David's Sling (39 page)

Bill growled, then mumbled something.

"What?" Kira asked.

"I said, I
have
been to the Institute, fm working on developing a Zetetic form of newscasting."

"I see. I've noticed that your newscasts seem less ridiculous lately. Of course, you have a long way to go." Kira had known before coming here that Bill was enrolled at the Institute. He had made great progress, in fits and starts. It seemed somehow inappropriate for her to compliment him, but her intellectual honesty was too great to leave it at that. "Actually, I'm delighted with some of your recent stuff. In fact, I'm worried about you—a Zetetic newscasting style would still be a ratings disaster, even though there are more Zetetic viewers every day. You'll have to be careful for a few more years, until we have a large enough group to form a significant sector of the audience."

She watched Bill shift his position, again and again, unable to suppress his drive to action. She considered his qualifications. He was smart, he was witty, he was too handsome, and he was passionate about anyone or anything with whom he got involved. In short, he had potential. The only question was, could he be trained? She would have to work on that.

The newscast that had been murmuring in the background suddenly became the focus of Bills attention. "Yes," a military spokesman was saying, "the Hunters that helped our boys win the war were actually developed under the auspices of the Army's regular research and development system. So were the enhanced HighHunters used on the Night of Steel Sleet. Contrary to the media's distorted versions of the recent past, the Sling Project did
not
expose flaws in the Defense Department's policies—it demonstrated the health and vitality of those policies."

Bill leaped from the sofa. "Liars and fools," he screamed. "The Zetetic Institute saved your asses. The Institute is the real hero of the war." He sat down, muttering, "The Army is riddled with deadbeats. We have to get rid of them."

Kira thought about the intricacies of the facts that came closer to the truth. Yes, there were many deadbeats in the Army, and incompetents, and politicians without regard for anything but their next promotion. But there were also the thousands of men who stood and fought with their tanks, with their rifles, with their knives, and finally, with their bare hands, in the face of a seemingly invincible enemy.
Those
men were the heroes. Even the Institute could not build a machine to replace human courage.

But these points were too subde for Bill's current frame of mind. Kira took a deep breath. His training would require long, patient hours.

Fortunately, she suspected she would enjoy it.

Daniel stepped close to the wall of glass. Outside, dark grays swirled through white clouds, hovering above trees stripped by winter. The winter had passed, but spring had not quite arrived. Daniel wondered if he would see another spring from the top floor of the Wilcox Building. In a rare gesture of fatigue, he exhaled sharply.

The warm moisture of his breath condensed on the glass. He drew his finger through the tiny droplets, leaving a trail that ended with his fingerprint. As the droplets evaporated, his fingerprint faded as well, disappearing into the past with the winter.

The Zetetic Institute had won. No one knew it yet. Not even the Zetetics themselves grasped the significance of their victory. No doubt Nathan Pilstrom could grasp what had happened easily enough. But equally without doubt, Nathan had had too many other concerns lately to take the time to deduce all the ramifications of recent events.

Daniel remembered worrying that his campaign against the Institute might make the Institute famous. He need not have worried. The men and women of the Institute had their own ways of achieving respect and prestige without him. Their fame now transcended any silly discussions of cigarettes and health. It rested with their roles as American heroes.

His nostrils flared. More condensation from his breath on the window blurred his view of the Potomac. Thinking about the latest flip-flop of the news media, he felt a sensation similar to the feeling of being jilted by a woman. He had invested so much time and creative energy into molding those news people into an effective, focused tool. For a brief time, their energies had all pointed in the same direction—in an attack on Zeteticism.

And now, with the fickleness of a woman, they had turned their energies in reverse, lavishing incredible praise upon Zetetics, imbuing the Zetetic view of life with miraculous powers.

This belief in the invincible perfection of Zetetic discipline would bring people into the anti-smoking clinics in swarms. The swarms would grow so vast that the Institute might be overwhelmed. Daniel had a moment's warm vision of an Institute growing so fast that the instructional quality deteriorated, driving the success rates down, causing yet another backlash from the fickle newspeople.

He suspected, however, that Nathan was too shrewd to make that kind of mistake. Nathan, he realized, was not interested in growth: he was interested in effectiveness. As often happened with effective people, growth came as a natural consequence.

Eventually, of course, the news media would backlash against Nathan anyway. The Institute was not perfect; its people, for all their enthusiasm and rationality, were nevertheless just people. Indeed, Daniel realized with a smile, the Institute's own philosophy militated against an image of spotless perfection. The Institute would be the first to rebut the glowing praise.

But the luster of the Institute would not wear off soon enough to help the tobacco industry. A tidal wave of smokers would kick the habit. They would convince their friends to follow them in an even greater wave. Tobacco would soon lose a major source of its profitability. The foreign sales would continue, but Daniel had little interest in riding a dying horse.

He reached into his pocket for a cigarette, thus breaking his own rule never to smoke in private. Reneging on this commitment to himself now seemed appropriate, since the very basis of the commitment would soon become irrelevant: this would be his last smoke. He lit up, in memoriam. The flavor filled his mouth and lungs.

What had gone wrong in his battle with the Institute? He worked this question over and over again in his mind. Slowly, oh so slowly, he drove to one conclusion: His loss had been inevitable with the coming of the Information Age.

He felt a bit surprised that he had not seen it coming sooner. He was the master at forecasting the future, after all. But he forgave himself. After all, the changes caused by the Information Revolution had not been readable in the nuances of life, in subtle twists of the road. Rather, the Information Age had struck everywhere with a steady, evenly applied pressure. It did not affect the road so much as it affected the very terrain upon which the road was laid. He had been so enmeshed in the change he could not see it, for he had been one of the principle users of the new information-rich terrain.

For years, every step he had taken in the defense of his industry had been based on advanced information processing. His sales projections; his political projections; his vulnerability projections; his data bases of men, women, corporations, laws, unions, and farmers; his strategies for campaigns against voters and reporters and networks—all stemmed from the central revolution. For years he had been fighting the Zetetic Institute and its forebears on their own turf, without realizing it.

Had he realized it, he would have cut and run long ago. He
never
fought on turf of his enemy's choosing, as Nathan had observed in their encounter in the Mansfield Room in the Capitol.

Taking a drag on his cigarette, he savored the long history of success he had had in fighting on his own turf. He had never argued health issues when fighting anti-smoking referenda. He had always argued on freedom or money issues—issues such as,
how much would it cost to implement the law
? In his favorite campaign, his forces had spread the word that a certain California Proposition would cost twenty million dollars to implement. The opposition had carefully analyzed his figures and found a massive error: it would only cost twenty thousand dollars.

He laughed at the memory even now, decades later. Fools! Once they started arguing about the price, the real numbers ceased to make a difference. Daniel swamped his enemies with commercial air time; people heard over and over again that the new law would cost millions. They heard it so often that in the end, the voters ridiculed the calculations made by his enemies, even though his enemies had been correct! Sweet.

But he had fought the Information Age Zetetics on their own terrain, on the terrain of information processing. This time it would be his turn to play the fool, unless he moved fast. The tight little world of the Wilcox-Morris Corporation would start crumbling in just a few months. He would have to ease his fortune out slowly, lest he cause panic. Even with care he would take a loss. He expected that his assets would drop below the magic billion-dollar threshold before the end of the affair.

But the tobacco industry would serve him well one last time, before he departed forever. Disasters could be very profitable for those who could see them coming. He would sell Wilcox-Morris stock short; that would make a tidy profit. Better yet, if he could cause a precipitous collapse in the industry, he could buy options with leverage that could get him a factor ten improvement in yield. Such a collapse could lift his worth into the multiple billions.

But the Institute would not precipitate such a fall. The Institute's focus on gradual success did not mesh with the creation of sudden catastrophes. Extra effort would have to be invested to make his vision real. He, Daniel Wilcox, would have to arrange the sudden collapse of the tobacco industry.

He would start in California, with a new series of restrictions on smoking. Once California had shown the way, he had great confidence that he could leverage his personal anti-smoking organization into the other leading states. The rest would follow on their own. With a bit of hustle, he could brutalize the Wilcox-Morris profit margins six months from now.

Daniel hummed a little cigarette commercial jingle as he turned from the window.
Change yields opportunity
, he remembered one of Nathan's little sayings.
And opportunity yields change.
Daniel could navigate the terrain of the Information Age, now that he had corrected the major flaw in his map. Profits beckoned in every direction. He had a sweet vision of one day buying up the Zetetic Institute itself. It was, after all, a corporate entity, with shares of stock for sale. What better property could he hold in a world where information was power?

On his way out the door, he paused at the trash can to toss out his cigarette stub. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his last pack of Wilcox-Morris cigarettes, running a finger over the embossed emblem that bore his name. The touch was almost a caress.

With no further hesitation, Daniel crushed the pack until shreds of weed regurgitated from it. He felt a great relief as he dumped the shreds into the trash. Smoking was a filthy habit; the world would be far better off without it.

Nathan had lived this nightmare exactly one year before. He remembered waking in the middle of the night at a chance sound, the terror of a ringing telephone, the horror of waiting. One year ago he had waited, knowing that soon the ringing telephone would end with a polite voice telling him to come to the hospital, telling him that Jan had finally escaped from the agony of dying by passing through death.

Now he waited again. This time the outcome was not quite so certain; even now the doctors were trying a radical new surgery, a technique devised during a Zetetic brainstorming conference just a month earlier. There was a chance, delicate as a snowflake, that Nell might survive. Still, the ringing of the telephone frightened him.

He waited in different surroundings. Entering the Blue Room, he joined Hilan Forstil in this vigil. Nathan hefted the small metal disk concealed in his right hand and tried to smile. Sunlight through the bay windows made it warm here; the air tasted dry.

Nathan watched as Hilan stared out the window, shift-ing his weight from side to side, left, right, left. "Mr. President," Nathan addressed him.

Hilan turned. His lips pursed tightly; other than that, he looked calm.

Nathan continued. "I have something for you. A medal." He opened his hand and waved the dingy metal disk, dangling from a rainbow-colored ribbon.

Hilan looked puzzled. "Tsk, Nathan. You know I can't accept gifts. It's in the Constitution."

Nathan chuckled. "I suspect they'll make an exception for this one. After all, we had to make an exception, too, to give it to you." He held out the disk. Hilan reluctantly took it. His puzzlement grew.

The disk was made of an undistinguished alloy of common metals, a gray monotone. It looked like a Boston subway token, save for two words inlaid in silver. The words "Rationality Token" flashed against the dull metal background.

Hilan flipped it over several times. "A rationality token? Just what is a rationality token?"

"It's a tradition," Nathan explained. "A Zetetic tradition that goes back before the birth of Zeteticism." He smiled. At least for a few moments, this story would take his mind off Nell and Jan. "Years and years ago, a friend of mine noticed an odd thing when he went to meetings with large groups of government bureaucrats. He would take a list of questions to each meeting, and put forth each question to the assembled body. He found that for each question, one bureaucrat in the room would have something rational and intelligent to say about the question; the rest would answer either with a magician's verbal handwaving, or with statements that were internally inconsistent, or with statements that had no apparent connection to the topic.

"Oddly, for each question, a
different
bureaucrat gave the rational response. It seemed as though a law of nature was in effect that prevented more than one bureaucrat from being rational at one time. And you could never predict beforehand which lucky bureaucrat could answer a particular question rationally.