Distraction

Defeat in the game, he could understand. Oscar could easily imagine himself, for instance, swept up in a major political scandal. Crapped out. Busted. Cast into the wilderness. Broken from the ranks. Disgraced. Shu

But he didn’t want to be shot. So Oscar gave up working on the building project. It was a sad sacrifice, because he truly enjoyed the process, and the many glorious opportunities it offered for shattering the preconceptions of backward East Texans. But it tired him to envi-sion the eager and curious crowds as a miasma of enemies. Where were the crosshairs centered? Constant morbid speculation on the sub-ject of murder was enough to convince Oscar that he himself would have made an excellent assassin — clever, patient, disciplined, resolute, and sleepless. This painful discovery rather harmed his self-image.

He warned his krewe of the developments. Heartwarmingly, they seemed far more worried about his safety than he was himself.

He retreated back inside the Collaboratory, where he knew he was much more secure. In the event of any violent crime, Col-laboratory security would flip a switch on their Escaped Animal Vec-tor alarms, and every orifice in the dome would lock as tight as a bank vault.

Oscar was much safer under glass — but he could feel himself curtailed, under pressure, his life delimited by unseen hands. However, he still had one major field of counterattack. Oscar dived aggressively into his laptop. He, Pelicanos, Bob Argow, and Audrey Avizienis had all been collaborating on the chams of evidence.

Senator Dougal and his Texan/Cajun mafia of pork-devouring good old boys had been very dutiful at first. Their relatively modest graft vanished at once, slipping methodically over Texas state lines into the vast money laundries of the Louisiana casinos. The funds oozed back later as generous campaign contributions and unexplained second homes in the names of wives and nephews.

But the years had gone on, and the country’s financial situation had become stormy and chaotic. With hyperinflation raging and ma-jor industries vanishing like pricked balloons, it was hard to keep up pretenses. Covering their tracks had become boring and tiresome. The Senator’s patronage of the Collaboratory was staunch and tireless, and the long-honored causes of advancing science and sheltering endan-gered species still gave most Americans a warm, generous, deeply uncritical feeling. The Collaboratory’s work struggled on — while the rot crept on in its shadow, spreading into parts scams, bid rigging, a minor galaxy of kickbacks and hush money. There was featherbedding on jobs, with small-time political allies slotted into dull yet lucrative posts, such as parking and plumbing and laundry. Embezzlement was like alcoholism. It was very hard to step back, and if no one ever called you out on it, then the little red veins began to show.

Oscar felt he was making excellent progress. His options for ac-tion were multiplying steadily.

Then the first homicidal lunatic attacked.

With this occurrence, Oscar was approached by Collaboratory security. Security took the form of a middle-aged female officer, who belonged to a tiny federal police agency known as the “Buna National Collaboratory Security Authority.” This woman informed Oscar that a man had just arrived from Muskogee, Oklahoma, banging fruitlessly at the southern airlock and brandishing a foil-wrapped cardboard box that he insisted was a “Super Reflexo-Grenade.”

Oscar visited the suspect in his cell. His would-be assassin was disheveled and wretched, utterly lost, with the awful cosmic disloca-tion of the seriously mentally ill. Oscar felt a sudden unexpected pang of terrible pity. It was very clear to him that this man had no focused malice. The poor wretch had simply been hammered into his clumsy evildoing through a ceaseless wicked pelting of deceptive net-based spam. Oscar found himself so shocked by this that he blurted out his instinctive wish that the man might be set free.

The local cops were wisely having none of that, however. They had called the Secret Service office in Austin. Special agents would be arriving presently to thoroughly interrogate Mr. Spencer, and dis-creetly take him elsewhere.

The very next day, another lethal crank showed up. This gen-tleman, Mr. Bell, was cleverer. He had attempted to hide himself in-side a truck shipment of electrical transformers. The truck driver had noticed the lunatic darting out from beneath a tarp, and had called security. A frantic chase ensued, and the stowaway was finally found burrowing desperately into a tussock of rare marsh grass, still gamely clutching a homemade black-powder pistol.

The advent of the third man, Mr. Anderson, was the worst by far. When caught lurking inside a dumpster, Anderson screamed loudly about flying saucers and the fate of the Confederacy, while slashing at his arms with a razor. This bloodshed was very shocking, and it made Oscar’s position difficult.

It was clear that he needed a safe house. And the safest area inside the Collaboratory was, of course, the Hot Zone.

The interior of the Hot Zone was rather less impressive than its towering china-white shell. The Zone was a very odd environment, since every item inside the structure had been designed to withstand high-pressure cleansing with superheated steam. The interior decor consisted of poreless plastics, acid-resistant white ceramic benchtops, bent-tubing metal chairs, and grainy nonslip floors. The Hot Zone was simultaneously deeply strange and profoundly mundane. After all, it wasn’t a fairyland or a spacecraft, it was simply a set of facilities where people carried out certain highly specific activities under closely defined and extremely clean circumstances. People had been working in the place for fifteen years.

Inside the dressing room-cum-airlock, Oscar was required to shed his street clothes. He outfitted himself in a disposable paper labcoat, gloves, a bouffant cap, a mask, and sockless ankle-wrapping clean-room booties. Greta Pe

Dr. Pe

Oscar was met by Greta’s krewe majordomo, Dr. Albert Gaz-zaniga. Gazzaniga was the exemplar of what Oscar had come to recog-nize as “the Collaboratory look,” intense and yet strangely diffuse, like a racquetball player in Lotusland. Gazzaniga spent his working life in clean-room gear, and relaxed outside in rotting sneakers and khaki shorts. Gazzaniga had an eager, honest, backpack-wearing look about him. He was one of the few people in the Collaboratory who identi-fied himself as a Federal Democrat. Most politically active Col-laboratory people tended to be tedious, fuzzy Left Tradition Bloc types, party members of the Social Democrats or the Communists. It was rare to find one with enough grit and energy to take a solidly Reformist stance.

“So, what’s become of Dr. Pe

“Oh, you mustn’t be offended, but she’s ru

“That’s all right. I quite understand.”

“It’s not that she doesn’t take you seriously, you know. She’s very sympathetic to your situation. We’ve had troubles of our own with extremists. Animal rights people, vivisection nuts… I know we scientists lead very sheltered lives compared to you politicians, but we’re not entirely out-of-it here.”