1. The Chairman

Block looked up and down 48th Street. The afternoon was warm, but he still felt comfortable in his casual dress, cotton slacks, short sleeve shirt open at the neck, a gold chain with a medallion hanging on his bleached chest hairs. The medallion was a capital "H" with the top and bottom closed in. A compilation of U.L.P., it meant nothing to the casual observer, the average citizen, but it meant plenty to those in the know.

He looked at his watch, an unobtrusive flat gold ring with a white face and gold hands.

Twenty-five minutes. Time for a little diversion.

He walked past the doormen and into the lobby. Glass caged ele-vators bobbed up and down on unobtrusive tracks outlined in carny lights a hundred stories up in the vast cavern of the lobby.

No accounting where The Chairman would turn up, but then, be-ing The Chairman, he could turn up anywhere he wanted.

Block navigated around the elevator bases, ponds with foot long gold fish swimming in crystal clear water, to the cashier's desk.

"4044," he said as the young man looked up.

Block handed him a plastic card with the same symbol as the medallion that hung around his neck.

The clerk ran it across an interface and the screen recorded:

UNIVERSAL LAISE PASSER X1X ALL REQUESTS

"Here's the pass to 4044," he said quizzically. "It's occupied. Can I do anything for you?"

"Yes. Give me an elevator key."

"Certainly." He reached under the counter and handed over a metal key.

"Thanks." He flipped the key in his hand, feeling the unfamiliar metalness of it. The Chairman had arrived, but he would let him wait a few minutes. The meeting still had fifteen minutes to the call time. It wasn't really necessary to be early or late. He had time to play a little.

He walked over to the nearest elevator and watched it descend. Two ladies came up beside him. He smiled at them. The elevator door opened. A stunning blond started out the opened door, looked at him through narrowing eyes, then smoothly moved past him. He stepped in, turned to the ladies, held up his hand palm out and apolo-gized.

"Sorry. We've had reports that the cables are slipping."

"Oh, my," one replied, turning away as the door closed. He switched the car to key operation.

As long as Block could remember, he had an adverse reaction to heights. It wasn't so bad as a kid, although he could remember one time on the observation deck of the old World Trade Center being unable to get closer than two feet to the edge even though there was only a mental edge, the deck being encased in concrete and glass allowing no possibility of falling.

The feeling had grown as he had grown. He knew that it was a common problem. Certain people had reactions to height, others to open spaces, still others to closed spaces.

Even with this knowledge, he could never quite come to terms with his reaction to heights. For one thing, being at heights that could cause damage if he were to fall led him to contemplate damage he had no desire to experience. He could not help thinking: What would happen if he jumped? He would go soaring into space. What would he think about as he fell? What would it feel like to go splat onto the ground? What if he caught a flagpole and miraculously es-caped, falling onto the roof a car?

All through his teens, he was haunted by these thoughts every time he got close to an edge. It wasn't until he reached his twenties that he became physically affected. Going close to the edge actually sent blind fear into his gut, paralyzing his legs. He had tried to climb a broadcast antenna on his twenty-first birthday and froze thirty feet up. He couldn't go up and he couldn't come down.

He couldn't remember how he got out of that and very little memory of coming back later, drunk, and climbing all the way to the top, defying himself to fall.

He eventually learned that it wasn't a fear you conquered. It was a fear you ignored. But he liked to play with it every chance he got and the glass enclosed elevator with its cable support and in-visible guide path was a great playpen. As it came to a rest a thou-sand feet above the floor of the lobby, he could put his head next to the glass and look almost straight down. He could feel the dizziness, the weakness in his legs and, as he turned the key to allow the cab to start its descent, the hollowness in the pit of his stomach as his heart started to beat faster.

The car didn't speed up as it dropped, but the spacing of the bal-conies as they sped past gave the illusion that it did and he could visualize himself momentarily in free fall. As he passed through the well guides of the lower floors, he could imagine the splat.

Invigorating!

He turned the key and began the ascent again to give it another go.

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The Chairman looked out the panoramic window over the Man-hattan skyline. On his left, the pyramid of the Worldwide Tower poked beneath the glass-encased balcony.

He should feel restive. He had just enjoyed an interesting expe-rience, something a man of his age and resources always cherished. But he didn't think he would want to repeat it.

Mary Renon had not been a particularly pretty young woman. She was a little thin and had an easily correctable bump on her nose.

When she walked, however, she walked with a style that pulled her out of her surroundings. She was noticeable a block away, in a crowd of beauties, all of them six inches taller.

She had been working on his room detail for several months.

The room detail was necessary to secure the hotel rooms The Chairman used in his peripatetic lifestyle. As the head of operations involved in consolidating the nationalities of the world into The Rep-resentative World Government, he was the Commander in Chief in a war for empire that most people were unaware was being fought and those who did, didn't know the generals involved, or even the sides, which changed from day to day, opportunity to opportunity.

As the supreme commander, he figured that it was much better to be a moving target than a sitting target for the multitude of na-tionalistic terrorist organizations that seemed to spring up like dandelions in all parts of the world.

As he moved from city to city and hotel to hotel, he dispatched his sharpest agents to secure the best rooms, seal them off, ensure that he had alternate arrival and departure routes and perform the computer operations that would ensure his safe and unhindered movements. He naturally chose agents from American Operations to staff the detail and obtaining a job on the detail would usually en-sure the agent's subsequent rise in The Chairman's service.

The AO bureaucracy wasn't blind to the fact that an attractive agent on the detail might further careers other than the attractive agent's. Mary, while not the most attractive agent, had style, even class, and had actively campaigned for the detail.

The Chairman went over to the suite's conversation alcove, sat in one of the easy chairs and added the name Renon to the list of items he wanted to cover with Block.

Mary hadn't been surprised when he suggested that she hold back after seeing him up to the room. He was the one who was sur-prised when she readily went down on him and then, through some use of her hand, sort of like a cock ring, worked him up into such a pitch that he was ready to blast the side of the building down while at the same time keeping him from doing so.

Every time that he reached a point he thought he couldn't stand it anymore, she had released the pressure on his tube and allowed a small amount of relief to seep through, starting a climax, but had then immediately closed it off, causing him to start the process all over again in a seemingly endless cycle.

How in hell, he wondered, had she done it, and for almost two hours. He was too old to go through that again but he'd have to ask some of the medical experts how it was anatomically possible.

He shook his head to clear it of the memories. Incredible. That gal had a future.

He reviewed his list. Suffocation, British restiveness, funds disappearance, he underlined funds disappearance, and added Renon. Payment where payment due.

"Ah, Ronald!" He pushed himself up from the chair as the door opened and Block walked in. Block was six foot-four, sandy-haired with natural curls worn neck length, an unobtrusive gold ring pinned to his left ear lobe. For two hundred pounds, he was deceptively slim and moved with catlike preciseness.

He came over and shook The Chairman's hand in a friendly rather than perfunctory manner, motioning The Chairman to stay seated.

Block knew that The Chairman, alone as he liked to appear, was, like himself, never alone. They were both always plugged into the Iridium Communications System. Their locations were always plotted on the world grid at The Representative World Center lo-cated a mile below the Hudson River north of Manhattan. They were always in communication with the Center and anybody else in com-munication with the Center in a security based star configuration.

But The Chairman, unlike Block, was always bailable no matter what his location. If his heart so much as skipped a beat, he would have assistance of whatever type necessary instantly, as though appearing out of thin air.

The universe would not act kindly to anyone raising a finger against The Chairman. As disarming and harmless as he success-fully appeared to be, his power was always present.

The Chairman, having long since given up on his personal pri-vacy, even freedom, in favor of the appearance of freedom and the pretense of privacy, admired Block's freedom of movement. Block could go anywhere, do anything and get away with it.

The Chairman, on the other hand, was insurmountable. He could receive and send communications to any point in the giant web of The Representative World Government, but being stuck in the cen-ter of the web, he couldn't get anything done without his Gulp's, agents that held his Universal Laissez Passers.

Even with the consolidation inevitable, with the unification of all governments on the planet into a single functioning representative world congress, individual governments still had their own ideas and their own desires to dominate The Representative World Gov-ernment. The British Empire, properly dismantled by the two world wars, still didn't want to accept the fact that it would no longer occupy empire status, just one more government in a worldwide network.

The various states of the United States had to undergo the same transition and, interestingly enough, the Empire State, New York, had to learn, just as all the states had to learn, that in a unified government, loyalties went to the unification. There was simply no alternative in a world grown large with population but small with resources.

It was inconceivable, with a history of fighting wherever socio-political structures were contiguous, that consolidation could be denied a world in which telecommunications made everyone each other's neighbor.

It was inevitable that once consolidation became inevitable, op-portunists would seek to gain control of the brains of the consolida-tion and thus fall heir to the consolidation itself, turning it into a gigantic parody of what the Roman Empire had become, a dictator-ship of a few for the benefit of the few rather than a representa-tive government for the benefit of all.

Because the establishment of a world government involved the transference of power away from the very nations that weren't willing to transfer that power, the power had been slowly consoli-dated through a system of disparate linkage. World government was consolidated in those areas where world government could only be successful, in keeping the seas clean, in monitoring international traffic, in policing opportunistic local anomalies. It slowly emerged as the arbiter in education, science and ultimately dangerous tech-nological advances.

It could conceive of the question, what would happen to the economy and social structure of a fractured world in which tech-nology had eliminated gravity? Without the need for energy to drive the engines of war, nationstates would not only have the desire, but the ability, to sally forth in an attempt to obtain nationalistic aims and the world would be consumed in a orgy of destruction.

The Chairman knew that the gravitational barrier was not for-ever and was able to use the contemplation of the resulting technol-ogy turning the world into a free-for-all to serve as an impetus to consolidation under The World Representative Government.

Some things just simply cannot occur before others do. The ex-istence of the miniskirt would have been inconceivable without the invention of pantyhose.

Eventually, the necessity for the interdependence of all nations became so obvious that it was recognized to be within the national interest to relinquish power because no single nation could survive without the survival of all nations.

World government and a new world order had never been a con-spiracy. Those interested in the survival of the planet had always conducted their affairs in an open manner.

As in any great historical movement, events move forward without the attention of those affected by them. People have a ten-dency to pay attention to the things that directly affect their lives. The average occupants of the planet do not daily concern them-selves with matters such as the global economic conditionalities involved with bilateral subset integration. As a result, much of the consolidation perforce had to be undertaken by those citizens of the world who were educated in and devoted their lives to the tasks required of them to accomplish an appropriate outcome.

Those in the forefront of consolidation were not a group of peo-ple who were educating themselves to accomplish some devised historical goal. They were people who were able to perceive the beneficial course history was taking and were attempting to keep that course from ending in disaster.

As the consolidation went on, however, it became more appar-ent, and with apparentness, it gained more opponents. These oppo-nents were people who had received a lifetime of benefits from the process of consolidation but were disconcerted because something had been going on they hadn't been aware of, even going so far as to blame things they had lost to history on the consolidation of his-tory.

There is no question that history grinds people up as it moves forward. It is those opportunists who appear out of nowhere and try to seize the reigns of history without understanding its course that cause the conflicts that do the grinding. It is those very op-portunists who grab hold of minds newly awakened to the processes of history and attempt to bend them toward their opportunism who build the devious corridors of history.

Thus a patriotic movement in one country might very well be a movement by another country to accomplish goals that are in total opposition to the goals of the patriotic movement.

The British Empire, for instance, was well known for its phi-losophy of divide and conquer. The history books don't really reveal how this was accomplished.

One of the most effective ways to divide a nation is to take a nation's religion, which always has liberal and conservative ex-pressions, and support the conservative or fundamentalist position.

Support means monetary support because it takes money to send people out into the streets to wreak havoc.

An opportunist who seeks to insert himself into the top of a process that has been evolving for centuries will attempt to har-ness the idealism of those who have been benefiting from the evo-lution by turning them against the historical process.

When the point is reached where a representative world gov-ernment is inevitable, the opportunist will attempt to gain control of it for his own benefit. In doing so, he will seek other allies by creating a community of interests in that which he seeks to cap-ture.

The people that lead everyday lives stand to have those lives crushed in the process if they aren't sensitive to the historical processes that are occurring. The average person therefore needs protection from the limitless ranks of opportunists.

The Chairman was the chief consolidator, the person who was coordinating the consolidation of the individual governments of the world into a World Representative Government, the chief protector of the common citizen.

Block was the construction boss, identifying weaknesses in the edifice and removing obstacles to orderly construction.

These obstacles normally took the form of resurgent nationalism or sub-nationalist movements in countries that were already part of the edifice and nationalistic vestiges in countries that were in the process of integration.

Block inserted himself wherever a situation endangered the emerging structure to ensure that the virus didn't spread to the growing body of The Representative World Government.

Entering The Chairman's room with ease, he looked around to lo-cate the bar and, doing so, walked over to mix himself a scotch on the rocks.

He eyed The Chairman. It never ceased to amaze him that a per-son of eighty-two years could not only still be active, but super active. He had once asked The Chairman what kept him so young.

The Chairman had replied that he couldn't conceive of quitting until The Representative World Government was an openly func-tioning reality with the various operations of the individual nations consolidated into its recurring operations.

"So our friends on the island are getting restive again," Block said, walking over and taking up a chair across from The Chairman.

"They're always restive. But you're right. They seem more so now than they have been for a number of months. I think they are up to no good."

"You'd think that they would roll over and die. When something is inevitable, it's inevitable."

"I always think what I would do if I were them. Giving up an em-pire is not something that one willingly does. In the past, empires disintegrated. But the British Empire was at its pinnacle when the need for consolidation dictated its being subordinated to world in-terests. I'm afraid I would also fight to maintain it to the bitter end."

"Which they're apparently going to do," Block replied holding up his glass in a toast. "It's lucky you're not on their side. They'd probably win."

"It's no longer possible for individual interests to win. If it was, all, including the individual interests, would be lost."

"So what are they up to?"

"I don't even know if it's them, or if they are up to anything. We might have a problem right here at home. I can't quite put my finger on it, but we have lost three people with top security clearance in information processing."

"That wouldn't seem to be alarming. Three compared to the number involved . . .?"

The Chairman shifted in his chair. "It's not only who died but how they died. Our network probability programming lifted them out of the statistical pot five different ways."

"Network probability programming?"

"It's the first viable all network utility program. It collects all events and categorizes them according to their statistical probabil-ity. Bells and whistles go off at different levels depending on how probable events are.

"Normally if we had a young, well-fed functionary die of stran-gulation in a hotel room, only his relatives would be notified. Here we have three. And a probable fourth, a Sidney St. Remain, who hasn't been located."

"This is over my head. How could there possibly be a fourth on a statistical basis when three is statistically improbable enough to catch your attention."

"These guys were processing information on the monetary sys-tem. It takes two to get in. The probability program nearly blew a fuse when two of the three turned out to be password dependent on each other."

"Neither could access the database without the other?"

"That's right. And a search for the odd man out's password partner turned him up missing."

"So we have three men, each with top security clearance to the financial database, turning up strangled in hotel rooms. What were they working on?"

"Monetary supply. They monitored the monetary supply. I don't think it is what they did so much. We have accessed their area of access and nothing has been disturbed. No. We think that whoever is in the game was after data. And we think that the data they were after was information on the points that the money enters the sys-tem."

"How would that be useful?"

"The vast majority of money today is electronic. If someone knew the codes at the point of entry they could manipulate the money supply independent of economic needs."

He paused and looked at Block searchingly.

"Tampering with the money supply is catastrophic. Note that I didn't say can be, or even might be. It simply is catastrophic. An imbalance, either too much or too little, can bring the entire structure down around our heads.

"If somebody knows the codes at the point of entry and has used them to either increase or decrease the money supply, we are in deep trouble."

"So run the computer and find out. We can correct it."

"Easier said than done. Authorized increases or decreases, which these would be, are impossible to trace. We wouldn't know about it until the results were in. The most probable way of doing this sort of thing would be to create the money and park it. It could be dumped into the economy when we least expect it, causing ram-pant inflation, or it could even be used as a method of blackmail."

"Somebody could dictate our policy by merely threatening to dump excess money into the economy?"

"Right. Remember we are talking about money, not credit. Credit is manipulated at the reserve level. Excess money will just create uncontrollable inflation and I think that is what is being set up. The finger points straight at BO."

"British Operations!"

"Right. They are being asked to submerge their currency into the Euro and they are not very willing dippers."

"What difference does it make what currency they use?" Block looked at this man in his eighties with keen interest. He had, in his prime, been Block's size and Block could only hope that when, or rather, if he reached that age, he too could be as vigorous as The Chairman, both physically and mentally.

"Well, you know how your friends at BO like to go around stir-ring up trouble."

"Sure. They like to go into a country and turn one element of the country against the other."

"Right. Divide and conquer. If they can keep one faction in a country fighting against another faction, they can pretty much do what they want while the fighting is going on, and afterward, when the target country is too exhausted to resist."

"The Civil War!"

"The Civil War, the War of 1812, the War of 1848, all were attempts to regain what had been lost by being too attentive to the threat of a French empire during the closing decades of the 18th century."

"It's hard to divide and conquer more than one country."

"Not so hard as expensive. Effectively supporting one side of an issue costs more than most nations can afford. Supporting opposing sides of the same issue can be ruinous."

"But we don't want them supporting either side."

"Supporting issues of national interest are what will make The Representative World Government work. Doing so in a manner that is detrimental to other members of The Consolidation is unavoid-able.

"But supporting national issues in a manner that results in physical conflict is not appropriate and, needless to say, not per-mitted.

"Because the British Empire became an empire as a result of its ability to divide and conquer, and because it naturally attempts to keep its empire by the same means, it is necessary to remove its ability to do so."

"And it takes money to divide and conquer."

"To put it mildly. As long as an individual nation can coin its own currency, it can buy the guns and ammunition that will allow it to intervene in another nation's problems. If nations are always trying to intervene in the affairs of other nations, there can be no consoli-dation. Without consolidation, the technology cannot be redirected toward the elimination of high cost energy and the resulting cornu-copia that will result. The benefits to be derived from eliminating energy costs will be destroyed and we'll all be destroyed in the scramble for power that would ensue. People have no idea what is at stake in the day-to-day operations of international cooperation."

"Nor is there any way to tell them," Block said, getting up and walking over to the bar to pour two more fingers of scotch. He'd listened to The Chairmen wind himself up too many times to allow him to get started. "So you think that this is a BO operation to delay the pound combining with the Euro?"

"It has to be. The whole purpose in creating regional currency units is to slowly withdraw dependence on the dollar as the inter-national currency. If we are going nuts trying to shore up the value of the dollar, the British will be able to keep their currency for a little longer."

"What good would a little longer do?"

"Hey," The Chairman laughed, "as long as there's life, there's hope."

"You don't think the British could stop the formation of The Rep-resentative World Government?"

Block was shocked.

"Stranger things have happened. Rather than stop it, they could take it over. Who knows? Your grandfather was fond of saying that the war won't be over until all the players are dead. I'd hate to have to have another generation of players. I was hoping that it would end with the third."

Block smiled at the mention of his grandfather. The Senior Block had been the architect of the invisible penetration, the ingenious infiltration of British Operations through The Trust, the ubiquitous soviet operation that was like a diamond, with a different facet for every beholder.

"In any event, this is by far one of the most serious situations that I have faced. Depending on you, and how it plays out, it may well be the most serious.

" I don't know what happened three or four millennia ago, but it crippled the human mind, robbed it of reason, blinded it to reality. After thousands of years, we're finally crawling out of our hole into the sunlight, to a world of peace and cooperation, a world whose technology reflects reality. If this gambit is successful, if the British can put off submerging their currency, The Representa-tive World Government will be set back a decade and we might never have another chance."

The Chairmen reached over and grabbed Block's free hand.

"Ronald, you have to track down what's going on and put the quits to it."

Block put his scotch down and clasped The Chairman's hand in a double grip.

"Have I ever failed you, Dave?"

The Chairman leaned back into his chair and picked up his pad, crossing off British Restiveness. He circled Suffocation.

"I don't know what the significance of suffocation is. Apparently they weren't choked to death. They simply drowned in their own dinner."

"You said they were well-fed."

"What, or even whether that has anything to do with it, I don't know." He crossed off the Funds Disappearance. That was only speculation on his part. But the word disappearance rang a bell.

"I don't want to hear anything about your last escapade, but for crying out loud, you're going to get someone in trouble if you don't quit making, shall I say, public examples of your projects. Can't you just make the problems disappear?"

Block's boyish face took on a foolish continence, a very mis-leading aspect as many had discovered too late. He had been given the project of eliminating a suitcase nuclear device that was des-tined for the Capitol City.

The technicians who had briefed him had been very skeptical that the technology that was required to create the field replace-ment that would allow for a nuclear reaction could fit inside a suit-case.

"You're not trying to just heat water like in a nuclear reactor," they had told him. "You're trying to create a critical reaction where the particles holding the units of an atom together are re-leased in one fell swoop. You can't do that without a lot of bulk."

Well maybe not, but when the suitcase was a code word for a drone aircraft, bulk was not really the question. He had fumbled around in confusion until he realized that he was dealing with an armed drone, a drone that was already on a preprogrammed course directly to the Capitol. He had been able to take control of the drone over New York but really hadn't the time to do anything other than send it as high as possible to disperse the effect of the explosion.

The resulting explosion, some thirty-five miles over Baltimore, was seen all over the eastern half of the United States.

"I do what I have to do," he said quite simply.

"There're only so many things we can blame on our elusive friends from outer space. We had to give up that gambit after dear Ronnie tried to use the threat of some sort of extraterrestrial in-vasion to justify ending the cold war."

"You knew when you brought him in that he had trouble following the script."

"We didn't know how much he was his own man. But success is its own reward. In any event, see if you can't control your pen-chant for spectacular public displays of your presence."

Block got up and walked over to the window. "It's not like I plan these things."

The Chairman followed. "I think that you work so much behind the scenes that you can't help having a public conclusion. I think you do it on purpose, even if you don't do it consciously. Your father was the same way. He would get so exhilarated with what he was doing, he would slip up on purpose, cause an international incident, and then sit back and read the books trying to speculate on what happened."

He put his arm around Block's shoulder. "In this business, be-lieve me, less is more."

Block turned and looked into the older man's eyes.

"Perhaps your right."

"I know I'm right. It is impossible to accomplish anything in the eye of the hurricane. Change only results from the maelstrom that circles the eye. And the maelstrom can't be captured by a camera, only the change that it produces."

"A violent analogy."

"Apt nonetheless. Most people don't know the storm is coming and would rather go about their way heedless of the danger. Those who do know what's coming have to prepare for it, make sure that as many people and as much property as possible is sheltered, and prepare for the world after the storm has passed. When the storm has finally passed, and the wreckage removed, the foundation re-mains for a more permanent rebuilding."

He gestured at the lower Manhattan skyline marked by the Ground Zero Freedom complex.

"History is going to come whether we are prepared for it or not. The tides of empire have washed away humanity's shore before, leaving it stranded and at its own throat, and there's nothing writ saying that it won't happen again. There're only two ways to go. We either go forward or we go backward. There is no standing still.

"If British Operations is successful, if it is able to use blackmail to keep an independent pound, or misdirect the world by sinking its temporary means of exchange, then we'll be standing still, and since we can't stand still, we'll be going backward.

"We don't want to go backward. Stop whatever is coming off, and for crying out loud, do it quietly." He paused. "And Ronald, when you find out who is responsible, who the agent is, bring that person directly to me. We can always use someone with both brains and skill."

Block took his glass over to the counter, carefully washed it out, dried it and replaced it with the clean glasses. He carefully folded the wash towel and replaced it in the drawer.

"Talking about doing it quietly, have you been laying off the help like I've told you."

Block was not only changing the subject, he was trying to change the initiative as if it was possible to put The Chairman on the defensive.

The Chairman laughed.

"Laying, maybe, but not off."

"I keep telling you that you are an old gaffer totally out of touch with the times. You're a sexist who pays the help enough to put up with your lecherous ways."

"It's wonderful being in the position to do that, and that's a fact!"

"So what's the latest? Or rather, who?"

The Chairman walked back to the couch to get his pad. "Renon," he read. He looked up. "Mary Renon. She's doing my booking for me. Fantastic head. Never had anything like it. Kind of a plain girl. Bouncy, but plain. But what head. It was a blockbuster!"

"A blockbuster?"

Block looked at The Chairman as The Chairman looked off into space. Apparently The Chairman didn't see the pun, if it was a pun.

"A blockbuster?" he repeated.

The Chairman refocused his attention. "Well, you track her down and give her a try. She'll send you to the moon and keep you there as long as she pleases."

"Sounds like she's a domineering bitch."

"She may be domineering, but a bitch? No. Just good at what she does. You like dominant women, don't you?"

"Only to the point of teaching them how to be open."

"Then you've got a lot to teach this Renon gal. Only I don't think you'll want to be a teacher in her case. I brought her aboard after reading her background. She's from wheat country, yet she has an almost intuitive knowledge of what's going on."

"So you use her as a face pump?"

The Chairman was unperturbed. "She came into American Op-erations with the blind patriotism that is standard middle American fare. She was an AO agent in college and wrote an essay called "Moving the World Forward" which is not Middle American fare, at least with respect to the world."

"And you still took advantage of her?"

"She majored in art history!"

"Uh oh. She took advantage of you."

"And went to law school."

"Don't they all."

"And then applied cold."

"You mean she hadn't been under contract to AO?" Block re-ferred to the practice of American Operations, indeed, any opera-tions unit no matter where located, of identifying potential recruits almost in diapers and following them through from the beginning so there was little about them that wasn't known. The practice had been loosened up in recent years by AO because of the abundance of psychological and physical knowledge about everybody that was routinely collected in the normal course of day-to-day life as a by-product of living in a computer driven society, but to take some-body cold. "And you let her get this close to you?"

"She worked for AO in college and word of the blockbuster pre-ceded her. To tell you the truth, I couldn't resist. I've put her in as my personal assistant."

"You say she has an intuitive knowledge of what's going on? In-tuitive or manipulative? You sure you aren't getting performance mixed up with knowledge?"

"Well, maybe. In any event, it was an experience you'd do well to pursue."

He dropped the pad, turned and held out his hand.

"Good luck."

"Thanks."

"On the project, too."

The meeting was over.

As the door closed behind Block, The Chairman returned to the window.

He could count the number of people on the fingers of one hand, those who could understand the mechanisms that society had cre-ated to regulate the money supply, but to him, as most things con-ceptual, it was second nature. It was soothing to think about. It put his mind at peace. It was at one with how things should be. In his mind, the money supply was an icon for the flow of goods and services through the economy so that the most goods could reach the most people while creating the most choices on an individual level.

Messing with the mechanism was anathema, for it was messing with the very flow of the goods the mechanism was designed to foster. Messing with the mechanism for the purpose of delaying the consolidation was among the highest of crimes. The money supply was simply the food on the table and to interfere with the mecha-nism that had evolved to regulate it was no less a crime than taking the food out of a baby's mouth. To delay the consolidation was to endanger all babies.

If the flow of currency in society were visualized as a swiftly moving stream, then someone, somewhere had been able to build a little shuttlecock that diverted some of the stream into a holding tank. Nobody would notice it because at the same time, that person had been able to increase the flow in the stream so that the stream's level remained unchanged.

But all that person had to do was dump the holding tank back into the stream. The stream would overflow its banks, causing consid-erable damage and untold misery.

He had devoted his life to maintaining the stream's flow at a steady but gradually increasing rate so that developments could grow and prosper along its banks.

He didn't take kindly to any attempt to flood those develop-ments, with the accompanying violence. He didn't take kindly even if the attempt was merely a threat. The implied violence required a response that entailed actual violence.

Thus Block with his boyish good looks!

The Chairman well knew what lay behind those boyish looks be-cause Block's father had been his close friend and confident when he had been able to roam the world at will in his youth. And his com-panion Block was the son of the senior Block, the author of the In-visible Penetration, clearly the premier espionage operation of any era.

The elder Block had been ruthless and his friend Block probably more so.

The Senior Block, as he was now known in order to distinguish him from the Block who was his childhood friend and the present Block who, in his turn, became so all important to the establishment of The Representative World Government, had been unfortunate enough to preside over the liquidation of thousands, perhaps hun-dreds of thousands of individuals. Some of those individuals were in active opposition to progress, but many just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Chairman had been schooled from the beginning in what his-tory was doing, and one of his first incongruities was the recogni-tion that the jovial father of his childhood friend was the same per-son that operated The Trust, a deception that ensnared all sorts of people in a ruse that led to their untimely deaths. One could be re-sponsible for all sorts of mayhem and still be jovial on a personal level because the mayhem occurred regardless of the individual.

It was up to the individual to make sense out of it and make it work for the benefit of all.

As long as there were more people in the world than there were material goods to make those people satisfied, there were going to be people taking material goods from other people against their will.

As long as groups of people could band together to take material goods from other groups of people, there was going to be the mass taking of goods away from other people against their will.

With the mass taking there was going to be mass murder. If your child is hungry and the people across the river have food, and they won't set up procedures for you to share in it, there is going to be mayhem.

And there is never enough! There never has been and there never will be. So there is always going to be mayhem.

If a person goes in and organizes the mayhem so there will be a chance in the future there will be enough for all, is that person to be charged with the mayhem that would have occurred with no pur-pose without him?

These arguments, which were not available on a widespread ba-sis because there was no experience with them on a widespread basis, were the philosophical problems The Chairman had cut his teeth on.

Without Originism, the science of origins, or Perceptionism, the science of how humans perceive and interact with reality, he would have had no answers.

But he knew instinctively, and consciously, that he had to do everything necessary to keep history from retreating, a history that had to be leading to the most freedom of choice for the most number of people without turning the bend of history so that pro-gress became regression.

The people who were willing to step into mayhem and take its blood on their hands in order to give mayhem a reason for exis-tence, in effect rob it of its randomness, were people who had to be strong indeed.

Generals did no less and weren't held accountable for the deaths on the battlefield. When the wars were undeclared and the casual-ties civilians, accountability should be no greater. Not all wars were fought on battlefields, and not all victories celebrated.

The Attilas of the world will come charging off the steppes of history and wreak havoc where they will, among the people whose job it is to fight and the people whose job it is to stand and wait.

The millstone of history does not discriminate against the grain it mills. It takes whoever it finds, armed or disarmed, worthy or unworthy, willing or unwilling.

An individual can only hope that through some accident of na-ture, or fortune of positioning, or even perception that he or she can avoid the devastation that is never more than a generation away, a nation away, and may even be as close as tomorrow's newspaper.

The Chairman knew at an early age that you don't eliminate mayhem tomorrow. You work to reduce it. And in working to reduce it, you accept the people that redirect the mayhem in order to re-duce it.

The Senior Block had started out to eliminate opposition to So-viet Operations by enticing survivors of the white armies, fami-lies, friends, and even passing admirers of the opposition with promises of amnesty and the collective advancement into the fu-ture. The job had proven so easy, and was met with such success that he began to wonder what effect his blandishments would have on experts, a new challenge.

The experts he had in mind were the purveyors of delusion who were pouring in from England with the overwhelming desire of bringing the new Soviet state back into the war against the Kaiser on the side of the allies.

To what extent, he had wondered, could the Soviet state con-vince these agents that the future lay with the Soviets rather than the Crown?

To what extent indeed, as he soon found out. The senior Block was able to buy an entire generation of British agents who suppos-edly reported to Soviet Operations but in fact were unknowingly reporting to the agents of the fledgling Representative World Gov-ernment.

As the thousands streamed past the Senior Block to their death in Siberia, dozens streamed back to cubbyholes off the halls of the British Empire to become the moles that would be indispensable to the destruction of the Empire in the next conflict.

Block, The Chairman's boyhood friend, had been the architect of that conflict. The British Empire had emerged from what became the First World War with its empire intact. It was the big loser in the conflict because the measurement of loss was not how low the conflict brought a nation, but how much a nation had lost.

While the British Empire was intact, its currency was in a shambles. It had always had an obsession with gold and silver. Its empire had been established on the basis of mercantilism, the proc-ess of controlling precious metals so that it could direct the raw materials and labor of the world onto its shores to its citizen's benefit.

Because the use of gold and silver as a currency is only one step removed from simple barter in the climb of civilization to some-thing more than local economies, the British attempt to maintain a species backed currency after the war weakened its intact empire for the final assault that became known as the Second World War.

This worked because the war had drained England of its precious metal resources, vacuuming gold and silver out of the closets, from under the beds, and even repatriating some of the dinner place-ments and tea sets transferred during the American War for Inde-pendence.

It's hard to have a gold backed currency when you have no gold!

Having developed reserve banking over two centuries before, Britain was nonetheless stuck in the rut of using mercantilism as a basis of power. The British therefore left their empire open to lib-eration through the use of their own invention as the markets adapted to the level of activity that no metal backing could support because the amount of metal needed to support the activity would render it valueless.

Thus, when it was maneuvered into the final conflict, the Empire had nothing of value, except its empire, and was forced to turn to its unlikely friend, the United States, for support, the same colo-nies that it had spent two centuries of unceasing efforts, in the simple words of Cecil Rhodes, to regain.

And of course, in return for support, it had to give up its em-pire!

Block, The Chairman's boyhood friend, had engineered the final destruction of the British Empire in a way that it still appeared that the victors of the war were the losers.

The Chairman still had to smile when he thought about it. Dec-ades after the end of the war, with Japan and Germany for all ap-pearances two of the strongest economies in the world, and the British Empire not only a memory, but an economic shambles, the history books were still being written and accepted that England won the war.

In a century-long process that began in the decades after the outrage that it committed on the United States that became known as the Civil War and would end only when the Pound Sterling became a sterling memory, the British went from empire to outdoor mu-seum.

It was apparently only with distance that the winners and losers could be tagged. Two centuries after the British destroyed the French at Waterloo, it was easy to see the French loss and the steps that led to it. It was not so easy to see the British Empire falling, not to another nation, but to the emerging Representative World Government because it was not only difficult to see the de-struction of an empire, but, without awareness, impossible to dis-cern the outlines of what was emerging to take its place.

And the Second World War was unsurpassed for carnage, for mayhem unimaginable even when tallied. Should his friend Block be tagged with that blood?

It took a certain type of person to meet a certain type of chal-lenge and the succession of Blocks had provided the world with just the type of persons needed.

The third Block, his young agent of choice in the final consolida-tion of The Representative World Government, like his father and grandfather before him, had to operate on the basis of the end test: Whatever means it took, no justification necessary!

Of the three, however, the young Block was closer to the conse-quences of his acts than either of his predecessors. When the bat-tlefields are vast and the participants many, the generals can at-tempt to avoid individual outrages wreaked on humanity by their troops, but they can't feel a personal responsibility for the out-rages that come to their attention.

In Block's sphere of operations, he was the one who was called on to wreak the havoc. The mayhem was his. The battles needed to finalize the consolidation were no longer battles of multitudes, but rather the individual battles that pitted an individual against the forces of darkness, the blackness that the regression of history always precedes.

Block had to have stamina, both mental and physical. He not only had to analyze a situation, he had to act and react directly in the situation. He was not a long distance warrior acting through others. He had to act himself to affect others directly.

This was the result of the nature of his task. As nationalistic elements were born, they were usually formed around the highest technology of the day. If a nationalist force could harness a nuclear device, it wasn't necessarily going to change the course of history.

But it could delay it, and in the process cause untold misery to millions of bystanders. The time when large populations were ground under the heels of history had not passed, but avoidable misery was to be avoided.

Delays in the inevitable increased the potential for unneeded misery.

Block had averted this last potential catastrophe.

Now he faced the threat of a drastically weakened currency. This would cause a delay, and delays caused misery.

The Chairman looked out at the darkening Manhattan sky.

There were, to boot, our friends out there, The Chairman thought, whoever and whatever they were.

The possibility that there was a stronger force at operation was a familiar thought. Not a stronger presence, but rather individuals from other star systems with more advanced technology who were able to monitor everything that occurred on the planet.

There was no question of their existence. There could only be speculation as to their intentions, although there was no reason to believe that they hadn't achieved the peace that appeared possible through The Representative World Government.

One thing was certain. The technology and the understanding of the physical processes of the universe were clearly apparent from the nature of their vehicles that could be observed periodically in the space around the planet.

That technology, and the understanding that underlay it, would soon belong to the residents of the Earth because the residents of the Earth were on the verge of developing it.

He felt the thrill that had been his lifetime companion.

Only a few were lucky enough to be able to grasp the magnitude of the events that had occurred during his lifetime, and were about to occur, probably within his lifetime.

It was a time to be alive.

And aware.

»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»«««««««««««««««««

Block shut the door behind him and walked over to the waiting elevator. He was oblivious to the decent as he set up a memory tri-angle: fourth man, Renon, drink.

The lights had become dominant in the atrium as the Manhattan sky darkened. He stepped out of the elevator as the door opened, got his bearings, and walked over to the cashier's desk.

He noticed a startlingly attractive strawberry-blonde, her hair so abundant it had to be tightly braided, the rest of her barely in a red sheath dress, sitting on one of the couches across from the desk. He lingered on the smooth expanse of leg, enjoying the sensa-tion it produced in his crotch.

He started to return the elevator key and then changed his mind. "Print me a new key for The Chairman's suite," he said. "I'll be keeping it for the night."

The redheaded beauty pretended to ignore him as he circled the edge of the lobby. He was looking for the bar while at the same time trying to see what the lady in red did.

He lost track of her.

He could never be too careful. There were very few ways that the opposition hadn't tried to finish him off. He rather enjoyed the game. There was, however, no percentage in ignoring precautions.

He found the bar and took a seat against one wall with a clear view of both entrances. As he sat down, he was startled to see the beauty in red already seated at the bar. This time she didn't ignore him, sending a smile that increased her attractiveness.

He decided to do the ignoring as he signaled for the waitress and ordered three fingers of scotch on ice. She wasn't going to go any-where. They never did, much to his satisfaction.

He had been called paranoid more than once. He was convinced that these individual nationalist groups were part of a gigantic con-spiracy whose ultimate goal was to insinuate itself into and take the reigns of The Representative World Government, turning it into a parody of the vile dictatorships of the past, formed by and serving the interests of a private clique of individuals to the detriment of all.

This reality had never been more apparent than his last project. He had traced the parts that went into the nuclear device across three continents and fourteen nations. He had been led through at least four different organizations that were responsible for the ul-timate product. When he finally identified the suitcase as a drone plane and picked up its trail, the control of the drone passed from hand to hand even after it became airborne.

Even though control had been passed from hand to hand, he had identified at least an arm for all of the hands, a source of direction. It had been an obese man, a disgusting pig of a person who was al-ways capable of staying one step ahead of him. He was like a side-walk conman, moving Block's target under one of the nutshells. Every time Block thought he had the right shell, the target had moved.

The man was a slug, trailing slime behind him wherever he went. Fortunately, once he had set up his trail of agents to move the drone, he returned to his primary love, the purchase and sale of young boys.

Because of this traceable preoccupation, and because of the complexity of preparation, Block was able to thwart the plan. As The Pig Man's slugs passed the drone off, they had no way of keep-ing count. Having access to the special channels of the Iridium Net-work, Block was able to follow the drone's course once he knew what he was dealing with, and he had simply passed it off to his control, even if it was only in time to fly it out of harms way.

But the very fact that the vile opposition was able to conduct operations on such a massive scale showed they were organized, or at least organizing, into the vast conspiracy he visualized. He would have to remember to pick up the trail of slime and see what other trails it led to.

Of course, he could accept the contrasting argument that these combinations were born of necessity and didn't last past any par-ticular effort. Making opposition complex was one way to guard against discovery. It was almost impossible to form a group with any degree of undertaking without having it penetrated to some extent or another, and passing something from hand to hand without one hand knowing what the other was doing was designed to make life difficult for people like himself whose job it was to stop nation-alistic regressions.

British Operations, on the other hand, could hire and train indi-vidual agents who, operating alone, could carry out negative op-erations limited only by the extent of the agent's imagination.

The question would, however, probably remain forever unan-swered. If there was a conspiracy, conspiracies being what they are, it was wrapped inside of other conspiracies that were in turn enshrouded in more conspiracies. Long after the danger had passed, there would be questions without answers.

The question would keep him on guard, and hopefully alive, he thought as he contemplated the luscious lady in red over his scotch. Most women would lose points simply from sitting on a bar stool, but the effect of the leg didn't diminish. She had started a casual conversation with a young man who was sitting attentively next to her. She looked directly at Block over the man's shoulder.

She would keep, he thought. If she was in fact planning to slip something to him, perhaps a knife or a drugged drink, she wasn't going anywhere and if she wasn't, from the look she gave him she still wasn't going anywhere. In either case, she would be there when he was ready for pleasure.

He took out his computer pad to outline the problem that he faced.

Block knew he wasn't a genius by any stretch of the imagination, but he had two things going for him. He could understand concepts in a fluid motion of events and he could learn technical details rapidly. He credited the former to being born with a well-developed per-ceptor and the latter to arduous training that taught him to forgot everything he learned just as soon as he no longer needed the in-formation.

Thus, when it came to the possible attempt on the part of BO to surreptitiously increase the money supply with the goal of dumping the increase unexpectedly into the economy, he had no trouble with the concept.

The entire purpose of regulating the money supply was to try to match the amount of money to the amount needed to make the many exchanges that occurred on a day-to-day basis. If there were a trillion transactions in a given hour, there would have to be a tril-lion pieces of paper, computer bytes, or promises that would rep-resent those trillion transactions. If there weren't enough, then some of the transactions would have to be delayed or postponed. If there were too many, then more than one unit of currency would represent the transaction and the transactions would become less expensive and result in inflation.

There was no way currency units could be surreptitiously re-moved from the economy because the failure to complete transac-tions would be noticed immediately.

And theoretically, there should be no way to surreptitiously add units for the same reason.

No one had yet thought of surreptitiously creating units of cur-rency and simultaneously draining them. On its face, such an activ-ity would seem to be useless.

However, not if the purpose was to suddenly inject them with-out any warning. Prices would skyrocket before any effective ac-tion could be taken. The harm would not be recognized until the damage was done.

Block had the concept down. Somewhere, somehow, someone was amassing credits in a gigantic pool that held the danger of flooding the world economy with dollars that would bid up the price of goods, destabilizing the world economy.

The next question he pondered as he entered his concept outline into the coded memory of his hand computer and sent it to the op-erations center through the Iridium Network was the how. He had no idea how credits could enter or exit the system. Did he really need to know? He knew that it would take some sort of computer ma-nipulation, that the computers were manned by teams of people, three of whom were dead, and a fourth probably dead soon, if not already.

The question would be what these men had that a third party could get that would allow them to essentially do what the men had been empowered to do.

Stating it that way, however, really didn't define the problem. It wasn't so much what the men could do as what they had the po-tential to do.

If the flow of money into the system could be visualized as sim-ply turning on and off a spigot to regulate the flow, all that could be obtained from the possibly four men, really two units of men, was the ability to turn the spigot on.

Once there was power over the spigot, it wouldn't take long to overfill the well, what with the speed that electronic bytes moved these days, in the trillions of units a second.

Wait. If that were true, then why two teams, two units of men to accomplish what could be accomplished with only one unit?

If the transfer would be instantaneous, it would only require one access and therefore there must be two attempts going on, with the first a failure and the second still in progress.

In short, there had been one attempt which had turned out to be a failure, and a second try was in progress.

Perhaps he could nip it in the bud.

Perhaps, he shrugged, his reasoning was just wrong.

He punched into the file that provided him information on the op-erational procedures for the two teams. His hand computer con-nected him directly to the operations center databank and his scrambled sequencer randomly changed the code his computer was using every split second so that only his unit could communicate with the master database on a decoded basis.

The test lines started to roll up the small screen. He adjusted their speed so that he could read them easily.

He tapped in the name of the fourth man, Sidney St. Remain, and when the file came up, asked for a task analysis, the breakdown of exactly what Sidney did to earn his daily pay.

St. Remain turned out to be part of a two-man fail-safe team that entered a predetermined amount of funds into the currency stream.

Block pushed the pause button.

"Entered" sat on the screen.

He contemplated the meaning of the word.

The spigot must be more like the lock of a canal, with one lock opening and closing before the next lock opened into the stream.

That meant that the first team that was eliminated performed a fail-safe function for the second team, a double double so to speak. There had been no failed attempt.

He scrolled back up to the task analysis heading and requested background.

The response was instantaneous. He read the text as it slowly scrolled up the window. The first team used a randomly generated sixteen-character code when they entered the amounts, timing and entry or exit point of the changes in the money supply.

Team A, the creation team, had no idea what these digits meant because they themselves were in code. Whatever the code was translated to by the program was put on a Diskcard for transfer to Team B.

Sidney St. Remain and his departed partner would then use the Diskcard to re-enter the instructions in the computer with the dis-tribution program.

Each team had one half of the activation code. Thus, to generate the credits required two persons, the two dead men, and to distrib-ute the credits through the economy required two persons, the one dead man, and Sidney, dead or not.

That meant the credits had been created and, presuming that Sidney was still alive, remained to be distributed.

Block's head began to spin.

If he was understanding this correctly, none of the four men, in-dividually or collectively, had any control over the amount of the credits that were created or distributed.

His focus returned to the soft light of the room and he watched as the strawberry blonde's tightly woven braids took a vigorous shake. She had apparently rebuked the man who had been talking to her because he shrugged and moved away. She glanced sideways at Block. He didn't respond.

If Sidney could only distribute, failure on his part would only prevent the normal changes in the money supply. This was not ex-actly what had The Chairman so concerned.

The Diskcard itself must already be the store of the offensive manipulation. The Chairman must have already discovered that the credits had been created. It wouldn't be the first time he, Block, hadn't been let in on the entire story.

Why should he be? The Chairman wasn't a schoolteacher. He, and maybe a handful of others understood the process. He had discov-ered what was happening and had taken the action that he could on his level. Faced with one missing link, he had called on Block to make sure the link didn't complete the chain.

Block's mind was sailing now. The Chairman knew that one of the doubles at the point of distribution was dead, so the job was not an internal job as far as the two teams were concerned.

If it were an internal job, the conspirator on the higher plane, the one who had generated the false information that was to be en-coded on the Diskcard by Team A could simply have let it go into distribution.

However, by doing so he couldn't have controlled the timing of the distribution.

The only way that he could control the timing of the distribution was to have both halves of the entry code together with the Disk-card itself. As one of the members of Team B was dead, Sidney re-mained with the other half of the entry code and the Diskcard.

But attempting to control the timing wouldn't account for the deaths of both members of Team A. They could have simply entered their codes to create the Diskcard.

It came to him instantly. The death of the two Team A members was designed to trigger the probability program. Whoever was managing this project had wanted The Chairman to know instantly what had happened, and what the probable consequences were.

The Chairman, on the other hand, could have no way of knowing the magnitude of the problem, nor the timing of its execution.

In short, he would be just where someone who wanted him by the short hairs wanted him.

He signaled the waitress who, keeping constant tabs on him was there instantly.

"Give me a bottle of chilled Malvasia Blanca with two glasses." He gestured toward the bar. "Have the lady join me."

Which, he continued to work toward the conclusion of his rea-soning process, means that he had time. Whoever was trying to get The Chairman by the short hairs would want to keep him there until he could confront him.

He didn't envy the fate of anyone who tried to get one over on The Chairman.

Flipping back to St. Remain, he began to leaf through Sidney's life. He skipped the locations, schools, the chronologies as being non-informative. Instead, he entered five or less, and after a date one month prior and then "all charges."

This would provide him with a record of all places that Sidney had made credit purchases five or less times in the past month.

"You're certainly presumptuous."

Block looked up at the redhead.

"You're not handcuffed. We both know we're interested. We just haven't determined in what."

He stood up, flipping the top closed on the computer, putting it in his shirt pocket.

Block was a student of how the mind worked, but his desire to get on with the evening had moved work to the rear. He had con-structed a memory triangle so that he could look up the fourth man and The Chairman's latest sex experience, Mary Renon. He had used a drink as the third side to complete the triangle. Once he con-structed such a triangle, it would not dissolve itself until each of its sides had been accomplished.

He'd had his drink and he'd discovered the function of the fourth man. Now the arrival of the redhead, or more specifically, the ide-alization of the redhead's leg, with all of the unfinished memory triangles it produced in his perceptor, sent The Chairman's triangle packing. With Mary Renon off to some remote storage shelf of his brain to be recalled at some future time, he enjoyed the pleasant physical messages the vision of the leg was sending into all the ap-propriate parts of his body.

He had replaced a memory triangle with an action triangle and he was ready for action.

He felt a small electrical sensation in his hands as her took her hand in both of them. "My name is Ron Block."

"Shandra Cottel."

"Did you feel that?"

"What?"

"I got a little tingle when I took your hand. An electric charge."

Shandra looked puzzled.

"It happens, but you have to be expecting it. We all have a dif-ferent mix of chemicals that make us up, and all those chemicals have different charges, and all of the charges go to make up one big charge, and no one's charge is ever the same as anyone else's."

"Whoa!" Shandra exclaimed.

"So you have an electrical potential," Block continued, ignoring her comment, "that is different. If you are very careful, you can feel it."

He rubbed her hand slowly.

"Feel it?"

"It feels good. But . . ."

"A lot of things happen to us that we pass off as feeling good, feeling bad, being bored, being excited. We label everything because we don't understand things and we have to have some way to deal with them. But feeling good is different for different sensations. You have to focus on the sensation to find out why it feels good. It's only then that you can successfully repeat it. Rub my hand."

She took his hand as he had taken hers, in both hands, and slowly rubbed it between her palms.

"That feels good," she admitted.

"How does it feel good?"

"What do you mean, how?"

"Where does it make you feel good?"

"It feels good in my hands."

"Is that all?"

"It makes me tingle."

"Where?"

"Uh. You know."

"I'm not you. You are feeling it. Where do you feel it?"

"In my stomach. Between my legs."

"Do you know why?"

"Why?"

"Why rubbing my hand makes you tingle where you want to tin-gle."

"Because of electricity? It's getting worse, or should I say better?"

"Because you're concentrating on how good it's making me feel."

"I am?"

Shandra felt the effect wear off. Block, as if aware that the moment had passed, withdraw his hand and stared quietly into her eyes. She didn't flinch under the directness of his clear blue eyes, returning his stare with equal directness.

He didn't have to make any decision, he thought, as he contem-plated her clear complexion. It was a light complexion, colored in accordance with what had to be the natural color of her hair. The delicate coloring complemented her finely chiseled features

Idealizing on the combination, Block let his mind blank for a sec-ond and then returned to the task at hand.

The woman was beautiful, but she had a head start. Women were naturally beautiful. Some were very beautiful. And some were very dangerous.

Shandra returned his gaze with clear amber eyes. She had pres-ence. She was self-assured, just the type of women that could role over in bed and insert a strategically placed hairpin into the base of his brain.

The very thought sent a surge of anticipation through his lower stomach.

The waitress brought the wine and he went through the tasting ritual.

"To a fine evening," he said, raising his glass.

Shandra didn't hesitate. "I think it might be."

She sipped from the glass and held it in her mouth. "An excellent choice. What do you do?"

Direct, Block thought, very direct. Does she know what I do?

Block never hid what he did. It was just that most people didn't know there was even a job such as his. Most people could pick up the paper and read what was going on in the world, but in doing so most people didn't have the foggiest idea what was going on.

He had learned early that everybody was limited by experience. The mind functioned by taking the picture of reality forced on it at any particular time by external reality and then comparing that picture with the pictures that had been stored of the mind's inter-pretation of external reality.

It was called Perceptionism. Everybody reconstructed mental images in a hypothetical construct called a perceptor. The percep-tor always had to deal with three things.

First, it had to deal with what it thought of itself, the person it occupied. This was more or less the concept that people had of self, the sum total of all their experiences as they handled them with their genetic attributes.

This was called the concept of self.

The perceptor next had to deal with what it was perceiving at any particular moment. This was external reality.

When the perceptor formed a picture of external reality, it modified that picture by the concept of self that was already in the perceptor. As the picture formed, it sent a flow of electricity into the vast memory banks of the brain seeking out pictures that were similar to the one the perceptor was trying to form from reality, the picture that came from the eyes in conjunction with the other senses.

From these vast caverns of stored experiences, the particular stream of electricity, generated by the picture from reality, re-called specific pictures as opposed to the cumulative memories that made up the concept of self and carried those pictures to the per-ceptor for comparison.

These were recalled pictures.

The picture of external reality was forced on the perceptor. It attempted to modify the concept of self already in the perceptor. The resulting struggle between the two created a flow of electric-ity that recalled pictures that could either reinforce external real-ity or the concept of self already existing in the perceptor.

At any one moment, a person was continually dealing with pic-tures formed in the perceptor that were a product of external re-ality, the concept of self of the person, and the recalled pictures formed by the constant interaction of all three constantly changing the current picture in the perceptor.

As Block gazed into Shandra's clear amber eyes, he could expect to see any of a number of things. She might be totally involved in recalled experiences, with a faraway look of dreaminess and little realization of the present. Or she might be totally occupied with her concept of self, which would be displayed by the fixed, tight fea-tures that would make a person look conceited, the tight features contrasting with the eye movements which would make her eyes look to the side or down the nose of her unmoving face. Or her gaze might be confused, with the concept of self fighting for recognition with recalled pictures of past experiences which would agitate her, making her display a restiveness with her eyes darting here and there.

Shandra displayed none of these characteristics, rather return-ing Block's clear gaze. She was completely in the present, adapting her concept of self to external reality while remaining in complete control of her perceptor's recall function.

"I study Perceptionism," Block said to deflect her question. If she knew who he was, it didn't make any difference and if she did-n't, it still didn't make any difference.

"Isn't that a religion?"

"No," Block replied, "although some people might promote it as such, people who are tying to make a buck out of other people's misfortune."

"Then what am I thinking of, Originism?"

"Originism describes how we, as organisms got here. How we happened to grow on the surface of this particular planet. Percep-tionism explains the manner that we are able to perceive our own existence."

"Then it is a religion," she insisted.

"If you could say that a mechanical explanation of origins and perception is religion. Actually, if it is religion, it is the first hu-manistic religion. But that isn't why I study Perceptionism."

She angled the mouth of the glass toward him and he refilled it. "And just why do you study Perceptionism?"

"Personal gratification."

"That does sound interesting. Only personal?"

"When you took my hand, what were you thinking about?"

"The sensation that you had felt when you took my hand."

"So you were thinking about my pleasure."

"I guess so, yes."

"And you got pleasure out of it?"

"Yes."

"Then you got pleasure out of my pleasure, right?"

"Yes."

"Then you're personal gratification was dependent on my pleas-ure."

"I've never looked at it that way before."

"That's why people lose pleasure. Perceptionism, at least the part of it that provides an understanding of what is happening to us when we are experiencing pleasure, keeps us from losing pleasure, either through not getting it in the first place or interrupting it once we are starting to get it."

"Let me get this straight. If I want to get pleasure, I have to please you?"

"Not please me. Concentrate on my pleasure."

"I'm not fully grasping this. I think you're going to have to give me a demonstration."

Block stood up. "My pleasure."

"If it's your pleasure," Shandra said, rising, "it'll be my pleas-ure, right?"

"Most certainly."

He walked over to the bar and inserted the key into the charge slot, entered the tip, and signaled Shandra to lead the way.

"I don't know the way."

He put his hand on the small of her back and steered her out of the lounge, through the various plants, and over to his reserved elevator.

"You own the place," she said.

"For now," he replied, punching out the floor, leaning back against the metal part of the car so that he was looking out the bub-ble portion, with Shandra in the center, the lights of the city drop-ping away behind her.

"You really are lovely."

She accepted the compliment as though she deserved it, turning to look at herself in the dropping skyline. He could see her twice, idealized by the reflection and her reality idealized by the vision he wanted to make of her, the focus on color and texture.

The elevator stopped at the top and he again directed her using the small of her back to and through the door, the same door he had entered earlier for his meeting with The Chairman.

The Chairman never used the same room twice and never stayed in a room that he had used. When he checked in, the hotel would have put the entire resources of its kitchen into laying out a spread in the sprawling suite, something of everything available for what-ever might please The Chairman.

When he found out that The Chairman would not be using the suite, when The Chairman brought up his interlude with his aide, Block had paid no attention. He could have whatever he wanted him-self.

When he was returning the elevator key and saw Shandra, he decided that what was already being prepared should be used.

He was surprised, then, when the sensors turned the lights on, the room was as he had left it, only tidied.

The surprise did not last long, however. He walked over to the double doors behind the bar and opened them onto a more pleasant vista.

He motioned Shandra to come over. Together they walked onto what was in effect, if not fact, a platform overlooking the Manhat-tan skyline. Along the side was a buffet loaded with appetizers, entrees and desserts, enough for fifty people. The buffet table ended where the room stretched out into the blackness of the Man-hattan night, the curved walls, as well as the floor, made of what he hoped was transparent plastic. In the middle of the room, that seemed to be suspended in the midst of the skyline, a table for two had been set. To the left of the table, as though suspended in space, a large circular bed invited satiated diners. The ceiling and parti-tions were studded with tiny lights making the room appear bathed in soft starlight.

"It's beautiful," Shandra whispered.

"We live the way we can," Block motioned to the food. "Shall we start?"

She started down the line ahead of him, taking small amounts of each dish. "Don't eat too much," he cautioned.

"How can I help but?" she responded.

"It won't pay to get drowsy."

He passed ahead of her to pull her chair out for her. His heart skipped a beat as he walked out onto the clear floor, the plastic partition that was the only thing between him and the emptiness of eternity below. The reflection of the star-like lights masked the sensation, however, and he put his plate down, pouring wine for each of them. Shandra came over and he moved her chair easily beneath her as she sat down.

"Does this bother you?" he asked.

"What?"

"Being stuck out here in space."

"I do some sky diving. I've been in space."

"You've been in space?"

"I did a stint on the space station. You know, drone work."

"Space station, eh? What else have you done?"

"I like to hike and cycle. Get out in the air."

He held up his glass to her reflection in the glass. "To the eve-ning," he toasted.

They looked at their reflections as they touched glasses. In the reality of the semi-darkened room, they looked like they were sus-pended in the night, with the lights the stars that Manhattan's light pollution drowned out. In the reflection, they were a dream lost in the blackness and the pinpoints of light.

"It's a good place to idealize," he commented.

"What does idealize mean?"

"Idealization is what makes everything possible. Are you famil-iar with action triangle theory?"

"Vaguely."

"We can't do anything, from getting up in the morning, to making love, without forming an action triangle. The perceptor has three worlds to deal with. It has external reality, its concept of self, and all of the memories we have stored up over the years. If we want to do something, we have to do it in external reality."

"You're saying that for an act to be successful, it has to match reality."

"Right. But we can only perceive the real world. If we misper-ceive the real world, our acts won't match reality. So we first have the side of the triangle that deals with the real world.

"The next side deals with how we perceive ourselves. If we can't summon up a picture of ourselves doing the act, we will never be able to do it. And, of course, if we don't have any experience to recall of ourselves doing the act, which is the third side of the ac-tion triangle, we are just stuck there trying to imagine what it would be like to perform the act."

"So to perform the act, all sides of the triangle have to be in agreement."

"If we have no experience performing the act, we don't have that side of the triangle. It's open. We can get it by jumping into the deep end of the pool, but that won't get us swimming. If we have a concept of self that will not willingly perform the act, it won't willingly recall the experience necessary to complete the triangle to successfully perform the act."

"And," Shandra continued, gesturing to the surroundings, "if you have the concept of self, and recall a matching experience so that you have two sides of a triangle, you still might not have the reality to perform the act in."

"It would be awful hard to conduct a conference in this room, yes."

"Exactly how does this affect idealization?"

"Reality is harsh. Jonathan Swift realized that if we could see others as they really were, a Lilliputian's view of humanity, pours, blackheads and all, we could never form the action triangles that allow us to interact. If we could see others as they really are, or if others could see us as we really are, blemishes and all, we would tend to keep our distance. Why would we willingly recall the ugly?

"So we idealize. We idealize so that we can form action triangles that will allow us to do the things we want to do."

He too gestured at the surroundings. "We create light, and then dim it so that our eyes can't see clearly." He gestured at the re-flections. "We create images that the eye can't focus on." He lifted his wine glass. "We take chemicals that blur our perception of the reality that remains. I focus on the angle of your body as you hold yourself, and my perceptor can limit its recall only to the pleasant images that accord with that angle. I am idealizing my perception of you so that my recall is being limited to only the pleasant things I have stored about you. I do the same thing with your beautiful fea-tures, you're gorgeous coloring. Your eyes. Your beautiful eyes, amber yet sapphire . . . the way your lips part, the way they moisten just at the edges . . . oh my . . ."

He stood up, slipped around behind her and gently lifted her out of the chair. His hand remained on the zipper of the red dress as she stood up and the dress fell away, revealing her perfect body. She turned into his embrace.

"You're a dream," he murmured, "idealization in reality."

"We're in a glass house," she started to protest.

"The world doesn't actively seek beauty," he whispered, leading her over to the circular bed. "If it wants beauty, it's here in abun-dance."

The bed, like the table, was suspended among the stars, at least in Shandra's mind. She remembered Block's comment that she had to concentrate on his pleasure to obtain her own, but from the first embrace obtaining pleasure had not been a problem. What to do with all of the pleasure that swept over her, not in repeated waves, but in a continuous flow, ebbing at times for sure, but always coming back with full force, but reciprocate.

Block had put a bottle of Draumbuie on the headboard and the first time in the timeless evening that she had begun to drowse off, he had held the glass as she sipped a few drops of the energy giving liquid which awakened her at the same time that it moved her fur-ther into the dream.

Now when Block began to doze, she performed the same service for him, but really for herself, as they moved in and out of sleep, each other, the dream, floating from non-existence to non-existence.

As dawn begin to dim the artificial starlight surrounding them, the cumulative effect of the wine and the Drambuie overcame the liquor's ability to revive them, and they both fell into a deep sleep in each other's arms.

Block was the first to awaken, having set his internal alarm to two hours sleep. He had to go to the lab and find out more about the three deaths, but more important, he wanted to find out whether Shandra was an agent of the darkness, the incessant nationalistic plots that threatened the emerging Representative World Govern-ment.

He dressed quickly, and, retrieving her purse, carefully exam-ined its contents. There was nothing in it he wouldn't expect to find from anybody who went to a hotel bar to be picked up.

He looked through her clothes. Nothing. No weapons on her, nothing in her, nothing in her clothes, nothing in her purse.

She was clean. She could live.

He started to leave, but took a last look at Shandra. A prominent feature was the tightly braided, strawberry-blonde hair flowing braids in all directions from the head on the pillow.

Pity, he thought. But he didn't want to be around when she woke up. He turned back toward the door, started to open it, and then the hair, that beautiful braided hair flashed through his mind.

No, he thought. But it wouldn't hurt to give it a try.

He walked over to the bed and began to rub first one braid be-tween his fingers, and then another.

At the fifth one, he stopped and looked closely at the separated strands. He took his other hand and separated what looked like a different colored strand out. Once he had it, he slowly began to pull it out.

It slowly separated.

He held it up.

It was a thin wire, probably tungsten, with two finger loops at either end.

It was a garrote!

The goddamn bitch was fixing to kill him. He knew it. He knew she was a god damn terrorist. He would have to kill her. With her own garrote. Damn.

He walked over to the edge of the bubble balcony. He had to col-lect his thoughts. The inability to form an action triangle, and thereby the inability to act, was one thing.

Acting without an action triangle was quite another. Acting without purpose could be dangerous, both to him personally and to the continued health of his perceptor, if the hypothetical structure did exist and survived death.

The last thing he needed was to start down the road of self-destructive acts that would lead to the destruction of his perceptor.

He looked at the sleeping Shandra. What about her perceptor? If he offed her, she might not be around long enough to destroy her own perceptor. Killing her might be giving her another chance.

If he purposely killed her, he might well be harming himself and helping her.

Damn the reverse ethics that Perceptionism led too. Instead of being born and having to do good to gain admittance into the herein-after, you were born with a healthy perceptor, it had to be healthy else you wouldn't be functioning, and you could only strengthen it. If you committed acts against others, instead of strengthening your perceptor you degraded it with the ultimate risk that it wouldn't survive your death. You would lose all chance of additional im-provement.

The basic principle of Perceptionism was that you didn't get in heaven for doing good, you destroyed yourself forever by doing bad.

Offing Shandra, the damned bitch, might well do him more harm than good, and might well do her more good than harm.

On the other hand, it might be imperative that he send a message to all of those nationalistic bastards who hire these murdering whores by killing her, and doing it good.

He turned toward the bed, still undecided, when the door to the bedroom suite burst open and, before he could say anything, what looked like a sea of waiters filled the room. If these were waiters, he instantly realized, the hotel had hired the entire Jets' offensive line because these guys were big, really big.

Block sprang into action but was stopped cold by the pure bulk of the front four.

Shit, he muttered as he went down, a clean napkin off the buffet filling his mouth.

Four of them were on him, one on each limb. He could but lift his head to see a fat pig of a man walk up between his legs and stare down at him with small beady eyes. Chewing tobacco spittle was running down the corner of his mouth and dribbling onto his dishev-eled shirt.

Block could see an equally disgusting woman moving over to Shandra with a knife in hand.

"Leave the Bimbo for later," The Pig Man grunted at her. Block could see Shandra lying motionless on the bed. "Bring me the knife."

Block felt revulsion as the man turned back to him. "I'm going to have a lot of pleasure with you," he said, unbuckling his pants and letting them fall down around his knees. "You fucked me by blowing up my god damned plane. I'm the joke of the entire god damned civi-lized world. I'm going to carve pieces off you and make you eat them. You aren't going to believe what I'm going to do to you. I'm going to start with your asshole. I'm going to stick my prick up your ass and then I'm going to carve your ass out with my prick still in it," the spittle was spraying over Block, "and make you swallow it with my prick still in it, you fucking cunt! Start taking his teeth out, boys."

Block closed his eyes and strained against the superior force in frustration. He didn't see Shandra come off the bed in a naked flash and deliver a blow that killed the woman with the knife instantly. He only came alive when he felt his right arm released. It automati-cally went to his left, instantly killing the person holding his left hand. Shandra was already on the man who had been on his right arm. The Pig Man was backing off. Block moved on the man on his left foot as the one on his right turned to take the full brunt of Shandra's attack. The Pig Man was backing up, moving for the knife that the woman had dropped in death, seeing the two other men die simultaneously. As he stooped to pick up the knife, Block grabbed him by his left arm, Shandra by his right, and they both propelled him forward onto the balcony against the plastic enclosure.

He hit it head on and went through in a splinter of glass, sailing out into empty space.

"Shit!" Shandra exclaimed, as she watched the wind catch The Pig Man's pants, which acted like a sail, floating him down over to the peak of the pyramid on the Worldwide Tower.

"Well," Block said, "I certainly took care of those bastards."

He turned to Shandra.

"Just who in hell are you?"

"The Chairman assigned me to keep you from littering the public horizon with even more public dead bodies, damn it."

They both watched as the wind deposited The Pig Man bare-assed on the north face of the pyramid some seven hundred feet above Manhattan.

"You sure are a fucking failure at your job."

Block grabbed an apple from the buffet table and headed for the door.

"The Chairman is just getting back at me for razzing him about boffing the help."

Shandra watched the door close behind him, a motionless statute framed nude in the splintered window.

Who the hell, she wondered, would put glass in a room like this?