Interface

A television set was going on the coffee table, showing a late-night news program. Her face flashed up on the screen right next to Cozzano's. What happened next was the most gratifying moment she had experienced since the birth of her last child. "Look at the TV," she said.

Mr. Salvador reached Cy Ogle by sky phone the next day. Ogle was on one of the Cozzano campaign planes. Cozzano 1 carried the candidate, his Secret Service detail, staff, and immediate hangers-on; Cozzano 2, was a press plane, and Cozzano 3, which hardly anyone knew about, was a GODS cargo plane. It carried a GODS shipping container, the Eye of Cy. Ogle was on Cozzano 1 when he got the call from Mr. Salvador, who was upset. "Did you see the morning papers?"

"Of course I did," Ogle said.

"It's exactly as I predicted. Eleanor Richmond is a loose ca

"Now, why would you say that?"

"Are you kidding? The first thing she does is go out and get herself arrested."

"Detained. Not arrested."

"And then, immediately, without consulting you, she begins to run her mouth. Yap yap yap, racists here, racists there, lynch mob mentality, all the usual radical Afro-American buzzwords."

"You can't blame her for being pissed."

"I can blame her for being strident. Did you see her on TV this morning? In front of the hotel?"

"Yes."

"Who authorized her to throw a street rally?"

"I don't think she threw it, per se," Ogle said. "It just sort of happened. A bunch of people came up from the South Side and wanted to burn the hotel down. She came out and cooled them off."

"Well, it looked like a rally."

"I know it did."

"And the last thing we need is some kind of outspoken radical black woman ru

"Mr. Salvador," Ogle said, quietly and forbearingly, "Eleanor Richmond, as we speak, is on a plane to Cashmere, Washington, to pick apples with migrant farm workers. Then she's going to go white-water rafting and read a scripted speech about the importance of wild rivers. Then she's going to fly to San Diego to mend fences with those Mexican people who run up the centerline of highways. Then-"

"Okay, I get the picture," Mr. Salvador said.

"So does she, I think," Ogle said.

48

Presidential campaigns had their own calendar: a series of special days, sprinkled throughout the year, determined by certain arcane astrological formulae. Chief among these was Election Day itself, which was the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Another such occasion was Labor Day, which, to most people, marked the end of summer, but which to politicians marked the formal begi

So television viewers across the land, who for the last year had not been able to settle into their recliners without being exposed to a scene of red-white-and-blue balloons and flawlessly coiffed candidates standing in front of blue curtains in hotel ballrooms, were generally befuddled when they checked the evening news on Labor Day and were informed, by solemn anchorpersons, that Tip McLane, the President, and William A. Cozzano had all kicked off their campaigns today.

The shortest point between a camera and a backdrop is a straight line passing through the candidate's head. Who these three candidates were, and how they would run their campaigns, could be inferred from the things they stood in front of.

The President stood in front of an empty Buick plant in Flint, Michigan. This informed the viewing public that he was a serious, taking-care-of-business type who cared about the downtrodden (unlike, for example, Tip McLane) and that he intended to renew America.

Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane stood in a lettuce field in California where he and his parents had once stooped at menial labor; behind him rose a mountain vista. This backdrop told the viewing public that Tip McLane had not forgotten his humble roots, that he was a grass-roots, back-to-basics conservative who was not afraid to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty.

William A. Cozzano and his ru

Boeing had nothing to do with the Cozzano campaign, of course, or so they said. This whole event was being held on municipal property. The presence of a Boeing facility next door was a convenient accident.

Cozzano looked snappy in his homburg, the sort of old-fashioned men's hat that had gone out of fashion when JFK had refused to wear one, and that Cozzano was now single-handedly bringing back into fashion. In the middle of his campaign-kickoff address, a new 767, painted with the logo of Japan Airlines, taxied on to the runway. Its tail fin momentarily came between Cozzano and the glaciated slopes of Rainier, then narrowed into a vertical blade as the plane turned onto the runway, revealing the mountain, illuminated by a peach-colored sunrise. The icy clarity of Rainier was muddled by the heat waves rising from the jet's engines. Then those engines glowed bluish-white, the plane accelerated down the runway, directly toward Rainier, shot into the air, banked into a climbing turn, and headed west, bound for Japan. It happened just as Cozzano was making a point about the trade deficit; and as the roar of the jet engines died away, it was almost possible to hear a dim cacophony of whacking noises from the directions of California and of Flint, Michigan, as Cozzano's competitors and their campaign managers smacked their foreheads in anguish.

Floyd Wayne Vishniak watched this lovely spectacle in a cool, dark hollow set in the folds of the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia. He was not much more than a hundred miles outside of Washington D.C., and yet the location could scarcely have been more remote.

He had been camping out here for a couple of days, just lying low for a time, watching Cozzano on his wristwatch TV-cum-brain-control device, tossing the occasional lure into the stream that ran past his little campsite, draining cans of beer and then shooting them full of big starburst holes with his nimble Fleis­chacker. His truck was stopped on a gravelly floodplain, the floor of a ravine with nearly vertical sides that made a perfect backstop for shooting. He had brought two cases of inexpensive beer with him, going out of his way to obtain cans rather than bottles. You could only shoot a bottle once, but you could shoot a can over and over again until not much was left of it; this was how a man had to pinch his pe

Out here in the Eastern time zone, the sun had already been up for a few hours and so the peach-coloured light on the slopes of Rainier looked strange and faky. Vishniak was sure that the lumbering jetliner and the ice-covered volcano looked great on the kind of thirty-nine-inch Trinitron that rich people would own, but on his postage-stamp wristwatch it didn't really look so hot.