Felzian laughed. “You can’t outplace every last one of us.”
“No, but I don’t have to. I only have to remove key opinion leaders, and the opposition will collapse. And if I can win your cooperation, we can get this all over with in short order. With dignity, maintaining all the proprieties. That’s in the best interests of the science community.”
Felzian crossed his arms triumphantly. “You’re sweet-talking me like this because you don’t really have anything on me.”
“Why should I resort to threats? You’re a reasonable man.”
“You’ve got nothing! And I’m supposed to collaborate with you, resign my Directorship, and quietly fall on my sword? You’ve got a lot of nerve.”
“But I’m telling you the truth.”
“The only problem I see here is you. And your problem is that you can’t do me any harm.”
Oscar sighed. “Yes, I can, actually. I’ve read your lab reports.”
“What are you talking about? I’m in administration! I haven’t published a paper in ten years.”
“Well, I’ve read your papers, Mr. Director. Of course, I’m not a trained geneticist, so, sad to say, I didn’t understand them. But I did audit them. They all received full-scale, nitpicking scans from an oppositional research team. You published seventy-five papers in your scientific career, every one of them jam-packed with numerical tables. Your numbers add up beautifully. Too beautifully, because six of them have the same sets of data.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that someone got lazy at the lab bench, and skipped the boring gruntwork.”
Felzian turned red. “What? You can’t prove that.”
“Unfortunately for you, yes, I can prove it. Because it’s all there in black and white. Back in your publish-or-perish days, you were in a big hurry, you had to cut some corners. And that’s bad. It’s very bad. For a scientist, it’s professionally fatal. Once we out you as a scientific fraud, you won’t have a friend left to your name. Your colleagues will break your sword and tear off your epaulets.”
Felzian said nothing.
Oscar shrugged. “As I said before, I’m not a scientist. I don’t take scientific fraud with the lethal seriousness that you scientists do. Personally, I don’t see how your fraud did any great harm, since no one was paying attention to those papers anyway. You were just a fair-to-middling talent in a very competitive field, trying to pad out your résumé.”
“I was completely unaware of this so-called problem. It must have been my grad students.”
Oscar chuckled. “Look, we both know that can’t get you off the hook. Sure, you can hide behind buck-passing when it comes to mere financial fraud. But this isn’t mere money. These are your lab results, your contribution to science. You cooked the books. If I out you on that, we both know you’re through. So why discuss this any further? Let’s get to the real agenda.”
“What is it you want from me?”
“I want you to resign, and I need your help in establishing the new Director.”
“Greta Penninger.”
“No,” Oscar said at once, “we both know that’s just not doable. Greta Penninger has been tactically useful to me, but I have another candidate that will be much more to your liking. In fact, he’s an old colleague of yours—Professor John Feduccia, the former president of Boston University.”
Felzian was astonished. “John Feduccia? How did he get onto the A-list?”
“Feduccia’s the ideal candidate! He’s very seasoned in administration, and he had an early career at the University of Texas, so that gives him the necessary local appeal. Plus, Feduccia is a personal friend of Senator Bambakias. Best of all, Feduccia is politically sound. He’s a Federal Democrat.”
Felzian stared at him in amazement. “Do you mean to tell me that you’ve been leading on poor Greta Penninger, while all this time you’ve been planning to bring in some Yankee who’s a personal crony of your boss?”
Oscar frowned. “Look, don’t be uncharitable. Of course I admire Greta Penninger. She was perfectly suited for the role that she’s already played here. She’s created a groundswell for change, but she can’t possibly run this facility. She doesn’t understand Washington. We need a responsible adult for that job, a seasoned hand from outside, someone who understands political reality. Feduccia’s a pro. Greta’s naive, she’s too easily swayed. She’d be a disaster.”
“Actually, I think she might do very well.”
“No, she’ll do much better where she belongs—back behind her lab bench. We can ease her off the board now, and back to her proper role as a working researcher, and everything will fall neatly into place.”
“So that you can continue having an affair with her, and nobody will bother to notice it.”
Oscar said nothing.
“Whereas, if she became Director, she’d be right in the public spotlight. So your sordid little dalliance becomes impossible.”
Oscar stirred in his seat. “I really didn’t expect this of you. This is truly beneath you. It’s not the act of a gentleman and scholar.”
“You didn’t think I knew anything about that business, did you? Well, I’m not quite the helpless buffoon that you take me for! Penninger is the next Director. You and your scurvy krewe can sneak back to Washington. I’m leaving this office—no, not because you’re forcing me out, but because I’m sick to death of this job!”
Felzian banged his desk. “It’s very bad here now. Since we lost our support in the Senate, it’s impossible. It’s a farce now, it’s untenable! I’m washing my hands of you, and Washington, and everything that you stand for. And keep one thing in mind, young man. With Penninger in office here, if you out me, I can out you. You might embarrass me—even humiliate me. But if you ever try it, I’ll out you and the new Director. I’ll break you both in public, like a pair of matchsticks.”
The abrupt departure of Dr. Felzian gave Oscar a vital window of opportunity. With the loss of his patron Bambakias, he had very little to fall back on. He had to seize the initiative. Their numbers were small, their resources narrow, their budget nonexistent. The order of the day was sheer audacity.
During Greta’s first day as Director, her followers formed a Strike Committee and physically occupied the Hot Zone. Strikers commandeered the airlocks overnight, overriding all the police-installed safety locks and replacing them with brand-new strikers’ pass-cards. Seizing the Hot Zone made excellent strategic sense, since the giant ceramic tower dominated the facility. The Hot Zone was a natural fortress.
Given this physical safe haven, the second order of business in Oscar’s internal coup was to attack and seize the means of information. The Hot Zone’s computers received a long-postponed security overhaul. This revealed an appalling number of police back doors, unregistered users, and whole forests of snooping crackerware. These freeloaders were all swiftly purged.
The lab’s internal phone system was still under the control of the Collaboratory police. The lab’s tiny corps of police were something of a comic-opera outfit, but they had been suborned by Huey long ago. They represented the greatest local threat to Greta’s fledgling administration. The lab’s phone system was riddled with taps, and beyond secure repair.
So, the strikers simply abandoned the phone system entirely, and replaced it with a homemade network of dirt-cheap nomad cellphones. These semi-licit gizmos ran off relay stakes, hammered into walls, ceilings, roofs, and (in a particularly daring midnight maneuver) all across the underside of the dome.
Greta’s first official act as Director was to abolish the Public Relations department. She accomplished this through the lethally effective tactic of zeroing-out the PR budget. She then returned the funds to Congress. Given the ongoing federal budget crisis, this was a very difficult move to parry politically.
Within the lab itself, abolishing the PR department was a hugely popular decision. At long last, the tedious jabber of the obnoxious pop-science pep squad ceased to irritate the loca
l populace. There was no more chummy propaganda from on high, no more elbow-grabbing official email, no more obligatory training videos, nothing but blissful quiet and time to think and work.
The Collaboratory’s official PR was replaced by Oscar’s revolutionary poster campaign. A Strike, of course, needed effective propaganda even more than did the dead Establishment, and Oscar was just the man to supply this. The giant cyclopean walls inside the dome were absolutely perfect for political poster work. Oscar had never run a campaign among people with such extremely high levels of literacy. He took real pleasure in the antique handicrafts involved.
Greta’s postindustrial action was a highly unorthodox “strike,” because the strikers were not refusing to do their work. They were refusing to do anything except their work. The general tenor of the Strike strategy was highly public noncooperation, combined with passive-aggressive cost-cutting.
The scientists were continuing their investigations, but they were refusing to fill out the federal paperwork. They refused to ask for grants, refused to pay rent on their barracks rooms, refused to pay for their food, refused to pay their power bills. They were refusing everything except for new instrumentation, a deeply embedded vice that simply could not be denied to scientists.
All the Strike Committee’s central members were also refusing their salaries. This was a deeply polarizing maneuver. Reasonable people simply couldn’t bring themselves to hold their breath and leap into the unknown in this way. Most of the lab’s “reasonable people” had long since made their peace with the Collaboratory’s institutional corruption. Therefore, they were all on the take. It followed that they were personally compromised, at war with themselves, riddled with guilt. Greta’s stalwart core of dissidents were made of sterner stuff.
So, through this swift and unpredictable seizure of the tactical initiative, the Strike won a series of heartening little moral victories. Oscar had arranged this situation deliberately, in order to build community self-confidence. The rent strike seemed very dramatic, but a rent strike was an unbeatable gambit. There was no internal competition for the rents in the Collaboratory. If the strikers were somehow thrown out of their lodgings, the buildings would simply stay empty.
The power strike succeeded in a very similar way, because there was no effective method to shut off the electricity for nonpayment. By its very nature as a sealed environment, the Collaboratory dome always required uninterrupted power, supplied by its own internal generators. There simply wasn’t any way to shut it off. It had never occurred to the original designers that the dome’s inhabitants might someday rebel and refuse to pay.
Each successful step away from the status quo won Greta more adherents. The long-oppressed scientists had always had many galling problems. But since they lacked a political awareness of their plight, they had never had any burning issues—they’d simply endured a bad scene. Now, organization and action had shattered their apathy. Aches and pains they’d long accepted as parts of the natural order were searingly revealed to them as oppression by evil know-nothings. A new power structure was aborning, with new methods, new goals, brave new opportunities for change. The Hot Zone had become a beehive of militant activism.
Within a week, the dome’s internal atmosphere was charged like a Leyden jar; it crackled with political potential. Greta’s unflinching radicalism had whipped the place into a frenzy.
Having built up a manic pressure for change, Greta took action to shore up her official legal situation. The Directorship had never been a strong executive post, but Greta engineered the forced resignations of all her fellow board members. The original board was, of course, deeply unwilling to leave power, but the sudden resignation and departure of Dr. Felzian had left them stunned. Outmaneuvered and discredited, they were soon replaced by Greta’s zealous fellow-travelers, who trusted her implicitly and granted her a free hand.
The Collaboratory’s party of the status quo had been decimated before they could organize any resistance. Years without serious challenge or controversy had made them fat and slow. They’d been crushed before they could even recognize the threat. Greta still held the initiative. She had excellent operational intelligence, thanks to Oscar’s oppositional research and his plethora of demographic profiles. The forced confession of Dr. Skopelitis had also been very useful, since Skopelitis had spilled his guts in a torrent of email and fingered his fellow conspirators.
Behind these vibrant, stage-managed scenes of unleashed popular discontent, the transition of actual day-to-day power had gone remarkably smoothly. Felzian had always run the lab like a high school vice principal; the real power decisions in the Collaboratory had always rested in the distant hands of Dougal and his Senate krewe.
Now Dougal and his cronies were finished. However, the power vacuum was brief. Oscar’s own krewe was a group of political operatives who could easily have become a Senate staff. With a little bending and jamming, they slotted very nicely into place, and quietly usurped the entire operation.
Oscar himself served as Greta’s (very unofficial) chief of staff. Pelicanos oversaw lab finances. Bob Argow and Audrey Avizienis were handling constituency services and counterintelligence. Lana Ramachandran dealt with scheduling, office equipment, and press relations. “Corky” Shoeki, formerly in charge of the Bambakias campaign’s road camps and rallies, was handling the scramble for office space inside the Hot Zone. Kevin Hamilton was doing bravura work on security.
Greta was acting as her own press spokeswoman. That would have to change eventually, but it made excellent sense during the Strike crisis. Greta became the only official source of Strike news, and her solo public role made her seem to be handling matters all by herself. This gave her heroic charisma.
In point of fact, Greta and her zealous idealists had no real idea how to run a modern executive staff. They’d never held power before, so they were anxious to have glamorous jobs with titles and prestige, rather than the gruntwork jobs by which the acts of government were actually accomplished. This charade suited Oscar perfectly. He knew now that if he could simply keep the lab alive, solvent, and out of Huey’s hands, he would have accomplished the greatest feat of his career.
So Oscar took a deeply shadowed backseat, well behind the throne. The new year ground on. Many scientists found the Strike to be an ideal opportunity to quietly resign and leave, but that left the remaining hard-core scientists saturated with revolutionary fervor. Like revolutionaries everywhere, they were discovering that every trifling matter was a moral and intellectual crisis. Every aspect of their former lives and careers seemed to require a radical reformulation. These formerly downtrodden wretches spent most of their free hours raising one another’s consciousnesses.
And it all suited Oscar very well. His political instincts had never been sharper and his krewe, frenetic neurotics to the last man and woman, always shone in a crisis.
At this particular moment—January 8, 2045—Greta and her kitchen cabinet were engaged in particularly intense debate. The scientists were anxiously weighing new candidates for the board: Information Genetics and Biomedicine. Oscar, accompanied by his ever-present bodyguard Kevin, lurked behind a tower of instrumental clutter. He planned to let them talk until they got very tired. Then he would ask a few pointed Socratic questions. After that, they would accept a solution that he had decided a week ago.
While Kevin munched a set of color-coded protein sticks, Oscar was enjoying a catered lunch. Since Oscar’s krewe had taken over the Collaboratory, they’d been forced to hire a new Texan krewe to run their hotel. Given the tepid economy in Buna, finding new staff hadn’t been difficult.
Kevin stopped tinkering with the microchipped innards of a phone, zipped its case shut, and passed the phone to Oscar. Oscar was soon chatting in blissful security to Leon Sosik in Washington.
“I need Russian Constructivist wall posters,” he told Sosik. “Have Alcott’s Boston krewe hit the art museums for me. I need everything they can get from the early Communist Period.”
/> “Oscar, I’m glad that you’re having fun at the lab, but forget the big glass snow globe. We need you here in DC, right away. Our anti-Huey campaign just crashed and burned.”
“What? Why? I don’t need to go to Washington to feud with Huey. I’ve got Huey on the ropes right here. We’ve fingered all his cronies in the lab. I’ve got people here who are literally picketing them. Give me another week, and we’ll purge all the local cops, too. Once those clowns are out of the picture, I can get to some serious work around here.”
“Oscar, try to stick to the point. That lab is just a local sideshow. We have a national-security crisis here. Huey has a radar hole.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means the North American radar coverage. The Air Force military radar. Part of the Southern U.S. radar boundary was run out of that Louisiana air base. Now that radar’s gone, and there’s a missing overlap between Texas and Georgia. The bayous have gone black. They’ve dropped right out of military surveillance.”
Oscar put his fork down. “What the hell does that have to do with anything? I can’t believe that. How is that even possible? No radar? A ten-year-old child can do radar!” He took a breath. “Look, surely they’ve still got air traffic control radar. New Orleans wouldn’t last two days without air traffic. Can’t the Air Force use the civilian radar?”
“You’d think so, but it just doesn’t work that way. They tell me it’s a programming problem. Civilian radar runs off a thousand decentralized cells. It’s distributed radar, on packet networks. That doesn’t work for the Air Force. The military has a hierarchical system architecture.”
Oscar thought quickly. “Why is that a political problem? That’s a technical issue. Let the Air Force handle that.”
Distraction Page 27
