"What did they say?" asked Barbara Campbell  entering the WQST conference room in a smart, opaque, business suit. She was returning from her tactical visit to the telewindow station’s small ladies room. The sight that greeted her was not what she’d hoped for when she departed.

A stranger sat at the apex of the bend in a horseshoe-shaped table, a tan-skinned young Afro in a seasonally inappropriate see-through blouse. The old war buddies, minus the general, sat on one side of the Negro woman whose name kept slipping away from Barbara. Ken sat facing them on the opposite side with Andrea one seat removed from Ken. Leah sat next to Andrea, one seat from the end. She, too, was wearing a see-though blouse, which was not only seasonally inappropriate for any professional woman in a work environment, but, in her case, patently obscene because of the grotesque size and shape of her breasts. The sight of her made Barbara queasy.

The table itself was segmented into seams which marked the edges of eleven table-top telewindows, three of which stood upright in front of the three women. With Ken and Vince occupying the seats closest to the young woman in charge, and an empty seat between Ken and Andrea, Barbara’s place at the table had been chosen by default. She had arranged that a seat would be chosen for her by the timing of her departure, but she’d hoped for a better result. One of the last things she would have chosen to do would have been to sit next to a couple of lesbians. She didn’t know whether to blame the Afro woman or her husband for putting her in this awkward situation. She settled the question by blaming them both.

Gail Parker, who had taken an immediate dislike to the former Negro couple, swiveled around in her chair to answer Barbara’s question. "They said they’re on their way."

"Good," said Barbara gliding into her padded, swivel chair with a stiff nod to Andrea.

Gail hadn’t said that the Lansing couple’s only function was to keep Leah and Andrea company. It was not a glamorous job but one that was necessary for the dynamics of the group to work effectively. On one level, she hated herself for bringing all of these people together with the idea that they could do great things for the country when their real function was to serve as a test group for her campaign to free Hector Clay. She had launched the first salvo of her campaign with a program that was scheduled to explode across the national telewindow airwaves within the hour. For the long term, she needed feedback on her assessment of things and her plans for the future. For that, Barbara Campbell may have been her most important guest.

Barbara’s gaze involuntarily strayed to the far end of the horseshoe’s opposite side where the unkempt Cousins sat in shabby old clothes that shouldn’t have been worn in the house, let alone in a public building. Well, she thought, without a clue that her thoughts were etched in her posture and every line of her face, at least I don’t have to sit next to him!

She hadn’t fooled Andrea, Cousins, Gail or anyone else for a second, not with that perfectly coordinated wardrobe on that perfectly reconstructed body and that perfectly applied make-up on that perfectly reconstructed face. Here was a woman who could not have questioned the fact that her idea of perfection was merely conformity to standards set by 3 Anglo-Saxon men who didn’t know they were setting them.

One of those men, a publisher, had founded a "girlie" magazine which another, a U.S. senator, had fought to have banned as obscene. They had no direct connection to the third man. That man was Dean Piper, who believed that the standards he set with his T-window personalities, his programming and his sponsorship of awards for telewindow excellence, came from elsewhere. Piper believed that they were derived from the predilections of nature and the natural evolution of civilized conduct.

Gail knew the story because she’d done the homework for a God segment. She had the Janus program and the specialized skills to help her do it accurately. She was literally one in a billion. If Barbara had been a regular viewer of God, she would have seen and heard the story. But to have been a regular viewer of God, she could not have been the "normal" person she was and thus, of no value to Gail in her effort to win Hector Clay’s immediate release.

People like Barbara Campbell were the strength of the American Party and the old guard of the mass communication industry which had kept them in power for so long. Barbara didn’t know where her concept of what she ought to be had originated. Though the role she was playing may have dictated her manners, it also announced her feelings about the others for not obeying the rules.

Ken couldn’t remember when he’d felt so small. It wasn’t that his wife’s artificial Caucasian nose was tilted toward the ceiling, or that she had insisted on dressing "appropriately" for their meeting at the station. It wasn’t that her strategic retreat to the ladies room had been a transparent attempt to avoid having to sit next to Cousins or one of the lesbians, or to avoid being seen choosing not to. It was her whole goddamn attitude! With Hector Clay in jail for murder, with people killing and dying in the streets in untold numbers, and with everything surrounding her father’s funeral a day before, her first priority was patently cosmetic—and she was being a snob about it!

The other men saw nothing new in Barbara’s demeanor.

Though Leah hadn’t paid much attention to her before and couldn’t see her now, she assumed that her first impression had been close enough. Barbara had given her no reason to modify that assumption.

Andrea, on the other hand, had spotted something that the others, with the possible exception of Gail Parker, hadn’t. She’d seen a victim of the times, a woman with a sense of self so weak that someone else was bound to have imposed upon it their idea of who and what she should be. To Andrea, the woman beside her was a pitiable case study in Displaced Personality Disorder Syndrome. As a psychologist, she could not be offended by the attitude of a DPDS sufferer any more than she could be offended by the attitude of an ELF. There was little functional difference between them save for the physical components of their bodies. In both cases, their minds belonged to the programmers.

In Andrea’s professional opinion, one Barbara Campbell was the same as a million or 10 million. She was the kind of woman Jack Fleetwood appealed to only because of his wealthy, Anglo-Saxon, Prince Charming appearance, and his high-cultured style. She was the kind of woman who would have been mesmerized by the teachings of media-made heroines like Estelle Gidarb and shills for the American Party like Corey Bucket and Sam Jinks. She was the kind of woman who could not distinguish between an original idea and a wrong one even if the idea was her own.

It was hard for Andrea to see how such a woman could have come as far as she had to an agreement with the rest of the people at the table that the authorities were the enemy. Without the blessings of someone in authority or a great majority of people who disagreed with the authorities, she was not likely to have come to any conclusions she could feel comfortable with.

"Tell me," Andrea said to Barbara, "I know you were invited, but why did you come?"

Barbara’s face reddened. "I beg your pardon," she said turning her eyes to her husband for help that was not forthcoming.

Leah leaned forward so she could look the woman in the eye and put her friend’s question another way. "Why are you here?" she asked.

"I’m with my husband."

"Yes," said Ken, "she’s with me."

"But why?" insisted Andrea. "I don’t mean to be rude, but this is not a social gathering. The rest of us have good reason to be here. We’re trying to pool our resources to free Hector Clay and end...no, win this...this civil war that seems to be going on. The people responsible for all of this...this emotional pain and violence are still at large. There is no guarantee that the authorities will arrest them unless they’re forced to. What we do or don’t do could cost more people than we know their freedom or their lives. That means we have to be able to speak freely. Do you understand that, Mrs. Campbell?"

"No," said Barbara, defiantly, with all eyes on her, including Ken’s.

Not everyone had the same reason for setting her adrift in this stormy sea of criticism, which seemed to have blown in from nowhere, but they were setting her adrift nevertheless. Barbara could see it in their body language and on their faces: Cousins didn’t care one way or another. Yu was curious about how she would handle herself. Vince wanted to know the answer to the question. The tan-skinned producer and the famous lesbians simply didn’t like her. Ken was afraid of alienating himself from the others.

To her credit, she did not blame Ken for laying back; she understood deep in her soul why he had to. Andrea had spoken the truth about why Ken and the others were there. That was one more thing she understood deep in her soul. She’d never heard of DPDS, but in the past few days she’d had to deal with enough of the symptoms to be aware of it in practice if not by name. She thought of the day her father died, and of the man she learned he was through the people who loved him, respected him, and learned from him. Her lower jaw quaked. Her eyes began to fill with tears.

Vince opened his mouth to assist her. Yu immediately threw up a stop sign in front his face.

"...My father," she said. She bit her lip and started over. "My father was Aaron McPhail."

Andrea blanched.

"Fuck," breathed Leah. "I’m sorry."

"I read you all wrong," said Andrea, only now recognizing her and Ken from the T-window broadcast of the funeral. It hadn’t crossed her mind that the woman in the smart suit might have had a race reassignment or that former Negroes were, by definition, people with DPDS. It was not a condition she had ever associated with African-Americans since she saw none in her practice and there was none in the literature. Only now did that strike her as an unacceptable state of affairs. No, she’d been right Barbara Campbell. The mistake was in the literature and, perhaps, her practice.

Barbara sniffled and whisked away a tear. "You didn’t read me wrong," she said. "I was being myself—whoever that is. I dunno, maybe it was a way of not thinking about Dad. Anyway, it’s hard to be yourself when you’ve practiced being somebody else all your life. You have to work at seeing so many things a different way. I’m trying harder than you know, but it’s going to take time."

One glance at Yu, told Vince that he was either proud of Barbara or proud of himself for stopping Vince from saving her. Maybe both. Vince had to admit that the old Top Soldier usually knew what he was doing in these matters. It also occurred to him that Barbara’s confession in front of all these people took more courage than he would have been able to muster—more courage or less awareness of what she was confessing to.

"While we’re waiting for your friends," he said to Andrea before looking to Gail, "why don’t we check out Mina Foski’s O.J. cuts?"

"Yeah," said Cousins, missing the inadvertent play on words but showing more interest in the proceedings than he had until then, "I wanna see what the LT an’ the General was talkin’ about."

"The LT and the General?" questioned Leah.

"I’m the LT," said Vince. "That is, I was the LT. It stands for lieutenant. The General is General Banks, the guy we told you about who had to get back to Washington when the shit hit the fan out there. He works in the Pentagon. Both of us are fans of Mina Foski’s Crime Scene 2000, and when Gail told us about her O.J. project we knew we were on to something."

Leah nodded. "I think I’m beginning to get the picture."

Andrea turned a puzzled face to Leah. Yu and Ken turned their puzzled faces to Vince. Barbara and Cousins turned theirs to Gail. All of them started talking at once.

Gail made an attempt to address Barbara’s question while acknowledging Cousins, who was trying to get her attention. Her meeting, which had been going so smoothly that she hardly had to say a word, had deteriorated into three or four separate meetings, none of which was going anywhere. As the volume of feckless chatter grew, Gail realized that she had to take charge.

After a protracted verbal struggle she shouted at Leah, "Will you please be quiet?" Leah stopped talking. Yu, who had been jabbering as much as Leah had, followed suit.

Gail sat back in her chair and proceeded to speak so softly that everyone had to pay close attention to hear her. That was her intent. Though her pose was casual, she spoke formally, like a law school professor giving a freshman class a short lesson in the basics of modern criminal law.

She said, "Some of the most important aspects of modern jurisprudence were widely adopted in response to the verdict in the criminal trial of O.J. Simpson. Mina Foski’s O.J. project for Crime scene 2000 is what I wanted all of you to see. It may be why the people who ambushed Leah, Andrea and Hector acted when they did."

"I don’t get it," said Yu, who was clearly speaking for everyone else.

"You will," said, Gail...In the unlikely event that you have forgotten, O.J. Simpson was an African-American celebrity charged with killing a white woman and a white Jewish man in 1994. The woman was his ex-wife and the mother of his two youngest children. The man was a friend of hers. The thinking that led to the institution of the legal changes was this: There was so much evidence against Simpson that: 1). He should have been convicted; and 2). With the seating of a class-A jury—meaning, no brown-eyed jurors—and the suppression of irrelevant racial arguments, he would have been convicted. Yet, no time scan was ever made to determine whether the lawmakers were right or wrong about Simpson’s guilt or the jury’s reasoning in letting him go."

That wasn’t enough for Cousins.

"What about the cop," he asked, "the big nazi who bragged about being able to plant evidence against black people and to get away with murder? Was there really a guy like that who had something to do with investigating the case?"

Vince answered, "Yes. He had the size, the build, the physical conditioning, the military training, the temperament...the opportunity. He had inside knowledge of the people places and institutions that a man would need to have in advance to kill the ex-wife, to frame O.J. and to come out looking like a hero. He was a homicide cop, hunter and an ex-marine. So, he wasn't squeamish about blood and he knew how to use a knife with a sharp blade and a heavy handle like two different kinds of weapons for a silent kill."

Leah frowned. "How do you know about the knife if you haven’t seen a time scan?"

"Easy," said Cousins. "I come from a long line of Marines—that’s why I joined the Army. You ever see a K-bar?"

All of the women shook their heads, no, while the men, including Ken who had never seen one that he knew of, nodded, yes.

"A K-Bar," continued Cousins, "is a Marine Corps fighting knife. It’s like a good, heavy, hunting knife with a solid metal heal and a strong, sharp blade. If Fuhrman was a Marine, he had one. But the important thing is, he knew how to use both ends of whatever knife was used exactly the way the killer used it."

Leah’s face lit up like a Knight of the Roundtable who’d found a map to the Holy Grail.

"Do you know what this could mean?" she said, searching face after face for one that shared her insight and enthusiasm. She found none. She supposed by the smug countenance of Gail and Vince that they had glimpsed her vision before she had. The others gave no indication that they did. She spoke to the others.

"If the public discovered what really happened in that case, it could turn the whole criminal justice system on its head."

Andrea looked skeptical. "I don’t see how one case can do all of that. Even if it was the foundation that the current system was built on, the people who want to keep things the way they are, are going to find ways to get around it. They’ll find another case that makes the point they want to make—"

"Ah," said Leah, "But the point is, that case was used to justify the exclusion of an entire class of people from the jury pool of most legal jurisdictions and to bar the presentation of certain kinds of evidence. If the brown-eyed jurors in that case were right and the kind of evidence that got excluded proved to be essential for solving the crime, there is no other case anybody can come up with that will undo the damage."

Yu wrinkled his nose. "But what if the jurors were wrong and the guy did kill his wife. I think he did. And I don’t think race had anything to do with it."

Vince turned to Yu. "You don’t watch Crime Scene 2000, do you, Top?"

"No. Why?"

"Because," said Gail, "the solution isn’t as important as how it was arrived at."

The light now dawned in Ken’s eyes. "Yeah," he said, speaking in turn to Yu, Andrea and Barbara. His wife who had never watched a single program to its conclusion, because she didn’t like the format, could not hide the fact that she now wished she had. He turned back to Andrea.

"2000," he said, is like a game show, in a way. They show the crime scene the way it appeared when the first officers arrived to investigate..."

"Who are ‘they,’ asked Andrea.

"Mina Foski, I guess, and the other people who help put the shows together."

Andrea nodded her okay and Ken proceeded. "They do their own investigations so they can get in all the relevant facts, only they don’t necessarily include all of the relevant facts at the same time. See, they do one investigation and they come up with a who, why, how scenario. Some facts, some speculation; you know. Then they do two more investigations and come up with two different scenarios. If you can’t pick one where all of the hard evidence fits, you have to come up with one of your own."

Vince turned to Barbara and said, "The only way you can figure out which of the scenarios have fatal flaws is to watch all three and sort out what’s relevant from what isn’t. If two of them have a fatal flaw, the right answer is the third one. If all of’em have it, you have to put your own answer together from elements of all three. But as far as any jury would be concerned, the logic of every investigation is complete—you know what I mean—because the jury wouldn’t know what relevant information is missing. That’s what makes the O.J. case so volatile. It’s not about who was right based on the time scan because they didn’t have time scans back then. It’s about the process of figuring out who did it based on the quality of the available evidence."

"I see," said Yu. "And you think the quality of evidence against O.J. stinks?"

"You would, too," said Gail, "if you gave it a close look."

"To tell you the truth," said Barbara, "the only murder mystery I’m interested in is my father’s. That’s the only one I’ve ever been interested it. But even if they were doing something on Crime Scene 2000 that I might want to see, I wouldn’t want to sit through two hours of it without a break the way Ken does. I’m sorry, but that’s too long for me."

"Same here," said Yu.

"Ditto," said Andrea. "And I think I know what you’re going to say next. Two hours may be a long time to sit through a program that you’re not particularly interested in, but it might not be enough time to bring out all the relevant details."

"Right!" smiled Barbara.

Gail said, "We’ve never had that problem with anything we’ve produced. If you’re crowded for time, you give bigger clues, that’s all."

"Okay," said Cousins, "lets see what they got."

Gail looked at the clock on the wall. "Glen and Vera should be here in a couple of minutes. Maybe we should wait for them."

Cousins whined, "But I thought we were gonna look at the O.J. cuts while we were waiting."

Gail pointed to the T-window in front of her. "They’re only a few blocks away. See for yourself."

She opened a sliding table-top door and pressed a button. All of the table-top T-windows unfolded like giant hard-bound book covers until they were standing upright in front of all the conferees. Everyone saw the minimalist map with the van, showing only the street it was on, the street it had to turn on to reach the I-96 service drive, and the telewindow station six blocks away.

"Oh," said Cousins. "I didn’t realize they were already in town."

"Me neither," said Vince. "I thought they were halfway between here and Lansing."

Noting the speed with which the van was closing the distance to the station, Vince decided to ask Andrea and Leah a few questions about their friends that might not be so easy to ask when the couple arrived.

"One thing I’m not clear on," he said, trying to make eye contact with everyone, "Why are we waiting for...ah...." He groped for the names.

"Glen and Vera," said Leah. "One of the reasons they’re in town is to see Andrea and me. And here we are. Tomorrow we’re all going to Blue Monday’s funeral. I have a feeling they can help us and Hector Clay."

Andrea nodded.

"A feeling?" said Vince, forgetting how much he had relied on his feelings in matters of life and death. "Fleetwood and the guy pulling his strings may be running for cover, but the trouble they set in motion could still bury a lot of good people. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a war going on out there."

Gail bridled, "In case you haven’t noticed, Mr. Costello, there’s been a war going on out there for decades. Glen and Vera may have helped to turn the tide in our favor. I don’t know if I can say the same for you."