“Huey has nothing to do with this.”

“I could have guessed that. He wanted you to disrupt the speech, he didn’t want you to fly totally off the handle and send the whole population into the streets. This is a science lab, not a ninja academy. You dropped your pants like a circus clown.”

Skopelitis had gone a light shade of green. “I want a lawyer.”

“Then get one. But you’re not talking to a cop here. You’re just having a friendly bedside chat with a U.S Senate staffer. Of course, once you’re questioned by the U.S. Senate, you’ll surely need a lawyer then. A very expensive lawyer. Conspiracy, obstruction of jus-tice… it’ll be juicy.”

“It was just a false alarm! A false alarm. They happen all the time.”

“You’ve been reading too many sabotage manuals. Proles can get away with urban netwar, because they don’t mind doing jail time. Proles have nothing much to lose — but you do. You came in there to shout her down and cover your own ass, but you lost your temper and destroyed your own career. You just lost twenty years of work in the blink of an eye. And you’ve got the nerve to dictate terms to me? You dumb bastard, I’m gonna crucify you. You just pulled the bonehead move of your life. I’m going to make you a public laughingstock, from sea to shining sea.”

“Look. Don’t do that.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t do that to me. Don’t ruin me. Please. He broke my nose, okay? He broke my nose! Look, I lost my head.” Skopelitis wiped tears from his blackened eye. “She never acted like that before, she’s turned on us, it was like she’d gone crazy! I had to do something, it was just… it just…” He broke into sobs. “Jesus…”

“Well, I can see I’m distressing you,” Oscar said, rising. “I’ve enjoyed our little confab, but time presses. I’ll be on my way.”

“Look, you just can’t do this to me! I only did one little thing.”

“Listen.” Oscar sat back down and pointed. “You’ve got a laptop there. You want off the hook? Write me some mail. Tell me all about it. Tell me every little thing. Just between the two of us, privately. And if you’re straight with me… well, what the hell. He did break your nose. I apologize for that. That was very wrong.”

Oscar was studying the minutes from the latest Senate Science Com-mittee meeting when Kevin walked into the room.

“Don’t you ever sleep?” Kevin said, yawning.

“No, not particularly.”

“I’m kind of gathering that.” Kevin dropped his cane and sat down in a sling chair. Oscar had a rather spartan room at the hotel. He was forced to move daily for security reasons, and besides, the best suites were all taken by paying customers.

Oscar shut his laptop. It was quite an intriguing report — a federal lab in Davis, California, was sorely infested with hyperintelligent lab mice, provoking a lawsuit-slinging panic from the outraged locals — but he found Kevin very worthwhile.

“So,” Kevin said, “what happens next?”

“What do you think: happens next, Kevin?”

“Well,” Kevin said, “that would be cheating. Because I’ve seen this sort of thing before.”

“You don’t say.”

“Yeah. Here’s the situation. You’ve got a group of people here who are about to all lose their jobs. So you’re gonna organize them and fight back politically. You’ll get a lot of excitement and solidarity for about six weeks, and then they’ll all get fired. They’ll shut the whole place down and lock the gates in your face. Then you’ll all turn into proles.”

“You really think so?”

“Well, maybe not. Maybe basic research scientists are somehow smarter than computer programmers, or stock traders, or assembly-line workers, or traditional farmers… You know, all those other people who lost their professions and got pushed off the edge of the earth. But that’s what everybody always thinks in these situations. ‘Yeah, their jobs are obsolete now, but people will always need us.’ ”

Oscar drummed his fingers on his laptop. “It’s good of you to take such a lively interest, Kevin. I appreciate your input. Believe it or not, what you’re saying isn’t exactly news to me. I’m very aware that huge numbers of people have been forced out of the conventional economy and become organized network mobs. I mean, they don’t vote, so they rarely command my professional attention, but over the years they’re getting better and better at ruining life for the rest of us.”

“Oscar, the proles are ‘the rest of us.’ It’s people like you who aren’t ‘the rest of us.’ ”

“I’ve never been the rest of anybody,” Oscar said. “Even people like me are never people like me. You want a coffee?”

“Okay.”

Oscar poured two cups. Kevin reached companionably into his back pocket and pulled out a square white baton of compressed vege-table protein. “Have a chew?”

“Sure.” Oscar gnawed thoughtfully on a snapped-off chunk. It tasted like carrots and foam.

“You know,” Oscar ruminated, “I have my share of prejudices — who doesn’t, really? — but I’ve never had it in for proles, per se. I’m just tired of living in a society permanently broken into fragments. I’ve always hoped and planned for federal, democratic, national reform. So we can have a system with a decent role for everyone.”

“But the economy’s out of control. Money just doesn’t need human beings anymore. Most of us only get in the way.”

“Well, money isn’t everything, but just try living without it.”

Kevin shrugged. “People lived before money was invented. Money’s not a law of nature. Money’s a medium. You can live without money, if you replace it with the right kind of computation. The proles know that. They’ve tried a million weird stunts to get by, road-blocks, shakedowns, smuggling, scrap metal, road shows… Heaven knows they never had much to work with. But the proles are almost there now. You know how reputation servers work, right?”

“Of course I know about them, but I also know they don’t really work.”

“I used to live off reputation servers. Let’s say you’re in the Reg-ulators — they’re a mob that’s very big around here. You show up at a Regulator camp with a trust rep in the high nineties, people will make it their business to look after you. Because they know for a fact that you’re a good guy to have around. You’re polite, you don’t rob stuff, they can trust you with their kids, their cars, whatever they got. You’re a certifiable good neighbor. You always pitch in. You always do people favors. You never sell out the gang. It’s a network gift econ-omy.”

“It’s gangster socialism. It’s a nutty scheme, it’s unrealistic. And it’s fragile. You can always bribe people to boost your ratings, and then money breaks into your little pie-in-the-sky setup. Then you’re right back where you started.”

“It can work all right. The problem is that the organized-crime feds are on to the proles, so they netwar their systems and deliberately break them down. They prefer the proles chaotic, because they’re a threat to the status quo. Living without money is just not the Ameri-can way. But most of Africa lives outside the money economy now — they’re all eating leaf protein out of Dutch machines. Polynesia is like that now. In Europe they’ve got guaranteed annual incomes, they’ve got zero-work people in their Parliaments. Gift networks have always been big in Japan. Russians still think property is theft — those poor guys could never make a money economy work. So if it’s so impracti-cal, then how come everybody else is doing it? With Green Huey in power, they’ve finally got a whole American state.”

“Green Huey is a pocket Stalin. He’s a personality cultist.”

“I agree he’s a son of a bitch, but he’s a giant son of a bitch. His state government runs Regulator servers now. And they didn’t over-run that air base by any accident. Huey’s nomads really have what it takes now — no more of this penny-ante roadblock and wire-clipper nonsense. Now they’ve got U.S. Air Force equipment that’s knocked over national governments. It’s a silent coup in progress, pal. They’re gonna eat the country right out from under you.”