THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 7, EPISODE 6

By the last time T. was driven into the city, a dead quiet Sunday two years back, he'd point to streets, whispering names of people he had known here, things that had happened there. His face innocent, upturned, finally harmless as a bunny as we'd shot up the empty executive elevator, up to the 53rd floor, corner office. T. needed a custom-crafted keyboard to accommodate his atrophied wrist muscles now... entering password HARDYHAR and bus route ENTKRAMS, he'd then tapped in QJEWEL, a prompt, chuckled: "When you in the Zone wrote code, so many passwords were in ordinary language any high school dropout could have blundered into LULU, even SPIFFY without the Q-defaults and fingerprint recognition. Ready now, fingers wiped clean..."

The second function key on T's specially prepared keyboard with its clear, crystal keys had begun to glow, a pulsing azure... he placed his left index finger on the key and with his right tapped out <TRANSFER, PASS FUNCTION>...

"I know you're cleared to four levels," he'd said, "but protocol can be rather stubborn." He tapped out... <OATMEAL>

I put my own finger to Function-2, a little hum and then the monitor glowed <CONFIRMED>.

OATMEAL, second Kramden level, is a cache of technical information... specs and test results, classified documents... so named, of course, after Ralph's Oatmeal Test (which was, of course, so funny because it was such a massive failure). Lentex has over a thousand OATMEAL-cleared users, each with fingerprints scanned into memory.

Function 3 begins glowing and T. repeats <TRANSFER, PASS FUNCTION... FORTUNE>. Fortune was the parrot left to Ralph by a rich old lady; its databanks bulge with financial information... secret bank accounts and transactions, corporate profiles... again, about a thousand users are FORTUNE cleared.

Only half that number are able to enter the fourth level... BRIOSCHE (the architect or, rather, condemnor of Ed Norton's beloved Parisian sewers)... BRIOSCHE mostly replicates OATMEAL and FORTUNE, but internationally.

"Now," T. says, flexing his hands, "to business."

"Actually," I confess, "I've already penetrated LULU. Since Utah..."

LULU, Ed's missing pooch, is gatekeeper to the Dogmap.

"Well I'm not particularly surprised. You people built this system, I'd be disappointed if you didn't have a way to use it. Very well... let's make this official. You're not going to tell me you also have a door into SPIFFY?"

"No," I say, holding the rest on my tongue, John Robinstett almost certainly has access... and then there's Jeff...

SPIFFY controls what might be called the Kramdens' black functions; techniques for eavesdropping, espionage... sabotage even, lots of grief for Tess and his team rise out from SPIFFY. T. rests his finger on the sixth function key, enters <SPIFFY, TRANSFER>, the key glows bluely, I lay my own finger on it, the screen replies <SPIFFY CONFIRMED - USER 107>.

"Next!" T. says cheerfully, F-7 has begun to glow. He enters <COLONADE, TRANSFER>, pecking carefully. Initiation into lower levels of the Kramden dungeon pass only from user to user, like certain diseases.

COLONADE is the first of the three bottommost layers... from the Colonnade Room of the 39th and last Honeymooner episode where the elite meet to eat mystery treats. I'm 42nd known initiate into COLONADE (which can access SPIFFY or any lesser levels and identify users). Here bus drivers are weeded out from traffic managers.

"Unfortunately, you're not quite ready to go any lower," T. smiles, rather sadly. "A little time, some exploration... when you're familiar with your new capacities you'll probably figure out the way on your own." My mistake for not pressing the issue...

Something scuttled behind the door, T. let his breath out. "Only a lawyer." T. used to insulate himself with attorneys like vagrants accumulated layers of soiled old coats and sweaters to survive the winter... trouble is - the more old clothes, more unknown wildlife. Bob Parsonage still working on getting these "white collar parasites", as he calls them, out of Dodge.

"They befuddle us with language and charge by the syllable," Bob says, and maybe he's correct. Louis told me lawyers shouldn't be paid for their wit, they're paid for their connections and, until the amorphity of the administration congeals... the Defense Secretary and Attorney General at each other's throat, now, like a pair of wild dogs in a Salamancan alley... any legal beagle with a nose for drainpipes down which trickle the lotions of rebel angels is going to be allowed to stick around. It runs in cycles - military cutbacks mean a glut of engineers... Hatefulness is more than a password - he's our market.

But no sooner had the idol of "Juke Girl" and "Hellcats of the Navy" put feet up on the Oval Office desk then Max 27 crashed. The Jersey of Lentex labs isn't out in the country around Princeton (like Ma Bell's seraglios with their fountains, bronzes, even a golf course); we're a tumbledown old complex of lofts and abandoned shoe and spice warehouses with big, creaky elevators and a view of the plant where the sewage of Jersey City, Hoboken and Newark gets stirred before being dumped into the Hudson.

From the roof Fernando Valenzuela, maybe, could hit Gallatin with a dead rat on a windy afternoon.

The top floor of our most decrepit building has Maxguts strewn round like Roman entrails - wires and chips lying in Druid circles on the splintery, old paint-spattered floors. Also greasy Blimpie wrappings, greasier issues of Punisher and Adam Threat. Only a few scrapings of wire and melted chips remain of most of the twenty seven failed Maxob... 27's half-disassembled and the frame remains from 26. The Temple's influence over Defense means no more split-brained, unpredictable supers... I think the Dogmap grew as it did because Templars knew an accommodation with the random would be necessary to jump valence between generations. (I also think T. greased my path to the Lentex board for the same reason.) Max will bring back together what was split asunder... digital, but with a ghost of Alice to be factored, if Max chooses. Two steps of speed forward, a little contingency-planning lost... speed is of Washington's essence to compete with the Japanese, that's why the unofficial designation of the Kid's a "Maxima-Seeking Engine". A more accurate name might have been derived from famous parricides... Cronus or Oedipus. Max has burn-in scheduled for '84... by which time marketing will surely contrive sleek Jaguar or Sportsman-like nomenclature, marketed by Indiana Jones knockoffs with blonde, remorseless babes in underwear promising glimpses of their pearly gates to convention remorae. Like baseball and Ballantine, as Neil Lamont is wont to say.

28 will be, alas, a wicked child... a Linda Blair of a machine. Santa wouldn't bring it an ant farm for Christmas... maybe a little desert of scorpions! Or, a bowl of coal. Cursing and jabbing with his pencil flashlight is Mike's section head, a sleek, hairless fellow... Frank Lamb... who predates me at Lentex by more than a decade. While Jeff and I were in the Zone he was T's headhunter, famous for stinging dismissals of applicants with long hair. I think he had Jobs escorted out by security, him or Wozniak... or both? Geneva likens him to one of those German villains in low-budget World War II movies, behind his back I've heard Lamb called "Klink" after the Colonel in "Hogan's Heroes", an inexplicable American comedy about Nazi concentration camps... more popular, even, than F-Troop!

Cakewalking round the periphery of damage is Bob DeWeest out of Pretoria; Frank probes long, marsupial fingers into the debris while, even further out Manny circles Max 28 widdershins to Oom Bob. Parody lurks here, polluted solar systems or one of those bad atoms in which rare particles haven't quite burned off yet. A roach lifts its little paws over the edge of a box of dried, low-cal pizza, regarding our whole stratum quizzically.

"The thing runs fine for an hour or so, then goes south. Comes and goes, comes and goes... no... I've kept notes, there's no pattern." Frank leads me with his eyes to a bulging looseleaf of schematics on a wooden bench. "Everything checks out, nothing works."

I am left lacking reply... these hippies are imponderable as Costazuelan politics; a Confusion Mountain copita of babel, half full. I ask Ernie what's suspended from the chandelier and he glares up at the wreath and spits "Crap! Nothing but crap. The same you get in La Prensa every day for eighty five centavos."

"But not for long," Kara Nan threatens.

"Why?" The Defense Minister's thick lower lip curls like a particularly brutal funeral god. "Are you finally going out of business?"

"By the end of July," says Bert, "we're raising our price to a full peso per issue. Three on Sundays. Why not?" he shrugs. "Everything else is going up under progressive government... not only petrol but bread, paper... everything, we have no choice."

Geneva and Kara simultaneously exhale dragons of smoke. "I think we ought to leave," I say, "Mike is supposed to meet me... shit, it's almost seven!"

"If you're going back towards the Malecon, let me give you a lift," Humberto'd volunteered. Geneva hesitated...

"Evie, do you know somewhere I can wash this death and oil stench out of my hair?" She looks pityingly from me to Kara Nan. "I mean... it's a wonderful country, maybe you've just had a run of bad luck, but ever since I've been here I just feel unclean all over... and tonight I want to sparkle."

"Certainly," said Kara, snatching up a Delfinas menu and removing a gold pen from her purse. "I know just the place... tell them I said so, and you won't be made to wait." As if any salon in the tourist zone's overflowing with customers!

"Can I come too? See you later, then," Eileen calls back. "Happy birthday, Evie, happy... uh... surprise..."

"Surprise? Surprise..." I snarl under my breath, going out to wait under the awning for Humberto Nan to bring round the old Thunderbird he drives, pink as his politics... mutable as the old pastel neighborhoods adjacent to the Malecon whose color changes with light... whiter under Arcilla's scorching sun, redder under the vague moon of Zamora and Juventud.

The Thunderbird purrs like a fat old cat of trial and error, contemplating rats in a maze whose top he's managed to pry off. "Did I tell you I interviewed Captain Engdahl in jail?"

"I didn't read or hear of it." Axel Engdahl, Captain of the KM, is a Norwegian and famous drunk... sole cause of the reefing, breakup and resultant oil spill, according to Junior's attorneys, now locked in a three way tussle with Tom Wendell and the British insurance companies.

"I haven't printed it... yet. He has a theory."

"Oh?" I ask.

"He thinks that indians on the coast... we all know who, they don't want anything to do with oily business or any sort of progress... doused Puerto Mugoso's lighthouse and set bonfires on the Cape to draw him towards the rocks."

"That's his theory?"

"It is now!" said the publisher. "If you were in his place with half a liter of aquavit in your bloodstream, wouldn't you jump at the likeliest alibi?"