THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 10, EPISODE 5

Korbel is getting sloppy in his middle age. He used to snicker at silvers in silly Star Trek polyester uniforms, mocking their hand signals and Jeff... shivering with junk but still proud of his Dogs and Dominoes scores... I instinctively scan all the potted palms in Nestor's lobby for the shadow of Flagler oozing up from the tiles.

"There's a 98% take Managua's flatlined by the third round," Mike boasts to Bert and Kara Nan, "even money on other Nic targets, probably Leon first, then Granada. The Nics were clever or, more likely, just plain lucky... psyops downgrade strike percentages by up to ten points when a Third World city has a European name."

"Ah..." Humberto says, "so the safest place in South America would be... Jonestown, Guyana."

"Bingo!" Korbel shoots back. "Cuba, of course, is toast... probably during the second exchange, maybe even a pre-emptive shot at Havana when the first batch of flying monkeys swarm out. The Canal?" He smiles. "Once the Russians hit it, our scenario is to hit again so nobody can use it, hammer and anvil. Ask the Lebanese! Devastation - as Herman Kahn, roasting in peace, puts it. Anyway Panama's off the frame, unless you have a freak storm blowing up from the Mosquito Gulf, Guatemala's the problem."

"Not Mexico?" Berto's fingers twitch, I know he wants to be writing this down.

"Maybe Evie can get you a meeting with Nick." Tess' full name is Nikolai Olganov Tessorovich... Bud's brother's profile suggests the Evil Empire's Dogmaster has Nestorian sympathies. The sect of Prester John, that bad dude east of the Caucasus who was to the Orthodox about what Orthodox are to "real Christians" (as Harry called them).

"I should begotten a commission from you war profiteers who would, without Nikolai, be littlest ants of capital," Tess complained Monday. "I disadequately compensate by my government, who suspect these games liturgical, zwechlos aber doch sinnvoll". 'Pointless but significant', a Platonic buzzphrase; Tess seems more comfortable with Greek, German and French than English. His precarious polyglottolaling's occasionally useful... ridiculing the new line of East German computers, Mabus, for example: "like Trabants, all things plastic and catching fire". He observes that the term's from Nostradamus and a few melodramatic films in the Expressionist vein, translating to "Magus... magician and Mab... fool". "So where begin search for Antichrist but here... perhaps in Hawaii shirt! Drinking the rum!"

I listen to Korbel tease Tess, extract inferences... the Russians don't seem overly demoralized at what Ralph and Alice, on the level of COLONADE, call a disastrous defeat. Tess is remarkably chipper. "We are accustomed to extreme preparings. Your Attorney General talks Civil Defense, huge tunnels full of food, rifles, opium for wounded. How will you stop your junkies, your Kukla Klan from take everything! Your bunkers in Blue Ridge for men important without room for family, unless the Americans are inhumane, as Suslov said, your Senators become brawling at the gates, tearing off trousers of the weakest. Xaoc!" he'd added. Chaos!

Mike, though... he says General Johnny thinks the Soviets want a strong Mexico, they foresee armies of the cockroach people swarming over to take back properties surrendered in the Texas War... and Hollywood too. "Da!" Tess agrees, "Da! there will be tomato and lettuce pickers living in your Brevity's hill, all big producers push the lawnmowers, your Farrah Fawcett doing launderers... certainly!" So Mike thinks Johnny wouldn't be above laying down some protective cover, but along the northern frontier... Tijuana, Mexicali, Juarez, maybe as far south as Monterrey. There's even said to be an acronym floating about RAND... Tangential Alien Containment Operations, TACO... nobody's ever weaned Cubeville's boys off their juvenile racist and sexist pranks.

Brian Palin has the right toys for Boy's Town... California growers have paid him advances to develop what they call Agribots (Brian calls them Mexibots). "We're nearing beta test on lettuce but there are still all kinds of bugs with soft stuff. Citrus mainly, tomatoes... hard to gentle down big steel fingers. Give them specs on titanium, let alone beryllium, they gag! I think our apps are limited until there's more progress in plastics..."

"So Mexico isn't the problem. Panama... forget it!" Korbel reflects, a voice like rat shrapnel... "it's our Guat bases that they know about, and those in Honduras they suspect - that's where the fallout comes from if matters go to a third or fourth counterstrike."

"So do we live or die?" Kara hangs it out.

"With Guatemala but without Honduras," Mike says, scribbling on a napkin, "Costazul's almost at the center of a perfect triangle... the Guats, Cuba and Nicaragua. It would get dirty, but the infrastructure holds, such as it is. Add Honduras... the Sysops figure that goes during the fourth round, things get a little hotter; by the fifth round of course, you figure everybody dumps off what's left, Costazul just as good as anyplace. Might come down to some Rear Admiral on a sub, nobody left to issue orders? Say he came down here with Johnny, took a noseful of La Grua, lost his dinner and developed a personal grudge..."

"So, how far do these games proceed," Kara continues. Berto looks sly, pretending patriotic concern... letting his woman do the work.

"That," smiles Mike, "is the really classified part within the ordinary classified. Evie could tell you, all those Utah scenarios have to be in the Kramdens, somewhere? But don't worry, drink up! All of us here get dead no matter what exchange it comes on... if we hang here!"

"Why?" Berto has to ask when Kara doesn't.

"Because Cuba is going to be so fucking annihilated that a wall of water seventy meters high is going to radiate away from it, crossing the straits at maybe six hundred kilometers an hour. On the coast, here, it'll be like getting hit with a million-car freight train full of hot, dirty water. Smashed, then drowned. But that's not Armageddon, just status quo... interior Costazul should pull through, although I guess it have to operate out of... help me Evie, Agustin? San Marco?"

"I hate Agustin," Berto glowers. "It is like second cities all over the world... inferiority, with a veneer of insolence. I would rather be drowned than live in Agustin!"

Jeff was in decline's full flower when Mike and the others first began running numbers in the Zone, diverting loose coinage from Fortune's five hundred to Federation coffers. My old man, having cut himself out of all that, grimly applied his genius to disabling burglar alarms, instead, the better to strip ski chalets in the Wasatch. That's another of my reasons for squashing Bud's pleas to buy a condo in New Hampshire or Vermont... Mrs. and Mister Claus throwing another tired, overworked elf on the fire. Local Jeffs slithering from trailers, prowling like mountain Mansons on snowshoes, squinting through snow... bad clown on white velvet, face all shotgun, glowing yellow... groin a dead bulb under the table.

Besides, we only got out of the City twice last winter, once before Aeon burned, once after. All the snow that hadn't fallen in New York banked up north... fields white, beckoning as acres of pharmaceutical morphine, silent as Paul's head after Ventura's ballet of the scalpels. No Monty Python movies in the snow, only traffic lights flashing: warning! warning! off chalet satellite dishes, hissing, sputtering... and ski lifts chugging up the slopes with their cargo of brightly colored puffballs.

Humberto motions for another round of drinks. Korbel just won't shut up... I wonder where Bobby finds his waiters. These don't look Suelan, too dark, but they don't have British accents either... Cubans maybe?

What would any self-respecting Cuban do, suspecting the fate being brewed for him by the enemy ninety miles northwest, with the cooperation of their Russian allies?

"So," Berto meditates, "it's likely that Costazul would pull through, except for the coast."

"That's a reasonable scenario," is as far as Mike will be taken. "Of course you have all those Guats and Nicas streaming across the border, all mutated and burned, glowing like Roman candles."

"We have faced terror before," Kara Nan says simply, "...we have learned the merciful policy is sometimes the strict one."

"Well," Mike replies, "...given that sort of spirit, I could foresee Costazul becoming a postwar center of reconstruction. Nonalignment is not without its dividends. Unless, of course, in a protracted struggle some pissed-off mole remembers La Grua and these flies, decides to vent a little manhole steam..."

"This is sadly true," Humberto Nan said, rising. "A spider poses little threat to man, the cucaracha even less... but we all feel compelled to step upon them. And now - I have work to attend to, I suspect we may see one other soon." To me, he winks, "I do hope your Mr. Wendell and Mr. Leonard remain where they belong... they are still held in disfavor over the ceviche among certain influential quarters. Good afternoon."

He tugs at his intellectual's glasses in their thick, black frames, staring out the window with a puzzled frown... "that dog under the mailbox?" he finally asks. "Is it sleeping, or dead?"