Aaron started whacking the space bar, paging through the list, flashing up the hundred photos one at a time. When it worked its way down to the bottom, it cycled back up to the top again, so he could keep it up forever if he wanted to. The red X on the map hopped back and forth across the country, tracing out a perfectly balanced demographic profile of the United States.
Floyd Wayne Vishniak was sitting in his trailer, watching Wheel, when he heard the sound of tires on gravel. He went to the front door, glancing over to make sure that his sawed-off shotgun was sitting in its secret place; it was there all right, craftily concealed in the narrow gap behind three stacked cases of beer, right next to the door. Having thus established his parameters, he looked out the window to see who had come all the way out here to pay him a visit. If it was another bill collector, he was not going to get a very friendly reception.
From initial appearances, it could very well be a bill collector. It was a little skinny dark-haired man with glasses and he got out of the car wearing a button-up shirt and a tie. First thing he did was open the back door of his gray Ford LTD Crown Victoria and unhook his suit jacket from the little hook that was above the back door.
Floyd Wayne Vishniak had been driving around in cars since he was tiny, of course, and he had seen those little hook thingies above the doors and someone had told him a long time ago that they were to hang coats off of. But this very moment was the first time in his entire life that he had actually seen one used.
A seed of resentment was germinated in his mind. Garment hooks in the back seats of cars. Always there, never used. A mysterious vestige of other times and places, like spittoons. Nobody used them; that’s how it was. Nobody wore suits to begin with, unless they were going to a wedding or a funeral. When they did wear suits, if they absolutely had to take off the jacket for some reason, they would toss it out flat on the backseat. To hang it up that way—what was this little geek trying to say, exactly? That the lint or whatever on the backseat of his fancy luxury car (which was spotless) could not be allowed to touch the fabric of his fancy suit jacket?
It was a nice car all right, brand new and probably costing in excess of fifteen thousand bucks. Its beautiful gray finish had been streaked, below the beltline, with dark brown mud thrown up by the wheels as it had come up the gravel road from the highway. Floyd had been kicked out of his apartment in Davenport so that the landlord could rent it out to a big family of African-Americans come from Chicago to steal away a few more of Davenport’s nonexistent jobs. Fortunately he knew someone who had this farm just outside of town, and was willing to let him live here in this trailer.
The man put his suit jacket on. The satin lining flashed in the horizontal sunlight of the early evening. He shrugged his shoulders a couple of times so that the jacket would fall into place and look pretty on him. The jacket had padding in the shoulders that made the man look bigger than he really was. He reached into the backseat and pulled out a briefcase.
As soon as he saw that briefcase, Floyd opened the door of his trailer and stood there leaning against the doorframe and smoking his cigarette and looking down the full height of the jury-rigged, mud-tracked staircase at this little man.
“Hello, Mr. Vishniak,” the man said, looking up at him.
“That’s funny, I ain’t introduced myself yet. How’d you know my name? I don’t know you. I don’t know anyone like you. All my friends drive pickup trucks with a lot of rust on ’em. Who the hell are you?”
The visitor seemed taken aback. “My name’s Aaron Green,” he said. He looked like he really didn’t want to be here. That actually made Floyd more sympathetic to the man because Floyd didn’t want him to be there either. So that was a start anyway.
“What do you want?” Floyd said.
“I want to give you ten thousand dollars.”
“You got it with you?”
“No, but I have a down payment of one thousand.”
Floyd stood there in the doorway for a while and smoked his cigarette and pondered this unusual situation. A man, very likely a Jew from Chicago, had just driven up to his trailer and offered him ten thousand dollars.
“This a Publishers Clearing House thing? You a friend of Ed McMahon or something?”
“No, it’s not a sweepstakes. I represent ODR, which is a poll-taking organization based in Virginia. We’ve identified you as being a typical representative of a particular part of the United States population.”
Floyd snorted derisively. He could just imagine.
“We would like to keep track of your reactions to the current presidential campaign. What you think of the different candidates and issues.”
“So you want me to go to Virginia?”
“No. Not at all. We want you to change your lifestyle as little as possible. That’s crucial to the system.”
“So you’re going to call me up every couple days and ask me questions.”
“It’s even easier than that,” Green said. “Can I step inside and show you?”
Floyd snorted again. “My little abode ain’t much to look at.”
“That’s okay. I’ll only take ten or fifteen minutes of your time.”
“Come on in then.”
Aaron Green and Floyd sat down in front of the TV. Floyd turned the volume down a little bit and offered his visitor a beer, which he declined. “I have to drive to Nebraska tonight,” he said, “and if I have a beer now I’ll be pulling over to urinate all night long.”
“Nebraska? What, you taking one guy from each state?”
“Something like that,” Aaron Green said. Obviously he did not believe that Floyd Wayne Vishniak, a dumb uneducated factory worker, would ever be smart enough to understand the details.
“You ever read Dick Tracy comics?” Aaron Green asked.
“They don’t have it in the paper here,” Floyd said. “You ever read Prince Valiant?”
Again, Aaron Green stumbled. He was having a hard time building up his momentum. “Well, you might have heard of the wristwatch television set.”
“Yeah, I heard of that.”
“Well, here’s your chance to have a look at one.” Aaron Green pulled something out of his briefcase.
It looked like a super high-tech watch or something. Like some kind of secret military thing that a commando in a movie would wear.
The band of the watch was not just a strip of leather or anything like that. It was made of hard black plastic ventilated with lots of holes. It was huge, about three inches wide. It consisted of several plates of this hard black plastic stuff hinged together so that it would curve around the wrist.
Instead of having just one clockface on the top surface, it had a whole little screen type of thing, just like on a digital watch except that it wasn’t showing anything right now, just gray and blank. And in addition to that there were a few other raised black containers molded to the outer surface of the watchband, but they didn’t have any screens or buttons or anything like that, they were just blank, and must have contained batteries or something.
“Shit,” Floyd said, “what the hell is it?”
“Most of the time it’s a digital watch. Part of the time, it’s a television set, complete with a little speaker for sound.”
“Can I get Whiplash games on it?”
“I’m afraid not. The TV will only show one type of program and one type only, and that is political programming having to do with the election.”
“Shit, I knew there was a catch.”
“That’s why we’re offering you the money. Because this is not all fun and games. Some responsibility falls on your shoulders as part of this deal.”
Floyd Wayne Vishniak thought that if Aaron Green were not trying to pay him ten thousand dollars, he might throw him down the stairs and jump on him out in the yard and mess him up a little bit. He did not appreciate the fact that this little man, who was about the same age as him, and maybe a bit younger, was lecturing him about responsibility. It was the kind of thing his dad used to s
ay to him.
But for now he was going to be cool. He put his feet up on the table next to the briefcase, sat back, raised his eyebrows, peered at Aaron Green through the smoke of his cigarette. “Well, for ten thousand bucks I guess I could be responsible.”
“Think of it as a part-time job. It’ll take maybe ten minutes of your time every day. It doesn’t prevent you from having other jobs. And it pays very, very well.”
“What do I got to do in this job?”
“Watch TV.”
Floyd laughed. “Watch TV? On this little wristwatch thing?”
“Exactly. Now, most of the time, it’ll just act like a digital watch.” Green pressed a button on the face of the wristwatch and the screen began to show black numerals on a gray background, giving the current time and date. “This is just a convenience for you,” he explained. “But from time to time, something like this will happen.”
The watch emitted a piercing beep. The numerals on the tiny screen disappeared and were replaced by a color-bar test pattern.
“Whoa, it’s in color!” Floyd said.
“Yeah. Of course, you can’t see any color when it’s pretending to be a wristwatch. But in TV mode, it’s just like a small color television set.”
After a couple of seconds, the test pattern was replaced by a videotape of John F. Kennedy giving his “Ask not what your country can do for you” speech.
“This is just a little canned demonstration. Once the program gets underway, it’ll show you coverage of campaign events. Debates, news conferences, and so on.”
“Why don’t I just watch ’em on my own TV set?”
“Because we’re going to pipe our own coverage directly to you, through this watch. We might want you to see some events that the networks wouldn’t cover, so we have to generate the programming ourselves. Besides, we think we’ll get better compliance this way.”
“Compliance?”
“Suppose you’re out of the house. Like maybe going to a Whiplash game. You wouldn’t be able to watch normal TV. But with this PIPER watch, you can watch it wherever you are.”
“PIPER?”
“That’s the name of this program.”
“How much of this stuff do I have to watch?”
“Many days there won’t be anything at all. We might show you fifteen minutes or half an hour of programming a few times a week. Sometimes it’ll be a little more intense. The only time when we’ll really give you a lot of stuff to watch will be during the conventions in July and August.”
“What else do I gotta do? You call me up and ask me questions about this stuff, or what?”
“That’s it. Just watch the TV programs.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes.”
“Then how do you know what my opinion is? I thought the whole idea was to get my opinion.”
“It is. But we can do that electronically.”
“How?”
“Through the PIPER watch.” Green reached into his briefcase and pulled out a videotape. “I see you have a VCR in here. You should watch this tape. It’ll explain how everything works.”
“I don’t get it.”
“The PIPER watch does more than just show you campaign events. It also monitors your reactions. You ever go to a mall or an amusement park and see one of those machines where you drop in a quarter and it gives you your biorhythms, or your emotional state, or something like that?”
“There’s one down at Duke’s Tavern that gives you your sex rating.”
“Oh.” Green seemed embarrassed. “How does that work?”
“You grab this big rod sticking out of the top and it measures your sex quotient and flashes it up on the screen. I always get a real high score.”
“Okay, it’s probably a galvanic skin response device.”
“Say what?”
“This PIPER watch has the same kind of thing built into it as your sex quotient machine. So it could provide a twenty-four hour a day readout of your sex quotient, if that was what we wanted.”
“Why would you want my sex quotient?”
“We probably wouldn’t, to tell you the truth—no offense!” Green laughed nervously. “But by using the same type of detectors, we can get a sense of how you are reacting to the programming shown on the TV screen. That information is piped directly back to us over the radio.”
“So, it gives you my emotions. Tells you what my body’s thinking.”
Green smiled. “That’s a good way to describe it. What your body is thinking. I like that.”
“What about my opinions, though?”
Green shook his head and frowned. “I’m not sure quite what you mean.”
“Well, this tells you how my emotions respond, right?”
“Yes.”
“But that’s not the same as an opinion, is it?”
Green seemed to be baffled, lost. “It’s not? I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”
“Well, maybe I watch some guy giving a speech. Maybe he’s real good at giving speeches and so my emotions are good. Then, I’m lying awake in bed in the middle of the night, thinking about what he said, and suddenly it doesn’t seem so logical any more, and I can see all kind of holes in his argument and I change my mind and decide he’s just another pencil-neck, media-slick son of a bitch out to take my money and send the jobs to Borneo. So my final opinion of the guy is that he’s a bastard. But all you know is that I had a good emotional response to his speech.”
Floyd knew that he had Green now. Clearly Green, the big-city, high-paid intellectual, had never thought about this. He had never anticipated that someone might make this objection. He did not know what to say. “We don’t have the technology to read that sort of thing,” he finally said, speaking very slowly and carefully. “We don’t have any way to read your mind in the middle of the night and find out that you think Senator So-and-so is going to send your job to Borneo.”
“Humph,” Floyd said, shaking his head.
“But PIPER is just one way we have of getting information,” Green said, picking up momentum now. Floyd had the distinct impression that he was just trying to talk his way out of the tight corner that Floyd had backed him into. “Needless to say, we are receptive to any kind of input that you might want to give us. So if you have these thoughts in the middle of the night—”
“I do,” Floyd affirmed, “all the time. They come to me like a thief in the night.”
“—in that case, you would be more than welcome to provide those to us.”
“My phone service got cut off,” Floyd said. “But I could write you letters.”
“That would be absolutely fine,” Green said. “Our address is printed right there on the videotape. You go ahead and send us as many letters as you like. We’d like to hear your opinions on any subject.”
“So I gotta wear this thing twenty-four hours a day?”
Green shrugged. “Just when you’re awake.”
“And what else do I gotta do to get this ten thousand bucks?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“Absolutely nothing?”
“Just get up in the morning and put it on, every day from now until Election Day. If you agree to this, I give you a thousand dollars right here and now. We’ll be able to tell, by monitoring the signals from the watch, whether you’re wearing it or not. As long as you keep it on during all of the programming segments that we broadcast, we will continue to send you a thousand dollars a month. On Election Day, we send you the remainder of the ten thousand.”
Floyd grabbed the PIPER watch. The two halves of the watchband were spread wide apart. He put it on his wrist, wrapped his other hand around it, and the watchband tightened down firmly but comfortably.
“To take it off, just push that little button right there and the ratchet will be released,” Green said.
“We got a deal,” Floyd said. “Where’s my thousand?”
thirty-six
“THIS IS it, baby,” Cyrus Rutherford Ogle said, sittin
g in the big chair and twiddling the joysticks. “This is the moon shot. T minus half an hour and counting.” That is what Aaron Green saw as he was climbing into the back of the big GODS truck out in back of the Decatur Civic Center in Decatur, Illinois. It was 7:30 P.M. on Flag Day.
“My god,” Aaron said. That was all he could force past his lips for the first several minutes.
It looked just like a plain flatbed semitrailer truck with a shipping container on the back. The shipping container, a steel box about the size of a mobile home, was brand new and slickly painted with the three-colored logo of Global Omnipresent Delivery Services. These days, as the U.S. Postal Service continued to go the way of Greyhound, the logo had become as ubiquitous as a mailbox. Most people wouldn’t notice this thing unless it was parked in their driveway. Out behind the Decatur Civic Center, sandwiched in between a food delivery truck and a video truck from Television North America, it was invisible. The only indications that it carried something other than mail were a soft humming noise and a glassy twist of heat waves coming from a small opening on its top. It carried its own power plant.
Aaron entered through a door in the rear, passing directly into a narrow aisle, some ten feet in length, between racks of electronics and heavier equipment that stretched from floor to ceiling. Nuclear submarines must be like this, Aaron thought, as he peered into the racks, picking out the familiar shapes and logos of various top-of-the-line Pacific Netware computer systems.
The aisle finally opened up into sort of an office and communications center. Countertops ran along both walls for several yards and a couple of desks sat in the middle. These surfaces were strewn with telephones, scrawled yellow notes, staplers, laptop computers, a miniature photocopier. Higher up, at head level, heavy shelves and racks were mounted to the walls, loaded with video stuff: three-quarter-inch and half-inch tape machines, monitors, and other rack-mounted goodies that Aaron recognized as being parts of a television editing suite.
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