television set, pushing buttons, but getting only scrambled, frantic pixels whirling on his screen.
A deep, masculine voice said, “Tired of losing your net service? Unable to log onto the web because your server can’t get its act together?”
The old man clicked the remote a couple more times, then shook his head and tossed the control onto a scratched table next to the worn and scuffed leather recliner.
A big, happy-looking German shepherd padded over to the old man. In his mouth, the dog held another remote, a silvery, glittering, truncated cone-shaped device. The old man looked at the dog, who dropped the device into his lap and gave him a dog smile.
“What’s this, boy?” the old man said.
The dog gave one sharp bark.
The old man picked up the remote.
The opening notes for Strauss’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra” began playing quietly in the background.
A deep voice said, “We at CyberNation understand your frustration. And we have a guarantee — if you are ever kept off the net for more than an hour on a CyberNation server, we’ll not only give you your money back for that entire month, we’ll give you your next month of service absolutely free.”
The music grew louder.
The old man looked at the dog and raised one eyebrow in question. The dog barked once, and it was obvious what he was saying. “Go for it!”
“At CyberNation, we are always here for you, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. You have our word on that, and we put our money where our mouth is.”
The old man pointed the remote at his television set.
The music’s volume increased so that it rumbled over the old man and dog as if a full symphony orchestra was in the next room.
The set morphed, changed into a giant window that expanded to cover the entire wall. People stepped out and into the shabby living room. There was an Indian holy man in a turban and long flowing white robe; a black woman in a grass skirt, bare from the waist up; a cowboy; an Arctic explorer; a big-game hunter. In addition, a rhino, an ostrich, and a small dinosaur stepped from the window into the suddenly expanded living room. All of them seemed to get along famously.
The music reached its peak, thundering Strauss, horns blasting their dramatic sting.
“Anywhere, anytime, any
The old man and dog both smiled as the music faded.
“What do you think?” Chance said.
Roberto said, “An old man and a dog?”
“Not everybody goes for the sex ads,” she said. “Dogs are always good. You know the old story about the book title?”
’Berto shook his head.
“Well, the theory is, people like dogs. They also like Abraham Lincoln and they like their doctors, for the most part. So a book title that would guarantee instant sales would be
’Berto smiled.
“It’s all about demographics. We catch a lot of the young male computer geeks with the sex come-ons. But we also have specific ads tailored for generation Xers, aging baby boomers turning into AARPers, young mothers, as many large groups as we can identify and niche-market to. Net, TV, radio, print ads, movie trailers, billboards, bus benches, sports sponsorships — everything from T-shirts to signs on racing cars — high school cable ed, you name it. Since the Blue Whale scramble, we’ve picked up eighty-eight thousand new subscribers on the U.S. West Coast alone.”
“That’s good, right?”
“Not as good as we’d hoped. The Net Force ops got in and patched things up faster than we expected. We should have gotten twice that many new linkers.”
He shrugged again. “So?”
“Truth is, things aren’t moving along as quickly as we want. We are falling short of our projections. It looks as if we are going to have to… step things up.”
“More ads? More software scrambles?”
She looked at him. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. “Don’t pull my chain, Roberto.”
He chuckled. “You have a new piercing you haven’t told me about, Missy?”
“Screw you.”
“I’m ready when you are.”
She smiled. Well. He had his charms, even when he played at being duller than he was…
Dressed in Net Force sweats and cross-trainers, John Howard stood under one of the chinning bars at the obstacle course, rotating his head slowly to stretch the muscles of his neck. Physical training was another thing he’d slacked off on during his short-lived retirement. Not that he’d stopped completely — he’d kept up morning calisthenics, and he still hit the weights down in the basement a couple times a week, plus he jogged most days for a few miles; still, he hadn’t run the course in almost a month, and normally he’d do it at least twice a week.
Probably he’d lost a couple of steps, but not that much.
He jumped up, caught the steel bar, palms forward and slightly wider than his shoulders, and started doing chins. He knew after the first couple that his usual twelve or fifteen routine was out of the question. By the fifth one, he was straining, and it was all he could do to gut out ten.
He was glad Julio Fernandez was not here to see this. If he had been, Howard would have had to find three or four more reps somewhere, and like as not, he’d have pulled a muscle doing ’em.
He let himself hang for a few seconds after the tenth rep, to stretch out his lats, then dropped to the ground, disgusted with himself. Who was it — Gertrude Stein? — who’d said that after you hit forty it’s all patch, patch, patch?
Didn’t matter who said it, it was sure true. On the one hand, he still felt like a kid of nineteen. Yeah, his hairline showed a little more face than it used to and there were little tufts of gray at the temples. But there weren’t too many wrinkles, and his general shape and weight wasn’t that different from twenty, twenty-five years ago. If anything, he’d put on some muscle since his first hitch in the regular army. But the days of partying all night and then working a full day were gone. The occasional strain or bruise took longer to heal, and if he didn’t stretch and warm up before he started working out hard, he got a lot more strains and bruises than he had as a kid. He thought he’d come to terms with getting older and slowing down, but he realized that didn’t mean he could slack off. He wasn’t going to get any younger or stronger, but if he didn’t stay on top of things, he was going to get older and weaker a lot sooner. A layoff like this just pointed out what he knew was so — you might not be able to win in the end, but you were going to get there quicker if you didn’t resist it every step of the way.
He took several deep breaths and looked at the obstacle course. He had his stopwatch, an old mechanical sweep-hand job he’d picked up from a Russian surplus place. Like that shotgun he’d given the commander, the Russians still did a lot of stuff the old-fashioned way. Not necessarily because of any desire for quality, but because they didn’t have the technology to do it on the cheap. You could get a windup pocket- or stopwatch with an eighteen-jeweled movement for less than fifty bucks; a shotgun that was sturdy and well-made for maybe three, four hundred. Try that in the U.S. If you could even find such things, they’d cost an awful lot more.
He decided to skip the stopwatch and just run the course. He didn’t really want to know how much he’d slowed down. He’d be happy just to get through without breaking something.
He set himself, and got ready to go. He was a religious man, he believed in God, and he’d been right with Jesus for a long time. He believed he would be admitted to the Kingdom of Heaven if he led a righteous life and he worked at it. But like the old joke his father used to tell, he wasn’t ready to go
