THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 3, EPISODE 6

When snow melted in the Zone eight springs back, Almond O'Neill drove me into the desert in her Jeep. Her hair's preternaturally white now, her face was then; Thale, in the back seat, twisted and turned a Linc action figure from Mod Squad into twilight poses. Infinite regrets, apologies. "It's time we split," she says. "The Federation is so strong... have you ever thought about what it would be like to be someone ordinary under all that power and military regimentation? A teacher or factory worker? Or someone unemployed and useless, since machines would be doing union jobs like building starships and alien slaves would get all the janitor and waitress jobs... they never show what happens to moaxes in the Federation. Everyone's a starship commander, ambassador or, at least, a master criminal! Where are the homeless, the prisoners, shoplifters?" All their magnetism flees erased tapes into screams - the Zone just one scream nobody hears in that Paramount universe.

The Jeep bumps over some rocks and Almond's lip's bitten, she licks at the blood hungrily. "Jeff served Duck's purpose, he gave the Federation something to fight and they gave him space and time to withdraw and consolidate - the Dogmap's like a corporation when world governments are going out of business. It makes its own rules, so it's exciting. Star Trek's one big, wholesome bore. Shoot and maneuver, shoot and escape and on and on and on... even kids who listen to Led Zeppelin are bored. Dogs extends their minds, and Duck's lost his way... he's just smart enough to know he's finished. Like one of those late Roman Emperors..."

"But when you're gone, who'll take custody of the cores?" I ask. There is a real problem here, I suppose it won't mean anything if I tell you, Egg, that certain practices in the Zone were illegal, flagrantly so... even their cover activities suspect, but protected by the reputations of elders. Billows knew about the core sessions, for example, but the real danger was the government's spy, Richard Munk... he was the cheese alone, Dick Nixon's zealot. Fortunately the influence of the Zone was far too gravid for a mere policeman - no matter how many officials Munk warned, how many layers of authority he tried to draw into his crusade, he always wound up being told the same thing: shut up, do your job, trust your superiors. Like Arthur Banks, his obsession would have been almost noble if he hadn't been such a complete asshole.

"I know you know about hot material that has gone missing," Munk waves the wiggity fingler. "Oxides, warm gunk or metal foil? I know some of you have been seeing Jack Moss, reading old books." It's true... astrogeology has confirmed the presence of heavy metals in the Hyades lately, sending silvers scurrying to Ambrose Bierce and yellower obscura. "Billows shields you! Wilson Leonard did too, but I'll find a way around that! I took an oath to protect the Constitution and prevent waste..." his words drop from their mouth like uranium pallets, chords from Grand Funk, "...and where I find waste, I will dispose of it and those who manufacture it. Like pigeons!"

Chip wound up with nowhere to turn except the lefties he despised, the way an officious IBMan pissed off ARPA so royally that they've used us, DEC and... recently... Xerox as vendors ever since. It's like the protocols Asimov wrote for robot ethics... when imperatives conflict, the robot is to act "drunk". When Richard Munk got blocked, he'd go out into the desert and kill birds.

In his first weeks in the zone Munk joylessly plotted a population boom to make the wretched ex-concentration camp a mighty Science City, requisitioning a hundred surplus parking meters (still waiting in a shed to become operational beneath the whirling gaze of Saul Sorken's skeleton army up Confusion Mountain). "Security" the Chipper observed back then, whenever the fastidious Billows threatened an inventory of these rusting legions, "can never be subjugated to mere accounting principles."

Whether T. or Harry waved a core over my infant face is something I cannot remember so, to my knowledge, my initiation... and Jeff's... occurred in Duck Schaefer's trinity of trailers (specifically the third, which he'd remodeled as his Vegas Room with a bar, TV and stereo gear, pool table, one-armed bandits and a couple of terminals jacked straight in to OPIE). The embryonic Kramdens lodged beneath a pigeon-fouled quonset a quarter mile north, tutored by ARPANET and a whole electronic stew of satellites. Picture the Enterprise sold for scrap to the cast of Ocean's Eleven, Egg!... Duck's trailer! Cushions atop wooden boxes of "borrowed" equipment serving as makeshift seats; there are a couple of armchairs and two sofas round a glass coffee table.

"What's to drink?" Goofballs asks, rubbing his hands, a red-locked, dreadlocked mantis. In a special freezer, Duck keeps chipped, dry ice, which he shakes into cocktails to produce cold, smoking steam... a deliberately banal affectation repeated to the point of ritual.

"Feel free to order whatever you like," Duck says behind his bar. "Mi casa es su casa."

"Maybe we ought to be going," Asa worries. "We... I have a lot of work to do by tomorrow."

"De nada!" Duck knows a fair amount of Spanish, speaks it like Pat Boone sings the blues. The night's password is BOWLING - from the episode where Ralph wears a shirt with four bowling pins on the front, four pins and a ball on the back... symbolic vestments, no less significant than all the silk hieroglyphs of the Papacy. Duck took such unnatural pleasure in his many possessions that, I think, his must have been a deprived childhood; if Harry's any example, a lot of depression children indulged their passion for cheap toys after the war. Turing kept an especially large and random collection he brought to Farm Hall, frolicking on the floor with Blackett and several old Nazis... toy trains, staring dolls, stuffed animals. Duck's taste ran to plastic hunting-decoys that never had touched water or felt a retriever's teeth, leatherette bound classics... "I don't have time to read much except the Atomists," he'd say, "but those are real books there, not paneling.

"Our cat," he pointed, proudly, and the creature obligingly stretched out on an open box of camera parts as if it were a Palin cat with little compartments of clockworks and their dogma, certainly no danger to Zone pigeons.

"Lily's Pomeranian!" The little dog stares at his masters' electronic loot like a flatulent Victrola poster.

"I used to download background radiation analysis before NASA terminated its contract," Asa volunteered.

"Ah... so you're the local Voice of God scavenging agent." The year before Jeff and I came to Utah, background radiation had been one of the prime directives in the Zone, and Oscar Van Zuss had been somebody. The universe is a radio, Oscar said, though full of noise instead of news... amongst a million, million white rasps might have been the voice of God, reading Genesis from his newsroom in a chapel of unimaginable heat, at the center of stars. The last serious work Jack Moss had done was mapping gamma rays, thrown off by a suspected cloud of antimatter just above the Milky Way... an Inky Way of dark, dark positrons sucking energy upwards through a sort of dark, galactic tree. As military needs overtook cosmological research, radiotelescopy crabwalked south, mostly to Arizona, while Jack... renaming himself Jesus Manson... ascended up Confusion Mountain.

Duck unpacked several fresh reels of tape. "All you're doing is feeding and breeding, let me just portal this little wire... so! and now this machine will suck the data up while this other, connected to my World 3 project, crunches. Don't worry about time - gets billed to the Club of Rome, and they can well afford it." He checked his watch. "Almost time for Star Trek. Lily!" he snapped, "see if you can raise Almond, I'm in the mood for that ol' time religion." And he'd winked at me.

"Almond... there was a real loose cannon," Jeff licks his lips out on Route 666. "I only kept playing that stupid Star Trek so their learning curve on Dogs would be slower than otherwise..."

"And because you could reach out and touch people," I added, "or pick their pockets, like from Livermore?"

"So hey... memory sandwiches, boogery long, long strings of ones and zeroes. What's the government's to do... prosecute? They'd never do so, no matter what Chipper tells them... they know that if they went openly into court they'd lose. Could the silvers have gotten away with what they were doing otherwise? Sure, they cracked banks and big insurance companies and got Wall Street rich, but all Duck's real hacks were puerile. Wouldn't take on the phone company today, let alone the Fourth Streich!" What an ego! "Any kid can crack systems, turn ones to zeroes in sequence and vice versa," Jeff rattles on, "...silver hacks are still simple smash and grabs... like breaking a window and stealing CBs, right? Now if you really want to milk the user," he grins, "not just once but repeatedly, you have to change the architecture of its prompts. If it's even a simple ASCII pattern that's a couple of hundred changes for just a word, but it can be done. It's getting in, cloaking and floating to the right target that's the problem, that and getting out. There... there is a worthwhile project! Everything else is just shoveling sand... since we went off the gold standard in '33 and silver in '64, nobody knows what's in Fort Knox, nobody... maybe a couple of empty wine bottles, an old pizza box..."

Back in the Zone Almond wonders if a poor computer would react to all of this tampering with something like high blood pressure or even cancer. "Then," Lily allowed, "we'd know that it had finally achieved intelligence."