“They can’t handle it. Because those are old federal missile-detection systems, they date back to Cold War One! They’re mil-spec hardware running antique code. That system just isn’t flexible—we’re lucky it still runs at all! But the point is, there’s no federal radar coverage in Louisiana. And that means that enemy aircraft can invade the United States! Anywhere from Baton Rouge south!”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Leon. It can’t possibly be that bad,” Oscar said. “How could the military miss a problem that size? There must be contingency plans. Who the hell was keeping track of all that?”
“No one seems to know,” Sosik said mournfully. “When the Emergency committees took over the base closures, the radar issue got lost in competing jurisdictions.”
Oscar grunted. “Typical.”
“It is typical. It’s totally typical. There’s just too much going on. There’s no clear line of authority. Huge, vital issues just fall through the cracks. We can’t get anywhere at all.”
Oscar was alarmed to hear Sosik sound so despondent. Clearly Sosik had been spending rather too much time at the Senator’s bedside. Bambakias became ever more fluent and compelling as his grip on reality faded. “All right, Leon. I agree with that diagnosis, I concede your point. I am with you all the way there. But let’s face it—nobody’s going to invade the United States. Nobody invades national boundaries anymore. So what if some idiot Emergency committee misplaced some ancient radar? Let’s just ignore the problem.”
“We can’t ignore it. Huey won’t let us. He’s making real hay out of the issue. He says this proves that his Louisiana air base was vital to national security all along. The Louisiana delegation is kicking our ass in Congress. They’re demanding that we build them a whole new air base from the ground up, immediately. But that’ll cost us billions, and we just don’t have the funds. And even if we can swing the funding, we can’t possibly launch a major federal building program inside Louisiana.”
“Obviously not,” Oscar said. “Roadblocks, NIMBY suits, eminent-domain hassles…that’s tailor-made for Huey. Once he’s got federal contractors stuck knee-deep in the swamp, he could rip off a leg and bleed the whole budget to death.”
“Exactly. So we’re stuck. We were trashing Huey big-time on the patriotism charge, but he’s turned the tables on us. He’s wrapping himself in the very same flag that we stitched for him. We’ve played right into his hands. And we can’t ignore his radar hole, because he’s already exploiting it. Last night, French unmanned aircraft started buzzing South Louisiana. They’re flying over the swamps, playing French pop music.”
“French pop music?”
“Multichannel broadcasts off unmanned aerial drones. It’s the Cajun Francophone card.”
“Come on. Even Huey can’t seriously believe that anybody listens to French pop music.”
“The French believe it. They can smell Yankee blood in the water. It’s your basic culture-war gambit. The French have always loved French-language confrontations. Now they can turn up their amps till we pull every burger joint out of Paris.”
“Leon, calm down. You’re a professional. You can’t let him get you rattled like this.”
“He does have me rattled, damn it. The son of a bitch just doesn’t play by the rules! He does two contradictory things at once, and he screws us coming and going. It’s like he’s got two brains!”
“Get a grip,” Oscar said. “It’s a minor provocation. What are we supposed to do about this so-called problem? Declare war on France?”
“Well…” Sosik said. He lowered his voice. “I know this sounds strange. But listen. A declaration of war would dissolve the Emergency committees by immediate fiat.”
“What!” Oscar shouted. “Are you crazy? We can’t invade France! France is a major industrial democracy! What are we, Nazis? That’s totally out of the question!”
Oscar looked up. He confronted a looming crowd of astonished scientists. They’d left their own discussion and had gathered on the far side of the lab bench, where they were straining to overhear him.
“Listen, Oscar,” Sosik continued tinnily, “nobody’s suggesting that we actually fight a war. But the concept is getting a pretty good float in DC. A declaration of war is a manual override of the federal system. As a domestic maneuver, a foreign war could be a real trump card. France is much too much, I agree with that—hell, the French still have nuclear power! But we could declare war on Holland. Holland’s a tiny, unarmed country, a bunch of radical pipsqueaks. So we throw a proper scare into the Dutch, the phony war lasts a week or so, and then the President declares victory. The Emergency is over. Then, once the dust settles, we have a fully functional Congress again.”
Oscar removed the phone from his ear, stared at it with distaste, and replaced it at his ear. “Look, I gotta get back to you later, Leon. I have some serious work to accomplish here.”
“The Senator’s very big on this idea, Oscar. He really thinks it could fly. It’s visionary.”
Oscar hung up. “They’re playing French pop music in Louisiana,” he told his impromptu audience.
Albert Gazzaniga scratched his head. “Big deal! So what?”
__________
The crux of the matter was, of course, the money. It had always been the money. Money was the mother’s milk of politics. And although scientific politics were several steps removed from conventional politics, money was the milk of science, too.
All strikes were, at the bottom line, struggles over economic power. All strikers made a bold declaration that they were willing to outstarve their employers, and if they backed it up with enough bad press and moral pressure, they were sometimes right.
So it was lovely to declare that Greta and her cadre were ready and eager to do science for nothing, asking for nothing, and refusing to supply anything but the results they themselves found of scientific interest. It was a holy crusade. But even a holy crusade needed a revenue stream.
So Oscar, Yosh, and the omnipresent Kevin found an empty corner in the hotel kitchen to discuss finances.
“We could hit up Bambakias for a couple of million, just to tide us over,” Pelicanos said. “There’s no question he’s got the funds.”
“Forget it,” Oscar said. “The Senate’s a billionaire’s club, but if they start running the country right out of their own pockets, that’s feudalism. Feudalism is not professional.”
Pelicanos nodded. “Okay. Then we’ll have to raise funds ourselves. How about the standard campaign methods? Direct mail. Rubber-chicken banquets. Raffles, garage sales, charity events. Who are the core prospects here?”
“Well, if this were a normal campaign…” Oscar rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “We’d hit up the alumni of her alma mater, Jewish temple groups, scientific professional societies…And of course the Collaboratory’s business suppliers. They’re plenty mad at us right now, but they’ll fall out of the trough completely, if the place ever closes down. We might be able to sweet-talk them into fronting us some cash, if we threaten them with total destruction.”
“Are there any rich, overclass scientists? There have got to be some rich scientists, right?”
“Sure there are—in Asia and Europe.”
“You guys sure don’t think very big,” Kevin chided.
Oscar gazed at him tolerantly. He was growing rather fond of Kevin. Kevin really worked hard; he’d become the heart and soul of the foulest part of the coup. “How big are we supposed to think, Kevin?”
“You guys don’t realize what you have here. You’ve got a perfect nomad rally-ground inside that lab. It’s like you’ve roadblocked the place; you can do anything you want with it. Why don’t you ask all the scientists in America to come down here and join you?”
Oscar sighed. “Kevin, bear with us. You’ve got the problem exactly backward. The point is, we’re trying to feed and supply two thousand people, even though they’re on strike. If we get a million of them, we’re sunk.”
“No you’re not,” Kevin said.
“If a million scientists showed up here and joined you, that wouldn’t be just a strike anymore. It would be a revolution. You wouldn’t just take over this one federal lab. You could take over the whole town. Probably the whole county. Maybe a big part of the state.”
Pelicanos laughed. “How are we supposed to manage a giant horde of freeloading scientists?”
“You’d use nomads, man. Who else knows how to run a giant horde of people with no money? You throw open your airlocks, and you promise them shelter in there. You give ’em propaganda tours, you show ’em all the pretty plants and animals. You get the cops and the feds off their backs for once, and you give them a big role to play in your own operation. The proles would become a giant support krewe for your egghead contingent. See, it’s people power, street power. It’s an occupying army, just like Huey likes to use.”
Oscar laughed. “They’d tear this place apart!”
“Sure, they could do that—but what if they decided not to? Maybe they’d decide that they liked the place. Maybe they’d look after it. Maybe they’d build it even bigger.”
Oscar hesitated. The construction angle hadn’t occurred to him. He’d always done extremely well by the construction angle. The construction angle was the best political wild card he’d ever had. Most politicians couldn’t create luxury hotels out of software and sweat equity, but those who could had an off-the-wall advantage. He was sitting inside the construction angle at this very moment, and it was working out just fine. “How much bigger?”
“How big would we need it?” Pelicanos said.
“Well, how many nomad proles would be joining our construction krewe?”
“You want me to load a spreadsheet?” Kevin said.
“Forget it, it’s too good to be true,” Pelicanos said. “Sure, maybe we could get distributed instantiation to scale-up. But we’d never be able to trust nomads. They’re all in Huey’s pockets.”
Kevin snorted. “The Regulators are in Huey’s pockets, but good Lord, fellas, Louisiana proles are not the only proles around. You guys have spent too much time in Boston. Wyoming was on fire, man! There are proles and dissidents all over the USA. There’s millions of proles.”
With a stern effort of will, Oscar forced himself to consider Kevin’s proposal seriously. “An army of unemployed nomads, constructing giant, intelligent domes…You know, that’s really a compelling image. I really hate to dismiss that idea out of hand. It’s so modern and photogenic and nonlinear. There’s a lovely carrying-the-war-to-the-enemy momentum there.”
Pelicanos narrowed his eyes. “Kevin, who’s the heaviest prole mob you know?”
“Well, the Regulators are the heaviest. They have state support from Huey, and they just smashed a federal air base. So they’ve got to be the strongest mob around—everybody knows that by now. But, well, there’s the Moderators. The Moderators are big. Plus, they hate the Regulators’ guts.”
“Why is that?” Oscar said, leaning forward with galvanized interest.
Kevin shrugged. “Why do mobs always hate other mobs? Somebody stole somebody’s girlfriend, somebody hacked somebody’s phones. They’re mobs. So they have no laws. So they have to feud with each other. It’s tribal. Tribes always act like that.”
Pelicanos scratched his jaw. “You know, Oscar, there’s no question that the Collaboratory is a much more attractive facility than some run-down federal air base.”
“You’re absolutely right, Yosh. That dome has real charisma. There’s a definite demand-pull there.”
There was a long, thoughtful silence.
“Time for a coffee,” Oscar announced, rising and fetching some. “Let’s run a reality check, guys. Forget all this blue-sky stuff—what’s the agenda? Our agenda here is to gently embarrass the powers that be, and get them to cut some operational slack for federal researchers. At the end of the day, Congress will fund this place at about half last year’s fiscal levels. But in return, we’ll get more direct power into the hands of the lab people. So we’ll create a workable deal. We’ll keep the lab in business, but without all the pork and the graft. That’s a perfectly decent accomplishment. It’s something we could all be very proud of.”
He sipped his coffee. “But if we let this situation spin out of control like Kevin is suggesting…Well, I actually suspect that it’s possible. What Huey did to the Air Force, that proves that it’s possible. But it’s not doable, because there’s no brakes. There are no brakes, because I can’t control the course of events. I don’t have the authority. I’m just a Senate staffer!”
“That’s never stopped you so far,” Kevin pointed out.
“Well, I admit that, Kevin, but…Well, I don’t like your idea because it’s bad ideology. I’m a Federal Democrat. We’re a serious-minded Reform party. We’re not a revolutionary vanguard, we can leave all that to self-marginalizing, violent morons. I’m operating under a lot of legal and ethical constraints here. I can’t have huge mobs commandeering federal facilities.”
Kevin sniffed. “Well, Huey did it.”
“Huey’s a Governor! Huey has a legislative branch and a judiciary. Huey was elected by the people, he won his last race with seventy-two percent of a ninety-percent voter turnout! I can’t paralyze the country with insane stunts like that, I just don’t have the power! I’m not a magician! I’m just a freshman Senate staffer. I don’t get my own way just because things are theoretically possible. Hell, I can’t even sleep with my own girlfriend.”
Kevin looked at Pelicanos. “Yosh, can’t you arrange it so this poor bastard can sleep with his girlfriend? She’d understand this situation. He’s getting all mentally cramped now. He’s losing his edge.”
“Well, that’s doable,” Pelicanos said. “You could resign from the Senate Science Committee, and take over here as Greta’s official chief of staff. I don’t think anyone would mind Greta sleeping with one of her staffers. I mean, technically it’s workplace sex harassment, but gee whiz.”
Oscar frowned darkly. “I am not leaving the Senate Science Committee! You people have no understanding of what I have been through all this time, massaging those creeps backstage in Washington. It is incredibly hard doing that over a network; if you’re not in the office doing face-time with the Hill rats, they always write you off and screw you. I’ve been wiring flowers to their goddamn sysadmin for three weeks. When I get back to Washington, I’ll probably have to date her.”
“Okay, then we’re back to square one,” Pelicanos said gloomily. “We still don’t know what we’re doing, and we still don’t have any money.”
__________
Oscar was up at three in the morning, examining schedules of upcoming Senate hearings, when there was a tap at his door. He glanced over at Kevin, who was snoring peacefully in his hotel bunk. Oscar fetched his plastic spraygun, checked the squirt chamber to see that it was loaded, and sidled to the door. “Who is it?” he whispered.
“It’s me.” It was Greta.
Oscar opened the door. “Come in. What are you doing here? Are you crazy?”
“Yes.”
Oscar sighed. “Did you check to see if your clothes are bugged? Did you watch to see if anyone was tailing you? Would you not wake up my bodyguard please? Give me a kiss.”
They embraced. “I know I’m being terrible,” she whispered. “But I’m still awake. I wore the rest of them out. I had one little moment to myself. And I thought, I know what I want. I want to be with Oscar.”
“It’s impossible,” he told her, slipping his hand under her shirt. “This is risking everything, it’s really foolish.”
“I know we can’t meet anymore,” she said, leaning against the wall and closing her eyes in bliss. “They watch me every second.”
“My bodyguard’s right in this room with us. And he’s totally trigger-happy.”
“I only came here to talk,” she said, pulling his shirt out of his trousers.
He led her into the bathroom, shut the door, flicked on the lights. Her lipstick was smeared and her
pupils were like two saucers.
“Just to talk,” she repeated. She set her purse on the sink. “I brought you something nice.”
Oscar locked the bathroom door. Then he turned on the shower, for the sake of the cover noise.
“A little gift,” she said. “Because we don’t get to be together anymore. And I can’t stand it.”
“I’m going to take a cold shower,” he announced, “just in case Kevin gets suspicious. We can talk, but talk quietly.” He began unbuttoning his shirt.
Greta dug into her purse and removed a wrapped and ribboned box. She set the box on the bathroom counter, then turned and looked at him thoughtfully. Oscar dropped his shirt on the cold tiles.
“Hurry up,” she suggested, stepping out of her underwear.
They threw a pair of towels on the floor, and slid onto them together. He got his elbows into the backs of her knees, bent her double, and went at it like a madman. It was a forty-second mutual frenzy that ended like an oncoming train.
When he’d caught his breath, he managed a weak smile. “We’ll just pretend that incident never happened. All right?”
“All right,” she said, and levered herself up with trembling arms. “I sure feel better though.” She climbed to her feet, pulling her skirt down. Then she fetched the box, and offered it. “Here, this is for you. Happy birthday.”
“I don’t have birthdays,” he said.
“Yes, I know that. So I made a birthday present, just for you.”
He found his pants, stepped back into them, and picked up her gift. To his vague alarm, the little ribboned box felt hot to the touch. He stripped off the gaudy paper and the plywood lid. The box was tightly packed with a gray bag of chemical heating element, surrounding a small curved device. He plucked the gift from its wedge of hot packing.
“It’s a wristwatch,” he said.
“Try it on!” she said with an eager smile.
He removed his classic Japanese chronometer and strapped on Greta’s watch. The watch was hot and clammy, the color of boiled okra. He examined the greenish glowing numerals in the face. The watch was six minutes slow. “This thing looks like it’s made out of jelly.”
Distraction Page 28
