Interface. Part 42

"Sometimes I can hardly believe myself," he said, turning to face her. A soft, arcing throw was headed toward Ogle from a five-year-old stationed on the pitcher's mound. Ogle deliberately took it in the back of the head and went into a staggering pantomime of a silly man with a mild concussion, wobbling around home plate, rolling his eyes, bouncing drunkenly off the backstop. The kids went completely out of their gourds and a couple of them actually fell down on the gra.s.s, tossing their gloves up in the air, screaming with uncontrollable laughter. Mary Catherine shook her head, smiling in spite of herself. She looked at the kids who were still strong enough to remain on their feet and twirled her finger around her ear.

"When you've recovered," she said, "I have one or two more things."

"I think I feel a little better now," Ogle said. "Shoot."

"I feel like I'm being set up as some kind of a surrogate wife. It's creepy."

"Yes, it is," Ogle said.

"It borders on the perverse. I'm not going to do it anymore."

"You don't have to," Ogle said. "The only reason it happened today was that this is a formal event, kind of like a wedding. In a wedding, you know, the father is supposed to give away the bride. But if the father of the bride is dead, or if he hit the road twenty years ago with some white trash floozy and a fifth of Jack and never was heard from again, then that place must be filled by some other individual - it doesn't matter who - anyone with a Y chromosome. Could be a brother, an uncle, even the bride's high-school basketball coach. It just don't matter. Well, a campaign announcement is the same deal except that normally the wife is there in her silly hat and her sensible shoes. You performed that role today; it's just that you happened to look a h.e.l.l of a lot better."

"Thanks," she snapped, rolling her eyes.

"Now that the ceremony is over, you can go back to being who you are. No more creepy stuff at least until he gets inaugurated."

"One more thing."

"What's that?"

"I'm the campaign physician."

Ogle was a bit startled. "We already hired-"

"I'm the campaign physician."

"We need you for other-"

"I'm the campaign physician," she said.

This time it sunk in. Ogle shrugged and nodded. "You're obviously the best person for the job."

The direct hit to Ogle's head had put the little kid on the pitcher's mound over the five-hundred-point mark. Mary Catherine thought about starting another game, but her attention had been drawn by a great deal ofcheering and hilarity from one of the other playing fields. She headed in that direction.

A football game was in progress. Two teams of at least fifteen players each had taken the field. The ex-Bears were evenly divided between those two teams. Cozzano was, of course, the quarterback of one team. The opposing quarterback wore two Super Bowl rings. The ages of the teams ranged from ten years old up to the early seventies. Some of the players were farmers and some ran major corporations. Mary Catherine recognized Kevin Tice, the founder of Pacific Netware, serving as a wide receiver; in person, he was bigger and more athletic than his nerdy image would lead one to believe. Zeldo was in the trenches on the defensive line, being blocked by none other than Hugh MacIntyre, CEO of MacIntyre Engineering, who must have been in his early sixties but looked as strong and healthy as Dad.

The game was an extremely loose and goofy affair, with players of both teams constantly circulating on and off the field to get refreshments or visit the portable toilets. It was too hot to play hard. Still, each team had a hard core of adult men with highly compet.i.tive natures, and as the game wore on, all the little kids and the dilettantes dropped out and left behind half a dozen or so guys on each side, playing football that verged on serious. They didn't have a formal timekeeper, but they did have a deadline: a formal reception was taking place later at the Cozzano residence and they all had to quit playing at six o'clock.

At the end, the game actually got exciting. Cozzano's team was down by three points with time left for only one play. They came out in shotgun formation; the ball was expertly snapped by a n.o.bel laureate from the University of Chicago and Cozzano dropped back to pa.s.s, faking repeatedly in the direction of a very tall retired Celtic who was running toward the end zone, waving his arms frantically. The defense shouted in unison "ONE MISSISSIPPI TWO MISSISSIPPI THREE MISSISSIPPI!" giving Cozzano a little bit of time, and then they attacked. Zeldo defeated the blocking efforts of Hugh MacIntyre, despite the fact the MacIntyre illegally held on to his belt and began to chase Cozzano around the backfield. Cozzano scrambled expertly and wildly, evading tackle after tackle; he was older and slower than Zeldo, but he was wearing shoes with rubber soles. Finally, Zeldo managed to bring Cozzano down near the forty-yard line, just as Cozzano launched a desperation pa.s.s known as a Hail Mary. To no one's surprise, the ex-Celtic grabbed the bull out of the air high over the outstretched hands of the defenders and then fell into the end zone, winning the game.

Mary Catherine applauded and cheered along with the rest of the crowd, then looked back up the field at her father and Zeldo. They were lying on the gra.s.s next to each other, propped up on their elbows, watching the action, laughing the deep, booming laughter of men completely out of their mind on a potent c.o.c.ktail of dirt, football, male bonding, and testosterone.

41.

MARY CATHERINE EXTRICATED HERSELF FROM THE RECEPTION around midnight and snuck upstairs to her room. Once inside, she stuck a bent paper clip into the keyhole of the old door hardware and shot the bolt, a skill she had picked up through long practice at the age of eight. Now that most of the techies and therapists had left, she had her room back the way it was supposed to be, with her old single bed with the handmade quilt on it, family pictures, her own little TV set on a table at the foot of the bed. She kicked her shoes off and stretched out full length on top of the old quilt. For the first time she realized how completely exhausted she was.

The red digits of the bedside clock flipped over to 12:00. A barrage of firecrackers went off all over town, ringing out the Fourth of July. "G.o.d forgive me for this," Mary Catherine said, reaching for the remote control on her bedside table, "but I have to see how this looked on TV."

It was the top story on CNN. And it looked fantastic. Mary Catherine had always known, vaguely, that things looked different on TV than they did in reality. But she didn't understand that well enough to predict howsomething would turn out on the small screen.

Ogle, obviously, had the knack. The rally had been impressive enough in person. But on television, you didn't see any of the boring, grungy stuff around the edges. All you saw was the good stuff. They covered the smoke divers. They showed most of Cozzano's run across the football field, and even a brief glimpse of a string of firecrackers being set off. The shower of confetti looked incredible.

And she looked incredible. She almost didn't recognize herself, but was embarra.s.sed anyway. Could it be that she was destined to wear this sort of clothes?

The CNN report didn't last long. They hit all the high points of the rally, airing all of the shots that Ogle had handed them on a silver platter, and then tossed in a few shots of the picnic, including some great footage of Cozzano throwing the Hail Mary.

CNN moved on to other topics. Mary Catherine picked up the remote control again and wandered up and down the electromagnetic spectrum, catching glimpses of fis.h.i.+ng shows, Home Shopping Network, Weather Channel, and Star Trek before finally locating C-SPAN, which was playing Dad's speech back in its entirety. For the first time, she got a chance to hear what he had been saying while she was looking around and chatting with all the little kids.

"About half a mile from here there's a factory that my father built, largely with his own capital and with the sweat of his brow, during the 1940s. The Army wouldn't let him fight - his mother had already lost one son to a German torpedo - but he was determined to get into the war one way or the other."

This was not true. He didn't build it with his own capital. The Meyers raised most of the money.

On the TV, Dad continued. "That factory made a new product known as nylon, which was an inexpensive replacement for silk - the main ingredient in parachutes. When the D day invasion was finally launched, my father couldn't be there. But the parachutes that he manufactured right here in Tuscola were strapped to the backs of every paratrooper who ventured into the skies of France on that fateful day."

He didn't make the chutes. Just the nylon fiber. The Army bought nylon from a whole bunch of suppliers.

"After V-E Day, a young man showed up in my father's factory one beautiful spring morning, asking to see Mr.

Cozzano. Well, in a lot of places he would have gotten the brushoff from the receptionists and the P.R. people but in my father's company you could always go straight to the top. So in short order this man was ushered into John Cozzano's office. And when he finally came face-to-face with my father, this strapping young lad became positively choked up with emotion and couldn't bring himself to speak for a few moments. And he explained that he was a paratrooper who had been in the very spearhead of the D day invasion. A hundred men had parachuted down from his unit and a hundred of them landed safely and took their objective with a minimum loss of life. Well, it seemed that these troopers had noticed the Cozzano label printed on to their chutes and decided that they liked that name and they had begun to call themselves the Cozzano gang. That became their rallying cry when they would jump out of the airplane. And at that point, my dad, who never shed tears in my presence in his entire life, well, he just burst out crying, you see, because that meant more to him than any of the money or anything else that he had gotten out of his factory- The TV set went dark. Mary Catherine was sitting up in bed, holding the remote control, aiming it at the screen like a gun. She was frozen in place.

The man she had been watching on the TV set wasn't her dad. Everything he'd just said was an out-and-out fabrication. And Dad would never tell a lie. Mel was right.

A familiar feeling came back. It was the clammy fear that had gripped her on the night of her father's first stroke. For weeks she had thought it would never go away. Then it had begun to relax its hold over her mind and her heart, and as Dad had recovered after the operation, it had gone away completely. She had thought that she and her family were out of the wood.

She'd been wrong. They weren't out of the woods. They had just walked through a little clearing. Now she found herself in the heart of a deeper and vaster forest than she'd ever imagined.

The party noise downstairs had faded to a low murmur. She could hear a new sound from the next room.

James's old room. It was the sound of fingers whacking a keyboard with the speed and power of a drumroll.

Zeldo was sitting at his workstation. He had turned off the lights and inverted the screen so that it was showing white letters on a black background. He had a huge high-resolution monitor with at least a dozenwindows open on it, each one filled with long snaking lines of text that Mary Catherine recognized, vaguely, as computer code.

"Hi," she said, and he almost jumped out of his skin. "Sorry to startle you."

"That's okay," Zeldo said, taking a deep breath and spinning his chair around to face her. "Too much Jolt. You can turn on a light if you want."

"It's okay," she said. She grabbed another swivel chair and sat down.

"Thanks. I'm running in blackout mode here," Zeldo said, "been on this d.a.m.n machine too long and my eyes won't focus anymore."

"What's going on?" she said. She had to a.s.sume, from what Mel had told her, that they were probably being listened to right now. For that matter, Zeldo himself was presumably part of the Network, though he seemed like a nice enough guy. And today, in the football game, she had seen a side of Zeldo that he didn't normally show. She could tell that, whatever devious schemes Zeldo might be involved in, he genuinely liked William A. Cozzano.

"We've had interference problems when your father goes near microwave relay stations," Zeldo said. "We're going to keep him away from those things, maybe work up some kind of a hat with EM s.h.i.+elding in it."

"But TV trucks use microwaves, don't they?"

"Exactly. And he spends a lot of time around TV trucks. So as a last line of defense, I'm building some safeguards into the software so that when the chip starts getting stray signals; it'll be smart enough to realize that there's a problem."

"Then what?"

"It'll go into Helen Keller mode until the interference goes away."

"What happens then? Dad goes into a coma?"

"Not at all," Zeldo said. "The chip will keep doing what it's supposed to do, filling in for the damaged parts of his brain. It's just that it won't be able to send or receive data anymore."

"That's not an important function anyway, is it?" Mary Catherine said. "You only send signals into his brain when you are fixing a bug in the software. Right?"

There was a long pause, and Mary Catherine wished that she had turned on the room lights. She suspected that she might be able to read some interesting things on Zeldo's face right now.

"As we mentioned before the implant," Zeldo finally said, "the biochips do more than just restore his normal capabilities."

This struck Mary Catherine as evasive. "You hackers aren't very good at playing these kinds of games, are you?" she said.

"No comment," Zeldo said. "I didn't spend half my life learning what I know so that I could get tangled up in politics."

The snappy technical patter had been replaced by a completely different sort of conversation. Both of them were now speaking elliptically with long pauses between sentences. Suddenly, Mary Catherine realized why: both of them knew that they were being listened to. Both of them had things to hide.

She had said something to Mel earlier in the day: Zeldo was in the Network but not of the Network. His fear of speaking freely in the bugged room was confirmation.

"As Ogle may have told you, I'm the campaign physician," she said.

"Yes," Zeldo said. "Congratulations. It's going to be a grind."

"Nothing like residency, I'm sure," Mary Catherine said.

"Because of. . . because of these pesky bugs and glitches," Zeldo said, framing the words carefully, "I've been a.s.signed to travel with the campaign, at least for a while. So let me know if there's anything I can do to help you out."

"For starters you could tell me exactly what happens when he goes near a microwave relay station."

Zeldo answered without hesitation. Now that they had gotten away from dangerous topics he had relaxed again. "He has a seizure."

"That's all?"

"Well . . . before that there are other symptoms. Disorientation. A flood of memories and sensations.""When these memories and sensations enter his mind, can he tell that they are just hallucinations from the chip?"

This question made Zeldo pause for a long time.

"You shouldn't grind your teeth. Bad for the enamel," Mary Catherine said, after at least sixty seconds had gone by.

"That's a profound question," Zeldo said. "It gets us into some heavy philosophical s.h.i.+t: if everything we think and feel is just a pattern of signals in our brain, then is there an objective reality? If the signals in Argus's brain happen to include radio transmissions, then does that mean that reality is a different thing for him?"

Mary Catherine held her tongue, for once, and did not ask why Zeldo was referring to her father as Argus. It was most definitely a slip of the tongue, a glimpse into something that Mary Catherine hadn't been allowed to see yet. If she got inquisitive, Zeldo would just clam up again.

Another, more interesting, possibility occurred to her: maybe Zeldo had slipped the word in deliberately.

"And if so," Zeldo continued, "who are we to say that one form of reality is preferable to another form?"

"Well, if he says things that simply aren't true, and seems to believe them, I would say that that was a problem," Mary Catherine said.

"Memory is a funny thing," Zeldo said. "None of our memories are really accurate to being with. So if he's got a memory that works a little differently from ours, and is otherwise healthy and happy, is that better than being aphasic in a wheelchair? Who's to say?"

"I guess it's up to Dad," Mary Catherine said.

Clearly she had to find the G.o.dS envelope. The events of the day had convinced her beyond doubt that Mel was right: there was a Network, and it was up to something. Mary Catherine went back to her room, changed out of her daughter costume, put on a bathrobe, and walked downstairs. The caterers were at work in the kitchen, cleaning up the aftermath of the party; all of the guests had gone home except for a few old Vietnam buddies of Cozzano's who sat around the coffee table in the living room having a few drinks and reminiscing about the war, alternately laughing and crying.

Mary Catherine avoided them and went out on to the back porch. A row of black plastic garbage bags were lined up against the wall, waiting to be collected. She opened one of the bags, sorted through a few loose pieces of paper, and found the brightly colored enveloped, still intact except for the broken seal. The mailing label was a bewildering panoply of numbers, code words, and bar codes; the inscrutable mutterings of the Network. Mary Catherine folded the envelope, stuffed it into her bathrobe, closed up the burn bag, and called it a day.

Floyd Wayne Vishniak R.R. 6 Box 895 Davenport, Iowa Aaron Green Ogle Data Research Pentagon Towers Arlington, Virginia Dear Mr. Green: Just for starters, I figured out your game that you are playing. When you came here you gave me some s.h.i.+t about working for that Ogle Data Research. Like you were some scientist writing a dissertation. But now I have figured out what you really are: you are working for William A. Cozzano. He must be paying you money to work on his campaign.

How did I figure it out? By just noticing what things you put on the little TV set on my wrist. You always show Cozzano but you don't show the other candidates as much.

Well, I watched Cozzano announcing that he would run for president this afternoon. I did not watch it onthe little wrist.w.a.tch. I went down to Dale's, which is a bar, and watched it on the big-screen TV there with some other guys. And I can tell you for your information that just about all the guys who were in that place thought it was real impressive.

I thought it was impressive too. But now it is two o'clock A.M. and I can not get to sleep. Because I am thinking about some of the things that Cozzano said and it troubles me.

When he was in that debate in Decatur, Illinois, he spoke about his dad's parachute factory and how important it was to the men on D day standing in the open door of the plane. But today, he told a whole story about a bunch of paratroopers and how one of them came to personally thank his dad. This is a strange discrepancy, don't you think?

My opinion: something got scrambled up inside Cozzano's head when he had those troubles. And now, either he has memory troubles or else he can't tell right from wrong. So don't expect me to vote for him.

You will be hearing again from me soon, I am sure.

Sincerely, Floyd Wayne Vishniak.

42.

MEL MEYER DROVE INTO MIAMI, OKLAHOMA, IN HIS BLACK Mercedes 500 SL at 4:30 on a hot mid-July afternoon. The sky was a sickening, yellowing white. He stopped at the Texaco station to fill up with gas and check his oil. He checked his oil religiously -though the car used none to speak of- because thirty years ago the Cozzanos had made fun of him for not knowing how.

He also needed to ask for directions. As he opened the window to talk to the attendant, the 103-degree heat poured in on him like boiling water. He ordered ultrapremium from the Texaco pump and popped the hood for the oil check. "How far to Cacher," he asked the grease-streaked, acne-ridden kid smearing his winds.h.i.+eld with an equally appetizing-looking rag.

The kid had never seen anything like Mel Meyer - dapper, intense, clad in a perfect black silk suit - nor had he seen many 500 SLs. "Why d'ya wanna go to Cacher? n.o.body lives in Cacher except some crazy old farts," he said. He went to the front of the car, could not figure out how to raise the hood, looked pleadingly at Mel.

Mel did not like the kid, did not like Miami, Oklahoma, and would have given anything to avoid being there.

But this was the closest thing to a lead he had come across in four months of investigating the Network. He could have hired a private investigator in Tulsa or Little Rock and had him drive out to the place and look around. But he knew that, whatever this Network might be, it was good at hiding itself. A private investigator, who made his living watching unsubtle people commit marital infidelities in cheap motels, could not be trusted to pick up the nearly invisible spoor of the Network. In the end Mel would have to come out and look around himself. He might as well get it over with.