1. The Chairman

The thinning colors of the Indian Ocean stretching out below the Stratodart pulled Block out of his reverie.

Ever since the Crystal Palace attempt on The Chairman's life, his stopovers became increasingly bazaar. Before, any luxury hotel was acceptable. As these hotels were normally located in population centers, it'd been fairly easy to tie in one of his summons with the myriad other activities he enjoyed engaging in.

Now, he had to travel who knew where with whatever means at hand for a single purpose visit.

Not, he thought as he strained to see the landfall the changing color presaged, that he minded. Without the Chairman's assignments to keep him busy, he'd probably be slinging hash at a fast food place somewhere. The fact his father and his grandfather had worked with The Chairman and his father over many years wouldn't have been any help.

He'd simply been lucky, both in his assignments and their suc-cessful conclusions. Nobody endured at his level of operation on family considerations, or even past achievements.

If he wanted a slice of the pie, he had to provide some of the heat to cook it.

So far, he'd been able to provide the heat.

And, he thought as he saw the southern tip of Sri Lanka loom on the horizon, he was willing to go anywhere The Chairman asked him to go in order to keep on cooking.

From his altitude, Sri Lanka looked like a jewel, but he didn't spend time enjoying the scenery. At his speed, he could do little more than use it as intended, to line himself up so he could shoot into the Bay of Bengal with the east coast of India on his left and the False Divi Point dead ahead.

He couldn't for the life of him think why The Chairman had sum-moned him. It was for conversation, he was sure, but not just for conversation, and yet the world seemed to be pretty quiet.

After that maniac Bourgesie's attempt to throttle world trade by what appeared to the rest of the world as just a simple little neighborly takeover and annihilation, and his subsequent pounding into the ground, the dissident factions in the world, the nationalists who wanted it all their way and the hell with everybody else, had gone into a sort of Bourgesie shock. The saber rattling, false threats, even public torture of dissident citizens, had taken a back seat to a minimal show of reasonableness and cooperation. There were armed conflicts, to be sure, but none of a nature that'd in-terfere with the orderly consolidation of the interests of The Rep-resentative World Government.

Who knew? Maybe Block was just witnessing the quiet before yet another storm. There was no end to which independent nations, wrapped up in efforts to take what they could without making the compromises necessary to universal survival, would combine into narrow nationalistic collations to throttle trade and commerce like the pirates of old who sat astride trade routes, sucking lifeblood out of the orderly movement of goods until the extraction itself brought pain and misery to the ultimate consumers of those goods.

He saw the False Divi Point dead ahead and prepared to drop fifty thousand feet. He had maintained his speed for just this thrill.

He slid the knob on the panel in front of him sharply up.

The Stratodart's nose followed the knob.

From slicing cleanly through what air their was at seventy thousand feet, he was suddenly bouncing like a rock, belly forward, the control surfaces gradually taking him up and over backwards, his slowing forward speed and his change of attitude turning the Stratodart upside down, then slowly into a nose dive, almost, Block hoped if he had judged his speed right, straight down like a free fal-ling elevator.

He felt his stomach go out of him as the sleek craft began to fall and felt his mind take the little leap it did just before he knew he was going to come and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it, the feeling of nothingness, non-existence, exhilaration, total power.

He closed his eyes to go with the sensation as the Stratodart be-gan to gain speed. He stayed with it as long as he could, safely, or maybe not so safely, pleasure is hard to let go of, but forced him-self to open his eyes and readjust the control so he leveled out at precisely twenty thousand feet, the window that'd allow him past the first security check point surrounding The Chairman wherever he went since the Crystal Palace affair.

He checked the forward momentum he had picked up from the precipitous fall, and, in dong so, noted the series display light ac-knowledging his presence.

The Chairman chose some strange places for his rendezvous. With his worldwide economic contacts, not to mention his prestige with the Governing Council of The Representative World Govern-ment, with each member committed to open borders, he was free to do so, making the places surpassingly interesting.

The marker coming up on the computer display identified Vara-nasi in Benares, the oldest extant city in the world, a religious center of unsurpassed reverence. But the worship took place at Al-lahabad, on the confluence of the Ganges, the Yamuna, and the great invisible underground river Savarati during the twelfth year festi-val of Khumbu Mela, with every twelfth festival being a sort of Halley's comet everyone wished would occur in their lifetimes.

The Khumbu Mela witnessed as many as twelve million souls cleansing themselves in the sacred waters in a single day, and things such as twenty-five thousand cholera deaths, or three to four thousand souls squashed under stampeding elephants, were hardly noticeable in the celebration.

Block focused his mind, knowing his second security check was next and required a positive response on his part. He entered his code, which was immediately accepted, and fanned the thrust so the Stratodart became a helicopter, slowing until it was motionless over the terrain below. He waited for the computer to accept and locate his final destination, then watched with interest as he moved forward, spying what looked like an abandoned palace below.

He looked at the read out.

Mahmudabad.

This was the place.

His stomach lurched and his mind entered climax as he flared out the thrusters and dropped like a rock toward the surface of the Earth.

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The Chairman had been busy and took a moment of solitude to catch a catnap, but before he was asleep, or so he thought as the face of a not quite pretty woman swam into view, the pressure of her arm on his back brought him back to reality.

His nap was over.

He was immediately alert.

He carefully slid out from under the arm resting on his back, an arm that half an hour before held him in tight embrace as he moved in her delightfulness. He rolled out of bed, slipping into a robe.

He watched as the women, was it Claret, he wasn't sure, turn over as a result of his slight disturbance, her magnificent breasts retarding her motion until they passed their center of gravity, then flowing slowly like delicious molasses to the other side of her body, their bulbous beauty pulled her over onto her other side.

She sighed and curled up, drawing her legs into her new posi-tion, looking immensely satisfied, which he couldn't object to given the satisfaction her body had provided him. He looked at the curva-ture of her buttocks as she drew up her knees. The way the full roundness of a women could turn into such a tight thrilling angle, taut, waiting, always intrigued him.

He went over to the bar, poured himself a glass of white wine, and walked to the other side of the bed, sitting down so he faced her as she dozed. He put the wine on the bedside table and picked up his notebook.

Claret it was, he noted in the section in the notebook reserved for her.

He checked to see if his original impression of her physical fea-tures still held. He'd had a favorable impression of her hair as she entered. It wasn't blond but a natural light brown. It'd smelled good so he put a check of agreement with his first impression.

The breasts, of course, in clothes, had been outstanding, and he'd been pleased to see they didn't hold up outside of artificial sup-port. Her face looked better when he was in her, but now, as he looked closely, her nose was a little askew, her lips a little thin, a fact she'd compensated for by being a very passionate kisser.

Her waist, well he could see now that she'd seen a little too much food, but it hadn't been apparent because of the visual bene-fits bookending it.

Inside she'd been delicious, but that was more a product of his size in relation to her size and couldn't be used to determine her overall value.

So there he had it with this one, he thought, as he took a sip of wine. Mediocre at best if viewed externally on an objective basis, and yet she carried herself, engaged in conversation with him, ma-nipulated him if you will, with the aplomb of a born princess.

How in heck can anyone equate the way someone looks with the way they act, the way they look with the way they effect others in reality?

He looked at Claret's number. She was number one hundred and eighteen since Block robbed him of Janette, Lanette, or whatever her name was, Danette now, married to that McGeorges Georges, or Lansdown Georges, or whatever the guy's name was, producing incredible results out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. He'd have to visit them sometime. Maybe they could tell him what it is about the way people look that makes people see, or not see, as the case may be.

He took his action pad and added cynosure to it.

Well, he thought, Claret wanted an assignment in Tigu Mures un-der the magnificent Carpathian Mountains, and she'd certainly earned it. There was no way Ronald Block would find her there.

And that would make one hundred and eighteen women he'd had Block would never have.

He picked up his action pad and his drink, and taking a last look at Claret, paused. It dawned on him when he'd been in her embrace, when he looked into her face in the warm afternoon light, she'd been the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen.

He shrugged. They all were under those circumstances. Block's Perceptionism?

He turned, the movement of the room in front of his eyes eras-ing the picture of Claret, a mixture of the girl on the bed and the girl he'd seen in embrace, replacing it with a whirl of walls, doors and lights.

Marise was sitting at a desk she'd improvised in the sitting room separating his bedroom from the living and dining areas. He didn't have to worry whether she was other than what she ap-peared to be. She was plain. She had plain nondescript eyes, an in-definable nose, a mouth you could barely see, a totally forgettable chin, her checks, well, they were there although he wasn't so sure about her ears.

Her plain brown lusterless hair was done up in a bun that seemed to counterbalance the bulky, colorless dress that poured over too wide shoulders and disappeared somewhere down below where he never let his imagination run. He'd caught a glimpse of ankles in rolled down men's socks and shoes and, no, he didn't want to recall the image.

She was a frump. Ronald Block could steal her all he wanted.

Let him do whatever he wanted with her. As a matter of fact, he intended to do everything he could to promote it.

Fortunately, Marise was integral to the mission he had for Block. It'd be interesting to see what happened.

"Time will tell," he said, handing Marise his notebook.

"Pardon me?" she asked.

"I mean, time will tell whether Claret likes her new assignment. You'll take care of it?"

"She'll be almost as excited to go there as she was to come here with you," Marise replied.

Marise opened a file resting on the right side of her desk. "Do you want to take them in order, or do you want to take the one that will be close to where we'll be . . ." she looked at the appointment calendar, "this evening?"

"I don't know. That business at lunch with Jarred has me a little off center."

"He's a charmer," Marise noted.

"Yes, well, I understand women all over the world adore him. Now there's a case of cynosure."

"Cynosure?" Marise asked, puzzled.

"The idea you'll be attracted or not attracted to someone ac-cording to what everybody else thinks about the person."

"I know what it is," Marise replied, "a focal point, but being attracted because everybody's attracted? That seems simplistic."

"I'm not so sure, at least according to Block. I know Jarred's rich, attractive, and well spoken, but then so are a million other men, and, for that matter, women."

He started to feel self-conscious talking about beauty in front of Marise, who didn't have any to speak of, and acted it, her shoulders hunched, her head bent forward most of the time. She was a cipher, but maybe not, being a realitist. Realitists were the group of men and women, mostly in Block's age group, although Block himself wasn't one, the generation that followed the boomer generation sandwiched between that Idealistic group and the coming Millenni-als, the group that'd take over the world early in the third millen-nial.

The Chairman had tied all computer databases together with a probability program that surfaced situations with absolutely no probability of ever occurring.

One of the first things the probability program surfaced was a group of men and women, small but growing, who registered totally average in everything, whether it be the so-called intelligent quo-tient tests, blood tests, psychological tests, or personality tests.

When The Chairman investigated a few of these individuals, he found while they might be average in everything, there was one area they weren't average in, an area never tested because there was no precedent for it. They were able to perceive reality exactly as reality is and therefore capable of matching their actions ex-actly to reality.

He suspected there'd always been a little bit of realitist behav-ior around for a long time. A baseball player who could unerringly stroke the bat into a ball was perceiving reality and acting within that reality exactly. Swishing a basketball, acing a tennis opponent all evidenced the ability. Many people had little instances of it in their lives, the "Yes!" feeling when something goes exactly right.

But no one had it like this group of average young men and women, men and women who became almost superhuman in his service.

Marise probably recognized her own plainness because her plainness was reality, and she was a realitist. All the better to turn her lose on Block. Block didn't know it, but Shandra, his first real-itist, sent him a present for his ninetieth birthday, a tape of her French Kissing Block in the ear. The note pointed out if she hadn't shorted the electricity to the infernal device Block was encased in, the kiss would have brought his genitals into contact with the wire passing just beneath them. Block's scream was the product of this expectation rather than the kiss itself.

Maybe, he thought, Marise could come up with a similar tor-ment.

"It doesn't bother me Jarred's something of a playboy. After all, that's his privilege. They sell tabloids. What he does with his success is up to him. It's something else. I should've let you sit in while I was talking to him. Maybe you could've picked up on it. I can't quite grasp what's bothering me. To heck with it, Block's up next. You have a position on him yet?"

"He's coming in over the Indian Ocean, about two thousand miles out from Sri Lanka. You still haven't told me what you want to do about your next assignment."

"Bring in the most drop dead beautiful one we have on the list from wherever."

"Yes sir," Marise replied, already familiar with The Chairman's serial sex policy.

"Tell me when Block breaks the inner ring and responds," The Chairman continued. "The fool will probably cut his engines at twenty thousand feet. That's always fun to watch."

"Will do," Marise replied.

The Chairman went into the living area, took a fresh glass of wine, and sat by the screening wall, the broad partition providing the vista into the Throne Room. The partition held a giant picture of Queen Victoria until made transparent, revealing the ruins of the Throne Room.

The Chairman didn't feel like including the Throne Room in his thoughts so he left it opaque. If he hadn't, he'd see the decay, the world rot the years of neglect created. He'd see scrub breaking through the tiles, the walls flaking, the rats scurrying, stopping, testing with their whiskers, changing course for no apparent reason to move through the jagged openings out into the barren landscape thousands of years of habitation created.

This cracking splendor wasn't to The Chairman's liking. He could shut his eyes and think of the Throne Room as it had been, with bright colors on reflective tiles, tapestries and portraiture soften-ing the effect of the gleaming throne so encrusted with jewels, its gold and silver barely shone through.

With these memories, he could visualize the stately figure of the Rajah, camouflaged in the same collage of bejeweled gold and sil-ver, mount the throne. Women carefully festooned flowers to his robe, hiding the jewels behind their splendor, men hoisting strong poles lifted the throne on their shoulders, carrying it through the massive doors into the vibrant day, millions of faces stretched out before the long portico, waiting for hope, for a future, many fu-tures.

The Chairman's thoughts drifted from the Rajah as a jewel en-crusted symbol to the Rajah as the wielder of power, the controller of the sea of souls swimming beneath his soul borne craft. He saw Mahmudabad as the confluence of control, sitting as it did, just be-neath the Nepalian girdle holding the distended stomach of China in place. The British Empire slid in through Katmandu, its agents moving northwest to Delhi, southwest to Bombay, southeast to Cal-cutta, fomenting revolution, discontent, and division to maintain their frontal control from the seas surrounding the Indian subconti-nent.

Empire was historically a product of exploration and exploita-tion. Carthaginian merchants sent their ships out into the storms to develop sources of trade, minerals, timber, slaves for fabrication, converting the Earth's bounty into people's wants, to wealth and prosperity.

The wealth the merchants amassed produced governance. While merchants formed alliances to increase individual enterprises, squabbling among themselves for sources and markets, their pri-mary purpose was to explore and exploit for the benefit of the Carthaginian people. If they encountered significant external oppo-sition to their exploration and exploitation, it was up to them to support the government's efforts to put together a force with suf-ficient strength to overcome that opposition.

The creation of wealth produces multiple claimants, with force the only way to prevent opposing claimants from seizing what's been created.

When the business interests to the north of Carthage began to coalesce into Rome, those interests exploring and exploiting the same territory Carthage claimed, conflict became inevitable, a conflict lasting almost two centuries, resulting in Carthage's anni-hilation.

The Chairman enjoyed visiting the fort cities sitting atop moun-tains stretching across the instep of the boot of Italy, forts pro-tecting Rome from the south, forts which, during the endless dec-ades of the conflict, became a way of life for the infant Empire.

The British Empire was based on the same commercial quest, complicated by technology, production, and the prosperity it pro-duced. The Raleighs and Drakes set out in ships to challenge the dominance of Spain and Portugal, which in turn had broken the grip of Venice on the trade routes to the east by traveling around the horn of Africa, and across the Atlantic to the new Indies.

These men may have carried Elizabeth's flag for the glory of Queen and Country, but they sought personal wealth, wealth that became the enterprises that were no less aligned, or unaligned, as those underpinning Carthage and later Rome.

An Empire is the sum total of its enterprises because without enterprise there is no Empire.

The men controlling the enterprises, what in England became the great trading companies, controlled the Empire. When opposition to their trade occurred, they called upon King and country to protect their enterprises, to keep the property at home from falling into the hands of others

If Venice controlled the trade, the waters of Venice were crowded with Palaces. When Portugal wrested trade from Venice, the Coast of Portugal blossomed with riches, its people basking in splendor along the sun coast. If Spain could take Portugal's capital, then it could take its trade, and if England could defeat Spain's Ar-mada, then the people in the unfortunately chilly climate could be-deck themselves in the silks of the east.

The British Empire claimed the sun never set on it, but it was on its business interests the sun never set because its business inter-ests were the Empire. Attention to preserving those interests against persistent French encroachment lost Britain its foothold in the United States.

As the succession of Empires progressed, each covering a greater portion of the globe than the last, in doing so annihilating those that came before, the world faced confrontations more de-structive than Carthage's annihilation.

Britain tried frantically to regain its lost territory in the Americas once it'd reduced France to a pile of rubble, sucking it dry of both its human resources and its wealth. It tried in 1812. It tried to encroach through Mexico in 1848 during the great revolu-tionary diversions on the continent. It tried in the 1860s by pitting the American north against its south. It tried right up to the discov-ery of the usefulness to civilization of oil at which point the game of Empire acquired a whole new set of rules.

Before the discovery of the applications for oil, the purpose of enterprises, or combinations of enterprises when other enterprises or combinations of enterprises thwarted them, was to bring forth the necessary military power for one to annihilate the other.

Before the British Empire, the conflicts were resource based, but with the advent of production, conflicts arose over protecting markets to consume production. Focused on protecting markets, the British Empire was caught with its pants down way below its royal knees when oil arrived on the scene, shifting the battle back to re-sources. It was left defending the outposts of a world as defined by the markets of the past while the world shifted violently through two world conflagrations to an emphasis on securing resources and protecting the market.

In the past, the group of men controlling the enterprises were nationalistic simply because the only way to protect their interests was through nationalistic power. However, with the market in control of enterprises rather than the enterprises centered around the nationalistic control of resources, business interests developed that weren't centered in a particular nation, but were international in scope, centered around wherever international markets devel-oped.

There were competing interests to be sure, at times violently so, but because all interests depended on the existence of the mar-ketplace, maintaining the marketplace in an undisturbed condition became the primary enterprise interest.

The Chairman knew he was only miles from the Nepal border over which British gold had poured to support a network of agents cascading like a giant waterfall down the Indian subcontinent to be siphoned off at its shores by the dominant British navy. At the time, British comfort depended on British control of the subconti-nent. Now the Indian subcontinent was free to compete with all con-tinents, subcontinents, nations and geographical groupings in an open marketplace, and was doing so with a vengeance.

The discovery and utilization of oil, by shifting the emphasis to securing the marketplace, made cooperation to protect it absolutely necessary. Wars no longer occurred between the market partici-pants, they occurred between the market participants as a group, and those wishing, for one reason or another, to destroy it.

And the market participants weren't limited to the people oper-ating the enterprises, the vast majority of the market was made up of market beneficiaries, the consumers of the goods and services who made up the enterprise effort. Because the entrepreneurial combinations were international, the market was international, limited by technological development and the ability to utilize planetary resources without affecting the stability of the planet itself.

The Chairman lived though the 20th century where mass educa-tion first produced the resources to plan the necessary unification of the world. This required the use of technology to satisfy the ex-panding market while preventing the technology from destroying the planet it mined, and the human market along with it.

There could be no international marketplace without interna-tional control. There could be no international control without inter-national cooperation. Nationalistic interests had to be submerged to the extent necessary to control planetary exploitation. Without control, the drive to technologically explore and exploit would lead to the same conclusion that the Carthaginian drive to explore and exploit led, extinction.

The Chairman had no intention of allowing that to happen.

The formation of a Representative World Government, in one form or another, preoccupied the twentieth century. It's formation was continuously setback by assaults of nationalistic interests at-tempting to preserve their right to destroy whatever was under their dominion to the exclusion of their common interest, the mar-ketplace. The Representative World Government strove to preserve the marketplace. The Chairman was confident the coming genera-tion, the Millennial generation, the worldwide group of people com-ing of age at the dawn of the third millennium, would be the group pulling the world over the final hump, establishing the effective worldwide institutions, both monetary and regulatory, necessary for cooperation and consolidation.

He tapped his pad against the top of his wine glass, the sound bringing the slight chill as the lengthened shadows brought the ad-vancing afternoon sun to his attention. The first topic of discussion was the Millennial generation.

"Block just landed," Marise said. "Sorry I didn't tell you ear-lier, but I didn't want to disturb your catnap. Block did his 20,000 foot drop, though."

"Is Claret out of here?"

"Far away," Marise replied.

"Good," he said, turning to the panel, making it transparent. "Let's see what's going on with Block."

He expected to see the flaking facade, the rats, the sparse shrubbery, perhaps Block. What he saw was Jarred calmly sitting in the middle of the Throne Room.

"What the . . ." he exclaimed, half rising from his chair

"I thought he was gone, too," Marise said.

"That's a breach of security," The Chairman said.

"Technically, no." Marise replied. "He's still inside the limits of the zone check."

"What the heck is he doing there?"

Marise came over to get a better look.

"He looks like he's meditating," she observed.

He was an impressive man, very masculine, aquiline handsome, his hair, a soft blonde, tied neatly in a ponytail, dressed in a v-necked monogrammed short sleeve shirt, gold chain neck and wrist, slacks, pointy shoes, not just pointed, almost stilettoed.

He casually sat on the end of the old throne stump, his back erect, one leg extended but still slightly bent, the other casually crossed at a right angle over it, a hand casually in one pocket, the other rubbing his chin.

"I don't like this," The Chairman said. "I don't like this one single bit."

Three or four rats running in a pack caught his attention.

"Is it my imagination," he asked Marise, "or are there more rats running around out there than there were when we got here?"

"Maybe they come out more in the afternoon," Marise sug-gested.

The Chairman examined Jarred closely. He looked like he was in deep concentration.

Concentration on what, The Chairman wondered.

Jarred had the important job of putting a stop to the exploitation of the Amazonian area of Brazil as part of the agreement with the Brazilian government giving it membership in The Representative World Government. He'd performed admirably, as he had in all his undertakings. He'd been in Delhi when security was initiated in an-ticipation of The Chairman's visit and asked for a few minutes of what turned out to be a little more than social time with him.

Jarred, it turned out, felt the Amazonian was a perfect place to import an ostrich operation and he wanted to feel The Chairman out on his opinion, knowing South America would be a new market for this rapidly expanding industry.

The Chairman felt there was something off-key about the visit and now, watching him sit on the decaying steps of the old throne base, he realized what it was.

It was confidence.

Jarred didn't act like he was asking The Chairman for an opin-ion. He acted like he was telling The Chairman what he was going to do.

What did that mean?

The Chairman had no way to know, so he shelved the question for future consideration, turning his attention to what Block's re-action to him would be.

Jarred, with his dress and demeanor, and especially his pony-tail, gave the impression of being a sixties radical, aging gently in his liberalism. The Chairman knew for a fact, however, he wasn't a boomer, not even a border baby born at the cusp between two gen-erations, but solidly in the camp of the Silent generation, the gen-eration following his own, very much older than he looked.

Block would take him like he took everything else, for what he purported to be. And Block's generation didn't like the generation Jarred appeared to represent one bit.

"I'll be darned," he heard Block exclaim over the speaker as he entered the Throne Room. "What's The Chairman doing with a hippy?"

Jarred leaned forward, springing upright on his pointed shoes, his hand outstretched in greeting.

"The famous Ronald Block. I knew if I stayed around long enough, I'd meet you."

Block took his hand. "And you're . . .?"

"Jarred. Jeremy Jarred," Jarred replied smoothly, "I do a bit of business with your boss now and then."

Block glanced around, looking directly at The Chairman, although he couldn't see him behind the wall.

"Well, he must be around here somewhere. You coming or go-ing."

Jarred wiggled one toe back and forth, sending a dozen rats scurrying. "I'm just leaving. I was sitting here trying to picture what it was like at the height of its splendor, with the Rajahs mas-ters of all they surveyed."

Block dodged the scurrying rats running in his direction.

"Where do all these darn things come from?" he asked.

"I guess anything you don't kill will take you over," Jarred re-plied.

The Chairman watched Block as he looked closely at Jarred.

"I guess you're right," he said, after a brief pause, "I'd like to stay for a chat, but I'm already late for my appointment with The Chairman."

The Chairman gave Marise a nod to fetch Block and sat contem-plating Jarred as he in turn watched Block move behind the throne stump, looking for a probable entrance, the rats scurrying every which way in front of him.

The Chairman only arrived that morning, and there hadn't been more than a dozen or so rats, not even enough to scurry, as he'd strolled through the collapsing Throne Room. Now the floor was covered with them. In fact, if his imagination wasn't getting the better of him, he'd say the number had increased during the five minutes he'd been looking at Jarred through the screen.

He tried to focus on his tasks, his scheme to fix Marise up with Block, the drop-dead gorgeous gal he'd enjoy later, Block's talking points, especially cynosure, but the rats kept intruding. He looked at his notes and realized there weren't that many subjects, only one other than cynosure, in fact, the Millennial generation.

He decided to defer the Marise Block attempt. He wanted her to visit Jarred in the Amazon to assess him in his natural habitat. However, he could let her accompany Block at the start of his as-signment to see if anything developed. If Jarred really was sitting in the Throne Room waiting for Block, why did he want to meet Block? If he weren't waiting for Block, then what was he doing? Imagining the glory of the Rajahs seemed fishy. If it wasn't, it was alarming.

Something wasn't right, and Jarred didn't seem to care whether anyone realized it.

"What kind of company have you been keeping?" Block asked, entering and immediately going over to the bar for a drink.

"What kind of greeting is that?" The Chairman asked, jokingly. Block was the son he'd never had. "You do business with who you have to do business with," he continued, getting up. " Let me do a little business first."

He went into the anteroom where Marise lingered at the door, looking at Block's back.

"First time you've met him?" he asked.

"Hmmm."

"Good. I want you to work with him on his new assignment. But first, I want you to track Jarred."

"Track?" she asked.

"Find out what he's doing back on his home turf."

"You want me to go to the Amazon?"

"I certainly do," he said emphatically.

Marise flushed, her eyes downcast more than when he caught her sneaking a peek at Block.

"You're sure me?" she asked, incredulously.

"I'm sure you. Have you got me lined up for tonight?"

"I'll line you up for the month to get an assignment like this," she said, hiding her excitement.

"Just tonight," The Chairman replied. "You'll be finished with the Amazon in a day or two at most."

"I'll do whatever has to be done," she replied, looking him di-rectly in the eyes.

The Chairman was startled. Her eyes were nondescript, but he thought he caught a glimmer of, was it, a spark, shinning through. Marise was by far the least self-confident Realitist he'd ever met, although by nature a Realitist's confidence factor was always lower than their abilities simply because it was difficult to find circum-stances in which they couldn't perform perfectly. Because they moved effortlessly through reality, matching their actions exactly to the conditions dictated by reality, their abilities were transpar-ent. They didn't realize the difficulty of the things they accom-plished and therefore didn't have anything to be confident about. The Chairman suspected Marise's plainness made her more diffident than normal in her estimation of what she could do.

Jarred was no Bourgesie, so he saw the assignment as some-thing to cut her teeth on. He was interested to see how she carried it out. Then there was the side assignment helping Block. That had the potential to turn into something totally unexpected.

Satisfied he had set Marise's course of action, The Chairman returned to find Block staring into the Throne Room.

"Where do all those rats come from?" he asked, holding out a fresh glass of wine for The Chairman. "Can you shut this screen off so we don't have to watch the little rodents? The big one has left."

The Chairman took his glass and looked around the Throne Room. Jarred was nowhere to be seen. He took one last look at the rats, which seemed to be multiplying even faster, and opaqued the screen.

"So, are we making any progress with cynosure?" he asked Block.

"You know what you're asking when you ask what makes some-body look at somebody simply because everybody else is looking at them? You're asking me to define beauty, and everybody knows beauty is in the eye of the beholder."

"Granted beauty is in the eye of the beholder," The Chairman replied, "but because everybody looks at one person, a movie star or an athlete or an astronaut, and they say there's something de-sirable, by definition, it isn't in the eye of the beholder if it's in everybody's eye. What makes a newcomer look favorably on an im-age simply because a lot of people look favorably on it? "

"How does this sound? The shape of a body part, the lips, the eyes, the way the stomach connects the hips and the breasts, these things have no meaning in and of themselves," Block countered.

"Of course they do," The Chairman said. "A nice butt, a cheer-ful smile, these things go right to the core. They're instinctual."

"Granted," Block said, "but what a particular butt or smile or pair of breasts or legs means to one person is learned. And until something is learned, it has no meaning. You may go through your entire life being attracted to a particular butt form, or a particular smile, and the same butt or smile wouldn't attract me at all."

"Oh really?" The Chairman said sarcastically.

"Instinct aside," Block continued, oblivious to The Chairman referencing the many girls Block had stolen from him, "an object in reality has no meaning unless we've something to compare it with. I may know what pair of legs turns me on when I see them, but I've no knowledge whether those legs are beautiful in objective reality. If I spend a lot of time comparing legs, I can come up with what it is about the legs that turn me on in comparison with the ones that don't.

"And I may like legs well enough to spend the time to find out, to set standards. But I can't do that about everything. For teeth, for instance, or body hair, or instep, I'm just going to have to take a packaged opinion as to what's beautiful, an off-the-shelf determi-nation made by somebody else. As a result, when everybody has come to a conclusion a person is in the ballpark as far as physical attributes are concerned, I'm going to turn my head, make an as-sessment, and see what I like, not seeing what I don't because it's within the norm. We've all learned what's outside the norm, ha-ven't we?"

"So cynosure is the sum total of everybody checking out some-one in the ballpark to see what they like?" The Chairman asked.

"Sounds silly, doesn't it?" he replied.

"Not more than anything else you say," The Chairman said, sighing as he took a sip of wine. "I'm wondering if it isn't just a way to fix beauty so it can't get away."

"You mean when someone you think is beautiful does something you don't like, and all of a sudden the beauty becomes ugliness to you, and the beauty can never be regained. What you once consid-ered precious becomes so hateful you can't even understand how you saw the beauty."

"I never have anyone around long enough for that to happen to me," The Chairman replied, looking at Block over the rim his glass. "But, I guess that's what I mean. Someone who has been defined as beautiful on an objective basis, a basis over which I have no con-trol, will remain beautiful regardless. Now take Marise . . ."

"You're not . . ."

"No."

"Good," Block said. "You do too many of your assistants. How you can justify going to bed with the help is beyond me. But she certainly wouldn't provide a cynosure, at least not for physical beauty. Is she one of your Realitists?"

The Chairman nodded.

"Well, she's that, at least."

"I think she likes you," The Chairman observed.

Block got up and refilled his glass. He remembered his night with Shandra, the one woman he knew for a fact to be a Realitist, and it had the appropriate physical response. Making love to her was like watching a molasses pot fill, the process lasted forever. A Realitist responded to lovemaking in exactly the way you wanted them to respond without you even knowing how you wanted them to re-spond.

He sneaked a peek at Marise as he brought his glass back, ob-serving her shapeless body under downcast eyes, apparently slav-ing away for God and The Chairman, if she could make any distinc-tion between the two.

"You say she's a Realitist?" he quizzed The Chairman again, be-cause he hadn't come right out and said it, only nodded his head.

"Yes," he said.

"Hmmm."

"Good. You'll find her intriguing.

"Who's that guy I met in the Throne room?" Block asked, changing the subject.

"Jarred's a very prosperous businessman, an independent busi-nessman. He's the guy who single-handedly created the business of harvesting ostrich meat. How many ways can you eat ostrich to-day?"

"Better question is," Block said wryly, "how can you avoid eating it?"

"Because the development of the ostrich industry took a very astute knowledge of marketing," The Chairman continued, ignoring Block's jibe, "Jarred is considered a very astute person. When the rape of the Amazon reached the point its progression was clear from satellites, a group of us got together and sent Jarred down there to put a stop to the process, stabilize the environment, and let the rain forest begin to replenish itself.

"He did an admirable job. Now let's get down to business. As generations go, The Representative World Government is looking to the up-coming Millennial generation to take over the administrative posts that will make it a success."

"The Millennial generation?" Block asked.

"Yes," The Chairman replied, "they're the ones that'll mature into leadership posts as the new millennium gains some years. They'll knit the world together into the format that'll be a blueprint for success, for planetary cooperation with respect to markets, resource use and preservation."

"So everything, all efforts are directed at the success of the Millennial generation. What's the problem?" Block asked.

"Somebody or some group seems to be attacking the Millennials, attempting to eliminate them, and with them, the chances of suc-cess for The Representative World Government."

"Eliminate an entire generation?" Block said, incredulously. "That doesn't seem feasible. Surely no one nationalistic leader, or even a cabal of them, has the ability to affect the formation of an entire worldwide generation."

"I don't know about ability," The Chairman noted, "where there's a desire, there'll always be someone attempting to satisfy that desire. I know something's afoot. You're familiar with my little hobby of fooling around with probabilities."

"You have a program that evaluates events according to their probability of occurrence" Block replied. "You have events with a low probability of occurrence flagged to your attention and then evaluate them to see if you can figure out whether the probability is an indication something besides the laws of chance are at work."

"Exactly," The Chairman said. "About a year ago, a private school composed totally of young Millennials participated in an inci-dent of incredible proportions. I didn't even pick it up with the prob-ability program. It was in all the papers. You probably remember it."

"The attack by the boys on the girls, and the death by suffoca-tion of several dozen of the girls."

"Right."

"But that's an isolated incident," Block said. "Surely you don't think . . ."

"It wasn't isolated," The Chairman interrupted him. "In a Cana-dian school, the student body formed into three gangs, the shifting alliances of which eventually led to a fracas in the auditorium that left ten deaths and the entire student body transferred to separate schools. They were all Millennials. In the Midwest United States, students banded together and lynched a teacher grading on the curve. Again, Millennials. Millennials again in Mexico, where they burned the school down, or again, in England, where they boarded it up, holding the teachers captive and carrying on a pitched battle with the police."

"Maybe the Millennials aren't what you think they are," Block suggested.

"But they are. All tests, all student assessments, all indica-tions, in fact, point unquestionably to their competence. There's simply no probability a similar series of events directed at dis-mantling authority could occur by accident. Someone is tampering, experimenting if you will, with the minds of the Millennial genera-tion."

"To what end?" Block asked.

"An unrecognizable attempt to destroy The Representative World Government. We need the Millennials to give it the structure that'll carry the world into the future. If the nationalists can elimi-nate, or even just damage the Millennial generation, the issues will be vainglorious, the battles vain, and the world will devolve into nationalistic centers of resource consumption, with the old patterns of rape and pillage perpetuating themselves ad infinitum. The human race will have missed its opportunity, and as a result will sink in its own failure."

The Chairman stood up abruptly.

"We can't let that happen!"

Block also stood involuntarily, caught up in The Chairman's en-thusiasm. He could see how his personality built solidity out of nothing.

"But I still don't see how an entire generation can be sub-verted," he insisted.

"I don't either. I know somebody's making the attempt." He put his arm around Block's shoulder. "I want you to find out who that somebody is, and I want you to do away with him, preferably in a quite manner if that's not too much to ask."

He walked Block toward the antechamber. Marise jumped up, retreating into the shadows at their approach.

"I've dictated some ideas to Marise," The Chairman said.

"She can fill you in on them. I have to hop up to the Baltics. I'm late as it is." He peeked though a porthole by the door leading into the Throne Room. "Get someone to clear out those rats so I can get out of here please, Marise."

Marise picked up the phone.

"They've put the usual layout for me in the other room, so you and Marise might as well stick around. The locals will be driven away by all these sacred rats, so you'll have to serve yourselves, but I don't think that'll be a problem. I've asked Marise to assist you on this, so you can get anything you want off her."

He watched closely to see if Block picked up his double entendre and, seeing Block's impassive face, continued, "but after she briefs you, she's going to follow up on your friend Jarred. That shouldn't take her too long, I'll be in touch."

And he was gone, leaving Block to look at Marise who seemed to be hiding in the shadows.

Block looked out the portal. The ubiquitous men and women dressed in suits, carrying machine pistols, were clearing The Chairman's way through the scurrying rats. The rats looked like they were actually trying to eat the agents' shoes.

"How bad do these rats get?" Block asked, turning to where he'd last seen Marise, but Marise was no longer there. He looked around and found her over at the bar mixing herself a drink.

Block walked over to join her. She took a stiff sip.

"I'm nervous," she said, taking another gulp.

"Why be nervous?" Block asked.

"I don't know," Marise said, taking still another healthy dose. "Just you I guess. I hear a lot about you, then I meet you and it makes me nervous. The drink will take the edge off. Can I fix you a drink?"

"No, I'll take it straight." He put some cubes in a glass and filled it halfway with Scotch, spilling some in the process. "See. You're making me nervous being nervous. I've never been around a nervous Realitist before."

Block held his glass up in a toast, watching the ripples in the front of her dress billow as she raised her arm in response.

"To the project, whatever the heck it is. The Chairman said you have his thoughts on it."

He gestured to the conversational arrangement in the middle of the room. Marise took an armchair facing the couch. Block sat down easily on the couch, watching as she made herself small in the chair.

She sighed. "As I understand it," she started slowly, "the Chairman believes there's some sort of mental tampering going on with members of the generation he styles the Millennials, those born at the end of the last millennium, the ones starting to come of age. The Chairman thinks there's a physical basis for whatever's happening."

"How so?" Block asked.

"The Chairman thinks there's physical trauma, either through the use of drugs, actual physical abuse, or a combination of the two, which wipes their minds clean, makes them a clean slate so to speak. Once their minds are a clean slate, they can be programmed so behavior can be triggered by some sort of outside influence."

"That sounds like brainwashing," Block commented.

"Except that it'd have to be accomplished on a mass scale, with a high degree of accuracy, which is not probable with today's sci-ence," Marise countered.

She held out her glass for Block, who got up and went to the bar.

"I'll switch to white wine," she said.

"A true disciple of The Chairman," Block replied. "He's just guessing, I take it."

"You know him. He has so much experience, there's no way knowing where his knowledge ends and his guesses begin. He proba-bly doesn't even know himself. But to have a whole school full of people, some two hundred individuals, all go bonkers at one time, well, it's without precedence. In any crowd situation, there'll be just as many conservative influences retarding action as there are radical influences trying to instigate irrational action. If it weren't so, society could never have gotten off the ground.

"Here we've instances where there were either no conservative influences or the conservative influences were eliminated in the tide of emotion sweeping through the entire group. This might occur infrequently, but we now have eleven instances of it occurring, all among one generational component, and no two instances occurring in the same country."

"No two in the same country?" Block asked.

"Right. That's what has The Chairman concerned. That sent the probability program into outer space. I agree there're experiments being carried out with the Millennial generation as the target, mak-ing them self-destructive. Someone's trying to eliminate an entire generation from the face of the globe!"

She finished her wine, getting up. "Let's hit the buffet before it gets cold," she said. "It was flown in. Why, I don't know, except food follows The Chairman like women."

Block got up and followed her through the antechamber into the back bedroom, which had been converted into a buffet.

"You mean there's no bed back here?" Block asked.

"There was. Here." She handed him a plate.

He passed over the Indian dishes and concentrated on the sand-wich setup. Marise took small helpings of Indian and supplemented it with a salad.

"Is The Chairman still bedding everyone he can get his hands on?"

"What do you think?" Marise asked in answer.

"I didn't see anyone around. He usually has some knockout in the background."

"She must've left before you got here."

"I didn't mean . . ."

"Forget it."

"I meant, I think he could get himself in trouble sleeping with the help."

"Who else do you want him to sleep with? They're all security cleared, he gets to know the people who're working for him around the globe, and above all, they want to sleep with him."

"They do?" Block settled back on the couch with his sandwich and a fresh drink.

"Certainly they do. Power is sexy, and you have to admit they don't come any more powerful than The Chairman. I would . . ." She let her voice trail off.

Quiet settled in as they made short work of their food. Block was the first to finish.

"So, there's some sort of mass conditioning," he said, "and some sort of triggering device. What exactly does that mean?"

"There's been plenty of work done on mass conditioning," Ma-rise replied, "none, to my knowledge, with any conclusive results. People are just too different to be uniformly affected by the same thing. But on the other hand, drugs can work miracles."

"So assuming mass conditioning is possible, how might the trig-ger work?" Block asked.

"Let's say you condition a dog to be vicious. You could produce some sort of situation, some type of stimulus that repressed the viciousness."

"So the dog's natural state would be vicious," Block mused, "but as long as the stimulus is present, the viciousness is re-pressed. What type of stimulus are we talking about?"

"Either a drug, or some sort of electrical repression," Marise replied.

"And the other situation?"

"That's the attack dog syndrome," Marise replied. "The dog is taught to be vicious in response to certain stimuli, probably elec-trical in nature, either through the eyes or ears."

"Through the eyes?"

"Sure. Whatever you see is converted into electrical signals and sent to the brain, isn't it?"

"So you'd class a dog trained to attack when it sees the mailman as electrically stimulated to attack the mailman because the picture of the mailman is converted into an electrical signal and sent into its brain?" Block asked.

"Sure. I'm telling you this? Aren't you the perceptive Percep-tionist?"

She got up and collected his plate on top of her own.

"I guess I am," she continued. "You see the possibility here? If you consider all communication to the brain as electrical, then the brain is the captive of the electrical signals it receives from exter-nal sources through the senses, sight and hearing most of all, but feeling to a great extent, and smell and taste to a lesser extent. If the brain is connected to the external world solely by electrical connections, the brain can be manipulated by manipulating the elec-trical signals, not through the senses, but directly."

Block followed her over to the bar where she disposed of the dishes. The sight of her, plain features, her nondescript dress flowing out over her chest and straight down to her knees receded into the background as he got caught up in her explanation.

"This goes along with some thoughts I've had on the subject of how the mind works," he said.

"Shandra told me how you use Perceptionism," Marise replied, refilling her wine glass.

" How's that?" he asked.

"To limit your perception of objects so they're more desirable. If someone you find desirable has a nose wart, you simply eliminate the wart by failing to reconstruct it in your mind when you other-wise reconstruct her face. You simply don't see something you don't want to see."

"That takes some sort of concept of how the mind works," Block observed.

"We generally use the Lansdowne Mind Model to analyze how Perceptionism might work," Marise replied.

"I know Lansdowne and I've discussed how the mind might oper-ate with him. But I'm not so sure I know what his mind model is."

He remembered, as he made himself another drink and Marise finished up the dishes, his discussion of the possible structure of the mind, the arrangement of electrons necessary for a mind to form a picture of external reality. Lansdowne opted for an un-structured cloud of electrons in some sort of electrical equilibrium. The disturbance of the equilibrium from the flows of information coming from the optic nerves reconstructed the picture of reality the flows represented.

After the flows passed, the disturbance collapsed, setting up a secondary flow that was encoded and stored in memory.

Because the collapsing disturbances could never exactly dupli-cate the original flows, the stored memory units never exactly matched reality, and indeed, depending on how the mind used mem-ory to alter its picture of reality, might never even come close to matching reality.

The basic difference between his and Lansdowne's conception was, he believed the mind wasn't an unstructured cloud of elec-trons, but an extremely structured group held into a web of stable equilibrium. The structure was as permanent as the compact center of the smallest unit in the nucleus of the atom. In short, Lans-downe's concept was incapable of surviving the organism to which it was attached. At death, with the end of the electrical fields unique to life, the cloud dissipated into the ambient fields sur-rounding the dying brain.

In his conception, the mind, once formed, existed independent of the organism to which it was attached and from which it received its ability to grow and prosper. The structure was a part of, and at the whim of, the organism to which it was attached, but its equilib-rium was independent of the chemical affinity of the organism.

The measure of its equilibrium was its ability to reconstruct external reality.

Those engaged in activities that weren't in accord with reality created a continual state of disequilibrium in their minds causing them to eventually collapse into themselves and go the way of Lansdowne's conceptual model.

Thus, if someone abused his fellow man, took advantage of him, and generally treated him in a manner they themselves wouldn't wish to be treated, their minds would be continuously out of equi-librium. When they slept, the period during which their mind re-turned to equilibrium, the images of the acts they'd performed, appearing as shadows, would be just as unsettling as the acts and force their minds further out of equilibrium rather than allowing them to return to equilibrium.

Performing acts in reality against one's fellow man, acts that became events existing in reality, would eventually lead to the de-struction of the very structure that allowed the perception not only of reality, but the self-awareness that made the person an individ-ual.

Lansdowne tended to scorn any concept that converted moral behavior into physical destruction.

"Lansdowne's Mind Model accommodates both you're narrowing of perception to make life a little more pleasant and the possibility of directly influencing the mind with external electrical or chemical inducements," Marise continued, her comments interrupting his thoughts.

"What is his model of the mind?" Block asked to confirm his thoughts.

Marise took a napkin and drew a circle with two arrows leading in one side and one out the other, continuing in an arc over the cir-cle and connecting with the top arrow entering the front.

"Your lower arrow is external input, the input from reality," she explained. "If everything's working properly, external reality is coded in the eye by the refraction expansion process."

"The reflection expansion process?"

"You know, expanding light hits an object and, reflecting off it at every point, begins to re-expand, providing information of the distance between the point and the eye that picks up the light. As light expands uniformly, there's a different amount of light be-tween the eye and any point it's reflected from."

"Ah, yes, I know that, just didn't know formal terms had been created for it," Block commented.

"The eye takes the information about all the points it's collect-ing each instant and encodes it into what Lansdowne calls a reality unit."

"That's the picture the eye sees."

"Right, and that's the unit that travels up the optic nerves and enters the mind, on the circle, at the lower arrow. The picture of reality is reconstructed in the mind, and reencoded to exit it at the arrow on this side." She tapped the arrow coming out of the oppo-site side of the circle.

"That arrow not only represents a re-encoded reality unit, what is now in Lansdowne's scheme of things a memory unit, but it rep-resents the particular flow of electricity that matches that mem-ory unit and is carrying it along with it to store in memory."

"What gives it its unique nature?" Block asked, remembering this hadn't been covered in his long discussion with Lansdowne at his blown up laboratory.

"The strength of the flow is determined by the input into the mind. The flows are what cause the mind to move into disequilib-rium, so the return to equilibrium determines the flow. The electri-cal charge of the flow is the same charge creating the memory unit, so they're matched."

"And when the flow carries the memory unit into the storage cells, the neurons, it . . ."

"It picks up other memory units having similar charges and brings them around for input into the mind at the top arrow," Ma-rise finished.

"So if everything is working properly, external reality sets up electrical flows in the brain that reconstruct reality, encodes it, delivers it into memory, and at the same time recalls memory units of a similar nature that are fed into the mind along with external reality."

"Which," Marise observed, "is Lansdowne's basis for mental operation. The mind identifies reality by comparing it with the units of reality it's reconstructed, re-encoded and stored in memory."

"What does he say the mind is made up of?" Block asked.

"He claims there's no reason to analyze the makeup of the mind as long as it operates as a model in accord with the way we oper-ate."

"In short, he's ducking the question," Block said, laughing.

"We don't have to know where the mind came from or where it goes to model how unaccustomed flows of electricity might trick it into acting against its own interests," Marise pointed out.

"That sounds like the old argument we didn't have to know what made a rock fall in order to measure how it fell, an argument that kept the quest for understanding in the dark ages for several hun-dred years longer than necessary. It's a violation of Luber's Law, that if something isn't explainable, it isn't."

"Well, for our purposes, its explanation enough," Marise re-plied.

"So how does this model eliminate my nose blemish?"

"By manipulating the upper input. The mind can only construct one picture at a time." She tapped the circle. "One circle, one pic-ture of reality. But there're two inputs, one from reality, the other from the reconstruction and re-encoding of reality. And, of course, all this activity is occurring at the speed electricity travels, which is the speed of light less resistance.

"You have one input coming from reality that, if reconstructed precisely the way you see it, produces a mole on the nose. How-ever, you don't want to see the mole. As soon as you reconstruct the picture of external reality, you've re-encoded it and sent it with an appropriate level of current for storage and retrieval of similarly charged memory units. The only memory units you've stored, however, are the memory units of the person without the mole. As soon as these come into your mind through the upper ar-row, you reconstruct this recall and ignore reality"

"I see and I don't see it," Block observed.

"You have to force yourself to look at the mole in order to see it because the mole is simply not being reconstructed in your mind. When you look into the eyes of your seducee shimmering in the can-dlelight over a glass of wine and idealize what you're seeing, you're seeing recall rather than reality. What you don't like doesn't get picked up. As you gaze lovingly into her eyes, her continence changes, with the features you don't like gradually disappearing from the picture you're forming until you see only what you like, and not what you find unpleasant."

"How does Lansdowne account for the electrical flows picking up a memory unit that's not exactly what's in reality?" Block asked.

Marise tapped the circle. "There are two more arrows to draw to finish the model, at least for our purposes." She drew an arrow down from the bottom of the circle and another arrow back up into the bottom of the circle.

"What's a physical part of the body that turns you on sexually?" Marise asked.

"What?" Block said, startled.

"It's not a difficult question," she replied, laughing nervously. "Let's take breasts. Everybody's got a gut feeling about breasts. Do you like big breasts?"

"I, uh, never gave it much thought."

"Then you don't chase women with big breasts?" Marise asked, surprised.

"I don't think so. Come to think of it," Block said thoughtfully, "they make me a little uncomfortable. I seem to end up with women with slight figures."

Marise's shoulders seemed to narrow as she poured herself a fresh glass of wine.

"Okay," she continued, "what's causing your mind to eliminate what it doesn't want to reconstruct? Your sitting across the table from a tastefully dressed woman whose neckline suddenly yawns, leaving a distinct cleavage. You've already idealized her, so you have her looking just the way you want her to look, and I might add, she's probably done the same with you.

"The cleavage becomes a part of a reality unit entering your optic nerves. It's fired into your mind. Your mind automatically reconstructs the cleavage, but you don't know what it is until you can re-encode the picture and send it into your memory banks to retrieve similar memory units. The only trouble is, the only similar memory units you have are a big-busted woman beating the hell out of you with a leather belt.

"The electric flow picks up that memory unit and delivers it to your mind.

"However, as soon as your mind tries to form the picture of the big busted bitch, it conflicts with the picture of the lovely women you've so painstakingly idealized. Your mind can't form more than one picture at a time. It isn't about to reconstruct a picture of some long forgotten dominatrix. What's going to happen to the big-busted bitch?"

"She's going to disappear?" Block queried.

Marise tapped the arrow pointing out the bottom of the circle.

"This arrow connects your mind to your physical body, the sub-systems that produce physical reactions to what you're doing. When you have the slight disagreement of reality with recall, your mind burps and the electricity responsible for that little piece of reality is redirected into you subsystems, causing you a little dis-comfort. The discomfort, conflicting with the desire created by the idealization, eliminates the breasts from your mind. You're ideal-izing, ignoring reality once again."

"And if I like breasts?"

"If pleasant experiences are associated with the cleavage, then you'd have no barrier between the cleavage and your idealization of the cleavage. It'd reinforce the idealized picture you already have of the woman. Then you'd have to ask yourself what's your purpose of idealizing her."

"To have sex with her," Block said.

"Precisely." Marise put her empty glass in front of Block, who refilled it.

"When you start off," she tapped the circle's reality input, "before you begin the process of idealizing the women, you've a conflict with reality and what you want reality to be. As you go through reality under any circumstances, your mind is going to constantly be dithering between the picture of reality and your picture of how you want reality to be."

She tapped the upper input and the lower input alternately.

"Your mind, capable of forming only one picture of reality, is going to constantly be vacillating between internal and external re-ality to come up with a compromise picture it can reconstruct without causing physical problems."

"The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," Block com-mented

"Exactly," Marise replied, surprised at his literary allusion. "But as you start to idealize the object of your affections, reality starts coming into accord with recall. It does so simply because you start to reconstruct reality on the basis of how you want that re-ality to appear. The more you idealize, the more conflict you have.

"Idealization doesn't get rid of the direct connection with your body, and the electrical flows, unused because of the idealization, are still invading your body. However, the level of electricity in your body has already been elevated simply because you're trying to bang the girl. Your body interprets the increased input from ide-alization as sexual excitement and drives you on to your ultimate goal.

"If you like breasts, and you focus on breasts to the point you've idealized them to the exclusion of everything else, the flows will rush between your legs prepping you for an orgasm.

"Boy," she said, stopping abruptly. "I think I'm drinking too much." She drained her glass in an attempt to hide the blush spreading across her face and neck. "I just got the urge for a ciga-rette and I don't even smoke."

"You like breasts?"

"No," she replied, "I was thinking of chests."

Block tapped the arrow reentering the cycle. "When you get a physical input at this point," he said, reverting to subject, "it must change the current level the memory unit's stored at."

Marise drank half a glass of white wine to regain her compo-sure.

"That's very perceptive," she said, trying to regain her busi-ness-like approach. "If you idealize, you're really drawing off cur-rent from the operation of your mind into your physical subsys-tems. The same thing happens when you have opposing inputs into your mind. In the case of idealization, your mind doesn't need to work. In the case of opposing inputs, it can't work because it can't form two pictures at the same time. In the case of idealization, the body somehow directs the excess electrical flows to its own bene-ficial purposes.

"However, opposing concepts freeze your mind, and the unex-pected electrical flows jolt your physical subsystems in a way that's not beneficial. When you reach for her décolletage and she strikes your hand away, the opposing concepts created between the picture you've formed of yourself taking the action, and the picture you have to form, the reality of your not being able to take the ac-tion, creates an adverse physical reaction."

She tapped the upper and lower input.

"When you're acting in reality, you don't like to have those ac-tions thwarted because the two opposing pictures freeze your mind, allowing the electrical flows to wreak havoc on unexpected areas of your subsystems. It's like being punched. Like receiving a physical blow."

"So what's being encoded by your mind can be affected by your mind being deprived of electrical flows, and also by what's going on with your physical subsystems?" Block asked, catching a glimpse of where this was going.

"Let's take the latter first," she replied, holding up her glass. "Drugs, which, of course, include alcohol, increase the amount of electricity in the flows. What's the effect of that?"

Block thought for a moment. "It tends to recall memory units that weren't precisely related to what the picture your mind is generating."

"If a reality unit composed a tree, and your mind formed a pic-ture of the tree from that memory unit, when it reencoded that tree into a memory unit, the electrical flow that picked it up would be comprised not only of the flow created by re-encoding the pic-ture of the tree, but incrementally by the flow from the drug. The tree would go into memory as something other than a tree, and the memory units picked up to compare with the tree might be fuzzier than a tree, might be a head of hair or a face surrounded by a head of hair, you get the idea."

"When drugs are added," Block said, "the precision of recall is lessened because the current created by the re-encoded reality unit into a memory unit is increased by the physical result of the drink-ing."

"Reality becomes more tolerable" Marise continued, "because the memory units being recalled to compare reality with are more in accord with internal reality than reality itself. It's a lot harder to avoid recalling the mole when the mind is pinpointing memory units with the electrical precision the brain has unaffected by an external source of current. When it has a few glasses of wine to call on to modify the current used for recall, reality becomes fuzzy, more pleasant."

"Everybody gets better looking at closing time," Block said, laughing.

"Right. Now, remove the source of the excess current. What happens then?" Marise asked.

"What's been re-encoded is stored at a distorted current level."

"Right again," Marise replied. "But that's not the worst of it. If you've drunk a bunch, you might have stored memories at a level that makes them inaccessible when sobriety sets in."

"Which may be merciful, but how does this connect to the type of conditioning that'd turn a whole school full of kids into maniacs?" Block asked.

"When you had the breast connected to the dominatrix, recon-structing the memory unit produced a conflict with the idealization you'd created of your dinner partner. The electrical flows went into your subsystems. To the extent your subsystems reacted, the reaction went back into the current flow used to store the memory unit being constructed by your mind, changing the current level in your brain. The change blockades the memory units connected to the dominatrix."

"Blockades?"

"The altered current effectively closes off access to the stored memory units. They can't get out. Picture a stream flowing. As it passes a point on the bank, it eddies back so there's a pool by the bank collecting twigs, and those twigs keep going round and round in a circle in the pool. It's the flow of the stream sealing up a little harbor at stream's edge. The twigs are blockaded from moving out into the flow by the effects of the flow itself. As long as the flow remains at its constant rate, it'll blockade the harbor.

"The same thing happens when the current is physically altered by your mind's refusal to reconstruct the reality that's in a par-ticular memory unit. The physical response alters the electrical flow so it blockades subsequent recall of the memory units your mind doesn't want to reconstruct."

"And it doesn't want to reconstruct them because . . ."

"Because your process of idealization has been carried out for a physical purpose that is also affecting the level of the flows, at-tempting to free some of them up to satisfy the needs of your crotch, which is a different discussion altogether."

"So physical input can blockade memory units, make them unre-callable."

"If you can't, or simply don't, generate electrical flows match-ing the memory units' charge, those memory units are effectively blockaded. They can't be brought into your mind for reconstruc-tion," Marise agreed.

"If they can't be reconstructed, they might as well not exist," Block said.

Marise grabbed Block's little finger with lightening speed and bent it back sharply. Block instinctively tried to draw his hand back, but Marise had it leveraged. Trying to get out of the pain in-creased it.

She finally released it, but not before the pain caused tears to stream down Block's face.

"What happened there?" she asked.

Block shook his hand. "You tried to break my damn finger."

"No I didn't. If I'd wanted to break your finger, I would've bro-ken your finger. What happened in your mind?"

"I don't know," he said. "I don't have any memory of it. I re-member you grabbing my finger and making it hurt."

"But you can't recall the pain, right? You can't make your fin-ger physically hurt like it did when I grabbed it."

"No, it's like pleasure, you can only recall the circumstances," Block replied.

"You can't recall it because nothing was encoded. The pain caused your mind to stop operating, froze it. The electrical flows bypassed it altogether. From the looks of it, excess electrons were removed through your eyes in the form of tears. Muscle move-ments, stomping your legs or banging your fist on a table, are other ways to get rid of the excess electrons entering your system when your mind shuts down. If things are really bad, your bowels might turn to liquid in an effort to dispel the excess electrons from your system.

"But that's all secondary. The primary fact is, the pain shut down your encoding process. You don't form memories of pain, you just remember the non-serial reconstructions occurring when you were experiencing the pain. You might be splayed out on a table with people doing the most horrible things to you, and the only thing you'll remember will be the crack in the lamp above the table, or one of your torturers calling home to see if his wife needs anything from the grocery store."

"Or her husband," Block said sardonically.

"Of course the origin of torture is well known, Marise contin-ued, ignoring his comment. "When someone is thwarted from doing what he wishes to do, its like being punched in the body. There are no blows thrown, but the conflict between the picture of the person wanting to do something, and the picture of the reality of the per-son unable to do so, freezes their mind, and the resulting electrical flow is a jolt to their system that actually hurts.

"The person has received a blow, and the inclination is to de-liver a blow back to the source of the blow. He looks around for the person who kept him from doing what he wanted to do, and he physically slugs him.

"Because the person thwarting you may well not be present, you have to save up your blow. It's at that point you get, as Bourgesie would say, artistic in the ways you want to deliver the blow. The body has nerves that sense things in the form of pain to protect it from damage.

"Because the mind can take in its reality totally from the upper input, the input from the memory banks, and because those memory banks have memory units dealing with what causes pain, even if they don't have memory units about the pain itself, the person who has time to dwell on the physical blow he's going to deliver can be-come very creative indeed in the manner in which he delivers it if he can get his hands on the person in a manner that'll allow him the time to deliver it. By the time he is ready to deliver it, he's almost in a sexual frenzy."

"How does sadism fit in with the mind model?" Block asked.

"It's just another form of idealization. Pain is a relatively sim-ple way to idealize a situation. If someone is crushing a person's finger, the sights and sounds of the victim form an effortless way to focus his, okay, her mind in a relatively narrow channel, which is all you're doing when you idealize your dinner partner.

"I would guess the practice of causing pain in order to cause the mind to focus, resulting in idealization and the resulting pleasure that occurs from idealization, stems from your mind being defec-tive in some manner. It's not idealizing in the ordinary fashion, which is to take reality and fashion it into an acceptable non-reality that is pleasing, it's creating an external reality that matches the non-reality you find pleasing but which doesn't create the idealiza-tion.

"External idealization is the product of a defective mind because instead of creating an internal reality that doesn't affect reality, it's creating an external reality you can force your will on. What do we do about someone with a defective mind who gets pleasure from torture?"

"I don't know what you do about them," Block replied, "but I kill them if I can. There's no place in the world for habitual abusers. But your point is valid. A person with a defective mind is not acting in reality, but rather in their own reality. The same would then be true of people who're conditioned so some or all of their memories have been, what's your word, blockaded.

"If a person reconstructs reality from external sources and has only a limited range of memory units to compare that reality with, then the acts he engages in as a result of the reconstructed reality aren't going to be in accord with reality."

"Right," Marise continued. "If we take someone and starve them, we're cutting off the source of electrons making up the flows operating their brain. If we start to beat him, we start to set up blockades in his memory, areas of memory inaccessible to the cur-rents he's able to generate. If we deprive him of sleep, we can cause his mind to reach a state of disequilibrium where there'll be no way it can reconstruct and reencode reality. At that point, when we've broken his mind down, which is to say, we've blockaded its present from its past, we can create a new reality for it."

"Well, I hope your 'we' doesn't include me," Block said.

"Obviously not. It doesn't include me, either, unless we get caught in nationalistic clutches. I'm just taking something that's universally practiced in nationalistic countries to enforce confor-mity and spreading it out on Lansdowne's Mind Model to point us in the right direction. Marxist countries, which are to say the epitome of nationalistic regimes, were very successful in brainwashing large numbers of individuals, many in groups. Some of your cults do it with ease, but there's no precedent for the almost instant con-version that'd be required to turn an entire school into apparent zombies. Drugs, of course, being a physical assault on the system, may shortcut it, but we don't have any drugs that'd produce such a mass conversion."

"You think broadcasting electrical currents could?" Block asked, puzzled again.

"I use that in its loosest sense. Radio waves can be broadcast, and theoretically, so could electrical energy, although there'd be little reason to do so, with inefficiencies outweighing the benefits. But the mind operates on extremely narrow current bands and when the small magnitudes involved are compared with the inefficiencies of broadcasting electrical energies, the use of broadcasting electri-cal currents becomes a distinct possibility for affecting the opera-tion of the mind."

"You mean," Block asked, incredulous, "you could use some sort of generator to increase the amount of electricity available for the mind's flows, or reduce them, so you can control the strength of the flows and thus the memory units the flows access?"

"That's exactly The Chairman's thought, although I doubt he un-derstands all the Lansdowne gobbledegook. More than that, I think what is happening is somehow memory units are being put into storage, how I have no idea, and the broadcast electrical currents control the level of electrical flow in a person's mind so all other memory units are blockaded and only the foreign memory units are accessed.

"Somehow, memory units are being put in their memory to make Millennials see the world as a hostile, uncooperative place, but they're blockaded until their electrical current is altered, at which point no matter what the reality is, they're only going to recall hostility and act accordingly."

Marise looked at her arm in surprise as a jet of wine plopped out of her glass, splashing her.

Both Block and Marise's eyes traveled to the glass, and then seeing the little object in the bottom, beneath the wine Marise hadn't touched since she'd declared with a blush she'd had too much, up to the ceiling.

"The roof falling in?" Block asked.

"I hope not," Marise replied.

Block got off the chair. "The bathroom's back where the food is?"

Marise nodded, still examining the ceiling.

Block got up and walked over to the entryway, past the desk Marise'd been using, turned the knob on the door and pushed.

The door gave a little, then pushed itself shut again.

"What the . . ." Block half turned. "We're the only ones here, aren't we?"

Marise stood up, looking around, puzzled. "Yes," she replied.

"It feels like someone is pushing on the other side of the door," Blocks said.

He tried again, getting the same result.

Marise reached around him, adding her weight to the effort.

The door opened about two inches before she pulled it shut, al-most knocking Block over.

Block saw it too, and didn't have to comment when he heard Ma-rise's gasp.

The rats covered the table the food was on and were apparently also knee deep on the floor.

"I don't think that's normal behavior," she said.

She brushed past Block, who was still trying to regain his bal-ance, and looked out the portal beside the door.

"For heaven's sake, look at that. They're up to Queen Victoria's eyebrows."

Block looked through the portal.

"Worse yet, look at the center. They've eaten the concrete throne stand away. They must've eaten through the concrete to get into the back room."

He was already looking for the transparency control for the wall abutting the Throne Room. Marise found it for him.

The transparency revealed a blood soaked wall as the rats climbed one atop the other trying to gnaw the plastic away.

They both heard the crash behind them at the same time. They turned to see a big hairy rat stand up amid the scattered bar glasses, look around, and seeing them with its beady eyes, immedi-ately lung at them.

Another one crashed through the hole in the ceiling.

Marise kicked the first one in the head as it came off the counter, breaking its back instantly, and had the second one in hand, its neck broken in a rapid whipping motion.

Block stood transfixed.

Marise had a knife in hand for the third and fourth one, but a crash on the other side off the room revealed the attack wasn't go-ing to come from just one area of the ceiling.

The recently arrived rat raced for Block's leg, bringing him out of his paralysis.

He shook it off and raced for the bar, jumping on the counter.

"I can't mount an offense if I can't get off the defensive," Ma-rise cried, as she joined him on the top of the bar.

A third hole opened up and the rats began to bomb down in num-bers.

"You keep them off the counter. Darn." She shook her head as one launched itself from the hole above the bar, landing directly in her hair.

"Use this," she said, handing Block the knife and moving down the bar, hopping over to the sink area where a vent protected it from above.

"Toss me the computer," she yelled, pointing at the small stan-dard issue computer on the bar stool next to Block.

"I don't think we're going to have time to call for help," he said, "the ceiling's turning into a sieve."

"Help comes to the creative," Marise said, laughing. She had the back of the computer open in a flash and was using a hairpin on its connections.

"What are you trying to do?" Block asked, knocking a falling rat halfway across the room.

"I'm going to plug into the iridium network," she said, referring to the satellite system that was part of the Global Positioning Sys-tem providing worldwide communications.

"But it's too late to get help," Block repeated.

"I'm going to get help from their timing signal. I'm going to feed it into the computer's speaker." She shut the back and opened the front, her fingers rapidly playing across the keys. "I'm going to reprogram it so I can adjust broadcasting the timing signal on a sliding cycle. Maybe I can block whatever's making them eat con-crete, not to mention us."

"You're going to try some sort of broadcast mechanism to alter the way they perceive the world?"

"You got it," Marise said matter-of-factly.

"Rats?"

"Rats have minds too, you know."

Block lost the response as he took whacks at two rats falling in tandem out of the enlarging hole.

"This isn't working. Toss me yours," she said, pointing at the computer Block carried on his belt. He took it off and handed it over, keeping his balance as another rat almost beaned him.

"Take mine, and . . ."

She focused on Block's computer as Block used hers to slug still another rat as it fell spread eagled, trying for his head.

"Ignore the rats, open the computer and use the embedded up ar-row," she yelled. "Just keep punching it until I tell you to use the down arrow."

Block began to hit the up arrow on Marise's computer as Marise hit the down arrow on Block's"

"Down," Marise instructed. Block did as directed.

"I think we hit something. Hit the up arrow two times," she or-dered.

Block complied.

"Now the down once."

Block dodged a rat, but was able to hit the down one more time. He braced his body for another hit. When it didn't come, he looked up. The hole above him was empty.

He looked around at the floor. The rats that'd been trying to climb up the side of the counter were now looking around, disori-ented, looking like they were wondering what they were doing there.

Marise jumped off the sink.

The rats scurried away from her.

"Let's get out fast before something happens to our signal," she said.

Block looked at the rats scurrying around the floor and hesi-tated.

"Now or never," Marise yelled, heading for the door, scattering rats in furry patterns as she went.

Block cradled her computer and jumped into the middle of a furry pile. The pile disappeared in every direction.

Marise opened the door to the Throne Room. Block followed her through. He couldn't believe the number of rats, and he couldn't be-lieve all they wanted to do was get away from the two of them.

They rapidly passed through the long room and, pushing open the decaying doors, emerged into the heavy evening air.

There wasn't a rat in sight on the steps they were taking two at a time.

On the broad plaza in front of the palace, they turned, taking in the grey splendor under the darkened Mahmudabad sky.

There was nothing to indicate anything unusual was happening, or indeed, had happened, in the building.

"Lucky I had my computer with me," Block mused.

"Right," Marise replied.