Oscar blinked. “Disaster relief buildings?”
“They never got built. Much too sophisticated and high tech for starving, backward third worlders, so they said. Bureaucrats! I worked my ass off on that project.” Bambakias laughed. “There’s no money in disaster relief. There’s no market-pull for that. I recast the concept later, as little chairs. No money in the little chairs either. They never appreciated any of that.”
“Actually, Senator, we have one of those little chairs in the Di-rector’s office, here at the lab. It’s provoking a lot of strongly favorable reaction. The locals really love that thing.”
“You don’t say. Too bad that scientists are too broke to buy any upscale furniture.”
“I wonder if you’d still have those disaster plans in your archives somewhere, Alcott. I’d like to see them.”
“See them? Hell, you can have them. The least I can do for you, after everything I’ve put you through.”
“I hope you’ll do that for me, Senator. I’m serious.”
“Sure, have ’em! Take anything you want! Kind of a fire sale on my brain products. You know, if we invade Europe, Oscar, it probably means a nuclear exchange.”
Oscar lowered his voice soothingly. “I really don’t think so, Al.” “They’re trifling with the grand old USA, these little Dutch creeps. Them and their wooden shoes and tulips. We’re a superpower! We can pulverize them.”
Lorena spoke up. “I think it’s time for your medication, Alcott.”
“I need to know what Oscar really thinks about the war! I’m all in favor of it. I’m a hawk! We’ve been pushed around by these little red-green Euro pipsqueaks long enough. Don’t you think so, Oscar?”
A nurse arrived. “You tell the President my opinion!” the Sena-tor insisted as the nurse led him away. “You tell Two Feathers I’m with him all the way down.”
Lorena moved back into camera range. She looked grim and stricken.
“You have a lot of new krewepeople now, Lorena.”
“Oh. That.” She looked into the camera. “I never got back to you about the Moira situation, did I?”
“Moira? I thought we had that problem straightened out and packed away with mothballs.”
“Oh, Moira was on her best behavior after that jail incident. Until Huey came looking for Moira. Now Moira works for Huey in Baton Rouge.”
“Oh no.”
“It got very bad for the krewe after that. Their morale suffered so much with the Senator’s illness, and once Huey had our former press agent in his own court … well, I guess you can imagine what it’s been like.”
“You’ve lost a lot of people?”
“Well, we just hire new ones, that’s all.” She looked up. “Maybe someday you can come back to us.”
“That would be good. The reelection campaign, maybe.”
“That should be a real challenge… You’re so good with him. You were always so good with him. That silly business with his old architecture plans. It really touched him, he was very lucid for a minute there. He was just like his old self with you.”
“I’m not just humoring him, Lorena. I really want those disaster relief plans. I want you to make sure that they’re sent to me here. I think I can use them.”
“Oscar, what are you really doing over there? It seems like a very strange thing. I don’t think it’s in the interests of the Federal Demo-crats. It’s not a sensible reform, it’s not like what we had in mind.”
“That’s true — it’s certainly not what we had in mind.”
“It’s that Penninger woman, isn’t it? She’s just not right for you. She’s not your type. You know that Moira knows all about you and Greta Penninger, don’t you? Huey knows too.”
“I know that. I’m looking after that. Although it’s challenging work.”
“You look so pale. You should have stayed with Clare Emerson. She’s an Anglo girl, but she was sweet-tempered and good for you. You always looked happy when you were with her.”
“Clare is in Holland.”
“Clare is coming back. What with the war, and all.”
“Lorena …” He sighed. “You play ball with a lot of journal-ists. So do I, all right? I used to sleep with Clare, but Clare is a journalist, first and last and always. Just because she gives you softball coverage doesn’t mean that she’s good for me. Don’t send Clare over here. I mean it. Send me the old architecture plans that Alcott did, when he was a wild design student who had never made any money. I can really use those. Do not send Clare.”
“I don’t want to see you destroyed by ambition, Oscar. I’ve seen what that means now and it’s bad, it’s worse than you imagine. It’s terrible. I just want to see you happy.”
“I can’t afford to be that kind of happy right now.”
Suddenly she laughed. “All right. You’re all right. I’m all right too. We’re going to survive all this. Someday, we’re going to be okay. I still believe that, don’t you? Don’t fret too much. Be good to your-self. All right?”
“All right.”
She hung up. Oscar stood up and stretched. She had just been kidding about Clare. She was just teasing him a little. He’d broken her out of her unhappiness for a little moment; Lorena was still a player, she liked to imagine he was her krewe and she was looking out for him. He’d managed to give her a little moment of diversion. It had been a good idea to make the phone call. He had done a kindly thing for old friends.
Oscar began the liquidation of his fortune. Without Pelicanos to manage his accounts and investments, the time demands were impossi-ble. And, on some deep level, he knew the money was a liability now. He was encouraging thousands of people to abandon conventional economics and adopt a profoundly alien way of life, while he himself remained safely armored. Huey had already made a few barbed com-ments along that line; the fact that Huey was a multimillionaire him-self never hampered his sarcastic public outbursts.
Besides, Oscar wasn’t throwing the money away. He was going to devote it all to the cause of science — until there was no money left.
The resignation and departure of Pelicanos had a profound effect on his krewe. As majordomo, Pelicanos had been a linchpin of the krewe, always the voice of reason when Oscar himself became a little too intense.
Oscar assembled his krewe at the hotel to clear the air and lay matters on the line. Point along the way: he was doubling everyone’s salary. The krewe should consider it hazard pay. They were plunging into unknown territory, at steep odds. But if they won, it would be the grandest political success they had ever seen. He finished his pep talk with a flourish.
Resignations followed immediately. They took departure pay and left his service. Audrey Avizienis left; she was his opposition re-searcher, she was far too skeptical and mean-spirited to stay on under such dubious, half-baked circumstances. Bob Argow also quit. He was a systems administrator, and he made his grievances clear: pushy com-puter-security nonsense from Kevin Hamilton, and hordes of would-be netgods in the Moderators who created code the way they made clothes: handmade, lopsided, and a stitch at a time. Negi Estabrook left as well. There was no point in cooking for such a diminished krewe, and besides, the cuisine of road proles was basically laboratory rat chow. Rebecca Pataki also left. She felt out of place and half-abandoned, and she was homesick for Boston.
This left Oscar with just four diehard hangers-on. Fred Dillen the janitor, Corky Shoeki his roadie and new majordomo, and his secretary and scheduler, Lana Ramachandran. Plus, his image consul-tant, Donna Nunez, who sensibly declared that she was staying on because in terms of its image, the Collaboratory was just getting inter-esting. Very well, he thought grimly; he was down to four people, he would just start over. Besides, he still had Kevin. There were plenty of useful people walking around loose within the Collaboratory. And he worked for the President.