“Well, your core-target violent paranoiac, he might not notice the misspellings.”
Oscar thought this over. “How many of those messages were mailed out, do you suppose?”
“Maybe a couple of thousand? The USSS protective-interest files list over three hundred thousand people. A clever program wouldn’t hit up every possible lunatic every single time, of course.”
“Of course.” Oscar nodded thoughtfully. “And what about Bambakias? Is he in danger too?”
“I briefed the Senator about this situation. They’ll step up his security in Cambridge and Washington. But I figure you’re in much more trouble than he is. You’re closer, you’re louder, and you’re a lot easier.”
“Hmmm. I see. Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Jules. You’re making very good sense, as always. So what would you advise?”
“I advise better security. The commonsense things. Break up your daily routine. Go to places where you can’t be expected. Keep a safe house ready, in case of trouble. Watch out for strangers, for anybody who might be stalking you, or workin’ up the nerve. Avoid crowds whenever possible. And you do need a bodyguard.”
“I don’t have time for all that, though. There’s too much work for me here.”
Fontenot sighed. “That’s exactly what people always tell us…Oscar, I was in the Secret Service for twenty-two years. It’s a career, we have a real job of work. You don’t hear a lot in public about the Secret Service, but the Secret Service is a very busy outfit. They shut down the old CIA, they broke up the FBI years ago, but the USSS has been around almost two hundred years now. We never go away. Because the threat never goes away. People in public life get death threats. They get ’em all the time. I’ve seen hundreds of death threats. They’re very common things for famous people. I never saw a real-life attempted assassination, though. Spent my whole career carefully watchin’ and waitin’ for one, and it never, ever happened. Until one fine day, that car bomb happened. Then I lost my leg.”
“I understand.”
“You need to come to terms with this. It’s reality. It’s real, and you have to adjust to it, but at the same time, you can’t let it stop you.”
Oscar said nothing.
“The sky is a different color when you know that you might get shot at. Things taste different. It can get to you, make you wonder if a public life’s worthwhile. But you know, despite stuff like this, this is not an evil or violent society.” Fontenot shrugged. “Really, it isn’t. Not anymore. Back when I was a young agent, America was truly violent then. Huge crime rates, crazy drug gangs, automatic weapons very cheap and easy. Miserable, angry, pitiful people. People with grudges, people with a lot of hate inside. But nowadays, this just isn’t a violent time anymore. It’s just a very weird time. People don’t fight real hard for anything in particular, when they know their whole lives could be turned inside out in a week flat. People’s lives don’t make sense anymore, but most people in America, the poor people especially, they’re a lot happier than they used to be. They might be profoundly lost, like your Senator likes to say, but they’re not all crushed and desperate. They’re just…wandering around. Drifting. Hanging loose. They’re at very loose ends.”
“Maybe.”
“If you lie low awhile, this business will pass right over you. You’ll move on to Boston or Washington, on to other issues, out of Huey’s hair. Automated hit lists are like barbed wire, they’re nasty but they’re very stupid. They don’t even understand what they read. Once you’re yesterday’s news, the machines will just forget you.”
“I don’t intend to become yesterday’s news for quite a while, Jules.”
“Then you’d better learn how famous people go on living.”
__________
Oscar was determined not to have his morale affected by Fontenot’s security alarm. He went back to work on the hotel. The hotel was coming along with the usual fairy-tale rapidity of a Bambakias structure. The whole krewe was pitching in; they had all been infected by the Bambakias ideology, so they all protested stoutly to one another that they wouldn’t miss the fun of construction for anything.
Strangely enough, the work really did become fun, in its own way; there was a rich sense of schadenfreude in fully sharing the sufferings of others. The system logged the movements of everyone’s hands, cruelly eliminating any easy method of deceiving your friends while you yourself slacked off work. Distributed instantiation was fun in the way that hard-core team sports were fun. Balconies flew up, archways and pillars rose, random jumbles crystallized into spacious sense and reason. It was like lashing your way up a mountainside in cables and crampons, only to notice, all sudden and gratuitous, a fine and lovely view.
There were certain set-piece construction activities guaranteed to attract an admiring crowd: the tightening of tensegrity cables, for instance, that turned a loose skein of blocks into a solidly locked-together parapet, good for the next three hundred years. Bambakias krewes took elaborate pleasure in these theatrical effects. The krewe would vigorously play to the crowd when they were doing the boring stuff, they would ham it up. But during these emergent moments when the system worked serious magic, they would kick back all loose and indifferent, with the heavy-lidded cool of twentieth-century jazz musicians.
Oscar was a political consultant. He made it his business to appreciate a crowd. He felt about a good crowd the way he imagined dirt farmers feeling about a thriving field of watermelons. However, he had a hard time conjuring up his usual warm appreciation when one of the watermelons might have come there to shoot him.
Of course he was familiar with security; during the campaign, everyone had known that there might be incidents, that the candidate might be hurt. The candidate was mixing with The People, and some few of The People were just naturally evil or insane. There had indeed been a few bad moments on the Massachusetts campaign trail: nasty hecklers, nutty protesters, vomiting drunks, pickpockets, fainting spells, shoving matches. The unpleasant business that made good campaign security the functional equivalent of seat belts or fire extinguishers. Security was an empty trouble and expense, ninety-nine times in a hundred. On the hundredth instance you were very glad you had been so sensible.
The modern rich always maintained their private security. Bodyguards were basic staff for the overclass, just like majordomos, cooks, secretaries, sysadmins, and image consultants. A well-organized personal krewe, including proper security, was simply expected of modern wealthy people; without a krewe, no one would take you seriously. All of this made perfect sense.
And yet none of it had much to do with the stark notion of having one’s flesh pierced by a bullet.
It wasn’t the idea of dying that bothered him. Oscar could easily imagine dying. It was the ugly sense of meaningless disruption that repelled him. His game board kicked over by a psychotic loner, a rule-breaker who couldn’t even comprehend the stakes.
Defeat in the game, he could understand. Oscar could easily imagine himself, for instance, swept up in a major political scandal. Crapped out. Busted. Cast into the wilderness. Broken from the ranks. Disgraced. Shunned, forgotten. A nonperson. A political hulk. Oscar could very well imagine that eventuality. It definitely gave the game a spice. After all, if victory was guaranteed, that wouldn’t be victory at all.
But he didn’t want to be shot. So Oscar gave up working on the building project. It was a sad sacrifice, because he truly enjoyed the process, and the many glorious opportunities it offered for shattering the preconceptions of backward East Texans. But it tired him to envision the eager and curious crowds as a miasma of enemies. Where were the crosshairs centered? Constant morbid speculation on the subject of murder was enough to convince Oscar that he himself would have made an excellent assassin—clever, patient, disciplined, resolute, and sleepless. This painful discovery rather harmed his self-image.
He warned his krewe of the developments. Heartwarmingly, they seemed far more worried about his safety than he was himself.
He retreated back inside the Collaboratory, where he knew he was much more secure. In the event of any violent crime, Collaboratory security would flip a switch on their Escaped Animal Vector alarms, and every orifice in the dome would lock as tight as a bank vault.
Oscar was much safer under glass—but he could feel himself curtailed, under pressure, his life delimited by unseen hands. However, he still had one major field of counterattack. Oscar dived aggressively into his laptop. He, Pelicanos, Bob Argow, and Audrey Avizienis had all been collaborating on the chains of evidence.
Senator Dougal and his Texan/Cajun mafia of pork-devouring good old boys had been very dutiful at first. Their relatively modest graft vanished at once, slipping methodically over Texas state lines into the vast money laundries of the Louisiana casinos. The funds oozed back later as generous campaign contributions and unexplained second homes in the names of wives and nephews.
But the years had gone on, and the country’s financial situation had become stormy and chaotic. With hyperinflation raging and major industries vanishing like pricked balloons, it was hard to keep up pretenses. Covering their tracks had become boring and tiresome. The Senator’s patronage of the Collaboratory was staunch and tireless, and the long-honored causes of advancing science and sheltering endangered species still gave most Americans a warm, generous, deeply uncritical feeling. The Collaboratory’s work struggled on—while the rot crept on in its shadow, spreading into parts scams, bid rigging, a minor galaxy of kickbacks and hush money. There was featherbedding on jobs, with small-time political allies slotted into dull yet lucrative posts, such as parking and plumbing and laundry. Embezzlement was like alcoholism. It was very hard to step back, and if no one ever called you out on it, then the little red veins began to show.
Oscar felt he was making excellent progress. His options for action were multiplying steadily.
Then the first homicidal lunatic attacked.
With this occurrence, Oscar was approached by Collaboratory security. Security took the form of a middle-aged female officer, who belonged to a tiny federal police agency known as the “Buna National Collaboratory Security Authority.” This woman informed Oscar that a man had just arrived from Muskogee, Oklahoma, banging fruitlessly at the southern airlock and brandishing a foil-wrapped cardboard box that he insisted was a “Super Reflexo-Grenade.”
Oscar visited the suspect in his cell. His would-be assassin was disheveled and wretched, utterly lost, with the awful cosmic dislocation of the seriously mentally ill. Oscar felt a sudden unexpected pang of terrible pity. It was very clear to him that this man had no focused malice. The poor wretch had simply been hammered into his clumsy evildoing through a ceaseless wicked pelting of deceptive net-based spam. Oscar found himself so shocked by this that he blurted out his instinctive wish that the man might be set free.
The local cops were wisely having none of that, however. They had called the Secret Service office in Austin. Special agents would be arriving presently to thoroughly interrogate Mr. Spencer, and discreetly take him elsewhere.
The very next day, another lethal crank showed up. This gentleman, Mr. Bell, was cleverer. He had attempted to hide himself inside a truck shipment of electrical transformers. The truck driver had noticed the lunatic darting out from beneath a tarp, and had called security. A frantic chase ensued, and the stowaway was finally found burrowing desperately into a tussock of rare marsh grass, still gamely clutching a homemade black-powder pistol.
The advent of the third man, Mr. Anderson, was the worst by far. When caught lurking inside a dumpster, Anderson screamed loudly about flying saucers and the fate of the Confederacy, while slashing at his arms with a razor. This bloodshed was very shocking, and it made Oscar’s position difficult.
It was clear that he needed a safe house. And the safest area inside the Collaboratory was, of course, the Hot Zone.
The interior of the Hot Zone was rather less impressive than its towering china-white shell. The Zone was a very odd environment, since every item inside the structure had been designed to withstand high-pressure cleansing with superheated steam. The interior decor consisted of poreless plastics, acid-resistant white ceramic benchtops, bent-tubing metal chairs, and grainy nonslip floors. The Hot Zone was simultaneously deeply strange and profoundly mundane. After all, it wasn’t a fairyland or a spacecraft, it was simply a set of facilities where people carried out certain highly specific activities under closely defined and extremely clean circumstances. People had been working in the place for fifteen years.
Inside the dressing room-cum-airlock, Oscar was required to shed his street clothes. He outfitted himself in a disposable paper labcoat, gloves, a bouffant cap, a mask, and sockless ankle-wrapping clean-room booties. Greta Penninger, swiftly appointing herself his unofficial hostess, sent a male lab gofer to take him in hand.
Dr. Penninger possessed a large suite of laboratory offices within a brightly lit warren known as Neurocomputational Studies. A plastic door identified her as GRETA v. PENNINGER, PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR, and behind that door was a brightly lit surgical theater. Yards of white tabletop. Safety treading. Drying racks. Safety film. Detergents. Balances, fume hoods, graduated beakers. Hand pipettes. Centrifuges. Chromatographs. And a great many square white devices of utterly unknown function.
Oscar was met by Greta’s krewe majordomo, Dr. Albert Gazzaniga. Gazzaniga was the exemplar of what Oscar had come to recognize as “the Collaboratory look,” intense and yet strangely diffuse, like a racquetball player in Lotusland. Gazzaniga spent his working life in clean-room gear, and relaxed outside in rotting sneakers and khaki shorts. Gazzaniga had an eager, honest, backpack-wearing look about him. He was one of the few people in the Collaboratory who identified himself as a Federal Democrat. Most politically active Collaboratory people tended to be tedious, fuzzy Left Tradition Bloc types, party members of the Social Democrats or the Communists. It was rare to find one with enough grit and energy to take a solidly Reformist stance.
“So, what’s become of Dr. Penninger?”
“Oh, you mustn’t be offended, but she’s running a procedure now. She’ll be here when she’s good and done. Believe me, when Greta wants to concentrate, it’s always best to let her be.”
“That’s all right. I quite understand.”
“It’s not that she doesn’t take you seriously, you know. She’s very sympathetic to your situation. We’ve had troubles of our own with extremists. Animal rights people, vivisection nuts…I know we scientists lead very sheltered lives compared to you politicians, but we’re not entirely out-of-it here.”
“I would never think that, Albert.”
“I feel personally very sorry that you should be subject to this kind of harassment. It’s an honor to help you, really.”
Oscar nodded. “I appreciate that sentiment. It’s good of you to take me in. I’ll try not to get in the way of your labwork.”
Dr. Gazzaniga led him down an aisle past seven bunny-suited workers probing at their jello dishes. “I hope you don’t have the impression that Greta’s lab is a biohazard zone. We never work on anything hot in this lab. We wear this clean-gear strictly to protect our cultures from contamination.”
“I see.”
Gazzaniga shrugged beneath his lint-free labcoat. “That whole gene-technology scare tactic—the giant towers, the catacombs, the airlocks, the huge sealed dome—I guess that made a lot of political sense in the old days, but it was always a naive idea basically, and now it’s very old-fashioned. Except for a few classified military apps, the Collaboratory gave up on survivable bugs ages ago. There’s nothing growing inside the Hot Zone that could hurt you. Genetic engineering is a very stable field of practice now, it’s fifty years old. In terms of bugs, we use only thermo extremophiles. Germs native to volcanic environments. Very efficient, high metabolism, and good industrial turnover, and of course they’re very safe. Their metabolism doesn’t function at all, under 90° C. They live off sulfur and hydrogen, which you’d never find in
side any human bloodstream. Plus, all our stocks are double knockouts. So even if you literally bathed in those bugs—well, you might well get scalded, but you’d never risk infection or genetic bleed-over.”
“That sounds very reassuring.”
“Greta’s a professional. She’s a stickler for good lab procedure. No, more than that—the lab is where she really shines personally. She’s very strong in neurocomputational math, don’t get me wrong there—but Greta’s one of the great hands-on lab fiends. She can do stuff with STM probes like nobody else in the world. And if we could just get her hands on some decent thixotropic centrifuges instead of this Stone Age rotor crap, we’d be really kicking ass in here.”
Gazzaniga was on a roll now. He was visibly trembling with passionate commitment. “In publishable papers per man-hour, this is the most productive lab in Buna. We’ve got the talent, and Greta’s lab krewe is second to none. If we could only get proper resources, there’s no telling what we could accomplish here. Neuroscience is really breaking open right now, the same way genetics did forty years ago, or computers forty years before that. The sky’s the limit, really.”
“What is it, exactly, that you’re doing in here?”
“Well, in layman’s terms…”
“Never mind that, Albert. Just tell me about your work.”
“Well, basically, we’re still following up her Nobel Prize results. That was all about glial neurochemical gradients evoking attentional modulation. It was the biggest neurocognitive breakthrough in years, so there’s a lot of open field for us to run in now. Karen there is working on phasic modulation and spiking frequency. Yung-Nien is our token cognition wizard in the krewe, she does stochastic resonance and rate-response modeling. And Serge over yonder is your basic receptor-mechanic, he’s working on dendritic transformer uptakes. The rest of these people are basically postdoc support staff, but you never know, when you work with Greta Penninger. This is a world-famous lab. It’s a magnet. It’s got the right stuff. By the time she’s fifty or sixty, even her junior co-authors will be running neuro labs.”
Distraction Page 10
