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Two science-fiction books are generally mentioned in regard to computer viral programs. "When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One" by David Gerrold is the other. (Interestingly, both books had two editions: in both cases the role of the viral-type program was reduced in the later edition. Further similarities I cannot comment on - I have been completely unable to locate a copy of Gerrold's work.)

A reasonably crafted and amusing diversion. A little slow off the mark for my taste, but the "psychodrama" cerebrations of the start give way to action by about the one-third mark. Good wins out over evil, the nice guys finish first and "appropriate" technology wins the day.

Enough small talk. What about the virus?

The "tapeworm", as it is referred to in the book, comes in very close to the end. It is a creation of the hero (a computer genius, naturally) used as a tool to end the secrecy and oppression of the ruling elite. The world of the "Shockwave Rider" (the United States of the not very distant future) has a universal information network. Audio, video and data channels are all tied together, and anyone can request information about anything from any terminal. The elite, of course, get the information, the masses get sanitized info and propaganda.

The tapeworm is a security-breaking program. It is not clear, from the text, whether the tapeworm reproduces. There seem to be some reproductive references to multiple "Leads": these might be additional copies of the initiating program. However, unlike programs we think of as viral, the tapeworm does not copy itself and attach to existing files. Instead, the tapeworm adds existing data and programming to itself. This allows it to provide information to requesters, and to circumvent the security and privacy measures of the ruling class. (The tapeworm is also incredibly intelligent. It is able to assess and correlate completely dissimilar data points and present them appropriately to the user. Hypermedia to the max.)

References to the tapeworm indicate a size that would preclude reproduction. The authorities are not unable to kill it because of defence mechanisms or numbers of copies. Rather, the authorities are prevented from even attempting to kill the tapeworm as the tapeworm has assumed into itself the network programming. To kill the tapeworm is, therefore, to kill the net.

Reasonably good read. Zero information about "real world" viral programs. Interesting conjectures.

Robert M. Slade, 1993

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

People like me who are concerned to portray in fictional terms aspects of that foreign country, the future, whither we are all willy-nilly being deported, do not make our guesses in a vacuum. We are frequently - and in this case I am specifically - indebted to those who are analyzing the limitless possibilities of tomorrow with some more practical aim in view... as for instance the slim yet admirable hope that our children may inherit a world more influenced by imagination and foresight than our own.

The "scenario" (to employ a fashionable cliche) of The Shockwave Rider derives in large part from Alvin Toffler's stimulating study Future Shock, and in consequence I'm much obliged to him.

J.K.H.B.

BOOK 1

THE BASIC STRAINING MANUAL

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY

Take 'em an inch and they'll give you a hell.

DATA-RETRIVIAL MODE

The man in the bare steel chair was as naked as the room's white walls. They had shaved his head and body completely; only his eyelashes remained. Tiny adhesive pads held sensors in position at a dozen places on his scalp, on his temples close to the corners of his eyes, at each side of his mouth, on his throat, over his heart and over his solar plexus and at every major ganglion down to his ankles.

From each sensor a lead, fine as gossamer, ran to the sole object - apart from the steel chair and two other chairs, both softly padded - that might be said to furnish the room. That was a data-analysis console about two meters broad by a meter and a half high, with display screens and signal lights on its slanted top, convenient to one of the padded chairs.

Additionally, on adjustable rods cantilevered out from the back of the steel chair, there were microphones and a three-vee camera.

The shaven man was not alone. Also present were three other people: a young woman in a slick white coverall engaged in checking the location of the sensors; a gaunt black man wearing a fashionable dark red jerkin suit clipped to the breast of which was a card bearing his picture and the name Paul T. Freeman; and a heavy-set white man of about fifty, dressed in dark blue, whose similar card named him as Ralph C. Hartz.

After long contemplation of the scene, Hartz spoke.

"So that's the dodger who went further and faster for longer than any of the others."

"Haflinger's career," Freeman said mildly, "is somewhat impressive. You've picked up on his record?"

"Naturally. That's why I'm here. It may be an atavistic impulse, but I did feel inclined to see with my own eyes the man who posted such an amazing score of new personae. One might almost better ask what he hasn't done than what he has. Utopia designer, lifestyle counselor, Delphi gambler, computer-sabotage consultant, systems rationalizer, and God knows what else besides."

"Priest, too," Freeman said. "We're progressing into that area today. But what's remarkable is not the number of separate occupations he's pursued. It's the contrast between successive versions of himself."

"Surely you'd expect him to muddle his trail as radically as possible?"

"You miss the point. The fact that he eluded us for so long implies that he's learned to live with and to some extent control his overload reflexes, using the sort of regular commercial tranquilizer you or I would take to cushion the shock of moving to a new house, and in no great quantity, either."

"Hmm..." Hartz pondered. "You're right; that is amazing. Are you ready to start today's run? I don't have too much time to spend here at Tarnover, you know."

Not looking up, the girl in white plastic said, "Yes, sir, he's status go."

She headed for the door. Taking a seat at Freeman's gestured invitation, Hartz said doubtfully, "Don't you have to give him a shot or something? He looks pretty thoroughly sedated."

Settling comfortably in his own chair adjacent to the data console, Freeman said, "No, it's not a question of drugs. It's done with induced current in the motor centers. One of our specialties, you know. All I have to do is move this switch and he'll recover consciousness - though not, of course, the power of ambulation. Just enough to let him answer in adequate detail. By the way, before I turn him on, I should fill in what's happening. Yesterday I broke off when I tapped into what seemed to be an exceptionally heavily loaded image, so I'm going to regress him to the appropriate date and key in the same again, and we'll see what develops."

"What kind of image?"

"A girl of about ten running like hell through the dark."

FOR PURPOSES OF IDENTIFICATION

At present I am being Arthur Edward Lazarus, profession minister, age forty-six, celibate: founder and proprietor of the Church of Infinite Insight, a converted (and what better way for a church to start than with a successful conversion?) drive-in movie theater near Toledo, Ohio, which stood derelict for years not so much because people gave up going to the movies - they still make them, there's always an audience for wide-screen porn of the type that gets pirate three-vee satellites sanded out of orbit in next to no time - as because it's on land disputed between the Billy-kings, a Protestant tribe, and the Grailers, Catholic. No one cares to have his property tribaled. However, normally they respect churches, and the territory of the nearest Moslem tribe, the Jihad Babies, lies ten miles to the west.

My code, of course, begins with 4GH, and has done so for the past six years.

Memo to selves: find out whether there's been any change in the status of a 4GH, and particularly whether something better has been introduced... a complication devoutly to be fished.

MAHER-SHALAL-HASH-BAZ

She ran, blinded by sorrow, under a sky that boasted a thousand extra stars moving more swiftly than a minute hand. The air of the June night rasped her throat with dust, every muscle ached in her legs, her belly, even her arms, but she kept right on as hard as she could pelt. It was so hot, the tears that leaked from her eyes dried as they were shed.

Sometimes she went on more or less level roadway, not repaired for years but still quite sound; sometimes she crossed rough ground, the sites perhaps of factories whose owners had transferred their operations up to orbit, or of homes which had been tribaled in some long-ago riot.

In the blackness ahead loomed lights and illuminated signs bordering a highway. Three of the signs advertised a church and offered free Delphi counseling to registered members of its congregation.

Wildly glancing around, blinking her eyes to clear perception, she saw a monstrous multi-colored dome, as though a lampshade made from a puffer-fish were to be blown up larger than a whale.

Pacing her at a discreet distance, tracking a tracer concealed in the paper frock which was all she wore except sandals, a man in an electric car fought his yawns and hoped that on this particular Sunday the pursuit would not be too long or too dull.

MINOR PROFIT IN THE BELLY OF THE GREAT FISH

As well as presiding at the church, Reverend Lazarus lived in it, his home being a trailer parked behind the cosmoramic altar - formerly the projection screen, twenty meters high. How else could a man with a minister's vocation afford so much privacy and so much space?

Surrounded by the nonstop hum of the compressor that kept his polychrome plastic dome inflated - three hundred meters by two hundred by ninety high - he sat alone at his desk in the nose compartment of the trailer, his tiny office, comping the take from the day's collection.

He was worried. His deal with the coley group who provided music at his services was on a percentage basis, but he had to guarantee a thousand, and attendance was falling off as the church's novelty declined. Today only about seven hundred people had come here; there had not even been a jam as they drove back on to the highway.

Moreover, for the first time in the nine months since the church was launched, today's collections had yielded more scrip than cash. Cash didn't circulate much any more - at least not on this continent - except in the paid-avoidance areas, where people drew a federal grant for going without some of the twenty-first century's more expensive gadgetry, but activating a line to the federal credit computers on a Sunday, their regular down-time day, meant a heavy surcharge, beyond the means of most churches including his. So churchgoers generally remembered to bring coins or bills or one of the little booklets of scrip vouchers issued to them when they joined.

The trouble with all this scrip, though - as he knew from sad experience - was that when he presented it to his bank tomorrow at least half of it would be returned marked VOID: the bigger the sum pledged, the more likely. Some would have been handed in by people already so deep in pointless debt the computers had banned expenditure on nonessentials; any new church inevitably attracted a lot of shock victims. But some would have been canceled overnight as the result of a family row: "You credded how much? My God, what did I do to deserve a twitch like you? Get that scrip deeveed this minute!"

Still, some people had been ignorantly generous. There was a stack of over fifty copper dollars, worth three hundred to any electronics firm, asteroid ores being poor in high-conduction metals. It was illegal to sell currency for scrap, but everybody did it, saying they'd found old saucepans in the attic of a secondhand house, or a disused cable while digging over the back yard.

Riding high on the public Delphi boards right now was a prediction that the next dollar issue would be plastic with a one- or two-year life. Well, plus ça small change plus c'est biodegradable...

He tipped the coins into his smelter without counting them because only the weight of the eventual ingot mattered, and turned to the other task he was obliged to complete before he quit work for the day: analysis of the Delphi forms the congregation had filled out. There were many fewer than there had been back in April; then, he'd expected fourteen or fifteen hundred, whereas this week's input was barely half that. Even seven hundred and some opinions, though, was a far wider spread than most individuals could hope to invoke, particularly while in the grip of acute depression or some other life-style crisis.

By definition, his congregation all had life-style crises.

The forms bore a series of bald statements each summarizing a personal problem, followed by blank spaces where any paid-up member of the church was invited to offer a solution. Today there were nine items, a sad contrast with those palmy days in the spring when he'd had to continue on the second side of the form. Now the word must be out on the mouth-to-mouth circuit: "Last time they only gave us nine things to delph, so next Sunday we're going to..."

What's the opposite of a snowball? A thawball?

Despite the failure of his old high hopes, though, he determined to go through the proper motions. He owed it to himself, to those who regularly attended his services, and above all to those whose heart cries of agony had been eavesdropped on today.

Item A on the list he disregarded. He had invented it as a juicy lure. There was nothing like a scandal of the kind that might eventually make the media to grab people's attention. The bait was the vague hope that one day soon they might notice a news report and be able to tell each other, "Say, that bit where the poker got shot for messing with his daughter - remember we comped that one at church?"

A link with yesterday, tenuous, but to be prized.

Wryly he re-read what he had dreamed up: I am a girl, fourteen. All the time my father is drunk and wants to plug into me but he creds so much for liquor I don't get none to pay my piece when I go out and they repossessed my...

The responses were drearily predictable. The girl should apply to the courts and have herself declared of age, she should tell her mother at once, she should denounce her father anonymously, she should get a doc-block put on his credit, bale out of home and go live in a teener dorm - and so forth.

"Lord!" he said to the air. "If I programmed a computer to feed my confessional booth, people would get better advice than that!"

Nothing about this project was working out in the least as he had hoped.

Moreover, the next item enshrined a genuine tragedy. But how could one help a woman still young, in her thirties, a trained electronics engineer, who went to orbit on a six-month contract and discovered too late that she was subject to osteochalcolysis - loss of calcium and other minerals from her skeleton in zero-gee conditions - and had to abort the job and now was in danger of breaking bones if she so much as tripped? Without chance of appeal her guild had awarded her contract-breaker status. She couldn't sue for reinstatement unless she worked to pay the lawyer, she couldn't work unless the guild allowed it, she... Round and round and round.

There's a lot of brave new misery in our brave new world!

Sighing, he shook the forms together and piled them under the scanner lens of his desk computer for consolidation and a verdict. For so few it wasn't worth renting time on the public net. To the purr of the air compressor was added the hush-hush of the paper-sorter's plastic fingers.

The computer was secondhand and nearly obsolete, but it still worked most of the time. So, provided it didn't have a b-d overnight, when the shy kids and the worried parents and the healthy but inexplicably unhappy middlers and the lost despairing old 'uns came back for their ration of spiritual reassurance, each would depart clutching a paper straw, a certificate redolent of old-fashioned absolute authority: its heading printed in imitation gold leaf declaring that it was an authentic and legal Delphi assessment based on contributions from not fewer than.....* hundred consultees (* Insert number; document invalid if total fails to exceed 99) and delivered under oath/deposition in presence of adult witnesses/notary's seal ** (** Delete as applicable) on.... (month) .. (day) 20..... (year).

A shoddy little makeshift, memorial to the collapse of his plans about converting the congregation into his own tame CIMA pool and giving himself the place to stand from which he could move the Earth. He knew now he had picked the wrong pitch, but there was still a faint ache when he thought back to his arrival in Ohio.

At least, though, what he had done might have saved a few people from drugs, or suicide, or murder. If it achieved nothing else, a Delphi certificate did convey the subconscious impression: I matter after all, because it says right here that hundreds of people have worried about my troubles!

And he had made a couple of coups on the public boards by taking the unintentional advice of the collective.

The day's work was over. But, moving into the trailer's living zone, he found he did not feel at all sleepy. He considered calling up somebody to play a game at fencing, then remembered that the last of the regular local opponents he'd contacted on arrival had just moved out, and at 2300 it was too late to try and trace another player by calling the Ohio State Fencing Committee.

So the fencing screen stayed rolled in its tube along with the light pencil and the scorer. He resigned himself to an hour of straight three-vee.

In an excess of impulsive generosity, one of the first people to join his church had given him an abominably expensive present, a monitor that could be programed with his tastes and would automatically select a channel with a suitable broadcast on it. He slumped into a chair and switched on. Promptly it lit the screen, and he found himself invited to advise the opposition party in Jamaica what to do about the widespread starvation on the island so as to depose the government at the next election. Currently the weight of opinion was clustering behind the suggestion that they buy a freight dirigible and airlift packages of synthetic food to the worst-hit areas. So far nobody seemed to have pointed out that the cost of a suitable airship would run into seven figures and Jamaica was as usual bankrupt.

Not tonight! I can't face any more stupidity!

But when he rejected that, the screen went dark. Could there really be nothing else on all the multifarious channels of the three-vee which held any interest for the Reverend Lazarus? He cut out the monitor and tried manual switching.

First he found a coley group, all blue-skin makeup and feathers in their hair, not playing instruments but moving among invisible columns of weak microwaves and provoking disturbances which a computer translated into sound... hopefully, music. They were stiff and awkward and their coordination was lousy. His own amateur group, composed of kids fresh out of high school, was better at keeping the key and homing on the tonic chord.

Changing, he found a scandal bulletin, voicing unprovable and slanderous - but by virtue of computerized editing not actionable - rumors designed to reassure people by convincing them the world really was as bad as they suspected. In El Paso, Texas, the name of the mayor had been mentioned following the arrest of a man running an illegal Delphi pool taking bets on the number of deaths, broken limbs and lost eyes during hockey and football games; it wasn't the pool per se that was illegal, but the fact that it had been returning less than the statutory fifty percent of money staked to the winning bettors. Well, doubtless the mayor's name had indeed been mentioned, several times. And over in Britain, the secretary of the Racial Purification Board had invited Princess Shirley and Prince Jim to become joint patrons of it, because it was known they held strong views on immigration to that unhappy island. Given the rate at which poverty was depopulating all but the areas closest to the Continent, one could scarcely foresee Australians or New Zealanders being impressed. And was it true that last week's long-range rocket attack on tourist hotels in the Seychelles had been financed by a rival hotel chain, not by irredentist members of the Seychellois Liberation Party? The hell with that.

But what he got next was circus - as everybody called it, despite the official title 'experiential reward and punishment complex.' He must have hit on a field-leader - perhaps the most famous of all, which operated out of Quemadura CA taking advantage of some unrepealed local statute or other - because it was using live animals. Half a dozen scared wide-eyed kids were lining up to walk a plank no more than five centimeters wide spanning a pool where restless alligators gaped and writhed. Their eager parents were cheering them on. A bold red sign in the corner of the screen said that each step each of them managed to take before slipping would be worth $1000. He switched once more, this time with a shudder.

The adjacent channel should have been spare. It wasn't. A Chinese pirate satellite had taken it over to try and reach midwestern American émigrés. There was a Chinese tribe near Cleveland, so he'd heard, or maybe it was Dayton. Not speaking the language, he moved on, and there were commercials. One was for a life-styling consultancy that he knew maintained private wards for those clients whose condition was worsened instead of improved by the expensive suggestions they'd been given; another was for a euphoric claimed not to be addictive but which was - the company marketing it was being sued by the FDA, only according to the mouth-to-mouth circuit they'd reached the judge, he was good and clutched, and they'd have cleared their profit and would be willing to withdraw the product voluntarily before the case actually came to trial, leaving another few hundred thousand addicts to be cared for by the underfunded, overworked Federal Health Service.

Then there was another pirate broadcast, Australian by the accents, and a girl in a costume of six strategic bubbles was saying, "Y'know, if all the people with life-style crises were laid end to end... Well, I mean, who'd be left to actually lay them?"

That prompted him to a faint grin, and since it was rare to pick up an Australian show he had half-decided to stick with this for a while when a loud buzzer shrilled at him.

Someone was in the confessional booth at the main gate. And presumably at this time of night therefore desperate.

Well, being disturbed at all hours was one of the penalties he'd recognized as inescapable when he created the church. He rose, sighing, and shut off his screen.

Memo to selves: going into three-vee for a while might be a good idea. Get back in touch with the media. Or has priesthood used up the limited amount of public exposure the possessor of a 4GH can permit himself in a given span of time? If not, how much left?

Must find out. Must.

Composing his features into a benign expression, he activated the three-vee link to the confessional. He was apprehensive. It was no news to the few who kept in circuit that the Billykings and the Grailers had counted seven dead in last week's match, and the latter had come out ahead. As one might expect; they were the more brutal. Where the Billykings were normally content to disable their captives and leave them to struggle home as best they might, the Grailers' habit was to rope and gag them and hide them in some convenient ruin to die of thirst. So the caller tonight might not be in need of counsel or even medication. It might be someone sussing out the church with a view to razing it. After all, in the eyes of both tribes it was a pagan shame.

But the screen showed him a girl probably too young to be inducted in either tribe: at a glance, no older than ten, her hair tousled, her eyes red-rimmed with weeping, her cheeks stained with dust down which tears had runneled. A child who had overreached her ability to imitate an adult, presumably, lost and frightened in the dark - Oh! No! Something more, and worse. For he could see she was holding a knife, and on both its blade and her green frock there were smears so red they could well be fresh blood.

"Yes, little sister?" he said in a neutral tone.

"Father, I got to make confession or I'll be damned!" she sobbed. "I shivved my mom - cut her all to bits! I guess I must have killed her! I'm sure I did!"

Time seemed to stop for a long moment. Then, with what calm he could summon, he uttered what had to be said for the benefit of the record... because, while the booth itself was sacrosanct, this veephone circuit like all such was tied into the city police-net, and thence to the tireless federal monitors at Canaveral. Or wherever. There were so many of them now, they couldn't all be in the same place.

Memo to selves: would be worth knowing where the rest are.

His voice as gritty as a gravel road, he said, "My child" - aware as ever of the irony in the phrase - "you're welcome to unburden your conscience by confiding in me. But I must explain that the secrecy of the confessional doesn't apply when you're talking to a microphone."

She gazed at his image with such intensity he fancied for a moment he could see himself from her point of view: a lean dark man with a broken nose, wearing a black jerkin and a white collar ornamented with little gilt crosses. Eventually she shook her head, as though her mind were too full of recent horror to leave room for any new shocks.

Gently he explained again, and this time she connected.

"You mean," she forced out, "you'll call the croakers?"

"Of course not. But they must be looking for you now in any case. And since you've admitted what you did over my mikes... Do you understand?"

Her face crumpled. She let fall her knife with a tinkling sound that the pickups caught, faint as fairy bells. A few seconds, and she was crying anew.

"Wait there," he said. "I'll be with you in a moment"

RECESS

A sharp wind tasting of winter blew over the hills surrounding Tarnover and broke red and gold leaves off the trees, but the sky was clear and the sun was bright. Waiting his turn in line at the best of the establishment's twenty restaurants, redolent of old-fashioned luxury up to and including portions of ready-heated food on open display, Hartz gazed admiringly at the view.

"Beautiful," he said at length. "Just beautiful."

"Hm?" Freeman had been pressing his skin on both temples toward the back of his head, as though attempting to squeeze out overpowering weariness. Now he glanced at the window and agreed, "Oh - yes, I guess it is. I don't get too much time to notice it these days."

"You seem tired," Hartz said sympathetically. "And I'm not surprised. You have a tough job on your hands."

"And a slow one. Nine hours per day, in segments of three hours each. It gets wearing."

"But it has to be done."

"Yes, it has to be done."

HOW TO GROW DELPHINIUMS

It works, approximately, like this.

First you corner a large - if possible, a very large - number of people who, while they've never formally studied the subject you're going to ask them about and hence are unlikely to recall the correct answer, are nonetheless plugged into the culture to which the question relates.

Then you ask them, as it might be, to estimate how many people died in the great influenza epidemic which followed World War I, or how many loaves were condemned by EEC food inspectors as unfit for human consumption during June 1970.

Curiously, when you consolidate their replies they tend to cluster around the actual figure as recorded in almanacs, yearbooks and statistical returns.

It's rather as though this paradox has proved true: that while nobody knows what's going on around here, everybody knows what's going on around here.

Well, if it works for the past, why can't it work for the future? Three hundred million people with access to the integrated North American data-net is a nice big number of potential consultees.

Unfortunately most of them are running scared from the awful specter of tomorrow. How best to corner people who just do not want to know?

Greed works for some, and for others hope. And most of the remainder will never have any impact on the world to speak of.

Good enough, as they say, for folk music...

A MOMENT FOR MILLSTONES

On the point of undogging his trailer's sealed door and disconnecting the alarms, he hesitated.

Sunday. A moderately good collection, if not a record-breaker. (He sniffed. Hot air. From the smelter.)

And she might be a precociously good actress...

He pictured a tribe raiding, looting, vanishing before the croakers swooped, leaving behind no one but a minor immune from police interrogation, hysterical with laughter at the success of her "practical joke."

Therefore, prior to shutting down the alarms, he activated all the church's electronics except the coley music system and the automated collection trolleys. When he rounded the base of the altar - ex screen - it was as though fire raged in the whale's-belly of the dome. Lights flashed all colors of the rainbow and a few to spare, while a three-vee remote over his head not only repeated his image monstrous on the face of the altar but also stored it, minutely detailed, in a recorder buried beneath a yard of concrete. If he were attacked, the recording would be evidence.

Moreover, he carried a gun... but he was never without it.

These precautions, slender though they were, constituted the maximum a priest was expected to take. More could easily worry the federal computers into assessing him as a potential paranoid. They'd been sensitive on such matters ever since, last summer, a rabbi in Seattle who had mined the approaches to his shul forgot to turn off the firing-circuit before a bar mitzvah.

Generally the Fedcomps approved of people with strong religious convictions. They were less likely than some to kick up a fuss. But there were limits, not to mention mavericks.

A few years ago his defenses would have been adequate. Now their flimsiness made him tremble as he walked down the wall-less aisle defined by the black rubber streaks car tires had left over decades. Sure, the fence at the base of the dome was electrified except where access had to be left for the confessional, and the booth itself was explosive-resistant and had its own air supply against a gas attack, but even so... !

Memo to selves: next time, a role where I can take more care of life and limb. Privacy is fine, and I needed it when I arrived here. But this place was never meant to be operated by a single individual. I can't scan every shifting shadow, make sure no nimble shivver is using it for cover!

Thinking of which as I stare around: my vision is unaided. At forty six??? Out of three hundred million there are bound to be some people that age who have never bought corrective lenses, most because they can't afford them. But suppose the Bureau of Health or some pharmo medical combine decided there were few enough middlers without glasses to organize an exhaustive study of them? Suppose the people at Tarnover decided there must be a genetic effect involved? Ow.

Memo to selves, in red italics: stay closer to chronological age!

At that point in his musing he entered the confessional - and found that through its shatterproof three-centimeter window he was not looking at a little girl in a dress spattered with blood.

Instead, the exterior section of the booth was occupied by a burly blond man with a streak of blue in his tightly curled hair, wearing a fashionable rose-and-carmine shirt and an apologetic smile.

"So sorry you've been disturbed, Father," he said. "Though it's a stroke of luck that little Gaila found her way here... My name's Shad Fluckner, by the way."

This poker looked too young to be the girl's father: no more than twenty-five, twenty-six. On the other hand, his congregation included women married for the third or fourth time and now to men as much as twenty years younger. Stepfather?

In that case, why the smile? Because he'd used this kid he didn't give a plastic penny for to rid himself of a rich but dragsome older wife? Fouler things had been admitted in this booth.

Foggily he said, "Are you kin to - ah - Gaila, then?"

"Not in law, but you could say that after what we've been through together I'm closer to her than her legal kinfolk. I work for Anti Trauma Inc., you see. Very sensibly, the moment Gaila's parents detected signs of deviant behavior in her, they signed her up for a full course of treatment. Last year we cured her sibling rivalry - classic penis-envy directed against her younger brother - and right now she's working into her Electra complex. With luck we'll progress her to Poppaea level this coming fall... Oh, incidentally: she babbled something about you calling in the croakers. You don't need to worry. She's on file with the police computers as a non-act case."

"She told me" - slowly and with effort - "she'd stabbed her mother. Killed her."

"Oh, far as she's concerned, sure she did! Just like she's unconsciously wanted to ever since her mother betrayed her by letting her be born. But it was all a setup, naturally. We dosed her with scotophobin and shut her in a dark room, to negate the womb-retreat impulse, gave her a phallic weapon to degrade residual sexual envy, and turned an anonymous companion loose in there with her. When she struck out, we turned up the lights to show her mother's body lying all bloody on the floor, and then we gave her the chance to run like hell. With me trailing her, of course. Wouldn't have wanted her to come to any harm."

His slightly bored tone indicated that for him this was just another routine chore. But when he had concluded his exposition, he brightened as though a sudden idea had occurred to him. He produced a recorder from his pocket.

"Say, Father! My publicity department would welcome any favorable comment about our methods you may care to make. Coming from a man of the cloth, it would carry extra weight. Suppose you said something to the effect that enabling kids to act out their most violent impulses in a controlled situation is preferable to letting them commit such crimes in real life, thereby endangering their immortal - "

"Yes, I do have a comment you can record! If there is anything more disgusting than war, it's what your company is doing. At least in warfare there is passion. What you do is calculated, and more likely by machines than men!"

Fluckner withdrew his head a fraction, as though afraid he might be punched through the intervening glass. He said defensively, "But what we've done is to enlist science in the service of morality. Surely you see - "

"What I see is the first person I ever felt justified in cursing. You have offended against our little ones, therefore a millstone shall be tied around your neck and you shall be cast into the depths of the sea. Depart from me into eternal darkness!"

Fluckner's face grew mottled-red on the instant, and harsh anger invaded his voice.

"You'll regret saying that, I promise you! You've insulted not just me but thousands of good citizens who rely on my company to save their children from hellfire. You'll pay for that!"

He spun on his heel and marched away.

LIGHT AND POWER CORRUPT

"Yes, of course Gaila's doing fine! What happier discovery could a kid make - what more welcome reinforcement can you offer her - than to find the mother she consciously loves, yet unconsciously hates, has been killed and in spite of that is still alive? We've been over that before!"

He had to wipe his forehead, hoping his mask of perspiration would be ascribed to the summer heat.

"And now may I use your phone? Alone, if you don't mind. It's best for the parents not to know too many details of our methods."

In a bright room with an underfloor pool reflecting sparkling random lights across an ecumenical array of a crucifix, a Buddha and a six handed Kali draped with roses, Shad Fluckner composed the code of Continental Power and Light's anonymous-denunciation department.

When he heard the proper tone, he followed it with the code for the Church of Infinite Insight, then a group equating to "fraudulent misapplication of charitable donations," then another for "assets sequestered pending legal judgment," which would automatically deevee the minister's credit rating, and lastly one for "notify all credit appraisal computers."

That should do the trick. He dusted his hands in satisfaction and left the room. There was effectively no chance of the call being traced to him. It had been two years since he worked for Power and Light, and their personnel was turning over at sixty-five percent annually, so any of half a million people might have fed in the false data.

By the time Reverend Lazarus fought his way through the maze of interlinked credit-appraisal computers and nailed the tapeworm that had just been hatched, he could well be ragged and starving.

Serve him right.

ON LINE BUT NOT REAL TIME

During a lull in the proceedings, while a nurse was spraying the subject's throat to restore his voice, Hartz glanced at his watch.

"Even if this is a slow job," he muttered, "you can't run at this rate very often, obviously - less than a day per day."

Freeman gave his habitual skull-like smile. "If so, I'd still be questioning him about his experience as a life-style counselor. But remember: once we knew where to look, we were able to put all data concerning his earlier personae into store. We know what he did; now we need to find out how he felt. In some cases the connection between a key memory and his unusually strong reaction is fairly plain, and you've been lucky today in that we've hit on such a link.

"His identifying with the girl who was running in panic? A parallel with his own hunted life?"

"More than that. Much more, I'm afraid. Consider the curse he pronounced on this man Fluckner, and the trigger that provoked it. That was consistent with the attitudes of Reverend Lazarus, certainly. What we have to find out is how deeply it reflected his real self. Nurse, if you've finished, I'd like to carry on."

MOVING DAY, OVERCAST AND HOT

Must MUST learn to control my temper even in face of an insult to humanity like -

What the hell?

He emerged with a gasp from coma-like sleep. Last night he had lain awake for hours with Fluckner's threat reverberating in memory, and ultimately resorted to a pill. It took a long time for an all important fact to penetrate his muzzy mind.

The hum of the air compressor had stopped.

Rolling over, he checked the self-powered illuminated clock at the head of his bed. It showed 7:45 A.M. But the windows of his trailer were solidly dark, although by now the sun must be high in the sky, the forecast had been for more fine weather, and when it was stretched taut the plastic membrane of his roof was quite translucent.

Therefore the power had been cut off and the dome had collapsed. All twenty-two and a half tons of it.

Naked, feeling terribly vulnerable, he swung his feet out of bed and fumbled for the switch of the nearest lamp to confirm his deduction. The darkness was oppressive; worse, the air had grown foul already - no doubt from the deposit of dirt, grease and fetid moisture which while the dome was distended had formed an unnoticeable film but now had been condensed into a layer like the muck lining a sewer pipe.

The light duly failed to shine.

A strike? Hardly likely; those key workers who still had the leverage to close down the nation's automated power system always waited for frost and snow before striking. An overload blackout? Scarcely more probable. There hadn't been a summer overload since 1990. People had seemingly been cured of regarding power as free like air.

Admittedly, a whole new generation had grown up since 1990... including himself.

A reactor meltdown?

After last year's triple-header of disasters, the Delphi boards currently showed much money riding on a lapse of two full years before the next such. Nonetheless he grabbed his one and only battery radio. By law an all-news monophonic station was still required to broadcast in each conurbation of a million or more people, so that the public could be warned of riots, tribal matches and disasters. The cells were low on power, but by placing the set close to his ear he determined that the duty newscaster was talking about record bets on today's football fatalities. If there had been a meltdown, radiation warnings would have been pouring out nonstop.

So what in the world... ? Oh. Fluckner?

He felt a shiver crawl down his spine, and realized that he was gazing hungrily at the little blurred glow from his clock, as though this darkness were symbolic of the womb (echoes of Gaila and those like her, condemned to grow up not as human beings but as mules, offspring of a bastard mating between Freudian psychoanalysis and behaviorism), and that mysterious glimmer presaged his emergence into a strange new world.

Which, as he admitted to himself with a pang of disappointment, it obviously did.

At least, even though the air stank, it wasn't overfull of CO2; he had no headache, just a hint of nausea. Somewhat reassured, he felt his way into the living zone, where against emergencies he kept a big battery lamp. Its cells were still powerful, being automatically recharged from the main supply. But when he clicked it on its yellowish gleam made everything around him menacing and unfamiliar. As he moved it, shadows scuttered on the polished metal walls, mimics of those that last night he had imagined offering cover to teeners bent on the work of Baron Samedi, Saint Nicholas or even Kali.

He splashed his face with what should have been ice water from the middle faucet over his washbasin. It didn't help. The power had been off so long, the tank was tepid. Unrefreshed, he opened the trailer door and looked out. Under the graceful curve formed by the plastic as it slumped over the altar a distant glimmer of light suggested he might be able to escape unaided.

But it would be preferable to get his power back.

In his office the smelter was cold and the copper ingot lay ready for removal. The desk computer, with a more demanding task, had been caught before finishing it. The fourth - no, the fifth - of today's Delphi assessments protruded from it like a pale stiff tongue, duly stamped with his automatic notary's seal. That, however, was not important right now. What he had to discover was whether Fluckner (who else could or would have discredited him overnight?) had contrived to isolate his phone as well as his power supply.

The answer was yes. A sweet recorded voice told him his phone credit was in abeyance pending judgment in the lawsuit that was apt to end with all his assets being garnisheed. If he wanted service to be renewed he must furnish proof that the verdict had gone in his favor.

Lawsuit? What lawsuit? Surely you can't take someone to court in this state for wishing a curse on you?

Then the answer dawned on him, and he almost laughed. Fluckner had resorted to one of the oldest tricks in the store and turned loose in the continental net a self-perpetuating tapeworm, probably headed by a denunciation group "borrowed" from a major corporation, which would shunt itself from one nexus to another every time his credit-code was punched into a keyboard. It could take days to kill a worm like that, and sometimes weeks.

Unless the victim possessed a means to override the original command. This one did. Any 4GH code-holder -

His embryo laughter died. What if, since he last exploited its potential, the validity of a 4GH had been downgraded or even deeveed?

There was only one way to find out. Dutiful, the machinery was waiting for him to furnish the asked-for evidence. He punched his full code into the phone, added the standard group for "input error due to malicious malpractice," and tailed it with an order to give the reference number of the lawsuit he had allegedly been cited in.

The normal dial tone sounded within seconds.

He had been holding his breath, unaware, and let it go with a gasp that sounded terribly loud in the unfamiliar silence. (How many separate soft hums had ended? Computer, water cooler, water heater, air conditioner, alarm monitor... et cetera. It was not customary to recall offhand how many powered devices one owned; therefore he didn't.)

Promptly he sent a retaliatory worm chasing Fluckner's. That should take care of the immediate problem in three to thirty minutes, depending on whether or not he beat the inevitable Monday morning circuit overload. He was fairly sure he wouldn't. According to recent report, there were so many worms and counterworms loose in the data-net now, the machines had been instructed to give them low priority unless they related to a medical emergency.

Well, he'd know as soon as the lights came on.

Now it was time for Reverend Lazarus to commit suicide. Fortified by a glass of lukewarm mock orange juice, sickly-sweet but not actively harmful to his metabolism - he was careful about the brands he patronized - he pondered the details of his next incarnation.

Thirty minutes and the power returned. Sixty, and the dome was inflated. Ninety, and he started on his rebirth.

It was always a bad experience, this computerized parturition. Today, because he had not intended to give up the Lazarus role yet and in consequence had not properly prepared his mind, it was the worst ever. His skin crawled, his heart hammered, sweat made his palms slippery, and his buttocks - bare, since he had not wasted time on getting dressed - itched all over the area in contact with his chair.

Even having found out that his code remained valid, he had to break off twice while priming the Fedcomps with his new lies. His fingers were trembling so badly, he was afraid of mis-hitting the phone buttons, and regular phones like this weren't equipped with a "display-last-five" facility.

But eventually he punched the final group to activate the phage that would eliminate all trace of Lazarus, the super-tapeworm compared to which Fluckner's was negligible, and he was able to stretch and scratch and do all the other things he had to forgo in order not to interrupt the invention of his new self.

No one below congressional level was entitled to call for a printout of the data stored behind a 4GH. It must have been devised for people with official permission to live other lives than their own. More than once he had been tempted to try to discover just what sort of person his code in theory made him - an FBI operative on undercover assignment, a counter-espionage agent, a White House special representative mopping up the mess his boss had left... But he had never actually been so foolish. He was like a rat, skulking in the walls of modern society. The moment he showed his nose, the exterminators would be sent for.

He dressed in the wrong clothes and collected what he felt he need not leave behind, a single bagful of oddments like transferable Delphi tickets and his new copper ingot. He also pocketed two inhalers of tranquilizer, which he knew he would require before the day was out.

Finally he set a bomb under his desk and wired it to the phone so that he could trigger it whenever he chose.

The destruction of the church might figure in the media's daily crime list - murders so many, robberies so many, rapes so many - but quite often they didn't get down as far as arson because there wasn't time. That, so long as nobody filed a claim for insurance money, would be that. With ready-made suspects at hand in the shape of the Grailers and the Billykings, the harried local police would be content to treat the case as open and shut.

He gave one final glance around as he prepared to quit the plastic dome for the last time. Traffic hummed on the highway, but there was nobody in sight who might have paid special attention to him. In some ways, he reflected, this was a much less complex century to live in than the twentieth must have been.

If only it were as simple as it looked.

THE NUMBER YOU HAVE REACHED

Back when it was still TV and not three-vee, a famous, crusty, cynical historian named Angus Porter, who had survived long enough to become a Grand Old Man and whose lifelong leftist views were in consequence now tolerated as forgivable eccentricity, had put the matter in a nutshell.

Or, as some would-be wit promptly said, in a nut case.

Invited to comment on the world nuclear disarmament treaty of 1989, he said, "This is the third stage of human social evolution. First we had the legs race. Then we had the arms race. Now we're going to have the brain race.

"And, if we're lucky, the final stage will be the human race."

THE PERSONIFICATION OF A TALENT

"So that's how he managed it!" Hartz said, marveling. He stared at the shaven body in the steel chair as though he had never seen this man before. "I'd never have believed it possible to punch a whole new identity into the net from a domestic phone - certainly not without the help of a computer larger than he owned."

"It's a talent," Freeman said, surveying the screens and lights on his console. "Compare it to the ability of a pianist, if you like. Back before tape, there were soloists who could carry twenty concerti in their heads, note-perfect, and could improvise for an hour on a four-note theme. That's disappeared, much as poets no longer recite by the thousand lines the way they apparently could in Homer's day. But it's not especially remarkable."

Hartz said after a moment, "Know something? I've seen a good few disturbing things, here at Tarnover, and been told about a great many more. But I don't think anything has..." He had to force himself to utter the next words, but with a valiant effort he made the confession. "So frightened me as hearing you say that."

"I'm not sure I follow you."

"Why, calling this amazing talent 'not especially remarkable'!"

"But it isn't." Freeman leaned back in his padded chair. "Not by our standards, at any rate."

"That's just it," Hartz muttered. "Your standards. Sometimes they don't seem altogether..."

"Human?"

Hartz nodded.

"Oh, but I assure you they are. We're a very gifted species. Most of what we're doing here is concerned with the recovery of talents we've neglected. We've been content to remain shockingly ignorant about some of our most precious mental resources. Until we've plugged those gaps in our knowledge, we can't plan our path toward the future." He glanced at his watch. "I think we've had enough for today. I'll call the nurse and have him taken away for feeding and cleansing."

"That worries me, too. Hearing you speak about him in - in such depersonalized terms. While I admire your thoroughness, your dedication, I have reservations about your methods."

Freeman rose, stretching slightly as he did so to relieve his cramped limbs.

"We use those methods which we've found to work, Mr. Hartz. Moreover, please recall we're dealing with a criminal, a deserter who, if he'd had the chance, would willingly have evolved into a traitor. There are other people engaged in projects similar to ours, and some of them are not just single-minded but downright brutal. I'm sure you wouldn't wish people of that stamp to outstrip us."

"Of course not," Hartz said uncomfortably, running his finger around his collar as though it had suddenly grown too tight.

Freeman smiled. The effect was that of a black turnip-ghost.

"Shall I have the pleasure of your company tomorrow?"

"No, I have to get back to Washington. But - uh..."

"Yes?"

"What did he do after leaving Toledo in such a hurry?"

"Oh, he took a vacation. Very sensible. In fact, the best thing he could possibly have done."

FOR PURPOSES OF RE-IDENTIFICATION

At present I am being Sandy (short, as I admit to people when I get stonkered and confidential, not for good old Alexander but for Lysander, of all things!) P. (worse yet, for Pericles!!!) Locke, aged thirty-two, swingle and in view of my beardless condition probably skew. However, I'm trying to give that up and might even consider getting married one of these years.

I shall remain Sandy Locke for a while at least, even after I finish my vacation at this resort hotel in the Georgia Sea Islands, medium fashionable, not so boringly up-to-the-second as some even if it does boast an underwater wing for womb-retreat therapy and the manager is a graduate psychologist. At least there's no obligatory experiential R&P.

It's my second vacation this year and I shall take at least one further in late fall. But I'm among people who aren't likely to mistake "taking another vacation" for "surpled and unemployable," as some would that I can think of. Many of my fellow guests are taking their third this year already and plan to make the total five. These latter, though, are considerably older, shut of the care and cost of kids. To be a triple-vacationer at thirty-two marks me as a comer... in all three senses. Right now the third kind matters; I need a job.

I've picked a good age, not so difficult as forty-six to put on when you're chronologically twenty-eight (the sudden recollection of spectacles! Ow!) and youthful enough to attract the middlers while being mature enough to impress the teeners. Memo to selves: could thirty-two be stretched until I'm actually, say, thirty-six? Keep eyes and ears ajar for data.

WINED AND DENIED

Past forty but not saying by how much, beautiful and apt to stay so for a long while yet, currently looking her best by reason of a bright brown tan, hair bleached by sun instead of shampoo, and an hour more sleep per night than she'd enjoyed for ages, Ina Grierson was also tough. Proof lay in the fact that she was heading the transient executive recruitment dept at the Kansas City HQ of Ground-to-Space Industries Inc., world's largest builders of orbital factories.

The question was, though: tough enough?

She thought of the old saying about being promoted to your level of incompetence - what was it called, the Peter-Pays-Paul Principle, or something like that? - and fumed and fretted. Her daughter kept declining to quit school, just signed up year after year for weirder and wilder courses of study (and all at the same university, for heaven's sake! Wouldn't be so bad if she'd consent to go someplace else). Ina felt tied, wanted to break away, move to the Gulf or Colorado or even the Bay Area, given that the slippage techniques were as efficient as the seismologists claimed and there wasn't going to be another million-victim quake, not ever... or at least for fifty years.

On her own terms, of course - no one else's.

Last year she'd rejected five offers. This year, so far only one. Next year?

Having a daughter out of step like Kate - hell! Why couldn't the stupid slittie act normal like everybody else, dig up her roots and plug them in some other socket, preferably on a different continent?

If Anti-Trauma Inc. had started up soon enough...!

Tactless people sometimes wondered publicly why Ina insisted on remaining in the same city as her daughter who was, after all, twenty two and had had her own apt since entering college and was not noticeably clinging or dependent. But Ina hated to be asked about that.

She never like being asked questions she couldn't answer.

One week into her two-week vacation Ina wanted to be cheered up but the man she'd kept company with since arrival had left today. That meant dining alone. Worse and worse. Eventually, with much effort she put on her favorite red-and-gold evening gear and went to the open-air dining terrace where soft music mingled with the hush of waves. She felt a little better after two drinks. To put the regular sparkle back in her world, what about champagne?

And a minute later she was shouting at the waiter (this being an expensive and exclusive establishment instead of the cast-from-a-mold type where you dealt always with machines that kept going wrong... not that human beings were immune from that): "What the hell do you mean, there isn't any?"

Her shrill voice caused heads to turn.

"That gentleman over there" - pointing - "just ordered the last bottle we have in stock."

"Call the manager!"

Who came, and explained with regret that was probably unfeigned (who likes to find his pride and joy deeveed by a mere bunch of circuitry?) why there was nothing he could do. The computer in charge of resources utilization at the HQ of the chain controlling this and a hundred other hotels had decided to allot what champagne was available to resorts where it could be sold at twice the price the traffic in the Sea Islands could bear. The decision was today's. Tomorrow the wine list would have been reprinted.

Meanwhile the waiter had faded in response to a signal from another table, and when he returned Ina was struggling not to scream with fury.

He laid a slip of paper in front of her. It bore a message in firm clear handwriting, unusual now that most literate kids were taught to type at seven. She read it at a glance:

The lucky shivver with the champagne has an idea. Share the bottle? - Sandy Locke

She raised her eyes and found grinning at her a man in a fashionable pirate shirt open to the waist, a gaudy headband, gilt wristers, one long lean finger poised at arm's length on the cork.

She felt her anger fade like mist at sunrise.

He was a strange one, this Sandy. He dismissed her complaint about how ridiculous it was never to have any more champagne at this hotel and steered the conversation into other channels. That made her ill tempered all over again, and she went to bed alone. But when the breakfast-trolley rolled automatically to her bedside at 0900, there was a bottle of champagne on it tied with a ribbon and accompanied by a posy. When she met Sandy by the pool at eleven, he asked whether she had enjoyed it.

"So it was you who fixed it! Do you work for this hotel chain?"

"This slumpy linkage? I'm insulted. Third-rank operations aren't my framework. Shall we swim?"

The next question died on her lips. She had been going to ask what pull he had, whether it was government or a hypercorp. But another explanation fitted, and if that were the right one, the implications were so enticing she dared not broach the matter without a buildup. She said, "Sure, let's." And peeled off her clothes.

The wine list was not reprinted after all, and the manager wore a very puzzled expression. That convinced Ina her guess might be correct. Next morning while they were breakfasting in bed she put it squarely to Sandy.

"Poker, I think you must be a CSC."

"Only if this bed isn't bugged."

"Is it?"

"No. I made sure. There are some things I simply don't care to let computers know."

"How right you are." She shivered. "Some of my colleagues at G2S, you know, live at Trianon, where they test new life-styles. And they boast about how their actions are monitored night and day, compare the advantages of various ultramodern bugs... I don't know how they can stand it."

"Stand?" he echoed sardonically. "Not a matter of standing, except social standing, I guess. More, it kind of props them up. A few years and they'll forget they have feet of their own."

All day Ina was near to shaking with excitement. To think that by pure chance she had bumped into a genuine three-vee tactile-true member of that prestigious elite, the tiny secretive tribe of computer-sabotage consultants... ! It was a perfectly legal discipline, provided its practitioners didn't tamper with data reserved to a government dept under the McBann-Krutch "greatest-good of-the-greatest-number" act, but its experts didn't advertise themselves any more than industrial spies, and it would have been politer to ask whether he was into DDR, "difficult data retrieval." Luckily he'd taken no offense.

Delicately she hinted at what was worrying her. How much longer was she still going to be able to move upward, not crosswise, when she changed jobs? At first his response was casual: "Oh, turn freelance, why not, the way I did? It's not so much different from the regular plug-in life-style. When you get adjusted to it."

Echoes underlying "freelance" resounded in her head: the lone knight riding out to champion his lady fair and Christian justice, the King's Messenger, the secret agent, the merchant venturer...

"I've thought about it, naturally. But I'd dearly like to know what G2S has added to my file before I decide."

"You could try asking me to find out."

"You mean" - hardly daring to hope - "you're for rent?"

"Right now?" He put the nip into nipple with sharp well-cared-for teeth. "No, my jiggle-oh rating is strictly O. This kind of thing I do for free."

"You know what I mean!"

He laughed. "Don't slidewise out of control. Of course I know. And it might be kind of fun to poke G2S."

"Are you serious?"

"I could be, when my vacation's over. Which it isn't."

Musingly, at two in the morning - her sleeping time was being eroded, but what the hell? - she said, "It isn't knowing that the machines know things about you which you wouldn't tell your straightener, let alone your spouse or chief. It's not knowing what the things are which they know."

"Sweedack. The number of people I've seen destabled by just that form of uncertainty, clear into paranoia!"

"Sweedack?"

"Ah, you don't follow hockey."

"Now and then, but I'm not what you'd call a 'fish for it."

"Nor me, but you have to stay in circuit. It's French. Came south with Canadian hockey players. Short for je suis d'accord. Thought everybody had picked up on it."

Before she could guard her tongue she had said, "Oh, yes! I've heard Kate say it to her friends."

"Who?"

"Uh... My daughter." And she trembled, imagining the inevitable sequence:

I didn't know you had a daughter. She in high school?

No - uh - at UMKC.

Followed by the brief silence full of subtraction which would all too closely betray her location on the age scale.

But this man, ultimately tactful, merely laughed. "Quit worrying. I know all about you. Think I'd have generated so much champagne on spec?"

That figured. In seconds she was laughing too. When she recovered, she said, "Would you really come to KC?"

"If you can afford me."

"G2S can afford anybody. What do you usually click on as?"

"A systems rationalizer."

She brightened. "Fantastic! We lost our head-of-dept in that area. He broke his contract and - Say, you didn't know that too, did you?" Suddenly suspicious.

He shook his head, stifling a yawn. "Never had any reason to probe G2S until I met you."

"No. No, of course not. What attracted you to your line of work, Sandy?"

"I guess my daddy was a phone freak and I inherited the gene."

"I want a proper answer."

"I don't know. Unless maybe it's a sneaking feeling that people are wrong when they say human beings can't keep track of the world any more, we have to leave it up to the machines. I don't want to be hung out to dry on a dead branch of the evolutionary tree."

"Nor do I. Right, I'll get you to KC, Sandy. I think your attitude is healthy. And we could do with a blast of fresh air."

SOLD TO THE MAN AT THE TOP

"I am not bleating you. This shivver is escape-velocity type. And we've been short one systems rash since Kurt bailed out and not wishing to cast nasturtiums at George she hasn't made my job any less of a bed of nails - let alone yours, hm?

"Sure, he asked for a trial period himself. Eight weeks, maybe twelve, see how he meshes with the rest of us.

"Right now he's on vacation. I told you: I met him in the Sea Islands. You can reach him there.

"Great. Here, take down his code. 4GH..."

UNSETTLEMENT PROGRAM

The palisade of thousand-meter towers around Mid-Continental Airport had two gaps in it, memorializing not - for once - buildings that had been riot-blown or tribaled but the crash sites of two veetol airliners, one taking off and one landing, which had slidewised simultaneously off their repulsors last week. Rumor had it the reason might be found in the launch of Ground-to-Space's latest orbital factory from their field westward in the cross-river state of Kansas; allegedly someone had omitted to notify the airlines of the volume and extent of the blast wave. But an inquiry was still in progress, and anyhow G2S was far too much of a Power in the Land hereabouts for any negligence charge to emerge from the hearings.

Nonetheless the outcome was a popular subject for bets on illegal short-term Delphi pools. Legal pools, naturally, were forbidden to pre-guess a court's verdict.

The façades of the remaining towers, whether homes or offices, were as blank as ancient gravestones and as gloomy. They had mostly been erected during the shitabrick phase architecture had suffered through in the early nineties. There was a more flattering term for the style - antideco - but it was too lame to have caught on. Such structures were as dehumanized as the coffins employed to bury the victims of the Great Bay Quake, and stemmed from the same cause. The damage sustained when San Francisco, plus most of Berkeley and Oakland, collapsed overnight had come close to bankrupting the country, so that everything but everything had to be designed with the fewest possible frills.

In a desperate attempt to make a virtue of necessity, all such buildings had been made "ecofast" - in other words, they were heavily insulated, they incorporated elaborate garbage-reclamation systems, every apartment was supplied with a flat area outside that caught at least some sunlight, allegedly large enough to be hydroponically planted with sufficient vegetables and fruit to meet the requirements of an average family. The consequence had been to fix in the public mind the impression that any genuinely efficient building must be stark, ugly, undesirable and dull.

It seemed that necessity was too hateful for anybody to enjoy being virtuous.

Thanks to some smart route adjustment by his airline's computers, his plane was a few minutes early. Ina had agreed to meet him on the main concourse, but when he emerged, tingling slightly, from the static discharge chamber by the plane gate, she wasn't in sight.

It would be out of character for him to waste spare minutes. Rubbing his arms, reflecting that even if electric lift for aircraft was efficient, economical and non-polluting it was damnably hard on the passengers when they had to shed their accumulated volts, he caught sight of a sign pointing the way to the public Delphi boards.

Most of his belongings, bought to fit his new identity, were on their way direct to G2S's recruit-settlement block. But he did have a travel bag weighing nine kaygees. From under the nose of a sour woman who favored him with a string of curses he nabbed an autoporter and - after consulting the illuminated fee table on its flank - credded the minimum: $35 for an hour's service. Rates were higher here than at Toledo, but that was to be expected; the cost of living at Trianon, a hundred kilometers away, was the second highest in the world.

From now until his credit expired the machine would carry his bag in its soft plastic jaws and follow him as faithfully as a well-trained hound, which indeed it resembled, down to the whimper it was programed to utter at the 55-minute mark, and the howl at 58.

At 60 it would drop the bag and slink away.

With it at his heels he stood surveying the high-slung display, tracking the shifting figures with the ease of much practice. He looked first at his favorite sector, social legislation, and was pleased to see he had two won bets due to be collected shortly. Despite all the pressure that had been applied, the president would not after all be able to make jail sentences mandatory for slandering his personal aides - it would cost him his majority if he tried. And Russian math-teaching methods were definitely going to be introduced here, given that money was still piling in when the odds had shortened to five-to-four. Well, if the U.S. team were ever to make a decent showing in the Mathematical Olympiads, there was no alternative.

Odds, though, were poor on that sector of the board, except ten-to-one against the adoption of the proposed new amendment to the Constitution which would redefine electoral zones in terms of professions and age groups rather than geographical location. It might make sense, but people were scarcely ready for it yet. Next generation, maybe.

He turned his attention to social analysis, which was offering many double and a few treble figures. He put a thousand on the chance that the mugging-per-adult rate in New York City would break ten percent this year; it had been hovering around eight for an improbably long time and people were losing their enthusiasm, but there was a new police chief in the Bronx with a get-tough reputation and that ought to sew the matter up.

And the technical breakthrough odds were also nice and fat. For old time's sake he put another thousand on the introduction of an Earth Moon gravislide before 2025. That was a perennial disappointment. The idea was to haul cargo off the Moon on a cable stretching past the neutral point and spill it direct into Earth's gravity-well so it could coast to a landing free of charge. It had failed twice already. But someone in New Zealand was on the track of mile-long single crystal filaments. Given those...

A couple of hungry-faced old men, one black and the other white, who clearly were not here to travel but merely to pass the time, noticed him placing the wager. They studied his expensive clothes, assessed his air of financial well-being, and after some argument agreed to risk fifty apiece.

"It beats horse racing," he heard one of them say.

"I used to like the horses!" the other objected, and they moved on, their voices querulous as though both craved the tension discharge of a quarrel but dared not start one for fear of losing an only friend.

Hmm! I wonder whether the Delphi systems in Russia, or East Germany, are patterned on stock markets and totalizators the way ours obviously are. One knows that in China they -

But at that moment he caught sight of odds being quoted which he simply didn't believe. One gets three in favor of genetic optimization becoming a commercial service by 2020, instead of a privilege reserved to government officials, hypercorp execs and billionaires? Last time he saw a board it had been up around 200, regardless of the fact that the public was clearly hungry for it. Such a violent crash in the odds must surely be due to inside information. One of the thousand-and-some staff and "students" at Tarnover must have yielded to the temptation to go sell his headful of data, and company scientists somewhere must be busily trying to turn a vague hope into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Unless...

Oh, no! It can't be that they know somebody did get away? After all this time, after these six mortal, hateful years, has the precious secret of my escape leaked out?

There couldn't possibly be a connection! Even so - !

The world swam around him for the space of half a dozen thumping heartbeats. Some one jostled him roughly; he was barely able to perceive that it was an economist, wearing a sewn-on badge in bright green and white saying UNDERPOWER! - one of the people who on principle declined to use up their full power allotment and did their utmost to prevent others from using theirs. There were alleged to be a great many economists at KC.

Then a bright voice was saying, "Sandy, good to see you - Is something wrong?"

Vast effort pulled him back together, smiling, calm, in a condition to note how changed Ina was from the Image she'd presented at the resort. She wore a light but severe coverall in plain black and white, and her long hair was in a snood. She was very much the head-of-dept doing a special favor to this recruit who was slotting into a higher-than average level of the hierarchy.

Therefore he didn't kiss her, didn't even take her hand, simply said, "Hello. No, nothing's wrong. Except I just saw what the odds are on my favorite long shot. One of these mornings I'll wake to find my credit well and truly docked."

As he spoke, he started toward the exit. Ina, and the autoporter, kept pace.

"You have baggage?" she inquired.

"Just this. I sent the rest direct. I hear you have a great settlement block."

"Oh, yes. It has a fine record. Been in use for ten years and so far not one environmental psychosis. Speaking of accommodation, I should have asked if you plan to bring a house with you. Currently we have room for one on site; we don't start building our next factory until September."

"No, I've had my house four years so I decided to trade it in. Matter of fact, I might get my next built here. I'm told there are good architects around KC."

"Well, I wouldn't know. I prefer to plug into an apt, but someone at the party might advise you."

"I'll ask around. What time is it set for?"

"Eight o'clock. The welcome suite is right on the entrance floor. All your signifying colleagues will be there."

PARADOX, NEXT STOP AFTER THE BOONDOCKS

"It's not because my mind is made up that I don't want you to confuse me with any more facts.

"It's because my mind isn't made up. I already have more facts than I can cope with.

"So SHUT UP, do you hear me? SHUT UP!"

YOU'RE BEING FRAMED

Although this was strictly transient accommodation, it differed subtly from a hotel suite. He noted with approval the touches that made it more like a smart private apartment. Retractable textured walls could subdivide the main room in half a dozen ways, according to taste. The decor on his arrival was in neutral shades: beige, pale blue and white. He made use at once of the switch by the door to change that to rich dark green, russet and old gold. It was done with lights behind translucent paneling. The conveniences, such as the three-vee, the polarity-reversal clothing cleaner and the electrotoner attached to the bathtub, were not the basic hotel-chain type but the more expensive home-use version. Perhaps most important of all, you could not only draw back the curtains but even open the windows. That was a facility not found in hotels nowadays.

Out of curiosity he did open one, and found he was looking over treetops toward the source of a roaring noise which a moment ago had been inaudible thanks to superefficient soundproofing.

What in the world - ?

Followed a moment later by the wry contradiction: What out of this world - ?

A brilliant light, dazzling as a magnesium flare, rose into sight above the trees and to the roar was added the impact of blast. He just managed to discern the needle-form of a one-man orbital ship before the glare compelled him to shut his eyes and turn away, groping for the window-closure again.

No doubt that would be one of G2S's troubleshooters on his way to orbit. The company was proud of its prompt and efficient after-sales service, and since even now three out of four orbital factories were one-off projects - new industries kept deciding to jump up there every other week - that was an essential element in preserving its field leader rating.

Which was not, in fact, as stable as the G2S board wished the public to believe. He'd investigated. Among the tasks he expected to be assigned, even though Ina hadn't mentioned it, was penetration of a rival corporation's research into so-called olivers, electronic alter egos designed to save the owner the strain of worrying about all his person-to-person contacts. A sort of twenty-first-century counterpart to the ancient Roman nomenclator, who discreetly whispered data into the ear of the emperor and endowed him with the reputation of a phenomenal memory. G2S was badly in need of diversification, but before picking up the option it had on a small independent company's work in this area, it wanted to make certain nobody else had reached the stage of commercial launching.

It would be a good-sized feather in his cap if he produced the answer within a few days of starting work.

Continuing his tour of inspection he discovered, neatly tucked away under the bed, a tension reliever with a reversible proboscis which a woman could let stand out and a man could simply push inward... or not, according to taste. Above it was a small but fine-detail screen, the images fed to which were changed - said a little label - on an eight-day rota; there were also headphones and a mask offering twenty odors.

Replacing the instrument in its sanitizing case, he decided he'd have to experiment with it at least once or twice; it was appropriate to the plug-in life-style, after all. But at most two or three times. Corporations like G2S were wary of people who relied excessively on machines in place of person-to-person contact. They would be watching.

He sighed. To think that some people were (had to be?) content with mechanical gratification... But maybe it was best in certain special cases: for instance, for those who had to establish deep emotional attachments or none at all, who suffered agonies when a change of employment or a posting to another city shattered their connections, who were safest when keeping their chance colleagues at a distance.

Not for the first time he reflected on the good fortune - heavily disguised - which had stunted his own capacity for intense emotional involvement to the point where he was content with mere liking. It was so much superior to the transitory possessiveness he had been exposed to in childhood, the strict impersonality maintained during his teener years at Tarnover.

Best not to think about Tarnover. Showering down, he relished his new situation. Much would depend on the personalities of the people he was about to meet at the welcome party, but they were bound to be good stable plug-in types, and certainly the nature of the job was ideal for his talents. Most commercial systems were sub-logical and significantly redundant, so he'd have no trouble tidying up a few tangles, saving G2S a couple of million a year, by way of proving he really was a systems rash. They'd regard him within weeks as an invaluable recruit.

Meantime, taking advantage of the corporation's status, he could gain access to data-nets that were ordinarily secure. That was the whole point of coming to KC. He wanted - more, he needed - data that as a priest he'd never have dared to probe for. Six years was about as far ahead as he'd been able to plan when he escaped from Tarnover, so...

He was stepping out of the shower compartment, dried by blasts of warm air, when he heard the sound of his circulation enormous in his ears: thud, thud, thud-thud-thud-thud, faster with each passing second. Giddy, furious, he clutched at the rim of the hand-basin to steady himself and caught a glimpse of Sandy Locke's face in the mirror above it - haggard, aged by decades on the instant - before he realized he wasn't going to make it to the tranquilizers he'd left in the main room. He was going to have to stay right here and fight back with yoga-style deep breathing.

His mouth was dry, his belly was drum-taut, his teeth wanted to chatter but couldn't because his jaw muscles were so tense, his vision wavered and there was a line of cramp as brutal as a knife-cut all the way up his right calf. And he was cold.

But luckily it wasn't a bad attack. In less than ten minutes he was able to reach his inhalers, and he was only three minutes late joining the party.

BETWEEN 500 AND 2000 TIMES A DAY

Somewhere out there, a house or an apartment or a hotel or motel room: beautiful, comfortable, a living hell.

Stonkered or clutched or quite simply going insane, someone reaches for the phone and punches the most famous number on the continent: the ten nines that key you into Hearing Aid.

And talks to a blank though lighted screen. It's a service. Imposing no penances, it's kinder than the confessional. Demanding no fees, it's affordable where psychotherapy is not. Offering no advice, it's better than arguing with that son (or daughter) of a bitch who thinks he/she knows all the answers and goes on and on and on until you want to SCREAM.

In a way it's like using the I Ching. It's a means of concentrating attention on reality. Above all, it provides an outlet for all the frustration you've struggled to digest for fear that, learning of it, your friends would brand you failure.

It must help some of the unhappy ones. The suicide rate is holding steady.

FLESHBACK SEQUENCE

Today, said the impersonal instruments, it would be advisable to waken the subject fully; too long spent in the trance-like state of recall that he had endured for the past forty-two days might endanger his conscious personality. The recommendation was not unwelcome to Paul Freeman. He was growing more and more intrigued by this man whose past had been mapped along so improbable a course.

On the other hand there was a diktat in force, straight from the Federal Bureau of Data Processing, which instructed him to produce a full report in the shortest possible time. Hence Hartz's flying visit. And that had lasted a whole working day, moreover, when one might have expected the typical "hello-how-interesting-goodbye" pattern. Someone in Washington must have a hunch... or at any rate have gone out so far on a limb as to need results regardless of what they were.

He compromised. For a single day he would talk person-to-person instead of merely replaying facts from store in a living memory.

He quite looked forward to the change.

"You know where you are?"

The totally shaven man licked his lips. His gaze flickered around the stark white walls.

"No, but I figure it must be Tarnover. I always pictured rooms like this in that faceless secret block on the east side of the campus."

"How do you feel about Tarnover?"

"It makes me want to be scared stiff. But I guess you dose me with something so I can't."

"But that wasn't how you felt when you first came here."

"Hell, no. In the beginning it seemed wonderful. Should it not to a kid with my background?"

That was documented: father disappeared when he was five, mother stood the strain for a year and vanished into an alcoholic haze. But the boy was resilient. They decided he would make an ideal rent-a-child: obviously bright, rather quiet, tolerably well mannered and cleanly in his habits. So, from six to twelve, he lived in a succession of modern, smart, sometimes luxurious company homes occupied by childless married couples posted in on temporary assignment from other cities. He was generally well liked by these "parents" and one couple seriously considered adopting him but decided against landing themselves permanently with a boy of another color. Anyhow, they consoled themselves, he was getting a terrific introduction to the plug-in life-style.

He appeared to accept the decision with good grace.

But several times after that, when left alone in the house for an evening (which was in fact often, for he was a good boy and to be trusted), he went to the phone - with a sense of dreadful guilt - and punched the ten nines as he dimly recalled seeing his mother do, his real mother, during the last terrible few months before something went wrong inside her head. To the blank screen he would pour out a nonstop volley of filth and curses. And wait, shaking, for the calm anonymous voice to say, "Only I heard that. I hope it helped."

Paradoxically: yes, it did.

"What about school, Haflinger?"

"Was it really my name... ? Don't bother to answer; that was rhetorical. I just didn't like it. Overtones of 'half,' as though I was condemned never to become a finished person. And I didn't care for Nick, either."

"Do you know why not?"

"Sure I do. In spite of anything it may say to the contrary on my record, I have excellent juvenile recall. Infantile too, in fact. I found out early about Auld Nick, the Scottish term for the devil. Also 'to nick,' meaning to arrest or sometimes to steal. And above all Saint Nick. I never did manage to find out how the same figment could give rise to both Santa Claus and Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of thieves."

"Maybe it was a matter of giving with one hand and taking away with the other. Did you know that in Holland Sinter Klaas brought gifts to children in the company of a black man who whipped the ones who hadn't behaved well enough to deserve a present?"

"That's news to me, and very interesting, Mr. - Mr. Freeman, isn't it?"

"You were going to tell me how you remember school."

"Should have known better than to try and strike up a brotherly chat. Yes, school. Much the same - the teachers turned over even faster than my temporary parents, and every new arrival seemed to have a new theory of education, so we never did learn very much. But of course in most respects it was a hell of a lot worse than - uh - home."

The high walls. The guarded gates. The classrooms where the walls were lined with broken teaching machines, waiting for the engineers who never seemed to come, inevitably vandalized after a couple of days and rendered unrepairable. The stark corridors where so often sand greeted the soles with a gritty kiss, marking a spot where blood had been shed. The blood on the floor was his only once; he was clever, to the point of being considered odd because he kept trying to learn when everybody else knew the right thing to do was sit tight and wait to be eighteen. He contrived to avoid all the shivs, clubs and guns bar one, and his wound was shallow and left no scar.

The one thing he was not clever enough to do was escape. Authoritatively the State Board of Education had laid it down that there must be one major element of stability in the life of a rent-a child; therefore he must continue at this same school regardless of where he currently happened to reside, and none of his temporary parents remained in the vicinity long enough to fight that ruling to the bitter end.

When he was twelve a teacher arrived named Adele Brixham, who kept on trying same as he did. She noticed him. Before she was ambushed and gang-raped and overloaded, she must have filed some sort of report. At any rate, a week or so later the classroom and the approach corridor were invaded by a government platoon, men and women in uniform carrying guns, webbers and fetters, and for a change the roll was called complete bar one girl who was in the hospital.

And there were tests which for a change could not be ignored, because someone with hard eyes and a holster stood by you to make sure. Nickie Haflinger sank all his frustrated lust for achievement into the six hours they lasted: three before, three after a supervised lunch eaten in the classroom. Even to visit the can you were escorted. It was a new thing for those of the kids who hadn't been arrested yet.

After IQ and EQ - empathic quotient - and perceptual and social tests, like the regular kind only more so, came the kickers: laterality tests, double-take tests, open-dilemma tests, value-judgment tests, wisdom tests... and those were fun! For the final thirty minutes of the session he was purely drunk on the notion that when something happened which had never happened before one human being could make a right decision about the outcome, and that person might be Nickie Haflinger!

The government people had brought a portable computer with them. Little by little he grew aware that each time it printed out, more and more of the gray-garbed strangers looked at him rather than the other children. The rest realized what was going on, too, and that expression came to their faces which he had long ago learned to recognize: Today, after class, he's the one we'll carve the ass off!

He was shaking as much from terror as excitement when the six hours ended, but he hadn't been able to stop himself from applying all he knew and all he could guess to the tests.

But there was no attack, no sanding along the streets between here and his current home. The woman in overall charge switched off the computer and jerked her head his way, and three men with guns drawn closed on him and one said in a kindly tone, "Stay right there, sonny, and don't worry."

His classmates drifted away, giving puzzled backward glances and kicking the doorposts with fury as they left. Later someone else was sanded - the term came from "S-and-D," search and destroy - and lost an eye. But by then he had arrived home in a government limo.

It was carefully explained, to him and his "parents," that he was being requisitioned in the service of his country under special regulation number such-and-such issued by the Secretary of Defense as authorized by clause number whatever of some or other Act of Congress... He didn't take in the details. He was giddy. He'd been promised that for the first time in his life he could stay where he was going as long as he liked.

Next morning he woke at Tarnover, and thought he had been transported halfway to heaven.

"Now I realize I was in hell. Why are you alone? I had the vague impression that when you woke up I'd find there were two of you, even though you were doing all the talking. Is there usually someone else in here?"

Freeman shook his head, his eyes watchful.

"But there has been. I'm sure of it. He said something about the way you regard me. Said he felt scared."

"Yes, that's so. You had a visitor, who sat in on one day's interrogation, and he did say that. But he doesn't work at Tarnover."

"The place where you take the improbable for granted."

"So to speak."

"I see. I'm reminded of one of my favorite funny stories when I was a kid. I haven't told it in years. With luck it'll have gone far enough out of style not to bore you. Seems that an oil company, back in - oh - the thirties of last century would fit, wanted to impress a sheikh. So they laid on a plane when they were few and far between in that part of the world."

"And when he was at ten thousand feet, perfectly calm and collected, they said, 'Aren't you impressed?' And the sheikh said, 'You mean it's not supposed to do this?' Yes, I know the story. I learned it from your dossier."

There was a short pause full of veiled tension. Eventually Freeman said, "What convinced you that you were in hell?"

After the legs race, the arms race; after the arms race...

Angus Porter's epigram was not just a slick crack to be over-quoted at parties. But few people realized how literally true the bon mot had become.

At Tarnover, at Crediton Hill, at some hole in the Rockies he had never managed to identify beyond the code name "Electric Skillet," and at other places scattered from Oregon to Louisiana, there were secret centers with a special task. They were dedicated to exploiting genius. Their ancestry could be traced back to the primitive "think tanks" of the mid-twentieth century, but only in the sense that a solid-state computer was descended from Hollerith's punched-card analyzer.

Every superpower, and a great many second- and third-rank nations, had similar centers. The brain race had been running for decades, and some countries had entered it with a head start. (The pun was popular, and forgivable.)

In Russia, for example, great publicity had long attended the Mathematical Olympiads, and it was a signal honor to be allowed to study at Akadiemgorodok. In China, too, the sheer pressure of population had forced an advance from ad hoc improvisation along predetermined Marxist-Maoist guidelines to a deliberate search for optimal administrative techniques, employing a form of cross-impact matrix analysis for which the Chinese language was peculiarly well adapted. Well before the turn of the century a pattern had been systematized that proved immensely successful. To every commune and small village was sent a deck of cards bearing ideograms relevant to impending changes, whether social or technical. By shuffling and dealing the symbols into fresh combinations, fresh ideas could automatically be generated, and the people at a series of public meetings discussed the implications at length and appointed one of their number to summarize their views and report back to Peking. It was cheap and amazingly efficient.

But it didn't work in any Western language except Esperanto.

The U.S.A. entered the race on the grand scale very late. Not until the nation was reeling under the impact of the Great Bay Quake was the harsh lesson learned that the economy could not absorb disasters of even this magnitude - let alone a nuclear strike which would exterminate millions plural. Even then it took years for the switch from brawn to brain to become definitive in North America.

In some ways the change remained incomplete. At Electric Skillet the primary concern was still with weaponry... but at least the stress was on defense in its literal meaning, not on counterstrike or preemptive strategies. (The name, of course, had been chosen on the frying-pan-and-fire principle.)

Newer concepts, though, were embodied at Crediton Hill. There, top rank analysts constantly monitored the national Delphi pools to maintain a high social-mollification index. Three times since 1990 agitators had nearly brought about a bloody revolution, but each had been aborted. What the public currently yearned for could be deduced by watching the betting, and steps could be taken to ensure that what was feasible was done, what was not was carefully deeveed. It was a task that taxed the skills of top CIMA experts to ensure that when the government artificially cut Delphi odds to distract attention from something undesirable no other element in the mix was dragged down with it.

And newest of all was the ultra-secret work of Tarnover and those other centers whose existence, but not whose names, one was aware of. The goal?

To pin down before anybody else did the genetic elements of wisdom.

"You make wisdom seem like a dirty word, Haflinger."

"Maybe I'm ahead of my time again. What you people are doing is bound to debase the term, and soon at that."

"I won't waste time by saying I disagree. If I didn't I wouldn't be here. But perhaps you'd define what you understand by the term."

"My definition is the same as yours. The only difference is that I mean what I say, and you manipulate it. What a wise man can do, that can't done by someone who's merely clever, is make a right judgment in an unprecedented situation. A wise man would never be overloaded by the plug-in life-style. He'd never need to go get mended in a mental hospital. He'd adjust to shifts of fashion, the coming-and-going of fad-type phrases, the ultrasonic-blender confusion of twenty-first century society, as a dolphin rides the bow wave of a ship, out ahead but always making in the right direction. And having a hell of a good time with it."

"You make it sound eminently desirable. So why are you opposed to our work?"

"Because what's being done here - and elsewhere - isn't motivated by love of wisdom, or the wish to make it available to everyone. It's motivated by terror, suspicion, and greed. You and everybody above and below you from the janitor to - hell, probably to the president himself and beyond that to the people who pull the president's strings! - the lot of you are afraid that by taking thought someone else may already have added a cubit to his wisdom while you're still fiddling around on the foolishness level. You're so scared that they may have hit on the answer in Brazil or the Philippines or Ghana, you daren't even go and ask. It makes me sick. If there is a person on the planet who has the answer, if there's even the shadow of a chance he does, then the only sane thing to do is go sit on his doorstep until he has time to talk to you."

"You believe there is an answer - one, and only one?"

"Hell, no. More likely there are thousands. But I do know this: as long as you're determined to be the first to reach the - or a - solution, just so long will you fail to find it. In the meantime, other people with other problems will be humbly pleased because things aren't so bad this year as they were last."

In China... One always began with China. It was the most populous country on the planet, hence the logical starting point.

Once there had been Mao. Then followed The Consortium, which was more like an interregnum, the Cultural Revolution redoubled in no trumps (except that the stock translation "Cultural Revolution" was ludicrously wrong and the people involved understood by the term something more like "agonizing reappraisal"), and then there was Feng Soo Yat... very suddenly, and with so little warning that on foreign-affairs Delphi boards high odds in favor of China crumbling into anarchy and violence swung to three hundred against in three days. He was the epitome of the Oriental wise man: young, reputedly still in his thirties, yet capable of running his government with such delicate touches and so keen an insight that he never needed to explain or justify his decisions. They simply worked.

He might have been trained to display such powers of judgment; he might have been specially bred to possess them. One thing was sure: he hadn't lived long enough to grow into them.

Not if he started from where most people had to.

Also in Brazil there had been no religious warfare since Lourenço Pereira seized power - whoever he might be - and that was a welcome contrast to the turn-of-the-century period when Catholics and Macumbans had fought pitched battles in the streets of São Paulo. And in the Philippines the reforms introduced by their first-ever woman president, Sara Castaldo, had slashed their dreadful annual murder rate by half, and in Ghana when Premier Akim Gomba said to clean house they started cleaning house and laughed and cheered, and in Korea since the coup by Inn Lim Pak there had been a remarkable fall-off in the crap-and-screw charter flights which formerly had come in from Sydney, Melbourne and Honolulu at the rate of three or four a day, and... and generally speaking in the most unlikely places wisdom appeared to be on the increase.

"So you're impressed by what's been happening in other countries. Why don't you want your own homeland to benefit from - shall we call it a shot in the arm of wisdom?"

"My homeland? I was born here, sure, but... Never mind; that's a stale argument these days, I guess. The point is that what's being peddled here as wisdom isn't."

"I sense a long debate ahead. Perhaps we should start again tomorrow."

"Which mode are you going to put me in?"

"The same as today. We're drawing closer to the point at which you ultimately overloaded. I want to compare your conscious and unconscious recollections of the events leading up to the climax."

"Don't try and bleat me. You mean you're bored with talking to an automaton. I'm more interesting when I'm fully awake."

"On the contrary. Your past is far more intriguing than either your present or your future. Both of those are completely programed. Good night. There's no point in my saying 'sleep well' - that's programed too."

KNOWN FACTORS CONTRIBUTING TO HAFLINGER'S DESERTION

The shy, quiet, reserved boy who came to Tarnover had spent so much of his childhood being traded from one set of "parents" to the next that he had developed a chameleon-like adaptability. He had liked almost all his "fathers" and "mothers" - small wonder, given the computerized care with which child was matched to adult - and he had been, briefly, exposed to an enormous range of interests. If his current "dad" enjoyed sports, he spent hours with a baseball or a football; if his "mom" was musical he sang to her accompaniment, or picked his way up and down a keyboard... and so on.

But he had never let himself become deeply engaged in anything. It would have been dangerous, as dangerous as coming to love somebody. At his next home it might not have been possible to continue.

At first, therefore, he was unsure of himself: diffident with his fellow students, among whom he was one of the youngest - most were in their mid-teens - and excessively formal when talking to members of the staff. He had a vague mental picture of government establishments, which was based on three-vee and movie portrayals of cadet schools and army bases. But there was nothing in the least military about Tarnover. There were rules, naturally, and among the students some customary traditions had already grown up although the place had been founded a mere decade earlier, but they were casually observed, and the atmosphere was - not friendly, but comradely. There was a sense of people banded together for a common purpose, undertaking a shared quest; in sum, there was a feeling of solidarity.

It was so novel to Nickie that he took months to realize how much he liked it.

Above all, he relished meeting people, not only adults but kids too, who obviously enjoyed knowing things. Accustomed to keeping his mouth shut in class, to imitating the sullen obstinacy of his fellow pupils because he had seen what happened to those who showed off their knowledge, he was astonished and for a while badly disturbed by this. Nobody tried to push him. He knew he was being watched, but that was all. He was told what was available for him to do, and his instructions stopped there. Provided he did one of the dozen or twenty choices, that was enough. Later he wouldn't even be obliged to choose from a list. He could make his own.

Suddenly he clicked on. His mind buzzed like a hive of bees with new and fascinating concepts: minus one has a square root, there are nearly a billion Chinese, a Shannon tree compresses written English by fifteen percent, so that's how a tranquilizer works, the word "okay" comes from the Wolof wawkay meaning "by all means" or "certainly"...

His comfortable private room was equipped with a computer remote; there were hundreds of them around the campus, more than one for each person living there. He used it voraciously, absorbing encyclopedias of data.

Very quickly he became convinced how necessary it was for his country and no other to be the first to apply wisdom to the running of the world. With change so radical and swift, what else would serve? And if a repressive, unfree culture got there ahead...

Shuddering when he recalled what life under a non-wise system had done to him, Nickie was ripe to be persuaded.

He didn't even mind the twice-yearly sampling of his cerebellar tissue which he and all the students had to undergo. (Only later did he start putting quote marks around "student" and thinking of himself and the others more as "inmates.") It was done with a microprobe and the loss was a negligible fifty cells.

And he was impressed to the point of awe by the single-mindedness of the biologists who worked in the anonymous-looking group of buildings on the east side of the campus. Their detachment was incredible and a little alarming, but their purpose seemed admirable. Organ grafts were routine to them - heart, kidney, lung, they made the transplant as impersonally as a mechanic would fit a spare part. Now they were after more ambitious goals: limb replacement complete with sensor and motor functions, restoration of vision to the blind, external gestation of the embryo... Now and then, without realizing what the slogans implied, Nickie had read advertisements in bold type headed BUY BABY BUNTING and IF YOU ABORT THEN WE'LL SUPPORT! But not until he arrived at Tarnover did he actually see one of the government fetus-trucks making its delivery of unwanted incomplete babies.

That troubled him a little, but it wasn't hard for him to decide that it was better for the not-yet-children to come here and be useful in research than for them to burn in a hospital incinerator.

After that, however, he wasn't quite as interested in genetics as he had begun to be. It could well have been coincidence, of course; most of the time he was hungrily rounding out his incomplete picture of the modern world, concentrating on history, sociology, political geography, comparative religion, linguistics and fiction in every possible form. His instructors were pleased and his fellow students were envious: here was one of the lucky ones, who was certain to go a long, long way.

There were graduates from Tarnover out in the larger world now. Not many. To build the student body up to its present total of seven hundred plus had taken nine years, and a good deal of the early work done here had gone to waste on the error side of the trial-and-error methods inevitable with any system as radically new as this. That was over. Sometimes a graduate returned for a short visit and expressed pleasure at the smoothness with which the establishment now ran, and told half-sad, half-funny stories about mistakes made when he or she was still a student. Most centered on the original assumption that an element of rivalry was indispensable if the people here were to function at maximum efficiency. On the contrary; one of the basic characteristics of a wise person is the ability to see how competition wastes time and effort. Some ludicrous contradictions had arisen before that problem was straightened out.

Existence at Tarnover was isolated. Vacations were naturally permitted - many of the students had living families, unlike Nickie. Pretty often one of his friends would take him home over Christmas or Thanksgiving or Labor Day. But he was well aware of the danger inherent in talking freely. No formal oath was administered, no security clearance issued, but all the kids were conscious, indeed proud, that their country's survival might depend on what they were doing. Besides, being a guest in another person's home reminded him uncomfortably of the old days. So he never accepted an invitation lasting more than a week, and always returned thankfully to what he now regarded as his ideal environment: the place where the air was constantly crackling with new ideas, yet the day-today pattern of life was wholly stable.

Naturally there were changes. Sometimes a student, less often an instructor, went away without warning. There was a phrase for that; it was said they had "bowed out" - bowed in the sense of an overstressed girder, or a tree before a gale. One instructor resigned because he was not allowed to attend a conference in Singapore. No one sympathized. People from Tarnover did not attend foreign congresses. They rarely went to those in North America. There were reasons not to be questioned.

By the time he was seventeen Nickie fell he had made up for most of his childhood. He had learned affection, above all. It wasn't just that he'd had girls - he was a presentable young man now, and a good talker, and according to what he was told an enterprising lover. More important was the fact that the permanence of Tarnover had allowed him to go beyond merely liking adults. There were many instructors to whom he had become genuinely attached. It was almost as though he had been born late into a vast extended family. He had more kinfolk, more dependable, than ninety percent of the population of the continent.

And then the day came when...

Most of the education imparted here was what you taught yourself with the help of computers and teaching machines. Logically enough. Knowledge that you wanted to acquire before you knew where to look for it sticks better than knowledge you never even suspected in advance. But now and then a problem arose where personal guidance was essential. It had been two years since he'd dug into biology at all, and in connection with a project he was planning in the psychology of communication he needed advice on the physiological aspects of sensory input. The computer remote in his room was not the same one he had had when he arrived, but a newer and more efficient model which by way of a private joke he had baptized Roger, after Friar Bacon of the talking head.

It told him within seconds that he should call on Dr. Joel Bosch in the biology section tomorrow at 1000. He had not met Dr. Bosch, but he knew about him: a South African, an immigrant to the States seven or eight years ago, who had been accepted on the staff of Tarnover after long and thorough loyalty evaluation, and reputedly was doing excellent work.

Nickie felt doubtful. One had heard about South Africans... but on the other hand he had never met one, so he suspended judgment.

He arrived on time, and Bosch bade him enter and sit down. He obeyed more by feel than sight, for his attention had instantly been riveted by - by a thing in one corner of the light and airy office.

It had a face. It had a torso. It had one normal-looking hand set straight in at the shoulder, one withered hand on the end of an arm straw-thin and almost innocent of muscle, and no legs. It rested in a system of supports that held its overlarge head upright, and it looked at him with an expression of indescribable jealousy. It was like a thalidomide parody of a little girl.

Portly, affable, Bosch chuckled at his visitor's reaction. "That's Miranda," he explained, dropping into his own chair. "Go ahead, stare all you like. She's used to it - or if she isn't by now, then she's damned well going to have to get used to it."

"What... ?" Words failed him.

"Our pride and joy. Our greatest achievement. And you're accidentally privileged to be among the first to know about it. We've kept her very quiet because we didn't know how much input she could stand, and if we'd let even the faintest hint leak out people would have been standing on line from here to the Pacific, demanding a chance to meet her. Which they will, but in due time. We're adjusting her to the world by slow degrees, now we know she really is a conscious being. Matter of fact, she probably has at least an average IQ, but it took us a while to figure out a way of letting her talk."

Staring, hypnotized, Nickie saw that a sort of bellows mechanism was pumping slowly in and out alongside her shrunken body, and a connection ran from it to her throat.

"Of course even if she hadn't survived this long she would still have been a milestone on the road," Bosch pursued. "Hence her name - Miranda, 'to be wondered at.'" He gave a broad grin. "We built her! That's to say, we combined the gametes under controlled conditions, we selected the genes we wanted and shoved them to the right side during crossover, we brought her to term in an artificial womb - yes, we literally built her. And we've learned countless lessons from her already. Next time the result should be independently viable instead of relying on all that gadgetry." An airy wave.

"Right, to business. I'm sure you don't mind her listening in. She won't understand what we're talking about, but she's here, as I said, to accustom her to the idea that there are lots of people in the world instead of just three or four attendants taking care of her. According to the computers you want a fast rundown on..."

Mechanically Nickie explained the reason for his visit, and Bosch obliged him with the titles of a dozen useful recent papers on relevant subjects. He barely heard what was said. When he left the office he stumbled rather than walked back to his room.

Alone that night, and sleepless, he asked himself a question that was not on the program, and agonized his way to its answer.

Consciously he was aware that not everyone would have displayed the same reaction. Most of his friends would have been as delighted as Bosch, stared at Miranda with interest instead of dismay, asked scores of informed questions and complimented the team responsible for her.

But for half his life before the age of twelve, for six of his most formative years, Nickie Haflinger had been more furniture than person and willy-nilly had been forced to like it.

As though he had come upon the problem in a random test of the type that formed a standard element in his education - training people to be taken by surprise and still get it right was an integral part of Tarnover thinking - he saw it, literally saw it, in his mind's eye. It was spelled out on the buff paper they used for "this section to be answered in terms of the calculus of morality," marking it off from the green used for administration and politics, the pink for social prognostication, and so on.

He could even imagine the style of type it was printed in. And it ran:

Distinguish between (a) the smelting of ore which could have become a tool in order to make a weapon and (b) the modification of germ plasm which might have been a person in order to make a tool. Do not continue your answer below the thick black line.

And the answer, the hateful horrible answer, boiled down to this.

No difference. No distinction. Both are wicked.

He didn't want to believe that conclusion. Taking it at face value implied giving up all that had been most precious in his short life. Tarnover had become his home in a more total sense than he had previously imagined possible.

But he felt insulted, clear down to the marrow of his bones.

I thought I was here to become myself with maximum perfection. I'm no longer sure that I was right. Suppose, just suppose, I'm here to become the person who's regarded as most usable...

Miranda died; her life supports were less than perfect. But she was reincarnated in numerous successors, and even when there was none of them around, her image continued to haunt Nickie Haflinger.

Privately, because he was afraid he would fail to explain himself if he talked about this to his friends, he wrestled with the ramifying tentacles of the problem.

The word wicked had sprung to his mind unbidden; it had been learned in infancy, most likely from his mother whom he dimly remembered as having been devout, a Pentecostalist or Baptist or the like. His later temporary parents had all been too enlightened to use such loaded terms around a child. Their homes contained computer remotes giving access to all the newest data concerning kids.

So what did the word mean? What in the modern world could be identified as evil, an abomination, wrong? He groped his way toward a definition, and found the final clue in his recollection of what Bosch had said. Having discovered that Miranda was a conscious being with an average IQ, they had not given her merciful release. They had not even kept her ignorant of the world, so that she could have had no standard of comparison between her existence and that of mobile, active, free individuals. Instead, they brought her out in public to "get used to being stared at." As though their conception of personality began and ended with what could be measured in the labs. As though, capable themselves of suffering, they granted no reality to the suffering of others. "The subject exhibited a pain response."

But not, under any circumstances, we hurt her.

Outwardly his conduct during his second five years at Tarnover was compatible with how he had previously behaved. He took tranquilizers, but they were prescribed for him as for most of his age group. He was sometimes called for counseling sessions after arguing with his instructors, but so were at least half of his peers. Having been jilted by a girl, he teetered on the verge of turning skew, but the typical emotional tempests of adolescence were magnified in this closed environment. All quite within the parameters laid down.

Once - literally once - he found he could stand the pressure no longer, and did something which, had he been found out, would have ensured his expulsion and very likely an operation to blank his memory. (It was rumored... One could never pin the rumor down.)

From a public veephone at the railcar terminal linking Tarnover to the nearest town he called Hearing Aid, for the first time in years, and for one dark lonely hour poured out the secrets of his heart. It was a catharsis, a purgation. But long before he had regained his room he was shaking, haunted by the fear that Hearing Aid's famous promise ("Only I heard that!") might not be true. How could it be? It was absurd! From Canaveral the tendril-ears of federal computers wove through his society like mycelia. No place could possibly be immune. All night he lay awake in fear, expecting his door to be flung open and stern silent men to take him under arrest. By dawn he was half minded to kill himself.

Miraculously, there followed no disaster, and a week later that awful impulse had receded in memory, growing vague as a dream. What he recalled all too vividly, though, was his terror.

He resolved it was the last time he'd be such a fool.

Shortly thereafter he began to concentrate on data processing techniques at the expense of his other study subjects, but about one in four of his contemporaries had by then also evinced a preference for some specialty, and this was a valuable talent. (It had been explained to him that in terms of n-value mean-path theory administering the three hundred million people of North America was a determinate problem; however, as with chess or fencing, it was no good to be told that there must be a perfect game if the universe wouldn't last long enough for it to be found by trial and error.)

He had been reserved and self-contained when he arrived. It was not inconsistent that after a gesture in the direction of greater openness he should revert to his old solitary habits. Neither his teachers nor his friends guessed that he had revised himself for a purpose. He wanted out, and there was not supposed to be an out.

The point was never labored, but there were constant reminders that to support one student at Tarnover cost the federal budget approximately three million dollars per year. What had been spent in the last century on missiles, submarines, the maintenance of forward bases overseas, was now lavished on these secret establishments. And it was known in the subtle way such things can be known that a condition of being here was that ultimately one must offer the government a return on its investment. All the graduates who came back to visit were doing so.

But the conviction had gradually grown in Nickie's mind that something was amiss. Were these people dedicated... or insensitive? Were they patriotic... or power-hungry? Were they single-minded... or purblind?

He was determined that somehow, sooner or later, before committing himself to the lifetime repayment they were bound to demand of him, he must break loose long enough to take a detached view and make his mind up about the rights and wrongs of the brain race.

That was what set him on the trail of what he later found to be a 4GH code. He deduced from first principles that there must be a way of allowing authorized persons to drop an old identity and assume a new one, no questions asked. The nation was tightly webbed in a net of interlocking data-channels, and a time-traveler from a century ago would have been horrified by the degree to which confidential information had been rendered accessible to total strangers capable of adding two plus two. ("The machines that make it more difficult to cheat on income tax can also ensure that blood of the right group is in the ambulance which picks you up from a car crash. Well?")

Yet it was known that not merely police informers, FBI agents and counterspies continued to go about their secret business, but also commercial spies - party agents shepherding million-dollar bribes - procurers serving the carnal purposes of the hypercorps. It was still true that if you were rich enough or had the ear of the proper person, you could avoid and evade.

Most people were resigned to living wholly on the public level. He was not. He found his code.

A 4GH contained a replicating phage: a group which automatically and consistently deleted all record of a previous persona whenever a replacement was keyed in. Possessed of one, an individual could rewrite him- or herself via any terminal connected to the federal data banks. That meant, since 2005, any veephone including a public one.

This was the most precious of all freedoms, the plug-in life-style raised to the nth power: freedom to become the person you chose to be instead of the person remembered by the computers. That was what Nickie Haflinger desired so keenly that he spent five years pretending he was still himself. It was the enchanted sword, the invulnerable shield, the winged boots, the cloak of invisibility. It was the ultimate defense.

Or so it seemed.

Therefore, one sunny Saturday morning, he left Tarnover, and on Monday he was a life-style counselor in Little Rock, ostensibly aged thirty five and - as the data-net certified - licensed to practice anywhere in North America.

THE TANGLED WEB

"Your first career went well for a while," Freeman said. "But it came to an abrupt and violent end."

"Yes." A harsh chuckle. "I was nearly shot by a woman I advised to go screw someone of a different color. The massed computers of half a continent were in agreement with me, but she wasn't. I concluded I'd been overoptimistic and rethought myself."

"Which was when you became an instructor with a three-vee cassette college. I note that for your new post you dropped down to twenty five, much nearer your real age, even though the bulk of the clientele was forty or over. I wonder why."

"The answer's simple. Think what lured most of those clients on to the college's reels. It was a sense of losing touch with the world. They were hungry for data supplied by people fifteen or twenty years younger, usually because they'd done what they thought best for their children and been repaid with rejection and insults. They were pathetic. What they wanted was not what they claimed to want. They wanted to be told yes, the world really is pretty much as it was when you were young, there aren't any objective differences, there's some magic charm you can recite and instantly the crazy moiling framework of the modern world will jell into fixed familiar patterns... The third time a complaint was filed about my tapes I was surpled despite my rigorous proof that I was right. Being right was at a discount in that context, too."

"So you tried your skill as a full-time Delphi gambler."

"And made a fortune in next to no time and grew unspeakably bored. I did nothing that anybody else couldn't do, once he realized the government manipulates Delphi odds to keep the social-mollification index high."

"Provided he had access to as much computer capacity as you did."

"But in theory everybody does, given a dollar to drop into a pay phone."

There was a pause. Freeman resumed in a brittle tone, "Did you have a clearly defined goal in mind which guided you in your choice of roles?"

"You didn't already dig that out of me?"

"Yes, but when you were regressed. I want your contemporary conscious opinion."

"It's still the same; I never hit on a better way of phrasing it. I was searching for a place to stand so that I could move the Earth."

"Did you ever consider going overseas?"

"No. The one thing I suspected a 4GH might not be good for was a passport, so if I found the right spot it would have to be in North America."

"I see. That puts your next career into much clearer perspective. You spent a full year with a Utopia-design consultancy."

"Yes. I was naïve. It took me that long to realize that only the very rich and the very stupid imagine happiness can be bought tailor made. What's more, I should have discovered right away that it was company policy to maximize variety from one project to the ne