7 The Chairman

Block stood outside the hotel watching the bubble elevators as-cend and descend, feeling a bit of the thrill he knew he would expe-rience once he got a key and began playing in one.

It had been a long weekend in bed. Friday night had passed in a haze, all day Saturday, Saturday night. He didn't make it out of bed Sunday, much to his surprise, finally falling into a deep sleep early Sunday afternoon and when he finally woke up alone mid-morning Monday the computer page was quietly blinking.

He punched it up and found he had a meeting with The Chairman at Two O'clock in the afternoon.

As he stood in Union Square, watching the bubbles rise and fall, he thought of the puzzlement he felt when he turned on the video screen to get the news.

The financial markets were in turmoil.

The Secretariat had announced the Pacific accord. He now real-ized the announcement must have coincided with the time he had sent D'Lazo on his final descent into the fires, if not of hell, of the combusting core of the planet. He could visualize the unitized atoms being caught by and combining with the atoms of concrete that made up the Plaza beneath the swinging body they had vacated. He could see the rest of D'Lazo's perceptor, his mind, pinned in place in the plaza, its electrical charge conglomerating the atoms that made up the "I" that was his essence, his self, stuck in place for eternity, or at least until the planet cooled off, lost its air and water and be-came dead like the moon, the natural progression of all planets in the universe.

Block decided he would have The Chairman put him in charge of the plaque memorializing the Pacific accord. He would place it on a pedestal directly beneath where D'Lazo expired. He would construct it so that it was a mini-lightning rod. As the planet moved from day to night and back to day, changing the potential differences between the ground and the air above it, the pedestal would act like a con-ductor, funneling all of the electrons beneath the plaza and the air above the plaza through it as they moved between the plaza and the sky to equalize the changing potentials, and thus moving an electri-cal charge through D'Lazo's essence until the planet stopped rotat-ing and lost its atmosphere.

Returning to reality, Block wondered about the turmoil in the fi-nancial markets. Even if D'Lazo had not been the endgame of his project, had not been the key to injecting the massive amounts of currency into the system, making the cost of a phone call a barrel of money, he had ended up with the Diskcard, disabled it, and pre-vented what he had been sent to prevent.

According to TV coverage, the markets had opened after the planned passage of the two-day weekend with the interest rate so impossibly high that the market limits on movements had prevented the bond market from falling as rapidly as it could have.

The main commentary on the news was to the effect that market restrictions should have been suspended. Anyone that was long on the interest rates, who had bet they would rise, would be rich be-yond all imagination. They could conceivably even move into The Chairman's league which included Lord Domainsing of the British Empire and the group that loosely surrounded them who by reason of ability or a combination of ability and perseverance, made up the structure that provided cohesion to the broad layer of technocrats that operated the world.

To these people money had no relevance, at least other than in the basic philosophical difference between the dying British Empire and the emerging Representative World Government.

Why, if he had been successful in performing his mission, were the markets acting like he had failed, like the currency had been debased, making the cost of money so dear?

Why were the interest rates rising so fast?

He knew The Chairman would have an answer and, looking at his watch, he knew the answer would come soon enough.

But first, the elevators.

In walking around the base of the hotel, he had noticed there was a large three-story structure attached at its base. A group of the elevators fell down the outside of the tower and disappeared into pits that were three, or even four stories deep.

That sounded just like his ticket.

He entered the hotel, located the interesting elevators, and noted the number of the one he thought might provide the most sen-sation.

It was off on a side corridor, so he retraced his path and stepped up to the cashier's desk.

"Yes, Mr. Block?" the pleasant women behind the computer ter-minal said.

"Could I have the key to number 17?"

"Seventeen?" she asked, momentarily puzzled. "Oh. You mean the elevator. Certainly."

She went into the back room and re-emerged with a small brass key. "It doesn't go to the penthouse, but you can leave the key in it. We'll watch out for it."

"Thanks."

He took the key and retraced his steps around the corner and down the corridor leading to the conference facilities and elevator 17.

He pushed the button and waited for its arrival. It showed up empty. He stepped in and inserted the key.

He looked around with a thrill.

The circular, clear plastic cage was a semicircle surrounded by dark grey concrete, circular to mold itself to the outside of the elevator. It couldn't be more than two inches away from the clear plastic.

He examined the panel and saw he was on the lobby level, with two additional levels below, LL and B.

He punched the B button and watched the wall as it slid by, al-most unnoticeable.

He allowed the door to open and peered out into a corridor lined with the stainless steel underpinnings of the hotel's food service operations.

He closed the door and pushed the top button.

He stared intently at the gray concrete wall as he felt the ele-vator begin its upward course.

Light!

It shot out of the tube at the fifth floor, giving Block the sensa-tion of being shot out of a cannon.

The initial rise, the first fifteen or twenty floors, was like the first time, glued to a window, he had experienced the rapid ascent of a StratoJet, the ground sinking at an impossible rate below.

He reached the top of the run and stopped the car, leaving the door closed. He gazed out over the Bay to Oakland and the mountains beyond.

Somewhere over there was the downslope house. The thought exhausted him and he released the car, pushing B.

He stared straight ahead, rather than down, watching as the dropping car changed his angle of perspective. Then he was sud-denly encased in concrete before he realized it and his stomach contracted, his legs growing weak.

He involuntarily reached out to support himself on the side of the car but restrained himself, his mind sorting out where he was and what he was doing there.

The car came to a halt and he immediately reactivated it for the top floor

He also turned off the lights to increase the effect.

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The Chairman walked out of the bedroom and shut the door be-hind him, perhaps holding it closed a bit longed than necessary, an involuntary guard against the possibility of being drawn back into bed once again.

He wasn't a young man by any means, and repeated intercourse was something he had not experienced since his late sixties, at least not an entire night of it. He couldn't remember an all-nighter since his hair was one color and all there.

But there it had been. Every time he thought he had finished, that the night was over, a mixture of regret and relief he was not accustomed to, he had been summoned forth to do the impossible, and do it he had.

He walked over to the bar, casually elegant as usual, dabbing at his temple with a silk handkerchief and replacing it in his breast pocket.

He glanced at the clock over the bar. It was not quite an hour before Block was expected.

He took out a fresh bottle of wine and expertly uncorked it, splashing a touch into one glass and then pouring another glass for himself.

The wine was always excellent.

Block would be here, and, he hoped, Shandra would be getting in. She was coming in on a nonscheduled StratoJet, so her arrival would be up to her.

He hoped she would be able to make it.

Any little bit would help in making sense out of the events that had occurred since he had last seen Block the prior Wednesday.

He took his glass and walked to the window, gazing out over the Bay to the mountains beyond.

He had left the room in Manhattan just after his meeting with Block and headed directly for JFK, where his personal StratoJet was waiting to take him to Hong Kong.

The Australian Equalization Rounds were scheduled to begin the following morning, and were convening down under to take advan-tage of the coming weekend and its ability to absorb any financial shocks that might otherwise cause unnecessary market gyrations if dumped onto open markets.

The European Union representatives had already filled the hotel rooms in Melbourne, their agendas in their briefcases.

A separate delegation, made up of members of the British gov-ernment, and quite separate and distinct from the British delegates to the European Union, had taken over Selby Towers, right on Hob-son's Bay, away from the main action. They had their own brief-cases with their own agendas.

Which made for great theatre, The Chairman thought, with the stakes high enough to bankrupt the players.

The world was either going to come together and begin its climb into a unitary future or it was going to risk shattering into a million shards with the inevitable jagged edges flying in every direction, becoming engorged with blood.

If the world didn't come together and obtain control of its bur-geoning technology, both frightening and exciting in its brilliance and movement, it would obtain the capacity to re-nationalize itself into medieval duchies which could fling themselves at each other to their very destruction at the hands of the technology they weren't able to come together to control.

The real Australian Equalization Rounds would take place in Hong Kong, however, in Victoria. The quiet grounds of the Changlee Pre-serve, a series of lakes and cabins, gardens and forest groves would host The Chairman, ending a long life of piecing together a government that would be representative of the nationalities, rather than the nations, of the world, and Lord Domainsing, the representative of the British Empire's interests.

The Round would not be a round in the ring, with the opponents slugging it out, blood dictating a clear victor.

The Chairman and The Lord had been friends since childhood. Their lives had been inextricably intertwined almost from the birth.

They had, more often than not, found themselves fighting each other side by side against a common enemy that, more often than not, either, and perhaps neither could succeed in recognizing.

Their fights were not physical battles, but were carried out in quiet walks under cooling trees next to fowl dotted ponds and over dizzying drinks.

Their instruments were neither in their hands nor even under their control.

The Chairman had no idea where Block was, what he was doing, whether he was being successful, even whether he was alive.

The Lord knew even less about his players, having left that as-pect, by preference, to his generals in the field, relying on pro-gress reports alone to determine whether to maintain his position or leave the field.

The Chairman's StratoJet had easily beaten the sun to Hong Kong. Time changes didn't affect his body because his body had never been able to become accustomed to any particular time zone. He had literally been moving around the planet since he was a baby.

He had arrived at his cabin, a small palace really, in time for breakfast, about the same time that Block and Shandra were sitting down to dinner on the other side of the planet. He had rested well on the flight, the feeling of a person who had laid a course and now had to play it out with all the skill he knew he possessed.

The Chairman abandoned his contemplations and returned to the bar, flipping open his computer. Hudson had been piping into him on a continuous basis the optimum plot of the interest rate fluctuations. Running markets was sort of like a gambler laying off bets on the basis of manipulating the odds by adding or subtracting points, only with gambling on interest rate futures the technocrats were laying off the long sellers against the short sellers with the premium on the right to buy or sell serving as the point spread.

Because it had been his show, the decision to remove trading re-strictions had been left up to him. Not wanting to, or for that mat-ter, having the ability to determine when that point was reached, he had asked the programmers at Hudson headquarters to modify their programs to apply to the current situation.

Now that he had the errant Diskcard, messengered over by Block, in hand and unusable, he could put in predictive factors to compensate for the results of his own manipulations.

Hudson was asking him for the go-ahead and he automatically gave it, the permission being electronically logged.

Interest rates were still unstable and it was taking all the skill he and his experts had to keep even with the chaos.

Nothing was ever predictable, especially when dealing with the perceptions of thousands of players each of whom was required to act instantaneously on the financial projections from those percep-tions, but nothing could have accounted for the over two hundred and fifty billion dollars seeping out of the system into a single valid, untouchable account.

D'Lazo's unexpected manipulation, which had sucked over a tril-lion dollars out of the monetary system directly into Acapulco, had been compensated for immediately, with Shandra being on the spot and able to declare the funds forfeit, immediately re-injecting them back into the system.

He could still remember Shandra's question: If it had been D'Lazo who had intended to flood the market with currency credits thereby debasing the currency, why did he take actions that would person-ally pull over a trillion dollars out of the markets? It would produce a result exactly the opposite from the one he would have intended if he had been the problem in the first place.

To which The Chairman could only reply, good question.

The only answer, of course, was that either his greed exceeded his loyalty to the Nationalist Conspiracy or he wasn't involved in the conspiracy in the first place.

Given the identity of the other big winner, he was left shaking his head in puzzlement.

How had scum like Lano D'Lazo been able to trade on information that shouldn't have been outside his immediate circle? On the other hand, there was nothing in the background of Mary Renon, the other big winner, that would indicate she could translate a knowledge of an attempt to debase the currency into the ability to play a sophis-ticated market such as puts and calls on interest rate futures.

He had instructed Block to make sure he turned the architect of the scheme because The Chairman always needed bright operatives. Could Renon have been the architect?

He had put the question to Shandra but Shandra could provide no response other than pointing out the same puzzling fact that applied to D'Lazo would apply to Renon if she had been the architect. And any response from Shandra, including no response or even a puzzled response, carried the highest weight with The Chairman.

Shandra had been one of the first of the group of people who were informally being called Realitists.

The probability software that had been the first innovation of the almost total interconnectivity of computer network systems had popped out some unexpected things in its short lifetime. The one that would result in incalculable benefit to the emerging techno-cratic society was the identification of a few people who profiled invisible in all psychological testing, regardless of the type or source.

In any profile of people compiled for purposes ranging from ath-letic potential, scientific potential, criminal potential, consumer potential, in fact, on any test designed to classify, and therefore provide predictability to groups of people, a certain number of peo-ple appeared with neither high nor low scores.

Because there was always a midpoint that was classified as a norm, the people at the midpoint had normally been ignored as nei-ther a problem nor a resource.

Given the diversity of human origin and experience, it had al-ways been assumed that each person was normal in something, on the high probability end of the spectrum on others, and the low end on still others.

With the adoption of the probability programming of intercon-nected network systems, names, very few at first, but as time passed, increasingly so, identities surfaced where all testing of every type put the person in the range of invisibility.

There had been some thirty-three identified so far, Shandra be-ing the earliest, and the first to mature into productive society.

Those people identified by the probability program as basically neutral had not been informed of the identification, but had been followed closely.

It was found that, while the people as a group were invisible to any form of testing analysis, any program devised to sort out hu-mans one from another, there was nothing that any couldn't do, and do perfectly.

It was almost as if their perception of external reality coincided exactly with external reality so that their actions were always in harmony with the external conditions in which their actions were carried out.

This discovery led to the further realization that actions that were in conformity with reality must be formulated in a manner that allowed the person to have a clear perception of that reality. To one of these people, a glass was neither half-full nor half-empty, but simply contained a substance.

While seeming trivial on the surface, such a conclusion had startling emotional conclusions. The individuals that comprised the group did not seem to have a dichotomy between the physical, the emotional effects arising from physical existence, and intellect, an analysis of that physical existence.

They could excel in loving, excel in thinking, and never have the two interfere with each other.

As one computer poet working on the project quipped, it was as though their soul and flesh were combined in a conspiracy with na-ture each to complement the other.

Thus, the word Realitist was coined to reflect the fact that they seemed to live totally in harmony with external reality as opposed to a realist, who merely accepted external reality.

To the realitist, physical reality was a set of blocks that could be arranged into shapes that were beneficial to some natural order that seemed invisible to others whose view of the world constantly alternated between what existed and what was perceived to exist.

It was the inevitable conclusion that these people would grow into the technocratic leaders of the future, replacing the need for people such as The Chairman, and The Chairman was totally aware of the possibility.

The effect was a sort of human predependency.

A predependency was a technological condition that had to exist before a subsequent technological condition could be achieved.

In its simplest form, it meant that Edison couldn't develop a light bulb until he had obtained a filament. Airports were predependent on planes, self-checkout on the universal use of bar codes.

Technology was the predependent of the realitist who could mold the technology to fit the human condition smoothly into the future.

While The Chairman accorded Shandra's observations a validity that he would not accord his own, he was not a little concerned the Shandras of the world had arrived too late to save it from its bur-geoning technology.

He had contemplated that irony as he held his first discussions with Lord Domainsing over breakfast shortly after his arrival at Changlee Preserve.

Bloomsey, as The Chairman affectionately referred to him, The Lord, as he was referred to by those around him, or Lord Do-mainsing as he was known to the world, had long since turned his doubts into redoubts of protection, barriers against anything that conflicted with his own perception of the world.

He had been chosen by the movers and shakers of the British Empire when it still had a claim to empire for that very reason. He represented the status quo and people who benefited from the status quo, and who would therefore naturally want to maintain it, would look for leadership to someone that embodied the status quo in his very essence.

Bloomsey had never had a doubt in his mind, ever, and he re-mained doubtless as once again The Chairman, a figure who had been a part of his childhood and who had just assailed him with clever stories that had no relevance to the continued existence of the Em-pire he embodied, launched into his offensive.

"You have to understand," The Chairman said over drinks, "a delay in consolidation will set The Representative World Govern-ment back by at least ten years."

"So merge the dollar instead," The Lord replied.

"The dollar has been the world currency unit for decades. The level of economic activity within the international community can no longer be dependent on the stability of the dollar if it is to grow at its optimum rate, the rate necessary to support its population."

"We beat the shit out of the French in the 19th Century and we beat the shit of the Germans and the Italians in the 20th Century.

"Let them merge the Euro with the pound."

"The point is not to merge," The Chairman insisted. "The point is to create a currency unit that every country can use. Can you imagine the United States with fifty-seven different currencies? We need to get to an international currency that is not based on any other currency"

"The pound sterling is based on real value," he replied. "With the Euro, we have nothing. It's not based on anything."

"Currencies only exist with respect to trade, the exchanges they represent." The Chairman countered.

"If currencies are based on something with intrinsic value, gold and silver, we can control the trade by controlling the currency," came the sharp reply.

"Which is what the British Empire did for years. You attempted to control the world by making sure that the end product of all trade resulted in the recognized media of exchange, gold and silver, returning to the control of the Empire.

"When you became addicted to Chinese silks and tea, that vast continent began to soak up your gold and silver. Because it was the medium you used to control the world, its loss threatened that control. To get it back out of China, you had to addict the populace with opium so you would have something to trade in order to get the silver and gold back out and into your control."

"The British Government never engaged in, nor did it condone, nor would it ever . . ."

"Agreed. It just benefited from the result, and who is the gov-ernment other than the people that make it up?

"The point is not to point fingers at the British Government, which was in a position of empire, or at any government.

"It is the system of nationalistic governments itself which leads to the distortion.

"If the store of wealth is contained in a metal whose only value is intrinsic, which has no use other than the fact that people know others will want it and therefore accept it in exchange for items of actual value, the possession of that metal affords access to the produce of the world."

"Which is as it should be."

"Access to the produce of the world should be afforded to other produce of the world, not to the possession of a medium of ex-change.

"The medium of exchange should be invisible, existing only to facilitate the interchange of production.

"If you create a medium of exchange that is something other than a medium, if you accord it value, you make it an object to it-self be possessed. Instead of spending time producing items of value that can be exchanged for other items of value, you spend time de-vising ways to control the medium of exchange so you can obtain items of value without exchanging them for other items of value."

"That's the way the world operates."

"That's the way the world operates as long as it accords what should be simply a medium of exchange an intrinsic value that al-lows its possession to become the object of military action."

"How does gold become the object of military action?"

"When China resisted your opium, you sent your gunboats up the Yangtze to persuade it otherwise. You wanted your silver back. If you couldn't get it by trade, you would get it by force because your control of the produce of the world depended on your control of the medium of exchange."

"But if we submerge the pound into the Euro, somebody will ob-tain control. The Euro is a credit-based currency. We will be sub-ject to the whims of the central bank that serves as the reserve for the currency. England will be in hock, it will lose its sover-eignty."

"Sovereignty is a concept that implies control over another. In a globalized economy, the only sovereignty is the sovereignty that results from production.

"Two or three hundred years ago, when the actions of one group did not bear directly on the actions of another group, self-contained societies could exist.

"Today, no society can exist without interdependence on other societies.

"The world is no longer fifty, or a hundred political units, each vying for supremacy over the other in terms of consumption, each attempting to compensate with military might for what it lacks in productive ability to equalize its ability to consume to its maxi-mum.

"By currency equalization, the possession of the medium of ex-change by any faction of the global economy that forms either through geography, race or religious beliefs, will be proportionate to the production it is able to contribute to the global economy.

"If a segment of the global economy seeks to obtain a segment of its production without an exchange of equal production, if it at-tempts either through terrorism or other means that would disrupt the global marketplace, to distort its ability to orderly distribution, the remaining segments will discipline it."

"And discipline implies control, the control we will be giving up."

"The fact that a political entity gives up control does not mean another entity is taking it. Currency units, which will ultimately be nothing more than bytes in computer systems, are credit based. When you ruled, you ruled by the power of gold. Whoever had the gold, had the rule.

"Credit based currency units carry an interest burden. More has to come back from wherever they go. If they go to create an elec-trical facility in Uganda, the electrical facility has to produce enough currency units to return the original currency units and the currency units required to service the credit burden the units carry, the interest.

"As a result, there is no entity in control. Because currency units are credit based, they can only flow to where they will be productive, where they can return the credit plus the interest. It is the epitome of no control, because success is the only control, not power.

"You have given up control only to the extent you are partici-pating in a process that allocates resources where the resources can be used the most efficiently to produce an orderly market-place."

The Lord lumbered out of his chair.

"I won't sacrifice my people to some nebulous concept of re-source allocation. There will be no currency combination, at least not in my lifetime."

Strategically speaking, The Chairman was going to get nowhere with The Lord.

Tactically, however, The Chairman had determined that Bloom-sey was in fact behind the attempt to debase the dollar. At first glance, debasing the dollar would seem to enhance the Euro and work against Bloomsey's objectives.

The resulting inflation, however, would cause commodities to come into the forefront as a medium of exchange and England was rich in commodities, the control of which were in the hands of the group that supported and were represented by The Lord.

His "not in my lifetime" message underlined this fact in case The Chairman had missed the other subtle subtleties.

The Lord, therefore, was working the agent Block was after. The credit didn't go to him, however, because the agent had been able to somehow circumvent innumerable controls and was close to bringing it off.

The Lord, though, could call off the attack.

As he hadn't responded to The Chairman's first arguments, he would try additional arguments later over dinner.

But right now, it didn't look too good.

He made his way to his own cabin.

He decided to sleep on it.

After eight hours of sleep, he punched into the Iridium Communi-cations Network to get the current New York news.

His first sight was the busted out hotel window and the rather comical sight of some poor bugger laid out on the Worldwide Tower.

Realizing the proximity to where he had last seen Block, he got an update and then put in a voice call to Shandra at the hotel to do a little mental handholding. Regardless of her exceptional ability to act within reality, he understood she was still human and subject to the doubts that contemplation can turn into insurmountable re-doubts.

He met Bloomsey again in the rock garden where an endless buffet was laid out under lights soft enough to allow the stars to shine through.

"What would it take to call your agent off?"

"Veto power in The Representative World Government."

"That's absurd."

"The old Empire should have a continuation into the new Empire."

"There is no new Empire."

"There has to be a continuity of interests. It is impossible to break from the past."

"So you would call off your attempt to destroy the dollar if you somehow got veto power in The Representative World Govern-ment."

"I would."

"There is no way to give you that power. It's not anybody's to give."

He still has control, The Chairman thought. The agent is still ac-tive and he still can control the outcome.

"Then you can sit back and watch the world's reserve currency be destroyed."

Bloomsey was smug.

"Aren't you familiar with the paradigm shift?" The Chairman asked.

"Listen. Seriously. I went down into one of my father's mines once as a kid. It didn't get hotter. It got colder. The Earth's cooling can't cause gravity, because it's already cold. Just look at the moon for crying out loud. That's not hot and it causes tides."

"It doesn't concern you that there is even an outside chance that rapidly expanding technology could destroy the world?"

"Listen, David. You know, and I know, that we are born alone and we die alone, and in between we get what we can get.

"There is a God, because God has been good to me. He has al-lowed me to get what I want in my life.

"And because I have been good in my life, if there is another life, then God will be good to me in that life too.

"For the time being, I have a little more life left in me and God is going to be good to me during that time, even if I have to destroy the entire economic structure of the world.

"The world isn't going to change. The only thing that's going to change is who gets what, and as long as I can keep getting mine, I'm going to continue to do so.

"If you think you can change the world, if you do change the world, it will only be by forcing the change on others and if you do that, you'll just be replacing us.

"And don't start in on that crap about humanity's last chance at redemption. Our international nationalism redeemed humanity, at least as far as it needs redemption."

"So you don't believe good men can work together to accomplish good things."

"Sure they can. We sure did over the last five hundred years."

"Just not this thing," short of murdering you, The Chairman added silently, but then realized the only way to improve the future was to let the past die. Killing the past just shoved it into the fu-ture.

Bloomsey went to bed, leaving The Chairman looking into his glass. It was closing on one in the morning. His mind went to the question of what propels light as he watched the starlight filter through the soft artificial lanterns placed unobtrusively around the garden.

He had wondered as a child, together with Bloomsey, what could make light start out from a star trillions of miles away, travel through space, and arrive still moving at the same rate.

They had asked their professors during the time he had attended school in England. Their answer, that light was a part of an elec-tromagnetic field, and as such, a distortion of space time, con-vinced Bloomsey who said it was a difficult concept to grasp, but one he was sure with effort, he would.

The Chairman had just shrugged his shoulders and moved on to other thoughts. To him, there was little use in explaining phenomena if the explanation didn't make sense. Regardless of the space/time continuum, the match he lit still burnt his finger and it did so with something that moved at a certain speed and kept moving at that speed, even if it passed by his finger and traveled to the moon.

Under the new paradigm, however, where light was conceived as an elementary particle with the property of motion, things be-came clearer. If light were at rest, just like the rocks that dotted the garden around him, when it was moving at one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second, then the light could be analo-gized to the rocks while it was moving.

It would be at rest, just like the rocks, so long as nothing inter-vened to change that motion. The rocks would sit in the garden for-ever and the light would travel forever.

If, however, something intervened, if he went over and lifted up one of the rocks, the rock then had a potential stored in it.

The effort that he had taken to lift the rock could be considered stored in the rock so if the rock were dropped, it would cause an effect when it hit.

Of course, the attractive force was what would cause the rock to fall. If the attractive force were removed, the rock would no longer have a potential to fall.

But as long as the attractive force was there, and the rock had been moved against it, then it had obtained a potential energy.

In the same manner, if the at rest nature of light, its ability to be at rest while traveling at one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second, had intervention, if something occurred to cause it to slow down, then to the extent that it lost its speed, the potential for regaining its speed increased.

If the elementary particles that made up light were immobilized, if their at rest motion which caused them to move at the speed of light were to be restrained, then the potential energy would be the potential to regain their at rest motion.

Thus, dropping the rock became analogous to striking the match, the rock regaining its at rest position on the ground, causing a dent, or perhaps a broken tile, the elementary particles that were light regaining their at rest motion, causing detectible motion, and per-haps even a burn.

The Chairman could understand this concept of light because he had never bothered to understand the other, less explanatory one.

Bloomsey, who had worked to understand the one that was not understandable, was incapable of understanding the other that was.

If he pointed to a star and told him that the light traveled from there to here because it was made up of the same elementary parti-cle that made up the matter that produced it, matter being the un-natural, restrained form of light, Bloomsey would only grunt and say "Huh? What does light and matter have to do with mass and gravity?"

It was beyond his understanding how two people, born at the same time, growing up in the same world, could turn out so differ-ently, with one working for the future and the other minding the past and thus working against the future.

Bloomsey had learned well the historical lessons of money and was incapable of understanding the demands of the future on money.

He held his glass up and it was immediately refilled.

He had set up the meeting to find out if The Lord still had control over the event, if the act that would debase the currency had oc-curred.

He had and it hadn't. He wasn't going to get Bloomsey to stop it, at least before his own deadline for action.

He was aware that Lord Domainsing had a well-organized oppo-sition faction within his government and that faction, being both the inheritors of the realm and potential heirs to the new wealth cur-rency consolidation would create, would be more than happy to see him falter.

Because all arguments had equal and opposite sides, Do-mainsing's own supporters would desert him like rodents if their own current economic interests were perceived to be in danger.

That was the basis of progress. A person would work over the long haul to improve conditions if conditions had room for improve-ment.

If conditions couldn't get better for a person, the least threat they could get worse would send that person into a panic.

The Chairman could no longer count on Block preventing the cur-rency debasement. He would take actions that would counter, to the extent possible, the havoc that would result if Block failed, actions that might also persuade Bloomsey's supporters to modify their support.

But, he looked at the time, Hong Kong was filled with a healthy number of very attractive, and extremely talented women, some who were the daughters of the daughters of the daughters of women he had known in his youth, not to mention some of the daughters along the way.

He returned about noon, refreshed.

He tried to reach Block without result. The query received an inactive response which meant Block's computer was set to receive automatic but was not manned. A location check put it in Acapulco.

He attempted to raise Shandra and failing, became alarmed. The signal was not accepted. Her computer did not even provide a loca-tion response which meant it no longer existed.

Block's computer was in Acapulco but Block's was not obtain-able. Shandra's computer was not obtainable.

He hooked in through the Iridium Communications Network and found Shandra's reservation to Acapulco. He couldn't raise Mary, either.

It was hopeless to try to find out specific events that might tell him something because there were a thousand events people wanted to call to his attention and he didn't have time to sort through them.

He had all of the resources of the world at his hands. However, without the sight of his agents, he was blind.

It was about nine in the evening in Acapulco, a little over twenty-four hours after he had sent Block on his mission. Decision time was growing close. He was going to have to make some ir-revocable decisions.

The Chairman opened a bottle of wine, poured himself a glass, picked up a piece of cheese to nibble on and punched in instructions to the International Bank in the Netherlands.

What he was doing was no different than what a stockbroker did when he sold stocks, what a garbage man did when he collected the garbage, what an assembler did when she assembled electronic parts in a Hong Kong factory down the street. He did what he knew how to do.

Everybody on the face of the Earth could be considered, to the extent extraneous to his or her field of endeavor, to be nothing more than nocturnal albino muskmoles, traveling inches below the dessert sand, perceiving and providing for itself through its sense of smell and its tactile ability to sense the movement of the sand around it.

No one could know everything. No one could even know much of anything. Problems were only simple when they weren't perceived.

As a result, whether Lord Domainsing liked it or not, or was even aware of it, The Chairman knew everyone was dependent on the acts of everyone else for their own well-being.

Because everyone's well-being is dependent on the well-being of everyone else, everyone has to accord others the assumption that they are good people doing the right thing. They have to accept that normal people, in the exchange of intelligence and skills through the extended network channels that provide for the diversity of pro-duction and consumption, are doing what they perceive to be the best.

A person does not willingly make decisions on the basis those decisions will result in a negative result because the negative re-sult might return to affect the person.

The results of decisions and acts made in accordance with those decisions might well be negative, on a personal, national, or global level.

But assuming negative motives is to assume that the universe is running down, that the timeline is a path to extinction.

Because this was The Chairman's project, The Chairman had the authority to order the adjustments in the world currency structure necessary to countermand nationalist and terrorist attempts to prevent the emergence of The Representative World Government by undermining world market stability through debasing the medium of exchange.

If Lord Domainsing was going to debase the currency by inject-ing incalculable amounts of it into the system, The Chairman was going to get the jump on him by removing massive amounts of credit from the system. Currency circulated but credit controlled.

His order to the International Bank resulted in the Reserve Banks in the European Market selling the dollars they were using as a reserve currency.

At first glance, this would appear to accomplish the same goal that Domainsing was attempting. But Domainsing's unexpected in-jection of currency into the system would indirectly increase the reserves rather than deplete them.

The Chairman depleted them directly. This would counteract the reserve increase that Domainsing's actions would cause.

By depleting reserves, The Chairman would reduce the credit available in the European economy. The reduction would have a di-rect affect on the prices of commodities.

Without credit, purchasers of commodities would vanish and with the disappearance of purchasers, the price of commodities would plummet.

Lord Domainsing and his supporters, and indeed the entire con-cept of the British World Empire and the nationalism that under-pinned it, were supported by the value of the commodities.

Because their ownership of the commodities was based on the credit economy to which the world was adapting, where resources flowed to the areas favoring production, the debt underlying the ownership of Domainsing's commodities would remain as their value disappeared.

Lord Domainsing and his supporters would soon be caught in a vise tighter than the iron torture pinchers they delighted displaying in the dungeons of the castles inherited from their revered ances-tors.

His second communication, made as he added some hard salami to his cheese dish and sipped his wine, was to communicate directly with the Secretary General.

The Secretary General was to announce the Pacific accord on Friday afternoon, around the time the New York markets closed, and he was to do so in Dag Hamerskold Plaza at a public press con-ference.

The Pacific Rim Currency Unit, jokingly called the Pricu because that was what the venerable oriental art of counterfeiting was con-stantly doing to it, was years behind the Euro, but its adoption en-countered little resistance. The Pacific Rim nations had no Empire on which the sun never set because the Empire of the rising sun had been caught in mid-morning and found its interests more aligned with global markets than acquisition. As a result, the only problem the Pricu faced was avoiding being debased by counterfeiting.

The Pacific accord was an agreement to create a currency that was solely electronic. Personal transactions could be carried on with molted frogs legs for all the Pacific accord cared, but if par-ticipation in the Pacific Rim Trading Area was desired, and it was required to obtain access into the global economy, then those trans-actions had to be carried out in the new electronic currency.

The Chairman had planned the conference that was to resolve the submergence of the pound into the Euro in Australia just in case Lord Domainsing was successful in delaying it.

The announcement of the Pacific accord would be taken as the successful conclusion of the Australian Equalization Rounds.

He next notified his people in Australia what to expect and to in-sure that the Round was successful.

The game was set.

Should he try Block? How about Shandra?

No one knew he was in Hong Kong rather than Australia. He did-n't know where they were.

It wouldn't change the course of action or the outcome, what-ever that would be. The extent to which individual actions affected a chain of causation was always open to question. What he had just done would certainly have an effect on the person assembling elec-tronic devices just a mile away.

By the time it did, it would have traveled through time and dis-tance, perceptions and reactions, until whatever his intent might have been would have no bearing on whatever the result to that person was.

His thoughts drifted to Mary Renon?

He didn't think he would ever go back to that well, but the idea of another session with her made the cheese taste better, the wine sweeter. He didn't have to think under her expertise. She sent him into a different world. Even though she was out of touch, he knew she would be setting up his San Francisco operation and another blockbuster would be just the medicine.

He finally drifted into a well-deserved sleep, thoughts of orien-tal beauty dancing in his head.

Domainsing was as cordial as ever that evening, but ever so im-patient. He apparently hadn't been getting too much sleep.

He was even more irritated at The Chairman's high spirits.

The Chairman had invited him over for a late night, actually early morning discussion.

"I had a wonderful time yesterday," he began, as they walked into the enclosed patio area of his cabin. "Seven, maybe eight hours of non-stop drinking, eating, and making merry. I tell you Bloom-sey, it's just like when I was a kid."

"You keep me up past my bedtime." He looked at his watch. "It's three o'clock in the morning."

"Pash. It's dinner time in London." He turned on the television set. "How are things in London, by the way?"

"Things in London are not well."

"I'm sure you have the means of changing them."

Domainsing could partially counteract the fall in commodity prices by activating his agent and injecting currency into the sys-tem.

"I thought I did."

"And?"

"Apparently I don't."

"You mean you are going to agree not to debase the currency?"

"No, blasted, I mean I apparently don't have the ability to cor-rect the situation. My holdings are dropping in value, my margins are being called, my support is vanishing, the world thinks that we've agreed to submerge our currency. What else do you want?"

I knew Block would succeed, The Chairman thought with glee. He always does.

"Just what's best for you, Bloomsey. I've always wanted what's best for you. Let's watch the announcement at the UN."

He made the connection with his personal computer so that he would have the signal directly from the satellite.

"Can I get you a drink?"

"Scotch will do."

The Chairman went behind the bar, fixed a scotch the way he knew his friend wanted it, and poured himself some wine.

"It's really for the best, you know."

"For me to lose? You always win. The least I could have done is won one round."

"There's no winners or losers. There's only the flow of history and you've been on the downside of the flow, hanging on to any rock or limb that can keep you from being swept away.

"You can get in the boat anytime and enjoy the trip. The stream becomes wider as it gets closer to its mouth."

"And be swallowed up in the ocean?"

"The ocean is made up of atoms of water just like the stream.

"In the stream, its close, its rough, the atoms have to compete with each other for space.

"There are narrows and shoals in which the water is wiped out in spray, lost over the banks, stranded in eddies.

"But it is a course that had to be taken. Because, while the ocean is dangerous, it's where the water belongs, and it's where the water can be at peace."

He walked over, handed Domainsing the scotch, and sat opposite him, leaning toward him.

"You know, Bloomsey, I believe that we do what we have to, and we do it because we have to survive. You are right that we are born alone and we die alone, and that we are motivated by a desire to acquire.

"But there comes a time when survival becomes a joint project, and where the period between birth and death becomes a part of that joint project. Not because we have lost the motivation to ac-quire, mind you, but simply because we have learned to match our production to our reproduction so that acquisition becomes secon-dary to our primary purpose, to comprehend and contribute to ex-istence.

"I truly believe, Bloomsey, that we are emerging at the mouth of a very long river and the future is going to be very different from the horror that shaped our perception of the world. I don't know what it will be because I have nothing to compare it with, no experience to call forth to analyze it.

"But I do know it will be a positive future, one that will be open to participation and development by those who are capable of devel-oping their abilities to the fullest."

"It kills me to betray my people's sovereignty."

The Chairman sighed. He got up and fiddled with the controls of the computer, switching signals until he picked up a gathering crowd.

He turned up the sound and verified that the Secretary General of the United Nations was going to be making an important an-nouncement on the outcome of the Australian Equalization Rounds.

He had just started his speech when The Chairman noted some-thing happening on the top of the Secretariat Building. He accessed the control room shots and centered in on a long shot from a camera stationed to survey the crowd. The camera operator was also fo-cusing on the activity above the crowd.

" s . . . announce the Pacific accord . . ." The voice was droning on but The Chairman was watching in fascination as a figure came shooting off the roof of the Secretariat Building and hung suspended momentarily in space, looking like a marionette with the wires con-nected between his legs.

"What does he mean, Pacific accord?" Lord Domainsing wanted to know.

The figure focusing The Chairman's attention looked like it was suspended from wiring attached to the top of the building as it began to fall, not straight down, but in an arc away from the vertical, the effect of the restraint of the wire on the body.

"Pacific accord." Domainsing insisted. "What Pacific accord?"

As the body gained speed, the arc away from the vertical in-creased until the wire holding the body played itself out and the body came to a screeching halt.

A new use for the phrase "screeching halt," The Chairman thought, because all he could hear was the screeching.

"Why did you give in?" he asked Bloomsey absent-mindedly, re-alizing that only Block could produce such a spectacle on an inter-national satellite hookup.

"Give in to what? What the fuck is the Pacific accord, you prick?"

The body was beginning to swing in an arc like a pendulum.

"Block!" He said, draining his wine. "I'll be fucked. It's Block!"

"You'll be fucked! You couldn't possibly be as fucked as I was this weekend. I had my wealth fucked out."

Altered air pressure brought The Chairman slowly back to the present and he looked up as Block walked into the dissolving picture of the pendulum swinging outside, rather than inside the United Na-tions Building.

"What's an 'It's Block'? damn it!" Bloomsey's voice echoed in his memory.

The Chairman looked down at his hands. The scene in Hong Kong dissolved.

"You look lost in thought," Block said, letting the door auto-matically shut behind him.

"I was thinking about that spectacle I saw at the United Nations on Friday. I think it had something to do with you tossing someone off the roof in front of the ICN cameras."

"A distinct pleasure, I can assure you. Did you know Lano D'Lazo?"

"I knew of him. We all knew of him. We just didn't know where he was. And then Shandra finds him in the phone book. Amazing."

"Let's hope his listing is up."

The Chairman reached into his pocket and brought out the Disk-card.

"This was one way to skin the cat," he said, holding it up to the window and squinting at the light shining through the bullet hole.

"Where did it finally turn up?" he asked.

The Chairman knew it had been out of commission by the time Block kicked D'Lazo's ass off the Secretariat building because at that point Lord Domainsing had already thrown in the towel. He had double-checked his reception and he had not had a replay. Bloomsey gave in over drinks early Saturday morning in Hong Kong minutes before D'Lazo went off the roof in New York Friday afternoon.

"It wasn't on St. Remain when I found him at D'Lazo's villa. D'Lazo had already made a beeline to New York where I caught up with him and brought the thing to a conclusion. The input code died with him so there was no possibility of the Diskcard being used. I put a hole in it just in case he had given the code to someone else."

"Is it possible that the code died with St. Remain?"

"Anything's possible. You know that. But I thought by spoiling the plot, the financial markets would be stable and the Pacific ac-cord would be signed. The Pacific accord was signed but the mar-kets are going crazy."

"I talked to you in New York on Wednesday afternoon,"

The Chairman replied. "By Thursday evening, New York time, my information was that there was still the possibility there would be a massive injection of liquidity into the system.

"I took steps to counter that liquidity before it could affect the system."

"Interest rates rise if you put too much money into the system? And they do the same if you put too little money into the system? Doing the opposite results in the same conclusion?"

"Regulating the medium of exchange for any society is a very complex operation that does not always produce the results the regulators want even when the regulators have complete control.

"There is always a balance in the markets that makes the regu-lators honest by dictating their actions. I have often thought that is the key principle that underlies the universe, the existence of ob-jective opposites and the equilibrium between them. There may be an at rest condition in the universe, but it is a dynamic condition that is balanced by an opposite at rest condition, with all action in the universe being the interplay between the two.

"But to answer your specific question, if there is too much money in the system, transactions become cheaper, they take more of the worthless money. People hedge against the future by de-manding a greater return on their money. If there is not enough credit, as opposed to currency, in the system, the demand for credit raises its value and interest rates go up. If there is too much money in the system, the value of the goods and services the money represents goes up, and the corresponding value of the money is reduced. Interest has to be adjusted to make up for this loss of value.

"The markets didn't go crazy because I withdrew some of the li-quidity. I did that simply to reduce the value of the commodity in-terests of those opposing the currency equalization.

"And of course, if you hadn't succeeded in keeping the Diskcard from being used, the markets would have gone crazy."

"So why did the markets go crazy?"

"Because Lano D'Lazo went long on interest rate futures. He gambled that interest rates would go up."

The Chairman stopped and poured himself a drink. He put a scotch on the counter for Block.

D'Lazo had to be the party behind injecting the currency into the system. No one would have bet so heavily on the increase in inter-est rates otherwise. And yet, The Chairman realized, Lord Do-mainsing knew that all bets were off before Block sent D'Lazo sail-ing off the roof of the Secretariat Building.

"And they did!" Block remembered the Diskcard sitting on the bed stand beside Mary. He continued to avoid telling The Chairman where he got the Diskcard.

"They went up, but not for the reason that anyone intended them to go up.

"The very act of going long on interest rate futures, the very act of betting that the rates would go up, defeated the purpose of debasing the currency.

"D'Lazo sucked over a trillion dollars into his own account in Acapulco as a result of the interest rate rise. If he had used the Diskcard to cause an inflationary rise in the interest rate, the profits from his act of betting on the rise would have sucked enough money out of the economy to bring the situation under control.

"If he was involved in the plot, he had no intention of carrying out his end of the bargain."

The Chairman sipped at his wine. He suddenly realized this was what Bloomsey had found out through his network of brokers. Enough money was long on interest rates to neutralize any actions taken to debase the currency. When credit tightened and his margins were called, he must have attributed the long money to The Chair-man, a false belief The Chairman would leave in place.

"That still doesn't explain the market gyrations."

"When I removed credit liquidity to topple Lord Domainsing's po-sition, I thought he was going to inject excess currency into the economy. When that didn't happen and the interest rates began to rise, the money started to flow into D'Lazo's account. The market doesn't care about motives, just supply and demand.

"With liquidity being sucked out of the market on top of the li-quidity that I had engineered, we just about collapsed the entire system.

"If Shandra hadn't been on the spot in Acapulco to recycle D'Lazo's funds back into the system under the confiscation clauses of the various financial accords, we would have been in hot water.

"But it's like everything else. The experts, of whom Shandra was not one to start with, had to find out what the parameters of the situation were before they knew how much to compensate for whatever those parameters turned out to be.

"It's been going on all weekend and it isn't over yet."

He looked at his watch. "Shandra should be getting here pretty soon."

"What's left?" Block asked.

"There is still a huge block of funds that are legitimately owned and have to be recycled into the system." He looked at Block closely. "Are you sure there isn't something that you haven't told me?"

Block went over and put his arm around The Chairman's shoul-der. "David, there is a hell of a lot of things I haven't told you, and I'm never going to tell you, either. You just wouldn't want to know. Aren't your markets going to be orderly, in equilibrium, as you say? Isn't that enough?"

"The timing is just not right. I don't yet understand it. It's like that blowjob I got from Mary Renon. I didn't understand it. Nobody could explain it to me. And now I can't get another one. And she's not about to talk about it."

"Luber's Law."

"What?"

"It's Luber's Law. If it isn't understandable, it isn't. Accept that it isn't and forget about it. You've got your equilibrium, financial stability is returning to the markets, what else do you want? You probably didn't want another, what did you call it, blockbuster, anyway"

"Did you ever get one off her?"

"I can truthfully say that I didn't. She screwed my head off, though."

"Same here. She's like a sixteen year old that just got a license to drive. Can't keep her from getting behind the wheel."

Just then the door to the bedroom opened and Mary, blond hair bouncing over a bright smile, jutted herself into the room as if it were hers.

"You boys talking about me? Goodness. You both look beat all to hell."

She kissed The Chairman on the cheek and then went over to Block, holding him at arms length, his size dwarfed by her energy.

"My savior," she said, kissing him full on the lips and hugging him fiercely. "Wonderful to see you again."

The Chairman looked at his watch and then the door. "Shandra should be here any minute, I'm hoping."

"I have an appointment with the Fortyniners after practice, so I hope she gets here soon. What does she want?"

"It's the matter of the some quarter of a trillion dollars you have been able to amass out of the recent events."

"A quarter of a trillion dollars . . ." Block said, or asked, he did-n't know which.

"That's a lot of money," The Chairman said.

"And all mine. May I have some of that wine? It looks scrump-tious."

"What do you plan on doing with it?" The Chairman asked, pour-ing her a glass and handing it to her across the bar.

"Save it for my old age, I guess."

"Money saved is not money."

"Then I'll spend it."

"How will you do that?"

"I'll just go out and find something to buy and buy it."

"And when you run out of things to buy?"

"Is that possible?"

"When you have everything that money can buy, you begin to look for things money can't buy, power, adulation, immortality.

"But by definition, the things that money can't buy are yours for the taking.

"After your personal needs are met, the things of value are the life you make."

"But I made that money on my own."

"Conditions occurred that allowed the money to flow through channels to which you had access. You were bright enough to make it stick, remain under your control."

He looked up as the door opened and Shandra came in.

"Shandra has a project you might be interested in."

Shandra looked around at The Chairman, Block, Mary. "Hello all." She walked over to Mary and shook her hand. "It's been an exciting weekend. I haven't had a chance to meet you personally. Have you explained the situation to her yet?" she asked, turning toward The Chairman.

"Not really."

Shandra turned to Mary. "We are trying to control the present. We have to allow The Representative World Government to emerge out of the various nationalistic, racial and political units. If we don't, there will be only ashes and no Phoenix, at least not as we know it."

"Ronnie has clarified that point of view for me, yes," Mary re-plied.

"The battle for the present is ebbing and flowing like the value of the Pacific Rim Currency Unit I have learned so much about these last few days. The Representative World Government is emerging, but only just ahead of the world catastrophe that would occur if widespread mastery of technology were put in the hands of narrow nationalistic aims.

"Technology can no longer be used for the acquisition of goods in excess of the amount contributed by the acquisitor. It has to be put to use improving the production and distribution of goods so that an orderly market will result in an equitable distribution.

"Our control of the present is tenuous. We are just keeping even in preparing for the emergence of The Representative World Gov-ernment.

"If we can control the past, however, we can provide a future compatible for its emergence.

"To date, the past has been controlled by narrow nationalistic interests and these interests have used it to mold a future that placed their interests ahead of the interests of the emerging Repre-sentative World Government.

"Block's penetration, and the securing of the D'Lazo villa has put in our hands a detailed history of the nationalistic past, a written history from the time that man recovered from the flood and re-forged bronze.

"I am sure that the cache of image information that we lucked out on at the villa is not the sole copy.

"But we can make it a copy that is available to the world.

"The Chairman has convinced the owners of a salt-mining op-eration south of San Francisco International to donate its consider-able area to the establishment of Bay State University with the purpose of disseminating the learning concerning the history of na-tionalism to everyone.

"We both feel that the generous donation of the funds you have accumulated as a result of this operation would put the institution eternally in your debt and more than willing to accommodate your suggestions for the accomplishment of its goals, as well, of course as taking care of any personal requirements you might have during your lifetime."

"It would also get that damned money back into the markets so the damn things would settle down and I could get some relaxation," The Chairman added. "Trust me."

"Hmmm." Mary put her glass down. "You do very well unre-laxed. And believe me, I trust you." She turned to Shandra. "Can we have a football team?"

"Of course."

"Where do I sign?"

Shandra accessed the appropriate series of documents. "Just hit F3."

"Push one computer key and a quarter of a trillion dollars passes hands?"

"And a great institution is established. Come on. Let's go look at the future campus."

"What about my appointment with the Fortyniners."

"Business before pleasure. You want to join us, Ronald?" she asked Block, smiling.

Block got that interesting feeling of ambivalence he had felt be-fore at the inconclusiveness of her smile.

"Yes," he said, accepting the smile as an invitation.

"Shandra," Mary said, getting off the chair. "I've got a small problem you might be able to help me with. I know a British agent who likes to give blowjobs. How do you think we could turn him?"

"Don't look at me," Block said, getting between the two and guiding them by their waists toward the door.

"Ron, I hate to mention it," The Chairman said as they reached the door, "but you failed in one aspect of your assignment."

"Oh?" Block replied. "What's that?"

"You were going to deliver the architect of the operation to me. We need the brainpower and I know it wasn't D'Lazo."

"I think Shandra just took care of that," Block replied over his shoulder as the automatic door closed behind him.

Alone, The Chairman filled his glass with the clear light wine and walked over to the window, gazing out over the bay to the mountains behind Oakland.

He thought of the Earth moving through space in a course that was dictated by how the sun moved in the arm of the galaxy, how the galaxy moved with respect to other galaxies and who knew how else.

And he thought of the billions of human beings on the face of the Earth dependent solely on the continued existence of the Earth as it continued its unknowable course through the void.

He knew the difference between animate and inanimate matter and the difference between stationary animate matter and ambula-tory animate matter.

He knew that he was a part of the animate ambulatory matter that had developed on the surface of the planet aware of its own existence.

He knew this self-awareness allowed his species to alter the environment to ensure its survival regardless of what happened to the planet, but only if it used that self-awareness in a cooperative effort to ensure its survival.

He held the wine glass up and watched the Bay's image float in the clear liquid, the surface of the liquid seeking a level within the glass.

Everything had to have balance, The Chairman thought. There had to be an equilibrium to everything.

The ultimate equilibrium had to be between the number of people on the face of the planet and the ability of the planet to support that number.

The people could ensure their survival regardless of the ulti-mate fate of the planet only so long as they were not themselves the source of the destruction of the planet.

Technology increased the number of people the planet could sup-port and would be the source of their survival. Technology could also destroy the planet and eliminate the possibility for survival.

It was a razor's edge. His own course was run. It would be hor-rible if the effort at survival didn't outlive him. It would be a trag-edy if it died with him.

It would be catastrophic if, through no fault of its own, through some galactic fluke in the position of the moon with respect to the Earth that destroyed its normal progress to the stars and immor-tality, the particular life that evolved on this particular planet in this particular solar system located in this particular arm of a gal-axy located with respect to countless other galaxies in the limitless vastness of nothingness, it would be catastrophic if the evolved life, the life of which he and everyone on Earth was a part, didn't recover from its amnesia in time, didn't recognize the actual na-ture of reality, didn't bring its technology into accord with that reality to ensure its survival in the universe, failed, died, disap-peared from existence, a footnote in the textbooks of other galactic civilizations, perhaps a warning sign to others but in reality no more than a wisp of a memory.

The Chairman held his glass up in an invisible toast to the sky above the mountains across the bay.

"To the ultimate equilibrium," he toasted.