"What do you want?" Floyd said.

"I want to give you ten thousand dollars."

"You got it with you?"

"No, but I have a down payment of one thousand."

Floyd stood there in the doorway for a while and smoked his cigarette and pondered this unusual situation. A man, very likely a Jew from Chicago, had just driven up to his trailer and offered him ten thousand dollars.

"This a Publishers Clearinghouse thing? You a friend of Ed McMahon or something?"

"No, it's not a sweepstakes. I represent ODR, which is a poll-taking organization based in Virginia. We've identified you as being a typical representative of a particular part of the United States population."

Floyd snorted derisively. He could just imagine.

"We would like to keep track of your reactions to the current presidential campaign. What you think of the different candidates and issues."

"So you want me to go to Virginia?"

"No. Not at all. We want you to change your lifestyle as little as possible. That's crucial to the system."

"So you're going to call me up every couple days and ask me questions."

"It's even easier than that," Green said. "Can I step inside and show you?"

Floyd snorted again. "My little abode ain't much to look at."

"That's okay. I'll only take ten or fifteen minutes of your time."

"Come on in then."

Aaron Green and Floyd sat down in front of the TV. Floyd turned the volume down a little bit and offered his visitor a beer, which he declined. "I have to drive to Nebraska tonight," he said, "and if I have a beer now I'll be pulling over to urinate all night long."

"Nebraska? What, you taking one guy from each state?"

"Something like that," Aaron Green said. Obviously he did not believe that Floyd Wayne Vishniak, a dumb uneducated factory worker, would ever be smart enough to understand the details.

"You ever read Dick Tracy comics?" Aaron Green asked.

"They don't have it in the paper here," Floyd said. "You ever read Prince Valiant?"

Again, Aaron Green stumbled. He was having a hard time building up his momentum. "Well, you might have heard of the wristwatch television set."

"Yeah, I heard of that."

"Well, here's your chance to have a look at one." Aaron Green pulled something out of his briefcase.

It looked like a super high-tech watch or something. Like some kind of secret military thing that a commando in a movie would wear.

The band of the watch was not just a strip of leather or anything like that. It was made of hard black plastic ventilated with lots of holes. It was huge, about three inches wide. It consisted of several plates of this hard black plastic stuff hinged together so that it would curve around the wrist.

Instead of having just one clockface on the top surface, it had a whole little screen type of thing, just like on a digital watch except that it wasn't showing anything right now, just gray and blank. And in addition to that there were a few other raised black containers molded to the outer surface of the watchband, but they didn't have any screens or buttons or anything like that, they were just blank, and must have contained batteries or something.

"Shit," Floyd said, "what the hell is it?"

"Most of the time it's a digital watch. Part of the time, it's a television set, complete with a little speaker for sound."

"Can I get Whiplash games on it?"

"I'm afraid not. The TV will only show one type of program and one type only, and that is political programming having to do with the election."

"Shit, I knew there was a catch."

"That's why we're offering you the money. Because this is not all fun and games. Some responsibility falls on your shoulders as part of this deal."

Floyd Wayne Vishniak thought that if Aaron Green were not trying to pay him ten thousand dollars, he might throw him down the stairs and jump on him out in the yard and mess him up a little bit. He did not appreciate the fact that this little man, who was about the same age as him, and maybe a bit younger, was lecturing him about responsibility. It was the kind of thing his dad used to say to him.

But for now he was going to be cool. He put his feet up on the table next to the briefcase, sat back, raised his eyebrows, peered at Aaron Green through the smoke of his cigarette. "Well, for ten thousand bucks I guess I could be responsible."

"Think of it as a part-time job. It'll take maybe ten minutes of your time every day. It doesn't prevent you from having other jobs. And it pays very, very well."

"What do I got to do in this job?"

"Watch TV."

Floyd laughed. "Watch TV? On this little wristwatch thing?"

"Exactly. Now, most of the time, it'll just act like a digital watch." Green pressed a button on the face of the wristwatch and the screen began to show black numerals on a gray background, giving the current time and date. "This is just a convenience for you," he explained. "But from time to time, something like this will happen."

The watch emitted a piercing beep. The numerals on the tiny screen disappeared and were replaced by a color-bar test pattern.

"Whoa, it's in color!" Floyd said.

"Yeah. Of course, you can't see any color when it's pretending to be a wristwatch. But in TV mode, it's just like a small color television set."

After a couple of seconds, the test pattern was replaced by a videotape of John F. Kennedy giving his "Ask not what your country can do for you" speech.

"This is just a little canned demonstration. Once the program gets underway, it'll show you coverage of campaign events. Debates, new conferences, and so on."

"Why don't I just watch 'em on my own TV set?"

"Because we're going to pipe our own coverage directly to you, through this watch. We might want you to see some events that the networks wouldn't cover, so we have to generate the programming ourselves. Besides, we think we'll get better compliance this way."

"Compliance?"

"Suppose you're out of the house. Like maybe going to a Whiplash game. You wouldn't be able to watch normal TV. But with this PIPER watch, you can watch it wherever you are."

"PIPER?"

"That's the name of this program."

"How much of this stuff do I have to watch?"

"Many days there won't be anything at all. We might show you fifteen minutes or half an hour of programming a few times a week. Sometimes it'll be a little more intense. The only time when we'll really give you a lot of stuff to watch will be during the conventions in July and August."

"What else do I gotta do? You call me up and ask me questions about this stuff, or what?"

"That's it. Just watch the TV programs."

"That's it?"

"Yes."

"Then how do you know what my opinion is? I thought the whole idea was to get my opinion."

"It is. But we can do that electronically."

"How?"

"Through the PIPER watch." Green reached into his briefcase and pulled out a videotape. "I see you have a VCR in here. You should watch this tape. It'll explain how everything works."

"I don't get it."

"The PIPER watch does more than just show you campaign events. It also monitors your reactions. You ever go to a mall or an amusement park and see one of those machines where you drop in a quarter and it gives you your biorhythms, or your emotional state, or something like that?"

"There's one down at Duke's Tavern that gives you your sex rating."

"Oh." Green seemed embarrassed. "How does that work?"

"You grab this big rod sticking out of the top and it measures your sex quotient and flashes it up on the screen. I always get a real high score."

"Okay, it's probably a galvanic skin response device."

"Say what?"

"This PIPER watch has the same kind of thing built into it as your sex quotient machine. So it could provide a twenty-four hour a day readout of your sex quotient, if that was what we wanted."