“You’re very brave. I admire you very much for saying that.”

Lorena began weeping. She massaged her eyes with her beauti-fully kept fingertips. “Now I’m crying but… Well, you don’t mind that, do you? You’re one of the people who really knew what we were like, back then.”

“I don’t mind.”

Lorena looked up after a while, her brittle face composed and bright. “Well, you haven’t told me how you are doing.”

“Me, Lorena? Couldn’t be better! Getting amazing things ac-complished over here. Unbelievable developments, all completely fas-cinating. ”

“You’ve lost a lot of weight,” she said. “You look tired.”

“I’ve had a little trouble with my new allergies. I’m fine as long as I stay around air filters.”

“How is your new job with the President? It must be exciting to be in the NSC when there’s almost a war on.”

Oscar opened his mouth. It was true; he was on the National Security Council, and there was a war in the works, and despite his tangential status and his deep disinterest in foreign affairs, he knew a great deal about the coming war. He knew that the President planned to send out a flotilla of clapped-out battleships across the Atlantic, without any air cover. He knew that the President was utterly deter-mined to provoke his token war, whether the Congress could be talked into declaring one or not. He knew that in a world of precisely targeted cheap missiles and infinite numbers of disposable drone air-craft, the rust-bucket American fleet was a fleet of sitting ducks.

He also knew that he would lose his job and perhaps even face espionage charges if he revealed this to a Senator’s wife on an NSC satphone. Oscar closed his mouth.

“I’m just a science adviser,” he said at last. “The Senator must know a great deal more about this than I do.”

“Would you like to talk to him?”

“That would be great.”

Lorena left. Oscar opened his nomad laptop, examined the screen for a moment, shut it again.

The Senator arrived on-camera. He was wearing pajamas and a blue velvet lounge robe. His face looked plump, polished, and strangely shapeless, as if the personality behind had lost its grip on the facial muscles.

“Oscar!” Bambakias boomed. “Good old Oscar! I think about you every day.”

“That’s good to know, Senator.”

“You’re doing marvelous things over there with the science facil-ity. Marvelous things. I really wish I could help you with that. Maybe we could fly over tomorrow! That would be good. We’d get results.”

Lorena’s voice sounded from off-camera. “There’s a hearing to-morrow, Alcott.”

“Hearings, more hearings. All right. Still, I keep up! I do keep up. I know what’s going on, I really do! Tremendous things you’re doing over there. You’ve got no budget, they tell me. None at all. Fill the place with the unemployed! Genius maneuver! It’s just like you always said, Oscar — push a political contradiction hard enough, it’ll break through to the other side. Then you can rub their noses in it. Great, great tactics.”

Oscar was touched. The Senator was obviously in a manic state, but he was a lot easier to take when he was so ebullient — it was like a funhouse-mirror version of his old charisma.

“You’ve done plenty for us already, Senator. We built a hotel here from your plans. The locals were very impressed by it.”

“Oh, that’s nothing.”

“No, seriously, your design attracted a lot of favorable com-ment.”

“No, I truly mean that it’s nothing. You should see the plans I used to do, back in college. Giant intelligent geodesics. Huge reactive structures made of membrane and sticks. You could fly ’em in on zeppelins and drop ’em over starving people, in the desert. Did ’em for a U.N. disaster relief competition — back when the U.S. was still in the U.N.”

Oscar blinked. “Disaster relief buildings?”

“They never got built. Much too sophisticated and high tech for starving, backward third worlders, so they said. Bureaucrats! I worked my ass off on that project.” Bambakias laughed. “There’s no money in disaster relief. There’s no market-pull for that. I recast the concept later, as little chairs. No money in the little chairs either. They never appreciated any of that.”

“Actually, Senator, we have one of those little chairs in the Di-rector’s office, here at the lab. It’s provoking a lot of strongly favorable reaction. The locals really love that thing.”

“You don’t say. Too bad that scientists are too broke to buy any upscale furniture.”

“I wonder if you’d still have those disaster plans in your archives somewhere, Alcott. I’d like to see them.”

“See them? Hell, you can have them. The least I can do for you, after everything I’ve put you through.”

“I hope you’ll do that for me, Senator. I’m serious.”

“Sure, have ’em! Take anything you want! Kind of a fire sale on my brain products. You know, if we invade Europe, Oscar, it probably means a nuclear exchange.”

Oscar lowered his voice soothingly. “I really don’t think so, Al.” “They’re trifling with the grand old USA, these little Dutch creeps. Them and their wooden shoes and tulips. We’re a superpower! We can pulverize them.”

Lorena spoke up. “I think it’s time for your medication, Alcott.”

“I need to know what Oscar really thinks about the war! I’m all in favor of it. I’m a hawk! We’ve been pushed around by these little red-green Euro pipsqueaks long enough. Don’t you think so, Oscar?”

A nurse arrived. “You tell the President my opinion!” the Sena-tor insisted as the nurse led him away. “You tell Two Feathers I’m with him all the way down.”

Lorena moved back into camera range. She looked grim and stricken.

“You have a lot of new krewepeople now, Lorena.”

“Oh. That.” She looked into the camera. “I never got back to you about the Moira situation, did I?”

“Moira? I thought we had that problem straightened out and packed away with mothballs.”

“Oh, Moira was on her best behavior after that jail incident. Until Huey came looking for Moira. Now Moira works for Huey in Baton Rouge.”

“Oh no.”

“It got very bad for the krewe after that. Their morale suffered so much with the Senator’s illness, and once Huey had our former press agent in his own court … well, I guess you can imagine what it’s been like.”

“You’ve lost a lot of people?”

“Well, we just hire new ones, that’s all.” She looked up. “Maybe someday you can come back to us.”

“That would be good. The reelection campaign, maybe.”

“That should be a real challenge… You’re so good with him. You were always so good with him. That silly business with his old architecture plans. It really touched him, he was very lucid for a minute there. He was just like his old self with you.”

“I’m not just humoring him, Lorena. I really want those disaster relief plans. I want you to make sure that they’re sent to me here. I think I can use them.”

“Oscar, what are you really doing over there? It seems like a very strange thing. I don’t think it’s in the interests of the Federal Demo-crats. It’s not a sensible reform, it’s not like what we had in mind.”

“That’s true — it’s certainly not what we had in mind.”

“It’s that Penninger woman, isn’t it? She’s just not right for you. She’s not your type. You know that Moira knows all about you and Greta Penninger, don’t you? Huey knows too.”

“I know that. I’m looking after that. Although it’s challenging work.”

“You look so pale. You should have stayed with Clare Emerson. She’s an Anglo girl, but she was sweet-tempered and good for you. You always looked happy when you were with her.”

“Clare is in Holland.”

“Clare is coming back. What with the war, and all.”

“Lorena …” He sighed. “You play ball with a lot of journal-ists. So do I, all right? I used to sleep with Clare, but Clare is a journalist, first and last and always. Just because she gives you softball coverage doesn’t mean that she’s good for me. Don’t send Clare over here. I mean it. Send me the old architecture plans that Alcott did, when he was a wild design student who had never made any money. I can really use those. Do not send Clare.”