The southerner hit the on button, hollering "BOOM!" so loud that Bristol actually startled a little bit. Then he laughed.

The screen came alive with windows and icons. From a distance, Aaron recognized about half of the icons. He knew what this soft­ware did. He could guess that the southerner did a lot of statistical analysis, desktop publishing, and even desktop video production.

"Sir, would this do the trick?" Bristol was saying.

"Yo!" said the southerner, giving Aaron a dig on the arm. "He's talking to you!"

"Huh?" Aaron said.

"Would this computer be capable of talking to your machine there?" Bristol said.

"Well, yes, if it had the right software loaded on to its hard drive. Which it doesn't."

"Oh, I see what's going on," the southerner said. Suddenly he stuck out his hand toward Aaron. "Cy Ogle," he said. "Pro­nounced, but not spelled, like mogul."

"Aaron Green."

Cy Ogle laughed. "So you have to show this guy here that your box won't blow up when we reach our cruising altitude. And until you hook it up to a computer, it won't do anything except turn on that little red light."

"Exactly."

"Which don't mean jack to him, because that light is about the size of a grain of rice, and for all he knows the rest of the box is full of black powder and roofing nails."

"Well..."

"You have the software with you? On floppies? Well, load it in there, and let's take this baby for a spin."

Aaron couldn't believe the guy was serious. But he was. Aaron fished the diskette with the IMIPREM software out of his briefcase and popped it into the drive on Ogle's machine. A single-typed command copied the files on to Ogle's hard drive.

In the meantime, Ogle had already figured out what to do with the cable: he ran it from the back of the IMIPREM into the corresponding port on the laptop.

"Okay. Ready to roll," Aaron said.

Aaron unbuttoned his shirt cuff. He fished the plastic cuff out of the case and snapped it snugly around his exposed wrist.

A ten-foot cable dangled from the cuff. Most of it was coiled up and held together by a plastic wire tie. Aaron plugged it into the back of the IMIPREM.

A new window materialized on the screen of Ogle's computer. It was a moving, animated bar graph. Half a dozen colored bars, of different lengths, fluctuated up and down. At the base of each bar was a label:

BP RESP TEMP PERSP PULS

GSR NEUR

"It's monitoring my body right now. See, the bars stand for blood pressure, respiration, body temp, and a few other things. Of course, this is its most basic level of functioning, beyond this it's capable of an incredible number of different-"

Ogle's hand slammed down on Aaron's shoulder and gripped him like a pair of barbecue tongs.

"I'm an undercover agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms," Cy Ogle said, "You're under arrest for conspiracy

to commit terrorist acts on board an airliner. Don't move or you'll be shot!"

"What!?" Aaron screamed.

"Just kidding," Ogle said, "Haw, haw!"

"He's right, look at the bars," the guard said.

Blood pressure and just about everything else had suddenly shot way up. As they watched, and as Aaron calmed down, the bars subsided.

"Thanks for the demonstration, sir, it was very interesting," the guard said. "Have a nice flight."

Then Bristol turned to look down the concourse. Aaron and Ogle were both looking that way too; some kind of generalized disturbance seemed to have broken out. But it wasn't hooligans or terrorists. It was businessmen in suits, stampeding out of the bars and restaurants where they had been watching the President on TV. They ran down the concourse, knocking travelers and sky caps aside, and began to scuffle over the few available pay telephones.

Ogle chuckled indulgently. "Looks like the President made a corker of a speech," he said. "Maybe we should hook you machine up to them."

As it turned out, they were on the same flight, sitting across the aisle from each other in the first row of first class. Coach was full of shuffling grannies and beefy sailors; first class was mostly empty. Ogle worked on his computer for the first hour or so, whacking the keys so rapidly that it sounded like a hailstorm on the tray table, occasionally mumbling a good-natured "shit!" and doing it again.

Aaron pulled a blank tablet of graph paper out of his briefcase, uncapped a pen, and stared at it until they were somewhere over Pittsburgh. Then it was dinnertime and he put it away. He was trying to organize his thoughts. But he didn't have any.

After dinner, Ogle moved from the window to the aisle seat, right across from Aaron, and then startled Aaron a little by ordering them both drinks.

"Big presentation," Ogle said.

Aaron heaved a sigh and nodded.

"You got some kind of small high-tech company."

"Yeah."

"You developed this thing, spent all your venture capital, prob­ably maxed out your credit cars to boot, and now you got to make some money off it or your investors will cash you in."

"Yeah, that's about right."

"And the cash flow is killing you because all the parts that go into these things cost money, but you don't actually get paid for them until, what, thirty or sixty days after you ship 'em. If you're lucky."

"Yeah, it's a problem all right," Aaron said. His face was getting red. This had started out interesting, gotten uncanny, and now it was starting to annoy him.

"So, let's see. You're going to L.A. The big industry in L.A. is entertainment. You got a device that measures people's reactions to things. A people meter."

"I wouldn't call it a people meter."

"Course not. But that's what they'll call it. Except it's a whole lot better than the usual kind, I could see that right away. Anyway, you're going to go meet with a bunch of executives for movie and television studios, maybe some ad agencies, and persuade 'em to buy a whole bunch of these things, hook 'em up to man-on-the­street types, show 'em movies and TV programs so they can do all that test audience stuff."

"Yeah, that's about right. You're a very perceptive man, Mr. Ogle."

"What I get paid for," Ogle said.

"You work in the media industry?"

"Yeah, that's a good way to put it," Ogle said.

"You seem to know a lot about what I do."

"Well," Ogle said. All of a sudden he seemed quiet, reflective. He pushed the button on his armrest and leaned his chair back a couple of inches. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, curled one hand around his drink. "High-tech has its own biorhythms."

"Biorhythms?"

Ogle opened one eye, turned his head a bit, peered at Aaron.

"Course you probably don't like that word because you are Mr. High Tech, and it sounds to you like cocktail-party pseudoscience."

"Exactly." Aaron was beginning to think that Ogle knew him better than he knew himself.

"Fair enough. But I have a legitimate point here. See, we live under capitalism. Capitalism is defined by competition for capital. Would-be businessmen, and existing businesses seeking to expand, fight for the tiny supply of available capital like starving jackals around a zebra leg.

"That's a depressing image."

"It's a depressing country. It's not like that in other countries where people save more money. But it's like that here, now, because we don't have values that encourage savings."

"Okay."

"Consequently you are starved for capital."

"Right!"

"You had to get capital from venture capitalists - or vulture capitalists, as we call them - who are like the vultures that feed on the jackals when they become too starved and weak to defend themselves."

"Well, I don't think my investor would agree."

"They probably would," Ogle said, "they just wouldn't do so in your presence."