As a sop to propriety, Oscar was told that an NSC lieutenant colonel would soon arrive, with a crack team of very low-profile Marine aviators. But then the lieutenant colonel was also delayed, due to unexpected foreign-policy developments.

An American-owned fast-food multinational had accidentally poisoned a number of Dutch citizens with poorly sterilized hamburger meat. In retaliation, angry Dutch zealots had attacked and torched several restaurants. Given strained Dutch-American relations, this was a serious scandal and close to a casus belli. The President, faced with his first foreign-policy crisis, was blustering and demanding repara-tions and formal apologies. Under these circumstances, military disor-der within the U.S. was not an issue that the Administration cared to emphasize.

These were all disappointments. However, Oscar bore up. He was peeved to be denied a legitimate office, but he wasn’t surprised. He certainly wasn’t under the illusion that the Presidency worked any better than any other aspect of contemporary American government. Besides, there were distinct advantages to his questionable status. De-spite the humiliations, Oscar was now far more powerful than he had ever been before. Oscar had become a spook. Spookhood was doable.

Oscar swiftly made himself a factor with the new powers lurking in the basement below the Oval Office. He studied their dossiers, memorized their names and the office flowcharts, and asserted himself in the organization by humbly demanding favors. They were small, easily granted favors, but they were carefully arranged so that a failure to grant them was sure to provoke a turf war in the White House staff. Consequently, Oscar got his way.

He resolved one nagging problem by obliterating the local police force. He had the Collaboratory’s captive police flown out of Texas in an unmarked cargo helicopter. They were transferred to a federal law enforcement training facility in West Virginia. The Collaboratory’s cops were not fired, much less were they tried for malfeasance and bribe-taking; but the budget of their tiny agency was zeroed-out, and the personnel simply vanished forever into the mazes of federal reas-signment.

This left the Collaboratory with no working budget for a police force. But that was doable. Because at the moment, there were no budgets of any kind at the Collaboratory. Everyone was working for no pay. They were living off barter, back gardens, surplus office equipment, and various forms of left-handed pin money.

The days that followed were the most intense and productive of Oscar’s political life. The lab’s situation was an absolute shambles. Only organizational skill of genius could have retrieved it. Oscar didn’t possess the skill of genius. However, he could successfully re-place genius through the simple expedient of giving up sleep and outworking everyone else.

The first truly serious challenge was to mollify the giant invasion of Moderators. The Moderators had to be dissuaded from wrecking and sacking the facility. Oscar finessed this through the simple gambit of informing the Moderators that they now owned the facility. Obvi-ously, they could wreck the place at will, but if they did so, the life-support systems would collapse, the atmosphere would sour, and all the glamorous and attractive rare animals would die. The Moderators would choke with everyone else, in an uninhabitable glass ghetto. However, if they came to working terms with the aboriginal scientists, the Moderators would possess a giant genetic Eden where they could live outdoors without tents.

Oscar’s argument carried the day. There were naturally a few ugly incidents, in which proles abducted and barbecued some espe-cially tasty animals. But the ghastly stench made it clear that open fires within the dome were counterproductive for everyone. The situation failed to explode. As days passed it began to show definite signs of stabilizing.

A new committee was formed, to negotiate the terms for local coexistence between the scientists and the invading dropouts. It con-sisted of Greta, the board’s division heads, Kevin, Oscar himself, occa-sional consultant members of Oscar’s krewe, and a solemn variety of gurus, sachems, and muckety-mucks from Burningboy’s contingent. This new governing body needed a name. It couldn’t be called the “Strike Committee,” as that term had already been used. It swiftly became known as the “Emergency Committee.”

Oscar regretted this coinage, as he loathed and despised all Emer-gency committees; but the term had one great advantage. It didn’t have to be explained to anyone. The American populace was already used to the spectacle of its political institutions collapsing, to be re-placed by Emergency committees. Having the Collaboratory itself run by an “emergency committee” was an easy matter to understand. It could even be interpreted as a prestigious step upward; it was as if the tiny Collaboratory had collapsed as grandly as the U.S. Congress.

Oscar canceled his public relations poster campaign. The Strike was well and truly over now, and the lab’s new regime required a new graphic look and a fresh media treatment. After a brainstorming ses-sion with his krewe, Oscar decided on the use of loudspeakers. The Emergency Committee’s continuing negotiations would be broadcast live on half a dozen loudspeakers, situated in various public areas within the dome.

This proved a wise design choice. The loudspeakers had a pleas-antly makeshift, grass-rootsy feeling. People could gently drift in and out of the flow of political agitation. The antiquated technology pro-vided a calming, peripheral media environment. People could become just as aware of the continuing crisis as they felt they needed to be.

Thanks to the use of loudspeakers, the Collaboratory personnel and their mongrelized invaders were placed on an equal informational plane. As an additional gambit, tasteful blue plastic “soapboxes” were set up here and there, where especially foolish and irate people could safely vent their discontents. Not only was this a safety valve and a useful check on popular sentiment, but it made the gimcrack Emer-gency Committee seem very adult and responsible by contrast.

This media campaign was especially useful in finessing the severe image problem presented by Captain (once General, once Corporal) Burningboy. In person or on video, the prole leader looked impossi-bly crazed and transgressive. However, he had a deep, fatherly speak-ing voice. Over the loudspeakers, Burningboy radiated the pious jollity of an arsonist Santa Claus.

It was a misconception to imagine that the Moderators were merely violent derelicts. The roads of America boasted a great many sadly desperate people, but the Moderators were not a mob of hobos. The Moderators were no longer even a “gang” or a “tribe.” Basically, the Moderators were best understood as a nongovernmental network organization. The Moderators deliberately dressed and talked like savages, but they didn’t lack sophistication. They were organized along new lines that were deeply orthogonal to those of conventional Amer-ican culture.

It had never occurred to the lords of the consumer society that consumerism as a political philosophy might one day manifest the grave systemic instabilities that Communism had. But as those instabil-ities multiplied, the country had cracked. Civil society shriveled in the pitiless reign of cash. As the last public spaces were privatized, it be-came harder and harder for American culture to breathe. Not only were people broke, but they were taunted to madness by commercials, and pitilessly surveilled by privacy-invading hucksters. An ever more aggressive consumer-outreach apparatus caused large numbers of peo-ple to simply abandon their official identities.

It was no longer any fun to be an American citizen. Bankruptcies multiplied beyond all reason, becoming a kind of commercial apostasy. Tax dodging became a spectator sport. The American people simply ceased to behave. They gathered to publicly burn their licenses, chop up their charge cards, and hit the road. The proles considered them-selves the only free Americans.