“I sit back, and the Director fires me on the spot.”

“No, he won’t. He won’t dare. He’s never been his own man, and he’s just not bright enough to react that quickly. He’ll stall for time, and he’s all out of time. Getting the Director out of office is not a problem. The next big step is getting you in as Director. And the real challenge will be keeping you in office — long enough for you to push some real reforms through.”

She sighed. “And then, finally, when that’s all over, do I get to go back and do my labwork?”

“Probably.” He paused. “No, sure, of course. If that’s what you really want.”

“How am I supposed to eat with no salary?”

“You’ve got your Nobel Prize money, Greta. You’ve got big piles of Swedish kronor that you’ve never even touched.”

She frowned. “I kept thinking I would buy new equipment with it, but the lab procurement people wouldn’t let me do all the paper-work.”

“Okay, that’s your problem in a nutshell. Fire all those sorry bastards first thing.”

She shut her laptop. “This is serious. When I do this, it will make a terrible stink. Something will happen.”

“We want things to happen. That’s why we’re doing all this.” She turned in her seat, anxiously poking him with a kneecap. “I just want to be truthful. Not political. Truthful.”

“This is an honest political speech! Everything there can be doc-umented.”

“It’s honest about everything but you and me.”

Oscar exhaled slowly. He’d been expecting this development.

“Well, that’s where we have to pay the price. After tomorrow, you’re on campaign. Even with the best will and intention, we won’t have any time for ourselves anymore. When we had our stolen moments, we could meet in Boston or Louisiana, and that was lovely, and we could get away with that. But we lose that privilege from now on. This is the last time that you and I can meet privately. I won’t even be in the audience when you speak tomorrow. It mustn’t look like I’m prompting you.”

“But people know about us. A lot of people know. I want people to know.”

“All political leaders lead double lives. Public, and private. That’s not hypocrisy. That’s just reality.”

“What if we’re outed?”

“Well, there’s two ways to play that development. We could stonewall. That’s simplest and easiest — just deny everything, and let them try to prove it. Or, we could be very coy and provocative, and say that we’re flattered by their matchmaking. We could lead them on a little, we could be sexy and glamorous. You know, play it the good old Hollywood way. That’s a dangerous game, but I know that game pretty well, and I like that one better, myself.”

She was silent for a moment. “Won’t you miss me?”

“How can I miss you? I’m managing you. You’re the very center of my life now. You’re my candidate.”

Oscar and Yosh Pelicanos were enjoying a healthful stroll around the china tower of the Hot Zone. Pelicanos wore a billed hat, khaki walk-ing shorts, and a sleeveless pullover. Two months inside the dome had caused almost all of Oscar’s krewe to go native. Oscar, by stark con-trast, wore his nattiest suit and a sharp new steam-blocked hat. Oscar rarely felt the need of serious exercise, since his metabolic rate was eight percent higher than that of a normal human.

Their walk was a deliberate and public promenade. The Col-laboratory’s board was meeting, Greta was about to speak, and Oscar was very conspicuously nowhere near the scene. Oscar was especially hard to miss when publicly trailed by his bodyguard: the spectral Kevin Hamilton, parading in his motorized wheelchair.

“What is it with this Hamilton guy?” Pelicanos grumbled, glanc-ing over his shoulder. “Why on earth did you have to hire some Anglo hustler? His only credential is that he limps even worse than Fontenot. ”

“Kevin’s very gifted. He got that netwar program off my back. Besides, he works cheap.”

“He dresses like a loan shark. The guy gets eighteen package deliveries a day. And that headphone and the scanning gear — he’s sleeping in it! He’s getting on our nerves.”

“Kevin will grow on you. I know he’s not the standard team player. Be tolerant.”

“I’m nervous,” Pelicanos admitted.

“No need for that. We’ve laid all the groundwork perfectly,” Oscar said. “I’ve got to hand it to the krewe, you’ve really done me proud here.” Oscar’s mood was radiant. Unbearable personal tension, stress, and agonizing suspense always brought out his boyish, endearing side. “Yosh, you did first-class work on those audits. And the push-polling was superb, you handled that beautifully. A few dozen loaded questions on the Science Committee letterhead, and the locals are hopping like puppets, they’re gun-shy now, they’re ready for anything. It’s been a tour de force all around. Even the hotel’s making money! Especially now that we lured in all those expense-account headhunters from out of state.”

“Yeah, you’ve got us all working like mules — you don’t have to tell me that. The question is, is it enough?”

“Well, nothing’s ever enough… Politics isn’t precision ma-chinery, it’s a performance art. It’s stage magic. It’s a brand-new year, and now the curtain’s going up. We’ve got our plants primed in the audience, we’ve got scarves and ribbons up our sleeve, we’ve saturated the playing field with extra hats and rabbits…”

“There’s way too many hats and rabbits.”

“No there aren’t! Can’t have too many! We’ll just use the ones that we need, as we need them. That’s the beauty of multitasking. It’s that fractal aspect, the self-similarity across multiple political layers …”

Pelicanos snorted. “Stop talking like Bambakias. That highbrow net-jive gets you nowhere with me.”

“But it works! If the feds somehow fail us, we’ve got leaks in at the Texas comptroller’s office. The Buna city council loves us! I know they’re not worth much politically, but hey, we’ve paid more atten-tion to them in the past six weeks than the Collaboratory has paid them in fifteen years.”

“So you’re keeping all your options open.”

“Exactly. ”

“You always say that you hate doing that.”

“What? I never said that. You’re just being morose. I feel very upbeat about this, Yosh — we’ve had a few little setbacks, but taking this assignment was a wise decision. It’s been a broadening professional experience. ”

They paused to let a yak cross the road. “You know what I really like about this campaign?” Oscar said. “It’s so tiny. Two thousand political illiterates, sealed inside a dome. We have complete voter profiles and interest-group dossiers on every single person in the Col-laboratory! It’s so sealed off and detached-politically speaking, there’s something perfect and magical about a setup like this.”

“I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself.”

“I’m determined to enjoy this, Yosh. We might be crushed here, or we might soar to glory, but we’ll never have the chance to do something quite like this again.”

A supply truck lumbered past them, laden with mutant seedlings.

“You know something?” Pelicanos said. “I’ve been so busy playing the angles that I never got the chance to understand what they actually do in here.”

“I think you understand it a lot better than they do.”

“Not their finances, I mean the actual science. I can understand commercial biotech well enough — we were in that business together, in Boston. But the real cutting edge here, those brain people, the cognition people… I know I’m missing something important there.”

“Yeah? Personally, I’ve been trying to get up to speed on ‘amy-loid fibrils.’ Greta really dotes on those things.”

“It’s not just that their field is technically difficult to grasp. It is, but I also have a feeling they’re hiding something.”

“Sure. That’s science in its decadence. They can’t patent or copyright their findings anymore, so sometimes they try for trade secrets.” Oscar laughed. “As if that could really work nowadays.”