3 Block

Block walked across Rockefeller Plaza at a brisk pace. He liked the irony. He had just come from a meeting with American Opera-tions at the western part of the plaza and was going to a meeting with British Operations at the eastern side. The windows of the of-fices were probably opposite each other.

Was opposite similar or dissimilar? All the windows looked the same and it would be a perfect place for an ambush.

Idyll thought but, as he looked at his watch again, he realized he would have to be anything but idyll if he wanted to get the afternoon StratoJet to Acapulco. He did, however, still have time for a somewhat leisurely lunch with his old friend from B.O.

The first thing he had done in the elevator at the hotel was to flip out his computer and check his last request. He had asked for any charge slips that had been processed in the name of St. Remain.

He got back a jumble of activity, charges and chargebacks, in Acapulco just the night before, several hours really with the time change, a hot trail if he had ever seen one. He paused at the en-trance, punched up the StratoJet's Acapulco schedule and then punched in priority reservations for the afternoon flight.

He had then punched in a priority call for a meeting with James Angular, the local A.O. station chief, with the code for the triple murders as subject matter, and also an electronic note to his friend, Billy Easy, Deputy Station Chief, British Operations, setting up lunch.

He then set off briskly for the short walk to Angular's office.

Angular's secretary passed him right through to the laboratory, which was usual when the business was known in advance. Actu-ally, Operations executives didn't like to deal with nonoperations field people, especially when they were outranked by one, as An-gular was with Block and his LFP X1X classification, which was outranked only by The Chairman.

Luber, the lab man, didn't care what rank he was. The only thing he cared about was what facts came out of his equipment.

This was not a minor issue in the post-paradigm world after the stunning realization that the scientific method could only verify facts and in no way could be used to prove theory.

If a person has a heart attack and goes to a doctor, he is not go-ing to see the doctor because the doctor has all sorts of theories about what causes heart attacks and what's the best way to re-cover from one.

The unfortunate patient could care less whether the color TV had eaten away the cells that circulated behind his eyes so they were not available to absorb the bad fat, or whether his autoimmune system had snacked on his white cells, or even that a dominant gene had been modified by environmental halitosis.

All he wanted to do was to talk to someone who had seen a thou-sand other victims of the same thing so that he could be told how the survivors behaved and how the ones that didn't had also be-haved.

Adopting theory as fact in medicine soon led to a lot of facts that weren't facts at all and then to a lot of deaths.

Eventually blood-sucking leaches are recognized for what they are and new paradigms will be explored to advance the cause of life.

Luber didn't care why a fact existed. He just wanted to verify its existence. He had often stated that science advances only on the ability to mechanically explain how something functioned. It was therefore science's purpose to explain in clear terms the relation-ship of the parts and how they worked together rather than to sim-ply describe the parts.

Describing the parts, using the scientific measurement to obtain objective measurements, was only the first step, the only step that had been taken before the great paradigm shift.

It was like observing a car move from one point to another.

At one level, the car's movement can be measured. It acceler-ates at such and such a rate, it can travel at such and such a speed, it can come to a stop over a specific distance, and if it runs into a brick wall, its parts will fly in all directions with a certain predict-ability.

This might be all that a vast majority of people are interested in when they described the car. To them, the question, why does the car move from one place to another, might well be a philosophical question beyond the reach of science.

However, on another level, a description might be obtained of a force in the engine block causing a shaft to rotate with that rotation converted by gears into a forward motion that turned the wheels.

The why of the thing had been taken to a different level through the ability to physically describe a process. However, the question of why the shaft rotates could still be beyond the current reach of that level of science.

When someone comes along and dismantles the block and finds that explosions move pistons that by a series of moveable levers convert the straight-line force of the explosion into a circular force to rotate the shaft, the physical description carries scientific understanding to an additional level.

The question, what causes the explosion, had never been sub-jected to the dictates of a physical description of what was going on when fuel was converted to energy. The only thing that could be described was how much energy what interactions produced, which was a first stage measurement, the acceleration and speed of the car.

Why something underwent combustion remained a philosophical question and there was no pressing need to determine an answer because the answer, on the surface at least, would not lead to a cheaper way to move an automobile. There was not a lot of impetus to try to come up with a mechanical explanation for the combustion itself.

This was the category of pure science, and when the American Operations Laboratory was looking for an answer, it was more in-terested in applying the science to someone so that the person could be liquidated or otherwise removed from the scene.

Block told Luber that he was only interested in the common threads of the three murders.

"Well, they were all found in hotel rooms. That is pretty obvi-ous. They were all first class hotels so that the scene was main-tained until photographs could be obtained, something of a require-ment when a Federal Officer is found dead in semipublic circum-stances. Otherwise, we would not have much at all other than their common employment."

"What did you find out about the scene?"

"Each was in a different city, Dallas, LA and Chicago, even though each worked right here in the Manhattan District. Those are the facts. What you can draw from them is only theory, supposi-tion. The obvious conclusion is that whoever dropped them either picked them up here and took them to their point of departure for some reason or had them come there. Each of the victims was on leave. The probability of all of them being on leave within forty-eight hours of each other is not high according to their employment records.

"There was a definite design here, but what it was is your guess."

"Forty-eight hours? Could there have been more than one person at work here?"

"I don't think so. You'll see why as we go along. In any event, the fact that there are three different cities involved, and it all occurred within forty-eight hours, would tend to provide us with an X-ray of how the three got where they were."

"The StratoJet System," Block picked up instantly.

"It's the only way that could physically describe the three deaths under identical conditions so far apart. Whoever did it had access to the StratoJet System."

Block started to pull out his computer, but hesitated. "I suppose you've already run it."

"I sure have. None of the three had access, at least ostensibly, none appear as booked, but it is the only physical answer to their presence at the three locations."

"Someone had security access."

"Exactly"

"Well, that narrows it down."

"To a mere unmanageable many. I wouldn't rule out the possibil-ity that the sites were selected for reasons other than the purpose for which they were used."

"Come again?"

"The perpetuator had to be in those cities for other reasons and found it necessary to move the victims as a convenience or neces-sity."

Block couldn't imagine an operative who moved around that fast yet still had a schedule predictable enough to carry it off.

He sighed. "What else?"

"Quite a bit. The means of death was planned very carefully. Each of the victims had their lungs scalded out, so to speak, by their own bile. The bile was reinforced by a particularly spicy form of Bouillabaisse, an old Cajun recipe. Each of the three hotels had it on their menu and provided it for room service. In addition, they were the only hotels in their respective cities to be licensed to carry it."

"So their last meal was planned? Sweet."

"Down to the wine, Egri Bikaver."

"Egri what?"

"Bulls Blood. A native Hungarian wine from the Lake Balaton re-gion, which carries a delayed fuse."

"So how does this mixture of expensive vinegar and spicy broth end up in the lungs?"

Luber pulled out some photographs. "Look at how neat every-thing is. Two bowls, traces of the Bouillabaisse still in them, the silver neatly on the plate, or at its setting. And look here." He pointed to the napkins. "See how they are folded. Even after they have been used, they have been refolded in this quite unique way, see, it looks like they have a double fold to make a cross. That shows that however the broth got in the lungs, it was very care-fully put there."

Block looked closely at the pictures. The ones that contained the body showed the victim nude, his back arched, head thrown back. Close-ups of the faces showed the eye whites only, the pupils ap-parently looking for the back of the head.

"Something made them nauseous," Luber continued. "Something made their stomachs convulse, and just at the right time made their lungs inhale what their stomachs convulsed up."

"That doesn't seem likely."

"No, it doesn't. Look more closely, at the penises."

Block having chosen not to perceive that portion of the picture, let his mind reconstruct it. "They're distended. Isn't that normal for suffocation, which is basically what we're talking about, isn't it?"

"Suffocation. Exactly. Suffocation usually causes evacuation. One of those evacuations is ejaculation, thus the distended penises."

"And . . ."

"All three died with a full load!"

"Pardon me?"

"All three of these guys were about as sexed up as you can get, and, poof, they went without coming."

"What a shitty way to go."

"That it is. These guys dropped like the mistress of an incom-petent lover who couldn't go the last stroke. At the very edge of satisfaction."

"But no cigar."

"No cigar."

"So what does that tell us?"

"If we wanted a physical description of the acid going from the stomach to the lungs, traveling up the esophagus, hitting an ob-struction at the pharynx and being redirected into the lungs through the trachea, that would do the trick."

"And a thumb and forefinger could very easily provide the ob-struction. What about the convulsion?"

"If you had someone working to get you sexually excited . . ."

"Yikes. My balls!"

"It wouldn't take much, just a little unexpected pressure in the wrong place and your stomach would turn cartwheels."

"So mechanically . . ."

"Mechanically, his stomach is filled with acid producing sub-stances, he's grabbed by the balls, perhaps after his attention is obtained by grabbing him elsewhere, given a little squeeze, the acid erupts into his throat where it runs into a clamp and the effort to get breath from the newly arrived clamp causes him to suck the acid right into his lungs. Finis. It's almost like a symphony. All of the parts of the model come together to produce beautiful music."

Block shrugged. After all, he was talking to the author of Luber's Law that stated if it can't be mechanically described, it can't be. That law led to the observation that because the mass/gravity relationship could not be described mechanically, it can't be.

This in turn led to the corollary of the basic law, that if it was, then it could be mechanically described.

Not being able to describe the relationship between something that did something, gravity, and something that did nothing, mat-ter, drove analysts to entertain the possibility that it was not matter that caused gravity but rather something that the matter was doing.

Quite rapidly, there had been a quantum leap from describing how a car moved to trying to describe the combustion going on in its piston chambers because the only thing that matter actually did was combust whether that combustion occurred in stars and was called something else or was going on hundreds of miles beneath the surface of the planet.

When researchers began to pursue an open interchange of ideas rather than continuing to engage in a stifling protection of precon-ceived notions embodied in millions of degree supporting theses, they soon realized that when matter underwent combustion, it emitted an electromagnetic spectrum that behaved in a manner identical to the mathematical description of gravity.

By following what appeared to be a simple little rule, the world of scientific exploration once again became active as open minds returned to the drawing boards to determine just what it might be about the expansion of electromagnetic emissions, light, that would cause a force to be created in the direction opposite to its expan-sion.

Block was not about to ignore simple little rules.

"Of course," Luber continued, "I'm sure that there are other explanations. All we can do when we can't directly measure what we are trying to analyze is to come up with explanations that ex-plain as many facts as possible and then pick the simplest. Occam's razor, it's called, an important procedure we seem to be able to forget for centuries at a time. There is nothing sacred about expla-nations and there is nothing wrong with proposing them. The only thing that is wrong is believing them so strongly that they cease to become explanations and become tenets in an invisible religion."

"I am perfectly aware of the ability of the mind to totally ignore reality. It not only ignores it, it manufactures it."

"Ah. A Perceptionist. Then you use Luber's Law to probe exis-tence itself."

"Right now I'm using it to try to figure out where a fourth mur-der is going to occur."

"I hadn't heard about that."

"These three guys formed a pair of two-man teams. The fourth member is now missing. At least he was before I tracked him down. Fourteen hours ago he was having a billing dispute over a hang glider in Acapulco."

"Acapulco, eh. Ummm. It's on the StratoJet System, but it cer-tainly isn't similar to Chicago, L.A. and Dallas, or at least it doesn't seem to be."

He took out a little notebook and jotted the fact down.

"That would come under the category of a dissimilar fact."

"Dissimilar fact?"

"Yes. It's a fact that's part of the group that makes up the op-eration that we are trying to physically explain. However, it's not exactly similar. The three cities we have would indicate that the murders would fit into an existing, or at least a more important schedule. You don't schedule Acapulco. You plan it."

"Well right now, Acapulco is my best bet whether it's a dis-similar fact or not."

"Ah. The eternal problem. We have to act whether we have a complete picture or not. We need some sort of a picture of reality to make any act at all, but we can never know what reality really is. Our acts, to be successful, have to match reality. Or maybe they don't. If we can never perceive reality, get a totally accurate picture of it, then our acts can never match it and they can never, therefore, be successful, or at least totally successful. On the other hand, acts that have absolutely no basis in reality have proven to be totally successful. Go figure."

Block looked at his watch. "I have to get going."

"Well, you want to be careful of one thing."

"What's that?"

"If you don't have a total picture of reality, and as a Percep-tionist, you should appreciate the inability of the mind to construct more than a partially correct picture of reality, then you really want to watch out for the dissimilar facts."

"Why? One dissimilar fact can change the picture, but it can't alter reality."

"The more accurate your picture of reality is, the less chance you have of a dissimilar fact altering your picture of reality so that it will produce results that aren't related to reality.

"Because we all operate with the given that we can never even know half the facts, let alone all of the facts, and the fact that many of the facts we have we've used to alter reality to make it more pleasing to ourselves, a dissimilar fact can take over reality, replace it with a reality that you manufacture yourself."

"That doesn't seem to follow. If a single fact can't shake a cor-rect picture of reality, how can it drastically change reality?"

"As a Perceptionist, you of all people should realize that we make our own reality up. The mind, the perceptor if you will, can only accommodate one picture of reality at a time.

"It only takes a subtle shift of perspective to substitute exter-nal reality with the reality we want to perceive.

"Electrons travel at the speed of light. One word can change the face of the one you love to the one you hate. It is only a chill before the lush green forest becomes a haven for monsters. The safe platform of a StratoJet is only a thought away from being a twisted mass of engineering horror plummeting thirty miles into the void.

"The picture of reality we construct at any one instant is a deli-cate balance between external reality and the reality we want to agree with ourselves. It can go either way depending on the circum-stances.

"If you find a fact you want to find, that fact is going to become the fact, rather than a dissimilar fact, and all other facts will be-come dissimilar.

"We've spent centuries believing in facts that were really con-cepts and then inventing facts to find that will prove the concepts to be facts. What would otherwise have been similar facts, facts that fit together to provide a logical explanation all of a sudden be-came dissimilar facts and dissimilar facts, facts that normally wouldn't even have gone into the pot as something to explain be-cause they probably aren't even facts to start with, became the facts that all else has to be similar to.

"Acapulco may very well be a dissimilar fact. But you don't want to give it so much weight that it alters your picture of real-ity."

Block pondered the fact, or rather the dissimilar fact that facts would be meaningless if he didn't press on. He said thank you to the good Luber and took his exit.

He used the elevator ride to confirm that Easy would meet him at the Foot, their code name for a small, out-of-the-way bistro at the base of one of the seemingly endless towers that surrounded the plaza. He ordered a limousine to be on call for him when he was ready to go to Kennedy International. He was surprised the thoughts of ambush returned as he hurried across the plaza. He shrugged it off as an occupational hazard.

Probably a residue of his discussion with Luber, where the jux-taposition of the two meetings turned what he would normally view as exciting, the prevalence of structures that dwarfed him, to something else, equally exciting, but more ominous.

He spotted Easy coming out of the base of the building housing BO and hailed him with a wave.

He and the British operative had been close friends since he had taken his obligatory two years of schooling in England.

Easy was of the Wraithmuires and, but for the fact that he had several older brothers, would have been titled. As it was, he had to make a go of it in the civil service and had gone into his Majesty's Secret Service.

The difference for Easy was he was post revelation. He had en-tered British Operations after all of the revelations had surfaced which called into question just who's secret service the British Se-cret Service had been since the days of the First World War.

As it turned out, all of the agents who had been sent to persuade the newly formed government of Lenin, who had declared peace on the Eastern Front, that the Russians should reenter the war as a favor to merry old England, had been turned.

And not just turned, as in agreeing to work for the other side. They had been turned incontrovertibly as if they had glimpsed something beyond their own country to which they could pledge their loyalty.

They had returned pledged, and in turn pledged a whole genera-tion of up and coming young liars, drunks, dissemblers and sex ad-venturers to take the same pledge. Their peccadilloes, especially their pursuit of the golden orgasm, merely reflected the expression of the freedom they felt releasing themselves from the suffocating societal restrictions that had been their heritage.

If the revelations of this massive exodus of several generations against the time honored allegiance to empire the privilege of class should have instilled in them was not enough, the further revelation that Soviet Operations could serve as a sort of neutral gateway was even more perplexing. Information flowed unhindered from the East to the West, from Russia to London to New York, without Lon-don even being aware that the backchannels existed. As a result, the actual guardians of the empire engaged in any number of opera-tions with the firm belief their assessments of events were an ac-curate reflection of reality when the reality, as it turned out, was about as opposite to reality as unreality could be.

By the time the Empire of the unsetting sun realized it was fal-ling to the inevitable march of a Representative World Government, it had taken the realistic course of requiring only that its agents openly declare their loyalties so everybody would know where eve-rybody else was coming from.

An agent, after all, could be a traitor to his country if he deliv-ered it into the hands of its enemies. However you could hardly be classified a traitor if you were openly helping to deliver it in into the hands of the future, a future which coincided with its future.

Billy Easy had grown up in privilege and had access to all of the resources of history a young mind needed. He had read about the Greeks emerging from their city-states long enough to destroy Greeks in other city-states. He had digested Alexander of Mace-donia coming out of the north and slaughtering everybody. He was versed in the Romans subduing the Greeks and eliminating Carthage down to and including roasting the last cobblestone in the street. He knew of the Druids, Charlemagne, Attila the Hun, Ivan the Terrible, all running around slashing, burning, crushing, goring. He was on top of the crusades and the endless European wars that made the Greek city-state conflicts a mere bagatelle. He was close to the massive 20th century movements where vast impersonal ideologies represented by single named horrors eliminated whole populations like smoke enveloping a plain.

He knew no one was exempt. The only difference between the slaughtered and the slaughterers was chance.

He had lain awake at night wondering how to avoid becoming ei-ther. He had tried to figure out how he could place his loyalties so that he would not have to become a hypocrite for the want of lux-ury.

He couldn't see it in religion because religion was divisive rather than cohesive. He couldn't see it in statism, in loyalty to empire, because empire dictated subservience and subservience precluded the excellence that can only arise from homogeneity.

He toyed with the idea of accomplishing it the American way for a while, the slow creation of a world government through the eco-nomic integration of state after state, until the world became one complete economic unit.

The Americans had been deeply divided as to whether that was in fact their destiny, though, and they were not eager to give up their privileged position in the world.

He had briefly flirted with a communism that had collapsed from economic incompetence but was still heavy on hope and found hope a brittle mortar at best.

The revelations of his youth about how the British Secret Serv-ice was operating and whom it was operating for had provided a welcome outline of the emerging Representative World Government and he had embraced it immediately.

Just as he had joined the service and had matured in his profes-sion, his government and the people it represented had matured in their understanding that the country's future was not with Empire, but with being a part of the emerging world community.

The only question was, what part?

The futurists saw England's prestige as a way of adding prestige to the emerging Representative World Government, a corner stone on which it could grow to satisfy the empire's current and former subjects as world citizens.

The realists saw England's role as the guardian, waiting for the outlines of The Representative World Government to emerge and then seizing it and converting it into a parliamentary government.

As The Representative World Government emerged, however, the English parties realigned themselves so the party that sup-ported allowing the emergence to take its natural form identified itself as the realists and the futurists became the nationalists with their goal preserving the English culture into an endless future.

Nor was the division unique to England and its possessions. No one could tell the players without a scorecard and no one was in the business of publishing scorecards.

As a result, who was winning, who was losing, and even who was playing was anybody's guess.

Easy joined British Operations as a professed Realist. He had de-clared his loyalties at the outset and on each annual review, when it came time for him to reaffirm his loyalties, he had filled in the blank to the statement, "I hereby state that my loyalties are aligned to those of -----." with The Representative World Govern-ment.

This eliminated him from being the Station Chief at any of his posts of assignment although realists had hired a lawyer to look into the possibility of a suit claiming discrimination, but it did make him good material for the Deputy post because he could be posted anywhere and be right at home.

He responded to Block's hail and fell in step beside his friend, the two entering one of the towering facades. After threading their way through a series of corridors, they came to the out-of-the-way bistro. They were waived on through and took up seats oppo-site each other at a booth in the back shadows.

"I'm worried about you," Easy said as soon as they were seated.

"Why?" Block wanted to know.

"You're hot as shit. You have a price on your head. You come into British Operations by email and that goes right through con-trol."

"So?"

"People are after your ass."

"Who would that be? Certainly not BO"

"How about the body that draped the Worldwide Tower during rush hour. It took them hours to get a hook on the carcass and haul it off by helicopter."

"That was just something left over from the last mission I had to clean up. Nothing important. It didn't cause me any trouble."

"Well I'm not so sure that is the end of it. Somebody rerouted your note and put a tracer on my reply."

"I'm too concerned about my new project to worry about the consequences of an old one." He took out his computer and punched in a request. A three-dimensional wire drawing segmented itself into existence. "Do you know what that is?"

Easy looked at the picture. "Judging from the security code across the control plate, it's a Diskcard. The data that it contains can only be extracted with its electronic fingerprint. Once it's ex-tracted, there's nothing left on the Diskcard. It's a one-time-use item."

"It's a little more complicated but basically the data can only be transferred to a databank that is coded to accept it. If you try to copy the data, you might as well throw the Diskcard away because it won't contain the data that is removed, and unless the receiving databank can decode it, it will automatically erase itself."

"We use them to time-delay the transfer of data where the transfer time has to be determined."

"This one was being used to transmit data so that the process of transmission could never come under the control of the person do-ing the transmission." Block looked closely at Easy. "Someone has converted a simple security precaution into a time-delay use."

"I see. Well, I'm sure that BO is not the only organization that uses it as a time delay system. What was the Diskcard being used for?"

"It was part of the normal communications procedure for regu-lating the money supply."

Easy whistled. "The only thing that could get you in more trouble than interfering with the regulation of the money supply is some idiot scientist trying to blow up the planet to prove that the core is made out of iron."

"Who would have an interest in interfering with the regulation of the money supply?"

"You know," Easy said, clearing space as the waiter delivered drinks, a martini for himself and a scotch for Block. "This strikes a bell for me." He paused, taking a sip of the martini. Block waited patiently. "This is causing me some concern."

"Why?"

"Integration of the currency is ripe now and it's causing quite a bit of infighting."

"I've heard something about that," Block said, leading him on.

"The Futurists are dead set against the submergence of the Pound Sterling into the European currency unit of exchange. The pound has been around for centuries, and being futurists, they want to see it around for centuries to come."

"This pretty much agrees with my information. What I have is a missing Diskcard and a missing person. The missing person holds the code that will allow the Diskcard to be entered into the database that controls the monetary supply. The data on the Diskcard will increase the money supply to the extent it will destabilize the world economy."

"You have to find the Diskcard or the person with the code and render one or the other inoperable."

"I either have to destroy the person with the code or the Disk-card," Block repeated. "That is precisely my project."

"This is extremely important." Easy downed his martini, star-tling Block with his unexpected vehemence.

""Hey," Block said, "it's not so bad. It's not the end of The Rep-resentative World Government for crying out loud. If I fail, it will only delay it for a year or more."

"There can be no delay!" Easy was vehement.

"Come on. Look, my grandfather spent his life for the cause; my father spent his life for the cause. I'm going to spend my life for the cause. It's been a hundred year war, though. Sure, it would be nice if I were around to see peace established under The Representative World Government, but if I'm not, the battle won't end. A little ploy like this is not going to derail an historical imperative."

"It could very well derail the historical imperative because the parallel inevitability, self-destruction, is always present."

"We can control it because we are aware of it. The effects of the inevitability of self-destruction in the 20th Century alone were awesome. Can you imagine the consequences without active man-agement?"

"The inevitability of self-destruction will overtake the histori-cal imperative of The Representative World Government if the mechanism of gravity is mastered before The Representative World Government can control its usage."

"Gravity isn't a mechanism, it's a force. Heck, I was just over to see Luber himself, and he said . . ."

"That if something can't be described mechanically, it can't be. And gravity is, so therefore it can be described mechanically, and if it isn't, then its description is wrong."

"Whatever. But assuming that it is a mechanism, how will its mastery derail The Representative World Government?"

"When the horse changed warfare, the extent of the warfare was then limited by the oats available to feed the horses. When tanks and planes changed the face of warfare, the availability of the oil that fueled the machinery of war then limited the extent of the warfare.

"Up until the invention of the atomic bomb, there was always a logistical limitation on the extent to which we could destroy our-selves.

"With the atom bomb, there was all of a sudden a whole new set of rules governing self-destruction. Fortunately, the massive con-centration of technology that goes into the production of an atom bomb has so far allowed us to monitor the production of the bomb. When the appropriate technology starts to flow to one place, we know that a bomb will soon emerge unless steps are taken to avert its production. As we go along, this is becoming more of an iffy safeguard."

"You're telling me? We know of at least one that got away."

"The flying saucer over Baltimore? I suspected as much. But the point is, since the paradigm shift, the possibility has arisen that there will arrive a time when there will be no logistical limitation on a nation which wanted to move its troops around the world."

"I don't understand how a paradigm shift can effect a material change. It's just a change in the way we look at something. Nothing else has changed."

"As a Perceptionist, you should know how subtle changes in points of view can change the entire landscape."

"Perceptionism doesn't involve a paradigm shift. Before Per-ceptionism, the mind was a mystery that could only be analyzed by its effects. The proposition that the mind's reconstruction of real-ity could be manipulated so that the electrical flows the mind used to control the body could be used to affect the body containing the mind was not that novel. We all knew we reacted to certain condi-tions in the same manner but we had no entrenched literature that prevented us from accepting the possibility that the perception of reality controlled our physical reaction to it because it altered the flows of electrons that controlled our bodily functions."

"You're right. There was no paradigm shift to the proposition that there was a physical connection between our perception of re-ality, the possibility of being slugged, where our perception created flows of electricity that did the slugging, and the actual physical connection between ourselves and the fist doing the slugging if we got slugged.

"Just look at the paradigm shift we have to undergo, however, to accept the possibility it is what matter is doing, combusting, that causes gravity, rather than gravity simply being a property of something called mass.

"The last such shift we had to endure was the shift from the concept that the Earth was the center of the universe to the concept that the Earth revolved around the sun.

"Before Copernicus, observers of the motion of the objects in the sky would draw all sorts of circles around circles, and then around those circles, to explain what they saw. They were up to over eighty of these epicycles when Copernicus suggested that if the Sun were placed at the center, instead of the Earth, the number of circles could be reduced to about forty."

"That would be another corollary for Luber. If something can be described mechanically in more than one way, then the one that de-scribes it the simplest will be the better one."

"Right. What Copernicus did was merely shift the point of view so the mechanical explanation would be simpler.

"But, when he did, he created a problem far greater than the one he solved!

"When the Earth was the center of the universe, we knew things fell down when they were dropped. It was easy for us to know why. If the Earth was the center of the universe, it was only natural that things fall to it. Everything, by definition, is attracted to the cen-ter.

"But when we were faced with the paradigm shift, that the Earth was not the center of the universe, we were faced with one of our own worst fears. If the Earth was moving around the sun, why didn't we fall off the Earth?"

"Because we were held to it by gravity."

"Right. All of a sudden, what we knew happened when we dropped something needed a name. It needed a name because we had to reassure ourselves, once we knew the Earth was hurtling around the sun at some ungodly speed, that we wouldn't fall off and spin out endlessly into the unknown blackness, perhaps even invading the realm of the gods.

"And because it was the Earth we didn't want to fall off, we made the Earth the source of the gravity.

"We didn't know how the Earth might produce gravity. We didn't really care so long as we could assure ourselves it would keep us from falling off its surface.

"The mass/gravity concept replaced the Earth as the center of the universe concept because it provided us with an unquestionable belief that, as far as putting our next foot down in front of us was concerned, there would be no change."

"Mass/gravity then becomes no more than the proverbial na-tives bowing before an erupting volcano," Block observed, "an un-conscious belief cloaked in scientism, that the force holding us to the matter that made up the Earth was inextricably a property, like color or hardness, of matter. Why couldn't a mechanism produce the same result?"

"Because a mechanism that results from something matter is doing would be dependent on the matter doing something.

"If matter is undergoing combustion and the mechanism is re-lated to combustion, it is, for instance, embedded in the expanding electromagnetic spectrum produced by combustion, light and heat. If matter was not undergoing combustion, there wouldn't be any attractive force produced by that matter."

"Gravity would vary with the rate the mass was combusting."

"Right. In the 16th and 17th centuries when gravity was formu-lated by people who didn't even know there were atoms, the Earth and other planets were not apparent emitters. Heck, as late as the latter part of the 20th century, the blind still denied the Earth has a hot core.

"Let me give you the example that is being used to explain the process of ignorance, where science creates reality through the process of creating a notion that can predict a fact which, when found, turns the notion into a fact. You are familiar with the great flood, aren't you?"

"The biblical flood of forty days and forty nights?"

"Right. Some people claim it is a myth while others spend their lives looking for Noah's ark, perhaps thinking that proving one inci-dent in the bible will prove the existence of God.

"Are you familiar with the prebiblical and dispersion flood tales?"

"Vaguely. Cloakroom study hall."

"The Chaldean's had their flood, as did the Sumerians and Baby-lonians. Moving east, we have written and oral traditions in Syria, India, Burma, Cochin China, and the Malay Peninsula.

"South of that area, we have it everywhere, in the Indian Ar-chipelago, Sumatra, Borneo, the Celebes to mention a few. The story is found in the Philippines, Formosa, in the Bay of Bengal, in New Zealand and Australia.

"Heading further east, we find identical tales all over Polynesia, on into the Hawaiian Islands. From Tierra del Fuego to Point Bar-row, up and down the continents in between, from shore to shore, from Eskimo to Algonquin to Inca, east and west, we have specific traditions of a great flood.

"Crossing the Atlantic, we find the same in Wales, in the Lithua-nians, and even the gypsies of Romania.

"In short, we have a flood everywhere."

"The ice caps melted?" Block suggested.

"They may have if they ever existed. They didn't cause the peo-ples across the face of an entire planet to have identical historical memories."

"The fear of a great flood was the same as the fear of falling off the Earth?"

"No. The great flood actually happened. As a Perceptionist, you know that not perceiving what exists doesn't mean it doesn't exist. If gravity is related to a process, the ignition, combustion and cooling of a planet or the sun and that process is slowly diminish-ing, gravity can diminish with respect to the matter in which the process is occurring. After all, gravity is dynamic. Why should its source be static?

"If we picture the moon as blue or made out of green cheese, as some sort of tradition illogically hints we can, we can produce a picture of the moon vastly different than the one we have today.

"If, as it is widely believed, the moon formed at the same time as the Earth, there is no reason to think that it didn't take the same course the Earth did as far as its physical development. When we look at its surface, we see mountain ranges and seabeds. There is no reason to assume that it wasn't at one time geologically active. It's a quarter the size of the Earth and therefore it simply cooled off faster.

"Other than for the fact that there is an absence of water, there is no reason to assume water didn't develop on its surface as it passed through normal geological development.

"The only reason we assume there was never any water is that, by believing that dynamic gravity is a nondynamic property of matter, any water that was there would still be there."

"That's pretty shallow thinking," Block said, smiling.

"But what if the water had been there, along with an atmos-phere, just like the present day Earth? What if the same geological forces that produced the Earth produced a moon with mountains rising out of seas, with an atmosphere, and storms and clouds?

"If the moon had been hot, cooling, with a hard cool crust, and a molten area below the surface, just like the Earth is today, then the gravity that resulted from the combustion process would hold the oceans and the atmosphere in place just like they do on Earth today.

"The concept of a static gravity, of course, has never been able to explain why the Earth rotates, but with the mechanism of grav-ity being a part of the expanding electromagnetic spectrum, the mechanism could well have caused the moon to rotate while it was cooling, just as the Earth rotates.

"The moon, because it was a quarter the size of the Earth, de-veloped faster and cooled off sooner?"

"Right. Given the certainty that gravity is proportional to cool-ing, what would be the scenario for an Earth-like moon existing next to another cooling body that was a great deal hotter and therefore produced a stronger gravity?"

"The gravity of the moon would begin to diminish faster than the gravity of the Earth as the moon's temperature passed a certain point?"

"As the moon cooled, its gravity lessened. As the gravity less-ened, the force holding the atmosphere and the water on the sur-face, lessened."

"And the mechanical nature of the force is?"

"As an object combusts, it emits an electromagnetic spectrum, heat or light if you will, that expands inversely over the distance it expands. Because light diminishes uniformly, at any point in its ex-pansion, something is causing it to diminish uniformly.

"Therefore, at any point, there is a mechanism that is regulat-ing the expansion. The mechanism keeps electromagnetic emissions from overexpanding simply be recombining overexpanding flows."

Block interrupted again. "Recombining? Then the recombining mechanism would capture atoms of matter and move them back to-ward the source of combustion."

"We look at it as acting on the smallest unit of the center of an atom."

"The smallest unit. That's interesting. There's a thought right at the edge of my mind. Go on."

"As the moon cooled, its hold on every particle of matter on its surface lessened. At the same time the hold on each particle less-ened, the comparative hold on that particle caused by the emission field of the Earth remained steady. Together, the Earth's gravity was becoming relatively stronger"

"A basic unit of each atom is subject to the mechanism that regulates the expansion of the emission field. It will go where the mechanism is strongest," Block speculated, his interest more in Perceptionism than physics.

"Toward the emitter. The waters forming the seas on the sur-face of the moon were subjected to greater tides as the moon cooled with the process probably taking hundreds of years to de-velop. The tides grew larger as the moon grew cooler and cooler.

"Eventually, the water coalesced on one side of the moon, the side facing the Earth, the side with the empty seabeds"

"That's how we find the moon, with two distinct topographies, the smooth one, like seabeds facing the Earth and the weathered one, always facing away," Block observed.

"The moon's rotation would have stopped as the water gathered on one side. It may well have stayed that way for another hundred or so years, but eventually the gravity of the Earth would have balanced the gravity of the moon.

"In such a dynamic situation, the diminishing gravity of the moon would no longer have been able to hold the water on its sur-face. The water would have lifted off the surface, following the atmosphere that would have already departed. I think the water would have spiraled up, carrying trees and rocks and mud, and even the remains of whatever civilization existed. Sunlight gleaming off the freezing mass would account for the coiling serpent that popu-lates the days leading up to the flood in many of the accounts.

"The spiraling sign of doom, containing an estimated one-fifth of all the water that now exists on Earth, would have moved toward the Earth, gaining momentum just as if it were a stone dropped on the surface of the planet."

"Holy spit. It would have wreaked havoc."

"The surface destruction that remains scarring the Earth showed it came in from the northwest, scouring the sides of moun-tains and leaving mountains of gravel piled up where no gravel should exist. It floated vast herds of animals, depositing them in islands in the Arctic and plugging cave openings all over the world. Tropical forests were transported thousands of miles. Entire for-ests are found a hundred feet beneath the sedimentary deposits. Entire cities were submerged while others, from the pressure of the water, where flung miles into the sky as the sinking Earth com-pensated by throwing up vast mountain ranges.

"Incredible," Block said quietly, his mind looking anew at the perceptor in light of this new view of gravity.

"Only if you believe that gravity is a static property of matter rather than the dynamic result of matter doing something, under-going combustion and the cooling process, which is what matter does in the universe. Then it is not only credible, it fits the evi-dence, evidence that we have to conveniently ignore because it doesn't fit our concept of the way things should be.

"Ron, the flood did happen. There was an existing civilization, a worldwide community whose remains are all around us, in jungles, on plains, in cities, buried under the water that inundated the world, cast up on mountain peaks raised by the pressure of the ad-ditional waters on the seabeds.

"When it happened, it devastated humanity, environmentally damaged it, cast it into a sort of cultural amnesia. The amount of farm and grazing land had been limited by the increased sea levels, the growing season had been shortened by the increased water cooling the climate and leaders emerged who were determined to keep their people in ignorance, gaining power over the limited food and maintaining that power through the warfare that limited re-sources fostered.

"The time has come for us to face reality. If we didn't need to know how to manipulate the mechanism that causes gravity, if we were a small community of people tilling the garden out back, it wouldn't be important how we rationalized it.

"There comes a time, however, in the development of any peo-ple when the garden out back becomes the entire planet and the gar-den is too small.

"There comes a time when the child leaves the home.

"That time has come for us. We have to throw off our ancient ignorance, inflicted on us through no fault of our own, and confront reality. We can no longer futz around with silly ideas that serve no useful purpose. We have to use our minds to analyze our circum-stances and modify our situation accordingly. There are still people who think that the Sun revolves around the Earth and others that think the Earth is hollow. There will be a lot of deadheads around for a long time who think gravity is a property of mass.

"It's the few who don't that will cause the problem. It's those few, and that's all it will take because knowledge has its own timetable, it springs up all over as if it were a dormant seed that needed just the right amount of light to trigger its bursting into existence, it's those few who will be able to create the ability to self-destruction without logistical limitations."

"The ability to wage war anywhere on Earth?"

"Once the ability to operate in the atmosphere without gravita-tional restraints is universal, if there are nationstates, there will be uncontrollable warfare. Any nation could align with any other nation to attack a third nation anywhere on Earth. Soldiers could be transported halfway around the world and wreak havoc wherever they wished. We would return to the culture of the club, with who-ever wielding the biggest club cutting the biggest swath.

"With the ensuing confusion and general loss of control, there will be no ability to monitor the flow of technology that goes into the production of the atom bomb. It will only be a matter of months, once civilization begins to collapse, before the ability to produce the bomb will become universal. Then . . . well, we can't blow up the planet, and according to Originism, life will develop to perceive the universe by adapting to the conditions that promote its exis-tence, but our civilization, and all the effort that has gone into pro-ducing it will be gone.

"We don't want that to happen."

"We really are going down to the wire on this?"

"We all know there are turning points in history. In the past, failure to successfully navigate the turning points has not been fa-tal. Oh, they may have thrown the world into centuries of stagna-tion, but we've always been able to pull ourselves out of the dark-ness. This turning point is different. It is the final turning point.

"This time, the darkness may be permanent. If we do not suc-ceed in establishing The Representative World Government before we become capable of destroying ourselves, there will be no future turning point for life as we know it.

"You must keep that Diskcard from being used. The ten or so years that it would take to recover from the economic setback re-sulting from the debasement of the currency might be ten years too many in the race of The Representative World Government with the march of technology. If armies become mobile because the mechan-ics of gravity become widely understood, the entire globe will be-come a stone age maelstrom."

"Now I understand why The Chairman was a little agitated about the project. Why don't you just find out whose project it is on your side and get rid of them?"

"We have no way of knowing who's running the scam. The fu-turist faction has so many sub-factions that the people involved don't even know who they are dealing with when they are dealing with themselves. You yourself know that promoting national inter-ests leaves a lot of room for personal plunder.

"The line between ideology and acquisition is as narrow as the difference between reality and fantasy to a willing mind."

"I have my man located in Acapulco within the last twenty-four hours."

"Ah, Acapulco, that hotbed of nationalism. Nations legislate against perversion and then declare open cities where their wealthy elite can collectively practice it. Like children, they can only obtain pleasure if it is perceived as forbidden.

"They seek to practice in the dark what they can't face in the sunlight. There is one piece of scum in Acapulco, Lano D'Lazo. Ring a bell?"

"Not that I can say."

"If nations are representative of the feudal system, where the seat of power was the castle rather than the equally representative parliamentary building, then D'Lazo can be pictured as the man in black leather, whip and mask, distended belly, beckoning humanity to his subterranean caverns. He facilitates those who would force their powers on the many to systematically tear the flesh and break the bones of the starved and putrid unfortunates languishing under their control. His torture chambers may be made of steel and chrome, but only so they can be hosed down more conveniently. They are nonetheless present and will always be so as long as the system of nationstates can protect them from the glare of human-ity.

"D'Lazo is the type who provides the technology, modernized from the dungeons of the past. If its information they want from your man, they will draw it out of him there and once he's given it up, they'll continue to draw pain out of his body just for the shear pleasure of it."

Block grimaced. "Where is he located?"

"He has a villa overlooking the bay down there. It's way up on a cliff. Right underneath the veranda, he has a big room he likes to take his partners to get them ready for sex, if that's what you want to call it. He also takes care of his personal projects down there, developing his instruments of torment for sale to the hun-dreds of national governments that line up for his services.

"You definitely don't want to get caught in his clutches."

"I have no intention of getting caught in his clutches. He does sound like the type of person who should be terminated." Block looked at his watch. "If I'm going to catch the afternoon StratoJet to Acapulco, I'd better get on the ball."

Block left Easy among the dishes containing the remnants of their excellent lunch soured by the reality of the task that faced the two colleagues. There was little sense in walking out together. His limousine would be waiting. He wanted some time to think about the comment Easy had made about the atom having a unit that was sub-ject to gravity.

If combustion produced gravity, he thought, as he went through the revolving doors, and all matter were made up of common units, then gravity would move all of those units toward combustion.

As long as combustion, which must be nothing more than the units undergoing a process of some sort, as long as combustion was going on, then the gravity would be pulling units of matter into the combustion process to themselves become a part of the combustion process.

He walked out onto the walkway that ribboned the plaza and spotted his limousine among the several, identified by its absence of a flag.

It was a circular process, he thought. A unit of an atom was drawn by gravity, which Easy was saying was the mechanism that controlled the expansion of the electromagnetic emissions that combusting matter produced and the unit was drawn into the com-busting matter. It would then begin to combust and in turn create the light, the expansion of which would cause other units of atoms to be drawn into the combustion process.

He stepped toward the door the driver was holding open for him. The curb disintegrated under his foot. He began to stumble with the absence of the curb. His hand went out to the window to brace him-self from falling.

That would mean, his mental process continued, that all matter would eventually undergo combustion and dissipate in the form of light.

The window disappeared from in front of his hand and his hand went on though to the back of the seat.

That's it, he thought. The units of the atom were undergoing combustion, then they were emitting something and that something must be the same thing that made them up.

The driver had steadied him as he rotated into the back seat of the limousine. The back window glass shattered over his shoulders.

He trembled under the impact of the insight. Atoms were made up of units of matter that in turn were made up of particles so small that they couldn't be attracted by gravity.

Matter must be made up of these units and that's why we can measure it, he speculated. The perceptor must somehow be made up of the individual particles and that's why we can't measure it.

"Wow!" he almost shouted as the acceleration drove him back into the seat.

"You ain't just shitting," the driver replied, looking over his shoulder. "I don't know when I'm going to learn to find out who I'm going to pick up. If I'd a known you were in town, I'd have taken some leave and jogged over to the Bronx."

"What?" Block was just becoming aware of his presence. He wiped the crystals of glass off his shoulders. "What the hell hap-pened?"

"Somebody was playing shooting gallery in Rockefeller Plaza, and you were the ducky."

"You all right?" Block asked the driver. He looked around at the window. "Doesn't look like they were very good shots."

"They were good enough to destroy this damn boat."

"Just put it on the expense account. How are Barbara and the kids?"

"Tim made the first cut for tech school. We've got our fingers crossed."

The mid-afternoon Manhattan traffic made the burden of weav-ing in and out among the cabs and the other limousines lighter.

Block settled back in a corner away from the breeze moving in the side window and out the back. A view of sea and endless sky swam into his consciousness as he focused on the job at hand.

There wasn't much to plan. He would simply drop in on D'Lazo unannounced and unexpected, wring the Diskcard out of him, or Sid-ney, or both, throttle Sidney for good measure to get rid of the code and throw D'Lazo off the cliff of his veranda if it was high enough to do him terminal harm.

He looked at his watch as the limousine pulled up at the Strato-Jet terminal. He was only five minutes late. With his name on the manifest, the swift craft couldn't take off without him in his seat. Nonetheless, he raced through the terminal, passing checkpoints unhindered and flew through the tunnel connecting the terminal to the plane.

No sooner was he in his seat with the door shutting behind him than the plane was moving away from the gate.

At all airports, the StratoJet terminals were positioned off the head of the runway at the direction of departure favored by the prevailing winds so that the StratoJets normally traveled down the short connecting strip to the runway, passed directly in front of the line of planes in queue for take off, and were immediately cleared. Today was no exception and Block was airborne within five minutes of entering the terminal.

He sat back in his cubicle and let his thoughts wander. The first thing that came to mind was the opening events of the day.

He had to admit The Pig Man had surprised him. He had heard a lot about him all through the suitcase project but had never even seen his picture.

That had not prevented him from experiencing instant recogni-tion. He stood on hind legs, but his whole body bent forward in a parody of the human form, looking exactly like a pig standing on its hind legs, impossible for a pig.

To mimic nature even more insanely, the slime even had what appeared to be a snout. He didn't have molars protruding from his lower snout, but the loss of the lower front teeth had the same af-fect when he let out his snarl of a smile.

He guessed The Chairman would give him holy hell when he found out about The Pig Man ending up on the slope of the pyramid of the Worldwide Tower.

He shut his eyes and replayed the scene. The Pig Man had come charging through the door like a swine, surrounded by a bunch of nondescript muscle. He had waded through the muscle, seized The Pig Man by the throat and hurled him through the bay window of the suite, watching him sail over to the top of the Worldwide Tower.

He remembered watching him sail with the breeze. His pants had been down around his knees.

The Pig Man had come charging through the door with his body-guards and in the fight, when he was eliminating the bodyguards, The Pig Man had taken his belt off to use it as a knuckle substitute, and when he had grabbed him by the throat, his pants had come down as he threw him through the window. Boy, the wind had really caught those pants.

The bodyguards had come through the door first, giving him time to knock them over one at a time, but giving The Pig Man a chance to plan his attack with the belt. The clever plan had failed and he threw The Pig Man through the window, the jagged glass catching his pants and pulling them down, making a sail out of them, his mis-shapen body floating like gossamer carrying snot over to the sur-face of the Worldwide Tower.

"Thank you," he said, taking the scotch from the stewardess.

The Pig Man should really have waited until Block left the apartment. If they had caught him in the hall, he might have been at a disadvantage, but maybe if the elevator door could have been pried open, he could have thrown The Pig Man down the shaft.

Block let the drink take over his recall process, making his per-ceptor conjure up the pictures that would not cause him to have conflicts with himself. By allowing agreeable pictures to roll through his mind at will, there could be no conflict of the type that would start the movement of unwanted electrical flows into his subsystems.

The alcohol filed the rough edges off the pictures he recon-structed. It blunted his recall process so the pictures he did con-struct didn't have anything in them that would set up a conflict with his primary concept of self.

This concept of self had been built up over the years of opportu-nity, the successful handling of his opportunities, and the recogni-tion that followed from his peers, especially from The Chairman.

It was a good concept of self, one that held him generally above others although he would be the first to admit he was an organism that operated pretty much like all other organisms.

Still, he had to act, and to act, he had to form a picture of him-self in his perceptor acting successfully. He couldn't form such a picture if he went around with a primary picture of himself being unable to act successfully.

The high regard he held himself in was not an unnecessary con-ceit and it wasn't an unrecognized conceit, one that would get in the way of his performance. It was simply something to be used.

However, when it wasn't being used to motivate his physical re-actions in response to his physical environment, he could enjoy a drink and lapse into the sort of reverie that would produce the pic-tures that agreed with his concept of self.

As he otherwise went through his daily activities, he didn't have that luxury. No matter how much he was catered to by the envi-ronment, no matter how many checkpoints in life he could pass un-hindered, and no matter how many people inconvenienced them-selves by being held up in delayed StratoJets so he could accom-plish his missions, he still faced constant conflicts of self forming in his perceptor that disagreed with his concept of self.

In fact, because his concept of self was so high, he was sub-jected to even more conflicts because his demands on himself were so high.

Thus, if something as simple as waiting for an elevator was forced on him through some mechanical inconsideration of the envi-ronment, he would have a concept of himself rapidly getting on the elevator. As the moments passed and the elevator didn't come, he would start to form a conflicting picture of himself, a picture of himself not being on the elevator. The longer he had to wait, the more real the picture of himself waiting became and the more real the conflict became.

When he pushed the elevator button, he had only a concept of himself getting on the elevator, a simple action concept. Form a picture and do what the picture has him doing.

His mental activity would be normal, simply supporting the systems that held him upright, caused him to move his hand, walk, keep his balance, and think of his destination.

When the elevator didn't come in the expected interval, the first conflict of self formed and the first shot of unwanted electrical flows entered his body. He would become slightly uncomfortable, the physical result classified as impatience.

He had to do something with the excess electricity pouring into his body. He knew physical activity could get rid of it so he pushed the elevator button again. He temporarily got rid of the excess electricity darting around his system at the speed of light and once again became more comfortable.

Pushing the button had reset his own button as to his action ex-pectation of the elevator coming and eliminated his opposing concept of self created by the elevator not coming.

If the elevator still didn't come, the picture of him waiting, once formed, reformed and in the process became more of a reality. He would take a real jolt of electricity into his body from the resulting conflict. He would then punch the button three, five, eight times to get rid of the unwanted flows. He had to get rid of them because they had a feedback effect on the picture in his perceptor. As there can only be one picture in the perceptor, and his physical comfort is assured to the extent external reality matches that picture, the more he had to wait, the more he had to accept an opposing picture of nature somehow proving him to be unworthy of a simple thing like delivering an elevator on time.

The excess electrical activity building up in his body as a result of this opposing picture, if not dissipated, simply reinforced the opposing picture of himself, the picture of himself as unworthy.

Therefore, he would punch at the elevator button as many times as it took to get rid of the opposing picture of himself as unworthy of the elevator.

Once gone, he could go back to his normal state of wait until the elevator came.

When it doesn't, the opposing picture becomes a reality and the picture of himself as worthy disappears altogether. The shock of the unnecessary electrical flows to his system is immediate and real and he has to do something drastic to get rid of them, to re-store his sense of self-worth.

He steps back and starts to kick the elevator door with his foot, over and over and over, until the physical activity dissipates the broiling electrical flows, allowing the opposing picture to dissolve. The elevator door gradually swims into view as the normal picture of himself takes back control of his perceptor.

In short, he has displayed his temper.

Block shook the thought out of his mind. Here he was sitting in the best seat on the StratoJet. He was climbing thirty miles above the surface of the Earth, drink in hand. Why set up imaginary con-flicts of self that made him uncomfortable? It was a mystery to him. He could, after all, simply walk up the stairs.

To wipe his mind of unpleasantness, he returned to the thought of The Pig Man floating bare-assed, impossibly light in the breeze, over to the Worldwide Tower in an endless ballet of flight. The feeling of joy at being the one who put him in perpetual motion kept his demons at bay.

As time passed, Acapulco beckoned. What was true for the physical environment, the rounded edges his perception gave expe-rience, also worked in the abstract realm of theory. Why would anyone want to mull over concepts or even facts that opposed the hard-learned concepts and theories that made up one's intellectual picture of self.

Having to restructure hard-learned concepts was why Luber's Law caused so much agony for so many people. The Monastersky Maxim, that it was only possible to disprove a theory and therefore the best theory, the scientific statement that lasted the longest, was the one least subject to scientific analysis, failed to take into account the requirement that, theory or no theory, a fact such as an object falling to the ground now required a mechanical explana-tion.

Theories were never better than the facts they explained be-cause by definition they were never subject to scientific proof.

When a theory became part of a person's concept of self, which it always did, it became a part of the person's ego, the positive picture of self-worth the person needed to act positively in reality. The concept, not a part of reality because it was only a thought, a notion, a mental construct, still supported the holder's picture of self-worth built up over a lifetime. Any attempt to set up an op-posing picture of self-worth by claiming the concept to be untrue, wrong, a mistake, an empty explanation, would be met with the same violent response the failure of an elevator to come might evoke or even an outright blow.

A scientist who had been brought up on the concept that gravity is proportional to mass, who has spent his life believing it, who has published theoretical musings whose validity rests on the existence of the relationship, whose whole concept of self-worth has devel-oped around the fact will become outraged if forced to confront the possibility gravity isn't a property of and proportional to mass.

Absent being floated out of his chair by an anti-gravity device, in the absence of an actual demonstration in reality, he is not about to question the positive picture of self-worth, his ego.

As long as reality is not forcing an opposing picture on him, he isn't about to force it on himself.

Why should he? Why should he cause himself pain, the conflict effect and subsequent damage to his system if he doesn't have to? To be truthful, he wouldn't cause himself conflict if he were wafted out of his chair. He'd remember it as a dream.

Nobody wants to be put in a position of confronting reality when doing so will mean pain.

Causing oneself unnecessary pain would be downright silly.

The description of gravity as a property like color or hardness provides no description at all. Facing this fact is the same as a rabid religionist running into an atheist. He would have to be re-strained from treating the atheist like the doors of a tardy eleva-tor.

Such was the problem Block confronted with nationalism and the nationalistic bent to treat other national groups with mores and customs that didn't match those of the first as uncooperative ele-vators.

The history of humanity was reducible to a history of treating each other like elevator doors that didn't respond in the way one group wanted the other to respond.

History was conflict and the resultant bloodshed was nearly universal.

Block sometimes wondered whether there wasn't a fatal defect in the operation of a perceptor that was clearly designed by the evolutionary process to form a picture of how the future should be so that physical reality could move toward it. This applied whether the future was achieving a full stomach or a just society of merited rewards and punishments, the latter being dependent on its mem-bers achieving the first.

While the conflicts that occurred by picturing the future caused conflict impacts that drove people to attempt to realize the future just to eliminate the discomfort pictures of an unrealized future produced, the pain from the conflict effect led to destruction just as often, if not more often, than it led to improvements in the hu-man environment and therefore the human condition.

Block wondered briefly about the possibility that the perceptor might somehow be made up of the particles that made up the basic units of an atom. Rather than being stationary in matter or travel-ing at the speed of light, he speculated whether they might some-how be captured in a sort of state of stable equilibrium so that their minute movement within the structure recorded the pictures of re-ality the perceptor obviously constructed.

The thought conflicted with the effect of his drink. He held his empty glass up and it was immediately replaced with a fresh one.

The alcohol promoted the creation of new concepts at times be-cause, by rounding off the edges of the pieces that were used to fit together the new concept, the pieces fit together more easily.

The concepts fell apart just as fast after the alcohol departed, leaving the disjointed parts of reality with no apparent relationship.

The alcohol did promote theoretical pictures of how the abstract is reconstructed into an understandable picture because it allowed Block to construct a picture that agreed with what he wanted it to agree while leaving out all reference to the realities that did not fit into the abstraction.

He had the same blurry abstraction of Acapulco. Acapulco was one of the many playgrounds for the politicians, the generals, the businessmen, the performers, set up to accommodate their urge to do what they didn't want the people who supported their wealth to do.

The prime places of the planet were staked out and used for the elite's pleasure and it was at these places, Block knew, that giant conspiracies were hatched to preserve the feudal system of nation-alism that was heir to the system of castles and fortifications of the middle ages.

The model was one of defensible geographic boundaries. Nation-alities didn't have anything to do with it. There were more nation-alities than there were nations, the nation being the political entity that was operated by the elite. These elites operated on a simple principle: Take as much as you can while keeping the populace, the nationalities, from hanging them. This elite set the nation's prices, controlled its exports and levied its taxes. The result was the abil-ity to siphon off most of the nation's labor and all of its national resources.

The elite of many nations had no relationship to the nationalities they controlled and many nationalities had no nation, which may or may not have been unfortunate.

In most cases, there was no representation in the nation by the nationalities exploited by this ruling elite and, of course, the ruling elite couldn't just trot down to the local watering hole for a little sex and recreation. It had to migrate to the climes that were warm, took resources to get to, and were thus out of the way of prying eyes.

These elite locations provided venues where the elite could do personally with complete freedom among themselves what they did with complete freedom at home, screw everybody possible, only at the resorts the screwors could very well end up the screwees.

No law applied. The participants thought themselves to be sub-ject to no law of man, of god, or of the devil. They lived their pri-mary concept of worth that they held of themselves, and eliminated any picture others tried to paint of them that didn't agree with this primary picture by eliminating the person who was causing the conflict.

If they were forced to endure any conflict, they would plot their revenge, taking pleasure from the pain they inflicted so that the pleasure would replace the pain they had been subjected to.

It never dawned on them the pain they felt was self-inflicted. If a politician suffered a humiliating public defeat, or a businessman a serious reversal, or a movie star lost a particularly plum role, they already had a conflict.

Reality had imposed on them a fact that was in opposition to their concept of self, the worthy picture of self they had developed during their lifetime, a vision that allowed them to look in the mir-ror in the morning without throwing up.

As long as they didn't think about the fact, the incident that pro-duced the picture of themselves as something less than worthy, they had no conflict and thus there was no conflict effect unleashed into their bodies to cause them bodily discomfort, even physical harm.

However, if they chose to dwell on the opposing picture, the picture of themselves as being unworthy, they could get the elec-trical flows started and the pain would begin.

The more real the memory of the incident that caused the con-flict became the more they would dwell on it, the greater the con-flict impact, and the greater the pain.

It would, naturally, always be another politician, another busi-nessman, another actress who caused the incident that gave rise to the conflict.

Thus, the picture representing the incident became a person be-cause an incident can't be the object of anything.

Eventually, simply dwelling on the person caused the conflict that in turn would impact the system and produce the welcome pain.

Like alcohol or cocaine or morphine or nicotine or sex, the pain became addictive. The addicted begin to dwell on the pain. They summoned the image of the person to rekindle the conflict and the pain.

Haters became addicted to pain because as they dwelt on the person that caused it, they ruminated on the pain they were going to cause that person.

They plotted on the chessboard of life a return of the pain. They manipulated events to crush the imagined cause of their own pain, all the time knowing it wouldn't be just the pain from conflict im-pacts, mental pain they would cause if they could get away with it, it would be bodily pain, long and lingering, delicious in its agony.

Being the inheritors of the feudal system, where the lord of the manor need only get his enemy into the dankness of the dungeon where he could do as he pleased with the pulsating flesh, so did the national borders provide a line across which victims could be transported to become the playthings of fate.

The play palaces of the world were where these modern feudal-ists were able to hide together behind common borders to extract their pleasure from whomever they could entice their way.

Block felt the StratoJet reach its apogee and begin its descent. He held his glass up for exchange.

Evita's gowns embodied his thoughts.

Evita was the bastard offspring of an Argentine middle-class feudal want-a-be. She parleyed being a two-bit actress into the wife of the leader of the country, a more-or-less normal progres-sion followed from the Philippines and China to the old banana re-publics on the other side of the globe. It had even been suggested the reason dictatorships changed so often was there were too many actresses for roles and therefore a subsidiary role had to be cre-ated for them.

Evita, who was the champion of the poor, boarded a plane as soon as she had secured her position and headed for Paris to spend some of the poor's hard earned money on one-of-a kind fashion creations.

Her husband, of course, encouraged these trips and diversions because Evita would be out of the country and he could proceed to get the firm young flesh of as many of his subjects under his lips and hands as time would permit.

Even the recently rich, perhaps especially the recently rich, knew that money was in and of itself of no value.

The value of money was in what it could buy.

It could buy food. However, the body could only consume so much. The same limitations applied to wine. The rich could pay more and get better, but limits still applied.

That left clothes and especially finery for women. And it applied for men to the number of women under the finery. The only limita-tion that applied to women was the limitless imagination of the men.

Creating markets to acquire the most desirable women for the leadership of the nations that emerged from the medieval nobility became job one.

Block had to admire the cunning subtly of the nationalistic mind in crafting solutions. The age-old practice of attracting desirable women through stage vastly increased with the advent of motion pictures. However, exploding the fashion industry was like old Henry Ford creating the assembly line, with a twist.

By establishing fashion centers, the elite had a place to herd the wives on a continuous basis. With the wives out of the way, they could bring in the possessors of the firm young flesh who made the possession of money worthwhile.

As travel became widespread, the worthy and the leaders began to expand their horizons. Why limit oneself to local flesh when they could be sampling the flesh of all sorts of wonderful creatures all over the world. There was no reason why they should endure, by the geographical limitation the accident of birth provided them, the mere selection of women available on a local basis.

After all, men graded women on a curve with the most sexually desirable being at the end of the curve that would subject them to their imaginative administrations. The number of available girls determined the breadth of the curve.

If the feudal lord lived on a manor with seigniorial privileges, the curve might be shallow indeed. In any one year there might only be five or six nubile young girls available to satisfy the perpetual itching for the feel of his hands. He might exhaust them all in the course of a May romp.

If the curve were extended to the entire country, the lords not only got a shot at their own, they were able to pass them around, getting more use out of the flesh while it was still young and firm.

Thus, the broader the fucking curve, the more sexually desir-able the girls were, and the more girls there were.

As the world became smaller, the problem of feeding the curve became larger.

After all, there were only a finite group of the powerful to feed around the trough of concentrated wealth and there was an infinite group of girls in the world.

A girl was only ripe once, and then only for a limited period of time. What happened to her before that period, and what became of her afterward, was of no consequence. The wealthy of the world, theoretically at least, should be able to devise some sort of scien-tific process whereby the ripe ones could be herded past their gaze each year so that the ones who were wanted could be plucked and sucked like the ripe fruit they were.

The task was to devise some system whereby only the top end of the curve would be available. To pull in every one, the way de-vised had to work so the top end, the cream, showed up of their own volition.

A system was needed to create a magnet that would attract only the most desirable to the viewing pens and here, Block observed, the cunning subtly of the nationalistic mind turned into pure genius.

The powerful were spending millions and millions each year for the fashion designs that were keeping their women occupied while they performed their seasonal plunder.

Those fashion designs were being displayed by women who were selected by designers to display their creations.

What, if instead of leaving the selection process in the hands of individual designers who weren't particularly interested in women in the first place, the selection process turned out cynosures, vi-sions to which all eyes turned.

What would happen if the clotheshorses were paid a fortune and their lives turned into fairy tales?

All girls would identify with the cynosure and be willing to ex-change anything in their possession for a shot at the glamour they imagined could be theirs.

The rub, of course, was that what the powerful wished to get their hands on, the uniqueness that was their ephemeral young flesh, was the only thing they had in their possession.

What a congruence of desires. The elite could get their wives out of the way by enticing them with fashions. They could use the pos-sibility of wearing the fashions for their wives to entice the young girls. And when they fucked the young girls, they were actually carrying out their husbandly duty of fucking their wives.

It was an efficient process all around.

And of course, all curves being relative, with what is sexually desirable one season being a turn-off the next, they could change the top of the curve simply by changing the cynosure. A blonde cy-nosure one season would attract a blonde crop to select from the next season. Oriental on the runway this season, oriental in hand next season.

The fashion season became a year round affair, with each crop of new dresses bringing a new crop of fresh firm flesh. While the wives of the powerful picked and chose among the dresses, the powerful picked and chose among the crop, plucking their desired subjects like roses to arrange as they pleased and discard when the itch was satisfied.

The process reversed sexual tourism, where planeloads of busi-nessmen would be booked into resorts with room, board and women, with the menu changing nightly on the eight-day seven night tour.

Here in Acapulco, the resort was a town and the rooms villas, the women the cream of the world imported to accommodate the desires of wealth.

Block would have liked to pick it up, roll it into a little ball, and drop it off the edge of the Earth.

Cynosure, the use of a created image to motivate a person, was one of the opening gates of Perceptionism. It had long been known that providing a means for a person to picture themselves in favor-able circumstances with relation to a product would make the per-son want the product.

If potential customers could be made to picture themselves in a red convertible, they would go out and sell their soul to obtain a red convertible.

The process was relatively simple. The picture of self that nor-mally occupied the perceptor was simply modified to include the external reality of the red convertible.

If a person's concept of self always included a red convertible, the red convertible would always be with him. Every time he formed an action triangle dealing with driving, the red convertible would be a part of it. If it weren't a part of reality, his action tri-angles would always be incomplete until there was the reality of the red convertible.

Cynosure was more complex and to Block a lot more subtle. In-stead of including the red convertible as a part of an action trian-gle, as part of a picture that would form when another side of the triangle came to mind, the red convertible became a part of the primary picture everyone carried around, the picture of self that formed all of the action triangles that allowed life to continue. The red convertible became a part of every picture because it went to the very worth of self.

The red convertible somehow moved from being an imagined ex-perience to something wrapped up in a person's sense of self-worth.

With cynosure, people seemed to visualize more than them-selves with the object, they visualized themselves as the object. In the case of a model, the person pictured herself in front of an adoring audience, the object of admiration. In the case of a movie star, people pictured themselves as a friend of the star, or even the star. With politicians, people identified with what the politician was saying and became the politician.

Cynosure, viewing the self-worth elevated through the eyes of an imaginary multitude, submerged the self in the object of adula-tion.

Cynosure somehow allowed people to free the self from the normal bounds of constraint and elevate it to the realm of the gods.

To put it in simpler terms, Block thought, cynosure allowed the unrestrained, those at the levers of nationalistic societies, to use symbols as a means of submerging the reality of their subjects.

Fantasy became reality, reality nothing and the objects that were incorporated into the fantasy became subject to the fantasy as the elite manipulated reality to its dictates.

Block finished his drink as the StratoJet dropped rapidly down for its landing.

A person always had to balance external reality with the inter-pretation of external reality.

Some people created a perception of reality and then imposed that reality on those around them. Others were caught up in that perception of reality, and their perception of reality was forever changed by the first person's created perception of reality.

Cynosure turned politicians into messiahs and because it also turned people into zombies, it raised a basic question the answer to which Block was perpetually seeking. How can anything justify the millions upon millions of people slaughtered, often under the most gruesome of conditions, in the periodic storms of death that raged over the surface of the planet as the zombies rose in response to the dreams weaved by the politicians?

Given the unerring result of cynosure, ruin, destruction, death, Block realized the only way to survive was to keep from being sucked into the historical shredder.

History did not discriminate against its victims. Keeping from being sucked into the perpetually grinding teeth of the shredder, however, was easier said than done, Block thought as the opening of the StratoJet door clanged into his consciousness.

He was the first off the plane and he passed quickly through the terminal, avoiding the StratoJet service area in favor of the serv-ices in the general terminal adjacent to the StratoJet terminal.

He wanted to remain as unobtrusive as possible. The array of luxury rental vehicles did not appeal to him. Instead, he went to the Renta Treck desk and picked up a four-wheeler.

A few minutes with a map of the local terrain and he was able to pick out the promontory just north of the diving cliff Easy had said was the lair of his prey D'Lazo.

He was still wearing the same clothes he had put on before porking The Pig Man earlier in the day. But a change of clothes could wait. He put the four-wheeler's nose on a course up the hills behind the town and settled back in order to maintain his bearings on the winding road.

He didn't have to look further than the cluster of limousines, their drivers lounging in groups, to find the villa. He parked on the hillside of the road somewhat up from the villa and listened to the music as the engine died.

There was obviously a party of some sort going on at the villa and he waited in the darkening sky for night to mask his progress.

Finally, he jumped out of the car, crossed the road and followed the inside row of the trees down to the main driveway. The clus-ters of smartly dressed chauffeurs were not interested in the swiftly moving black shadow as he glided from dark spot to dark spot across the small pools of light.

Thanks to the party, none of the perimeter security devices were functioning and Block was able to move around them and ap-proach the veranda. The party was crowded with large and small groupings.

He stood motionless in the shrubbery between the buildings that surrounded the veranda. The filtered light from the pool airbrushed the sensuous bodies green, bodies, which he noted with a rush of excitement, were adorned only in string bikinis.

Block hadn't thought to bring a suit.

He heard the sound of love in the bushes to his right and as he concentrated, he saw two strings neatly laid over the back of a chair.

He swiftly removed them both, checked one, found it to be a fe-male bikini, swiftly removed his clothes and slipped into the other one only to find that it, too, was a female string.

What the heck, he thought, tossing them back on the chair, it can't make that much difference. He stepped into the first group he encountered, grabbing a drink from a passing trey.

The group was composed of two men speaking Polish and three beautiful women with fixed, interested looks on their faces. Block's appearance didn't affect the conversation of the Poles one bit. They were talking about a huge investment they were making with each other. One looked at him with a question on his face, but went back to his conversation when Block nodded knowingly.

"It's for charity," the brunette to his left said, turning toward him so that her breasts brushed across his arm.

"For the poor," the blonde on his right said, pressing herself against his side.

He could see the long straight legs of the redhead between the two men and he wished he had found a bikini as the natural thrill from his skin and his eyes rushed through him.

"You just got here," the redhead exclaimed. She detached her-self from the two businessmen and moved to take his arm. She was blocked by the blonde who already had a substantial position, but the brunette stole the day, already being in motion to his front. She spun him in her direction and maneuvered him away from the group.

The activity settled Block down a little so that he didn't feel quite so conspicuous.

"I don't see our host around anywhere."

"He's around," she replied, "but I'm sure you didn't come here to see him." She had moved him back into the bushes. He was starting to get excited again.

She turned to face him fully, putting her arms around him, climbing up on him so that his erection was between her legs just under her bikini bottom, overbalancing her weight so that she was actually pulling him down into the bushes on top of her.

What the heck, he thought as the rush enveloped his mind. She quickly moved the skimpy material covering her pleasure passage and the contact with the inside of her vagina as he slid smoothly in physically exploded his mind. He pushed as far in as he could to keep the source of the pleasure, the forward movement massaging his mind, then slowly started to move backwards to keep the millions of fingers vibrating the points of pleasure resonating in disturbed equilibrium deep behind his eyes active. Then his mind exploded in white heat as he was literally left hanging in the cold, the warmth of the symphony a memory.

Reality swam back into view and reality was a face smiling up into his. The brunette was standing up behind the face, catching her breath. Block was dangling between two burly men dressed in smart looking green and yellow guard uniforms.

"Shit, you bastard, can't you let a man finish what he's started?" He tried to throw a kick but one of his captors expertly used a leg to block his foot.

" I have much better for you," the face replied. "I didn't want you to waste yourself on a mere roll in the, eh, bushes, if you will. A taste of pleasure is quite enough to keep you primed for the bet-ter things in life." The face motioned to the two burley men. "Bring him along here quietly." He turned to the brunette. "Thank you my dear. You'll be rewarded handsomely." He turned back. "Bring him through this way." He motioned to the darkened front of one of the rooms surrounding the veranda.

D'Lazo led the procession into the bedroom. He signaled with a small clicker and the bed collapsed sideways into the floor, leaving a huge circular vat made out of clear plastic. A stairway descended beside it.

"This," D'Lazo gestured at the vat, "provides me with an infi-nite amount of pleasure. You'll appreciate, I'm sure, what happens to the lovers using the bed who suddenly find the bed drop out be-neath them. The pit is filled with the barbed wire that used to serve as my perimeter defense before I installed the underground sensors that marked your progress so well."

Block struggled in vain as his two captors moved him sideways down the metal stairs.

"I couldn't just throw the barbed wire out. Just imagine my de-light at the surprise when one of my selected matches, beautiful specimens lost in sexual ecstasy suddenly find themselves thrash-ing around on a bed of barbed wire. Ah, the cries of ecstasy. I was going to enjoy a show tonight but I had this delightful visit from you to plan for and then execute before I run up to Manhattan for my triumphant integration into The Representative World Government."

"The Representative World Government would never have any-thing to do with your kind," Block yelled, still struggling with his captors who were dragging him down the staircase.

D'Lazo turned to face him. "That will be no concern of yours. Now this pleasure pit, I really would like to show you it in use. It affords me endless pleasure. The barbed wire is a little extreme, but it's vastly more enjoyable than the snakes, hydrochloric acid, and of course, hungry rats, mustn't forget the hungry rats." His voice changed from excitement to disappointment. "Spiders don't seem to work that well."

The guards dragged Block to the foot of the stairs. "You're in-sane," he spat.

"It's all in the ability to experiment. We have to have an open mind. We get an idea. But that isn't sufficient. We have to test the idea over and over to make sure it is a valid idea. I couldn't be sending out a methodology that proved to be false, now, could I? After all, repeat business is what it's all about and my business is built on repeat business. Anyone can break a bone. But it takes re-search to break a bone scientifically so that it has the maximum neurological effect. I think that great humanitarian Ivan the Terrible said that. Method is everything."

Block looked around. The cavernous room they were in was dominated by the underside of the swimming pool. They were di-rectly below the veranda. The pool was made out of clear plastic and the bodies of swimmers were moving like diaphanous dreams in the crystal clear water. The brunette that had enticed him swam languidly by, unaware that she was being observed. The freshness of his experience with her had its effect.

"See," D'Lazo continued, "I was right, as usual. You are still ready for some action." He motioned to the two guards. "Bring him over here." They moved to the base of the pool where equipment and partitions had been set up to create a sort of quasi-room.

"Isn't this delightful?" D'Lazo said, clapping his hands excitedly. "I just love to work by this light. It makes everything so, eh, pleasant." He moved a heavy restraint behind Block. "Now, if we can just have some cooperation." The guards placed Block in the restraint. He was stuck there, immobile, naked, the leather cov-ered restraints clamped firmly over his arms and legs.

In response to D'Lazo's signal additional guards, all wearing the smart green and yellow uniforms, pushed another restraining de-vice forward into the light. This one contained a stunning blonde, startling in her nakedness. The back brace of the restraint had been pushed in against her so that her chest was shoved unnaturally out. Her perfect breasts jutted impossibly forward. Tears were streaming down her face. Her eyes were darting around as if she couldn't fit together even two pieces of reality.

D'Lazo looked at Block. "Hmmm. I see that this doesn't excite you. I thought surely it would. It's lovely to have a woman like this. You can do anything you want to her and she isn't a threat at all."

He turned to one of the guards. "Let me see her papers."

The guard handed him a computer printout.

"Ah, yes, my dear Alix. We had so much fun at the Pyramid last night, didn't we." His voice turned harsh. "It seems that you did take advantage of me."

"For heaven's sake," Block yelled, "can't you see she isn't even functioning?" Block felt the frustration and panic of being totally restrained. The restraint set up a horrible conflict of self within him he had trouble controlling. He had a normal picture of himself free to move. The reality of not being able to move set up opposing pictures in his perceptor. The opposing pictures started electrical flows crashing through his body. He couldn't get rid of them by physical movement. He could scream out and get rid of some, but not enough to relieve the pressure. He wasn't about to give this monster the satisfaction.

Alix was clearly getting rid of some of her excess electrons in her tears, but she was almost past the point where she could have conflicting images of herself in her perceptor. Her perceptor had simply stopped registering reality as a continuous flow. It only re-constructed bits and pieces of it, not a reality that made any sense. It left her with a confused look underneath the streaming tears.

"Lano. Why . . ." she sobbed. "What did I do? I'm so sorry."

"Music, eh?" D'Lazo said to Block. "That still doesn't excite you? Begging is a real turn on for me. Let's see, now."

He studied the computer print out. "Yes. That's why I invited dear Alix down for a vacation. She is reported to be a devotee of knismolagnia, or at least someone who could become over-sensitive to it, like a little too much clitoral pleasure becomes, eh, ecstasy."

He handed the printout back to the guard and began to slowly move his fingers over Alix's rib cage, exploring each rib carefully, watching her reaction carefully. The reaction was marked. Alix writhed to the extent possible in her restraints, trying to move away from D'Lazo's relentless fingers. The more she tried to move away, the faster D'Lazo's exploration became. She was moaning and whimpering under the increasing flow of her tears. D'Lazo was be-coming more and more excited as his fingers zeroed in on the areas that caused the most reaction. Making his final selection, he sav-agely concentrated his tickling on those areas as Alix threw her head to one side, let out a near breathless scream, and lost control of her bladder.

D'Lazo stepped back, rubbing his crotch. "I'm disappointed," he said, looking at Block. "You should be hard as a rock. You're not even trying."

"How could I get excited from you torturing that poor girl. Let me loose and I'll show you excitement."

"Temper, temper. You're never going to be free again." He snapped his fingers and one of the guards handed him a ball peen hammer. He went behind Alix's brace and pressed a button. A motor moved the back brace forcing Alix's chest out even further so that for a minute Block thought her back would break. D'Lazo released the button just in time.

"This should really turn you on."

Block watched unbelievingly as D'Lazo took the hammer and cracked Alix's ribs at each of the five points on each side that D'Lazo had found most sensitive. Alix, who hadn't recovered from the tickling episode, just stared blankly ahead.

"The pain won't start for another ten minutes or so," he told Block. "But you're hopeless." He stood back and looked him up and down. "You get all hot and bothered about sticking it in some dumb little brunette, you get it up just seeing her swimming by in the pool, and you don't even move a millimeter for some real action."

He walked over to Block, took the earring in his left ear between his thumb and forefinger.

Block winced as the ring tore through his earlobe.

"Don't advertise if you can't deliver."

The blood dripped off his ear and down his chest. Block was speechless, his own perceptor starting to go into overload at the unreality of the situation. He wondered if he could even remember what was happening. He tried to force his perceptor to keep reality continuous, but when it made little or no sense, it was hard. It made little or no sense because he couldn't keep the picture of unreality continuous.

He shook his head, trying to sort out the pictures so that the electrical flows operating his perceptor could reconstruct a con-tinuous picture of reality.

He was having very little luck until D'Lazo, after lovingly watching the guards roll Alix out, gave him his full attention.

"What I have planned for you is going to hurt you a lot more than it's going to hurt me. In fact, it's going to hurt you a lot more than you can imagine possible. While it's hurting you, you won't be able to imagine it.

"It's just plain delightful and fate that you should drop in on me so unannounced."

He grabbed the side of Block's restraint and began to push it to-ward the deep end of the pool.

"I've been working on this for a number of years," he said con-versationally as they moved side by side along the bottom side of the pool, the nude bodies dancing in the crystal clear water next to and above them. "Every nation needs one, hell a hundred, and you're going to star in the advertising film that's going to sell 'em. It's going to be titled the end of the RepWorld Pig, and I would guess that it's going to be at least two days long. You are extremely healthy." He punched Block as hard as he could in the rib cage while the restraint was still moving toward the punch. Block turned white in pain.

"I have to believe we will find an audience that will be more than willing to have an extended party while watching your protracted end. Just think of all of the enjoyment you'll be bringing to human-ity."

He let the restraint drift to a stop. The brunette dove into the deep end behind Block. Block was oblivious, studying the motorcycle type apparatus in front of him. Instead of someone riding it, how-ever, it appeared to be designed to hold the rider inside rather than outside, with, however, a hole through which the imaginary driver could poke his head. The device was made of the same clear plastic that seemed to pervade everything else in this house of horrors, the swimming pool, the vat under the spring-drop bed, and now this. Whatever it was, it was electric, with a plug running out the back over to a box

"You see," D'Lazo continued in a conversational tone, "my task was to find a way to cut a person in half while he, or she for that matter, was still alive."

He yelled up to the ceiling, "Are the cameras rolling?"

An invisible voice returned an affirmative. "Good. We can start."

D'Lazo walked over to the motorcycle and swung open one side of it.

"We not only want to cut the victim in half while he is still alive, we want to make the cutting extremely painful, and we want to make the subject of our pleasure do it himself, or more delight-fully, herself."

D'Lazo signaled for one of the guards to come over. "Notice this thin wire running the distance of the device." He pressed a switch on the side of the device, waited a second and then took the guard's hand and pressed it on the wire. The guard screamed and jerked his hand away.

D'Lazo signaled two other guards who grabbed the first and forced his hand back onto the wire. The guards eyes bulged, he screamed, his body twitched, his feet stamped, his free arm flailed.

D'Lazo snapped his fingers again and the guard crumpled on the floor whimpering. He went over and held the injured hand up. All that was apparent was a thin black line.

"The wire slowly burns away the flesh as it cauterizes it. No mess. No bother. We have scientifically tested this on thousands of rats, rabbits and even dogs, and the laboratory analysis is always the same. As long as it does not cut through some vital function, the victim will be around to enjoy the sensation."

He turned to the device. "That's why we have designed this little cabinet so that once the full weight of the occupant is on the wire, it will slice him in half, keeping him alive until it reaches his heart."

He moved his hand over the inside of the cabinet. "Of course," he continued, talking to the unseen audience the cameras would reach, "the victim, in this case the pride of The Representative World Government, Ron Block, will not willingly sit down on the wire. We have therefore prepared this special cabinet so that Block will be able to use every muscle in his body to keep from sitting on the wire."

He smiled into an invisible camera. "You know what every mus-cle means, of course. It means that the cabinet puts him in a posi-tion that he has to use his strength to keep from sitting on the wire.

"The hole is even big enough to provide a chin rest so he can use his neck muscles to keep him from sitting on the wire.

"And," he pointed at the guard lying in a fetal position on the floor, "he will use every muscle to avoid touching the wire.

"And every muscle will become a pillar of pain. As he shifts from muscle to muscle, the pain will follow all over his body until, racked with pain," D'Lazo was rubbing his hands rapidly together, spittle dripping from the corners of his mouth, "he will have to give in and sit on the wire. And then he'll think the pain in his muscles was pleasure."

He signaled the guards by turning off the switch. They released Block from the restraint and forced him into the cabinet. As he was forced into a crouching position facing the lighted deep end of the pool, his genitals brushed the wire. He immediately sat bolt upright through the opening as the door slammed shut.

"Just a little residual electricity," D'Lazo commented approv-ingly. "Just a kiss of the future. All comfy?"

He marched around the clear plastic cabinet satisfied that eve-rything was as it should be. He then came back in front and flipped the switch.

Perspiration was rolling down Block's forehead.

"I think," D'Lazo said, as the guards dragged their comrade away, "that I'll go up and talk to a certain brunette about spending the rest of the night in the deep end of the pool."