THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 4, EPISODE 1

If boarded-over Whitehall Street was a starveling cabinet from Caligula's pad, Egg, the Office of Program Innovation, at One World Trade Center, was a motion picture set for some unpleasant, artificial melodrama of the future. Pale government dudes with vague Op Researchly titles. Slane, the Commissioner's man, piles so many pudgy chins atop one another that I cannot help but think of Lewis Carroll's caterpillar. I sniff... office smells like wet undergarments, and... is that a toadstool, instead of a chair, supporting all that larval ichor and humid flesh?

It's up to Mike to make the overtures, probes... Korbel's an old rat in a favorite maze. "I understand Omnicard to be in competition with three competing proposals... two domestic, the other..." Slane tries to find a Jabberwockian euphemism for something untoward like "foreign", gives up, lets thought devolve away in clouds of slime and folds his thick hands 'neath his ninth chin.

"Omnicard's wholly a Lentex enterprise," I clarify. "Quad doesn't enter the picture."

"Of course not. But its protocols might be of proprietary interest? This little..." and he prestidigitates his fingers in a way I saw Orson Welles do for Wally, once, "magnetic devil... that Republic Bank could use in its transactions? Or gasoline people, for their credit cards?"

He stops, as if hoping for expiation. "It's a free market," I'd finally replied.

"Anyone's welcome to Omni peripherals," Michael augmented, "so long as they pay for them."

"Except the Iranians," I make a gesture of understanding, and then check myself. "The government in Iran..."

"They're already doing remarkable things with magnetic card compression," Mike allowed. "Out West, IBM securing the ticketing contract for that whole transit system around San Francisco Bay? Over time, who knows just what might evolve?" Who knows? Back when I lived in San Francisco and commuted to Berkeley, tedious bus rides were my study hall, providing time to think, sort out my feelings about Jeff and Brendan. Especially after Halloween, while Brendan and the newly christened Rambles with their new rhythm guitar... this LA session jobber... went out on their Midwestern tour and Jeff buried himself in theses on Karl Popper and Heisenberg, his studies of the malign INGSOC program series, eye/hand economic forecasting and bioelectricity. (It'll be two more years until that Adam Threat issue where he learns to change the course of electric current with his fingers appears.)

During Days of the Dead celebrations, after Halloween, in San Francisco's Mission District where most Suelans, Mexicans and others such were called to Mass, I lit candles for Carlo's restless soul, another for Jeff's. Bismarck having unrolled its mat, Jeff invited me to sip from the can of DeLanda's diet rain that shadows the hearts of arms traders the world over. If a larval bureaucrat suddenly asked "Who are you?" I think I might have slid down that toadstool's trunk forever. Suddenly I wanted out of this place of symmetrical windows, and quickly.

Slane smiled his slimy little smirk but said nothing more than "Good... good..." bouncing one sausage finger off another. "That's all that we wish to know, for the time being. We have authority that's indistinct, you know, and... between Defense, State and Commerce... must be nimble. Commerce, however, is acquiring focus and Interior... well that is very, very interesting, also..." I realized I'd wandered through the wrong looking glass, this was a Cheshire fat cat before us, already disappearing, tail raised upwards to spray, leaving no smile, just a few hard little pies of nature in the Lentex catbox.

"We are always interested in opportunities," Korbel nodded and, with that unpleasant exchange of opinions done, we made our hasty exit. Manny drove us up to the Russian Tea Room where, it seems, dozens of the newly chartered rag and bagmen loaf, and I told him of the books on OPIE, already figuring that if we gave them reason for continued existence, eternal gratitude would be Slane's response.

Tanned, trim and hungry from a week in Salamanca (where, he said, Popo Canul had slapped the old Archbishop), Manny congratulated me on staying out of prison, and I had to remind him our kind... these days... never wind up in prison.

"We are dealers of information, not dope. If ever we were to really screw up," I say, breathing steam rising from the samovar, "they'd send us to honor camp, they way they did with Richard Munk." The prospect almost reminds me of vacation... Honor Camp... girl scouts and boy waterburglars in khaki tying knots, starting fires with sticks and flints for badges. Tearing wings off ugly bugs.

Mike points out the window, down to the fighting people on the sidewalk. "Street psychos have shorter lifelines than most people. Sooner or later most fixate on someone really dangerous!"