Interface (76 page)

"Shit, man, that was incredible," the man said. "I can't believe you alive. That is a bitchin' car, man!"

He couldn't seem to move his left arm, which was still dangling
on the ground. He reached across the body with his right hand
and stuck the phone out the window. "Would you please dial
911?"

"Sure," the man said. Chase Merriam heard him shuffling the
phone around in his hands, figuring out which way was up, then
he heard the three electronic beeps.

"Hello, Officer," the man said, "I would like to report a car crash
in Fort Washington Park. Down by the river. This car jumped the
guardrail on the highway and now it's upside down. And I think
you better get here real quick, because this dude is stuck inside the
car, and this is a real bad area. It's full of bad criminals man, people
who would cut this guy's heart out for a dollar, and they are all
gathering around the vehicle right now, like jackals around a
wounded beast, waiting for the right moment to strike. Huh? No,
I'm sorry, I won't give you my name. Okay. Bye."

"Thank you," Chase Merriam said.

"No problem,"

"That business about the jackals - that wasn't for real was it?"

"Shit man, where do you think you are? Cape May?" the man
said. "We are, like, just a couple of blocks from the biggest
homeless shelter in New York City. The only ones here are the
people they wouldn't let into the shelter because we're too big and
bad and scary."

"Take whatever you want," Chase Merriam said. "I don't care."

"Okay. We'll begin with the watch," the man said. He picked
up Merriam's arm, which instantly began to hurt, and after a little
bit of fiddling around, figured out how to detach the watch. "What
kind of watch is this, anyway? Looks like some cheap piece of
digital shit."

"It's a long story."

"Well, if a guy was going to look for your wallet-"

"Beats me," Chase Merriam said. "I have to assume it fell out."

The man reached in the window and patted Merriam down,
finding no wallets in the usual places. "Does this thing have a dome
light?" he asked.

"I believe a dome light is standard on the big Mercedes. It's
probably broken."

"Yeah," the man said, crestfallen. "I guess I'll just have to grope
around."

He picked up Merriam's left arm and moved it out of the way, gently and firmly. Then he lay down on his belly and crawled
forward, shoving his arms, head, and shoulders in through the
crumpled window frame, shoving Merriam back against the set, and began to feel around on the ceiling of the car, now the floor.

"Damn!" he said. "It ain't anywhere. You sure you had a
wallet?"

"Positive. Maybe it was thrown out of the car."

"Shit!" the guy said. He crawled into the car even farther, all the
way up to his waist, the bulk of his body pinning Merriam tightly
back. To judge from his breath, it had been a few decades since this
guy had laid hands on dental floss.

The insides of Chase Merriam's eyelids glowed a warm pinkish-
orange color.

"Shit!" the guy said again, and began to thrash around wildly,
trying to extricate himself from the car. In the process he did a little
bit more damage to Chase Merriam, but by now it was all kind of
superfluous. "They never come this fast!"

"Freeze!" shouted a nearby voice that could only belong to a
cop. "You are under arrest!"

After that it was all footsteps. The man ran away. A cop followed
him; they crashed into some brush and then receded into the
distance. And then another set of footsteps approached the overturned car. Slowly, calmly.

"Nice car," the cop said. "Didn't know these babies were four-
wheel-drive."

The debate would be starting in less than five minutes. In addition
to the cavernous exhibition space where most of the Town
Meeting was happening, McCormick Place had its own theater,
which was currently filling up with audience members chosen at
random from Ogle's ten thousand typical Americans.

Eleanor Richmond, sitting in a dressing room backstage, having
her face fixed by a professional makeup artist, was startled to realize
that she wasn't nervous at all.

That was strange because she was about to go on national
television. She had been on national television quite a bit
recently, but this time she was going to engage in verbal combat
with three other people who were better at this kind of things
than she was. Had she become so jaded that she didn't even care
anymore?

Someone knocked on the door and pushed it open before
Eleanor could tell them to get lost. It was Mary Catherine
Cozzano. She slipped quickly into the room, glancing nervously behind her, and leaned back against the door, pushing it shut. She was carrying a bouquet of blue flowers.

"Sorry, I didn't want to be seen coming in here," she said.
"People would say I was playing favorites."

"Did you get those from a boyfriend, or just some political
weasel?" Eleanor said, eyeing the flowers. "They're nice."

"I got them from a florist," Mary Catherine said. "They're for
you."

"Well, how nice! Thank you!"

"I got blue ones, to symbolize the truth," Mary Catherine said,
"because you always tell the truth."

"Well, not always," Eleanor said, "but often enough to give
people the willies."

"You look great," Mary Catherine said. "I hope you knock 'em
dead."

Eleanor didn't figure out the real reason for her lack of nervous
ness until she went out and sat down on the set. She was the last
one to get there. The other debaters were a white man; a somewhat
Anglicized Hispanic man; and a middle-aged woman, blond and
blue-eyed. And all of them were perfect. They were good-looking,
with large, clear features that looked good on television. They were
poised, coiffed, made-up, dressed, prepped. She felt like she had
blundered into the Academy Awards.

She was here as a token. Nothing more. She didn't have a chance
of becoming William A. Cozzano's vice-presidential candidate,
even if she and Mary Catherine did have a mutual admiration
society. That's why she wasn't nervous.

Less than a hundred yards away from the debate set, Cyrus
Rutherford Ogle was settling into the comfy swivel chair at the
center of the Eye of Cy. For purposes of the National Town
Meeting, the GODS container had been driven into the very heart
of McCormick Place and everything else constructed around it; the
platform where Cozzano and his guests stood every night was
directly above his head.

Compliance was good tonight. Ninety-eight of the hundred
screens were lit up. The PIPER 100 had started out as a somewhat
disorganized and unreliable group and, through practice, had now
become steady and disciplined.

That was comforting, because Cy Ogle was scared. The v.p.
thing was the hardest of all. Practically everyone screwed this up.
For the last week, Ogle had not been able to close his eyes at night
without seeing the ghostly faces hanging before him. Nixon,
Agnew, Eagleton, Bush, Quayle, Stockdale.

The best that Ogle could do was round up the four best people
he knew of- that is, the four people who made the best impression
on television - put them up on the tube, side by side, and chart
people's reactions to them. Of course, he would have to bring in a moderator to ask them some questions. What kinds of questions
didn't really matter. Neither did the answers. The important thing
was just to get their faces up on the tube, get their voices working.
The hard part was going to be interpreting the data. Because the
deeper he got into this, the more weird little angles he began to
notice inside the minds of the PIPER 100.

Mae Hunter was sitting not far from the banks of the Hudson
River, applying lipstick and watching the sun go down on New
Jersey. She had discovered the lipstick earlier today, in a
wastebasket in the women's room at the New York Public Library,
and decided that it was a good shade for her. It was a pretty nice
one, and brand new; some fickle shopper must have picked it up in
one of the nice stores on Fifth Avenue, ducked into the library to
touch herself up, and decided that under that light, it didn't look so hot.

Mae Hunter admired that decisiveness, the ability to fire a brand-new lipstick directly into the wastebasket because it was the wrong
shade. Most women would have taken it home and put it on their
dresser and left it there for the next twenty years. But here in New
York, you met all kinds. People had higher standards. They did not tolerate imperfections quite so easily. This lipstick had obviously
been thrown away by a woman of breeding.

She had found a lot of interesting things in the restrooms of the
New York Public Library. They didn't let you bring food into the
building, so the wastebaskets were cleaner. Almost everything that
was in there was paper. Actual merchandise like the lipstick stood
out prominently.

Mae Hunter spent a great deal of time in the library because she
didn't have a job, family, or home to distract her from her real
mission in life, which was to improve her mind. For the past few
months she had been working her way through Gibbon's
Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire.
She was halfway through the fifth of
seven volumes.

Reading was the most important thing in her life. She had found,
over the year and a half since her husband died, that she could handle
sleeping out of doors and dumpster-diving for food. She could
handle the uncertainty and fear. She had been raped twice and she
could even handle that. But the one thing that drove her nuts was
the ignorance. She saw these people all around her, sleeping in the
parks, spare-changing at Port Authority, checking themselves in to
those awful homeless shelters, and none of them made any effort to
improve their minds. You could hardly walk ten paces in New York
City without coming across a discarded copy of
The New York Times,
the world's finest newspaper, but none of these people bothered to
avail themselves. As a former elementary-school teacher, she found
that this really irked her. All that wasted brainpower.

Another thing that annoyed her was people's failure to take care
of themselves, which is why she was being so exquisitely careful to
get this lipstick on correctly. That done, she found a comfortable place and settled in against the base of a small embankment with
some shrubs growing on top of it.

She jumped as a burst of music sounded from nearby. Someone was listening to a transistor radio behind her, back in the bushes.
"Hello?" she said. "Is someone back there?" But there was no
answer.

There was still barely enough light to see. She stood up and peered into the bushes. "Hello?"

The music faded out and was replaced by the sound of an
announcer. "From the National Town Meeting, four contenders
for the vice presidency debate the issues
..."

She was almost positive that no one was back there. She walked
back and forth in front of the bushes, peering in through gaps
between the leaves, trying to see. Something was glowing back
there. It looked like a little TV set. And no one was anywhere near
it. She found a sort of gap through the little thicket where it looked
as though someone had charged through it, flattening down the
branches. She followed it in and picked up the source of the noise
and light: a Dick Tracy watch.

She debated whether to take it. It had obviously been stolen and
dropped here by some criminal who might come back later to look
for it.

She looked at the screen. It was showing a TV program: a debate
featuring four people who wanted to be William Cozzano's vice-
presidential candidate. One by one, the announcer introduced
them as they nodded into the camera.