Less than a hundred yards away from the debate set, Cyrus Rutherford Ogle was settling into the comfy swivel chair at the center of the Eye of Cy. For purposes of the National Town Meeting, the GODS container had been driven into the very heart of McCormick Place and everything else constructed around it; the platform where Cozzano and his guests stood every night was directly above his head.
Compliance was good tonight. Ninety-eight of the hundred screens were lit up. The PIPER 100 had started out as a somewhat disorganized and unreliable group and, through practice, had now become steady and disciplined.
That was comforting, because Cy Ogle was scared. The v.p. thing was the hardest of all. Practically everyone screwed this up. For the last week, Ogle had not been able to close his eyes at night without seeing the ghostly faces hanging before him. Nixon, Agnew, Eagleton, Bush, Quayle, Stockdale.
The best that Ogle could do was round up the four best people he knew of- that is, the four people who made the best impression on television - put them up on the tube, side by side, and chart people's reactions to them. Of course, he would have to bring in a moderator to ask them some questions. What kinds of questions didn't really matter. Neither did the answers. The important thing was just to get their faces up on the tube, get their voices working. The hard part was going to be interpreting the data. Because the deeper he got into this, the more weird little angles he began to notice inside the minds of the PIPER 100.
Mae Hunter was sitting not far from the banks of the Hudson River, applying lipstick and watching the sun go down on New Jersey. She had discovered the lipstick earlier today, in a wastebasket in the women's room at the New York Public Library, and decided that it was a good shade for her. It was a pretty nice one, and brand new; some fickle shopper must have picked it up in one of the nice stores on Fifth Avenue, ducked into the library to touch herself up, and decided that under that light, it didn't look so hot.
Mae Hunter admired that decisiveness, the ability to fire a brand-new lipstick directly into the wastebasket because it was the wrong shade. Most women would have taken it home and put it on their dresser and left it there for the next twenty years. But here in New York, you met all kinds. People had higher standards. They did not tolerate imperfections quite so easily. This lipstick had obviously been thrown away by a woman of breeding.
She had found a lot of interesting things in the restrooms of the New York Public Library. They didn't let you bring food into the building, so the wastebaskets were cleaner. Almost everything that was in there was paper. Actual merchandise like the lipstick stood out prominently.
Mae Hunter spent a great deal of time in the library because she didn't have a job, family, or home to distract her from her real mission in life, which was to improve her mind. For the past few months she had been working her way through Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. She was halfway through the fifth of seven volumes.
Reading was the most important thing in her life. She had found, over the year and a half since her husband died, that she could handle sleeping out of doors and dumpster-diving for food. She could handle the uncertainty and fear. She had been raped twice and she could even handle that. But the one thing that drove her nuts was the ignorance. She saw these people all around her, sleeping in the parks, spare-changing at Port Authority, checking themselves in to those awful homeless shelters, and none of them made any effort to improve their minds. You could hardly walk ten paces in New York City without coming across a discarded copy of The New York Times, the world's finest newspaper, but none of these people bothered to avail themselves. As a former elementary-school teacher, she found that this really irked her. All that wasted brainpower.
Another thing that annoyed her was people's failure to take care of themselves, which is why she was being so exquisitely careful to get this lipstick on correctly. That done, she found a comfortable place and settled in against the base of a small embankment with some shrubs growing on top of it.
She jumped as a burst of music sounded from nearby. Someone was listening to a transistor radio behind her, back in the bushes. "Hello?" she said. "Is someone back there?" But there was no answer.
There was still barely enough light to see. She stood up and peered into the bushes. "Hello?"
The music faded out and was replaced by the sound of an announcer. "From the National Town Meeting, four contenders for the vice presidency debate the issues ..."
She was almost positive that no one was back there. She walked back and forth in front of the bushes, peering in through gaps between the leaves, trying to see. Something was glowing back there. It looked like a little TV set. And no one was anywhere near it. She found a sort of gap through the little thicket where it looked as though someone had charged through it, flattening down the branches. She followed it in and picked up the source of the noise and light: a Dick Tracy watch.
She debated whether to take it. It had obviously been stolen and dropped here by some criminal who might come back later to look for it.
She looked at the screen. It was showing a TV program: a debate featuring four people who wanted to be William Cozzano's vice-presidential candidate. One by one, the announcer introduced them as they nodded into the camera.
"Brandon F. Doyle, former U.S. Representative from Massachusetts, currently on the faculty of Georgetown University..." This was a handsome, youngish man, probably in his late forties but young-looking for that age. He smiled a tight little smile into the camera and nodded. She didn't like him.
"Marco Gutierrez, Mayor of Brownsville, Texas, and a founding member of the international environmental group Toxic Borders ..." This was a burly Latino man with a mustache and large, intense black eyes. He was leaning back in his chair, stroking his mustache with one finger. He raised his hand away from his face as his name was called and waved at the camera.
Mae Hunter snapped the Dick Tracy watch into place around her wrist. She wanted to see at least this one program.
The TV image cut to a blond, blue-eyed woman with one of those professional-looking haircuts that Mae always saw on the young women in midtown. She stared directly, and almost coldly, into the camera. "Laura Thibodeaux-Green, founder and CEO of Santa Fe Software, who, two years ago, came within a thousand votes of being elected senator from New Mexico."
Finally, to Mae Hunter's surprise and delight, she appeared on the screen!
"And Eleanor Richmond of Alexandria, Virginia, assistant to the late Senator Caleb Marshall."
The woman was so cool. She didn't even look at the camera, didn't react to the introduction at all. She was looking at some papers in her lap. Then she glanced up and looked around a little bit, calm, alert, but not paying any attention to the announcer or the TV cameras. She was so like a princess.
What a terrible introduction that was! It didn't do justice to the life and times of Eleanor Richmond at all. Mae Hunter knew all about her, she had followed her career in the discarded pages of The New York Times. She was a modern-day hero. Mae pushed her way out through the bushes and went on to the broad open bank of the Hudson to watch her girlfriend Eleanor.
The moderator was Marcus Hale, a grizzled ex-anchorman who had gotten to the place in his career where he could write his own job description. He did a lot of work for TV North America now, because there, he didn't have to keep stopping in midparagraph to pimp hemorrhoid remedies to the American public. And now that the candidacy of William A. Cozzano had developed into a media-certified Important Phenomenon, he had been all too eager to serve as the moderator of this vice-presidential showdown. He opened things up, in typical Marcus Hale style, with a lengthy editorial, though he probably would have preferred to call it analysis. Eventually he worked his way around to asking a question.