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  But Eve snorted, setting off ripples in the flesh at her throat. She had the trick of switching from the nasally sensuous to imperious tones without pause. "Not the electronics, goddammit, I'm talking about viewer reaction. Boren, you're asking for a level of message control that assumes viewers will never compare videotapes, never start a brush-fire under some Indy congressman once they have proof you're tailoring messages to each holo set."

  Mills reflected on the lifetime appointments of media commissioners and waved the objection away. "Not that the Indys could do anything about it," he said.

  "Legally? No, your risks aren't legal; they're charismatic." In media research, 'charisma' no longer referred strictly to people. Any message that approached overwhelming credibility was said to be charismatic. Eve was working on it. "As long as John Q. talks to his neighbor, you'll get some coalition of fruitcakes who'll call FBN's credibility on the carpet. Even if you cleaned up your act afterward, it'd be bye-bye charisma — and bye-bye to some network ad accounts for FBN. Is that what you want?"

  Mills, sitting on an arm of Eve's ample couch, sighed and retrieved the fax sheet. "So the problem is still word-of-mouth," he mused. "Which means we work harder to alienate the bastards from one another."

  "Divide and conquer," Eve chuckled. "Welcome to media theory. Nice to know my chief exec is still capable of an intuitive leap."

  Sharply: "Don't patronize me, Eve. Papa spank."

  "What would urns do," she cooed, sapphire insets winking in her fingernails as she reached out to knead the calf of his leg; "tie me down like old times? A wittle domestic westwaint for baby?"

  He shifted his leg away. "How about lifting your pass to the synthesizer lab? Would that be enough restraint for you?"

  A shrug; the sausagelike fingers flirted in the air. "Go ahead, bugfucker, then you'd need someone else to deal maintenance doses to your bloody Chinese slaveys."

  "Someone easier to dear with than you are, my dear," said Mills, and let his threat lapse. "By the way: Young's protocol people expect us to put in an appearance when he presents those S & R citations in Santa Fe. Formal, of course."

  "A politician after my own heart," she murmured, "parading his hit teams as saviors and reaping public applause for it."

  "I don't know if the rover bunch will be there," he said, well aware that a man licensed to kill embodied raw potency to Eve Simpson.

  "You know how I hate public display," she said, and Mills knew it was self-display she meant. "Will we be screened?"

  "Not from the Prez, but they'll split-screen the dais to make the Secret Service happy. Nobody will see you — us — except Young and a few others like, oh, Lon Salter. You can ogle the beefcake all you like," he said wryly.

  "It's not window-shopping I like; it's trying things on."

  "Don't put yourself in a bind with Young over it, Eve. The President has some strict ethics about drugging his people."

  Delighted laughter, as though Mills had sprung a salacious joke. "Shyster ethics: if you might get punished for it, it's unethical." Long ago, Mills had learned Eve's method of bedding a man who did not fancy tussling with cellulite. She merely laced his food with lobotol, a controlled substance developed to aid hypnotists in making the most intractable patient highly suggestible. While fuddled in this fashion, a man would believe whatever Eve told him, e.g., that she was the most desirable sexual provender he could possibly imagine. And he would further believe that he had hungered all his life to test the adage that whatever one can imagine, one can do.

  Mills had discovered Eve's ploy two years previously, after waking one morning with a swirling recollection of boffing his blousy ex-bimbo in ways he had never before contemplated. Those memories did not please him much; the exhausted Mills had the distinct impression that, he’d spent the night with a dirty joke. His cold rage on learning her deception had left Eve frightened and astonished; she'd thought the whole business would amuse him. She had never repeated her mistake on Mills but still found lobotol her chief procurer for the one-nighters she chose like a young Messalina.

  Deliberately abrading a troubled spot: "Anyhow, I don't keep my slaves endlessly hooked on heavy shit — like some folks we know," she arched one brow, squinted the other eye.

  Icily: "If there were any other way to pursue the most awesome breathrough in recorded history, believe me, — I'd do it."

  "Without giving anything away to John Q. or our glorious government, you mean."

  Mills, now standing, showed every sign of truncating their old debate. "Eve, if you can keep your great wanton ass out of trouble at the top — and if I can get the San Rafael Desert lab to come through for us — you and I will be the glorious government, for all practical purposes. I know you're laying poor strung-out Chabrier every time you visit the lab; considering the stuff he pollutes his system with, I don't think your lobotol could do him any additional harm. Be circumspect; that's all."

  "I don't need lobotol with Chabrier," she said, feeling that her charm had been questioned.

  "Thai hash, then," Mills sighed; "whatever. I must get back upstairs; thanks for the warning on individually tailored messages, I'm sure you're right."

  Her languid purr followed him to the door. "With enough lobotol in a metro water supply you wouldn't need tailored messages, luv."

  "Now you're being absurd, Eve. Only half the population would be tuned to FBN and besides, a steady diet of judgment suppressants would put Mexicans in New Denver inside a month."

  "But I can see you've given it a lot of thought," she said, and her cruel cupid lips mimed a juicy kiss of parting.

  Mills strode to the executive lift, exasperated.

  She hadn't even said whether she'd go to Santa Fe. But Mills knew her cravings; she'd be there, all right.

  He made a mental note to check the remote monitors at the desert lab by way of his private access code.

  Eve Simpson was the only soul running loose, besides himself, who knew just how Marengo Chabrier's lab was run — and for what purpose.

  CHAPTER 9

  Cloistered in Utah's San Rafael desert region was Mills's most secure research facility, where need-to-know was as strictly monitored as on any proving ground in the world. There, Mills had carefully assembled a group of the technological elite whose drug requirements made them tractable. From Marengo Chabrier, the French program administrator, to the illegal aliens, all lived out their days behind particle-beam fences within a trackless waste. Their one goal: to find some way to scale up the mass synthesizer which China had developed during the war.

  All but a few Chinese researchers had been liquidated by their own leaders, and only Boren Mills had a working model of the device. He had killed to get it. No larger than an overnight bag, the synthesizer had powered the reaction engine of a tiny Sino submarine, also providing oxygen and simple nutrients for the hibernating crew.

  Now, twenty-seven months into his scale-up program. Mills rejoiced and writhed. Chabrier, physicist-turned-administrator and a druggie of broad scope, boasted that the little Chinese synthesizer could now produce small amounts of organic dyes, pheromones, heavy alcohols, and other complex chemicals using plain air as conversion input mass. But an inherent limitation existed in the size of the gadget's toroidal output chamber. The Chinese had already built the thing with its maximum output, and neither Chabrier nor subtler asiatic minds in the lab could even posit, let alone demonstrate, a rig that could do any better.

  Within a few weeks, the lab would try out the new prototype which could produce an incredible range of substances, so precisely metered that it could issue a shot of bourbon or a root beer complete with effervescence. Mills was no fool; his lab personnel, Chabrier very much included, wore implant monitors that kept Mills informed of their drug abuses. He could not prevent them from manufacturing booze or Fentanyl, but he would know if any one of them absorbed any of it at other than scheduled times. And that would mean cold turkey withdrawal in a padded cell for Chabrier as well as the abuser. So f
ar, Chabrier's vigilance was flawless.

  Still more disturbing, Mills found it easier to fund the lab's exotic needs from his own pocket than to continue siphoning money from projects known to IEE board members. Those expenses were mounting, but Mills did not dare permit use of the synthesizer for cash crops; gold, pharmaceuticals, plutonium. Not yet; not until Mills had absolute control of a synthesizer that could produce its goods in staggering quantity.

  To make a million copies of the Chinese model would be to court disaster. Eventually its secrets would become known to others outside his grasp and, once every citizen had access to a synthesizer, government-by-scarcity would be a thing of the past. No wonder the Chinese had purged their technocrats; in the nether corners of his mind, Mills had scheduled something similar for his own lab people — but only after they'd done their work.

  Mills, who loathed procrastination, had decided to put off his decision for another year. If by that time it still seemed impossible to design a factory-sized synthesizer, he might order a factory full of the small ones. But: should he try to coerce his captives into building wholly automated repair equipment for the inevitable maintenance?

  If 'yes', they might prove laggards, even sabotage their own work. To underestimate them would be a disaster; they surely knew their utility would end when a million synthesizers were self-maintaining.

  If 'no', then Marengo Chabrier and nine other brilliant trip-freaks would be the maintenance crew, the most expensive mechanics on earth and worth it — and they would know it! The plutonium scenario, for example: what if they produced enough of it, despite the best monitors Mills could employ, to build a — well, call it a negotiating device? It could be scarifying. Hell, it was already scary! With a factory full of small synthesizers, his goosepimple factor would be raised to the nth power. It was almost enough to make Mills ask for government control.

  Hypothesis 1: A special security force would help.

  Hypothesis 2: A special security force would multiply his security problems. Quis custodiet?

  Boren Mills's basic problem was easily stated: he had a cornucopia by the tail.

  CHAPTER 10

  A half-century earlier, the Santa Fe Opera complex had been modern, a layered amalgam of steel and adobe on concrete, thrusting up from fragrant serrated hills at the city's edge. Noah Laker, the S & R regular who'd piloted Quantrill and four others into the huge parking lot, stood with him at parade rest stance near the nose of their sprint chopper.

  "Quaint," muttered Laker, one of the few regulars who saw nothing unGodly about talking in ranks. "But that open roof is a crime against thermal efficiency. Saints! Just look at all that wasted concrete swooping around. Ever see such a thing?"

  "Nope," Quantrill lied, lips barely moving. He had seen it often from the highway when T Section was based in Santa Fe during the war. "But who needs efficiency in Santa Fe?"

  "Wha-a?" Minnetta Adams, one of the few female regulars, would not turn her head but eyed Quantrill sidelong. Adams was the kind of ecology nut who'd pick a dandelion salad outside a banquet hall; good-natured but serious in her beliefs.

  "Come on, Adams; these people have sunlight to burn. Isn't that sweat you're lickin' off your mustache?"

  The comely Adams had no mustache though she was the equal of most men in strength. "I'll get you for that," she murmured chortling.

  "Bury me in that compost pile she calls her mummybag," he said, loud enough for the others to hear.

  Another calumny, for Adams kept her gear spotless. Several snickers rewarded him; any entertainment was welcome when three hundred young people stood sweltering in dress blacks for review.

  "Quantrill, are you supposed to be in formation?" It was Control speaking into his mastoid. He guessed from the voice cadence that a human monitor was on-line.

  "Um-hm," he hummed his admission softly. You never knew when the damned thing was monitoring you.

  Whatthehell.

  "Is the President reviewing your assembly at this moment?"

  Again he agreed. The President strolled a hundred meters away, taller by half a head than S & R's Lon Salter who strode in his shadow like a king's equerry. Young merely glanced at the teams in their formal dress. A score of rovers filled out the ranks, for four teams of regulars had stayed away on alert duty.

  "You're a disgrace," said Control as if she could not care less. "Shut up and report yourself to How-ell after your formation is dismissed." Pause. "Do you affirm?"

  "Uhf-furhhm," Quantrill coughed aloud. It might have been just a cough. It would also probably irritate Control — but if Control demanded acknowledgement, you gave it. Somehow. Whatever Control demanded — you gave.

  "This is what we get for giving you a freebie entertainment," Control snarled, all too human for a change, and coded out.

  Yep, that's what you got, Quantrill reflected. He hadn't asked for a two-hour cruise bouncing across the Rockies so he could stand on display with three hundred other tin soldiers in heat-absorbent black, waiting for a hulking politician to glance his way under a broiling afternoon sun. The flare-leg black formal synthosuedes had been designed to keep creases in, not to keep heat out. The black vee-necked blouse could have been cool but for its high stiff open collar, and the goddam canary-yellow side-tied neckerchief kept the dry breeze from his throat. Okay, so they looked smart as prodigies with the yellow sunflower S & R patch and suede low-quarters, and the belt medikit with sunflower and caduceus. All that pizazz was for the public and for the President who, increasingly for Quantrill, was no more and no less than the controller of Control; his ultimate oppressor.

  He turned his mind to more pleasant employment. Somewhere in the front rank was Sanger, among a scatter of other women chosen for the on-camera impact they made. Perhaps, after the awards banquet, they'd find a way to duck out. They could stroll away from the Opera House to sit silently and watch the moon turn the brush-dotted hills to alien country, to smell the night-flower fragrances unique to late spring on a high, dry New Mexico evening.

  Most likely, he thought, they'd be burping from the barbecued prime rib which, his flattened nose told him, was already steaming somewhere in the bowels of the place. His belly growled its readiness. In another hour he'd be savoring it, relaxing, glad that he did not have to parade up to a dais and accept a bit of ribbon before holo cameras.

  From one-way glass in the Opera complex overlook, Eve Simpson gazed unseen on the Presidential inspection. She grasped the swivel of a magnifier, pulled the scope into position without moving from her motorized lounge chair, and let her mouth water. Eve was not thinking about cooked beef; she was enjoying the human stuff on the hoof which stood in its stalwart innocence, facing her unaware from a distance of three hundred meters. The magnifier made it seem like only ten.

  The big one on the front row would be delightful, those long legs and slender hips stripped bare by lobotol and lust. Or — there, the lank towhead on the end, with the bulge at the crotch of his syntho-suedes, the honest farmboy face gleaming with perspiration, the slender delicate nose straight and clean under his blue ingenue eyes.

  They were all so photogenic Eve could not — suddenly did not want to — choose. Let kismet choose, she thought, and surprise me. She would go light on the barbecue, heavy on the man. In an hour she would be with S & R's top dog, the glum Salter, who managed to seem a harried bookkeeper while he kept secrets that could topple an administration.

  Should she ask Salter specifically for one of his war dogs, a rover? Anytime an interviewer singled rovers out, Salter's pale eyes fairly jumped in their sockets. She would make her eyes huge, innocuous, and propose a brief private interview with a rover for FBN. Salter could hardly refuse under the circumstances — the whole evening was a media event.

  The interview would be in Eve's suite at the De Vargas, naturally. She entertained no illusions about the impression her flesh made; she would ask Salter to choose someone, ah, typical of the S & R rover and to send him alone to her hotel in the city.r />
  Eve giggled at the sweet tickle between her thighs, pushed the magnifier away, wrinkled her button nose at the scent of barbecue. Yes, she'd feed delicately on that.

  It would be another matter when they sent the meat to her raw.

  CHAPTER 11

  Boren Mills stood in the reception room amid the hubbub of young voices, the clink of glasses, the exhalations of food and fruit juices, loathing the unstructuredness of it all. The banquet and the award citations, he admitted, had been well-staged and orderly. It was all this chaotic socializing afterward that gave him offense. Idly he sipped his execrable carrot cocktail and, over the rim of his glass, studied the throng for the layers of order he knew were woven through the gathering.

  He spotted one of the heroes of the moment, resplendent in dress blacks, his citation ribbon a white satin slash against his breast. Mills murmured something appropriate, shook the youth's hand, touched glasses and moved on.

  The President, as usual, stood stockaded within a crowd that was one-third celebrity-seekers and two-thirds Secret Service. Of course it was easy to spot Young's men among the uniformed S & R members, their dark blue suits almost festive against the yellow-accented black of the Search & Rescue people.

  Mills began to smile. Order was on hand, you merely needed to know how to spot it. The foci were Young, surrounded by his praetorians; the regulars with the virginal white ribbons, accepting kudos from envious peers; and Salter, talking earnestly to a pair in dress blacks who were twice as old as most regulars — hence had to be S & R supervision.

  He'd seen Eve, flirtatious and charming as a vampire whale, gently badgering Lon Salter over the salad course, but he hadn't seen her since the awards ceremony. Who knew what the self-indulgent slut was up to? She was as hard to figure as a Chinese speedfreak. Well, it probably had nothing to do with Mills's own troubles. He sidled to the refreshment table for a change of poisons— celery juice, for God's sake!