Dean Piper was the last and the oldest of thirteen men, all with sapphire blue eyes, to beam his, blue-eyed, white-suited virtual reality persona into the space station VRS.

On his left was Phil McBain, followed in clockwise rotation by the U.S. Attorney General, Ron Cobb; Supreme Court Justice, Lloyd Ashbe; House Appropriations Committee Chairman, Al Bates; House Majority Leader Bill Cooper; Chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee, Matthew Forrest; CEO of the Nation’s leading electronic heir to former print media publications, Griffin Hays and chief time track engineer for CBI, Joshua Peters.

Next to Peters was an empty seat, then, the head of Condor Labs, Stewart Lynch, the youngest man at the table. Sam Jinks and Corey Becket, the ubiquitous newspad columnists, Presidential advisors and much-quoted radio and telewindow commentators came next, followed by Jeff Easton.

Piper’s attention went immediately to the empty seat between Peters and Lynch. "Where is Sanderson?" he asked, testily.

Peters smiled a reptilian smile that reminded everyone but Easton of Easton. "Hunting," he said.

Around the table jaws tightened and heads wagged.

Piper fumed. "I’ve had it with that buddy of yours."

"Associate," corrected, Peters.

"Cretin," said white-bearded Justice Ashbe.

"Well," said Piper to Peters as the room buzzed with commentary about the absent member, "Is the great, white, toasty hunter going to grace our humble gathering with his presence or not?"

Toasty was one of Sanderson's favorite words, not Piper's. The buzzing stopped.

Peters shrugged. "Last week, he took care of that business with the Michigan attorney general—the frontrunner for the Party's Presidential nomination."

Dean Piper impatiently drummed the VR table with his VR fingers. "We all know who the Michigan attorney general is," he said, as if to underline the insignificance of any mere politician in the overall scheme of things with his pointed reference to the lesser elected office.

Peters took the hint. "Sanderson must have beamed into a VRS from his plane because he gave Phil and me a full report before it landed. That was the last anyone heard from him. As near as I can tell, he’ll be dead before sundown—LA time."

Easton’s eyes narrowed, "Is that what your magic crystal ball says?"

"Janus," said Peters, "is a remarkable program but there’s nothing magical about it. When you get as many coincidence clusters—"

"Whatever," said Piper, waving his hands to cut off further elaboration. "Sanderson is supposed to know as much about it as you do. That’s why he was entrusted with a place at this table."

"Because you don’t trust me," said Peters.

"Because knowledge is power," said Piper. "The Circle can’t afford to trust any one person with that much knowledge about the future."

Peters shook his head. "The kind of power you’re talking about is a combination of vision and reach," he said, seeing no need to attribute that observation to an obscure drug dealer in Detroit. "Time track engineers have no more control over the future than anyone else. We can’t see everything and we can’t do much with what we see. If Sanderson could have cut a special deal with time for himself he wouldn’t be out of touch in some God-forsaken disposal zone on a time track to eternity."

McBain huffed, "Maybe you knew something that you neglected to tell him." He cut his eye meaningfully at Easton.

Peters intercepted the message. "I know what you’re thinking," he said, "but it was nothing like that. I didn’t find out what track he was on till a few minutes before I beamed into this VRS. I swear it. The man is a thrill junkie with a taste for blood. That sealed his fate a long time ago."

"Hell," said Griffin Hays, a square-headed, older man with a gruff voice and a face to match, "why didn’t he see that?"

Peters turned to him and said, "Griff, we all know that we’re going to die. I can tell you only that it’s not easy to turn over a card that might say when it's going to happen."

The droopy-eyed, silky-voiced Corey Becket countered, "You said he was a thrill junkie."

Peters kept smiling, not at all intimidated by the award-winning journalist’s famous reputation for perspicacity. "Once you remove the element of risk from anything, you take away all of the feelings associated with uncertainty. You take away the challenge, the suspense. The last thing a thrill junkie wants is to find out that he’s invulnerable. It would have been a losing proposition for Sanderson either way."

"So?" said Piper, "You know what kind of man he is. For the good of The Circle, why didn’t you turn over that card with his name on it?"

Peters’ smile didn’t vanish, as it never did, but it faded as much as it ever did. "I couldn’t figure out how to get at it without turning over my own. Sometimes.... sometimes you get the feeling that time has a mind of its own, which will allow us to see only those things about the future that will change nothing it considers important."

"To hell with Sanderson," said Stewart Lynch, the young, lean, intense-looking head of Condor Labs, "None of us like him and he never contributed anything to what we’re trying to do."

"Oh," said Piper, coldly," And what are we trying to do?"

Lynch hesitated. "A lot of things."

Piper’s eyes burrowed into his. "Give us a rough idea, will you Stewart?"

The younger man flushed and fell silent until the silent stares of the other white-suited men coaxed him to say the right words—to recite The Circle’s founding principles, the last four words of which were inscribed on the gold circle of their rings. He gritted his teeth. "To preserve and promote the God-fearing American values of justice, morality, community and family."

"Very good," said Piper sarcastically. "Can you tell us why your suggestion to abandon Mr. Sanderson conflicts with that statement of purpose?"

Lynch clenched his teeth, unable to hide his pique at being lectured to like a dimwitted schoolboy. He said nothing.

Piper looked around the table and threw open his arms, "Can anyone help him out?"

"We’re family," said Sen. Forrest, his thin lips almost buried in a thick black moustache and beard. "Sanderson may be a worthless bastard but he’s our worthless bastard."

"We never abandon one of our own," said Congressman Bates."

"Never," said Congressman Cooper.

Piper turned back to Lynch.   "The Circle," he said, "hasn’t been around as long as you have, my young friend. In those few years, we’ve learned to help each other; Americans helping other Americans the way Japanese helped other Japanese to gain dominance in key American industries sixty years ago.

"Look at us now. Our artificial Intelligence chip is in every sophisticated computing device in the word. We own Condor Labs’ which means we own the patents for Black Glass, Exline plastics, Psyche Cosmetics, and so on. Books and magazines that used to clutter the environment are now in compact electronic libraries. Our people are the librarians and we sell the library cards. Who does the world have to come to for the micro-telecommunication systems that made hand-held telephones obsolete, replaced portable radios with multi-function transceivers the size of sugar crystals. Who made telewindow computers small enough and cheap enough for everyone to carry in their pockets or wear on their wrists like a wristwatch?"

"Remember wristwatches?" smiled Easton. "When was the last time any of you saw a wristwatch? When was the last time you saw a television set, a DVD player or a VCR? What aspect of modern life can you name that hasn’t been touched by Condor Industries?"

"Yes," said Lynch, "But didn’t we get to keep some of our key industries in the 1970s and '80 by giving away some of our other key industries to the Japanese?"

Sam Jinks pulled a curved ivory pipe out of the air which ignited with his first deep draw. He blew out a fragrant swirl of blue-gray smoke and said, "That was a different era, kid. Condor wasn’t around then. Besides, it was no giveaway. It was a stable cleaning. All we lost were nigger jobs. We’re better off without them."

"The jobs or the niggers?" snickered Attorney General Cobb. Everyone laughed with Cobb. The joke was on the pseudo-aristocratic Sam Jinks, who never caught on that his overuse of the word "nigger" made him sound like a stereotypical redneck. The joke was also on Sanderson, the absent "great, white, toasty hunter" and McBain, the former Negro. They never got it, either.

"Let’s face it," said Becket, "Negroes were brought to this county to perform a certain kind of labor, which is all that most of them can do now. There have always been exceptions like President Leighton and Chief Justice Thomas who have to be encouraged—and we have encouraged them. Hell, the NEZ system is producing some of the finest innovators, entrepreneurs and community leaders in the land. And nobody," he said, glancing at the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Phil McBain, "nobody makes a better American than a former Negro...."

Lynch cut him off. "Hey, fellas. I'm not that ignorant. I study history every day. I watch The Jinks Report on CBI News every night and I listen to Becket on National Public Radio every morning. All I did was ask a simple question."

Piper smiled and addressed the group. "Sometimes," he said, making eye contact with everyone, "it’s good to share these thoughts in an unstructured way before we reach for the agenda. We’ve all gotten sloppy in our thinking about who we are and what we have to do. Now, it’s time to get to work."

Piper stood and bowed his head in prayer. The others remained seated and bowed their heads.

"Dear Lord," said Dean Piper, reverently, "One of your children is lost. We beseech thee to show him the way home. If it is not your will to grant our request for our lost brother, we thank thee all the same for the blessings thou hast bestowed upon us and ask your continued divine guidance in our humble efforts to do your work on Earth. In God we trust and in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen."

All 13 men raised their heads as Piper sat down and pulled a data slate out of the air the way Sam Jinks had pulled out his pipe. He looked it over, gave a satisfied grunt and pointed in rapid, clockwise rotation to each man at the table, leaving an identical slate suspended in space before their eyes.

Most of the men took it in hand but some let it hang where it materialized as they read it over. Easton was one of the later. It was the agenda that he, Peters and McBain had drawn up the day before with Piper.

The first item, as always, was a prayer of thanks to God Almighty from the First Council.

Second, was a recap of the previous meeting and resent developments by himself, the Second Council.

Third, was a brief discussion of old business by all with a special presentation by Sanderson, Peters and the Third Council Phil McBain on the X-channeling of George Calloway, Vivian Foski, Gail Parker and Hector Clay.

Fourth, was a brief discussion of new business by all.

The words on the slate scrolled up and vanished at the top as Easton read them.

"Brothers of The Circle," said Easton, "at our last gathering, we agreed to spend less time on matters that would take care of themselves and more time on matters that demanded attention. I’ll just say very quickly that the Health Department has announced a negative reproduction rate in the least productive and least likely to improve segment of the NEZ population since the last census count. Over the same period, the survival rate among naturally gifted and genetically enhanced NEZ infants is increasing proportionally."

Seeing that the virtual reality eyes of his colleagues were already beginning to glaze over, he skipped what he was going to say about real Americans working their way out of the New Economic Zones that they were born in. He was tired of hearing it himself. "No need to say any more about that," he muttered, before clearing his throat and flashed ahead several paragraphs.

"We received encouraging news from the Justice Department." Easton nodded toward Ron Cobb who nodded back. "The proper concentration of alcohol, tobacco, cocaine, heroin and firearms of all types, particularly our low cost, high quality 7 mm hand guns and automatic assault rifles, are having the effect we anticipated in our overall NEZ population reduction plan. This strategy seems to have led to a spillover problem in real American neighborhoods, but we think we can contain it.

"Altogether, the national NEZ population, with figures adjusted to reflect an increase in the annual involuntary residency rate, is self-destructing at a significantly higher rate than anticipated."

Easton paused. The words on the message slate instantly paused, too. "As an aside," he said, "these techniques were first used on our class D prisoners many years ago. We weren't sure what to expect outside of a tightly controlled prison environment..."

Seeing that no one was interested in his digression, Easton went back to reading from the slate.

"Lethal infections are taking out drug and sex offenders at a projected annual rate of 7%. Homicides and fatal firearms accidents are up 9% from last year. The net population reduction from all causes is greater now than at this time a year ago and the long term trend looks good. All of which suggests that our recent crime control legislation is doing the job it was designed to do.

"The annual state execution figures are down to double digits, reflecting a substantial decline in capital crimes committed outside of the NEZ’s. We’ve cleared the backlog of death row inmates in all but three states. Our combined media campaign to publicize the automatic time scans that now go with capital crimes has been an unqualified success. This is one reason we are confident that we can contain the spillover problems with illicit drugs, and firearms. By this time next year our experts anticipate that violent crimes of all kinds will be half of what they are today. The following year they are expected to be halved again, and so on."

Easton paused solemnly: "Gentlemen, he announced. "We have reached a milestone. The violent crime rate in the real America is now the lowest in history and the lowest of any civilized country in the world."

A spontaneous burst of applause halted Easton's reading of the minutes. It was only proper that such a glorious moment in history for the America that The Circle was founded to serve be marked by a celebration of some sort. Today, applause. Tomorrow, fireworks. 

The applause abated. Easton continued. "Food and money smugglers are still a problem. It’s harder to sell the voters on the necessity of cracking down on them because of living cultural icons like George Calloway who have to be smashed to do it. Nobody likes an iconoclast.

We have had some success in making celebrities out of the exemplary NEZ residents we mentioned in our informal discussion. We’re very, very pleased with how well that is going. The ones who insist on remaining black or Afro or whatever the politically correct name for them is these days, are the most effective spokesmen we have for all of our NEZ policies. We agreed that the more of these Negroes we can showcase in the media, the easier it will be to prosecute the smugglers and the class D offenders who encourage the offenders. We further agreed that our government representatives have done all they can to solve the problem and that it’s up to the media to do the rest."

Easton looked up from his slate. "As distasteful as I know it is for you, I think you should watch The X Channel piece we did on George Calloway. The Hector Clay thing doesn’t seem to be working so far, and we’re having trouble getting the Vivian Foski cuts ready. However, the first Gail Parker piece will go out this week with a high probability of success and the Calloway cuts can’t miss."

Easton rotated the slate in his hand 90 degrees to transform it and all of the others into telewindows with the mention of the word, "Windows."

"Who is Gail Parker?" asked Congressman Bates.

"She’s one of the producers of that telewindow show in Detroit," said, the time track engineer Peters. "She could be big, big, trouble for Condor and the party in the long term. There seems to be a random factor at work that won’t let me see what form it will take. It won't do us any good to nail her on a class D and let her die in prison like all the others if she has the influence that she appears to have. We have discredit her."

Easton looked at the virtual reality T-window with its frozen head-shot of George Calloway, a balding, ruddy-faced, white-bearded man in his mid '70s. Easton pushed the window out to arms length in front of his face and let go of it, leaving it suspended in air. The other men followed suit as Easton looked past Dean Piper to Phil McBain. "Phil?"

"Thanks, Jeff," said McBain, taking over the proceedings. He touched the window. "Enlarge," he said.

All of the windows suspended around the table began to grow. When they had expanded by more than a third, McBain said, "Enough," and the expansion stopped.

"Everybody knows George Calloway," he said, with contempt, "the last champion of forced integration, forced income redistribution, reverse-discrimination, pervert rights and every other half-baked liberal notion you can think of. We have no rational explanation for his popularity among normal, college-educated, middle-income whites, especially among those who have the nerve to call themselves conservatives. There’s a stubborn core of them that we haven’t been able to reach."

The 3-D picture in the window came to life without sound. The view panned back and swung around in back of the man to show him behind the podium of a large lecture hall crammed with young, enthralled, black, white, Asian and Hispanic faces.

"Call it charisma, if you like. Whatever it is, he’s got it, and our every attempt to attack his credibility through prominent spokesmen for the party has done nothing but hurt us. Sam and Corey don’t dare touch him. Griff has to publish his rebuttals to other Americans in order to appear objective. And, you have to hand it to the bastard, he knows how to turn a phrase."

McBain nodded across the table at Peters. "Peters?"

"There was nothing in the public record we could nail him with," said the ever-smirking time tracker. "However, no one is immune to a time scan when you have something solid to key-in on."

The picture in the window changed to what appeared to be a backyard Bar-B-Q scene with three laughing children, a frail, young mother and two doting grandparents. "Before his wife’s death," said Peters, "large sums of money were routinely transferred from their bank account to that of a single mother with three small children who lived with them for a year and a half.

"It seems that Mrs. Calloway found the girl and her kids on the street and took them in. The arrangement was legal back then. The money paid for the children’s primary education, so we couldn’t do anything with that. But it turns out that the woman was involved in illicit drugs and prostitution before the Calloways cleaned her up and cut her loose."

The next scene affected everyone who hadn’t seen it before with genuine shock and revulsion.

"Jesus!" cried Congressman Cooper, turning his head involuntarily to one side.

"Is that for real?" gasped Stewart Lynch, "That little girl; she couldn’t be more than ten...."

"Her little sister and brother, too," said Peters, mercifully blanking out the appalling images in the 13 windows with a wave of his hand. "The woman did sell her son and daughters to adults who liked sex with kids. The scenes you saw were taken from raw time scans with a minimum of editing and, believe me, they weren’t the worst. We couldn’t find anything like that involving George Calloway or his wife, but if they knew about it. They never reported it to the authorities, so they’re just as guilty."

Jeff Easton always marveled at the need of some people to justify acts of necessity with specious argumentation when necessity was justification enough. He listened to Peters’ true story of how the Calloways didn’t stop with the woman Mrs. Calloway found on the street after such unregulated aid to indigent, single mothers was outlawed. They took in many, supplemented their income and cared for their children when they couldn’t do it themselves.

Peters explained how George Calloway would be seen around the world as a man who pays destitute women money to have sex with their pre-pubescent children. The question before the officers of The Circle was how to go about it.

Justice Ashbe suggested that it be presented as a telewindow news story. "Pertinent details can be omitted for the sake of good taste," he said. He got support from Griff and Forrest. Forrest reminded his colleagues of how well the peace movement had used the technique to sell the world on the justice of a communist victory in Indochina, New Economic Zones and all. Although that was the model for much of The Circle’s success, McBain and Easton argued against it.

"It’ll have more impact," said Easton, "if people discover it for themselves. We just have to give the smarter ones out there in Telewindow Land enough to go on."

"Yeah," said McBain, "We can mix it in with the bestiality, the Sado-Masochism and that interracial filth on the X Channel. We’ll have our man make whatever ELFs he has to and run it. Maybe we can do one quick shot of his face and have one of the kids call him ‘Uncle Georgie,’ or something like that."

"I see," said Congressman Bates, after seeing that everyone else had been won over, "Somebody is bound to recognize him and phone in a news tip."

Sam Jinks nodded with his pipe in his mouth and took it out to add, "Corey and I will, of course, come to our colleague’s defense. We’ll express our confidence in his personal integrity however much we may disagree with his social philosophy. We’ll condemn the anonymous tipster’s wild allegations. We’ll demand proof..."

"And," said Corey Becket, "we’ll get it."

"Excellent," said Piper. "Phil, I want you to put your best man on this, if you haven’t done it already. George Calloway is the biggest fish in the sea of opposition opinion and we don’t want him to get off the hook."

"The show cuts are all done," said McBain, "Three putrid hours worth in nine 20-minute segments. Calloway is one big fish and he’s not going to get off the hook, but he’s beginning to look like a minnow next to Hector Clay."

Sam Jinks, the T-window commentator, sprang to his feet and slammed his pipe down on the seemingly solid table top where it was absorbed like a sugar cube in a cup of hot coffee. "I don’t believe it!" he shouted. "You can’t tell me that some well-done toasty that nobody heard of a year ago has that much national influence."

"International influence," said Peters, taking obvious joy in the celebrated pundit’s red-faced fit of jealousy.

"Sit down, Sam," said Piper, motioning to the angry man with his hand while shooting a hard look at Peters to show his displeasure with him.

Jinks sat down. Peters shrugged.

Piper took a deep breath. "I want all of you to take a deep breath," he said.

Some did as he suggested. Some didn’t. The white-haired patriarch of The Circle locked eyes with each of the reluctant men in turn until everyone had done what he’d asked.

"Now," he said, "Let’s consider this problem calmly and see what we can do to keep it from becoming a catastrophe....Peters?"

"Hector Clay could undermine everything we have worked for," said Peters. "Our attempts to X-channel him have fallen flat for reasons we have been unable to pin down and he is physically invulnerable, whether we want to believe it or not. However, what he’s done, he hasn’t been able to do by himself. If we eliminate his supporting cast he won’t be able to do much in the future."

"Hold everything," said Justice Ashbe. "What the hell do you mean by that?"

Easton answered, "It means direct action."

"Oh," said Ashbe, indignantly, "Since when did The Circle get into the assassination business?"

His question was met by twelve incredulous stares. The federal class D felony act, which Ashbe's Supreme court unanimously ruled Constitutional, killed people all the time by locking them in dark cages and letting them starve to death. Could he really see a moral difference between letting people die in prison or New Economic Zones and killing them outright? Apparently he could.

"Well?" he insisted.

No one answered.

Peters took up where Easton left off, addressing the group as a whole. "I’ve compiled the names of all the actors we have to worry about."

"Actors?" asked Lynch.

"Actors," said Peters, "is a time track locator in the Janus program. That's the death card I told you about. Actually, it's a category of potential death cards but we don't have to be picky about it here.  If a tracker looks a few years ahead in a situation like this along any potential time track, he’s going to read tombstones. If he picks the wrong one he’ll be reading his own. I picked the right one."

"Back up," said Becket, "Didn’t you tell us at the start off this meeting that you didn’t turn over the death card because you were afraid of seeing yourself dead?"

"Yes," said Piper.

"No," said Peters, "I said that it wasn’t easy and, because of that, I didn’t dare do it to find out when Sanderson would meet his maker. But I accidentally found out some things about the future when I was following a coincidence cluster around Hector Clay along a time track that couldn’t have developed if I were dead. So, as you suggested, I backed up."

Phil McBain nodded, "Peters called me to ask if I’d heard about the old whigger who dropped dead on the borderline of a NEZ in Detroit. Turns out it hadn’t happened until an hour after he called."

"So what?" said Lynch.

"Tell him, Phil," said Piper, excitedly.

McBain waved the telewindows on and let them illustrate as he talked. "The whigger worked with Hector Clay, Gail Parker and Vivian Foski. He had so much money on him that the cops figured him for a money smuggler until they found out he lived in the NEZ and made enough money on investments to account for every dime. That was the end of the money smuggling investigation but it wasn’t the end of the story. This may be a slight exaggeration, but the police say his house was so crammed with porn that they couldn’t take two steps without tripping over a box of dirty books, magazines or VHS tapes. Remember VHS tapes?"

"VHS tapes?" said Griff. You mean he still watched that stuff on television when he could have seen everything there is in 3-D in a telewindow X channel? Why would he do that?"

"What do you expect?" said McBain. "He was old. He may have been the last surviving Vietnam vet. You know how screwed up those guys were. We can do a lot with that Vietnam vet thing. Peters has a scan of him from the 1970s, raping his next door neighbor’s mother right on the front porch. See the hat? That’s him..."

"No, no," said Peters, "That’s not what happened. It just looks that way."

"That’s all we care about," said McBain. "The problem is, she was colored," he added as though he never had been, "but we can fix that in the control room. We had to redo her voice anyway."

"OK," said Piper. "We’ve got Calloway, the Parker woman and the old man taken care of. Who don’t we have taken care of?"

"Vivian Foski," said Peters, "and an unknown programmer at CBI."

"Mina Foski," said McBain.

"No," said Peters. "It’s somebody else. Vivian Foski’s sister could be useful to us. The only way she could be a problem is if she gets involved with a certain racially mixed family. These people are dangerous."

The scene in the windows was that of a beer-bellied white man in his fifties plunked down in front of a medium-sized telewindow beside his slim, caramel-colored wife. They were holding hands like young lovers on their first big date. Their beautiful, dark-skinned, teenage daughter and their fair-skinned son in his late twenties, could be seen in another room playing a telewindow computer game.

"The Tylers have to go. There’s no other way."

"My God!" cried Justice Ashbe. "We can’t...."

"Shut up," said the man on his right, Attorney General Cobb. "I’m tired of your whining."

"So am I," said Congressman Bates, the man on Ashbe's left.

Ashbe’s eyes shifted back and fourth, then slowly swept the granite faces of the men around the table as the color drained from his face. Jesus, he thought, what have I become?

He didn’t ask himself what he had always been.

"Well," said Piper, dissolving the windows in succession with another wave of his hand, "This has been a good meeting. I really enjoyed our earlier conversation. We need to do more of that. I wish Sanderson was around to take care of that Tyler thing."

Easton’s pulse quickened. "I’ll see to it," he said, as Piper knew he would. Easton had spent several years as a field officer with the Drug Enforcement Administration. Piper had every confidence that he was up to the challenge. Sanderson wasn’t the only thrill junkie in The Circle with a taste for blood.

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