Distraction

“I don’t want to see you destroyed by ambition, Oscar. I’ve seen what that means now and it’s bad, it’s worse than you imagine. It’s terrible. I just want to see you happy.”

“I can’t afford to be that kind of happy right now.”

Suddenly she laughed. “All right. You’re all right. I’m all right too. We’re going to survive all this. Someday, we’re going to be okay. I still believe that, don’t you? Don’t fret too much. Be good to your-self. All right?”

“All right.”

She hung up. Oscar stood up and stretched. She had just been kidding about Clare. She was just teasing him a little. He’d broken her out of her unhappiness for a little moment; Lorena was still a player, she liked to imagine he was her krewe and she was looking out for him. He’d managed to give her a little moment of diversion. It had been a good idea to make the phone call. He had done a kindly thing for old friends.

Oscar began the liquidation of his fortune. Without Pelicanos to manage his accounts and investments, the time demands were impossi-ble. And, on some deep level, he knew the money was a liability now. He was encouraging thousands of people to abandon conventional economics and adopt a profoundly alien way of life, while he himself remained safely armored. Huey had already made a few barbed com-ments along that line; the fact that Huey was a multimillionaire him-self never hampered his sarcastic public outbursts.

Besides, Oscar wasn’t throwing the money away. He was going to devote it all to the cause of science — until there was no money left.

The resignation and departure of Pelicanos had a profound effect on his krewe. As majordomo, Pelicanos had been a linchpin of the krewe, always the voice of reason when Oscar himself became a little too intense.

Oscar assembled his krewe at the hotel to clear the air and lay matters on the line. Point along the way: he was doubling everyone’s salary. The krewe should consider it hazard pay. They were plunging into unknown territory, at steep odds. But if they won, it would be the grandest political success they had ever seen. He finished his pep talk with a flourish.

Resignations followed immediately. They took departure pay and left his service. Audrey Avizienis left; she was his opposition re-searcher, she was far too skeptical and mean-spirited to stay on under such dubious, half-baked circumstances. Bob Argow also quit. He was a systems administrator, and he made his grievances clear: pushy com-puter-security nonsense from Kevin Hamilton, and hordes of would-be netgods in the Moderators who created code the way they made clothes: handmade, lopsided, and a stitch at a time. Negi Estabrook left as well. There was no point in cooking for such a diminished krewe, and besides, the cuisine of road proles was basically laboratory rat chow. Rebecca Pataki also left. She felt out of place and half-abandoned, and she was homesick for Boston.

This left Oscar with just four diehard hangers-on. Fred Dillen the janitor, Corky Shoeki his roadie and new majordomo, and his secretary and scheduler, Lana Ramachandran. Plus, his image consul-tant, Do

He would ask the NSC for help.

Two days later, help arrived from the National Security Council. The President’s personal spooks had at last sent military reinforcements to the Collaboratory. Military aid took the form of a young Air Force lieutenant colonel from Colorado. He was the very man who had been on the graveyard shift when Oscar had been abducted, and when Kevin had made his frantic phone call. In fact, it was he who had ordered Oscar’s armed rescue effort.

The lieutenant colonel was erect, spit-polished, steely-eyed. He wore a full uniform with scarlet beret. He had brought three vehi-cles with him to Texas. The first contained a squadron of rapid-deployment ground troops, soldiers wearing combat gear of such astonishing weight and complexity that they seemed scarcely able to walk. The second and third trucks contained the lieutenant colonel’s media coverage.

The lieutenant enjoyed a glorious circuit of the Collaboratory, ostensibly to check it out for security purposes, but mostly in order to exhibit himself to the awestruck locals. Oscar tried to make himself useful. He introduced the lieutenant colonel to his local security ex-perts: Kevin, and Captain Burningboy.

During the briefing, Kevin said little — Kevin seemed rather em-barrassed. Burningboy proved most forthcoming. The Moderator cap-tain launched into a detailed and terrifying recitation of the Collaboratory’s strategic plight. Buna was a mere twenty kilometers from the highly porous border with Louisiana. The murky swamps of the Sabine River valley were swarming with vengeful Regulators. Though the armed helicopter attack against the Regulator comman-dos had never become official news, the assault had provoked them to fury.

The threat to Buna was immediate and serious. The Regulators had swarms of airborne drones surveilling the facility around the clock. Huey had given up his plans to co-opt the facility. He wanted it abandoned, ruined, destroyed. The Regulators were more than will-ing to carry out Huey’s aims. They were lethally furious that the Collaboratory was hosting Moderators.

This briefing enthralled the lieutenant colonel. Sickened by his desk job and embarrassed by the sordid cover-up of his glorious at-tack, the man was visibly itching for a fight. He had come fully pre-pared. His all-volunteer squad of forest ninjas were lugging whole arsenals of professional gear: body armor, silenced sniper rifles, human body-odor sniffers, mine-proofed boot soles, night-fighting video hel-mets, even ultraspecial, freeze-dried, self-heating, long-range patrol ra-tions.

The lieutenant colonel, having debriefed the locals on the ground, a

Oscar had some acquaintance with the lieutenant colonel through his NSC co

Oscar nevertheless made his best professional effort.

“Colonel, sir, those flooded woods in the Sabine River valley are tougher than you might expect. We’re not just talking swamps here — we’re basically talking permanent disaster areas. There’s been a lot of severe flooding in the Sabine since the rain patterns changed, and a lot of the local farmland has gone back to wilderness. That’s not the forest primeval out there. Those are deserted, toxic locales of no eco-nomic value, where all the decent lumber is long gone and there are poisonous weeds and bushes half the size of trees. It would be a mis-take to underestimate those Regulators when they’re on their native ground. Those Cajun nomads are not just native hunters and fishers and swamp dwellers; they’re also very big on sylvan audio surveil-lance.”

It was, of course, of no use. The lieutenant colonel, and his men, and his impressionable, airborne war correspondents, left on dawn patrol the next morning. Not a single one of them was ever seen again.