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

"Paul's a chameleon," I explain as Nikolai Olganov Tessorovich sipped his fourth orange refresca Tuesday morning. If I were a visiting Russian on an expense account... however slim... I'd load up on real juice but... this is the Soviet Dogteam getting its ass kicked here; I see Tess is puzzled, but doesn't want to admit it... his English is good enough to recognize properties of lizards but still unable to discriminate. "One that changes its color, imitating whatever and whomever it is around..."

"Ah," Tess replies, "Xamaleon!"

"Da... da..." Tess understands. "The nature of all children these days... spoiled rotten as sausages. And the Chinese! When I was boy..." and he pantomimes a switch being vigorously applied across young backs.

"You think you know what Harry Stone brought to Berlin!" Tess scolds, waving a finger, "...the Hewlett Packards stolen languages from IBM and so what other could we do than take from Packard and adapt these instrument to Socialist specifications? You see, all canonical structures of control bureaucratized not... as the revisionists have one to think... as emergency act against the Hitler, but under Lenin's Eighty Party Congress, 1919. Yes... owing to infantilism of masses, Lenin himself make every process... scientific, literary to be spell out in detail. Clean room... da! Your thinking machines... they think! Ours are restrict to political branchings, if-then-else, while-do, repeat-until-assert... programs of elegance, before the Packards, like automobiles no longer make... the Daimler-Dagger, Dusenberg...

"Wilson Leonard, I hear, drove Dusenberg well into Cold War, after Wilson Senior passed away. Choozhpak family... not, of course, fare so well in Socialist environment. That boy..." and Tess shook his shaggy, buffalo-head in wonder, or dismay... "we catch trying to break into Semipalatinsk through machinery only because young... greedy is the curiosity of young persons?" And he'd repeated the switching motion. "They want to play game, hooligan children, don't know what are risking? I trust Wilson Leonard to have disciplined him. Tell me he not one of those nuclear protesters... if there was reason behind what he does, would go very badly, very badly for all!"