold a lot of different airborne agents. Pretty much anything, really."

"And there's a battery of these missiles pointed at us, right now?" Menlo nodded. "Just one battery. Twenty warheads."

"I've been thinking," Gazzaniga announced, "if there was a lim-itd, surgical raid . . . not by U.S. troops officially, but let's say, by some competent combat veterans disguised as irregular Modera-tors . . ."

"Completely different matter," said a department head.

"Exactly."

"Actually defuses the crisis. Increases the general security."

"Just what I was thinking."

"How long before you can attack, Marshal Menlo?"

"Seventy-two hours," the Field Marshal said.

But Huey had bombed them within forty-eight.

The first missile overshot the Collaboratory dome and landed in the western edge of Buna. A section of the city the size of four football fields was soaked with caustic black goo. The arrival of the bio-missile and its explosion were completely silent. It took until three in the morning for a partying German film crew in a local bed-and--breakfast to notice that the town's streets, roofs, and windows were covered with a finely powdered black tar.

The reaction was mass hysteria. The captive Haitians in Washing-ton, DC, had been getting a lot of press lately. The attack of gas psychosis in the Air Force base had not been forgotten, either. The news from the Collaboratory's War Committee had, of course, imme-diately leaked to the public-not officially, but as rumor. Confronted with this black manifestation of their darkest fears, the people of Buna lost their minds. Fits of itching, burning, fainting, and convulsions were reported. Many of the afflicted claimed to have bicameral con-sciousness, or second sight, or even telepathy.

A courageous Collaboratory krewe donned emergency respirator gear and rushed to the site of the gas attack. They gathered samples and returned-barely able to make it through the panicked crowds at the Collaboratory's airlocks, townsfolk desperate for the safety of the airtight lab. There were ugly incidents at the gates, where families found themselves separated in the crowds, where women held their children up in the air and begged for safety and mercy.

By ten AM, a lab study of the black tar had revealed that it was paint. It was a black, nontoxic, nonremovable caustic polymer, in a fog of gelatin beads. There was no psychotropic agent at all. The insanity of the townsfolk had been entirely a case of mass suggestion. The missile was just a silent paint balloon, a darkly humorous warning shot.

The CDIA's raid across Louisiana's border was canceled, because the missile battery had been moved. Worse yet, twenty new dummy missile batteries had suddenly appeared in its place: on farms, in towns, roaming on shrimp trucks, all over Louisiana.

Despite the fact that scientific analysis had proved that the missile was paint, a large proportion of the population simply refused to be-lieve it. The state and federal governments officially announced that it was paint; so did the city council, but people simply refused to accept this. People were paranoid and terrified-but many seemed weirdly elated by the incident. In the days that followed, a thriving gray market sprang up for samples of the paint, which were swiftly distributed all over the coun-try, sold to the gullible in little plastic-topped vials. Hundreds of peo-ple spontaneously arrived in Buna, anxious to scrape up paint and sniff it. A large number of miracle cures were attributed to use of this substance. People wrote open letters to the Governor of Louisiana, begging him to bomb their own cities with the "liberation gas."

Huey denied all knowledge of any missiles in Louisiana. He stoutly denied that he had anything to do with black paint. He made fun of the ridiculous antics of the war-crazed populace-which didn't require much effort-and suggested that it proved that the federal government had lost its grip. Huey's two Senators had both been purged from the Senate, which was behaving with more purpose than it had managed to show for years; but this allowed Huey to wash his hands of Washington entirely.

Huey's mood darkened drastically after his own bomb attack.

One of Huey's trusted henchmen had planted an explosive briefcase inside the statehouse. Huey's left arm was broken in the explosion, and two of his state senators were killed. This was not the first con-spiracy against Huey's life; it was far from the first attempt to kill him. But it was the closest to success.

Naturally the President was suspected. Oscar very much doubted that the President would have stooped to a tactic so archaic and crude. The failed assassination actually strengthened Huey's hand-and his hand came down hard on Louisianans, and on the Regulator hierarchy in particular. It was of course Louisianans who had the greatest reason to kill their leader, who in pursuit of his own ambitions had placed their state in a hopeless struggle against the entire Union. The Regu-lators in particular-Huey's favorite fall guys-had a grim future ahead of them, if and when they faced federal vengeance. Regulators from outside Louisiana-and there were many such-were sensing which way the wind blew, and were signing up in droves for the quasi-legitimacy of the President's CDIA. Huey had been good to the proles, he had made them a force to be reckoned with-but even proles understood power politics. Why go down in flames with a Governor, when you could rise to the heights with a President?