"Nil carborundum illegitimis to you, too."

She clicked over to her editor. "Jimmy," she said. "Long time no speak. Sorry I missed your calls before -- I'm in Russia on a story."

"h.e.l.lo, Suzanne," he said. His voice had an odd, strained quality, or maybe that was just her mood, projecting. "I'm sorry, Suzanne. You've been doing good work. The best work of your career, if you ask me. I follow it closely."

It made her feel a little better. She'd been uncomfortable about the way she and Jimmy had parted ways, but this was vindicating. It emboldened her. "Jimmy, what the h.e.l.l do I do now?"

"Christ, Suzanne, I don't know. I'll tell you what not to do, though. Off the record."

"Off the record."

"Don't do what I've done. Don't hang grimly onto the last planks from the sinking ship, chronicling the last few struggling, sinking schmucks' demise. It's no fun being the stenographer for the fall of a great empire. Find something else to cover."

The words made her heart sink. Poor Jimmy, stuck there in the Merc's once-great newsroom, while the world crumbled around him. It must have been heartbreaking.

"Thanks," she said. "You want an interview?"

"What? No, woman. I'm not a ghoul. I wanted to call and make sure you were all right."

"Jimmy, you're a prince. But I'll be OK. I land on my feet. You've got someone covering this story, so give her my number and have her call me and I'll give her a quote."

"Really, Suzanne --"

"It's *fine*, Jimmy."

"Suzanne," he said. "We don't cover that kind of thing from our newsroom anymore. Just local stuff. National coverage comes from the wires or from the McClatchy national newsroom."

She sucked in air. Could it be possible? Her first thought when Jimmy called was that she'd made a terrible mistake by leaving the Merc, but if this was what the paper had come to, she had left just in time, even if her own life-raft was sinking, it had kept her afloat for a while.

"The offer still stands, Jimmy. I'll talk to anyone you want to a.s.sign."

"You're a sweetheart, Suzanne. What are you in Russia for?"

She told him. Screw scoops, anyway. Not like Jimmy was going to send anyone to *Russia*, he couldn't even afford to dispatch a reporter to Marin County by the sounds of things.

"What a story!" he said. "Man!"

"Yeah," she said. "Yeah I guess it is."

"You *guess*? Suzanne, this is the single most important issue in practically every American's life -- there isn't one in a thousand who doesn't worry endlessly about his weight."

"Well, I have been getting really good numbers on this." She named the figure. He sucked air between his teeth. "That's what the whole freaking *chain* does on a top story, Suzanne. You're outperforming fifty local papers *combined.*"

"Yeah?"

"h.e.l.l yeah," he said. "Maybe I should ask you for a job."

When he got off the phone, she spoke to Perry, and then to Lester. Lester said that he wanted to go traveling and see his old friends in Russia and that if she was still around in a couple weeks, maybe he'd see her there. Perry was morose and grimly determined. He was on the verge of shipping his three-d printers and he was sure he could do it, even if he didn't have the Kodacell network for marketing and logistics. He didn't even seem to register it when she told him that she was going to be spending some time in Russia.

Then she had to go into the clinic and ask intelligent questions and take pictures and record audio and jot notes and pay attention to the small details so that she would be able to write the best account possible.

They dressed well in Russia, in the clinics. Business casual, but well tailored and made from good material. The Europeans knew from textiles, and expert tailoring seemed to be in cheap supply here.

She'd have to get someone to run her up a blue blazer and a white shirt and a decent skirt. It would be nice to get back into grown-up clothes after a couple years' worth of Florida casual.

She'd see Geoff after dinner that night, get more detail for the story. There was something big here in the medical tourism angle -- not just weight loss but gene therapy, too, and voodoo stem-cell stuff and advanced prostheses and even some crazy performance enhancement stuff that had kept Russia out of the past Olympics.

She typed her story notes and answered the phone calls. One special call she returned once she was sitting in her room, relaxed, with a cup of coffee from the in-room coffee-maker.

"h.e.l.lo, Freddy," she said.

"Suzanne, darling!" He sounded like he was breathing hard.

"What can I do for you?"

"Just wanted a quote, love, something for color."

"Oh, I've got a quote for you." She'd given the quote a lot of thought. Living with the squatters had broadened her vocabulary magnificently.

"And those are your good points," she said, taking a sip of coffee. "Goodbye, Freddy."

PART II

The drive from Orlando down to Hollywood got worse every time Sammy took it. The turnpike tolls went up every year and the road surface quality declined, and the gas prices at the clip-joints were heart-attack-inducing. When Sammy started at Disney Imagineering a decade before, the company had covered your actual expenses -- just collect the receipts and turn them in for cash back. But since Parks had been spun off into a separate company with its own shareholders, the new austerity measures meant that the bean-counters in Burbank set a maximum per-mile reimburs.e.m.e.nt and never mind the actual expense.

Enough of this compet.i.tive intelligence work and Sammy would go broke.

Off the turnpike, it was even worse. The shantytowns multiplied and multiplied. Laundry lines stretched out in the parking-lots of former strip-malls. Every traffic-light clogged with aggressive techno-tchotchke vendors, the squeegee b.u.ms of the twenty-first century, with their p.o.r.nographic animatronic dollies and infinitely varied robot dogs. Disney World still sucked in a fair number of tourists (though not nearly so many as in its golden day), but they were staying away from Miami in droves. The s...o...b..rds had died off in a great demographic spasm over the past decade, and their children lacked the financial wherewithal to even think of over-wintering in their parents' now-derelict condos.

The area around the dead Wal-Mart was particularly awful. The shanties here rose three, even four stories into the air, cl.u.s.tered together to make medieval street-mazes. Broward County had long since stopped enforcing the property claims of the bankruptcy courts that managed the real-estate interests of the former owners of the fields and malls that had been turned into the new towns.

By the time he pulled into the Wal-Mart's enormous parking lot, the day had heated up, his air-con had conked, and he'd acc.u.mulated a comet-tail of urchins who wanted to sell him a computer-generated bust of himself in the style of a Roman emperor -- they worked on affiliate commission for some three-d printer jerk in the shanties, and they had a real aggressive pitch, practically flinging their samples at him.

He pushed past them and wandered through the open-air market stalls, a kind of cruel parody of the long-gone Florida flea-markets. These gypsies sold fabricated parts that could be modded to make single-shot zip guns and/or bongs and/or illegal-gain wireless antennae. They sold fruit smoothies and suspicious "beef" jerky. They sold bootleg hardcopies of Mexican fotonovelas and bound printouts of j.a.panese fan-produced tentacle-p.o.r.n comics. It was all d.a.m.nably eye-catching and intriguing, even though Sammy knew that it was all junk.

Finally, he reached the ticket-window in front of the Wal-Mart and slapped down five bucks on the counter. The guy behind the counter was the kind of character that kept the tourists away from Florida: shaven-headed, with one c.o.c.keyed eyebrow that looked like a set of hills, a three-day beard and skin tanned like wrinkled leather.

"Hi again!" Sammy said, brightly. Working at Disney taught you to talk happy even when your stomach was crawling -- the castmember's grin.

"Back again?" the guy behind the counter laughed. He was missing a canine tooth and it made him look even more sketchy. "Christ, dude, we'll have to invent a season's pa.s.s for you."

"Just can't stay away," Sammy said.

"You're not the only one. You're a h.e.l.l of a customer for the ride, but you haven't got anything on some of the people I get here -- people who come practically every day. It's flattering, I tell you."

"You made this, then?"