50

This was where he'd have to be careful. He still had no idea what the Ogle Data Research people were actually doing to their test subjects up there on the eleventh floor. If it was some kind of brain surgery, then Vishniak would have to open fire before they could get him under anaesthesia. Otherwise he would become one of the living dead, a robot slave like Cozzano.

To outward appearances, everything seemed real nice. They had a big lobby by the elevators. It was all decorated. A nice young woman, whom Vishniak recognized from his reconnaissance, greeted him and led him around past the big curving desk where the receptionist sat with her space-age headset. Two security guards stood by, shifting their weight from one tired foot to the other; one of them was about ninety years old and the other one was overweight. Vishniak considered picking them off right here and now but decided against it; as long as they kept leading him deeper into the bowels of ODR, there was no reason to get feisty.

The girl offered him coffee but he refused; maybe that was how they knocked people out. She ushered him into a room with half a dozen chairs, all facing a big fancy TV set. Made in Japan, naturally. Three other people were already sitting there, and Vishniak recognized them as the sort of typical mall-cruising Americans that the ODR agents were always trying to recruit. A couple of them were drinking coffee but seemed to be suffering no ill effects so far.

Vishniak took a seat and waited for the usher gal to leave the room. Then he stood up, ambled over to the door, and stuck his head out into the hallway, trying to get a sense of the layout. They were not far from the receptionist's station. In the other direction, the hallway led past a line of offices. All the offices had big picture windows to let in the light, and so Vishniak could tell from a distance which doors were open and which were closed. Glancing back the other way he saw that the fat security guard was eyeballing him. He withdrew into the room and went over to the windows.

They had an incredible view. A fellow could probably make money, Vishniak reflected, by renting out an office in this building and charging mall shoppers a quarter to ride the elevators up and look out the windows. They were so close to the Pentagon that you could probably hawk a loogie into its central courtyard. Off to the left of the Pentagon was a huge cemetery with millions of white gravestones. This juxtaposition made good horse sense in that the Pentagon had to do with killing people. Beyond these landmarks was a river, and on the far shore of that river, Vishniak looked right into the heart of Washington. He didn't recognize it at first because, compared to Chicago, it was sparse and low-slung, like a farm or a park.

A long, narrow strip of grass ran off into the distance and it was lined with white buildings. In the middle of it was a tall spiky thing. At the far end of it was a dome that Vishniak recognized as being the Capitol. Beyond that, he could not really tell one building from another: there were a million of them, they were all white, they had lots of columns and the occasional squat dome. The only other one that looked familiar was located on the far side of the strip of grass, off the main drag: he thought it was the White House.

But it didn't look exactly right. He had seen the White House on TV a million times, always with a TV reporter standing in front of it, and thought it had a simple crackerbox shape with a verandah bulging out from the long side of it, but from this vantage point he could see that this thing he had always thought of as the White House was just the central unit in a sprawling, far-flung affair. The thing had wings sticking out to both sides, and the wings had additions tacked on to them. It was like a simple crackerbox house that the owner kept adding rooms to, until it rambled crazily all over the lot.

Seeing this, Vishniak felt betrayed. He had been raised to believe that the White House was just the President's house. His family lived there and his kids hunted Easter eggs on the lawn. It was big and nice by house standards, but still a house. But now he could see that the White House wasn't a real house at all. It was a false front for a rambling complex of sinister-looking additions that were cleverly concealed behind trees and bushes. And a fellow had to ask himself what happened in those additions, and what kind of people worked there, that their existence was so carefully kept hidden from the American public.

"Excuse me, sir?" someone was saying. He felt a hand placed gently on his arm, and startled away from it. It was one of the ODR gals. "Would you like to have a seat? We're about to get started."

"Sure," he said, and took a seat, one that had a good view of the door. While he had been standing at the window analyzing the structure of the U.S. Government, two other mall folk had come into the room, making a total complement of six.

What happened next was kind of amusing: they passed out wrist cuffs, one per customer. They were just like the one that Vishniak was already wearing, except that these didn't have the built-in TV screens. Playing dumb, Vishniak watched the gal explain how to put them on your arm, and followed her instructions with artificial clumsiness. Now he had one on each wrist.

Then she closed the blinds, turned off the lights, and showed them about fifteen minutes of television. Most of it consisted of advertisements but there were a few news stories in there too. All of it had to do, one way or another, with William A. Cozzano. Some of the ads were fuzzy-warm, touchy-feely numbers showing past events in Cozzano's life, including some grainy home videos of Cozzano recovering from his stroke that made Vishniak get choked up. Some of the ads were attacks on the President or Tip McLane. And then there were news stories - excerpts from what looked like network broadcasts. But the anchormen were unfamiliar to Vishniak. And the news events being reported had not actually happened.

Watching the anchorman read the stories, Vishniak sensed, somehow, that he was familiar. But not as an anchorman. As something else. Then it came to him: this man had played the captain of a starship - not the Enterprise - in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. He was an actor. And this news story was a fake. It hadn't really happened. It was just a potential news story.

"Huh. Getting some interesting reactions from our Post-Confederate Gravy Eater," Aaron Green said. He was sitting in the next room, looking at half a dozen monitor screens. Next to him was Shane Schram.

"What's this guy's problem?' Shane Schram said. He looked at the TV monitor showing the face of the Post-Confederate Gravy Eater, who was staring fixedly at the screen, jaw muscles throbbing.

"Incredible cortex activity," Aaron said, scrutinizing the readout.

"What does that mean?"

"It means his mental gears are spinning at a million rpm. He's thinking way too hard about everything."

"Can't have that. We'll just throw out his results," Schram said.

The videotape came to an end. Schram got up, walked next door, and turned on the lights in the focus group room. Then he delivered his usual self-introduction, which Aaron Green had now listened to a million times.

The door opened and Mr. Salvador came into the room, joining Aaron. Everyone called him Mr. Salvador because he had a kind of intercontinental breeding that inspired un-American levels of formality and because he was their boss. Even Cy Ogle's boss. But he wasn't just some figurehead who golfed and went to the occasional board meeting. He was very much a hands-on type. He spent days at a time holed up in the room where they had set up all of the monitors for the PIPER 100.