"Today-tomorrow-I will be declaring a state of emergency

-granting the executive... power. Necessary to protect our citizenry from possible subversion... from attack. By either the Gray globalists, or the blacks. The Gremadies. The ... Ne- gro niggers!"

(Kim lurched from the podium, half reeling. He glanced to his left again, dizzily, searching for support. Someone off-camera murmured drowned words, anxiously. Kim muttered aloud.)

"What did I say?"

He tugged at his pocket kerchief, and his shades clattered to the floor. He mopped his forehead, his neck. Then a sudden convulsion seized him. He stumbled forward, slap- ping his podium. His face congested and he screamed into the microphones.

"Dogs fucked Vienna! Ladies and gentlemen, I... I'm afraid I'm sorry that the pariah dump-dogs fucked the Ayatollah!

Lick my ass! You should-shit on the Space Captain fucking laser launch-"

Horrified screams. A roar and rustle as the crowd of thou- sands rose in bewilderment.

Kim slumped and fell behind the podium.

Suddenly he vaulted up again, like a puppet. He opened his mouth.

Suddenly, hellishly, he vomited blood and fire. A torrent of livid flame gushed from his mouth and eyes. In seconds his giant video face was blackening with impossible heat. A

deafening agonized scream shook the stadium. A sound like damned souls and sheet metal torn apart.

His hair flared like a candle, his skin crisped. He clawed at his burning eyes. The air became a hurricane of obscene metallic noise.

Suddenly, people from the lower stands were scrambling onto the soccer field. Vaulting, stumbling, clambering over the rails, over each other. Sweeping the white helmets of police away, like buoys in a tidal wave.

The noise went on and on.

There was a hard tug at Laura's knee. It was Suvendra. She was crouching low beneath the bleacher, hunkered on knees and elbows. She shouted something impossible to hear. Then gestured-get down!

Laura hesitated, looked up, and suddenly the crowd was all over her.

It poured down the slope like a juggernaut. Elbows, knees, shoulders, murderous stampeding feet. A sudden slamming body block, and Laura tumbled backward, downhill, over the bleacher. She slammed down into something that buckled spongily-a human body.

Concrete rose and smacked her' face. She was down and trampled-a crushing blow across her back that drove the air from her lungs. Winded, blinded. Dying!

Raw seconds of black panic. Then-she found herself scram- bling. Squirming, like Suvendra, under a denting, rocking bleacher. People pouring over her now. An endless, mad threshing engine of pistoning legs. A sandaled foot mashed her fingers and she snatched her hand back.

A little boy spun past her headlong. His shoulder smashed against the hard edge of a bleacher, and he was down.

Shadows and rising heat and the stink of fear and noise, bodies falling, scrambling-

Laura clenched her teeth and lunged out into a beating. She grabbed the boy's waist and hauled him back with her. She wrapped her arms around him, huddled him under her.

He buried his face against her shoulder, clutching her so hard it hurt. Concrete trembled under her, the stadium quaking to the avalanche of human meat.

Suddenly the hellish racket from the speakers vanished.

Laura's ears rang. With shocking suddenness, she could hear the boy sobbing. Wails of shock and pain bloomed in the sudden silence.

The soccer field was awash with the mob. The bleachers around her were littered with abandoned trash: shoes, hats, splattered dripping drinks. Down at the railing, the dazed and wounded staggered like drunks. Some knelt, sobbing. Others lay sprawled and broken.

Laura sat up slowly onto the bleacher, holding the boy on her lap. He hid his face against her shoulder.

Streaks of television static hissed soundlessly on the giant display board. She breathed hard, trembling. As long as it had lasted, there had been no time, just a maddened, deafen- ing eternity. Madness had streaked through the crowd like a tornado. Now it was gone.

It had lasted maybe forty seconds.

An elderly turbanned Sikh limped past her, his white beard dripping blood.

Down in the soccer field the crowd was milling, slowly.

The police had rallied here and there, clumps of white hel- mets. They were trying to make people sit. Some were doing it, but most were shying away, dumb and reluctant, like cattle.

Laura sucked her mashed knuckles and gazed down in wonder.

It was all for nothing. Sensible, civilized people had boiled out of their seats and trampled each other to death. For no sane reason at all. Now that it was over, they weren't even trying to leave the stadium. Some of them were even return- ing to their seats in the bleachers. Faces drained, legs rubbery- the look of zombies.

At the far end of Laura's bleacher, a .fat woman in a flowered sari was shaking and screaming. She was hitting her husband with her floppy straw hat, over and over again.

There was a touch on Laura's shoulder. Suvendra sat be- side her, her binoculars in her hand. "You are all right?"

"Mama," the little boy begged. He was about six. He had a gold ID bracelet and a T-shirt with a bust of Socrates.

"I hid. Like you did," Laura told Suvendra. She cleared her throat shakily. "That was smart."

"I have seen such troubles before, in Djakarta," Suvendra said.

"What the hell happened?"

Suvendra tapped her binoculars and pointed at the celebrity box. "I have spotted Kim there. He is alive."

"Kim! But I saw him die...."

"You saw a dirty trick," Suvendra said soberly. "What you saw was not possible. Even Kim Swee Lok cannot spit fire and explode." Suvendra winced a little, sourly. "They knew he was scheduled to speak today. They had time to prepare. The terrorists."

Laura knotted her hands. "Oh, Jesus."

Suvendra nodded at the static-laden screen. "The authori- ties have shut it down, now. Because it was sabotaged, yes?

Someone pirated that screen and put on a nightmare. To frighten the city."

"But what about that weird, vile stuff Kim was babbling....

He looked doped!" Laura smoothed the boy's hair absently.

"But that had to be faked, too. It was all a faked tape. Right?

So Kim's all right, really. "

Suvendra touched her binoculars. "No, I saw him. They were carrying him.... I'm afraid the celebrity box was booby- trapped. Kim fell into a trap."

"You mean all that really happened? Kim actually said that? All about dogs and... oh, God, no."

"To drug a man so to play a fool, then make him seem to burn alive-that might seem pleasant-to a voodoo man."

Suvendra stood up, tying the ribbons of her sun hat under her chin.

"But Kim ... he said he wanted peace with Grenada."

"Hurting Kim is a stupid blunder. We could have worked things out sensibly," Suvendra said. "But then, we are not terrorists." She opened her purse and dug out a cigarette.

A woman in a torn satin blouse limped up the aisle, screaming for someone named Lee.

"You can't smoke in public," Laura said blankly. "It's illegal here."

Suvendra smiled. "Rizome must help these poor mad people. I hope you are remembering your first-aid training."

Laura lay in her Rizome camp bed, feeling like shredded confetti. She touched her wrist. Three A.M. Singapore time,

Friday, October 13. The window glowed palely with the bluish light of arc lamps from the wharfs of East Lagoon.

Longshore robots on big lugged tires rolled unerringly through patches of darkness. A skeletal crane dipped into the holds of a Rumanian cargo clipper, the vast iron arm moving with mindless persistence, shuffling giant cargo containers like alphabet blocks.

A television flickered at the foot of Laura's cot, its sound off. Some local newsman, a government-approved flunky like all the newsmen here in Singapore ... like newsmen every- where, when you came right down to it. Reporting from the hospitals .. .