For a moment, Jack Fleetwood was sure that he had materialized in the wrong VRS. He’d seen darkened movie theater lobbies in enough telewindow shows to know that he was standing in one. But the loud "easy listening" music and the strong smell of incense—which he’d never sampled before—didn’t add up. Besides, Gieldgood was supposed to be waiting for him and the only person in sight was an older black man in a yellow cowboy shirt rolling a mop in a bucket into the men’s lavatory.

Had Fleetwood been as familiar with the late Aaron McPhail as Gieldgood was, he would have gotten the joke. As it was, the black man going to clean the john was, to Fleetwood’s mind, as much a part of his natural environment as a monkey in a tree. The fact that the man with the mop was no more of a human being than an animated, 3-D picture of one escaped Fleetwood’s attention until he caught himself preparing to ask him if he’d seen the doctor.

He’d been in hundreds of Virtual Reality Settings without ever having encountered the VR equivalent of an ELF. It was more than a man could adjust to in a single session. Then again, who but Gieldgood could say whether the people he encountered in this VRS were, indeed, ELFs or Virtual Realty Personas of spies in Gieldgood’s employ?

Jack Fleetwood’s mental alert system flashed "DANGER!" The loud, inane music was already beginning to grate on his nervous and the unfamiliar odor of burning incense was playing havoc with his learned defenses against the smell of a toxic environment. He didn’t know what it was, but it didn’t smell healthy. The place didn’t look healthy, either. It was dirty, small and cheap. A dusty, broken-down refreshment stand stood empty. The carpeting was thread-bare in several places. The dim lighting seemed to be attributable to missing bulbs in the single, low-hanging chandelier. The wall paint was pealing, and the posters—the posters....were obscene!

"Oh no," groaned Fleetwood, struck stupid with shame and dread at the realization that he was loitering in a dirty movie theater. Notwithstanding the fact that such places no longer existed for real, the intense feeling of exposure came with the territory. Everyone in the civilized world knew his face, which told his subconscious mind that anyone who saw him could ruin his life. None of those concerns carried a feather’s worth of intellectual weight in a VRS. Never-the-less, the emotional weight was crushing.

Fleetwood scurried in near-panic for the darkest shadows he could find in a notched out section of the wall where he saw a door. He reasoned that it had to be the entrance to the viewing room, or whatever they called the place where the movie screen was. He also reasoned that Gieldgood—which was to say, a Virtual Reality Persona of Gieldgood—was seated in that audience. And he, Attorney General Jack Fleetwood, would have to pick his way through the dark to find him. That arrogant bastard is playing with me! he thought, lowering himself by bending his legs to peer through the window in the door.

He was on the verge of being enraged when the raw, nasty, uninhibited, illegal sex he saw on the screen sent his thoughts and feelings off in another direction. Any doubts about the correctness of his Blue Monday prosecution was washed away in an instant. Perhaps there was a higher purpose after all in Gieldgood’s staging of this meeting. He rejected the thought almost as soon as he’d hatched it. That may have been true with another man, but Gieldgood? Not likely!

He pushed angrily through the door, catching a louder blast of the music than he was ready for as his eyes made enough of an adjustment to the darker room to separate the few heads in the audience from the backs of many empty seats. There were only five heads to count on the right side of the aisle and six on the left. With the lone exception of a woman he took to be a whore, the patrons appeared to be men. He allowed that one or two of the others might have been masculine lesbians, since they were all wearing men’s clothes and he could see most of the faces. Never-the-less, it was clear that this was an establishment that catered to males. Most had whole rows of seats to themselves on both sides of the aisle with no one in front or back for one or more rows deep.

Gieldgood, the only man without a hat who had a full head of hair, sat in the middle of the room, one seat from the aisle on the left. A man in a cowboy hat and a yellow shirt three rows in front of him and well to his left, rested his arms on the backs of the chairs next to him and crossed his cowboy-booted ankles over the top of the chair in front. Another man sat across from Gieldgood in the aisle seat.

Fleetwood took it for granted that the doctor had concocted this seating arrangement for a reason which would be reviled in its own good time. He made a mental note to guard against letting it bother him, knowing that however real the bit players in this VRS appeared to be, they were probably no more real than cardboard cutouts. Only one person besides himself mattered.

As Fleetwood started toward him, trying not to look at the screen or to concern himself with VR patrons stealing a glance at him, Gieldgood was making a profound observation of the obvious. It took real-time-motion and three dimensions, to create a convincing vision of reality. That’s why the two naked, larger-than-life women having sex on the giant theater screen as only two women could, didn’t look true-to-life. No image projected onto a 2-D screen ever could.

Yet, thought Gieldgood, letting his eyes wonder around the darkened, sparsely populated theater away from the man in the cowboy hat, these Bullwinkles actually believe what they’re seeing. It never crossed his mind that he was relating to the computer-generated facsimiles of human beings in the computer-generated movie house as though they were warm-blooded, breathing, thinking people. Real people were what they symbolized to him. He knew perfectly well what they were because one of the best ELF-maker in the country had created them to Gieldgood’s specifications. Therefore, he didn’t think it necessary to remind himself of that fact at regular intervals—unlike the need he felt to remind himself that one of only two men he had ever feared was dead. The other was hosting a popular talk show called God.

Gieldgood caught the motion of Fleetwood’s approach out of the corner of his eye. "Sit down," he said, pointing to the empty seat next to the aisle.

When Fleetwood had seated himself, Gieldgood turned to him and said something Fleetwood couldn’t hear over the volume of the music. He said it louder. "Look at them, Jack. These are the citizens who are going to put you in the White House."

"Christ!" said the attorney general barely loud enough for Gieldgood to hear. "What the hell are we doing in here?"

Gieldgood chuckled. "What’s the matter, Jack, afraid somebody will recognize you?" He couldn’t see the color of Fleetwood’s cheeks in the dark, but he didn’t have to see them to know they were flushed.

"Of course not!" retorted Fleetwood, his eyes darting involuntarily from one seedy-looking patron of the seedy porno theater to another. An effeminate man in the aisle seat across from him was eyeing him surreptitiously. When Fleetwood’s eyes fell on him, the man pretended to be looking at the screen. Gieldgood would have programmed that kind of behavior into a VR ELF to work on his nerves. Though he and the doctor were supposed to be the only real people in this artificial environment, one could never be sure. Moreover, since all of Fleetwood’s experiences in VR had been with business conferences where everybody in attendance represented somebody real, he was conditioned to see all bodies in a VRS as the Virtual Reality Persona of somebody real. He was powerless to react to them as mindless props.

"Are you going to answer my question?" insisted Fleetwood. "What are we doing in this place?"

"The answer is up there in front of you, my friend, and all around you. This is the court of public opinion. These people are the jury. If you pay attention, you’ll get an invaluable lesson in group psychology."

Fleetwood tried to protest, feeling certain that the gaunt man was toying with him. Gieldgood’s only response was to stare at him as if he were a poor student who had failed a simple quiz.

Before the younger man could do anything to avoid it, he found himself in a stare down. He couldn’t blink first without acknowledging the doctor’s right to dominate him. But the longer they stared at each other, the clearer it became that Gieldgood would win either way. By not blinking he would be the man Fleetwood couldn’t stand up to. By blinking he would be the teacher who failed to teach an ignorant pupil a simple lesson.

Gieldgood blinked. "Maybe I should have beamed you into a dirty book store," he said.

The attorney general turned his whole body in his seat, gritted his teeth and growled, his fingers balled into painfully tight fists.

Gieldgood brought a contemplative finger to his chin, "Yes," he said, as though his previous words had not been interrupted by Fleetwood’s demonstration of pique, "that might have better illustrated the point. In this environment or that one, most people want to see without being seen. They want to judge without being judged. In a dirty book store, the customers hardly ever look at each other. When they come in by themselves and the salesman looks like a pervert or somebody of lower social standing, they buy whatever they want to see. When they come in with their friends or the salesman is a regular guy or a pretty girl, they buy what they think a normal guy would want to see. Women hardly ever shop alone in a place like that for the same reason they hardly ever walk into places like this. They’re afraid of being seen by themselves. What would you think of one if you saw her?"

Fleetwood folded his arms in a huff, trying to recall what the woman he did see looked like. All he could remember was the generic image of the kind of woman he might have expected to see. He faced forward and closed his eyes.

The last thing he saw before slamming his eyelids shut was the brown, passion-dripped face of one of the women on the movie screen, the one lifting her head from between her partners white thighs. The latent image of the pretty, Latin porn star made an indelible impression.

Hey! thought Fleetwood with a start, I know that woman! Indeed, he did know the woman. He knew both women; Leah Flores, the plump, huge-breasted defense attorney for Blue Monday, and her older, slimmer lesbian lover, Andrea Urlan, a licensed clinical psychologist.

The music faded to a level low enough to permit Fleetwood and Gieldgood to speak comfortably to each other and loud enough to create the illusion of an audio barrier to anyone else. Gieldgood chuckled. "That’s a start Jack. You’ve opened your eyes. You’ve seen something that you’ve only heard about before. What do you think?"

Fleetwood hesitated. "I think they’re a couple of lezzies," he said.

"Don’t be obtuse," said Gieldgood. "Of course they’re lezzies. The point is, what they’re doing is against the law, and everybody who wants to catch them in the act of breaking the law can catch them. The trouble is, most people are unwilling to expose themselves to the risk of being labeled perverts themselves to do it."

Fleetwood blinked, as many key pieces of the Gieldgood puzzle snapped together at once. Even in an artificial "Adult" theater environment, the anxiety that came with being there—the fear of being discovered there, was enough to ward away the vast majority of people regardless of how they felt about the subject matter on exhibit. Only by being in that situation could one fully appreciate the pull of the forces at work to keep most people in any population from deviating from the norm—or what they believed the norm to be. Now, Fleetwood understood in a visceral way what he had been able to comprehend only on an intellectual level before: Whoever controlled the strings of popular opinion for the population whose opinions ruled the world, was the ultimate puppeteer.

"Now," said Gieldgood, "you know why the X Channel is so important to us. We can do only so much with the Gossip Channel. Most people don’t want the X Channel to go away. Eventually, it will, but as long as we can limit the content of the programs in a few fringe areas, we can do some good with it. Unfortunately, we have to let the smut-fiends watch what’s left in the privacy of their homes without fear of being watched by somebody else. The only way to remove the fear is to remove the threat. It’s a double-edged sword, but it’s the only way it’ll work."

"Yeah," said Fleetwood, thinking of how badly he had misjudged the popularity of his Blue Monday prosecution on the one hand, and on the other hand, how effective the Leah Flores/Andrea Urlan programs running on the X Channel had been for the state. "I take it, this is a representative sample of what the public saw during the trial."

Gieldgood nodded. "A 2-D version. They saw it in 3-D."

With a wave of his hand, the movie screen was transformed into a telewindow. The other spectators fizzed away to nothing and the music died, to be replaced by the sounds of two women in a heated, sexual embrace.

"Leah Flores claimed they were ELFs," said Fleetwood, looking behind him to see nothing but empty seats. "Were they?"

"What difference does it make? They’re lesbians. That’s what lesbians do."

"You can only prosecute them for it if you catch them doing it. Who’s going to admit they saw them on the X Channel? And where would the prosecution be if the evidence turned out to be computer manufactured?"

Gieldgood smiled. "There’s hope for you yet, Jack. Take a closer look."

"...This isn’t the same as the other ones, is it?"

"No. This is typical of the current ones on the X Channel. There may have been some ELF-enhanced disks in circulation during the trial but they’re tame compared to the other X-channel programs with these two that are coming in straight off the satellite. All of that material is real and some of it is sick."

"What could be sicker than this?"

"You’ll see. So will the jury at their trial, if they haven’t already."

Fleetwood’s lips stretched into a smile then went slack. "If only we could figure out how to wrap up this Monday thing before his jury brings back a decision."

"They’re not going to."

"What?"

"The Blue Monday jury is not going to bring back a decision."

Fleetwood said nothing as a tight band of apprehension around his chest loosened, allowing him to breath freely for the first time in weeks. He didn’t know what the doctor had in mind for Monday—if, indeed, he hadn’t already done it, but he had complete confidence that it would be effective.

"Aren’t you going to ask me how I know?"

"It’s probably better if I don’t know."

The doctor smiled. "Hmmm. I think you’ve got something there." Then he laughed. "Plausible deniability. I should have thought of this myself. I will tell you this: The women could be a big problem for you if we don’t take care of them first. That’s why we’re doing this X Channel thing now. You’ll see."

"Okay. What about Estelle Gidarb?"

"Funny you should ask. What’s going to happen to her is one of those things that has to happen to replace the image you made for yourself in the public mind with that Blue Monday fiasco. One or two little victories against sin on the national stage won’t do it. By the way, you do understand that Brown Belt Strangler thing, don’t you?"

"Yes," said Fleetwood testily, "we’ve been over it a hundred times. You haven’t told me anything about Estelle Gidarb."

"See that black buck joining the party with Ms. Flores and her white lady friend?"

"Where’d he come from?"

"He was ELFed in. Look familiar?"

"Is that...Yeah! That’s what’s-his-name...Clay, Hector Clay, the talk show host. Why does everybody make a big deal out of him? He may be the only public figure in America with the guts to actually side with Monday and his lezzie lawyer against me and Estelle Gidarb, but he’s a small public figure with a cheap little show in Detroit. If you’d ignore him the way I do, he’d go away."

Gieldgood shook his head. "If you’d been with The Circle a little longer, you’d know that Hector Clay is not going anywhere but up in the national opinion poles. That, Mr. Fleetwood, is a contradiction in the American body politic which cannot long endure. We have to discredit him and we have to eliminate Estelle Gidarb. We have every reason to believe we can do both at the same time."

"You don’t think this porno program is going to do it?" asked Fleetwood incredulously. The way I understand it, you tried that before and it didn’t work."

"This program is not going to stand alone. It’s going to influence public opinion at his murder trial."

"Are you nuts? We can’t put a man as popular as you say he is on trial for murder."

Gieldgood wagged his finger. "A black man on trial for the gruesome murder of a white woman he has publicly identified as his enemy is a different proposition. Clay is a former Army Ranger with a phenomenal aptitude for killing people with a knife. His biggest fans and worst enemies already know that; the rest of the public don’t. He has killed more than one woman that way. And did you know that he has a body count of enemy dead higher than the total number of Americans the Guidos killed in the entire 13 weeks of the Guido Calvera War. That’s a fact. There’s going to be evidence—tones of evidence that he murdered Dr. Estelle Gidarb. He is not going to have a believable alibi."

How are you going to arrange that?"

"Easily enough, now that she has moved within an easy fifteen to twenty minute drive from Clay’s home and work place. Both of them have been under surveillance for months. They spend a considerable amount of time alone. Sooner or later a window of opportunity is bound to open. When it does, our man will be ready."

Fleetwood looked skeptical. "Assuming you can do all of that, how are you going to get around a time scan?"

"No need to. It’ll be a man in dark clothes with dark gloves and a knit cap over his head. He’ll have Clay’s build. He’ll be wearing shoes that Clay is partial to—same size, same brand. He’ll leave bloody footprints that might as well have his name on them."

"The footprint evidence is too much. Nobody is going to believe that Hector Clay would be that stupid.

"Trust me, most people are going to see Hector Clay because that’s who they expect to see and the bloody footprints are going to be proof positive. What they won’t believe is a frame-up with somebody else walking in his shoes and planting evidence."

"Too risky. There are bound to be details that don’t work."

"So what? The details that do work are what the voters are going to remember. There are always details that don’t. Besides, who pays attention to a few small things when they have a warehouse full of big things to look at? We’re going to fill up the ‘guilty’ warehouse with items large and small. Think O.J. Everybody else will.

"That’s another thing," said Fleetwood. "The husband is always the first suspect. Everybody knows that Euel Gidarb was the first man in America to undergo the Gidarb procedure. If we can’t prove, absolutely, that he didn’t kill his wife or hire somebody to do it, a lot of people are going to believe he did."

"You’re not thinking O.J.," said Gieldgood."

"I am. The man killed his wife and some Jewish guy. That’s the important thing."

Gieldgood smiled enigmatically. "That’s irrelevant, Jack. The fact that no one has bothered to do a time scan on that murder ought to tell you something. If you haven’t learned anything else from your visit to this place and your gut reaction to what you saw here, you should know that. What matters is what the voters believe, how they came to believe it and who made it happen. That’s what you have to start thinking about. You have to be the one to make it happen with your issues."

Fleetwood studied the man next to him. No politician ever rose to high elected office without telling people what to see and feeding them enough good information to make them see it. Details mattered only when people were determined to see them, to hear them or to sniff them out. Whether or not the host of "God" was convicted of a grisly murder, enough people could be persuaded that he was guilty to make it so in their minds forever, and to establish a core of true believers to build on. What’s more, they would be passionate in their conviction and resistant to opposing views.