But it didn't look exactly right. He had seen the White House on TV a million times, always with a TV reporter standing in front of it, and thought it had a simple crackerbox shape with a verandah bulging out from the long side of it, but from this vantage point he could see that this thing he had always thought of as the White House was just the central unit in a sprawling, far-flung affair. The thing had wings sticking out to both sides, and the wings had additions tacked on to them. It was like a simple crackerbox house that the owner kept adding rooms to, until it rambled crazily all over the lot.
Seeing this, Vishniak felt betrayed. He had been raised to believe that the White House was just the President's house. His family lived there and his kids hunted Easter eggs on the lawn. It was big and nice by house standards, but still a house. But now he could see that the White House wasn't a real house at all. It was a false front for a rambling complex of sinister-looking additions that were cleverly concealed behind trees and bushes. And a fellow had to ask himself what happened in those additions, and what kind of people worked there, that their existence was so carefully kept hidden from the American public.
"Excuse me, sir?" someone was saying. He felt a hand placed gently on his arm, and startled away from it. It was one of the ODR gals. "Would you like to have a seat? We're about to get started."
"Sure," he said, and took a seat, one that had a good view of the door. While he had been standing at the window analyzing the structure of the U.S. Government, two other mall folk had come into the room, making a total complement of six.
What happened next was kind of amusing: they passed out wrist cuffs, one per customer. They were just like the one that Vishniak was already wearing, except that these didn't have the built-in TV screens. Playing dumb, Vishniak watched the gal explain how to put them on your arm, and followed her instructions with artificial clumsiness. Now he had one on each wrist.
Then she closed the blinds, turned off the lights, and showed them about fifteen minutes of television. Most of it consisted of advertisements but there were a few news stories in there too. All of it had to do, one way or another, with William A. Cozzano. Some of the ads were fuzzy-warm, touchy-feely numbers showing past events in Cozzano's life, including some grainy home videos of Cozzano recovering from his stroke that made Vishniak get choked up. Some of the ads were attacks on the President or Tip McLane. And then there were news stories - excerpts from what looked like network broadcasts. But the anchormen were unfamiliar to Vishniak. And the news events being reported had not actually happened.
Watching the anchorman read the stories, Vishniak sensed, somehow, that he was familiar. But not as an anchorman. As something else. Then it came to him: this man had played the captain of a starship - not the Enterprise - in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. He was an actor. And this news story was a fake. It hadn't really happened. It was just a potential news story.
"Huh. Getting some interesting reactions from our Post-Confederate Gravy Eater," Aaron Green said. He was sitting in the next room, looking at half a dozen monitor screens. Next to him was Shane Schram.
"What's this guy's problem?' Shane Schram said. He looked at the TV monitor showing the face of the Post-Confederate Gravy Eater, who was staring fixedly at the screen, jaw muscles throbbing.
"Incredible cortex activity," Aaron said, scrutinizing the readout.
"What does that mean?"
"It means his mental gears are spinning at a million rpm. He's thinking way too hard about everything."
"Can't have that. We'll just throw out his results," Schram said.
The videotape came to an end. Schram got up, walked next door, and turned on the lights in the focus group room. Then he delivered his usual self-introduction, which Aaron Green had now listened to a million times.
The door opened and Mr. Salvador came into the room, joining Aaron. Everyone called him Mr. Salvador because he had a kind of intercontinental breeding that inspired un-American levels of formality and because he was their boss. Even Cy Ogle's boss. But he wasn't just some figurehead who golfed and went to the occasional board meeting. He was very much a hands-on type. He spent days at a time holed up in the room where they had set up all of the monitors for the PIPER 100.
"We're doing a PIPER broadcast in a couple of minutes," Mr. Salvador said. "I'd like you to join me and give me your analysis."
"What's up?"
"Cozzano's giving an address to a convention of gun nuts in Tulsa," Salvador said. "It's going to be his major statement on the gun control issue. Which, in this country, seems to be hysterically emotional."
"That's for sure."
"I'm just sick of all this gutter politics," the lady said. She was a solidly built, bifocal-wearing woman with a conservative mid-western haircut, wearing a lavender jogging suit. Fresh off a tour bus from Indiana, no doubt. "I just don't want to see any more of this trash."
"I think you do want to see it," Schram said, "I think you are fascinated by this kind of thing. I think that, when you go to the grocery stores, you deliberately stand in the longest checkout line so that you will have time to pull the tabloids off the racks and leaf through them. And then you put them back on their racks. Because you're not the kind of person who would read sleazy tabloids - are you?"
The woman was utterly dumbfounded. "How - how did you know that? Have you been following me around or something?"
"Stop messing with her brain waves!" said the Post-Confederate Gravy Eater. Contrary to his assigned stereotype, he did not have a southern accent. More midwestern.
"How's that again?" Schram asked.
"You get into people's brains. I know you do. Can't you see you're bothering that woman?"
Schram shrugged innocently and held up his hands, palms up. "Hey. I'm just here having a conversation with her. I don't know anything about brain waves."
"Oh, yeah?" the man said, yanking the cuff off his wrist. "Then what's this?"
"That's already been explained," Schram said.
"Your explanations are all lies and cover-ups," the man said.
"Look," Schram said, "let me be honest. We're done with your interview, sir. Why don't you go ahead and take off. You can pick up your fifty dollars at the desk."
"What about these others?"
"I'd like to talk to them a little bit more."
"Why don't you want to talk to me? Isn't my opinion important?"
"We had a bug in our equipment," Schram said. "It didn't work in your case. So to keep you here any longer would be a waste of time. Thank you for coming in."
The man stood up out of his chair, facing the door, and then hesitated. He had grabbed the zipper pull on his red Confederate flag windbreaker with his left hand and was nervously zipping it up and down. He seemed to be deep in thought.
"Sir? That's all we need from you," Schram said. "You can go home now. Thanks for coming."
"Okay," the man said, finally zipping his zipper all the way up to his neck. "Okay, I think I'll go back home now. Thanks. It was real interesting. I learned a lot."
"You're welcome," Schram said.
The man started for the exit. Then music began to come out of him, as if he were carrying a transistor radio in his pocket. He stopped and froze for a moment.
The music was tinny and compressed, as if coming from a very small speaker. It was a patriotic fifes-and drums number. Shane Schram stared in astonishment.
The man took his hands out of his pockets. One wrist had an Ace bandage wrapped around it. The music became louder. He ripped the Ace bandage off. The sound of applause was now coming from his wrist.
William A. Cozzano stepped to the lectern and waved down the applause and cheers of the attendees at the Tulsa Gun and Knife Show.
"My Secret Service people wanted to provide additional security for me today," he said, "because I was addressing a bunch of gun owners, and for some reason that made them nervous. Well, I have one thing to say to you gun owners: if any one of you really wants to take a shot at me, here I am!"