Distraction - Bruce Sterling [197]
So they were stymied. It always boiled down to money. They just didn’t have any. They had proved that the business of science could run on sheer charisma for a while, a life powered by sheer sense of wonder, like some endless pledge drive. But people were still people; they ran out of charisma, and the sense of wonder ate its young. The need for money was always serious, and always there.
Tempers frayed. Despite the utter harmlessness of the federal SO/LIC troops, Huey correctly took their presence on the border of Louisiana as a menacing provocation. He unleashed a barrage of hysterical propaganda, including the bizarre, and documented, allegation that the President was a long-time Dutch agent. As Governor, and as a timber businessman, the President had had extensive dealings with the Dutch, during happier times. Huey’s oppo-research people had compiled painstaking dossiers to this effect.
It didn’t matter. Only a schizoid with a case of bicameral consciousness could seriously contend that the President was a Dutch agent, when the President had just declared War on Holland. When the U.S. Navy was steaming for Amsterdam. When the Dutch were screaming for help, and getting none.
This spy allegation not only went nowhere, it convinced many former fence-sitters that Huey had utterly lost his mind. Huey was dangerous, and had to be pried from public office at all costs. And yet Huey held on, publicly drilling his state militia, conducting purges of his faltering police, swearing vengeance on a world of hypocrites and liars.
Oscar and Greta had reached the end of their rope. They began to argue seriously and publicly. They had had tiffs before, spats before, little misunderstandings; but after so many hours, days, weeks of difficult administration work, they began to have bruising public combats over the future of the lab, over the meaning of their effort.
The end of the Emergency and the beginning of the War necessitated the creation of yet another media environment. Oscar shut down the public loudspeakers that monitored Emergency Committee discussions. Wartime was about loose lips sinking ships, about blood, sweat, toil, and tears. It was time to stop propagandizing the people of the Collaboratory. They already knew where they stood and what was at stake. Now they had to defend what they had built; they should be in the trenches with shovels, they should be singing marching songs.
And yet they could do no such thing. They could only wait. The situation was out of their hands. They were no longer masters of their own destiny, they no longer held the initiative. The real struggle was taking place in Washington, in The Hague, in a flotilla of Navy ships somberly crossing the storm-tossed Atlantic, about as slowly as was physically possible. The nation was at War.
No sooner had they resigned themselves to their own irrelevance than the situation took a lethal head spin. The leader of the CDIA arrived in Buna. He was a Moderator from Colorado named Field Marshal Munchy Menlo. Munchy Menlo’s original name was Gutierrez; in his distant youth, he had been involved in some nasty anti-insurgency shoot-’em-ups in Colombia and Peru. Munchy Menlo had become something of a lost soul in civilian life; he’d had drinking problems, he had failed at running a grocery. Eventually he’d drifted off the edge of the earth into Moderator life, where he had done very well for himself.
Field Marshal Menlo—he boldly insisted on retaining his “road name”—was a creature of a different military order than any Oscar had met before. He was plainspoken, bearded, and reticent, modest in his manner. He radiated a certain magnetism peculiar to men who had personally killed a lot of people.
With