Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  “Fine.” Then, continuing to pursue his endemic insanity theory, he said, “It’s the lead.”

  “Lead?”

  “Yeah. Even though the lead mines are shut down, Cacher is soaked through with lead pollution, and like we learned in school, that will make you crazy.”

  Mel muttered genially, as if this information were fascinating, and handed over his credit card. The kid took it into the battered old station and swiped it through the electronic slot. Their building didn’t look like much but they had the latest point-of-purchase electronics.

  “You got something else, buddy?” asked the kid with a satisfied leer on his face, waggling the card in the air. “You’ve got to pay your bills from time to time, you know… just kiddin’.”

  Mel was too surprised to be embarrassed. He compulsively paid every bill within twenty-four hours of receipt, especially the national ones. You didn’t let bills get overdue. Unlike the people who ran Washington, Mel understood that an overdue bill was a club that other people could wave over your head.

  “It’s a mistake,” he said, “but why don’t you try this one.” He handed the kid another credit card. Once again, it was rejected.

  “Shit buddy, don’t you every pay your bills? What about cash?”

  Mel looked in his wallet. It contained several hundred-dollar bills, a ten, and a five. The bill was $16.34.

  “Can you break a hundred? Mel asked, already feeling he knew the answer.

  The kid yukked it up for a little bit. “I can’t remember the last time I saw a C-note. We never got more than a few bucks in change.”

  Down the street, set anachronistically into the sandstone facade of an old bank, was an ATM machine with a familiar logo. Mel took off his jacket, ambled slowly down the street, trying not to get hotter than he was, and stuck his bank card into the slot.

  The video screen said PLEASE WAIT.

  An alarm bell began ringing on the side of the bank.

  A siren began to sound from the direction of the police station in downtown Miami, two blocks away.

  Mel lurched back down the street, got to the car, and turned on the ignition.

  “Hold it right there, hot shot,” said the kid. Mel looked over and was astounded to see a twelve-gauge pump shotgun cradled in the kid’s hands. “You might as well wait for Harold to come.”

  The Miami P.D. patrol car, an aging Caprice, swung around the corner. Mel knew that he could easily outrun it. But it wouldn’t be a good idea. Instead he shut off the ignition, and, as a good faith gesture, took the keys out of the ignition and tossed them up on the dashboard, in plain sight. He rolled the window back down and put both hands on the steering wheel.

  A lean, small, pox-faced cop emerged reluctantly from the Caprice, winced from the heat, and walked over toward Mel, moving with exaggerated slowness.

  “Harold, I presume.” Mel said, when he got close enough.

  “What we got here li’l buddy?” Harold said to the kid.

  “Looks like it’s credit card fraud to me,” said the kid.

  “Come on out of there, fellow,” said Harold, shooting a mean, judgmental look at Mel. “Don’t make a bad thing worse for you.”

  Mel was pissed off, hopelessly out of any chance to control things. He eased out of the car, frustrated, frightened, feeling helpless for the first time in years, and said, “I don’t know what the hell has happened.”

  “Nothing yet, and nothing will, unless you do something stupid.”

  “All I want is to pay for my gas and go to Cacher.”

  Harold looked at the kid and said, “Why in the name of God would anybody want to go to Cacher?” Mel knew what was coming next, Harold said it anyway. “Ain’t nobody there, but a bunch of loony-tunes.”

  Mel said, “Let me talk to you straight.” He had spent enough time downstate to know that this attitude might be appreciated. “I’m not trying to pull a fast one, and I don’t know why none of my cards don’t work. Look, take the AMEX, call the eight hundred number and you’ll see I’ve got a huge line of credit, and Texaco’s been all paid up, and I don’t know why the ATM went crazy.”

  Harold looked at him and then at the kid. “He broke any laws?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Fella, you look decent enough. Let’s go rescue your bank card and send you on your way out of town.”

  They strolled down to the bank, which had closed at three o’clock. Harold banged on the front door, and a Big Hair Girl peered out the door.

  “Honey, your machine’s done eaten this man’s card. Think you could dig it out so’s he could leave to go to” - and here Harold could not keep a straight face - “Cacher.”

  “Cacher,” she shrieked, “who the hell would want to go there?” Mel by this time had heard all he wanted to about the deficiencies of Cacher and simply said, “I’ve got some relatives out there.”

  Honey retreated into the bank, opened up the machine from the back side, and retrieved Mel’s card. “Before I can let you have this, mister, I got to make sure you’re who you say you are,” she said. She sat down at a desk, called Chicago, asked a few questions, whistled, shook her head in wonderment.

  “Buddy,” she said, handing the card over, “I’m going to treat you with a lot more respect. You’re one rich sucker.”

  Mel relaxed, realizing for the first time that he was probably going to get out of Miami alive. “Could I get change for a hundred so I can pay off boy wonder over at the Texaco?”

  Harold didn’t like that. “Now slick, you just be careful. That’s my nephew over there, and you bad-mouth any of my kin, you might be spending a night in jail.”

  Mel fumed at his own stupidity, considered a number of replies, and decided to shut up.

  Honey gave him his change. Mel thanked her and resolved to get out of Miami as quickly as he could, saying as little as possible. He handed boy wonder a twenty.

  “Seriously mister,” the kid said, getting Mel’s change, “take care of yourself. We had people go out there and not come back. Those shafts go down a couple of miles, and those crazy people are not accountable.”

  Mel got back in the Mercedes and drove carefully out of town, accompanied by Harold and his radar gun. That’s all I need, he thought, to fall into one of Harold’s speed traps. As soon as he got out of radar range, he turned the car toward Cacher and put the hammer down.

  As he drove, the vegetation thinned away and vanished, and the rolling hills took on a steep, foreboding quality. The road itself was potholed asphalt that shook the Mercedes’ frame. In the distance he could see the malevolent tips of the mine tailings, looking much like the Welsh coal tips that periodically unloaded and covered small villages in sad valleys. There were no farms, no ranches, only ancient weather-beaten abandoned shacks, a legacy of the thirties. Running along the road was a single telephone line. There was no evidence of electricity. On the road was regional roadkill: armadillos, ‘possums, the occasional dead cat. As the evening approached, the whole scene made Mel want to turn around and go back home.

  And as he approached the scattered buildings of the town, he did just that. He stopped half a mile short of Cacher, turned directly north on to a section line road, and drove north at a hundred miles an hour, turning up a rooster-tail of yellowish lead-saturated dust. Mel prided himself on being a rational man. Usually that meant controlling his fear. Today it meant giving into it.

  The faster he drove, the more frightened he became, and as the crossroads flashed by every six miles, he did not look either way. He was convinced that he was being pursued, and not until he crossed the Kansas line did he begin to slow down. His heart was pounding dangerously and his forehead was stiff from sweat, which poured out of his body and was dried to a crust by the air conditioner running full blast.

  Cacher was made up of an old two-story brick school tilted at a precipitous angle, undermined by a mine shaft that went to close, or a water table that was drained. There was no sign of life, no dogs, no cats, no lights. G
as stations were boarded up. The only inhabited building was a shabby general store, the paint long since blistered away from its rough, knotty wooden siding. In front was a set of thirties-style, manually powered gas pumps, and, as an afterthought, a U.S. post office zip code sign bearing the WE DELIVER FOR YOU emblem.

  Inside the store, it was as dry and hot as a sauna. The heat strengthened the smell of stale urine that emanated from Otho Stimpson, who was sitting in an old wooden swivel rocker with the canes busted out. His son, Otis, was standing by the entrance holding a small 9mm automatic weapon with a long clip. It was a crude and awkward device, almost as clumsy as Otis himself, but he had gotten good at using it. He would take it out among the mine tailings and fire clip after clip, lead thudding into lead. No one was around to complain about the noise.

  If Mel Meyer had pulled into Cacher, the gun would have turned his Mercedes into scrap metal in seconds. Otis would have pushed the car down a mine shaft. It would have fallen a mile or two into the earth and never been seen again.

  “Looks like the little Jew got scared,” Otis said. “Got some sense in his head. Won’t have much more trouble with him.”

  Otho said nothing. A couple of decades ago he would have sighed hopelessly at the racial slur, but he had long since reconciled himself to the fact that his son was a product of his environment and would never be as cosmopolitan as Otho was, with his fancy education at the Lady Wilburdon School for Mathematical Geniuses on the Isle of Rhum. “He’s good,” Otho said. “He’s gotten closer to us than anyone.”

  Otho was shaken. No one had ever come to Cacher before. The very fact that Otis had been placed in this position - standing in the door of the old general store with a machine gun, locked and loaded - was disastrous. If the Network knew that they had been reduced to such methods, they would probably be cut off, and Otho’s responsibilities transferred to someone else. Otho knew that there were others - like Mr. Salvador - waiting to take his place as soon as he slipped up.

  “Should we kill him?” Otis said. It was a painfully stupid question, but it was good that Otis had come out and asked it. Otis had spent an unhealthy amount of time watching spy movies and thrillers on HBO. Since he had become aware of the nature of the current undertaking, he had let his imagination run away with him, thinking that they were in the middle of some asinine James Bond movie.

  “That’s not what this is about,” Otho said. “This is not violence, son. It’s not war. It’s not espionage. The whole point here is to get this country back to basics: contracts, markets, keeping your promises, meeting your responsibilities. Meyer’s an honorable man and if we killed him we’d cut the ground out from under our feet.” Otho paused for a moment and stared through a dusty windowpane. “If we were killers, I’d kill Mr. Salvador.”

  “How come?” Otis said, astonished. “I thought he was doing a real good job.”

  “If he was doing a real good job,” Otho said, “Mel Meyer never would have come here. He wouldn’t even have known that anything was going on.”

  43

  William A. Cozzano’s National Town Meeting, which took place in Chicago in August, was the equivalent of a political con­vention. But because it was a pure media event, with no procedural nonsense to gum up the works, it was a lot more entertaining.

  The opening event was held in Grant Park, a green swath that ran between the towering center of downtown Chicago and the lake. At the cost of permanently alienating the animal-rights and anticombustion constituencies, Cozzano’s campaign managers had set up a huge Sunday evening barbecue. The ten thousand participants in the town meeting had been streaming into Chicago all weekend, checking into the big downtown hotels and getting themselves settled in the rooms where they would spend the next week. The Grant Park barbecue was an informal way for everyone to get together and goof around before the scheduled events got underway at the convention center on Monday morning.

  From the balcony of her hotel suite along Congress Plaza overlooking the heart of Grant Park, Mary Catherine could see the barbecue developing through most of the day. Around five p.m., when the afternoon heat was starting to subside, the smoke rising up from all of those barbecue pits began to look appetizing, and so she put on a sundress. It was rather prim by the standards of an urban beach on a hot summer day, but racy by the standards of candidates’ wives and daughters. Furthermore, it was light and loose enough that she could play Softball in it, though sliding into base would be out of the question. Since her display of place-hitting acumen in Tuscola on the Fourth of July, being spunky and athletic had become part of her job description.

  She took the elevator down to the street and strolled through the park. Mary Catherine could now stroll anywhere in Chicago, wearing any clothing she wanted, at any time of the day or night, because she was always followed by Secret Service agents. She had decided that armed guards were a great thing and that every girl should have a few.

  The barbecue couldn’t just be a plain old barbecue. It had to be built around some kind of a central media concept. In this case, the concept was that all of the various regions of the United States were competing to see where the best barbecuing was done. Mary Catherine strolled among the smoking beef pits, from Texas, North Carolina, Kansas City, and decided that, beyond providing her with a quick take-out dinner, comparative barbecue was not very interesting to her.

  Flocks of black birds, just like the ones Mel had raved about, swirled around the grassy areas scavenging the ends of french fries. One of Dad’s favorite sixties rock bands was playing in the bandshell to the north, but she found their songs just one step above Muzak. To the south, on Hutchinson Field, a number of impromptu games were underway: touch football, frisbee, softball, volleyball. She didn’t feel like getting sweaty just yet, and stayed close to the footpaths, which were lined with double rows of shade trees.

  Across Lakeshore Drive, along the border of the yacht basin, things were much quieter and several degrees cooler. The basin was dotted with numbered white-and-blue buoys where recreational boats could tie up. There was no beach here, just a stone seawall with one or two depressed platforms where boats could take on or discharge passengers. A couple of big tour boats were circulating between these sites and the open lake, taking people on free rides so that they could appreciate the splendour of the Loop as seen from Lake Michigan. That looked cool and relaxing, so Mary Catherine climbed on board one of the boats, sat down in a deck chair, and took her freshly barbecued hamburger out of its wrapper. She and her Secret Service agents were the last persons to cross the gangplank; within a few moments the boat was motoring out through a broad avenue between the white buoys, headed for a gap in the breakwater.

  As she was polishing off the last of her hamburger, a woman separated herself from the crowd of people standing along the railing of the boat and approached her. She was black, nicely dressed, probably in her forties but capable of looking younger. She ” moved with unusual confidence through the loose picket fence of Secret Service agents, giving each of the guards a knowing smile and a nod. She had a nice face and a nice smile. “Hello,” she said, gesturing to an empty deck chair next to Mary Catherine. “Is this taken?”

  “Go ahead,” Mary Catherine said. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

  The woman laughed. “Eleanor Richmond. It’s nice to meet you, Ms. Cozzano,” she said, extending her hand.

  “Nice to meet you,” Mary Catherine said, shaking it. “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you right away - I’ve seen you several times on TV.”

  “Several times. Well, you are one attentive TV watcher. I haven’t been on that many times.”

  “I watch Dr. Lawrence’s program pretty regularly,” Mary Catherine said, “and he seemed to like you.”

  “He hates me,” Eleanor said, “but I do wonders for his ratings. And, I suspect, for his fantasy life.”

  “I was so sorry to hear about Senator Marshall,” Mary Catherine said.

  “Thank you,” Eleanor said gracious
ly.

  Caleb Roosevelt Marshall had gone back to his ranch in south­eastern Colorado “to clear some brush” in the third week of July. The doctors, aides, and bodyguards who traveled with him all the time had arisen early one morning to find his bed empty. Eventually they had found him on the top of a mesa. He had ridden up there before dawn, watched the sun rise over the prairie, and then blown his heart out with a double-barrelled shotgun.

  He left letters addressed to several people: his staff, various senate colleagues, old friends, old enemies, and the President. Most of the contents of these letters were never revealed, partly because they were private and partly because many of them were unprintable. The President read his letter - two lines scrawled over a piece of senate stationery - threw it into the fire, and ordered a double Scotch from the White House bar.

  Eleanor’s note said, “You know what to do - Caleb. P.S. Watch your back.”

  They flew his body back to the Rotunda, where it lay in state for twenty-four hours, and then they flew him back to Colorado, where he was cremated and his ashes spread over his ranch. As per Marshall’s written instructions, Eleanor ran the office for the next two weeks, while the Governor of Colorado debated whom to appoint to replace Marshall.

  He ended up appointing himself. The polls indicated that many Coloradans took a dim view of this, seeing it as naked opportunism. But his first official act was to fire Eleanor Richmond. That announcement sent his approval rating sky-high.

  “I hope you get a good job,” Mary Catherine said, “you deserve one.”

  “Thanks,” Eleanor said. “I’ve had some feelers. Don’t worry about me.”

  “You know, as a person who was raised Catholic, I have to take a dim view of suicide,” Mary Catherine said, “but I think that what the Senator did was incredibly noble. It’s hard to imagine any Washington person having that much backbone.”

  Eleanor smiled. “Caleb felt the same way. And apparently he said so in some of the notes he left behind.”

  Mary Catherine threw back her head and laughed. “Are you kidding? He taunted people-