Construction on four new offices zipped along at telewindow station WQST. While they were being equipped with full-sized T-windows linked to the CBI net and a virtual reality conversion grid, Vivian Foski made do with what she had. Maybe her first reaction to Walter Judd would have been different had she seen him in the big new window rather than her puny old one but he didn’t strike her as creepy-looking the way Mina had warned that he would. On the contrary, Vivian could not reconcile the wise, earnest face she was looking at with the pervert she had assumed him to be in light of his involvement with the X Channel.

Walter Judd's face was the face that God himself had shown her in the instant she thought she would die. Now, after having spoken with Walter, she was no longer sure whether he or she was the pervert but she was convinced of his wisdom and earnestness and absolutely sure that she wanted his input on God. She was sure that the God of creation wanted it—that the God of creation was still creating and Walter Judd was a vital part of His plan.

Vivian was going to ask Walter's superiors at Condor if he could work as a consultant to God when his other network duties permitted. She would need their approval and she promised him that she would do all she could to get it. The truth was sacred to Walter, as it had been with Vivian's father. If Walter could do the time traces she proposed on men like Clarence Thomas, regarded as sacred by the American Party elite, he saw no reason not to do them as Walter had proposed on men regarded as sacred by the great masses of the world.

Before her recent encounter with Shag Man, Vivian would not have had the courage to think about it, much less do it. Now, she was determined to follow all paths to enlightenment, including a vision quest to a remote corner of the world. There, she would be cut off from communication with the secular world for months.

After all that had happened, it would be easy to make it appear that she had taken off to Canada until the money smuggling laws had been changed. In her vision of Walter Judd, which could not have been manipulated by a computer, she’d heard what she had taken to be the voice of God, telling her where to go and how long to stay. She hadn’t understood any of it until now. No, Walter Judd was not God. He was a man that only the God of creation could have shown her to put her on the right path.

While Vivian was on her mystic journey in the East, Walter would be doing hard-headed time traces on Moses, Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed to witness the events that gave them their holy names....

A minute after Frost's conference with Vivian, Walter Judd entered his’s virtual reality office a few inches taller and considerably better looking than he was outside of it. It was definitely him, though, the correction of his facial neural disorder making a subtle, but dramatic difference in his appearance.

His assembled associates hid their reaction to his altered appearance as best they could, a task equivalent to ignoring the flawless skin of a man who had been covered with warts the day before.

Walter briefed Frost on his part in the Greenlawn incident and the counter-flashback technology that preserved the anonymity of the dead man in the dark, Soft-glow suit. He had believed that the mystery man was Jeff Easton and told the man who replaced him why he thought so. It took little discussion to bring everyone to the same conclusion.

"We have to move quickly," said Frost. "The ring guys have ripped their pants good and we have to turn’em around for the whole fucking world to see while their asses are still hanging out. Are you with me?" he added melodramatically.

Walter and Mina nodded gravely. Margaret gave him one of her looks, the one that asked, what kind of a stupid question is that?

Frost was taken aback, but only fleetingly. A slow smile crept across his lips. "I’m glad you’re not with them," he said, dropping the unnecessary theatrics. "Some of the other DM’s have been trying to crack the system for years. We’ve been able to do some good here and there when The Circle didn’t think it mattered, but we haven’t been able to communicate freely with one another 'till now."

"The Circle?" said Margaret, with Mina and Walter leaning an ear to the same words.

"The ring guys," said Frost. "One of them has apparently defected to us, a time tracker named Peters. Ever hear of’em?"

"I have," said Walter, "He did the tracking for the X Channel before Easton turned it over to me."

Frost squinted, "I thought you were a programmer," he said to Walter, "And what do you know about the X Channel?"

"I was a tracker before I was a programmer. Peters did some tracking. A guy named Sanderson did most of it, though. McBain did most of the programming before the rings decided it was beneath them to involve themselves directly in the ‘smut’ business."

"Why did they pick you?" asked Mina.

"They work for the Party. The X Channel was their way of fighting fire with fire, only they weren’t good at it. You have to love unconventional erotic art and respect the maturity and intelligence of your audience to do it right. They didn’t. It was a distasteful means to an end for them and one of the things they wanted to put an end to when it served its purpose."

"You didn’t answer her question," said Frost, sneering at Walter’s defense of pornography the way a normal, decent man was expected to. Deriding those who condoned any form of sex that didn’t fit the Piper vision of correctness was a safe and easy way to affirm one’s good standing in most groups. One glance at Margaret and Mina told him that he might have been in the wrong group. If anyone was being looked at with disfavor, it was Frost.

Without the judgment in his tone and manner he repeated Margaret’s question. "Why did they pick you for the X Channel?"

Walter hesitated, wondering whether to tell the others as much as he had told Vivian. He decided that sooner or later he would have to, and now was as good a time as any. "Considering my technical background," he said "and ‘lack of morals,’ as they saw it, they figured I was the best man for the job. They let me get away with selling my programs through their Ballot Channel to see what I could do. They tried out hundreds of people that way. I should have known I was being set up when I got into the confidential exchange net so easily but I was making too many friends, too much money and having too good a time.

"Easton arranged to have me arrested on an obscenity charge. Then he offered me the choice of working the X Channel for the Party or living out the rest of my life on a tether in a disposal zone. Of course, nowadays they’re trying to get men like me ‘Gidarbed,’ but that’s another story."

"Let’s get something straight," said Margaret, ignoring his reference the surgical procedure named after its leading proponent, Dr. Estelle Gidarb. "You can’t blame the ring guys or the Party for the laws that got you arrested. They’ve been in place for three generations."

Walter looked at her and nodded, "Yes," he said, "I know. People in power have regarded some things they’ve seen, heard or imagined about sex as too awful for anybody else to see, hear or talk about long before there was an American Party. If the subject matter didn’t conform to some government official’s idea of community standards it was against the law. Since unconventional erotica, by its very nature, appealed to a small minority of people, most people thought that was a reasonable application of law. Do you think Gidarbing would have caught on so fast if it didn’t have such a popular advocate and target such a small, despised minority?

Walter waited for an answer. The long dead silence was answer enough.

"Sexual conformity is one of the foundation stones that the Party was built on, right down there next to racial conformity and religious conformity. These are our basic drives, our skin and bones, our souls.

"People like me are the niggers and the heretics of sexual ideation. That makes the people who deride us and persecute us feel like they’re not only superior to us for what we are but for anything they do to us for being different. Why not Gidarb a smut peddler or a man who gets too much pleasure out of looking at it? What does a man like that need with his sex organs anyway? And who in his right mind would defend him? There’d be nothing to gain and everything—everything to lose."

Walter had crafted and practiced most of those lines for weeks hoping they would impress Margaret when he got the chance to use them. They did. Walter was as mindful of the eyes and ears of history as other time track engineers. This, he knew, was an historic occasion and he was speaking as much to posterity as he was to Margaret, Mina and Frost.

Frost cleared his throat. "How many others are involved in this X Channel?" he asked.

"About two dozen, I’d say. They’re nothing to worry about, though. With everything the ring guys had on me and four of their own to watch me, they didn’t think twice about handing me the keys to the whole operation. Without Easton, Sanderson, Peters or McBain to give the orders and sign the authorizations the others can’t even turn on their machines."

"Wow," said Frost, feeling suddenly naked and vulnerable in the presence of Walter Judd. "What a lucky break for us. Do you think Easton was behind the X Channel?"

"You mean the head of it?"

"Yeah."

"No," said Walter, puzzled by the question since the answer was self-evident.

"Is it somebody in the government?"

This time Margaret was only one of three to give Frost "the look."

"...Not Dean Piper. I know he wears one of those rings but—Oh, man. Then Peters was telling the truth."

"Peters is a slippery son of a bitch," said Walter, "but it looks like his survival instincts are reliable enough if he came over to us. Did he tell you about the Janus program?"

"Yes," said Frost, "That was one  reason I didn’t trust him. It's like some guy telling you that he can predict the future by reading tealeaves.

Walter shrugged. "The Janus program works," he said authoritatively," but it never tells you everything you need to know to make wise decisions."

Frost grunted. "Then what good is it?"

"Walter smiled. "Good question."

When Walter didn't elaborate Frost looked nervously at his watch. "I have to beam out of here. Tomorrow I’m going to get all of us together, including Peters, and bring everybody up to speed. My secretary will contact yours within the hour with the time and place. Whatever you do, be there."

Frost’s virtual reality persona dissolved, taking his virtual reality office with him, to be replaced by Margaret’s. After a moment of adjustment to the abrupt change in environment, Mina nodded so-long to Margaret and Walter but Margaret motioned for her to wait. "Remember," she said, "Dean is flying into City Airport this morning. Better warn Vivian and Heck to steer clear until we can find out what he’s up to."

"I did," said Mina, with the tombstone-cold look of an assassin. "A limo will be there to pick him up at 10." She and Margaret exchanged nods and Mina's persona dissolved.

Margaret turned to Walter. "Do you mind if the two of us beam into another VRS?" she asked.

The digital body of Walter Judd didn’t blush. Had it been his real body or even a regular VRP Margaret was sure that it would have, though it wasn’t her aim to make him uncomfortable. "Please," she said, "I have to talk to you in private."

"Okay," he said, shyly, "Where would you like to go?"

"My place," she said, looking Walter straight in the eye.

His face didn’t mirror his chagrin, but his voice did. "What? I don’t...I mean they made me...Oh shit. I’m sorry. I...I...How did you know?"

"I know," said Margaret, "that you’ve had Mina under flashback surveillance for some time and it would be foolish of me to think that you haven’t been watching me, too."

"I...But..."

"Walter," You know every freaky thing there is to know about me. Don’t you think it’s fair that I get to share some of your secrets? After all," she said with a forgiving smile, "us perverts have to stick together."

Walter’s struggle with the lie he wanted to tell ended when he saw that Margaret was never going to buy it. Moreover, how could he not be honest with her when she had already pardoned him? "OK," he said, "... Key-in program, Walter/Margaret 1."

Margaret had beamed from one virtual reality setting to another many times before. She thought she knew what to expect. She was wrong. As quickly as she would have switched channels on a T-window monitor she was out of what she knew to be an artificial company office and into what she would have sworn was her own entertainment room.

She stood on her own white shag carpet next to her own, Mediterranean furniture, erotic marble sculptures, grand piano and wall to wall telewindow. The 18^th green of the Farmington Hills Country Club, as it appeared in the window, was her own creation. Even her artificial body felt more like her own, a second body no more foreign to her than her left hand.

She lifted both hands, one at a time, extending them in front of her eyes and wiggling each finger with little more than the exercise of will that moved her real ones. She turned her hands from palm to back to palm again then turned her head toward the handsome Walter Judd standing by her side. "You gave me another VRP," she said.

"Yes," said Walter. "Your body scan signature has to be tied into my program with a compatible VRP to operate as freely as I do."

"Do you want me to operate as freely as you do?"

"Ye...Yes. Of course."

"Then drop the false face."

Walter took a step back, "No!"

"Just stop whatever it is you’re doing to hide your emotions. I really fucking hate that!"

The Walter Judd she entered this convincingly familiar setting with stood unchanged for a long moment. Then his apparent substance broke up into a million tiny bits and fizzed for another long moment. His solid-looking form reappeared with as bad a case of the jitters as Margaret had ever seen.

"Walter, what are you so afraid of?"

"You."

"You don’t have to...Walter, I’m sorry for the way I’ve treated you all these years."

"Don’t...don’t be sorry. I understand. I just...I never..."

Margaret thought that a change of tact was in order. "You and Leo said something about a program that tells the future. Does that mean there is a future—one future?"

"It depends on who you’re looking at and what you’re looking for. Not everybody has the same future."

Margaret cocked her head to one side. Then she smiled. "What about Mina and Rick?" she said, trying to create an atmosphere of happy anticipation.

Walter hadn’t meant to give her the impression that he was as expert at working with Janus as he was with making pornographic ELFs. With no knowledge of what a nexus was, much less the various possibilities leading away from one, he had, in fact, learned only enough to be wrong as often as right. But that, too, was something he had yet to learn. He knew only, and only on a nonverbal level, that he would do anything to keep that light of respect for him in Margaret's eyes from dimming.

"They love each other as much as I—They love each other. But they’ll never live together. They’ll never even make love."

"What? I can’t believe that."

This time Margaret’s gut level feeling was as right as it usually was. But she bowed to what she thought was the voice of authority as Walter bowed to the temptation to appear more authoritative than he was.

"The thing is," he said, "we’re not the only ones with secrets. Their secrets are standing in the way of them getting married and living happily ever after. Their only real problem is fear. If she could tell him hers, he’d love her all the more for trusting him with it. If he could tell her his, he’d know that he was worried for nothing."

"What would Rick have to worry about with Mina?" asked Margaret, falsely assuming that she knew Mina’s secret.

"Well, men have a lot of anxieties about their equipment."

"You mean their dicks."

"With some women you can’t use a word like that—or they’ll make you pay for it. With other women, you’ll pay for it if you don’t. Then it’s the size thing. If it’s not bigger than average, some women are going to make you pay for that. If it’s too big, you won’t get any play without divine intervention unless you advertise for a woman who really wants one. Of course that kind of advertising is illegal now, so most guys with those donkey dongs that are supposed to be so popular are holding their own."

Margaret smiled. "Are you saying, Rick Tyler has a real big dick."

"That has nothing to do with it. He’s self-conscious about not being clipped."

"Why?," asked Margaret as one of a generation of women who, in general, preferred her men as nature made them, though her own feelings about it changed from man to man and mood to mood.

"Circumcision wasn’t in vogue when Rick was born. The prevailing idea among mothers was that it was a form of sexual mutilation. But the prevailing notion among their daughters is that an uncircumcised man is not clean—and they make you pay for it. It has caused Rick as much real grief as Mina thinks her little problem would cause her if he found out about it."

Margaret, sighed ruefully, thinking not only of her young friend’s sad fate, but of all the men she had punished for their imperfections in her eyes with hurtful words and looks and deeds. Had Walter tried to approach her as a woman outside of this make-believe environment she would have punished him for his smile.

Walter read her silence only as concern about Mina and Rick. "They’ll be happy enough with the lives they choose," he said. "Wish I could be that sure about Vivian and Heck."

"What about them, Walter?" What should I know?"

"Remember Shag man?"

"Of course."

"Well, Heck had a tough choice to make between him and Vivian."

"What? No. Don’t explain. I don’t want to know."

Walter didn’t know that the time track he selected showed a strain in their relationship where none existed because of something that might have happened but didn’t; a choice of words between, "I promise I’ll kill you if you don’t shoot" and, "I promise I’ll kill you if you don’t kill her." Like most happy couples they were not 100% compatible but close enough and considerate enough to adjust, Vivian being a moderately orgasmic Bridget Piper, Hector being more adventurous but not by much. Certainly not as much as Walter’s ELF of him on the X Channel.

Walter had designed his Hector Clay ELF to be most pleasing to Margaret without being offensive to most other women. He wondered if he had been right in telling Vivian what he’d done, without the details, of course.

Walter didn’t know that Hector’s decision had set up a different time track than the one he thought was the only possible future. Vivian would be going away, but only for a long vacation from the civilized world. Had Walter picked a track set up by a decision Vivian didn’t make to dump Hector as a lover, Walter and Vivian would have been sharing this VRS. Margaret would have contented herself with another woman and a less inhibited Hector Clay. None of which mattered to the nexus set up by Vivian’s decision to bring Walter Judd to God.

Margaret changed tact once more, catching his eyes with hers again and again in a clearly flirtatious way as he averted them until his shyness overcame him and he turned his back.

"Please don’t tease me like that," he said.

Margaret blanched. "Is that what you think I was doing? Walter, look at me."

"No."

"Walter?"

Without facing her, he squared his shoulders and spoke as though he was facing her, "Look, Ms. St. Clair, I’m sorry for invading your privacy the way I did and I don’t blame you for wanting to humiliate me. I was—"

"You were doing what you were ordered to do," offered Margaret, generously."

"That’s what I said about Jeff Easton, remember?"

"Walter, you’re being too hard on yourself. Come on, turn around...Look at me. Please?"

Haltingly, he did as she asked with stooped shoulders and lowered eyes.

Margaret did her best to offer him a tender expression without having him falsely interpret it as pity. "I told Leo Frost that you were quite a guy. I meant it."

He looked up at her in astonishment, "You didn’t," he said. But her eyes said that she did.

Walter felt a rush of pleasure so intense and so different from anything he had experienced before that it frightened him. Was that admiration in her eyes? For him, Walter Judd? Was it the real Walter Judd she was seeing through his artificial body? Yes! It was!

For the last 20 years of Walter's life, Elation, had been the name of an illicit drug, the effects of which he could not imagine being so wonderful as to make someone die for it. No longer would it be necessary for him to imagine anything like that. For every year of his life to come, it would be this feeling in this setting with Margaret St. Clair.

"How do they work?" asked Margaret.

"What?"

"These bodies. How do you make them change without beaming out?"

Walter blinked. No one had ever asked him that question before. "Ah..."

His shyness was showing again.

"Come on, Walter, spit it out. What do I have to do?"

"Cross your fingers and make a wish?"

"You’re kidding," laughed Margaret.

Walter smiled weakly, "You have to do something to run the program without triggering it by accident. It’s my program. I can run it any way I want."

Margaret laughed again. Walter laughed with her. It was the first time in all of his 38 years that he’d ever laughed like this with a real woman. He felt so good, so free, so... happy? Yes, happiness, that’s what it was.

"I wish," said Margaret, with crossed fingers, "that we were both naked."

Nothing happened.

"You can’t make wishes for both of us," said Walter, his pulse quickening.

"Okay," said Margaret, closing her eyes this time as she crossed her fingers, "I wish I were naked." Opening her eyes, she felt the clothes leave her body like flash paper touched by a flame. She saw that her wish had come true—her first wish. She and Walter were nude.

Margaret's body was as it had been before she entered the VRS, fairly well molded, but not spectacular, with a little more extra padding here and there than the average swimsuit model. Walter’s nude body, on the other hand, was magnificent. That is, it was the kind of body she found most attractive in a man, with the possible exception of Hector Clay’s. There was, however, one long, fat, rigid portion of Walter’s anatomy that was, except for the color, identical to Hector Clay’s.

Margaret beamed with joy, knowing that he had configured his body to be what she wanted it to be. "Oh Walter," she cooed, watching him blush furiously but hold his ground with a silly grin on his face that reminded her of her first virgin lover. Walter had made himself the man of her dreams. She thought it only fair to make herself the woman of his dreams. She also thought that it might be fun.

She crossed her fingers, closed her eyes and cupped her breasts, picturing Beth, her secretary. "I wish I had bigger tits," she said. No sooner had she uttered the words than she felt her breasts begin to grow. "Yeee!" she squealed, "It feels like they’re really growing. They grew larger and heavier in her hands until they pressed together and the weight of them pulled insistently at her upper chest. "That’s big enough," she breathed with a giggle.

She opened her eyes and gasped, at the incredible dimensions she had given herself. "Oh, my! This is incredible!"

"You’re the one that’s incredible, Margaret."

Margaret. He called her Margaret. She liked it. When she was naked in front of someone who excited her, there were other names she liked to be called even more.

She grinned wickedly at her new lover, "I’m nothing but a common slut," she said, her long nipples stiff and swollen.

Walter was quick to catch on to her game, having seen it many times before. "Yes," he said, knowing how rare and wonderful such adventurous, uninhibited creatures were, "You’re nothing but a common slut."

"I want you to do something nasty to me," said Margaret, stepping closer and closer to Walter until one hand touched his solid, heaving chest and the other encircled another solid body part. She loved the feel of that warm, pulsing thing in her fist. She could never have moved with this much ease in a conventional virtual reality persona which always felt like something she was operating by remote control. This was different. This was her, mammoth breasts and all. And this wonderful plaything in her hand was his.

"You know what I want," she whispered, "Can you do that in here without messing up your office?"

Walter groaned as she sank to her knees in front of him. "Yes," he breathed, "We can do anything we want in here."

His head was spinning, his heart thumping like a timpani drum on maximum overdrive. He was doing this for her. That was not to say that it wouldn’t please him to please her in this peculiar way that most people wouldn’t even think of as sex. But afterward, he knew that she was going to do something for him that could be thought of only as sex. She was going to relieve him of his virginity....

Piper’s limousine was waiting for him at Detroit’s City Airport when his private jet arrived from Aspen to take him to Auburn Hills. The driver, a tall, obsequious, light-skinned Negro, opened the rear door for him. Piper got in, sat down, and opened his laptop in one continuous motion.

His first order of business, as always, was to call his wife Bridget. He pressed the 1 key on the keyboard and watched the telewindow in the lid open to the worried face of an attractive older woman.

"Oh, Dean," she said before he could say anything, "I wish you hadn’t gone to that filthy city."

Piper chuckled, "Now, now sweetheart. Let’s not start in with that again. Auburn Hills is not Detroit any more than Aspen is Denver."

"But that’s where you are now isn’t it?"

"I’m at the airport. I’ll be in the Condor Tower in less than twenty minutes."

"Darling, please come back. Something terrible is going to happen if you don’t."

"That dream again, the one you won’t share with me?"

"Don’t laugh. It was so—so real."

"Not everything that seems real is real. That’s why I had to come, don’t you understand?"

"How can I? You say it involves the McBains but you won’t say what. They were my friends, too, you know. I’ve lost as much sleep over what happened to them as you have. But they’re gone, darling. They are gone. I don’t even see what anything or anybody in Detroit has to do with it."

"You would, if you knew Walter Judd."

"Who?"

"A little slimeball with more brains and more guts than anybody gave him credit for. Too many things were happening that didn’t fit together until we ran everything we had through the computer and came up with a slew of arrows pointing straight at him."

"That still doesn’t justify flying all the way to Detroit when you could have gone into your study and been anywhere you wanted to be."

"Honey, that’s what—Okay, I’ll tell you...I found out that a man in our organization is responsible for that filth on the X Channel. One of the ways he’s been able to get away with it is by forging the body scan signatures that our top team use to enter the company’s virtual reality net. I have to put a stop to it in person to eliminate any question about who gave the order before the FBI gets involved."

"The FBI? But that would mean a scandal."

"Yes. The biggest scandal since Monica Lewinsky. It could give all of Condor Industries a bad name if I don’t get out front on this thing. But it’s also an opportunity to put an end to pornography in this country forever."

Pornography was a word that Bridget understood. The very mention of it was an intolerable assault on her sensibilities that invariably made her ill and angry at the same time. The Gidarb phenomenon had been a pleasing sign of hope that America was waking up to the evil thing she knew pornography to be. Now her husband was telling her that its extinction was at hand. She didn’t know it, but the feeling she had at that moment was identical to the one Walter Judd had so recently experienced as "Elation."

"I love you," said Bridget.

"I love you," said Dean. "Kiss the grandchildren for me. I’ll be home before dark." He blew her a kiss and blinked out.

Piper closed the laptop and sat it on the floor. For a while it looked as though The Circle was on its last leg. But now that they knew where the problem was they would be up and running again quite soon. That idiot, Cobb, was due for a brain hemorrhage within the hour. Twelve good men had been identified who could replace him. All of the weak links in The Circle were being replaced. A new beginning was at hand. Piper closed his eyes and relaxed.

Fifteen minutes later, Shag Man peeked at the white-haired aristocrat in the back seat of his stretched, black Lexus, wondering when he would realize that they were going the wrong way.

"Nice weather we’re having," he said.

Piper opened his eyes. "I beg your pardon?"

"Just making conversation, man. We can talk about something else if you want."

"No thank you...Hey!"

The car was leaving the freeway on an up-ramp that Piper knew at once was dangerously out of bounds.

"This is insane. I don’t know who you are or what you think you’re doing but you’d better turn this car around."

"You ever watch God?" asked Shag Man.

Piper fumed, "You are insane!"

Shag Man scratched the back of his ear with the barrel of a gun pointed at his passenger. "Could be," he said, "Although I hardly see how that improves your situation."

Piper forced himself to calm down. He was, after all, invulnerable. Regardless of this underdone toastie’s best laid plans, there was no way he could kill him. Still, the idea of being shot for attempting a distress call and perhaps crippled or in pain for life removed that notion from his list of viable options. His best protection lay with his wits.

"Are you a friend of Hector Clay?" he asked.

"I am Hector Clay. We discussed your case thoroughly..."

Piper closed his eyes. I am? We discussed? Good Lord!

"We decided that our lives must have been inextricably entwined and permitted to continue past any logical point of termination for a reason. We ran everything we had through the computer, so to speak, and came up with a slew of arrows all pointing to Condor Industries’ CEO, advisor to Presidents and exclusive manufacturer of the ubiquitous Piper AI chip. That’s you, buddy. We knew you had to come to town sooner or later. Never figured it would be this soon."

Piper wasn’t listening. He was looking. He saw a street sign that read, "Livernois," as the limo turned off of the main street and headed down a trashy side-street with no name. On each side of the street were high, cyclone fences blocking off most of the alleyways. They reached an alley that wasn’t blocked and turned into it.

Piper steeled himself against the abuse he might have to endure before this trial was over. He hadn’t built an industry and created The Circle to insure the survival of the American Party by being a weakling. Whatever awaited him here, his strength and courage would see him through and be recorded on flashback for the world to see—with, perhaps, some minor editing here and there. He would emerge stronger than ever.

The future. That’s what he had to focus on. The future.

"You can’t intimidate me," he said defiantly. "You’re going to die for this. And whatever you dish out I can take."

"Roger dat," said Shag Man.

The car rolled to a stop. Shag Man lowered the rear window next to his distinguished passenger and pointed to someone he wanted him to meet, a smiling black brute named Horse.

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