"You want to pursue this?" Mary Catherine said.

"Yes, goddamn it," Cozzano said.

Mel just closed his eyes and shook his head in disbelief.

"There is a step we can take now, without committing ourselves," Mary Catherine said. "I don't know whether I like this. But I have to give you all the information. As you said, Mel, we're all adults."

"What is it?" Mel said warily.

"Dad has to go up to Champaign, to Burke Hospital, tomorrow for a routine checkup. While he's in there, we could arrange for a biopsy."

"Of what?"

"Brain cells."

"Why?"

"We could send them to Genomics. They could hang on to them there. That way, if Dad made the decision to go ahead with an implant, they could culture the cells and prepare the biochip at any time."

"Do it," Cozzano said.

"Oh shit," Mel said.

"Do the biopsy?" Mary Catherine said. "Tomorrow?"

Cozzano just looked her in the eye and nodded. His eyes looked a little brighter. He smiled at Mary Catherine with the good side of his mouth, and a thin trickle of drool steamed down out of the other side.

"I'm tired of this," Cozzano said, wiping off the drool with his good hand. "This is bad."

"Yes, it's bad," Mel said, "but-

"I want to be the Milhous," Cozzano said.

"And one day you will be," Mel said, "but-"

"Shut up, goddamnit!" Cozzano bellowed. Suddenly he riped the blanket off his lap with his good hand. Then he pitched forward in his wheelchair so violently that he seemed to be falling out.

Everyone jumped up and converged on him. But he wasn't falling. He was trying to stand up. The momentum of his upper body carried him halfway to his feet and he used the powerful thrust of his good arm to push him up on one leg. Then he almost tottered over, but Mary Catherine had already danced around the coffee table and now she drove her shoulder up under her father's armpit, taking most of his weight.

Though no one but Mary Catherine would ever know it, this had taken a lot of guts on her part, because her impulse had been to shrink away. Suddenly back on his feet, Dad was massive, dark, and towering. Mary Catherine's love for her father had always been mingled with a judicious amount of fear, or maybe respect was a nicer word for it. He had never struck her or even threatened to, but he never needed to. The tornadic force of his personality made people cringe and scurry, especially when he was mad, and right now he was really pissed. He threw his entire weight on her body for a moment, nearly buckling her knees, and finally got his weight centered over his good leg again.

And then he started to hop. He was going somewhere. He had fixed a dark, unblinking gaze on the far wall of the den, and seeing this, Mary Catherine tried to help him along. They moved together one hop at a time across the shag carpet and into the den. Mel shuffled along behind them.

Cozzano was headed for a framed picture hung on the wall. It was a picture of Cozzano shaking George Bush's hand on the south lawn a few year ago. Barbara Bush stood off to the side, hands clasped together, beaming supportively. Behind them rose the columns of the White House.

Cozzano went straight across the floor and fell, crushing Mary Catherine into the wall with his bad shoulder and pinning her there. He reached across his body with his good hand and slammed the end of his index finger into the framed picture so hard that it whacked back into the wall and a couple of cracks appeared in the glass.

He wasn't pointing to himself or to the Bushes. He was pointing to the White House.

"This is mine," he said. "This is my barn." He slammed his index finger into the White House a couple of more times for emphasis. "I should have done it before."

"You have to get better first," Mary Catherine said in a strangled voice.

"Well, I guess I better print up a shitload of bumper stickers," Mel said morosely. "Femelhebbers for Cozzano."

Mary Catherine didn't say anything. She was feeling the hairs stand up on the back of her neck.

Her dad was running for president. Her dad was running for president. President of the United States. It was enough to make her forget about the stroke, to obliterate the fact that there was no way he could be elected in his condition.

She wanted to talk to her mother. She wished Mom was here. This would be a good time to have a mother.

But Mom wasn't here. She forced herself to open her eyes and stare at him.

He was looking right back at her with the frightening, soul-penetrating glare that made people want to leave the room.

Then it went away and was replaced by an idiotic grin. Mary Catherine had seen this grin a million times while examining neurology patients, and she had seen it on Dad's face a few times since the stroke, usually when it seemed like he was giving up. It was the drooling, clownlike, sheepish grin of a near vegetable. It was a lot more frightening than his intense glare.

"You are the quarterback now, peanut," he said. His eyes rolled back into his head and he went completely limp, as if his bones had turned to water. Mary Catherine let him down to the floor as gently as she could; Mel stepped in to support his head.

"He's just had another stroke," Mary Catherine said. "Forget about the phone, Tuscola doesn't have 911. Let's get him into that fast little car of yours. And then you need to drive it like a bat out of hell."

18

The South Platte River looked big and important on maps of Denver. It approached the city from the north-northeast. Its valley and flood plain were several miles wide and served as a corridor for a bundle of major transportation routes: state highways, an interstate, natural gas pipelines, major railways, and high-tension power lines. The first time Eleanor had seen it was shortly after she and Harmon had arrived in Denver and they were driving around looking for places to live. Harmon drove and Eleanor navigated, and she got them lost. She got them lost because she was trying to use the mighty South Platte as a landmark, and instead they kept crossing back and forth over a paltry creek or drainage ditch out in the middle of nowhere. Not until she actually saw the name of the thing on a sign by a bridge could she believe that this dried-up rill was all there was to it.

They had crossed the Platte again a couple of years ago on their way to the Commerce Vista Motel and Mobile Home Haven. In retrospect, Eleanor knew that Harmon had craftily plotted their trajectory so that they could reach the place without having to pass through any part of Commerce City proper. They'd come in from the northwest, from the middle-class suburbs where they had raised their family, past brand-new strip malls sitting totally empty with weathered FOR LEASE banners stretched across their fronts, across open grassland that was too close to the flood plain or too far from the highway to develop. At the edge of Commerce City they had passed quickly through a brief unpleasant flurry of franchise development and then come upon the Commerce Vista. Somehow Eleanor had failed to notice the WEEKLY RATES sign on the motel's marquee, and she hadn't even bothered to look across the highway, off to the eastern edge of the mobile home park. She hadn't looked that way because it was nothing but empty grassland stretching vastly under a white sky, and Eleanor didn't like to look east across that territory because it told her exactly how far she was from home. But if she had looked she would have seen that it was surrounded by tall chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, with signs every few yards reading U.S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS - NO TRESPASSING. Tangles of plumbing stuck mysteriously out of the ground from place to place, and every few hundred yards was a white wooden box with a peaked roof, like an oversized birdhouse, containing instruments to monitor the air.