Neal Stephenson - Interface

Al, and the rest of the minders, left the room and closed the door.

They were still standing there, nervously, a minute later, when Louella stuck her head out the door. "I knew it!" she said. "You guys are all perverts. Get back to your rooms!"

Al posted one of his men by the elevators, just down the hall, and then the rest of the men retreated to their rooms, leaving the doors open.

A minute later, the guard by the elevators heard the little bell chime. The down arrow lit up. The elevator door opened to reveal a pair of brawny men, both wearing gas masks and ear protectors, who were just in the perfectly timed act of bursting out the doors; one of them grabbed the guard by the collar and jammed a thick wad of cloth over his mouth as the other reached out with a small but dense blunt object and took it upside of his head.

Louella emerged from Freel's room, stark naked, pursued closely by Freel himself. She was laughing and screaming; he was shouting, "You dirty bitch! Get back here!"

Louella made for the elevator. She reached it, and hit the lobby button, just as Al and the rest of Freel's guards were emerging into the corridor. They saw nothing but Jeremiah Freel diving into the elevator, and two large, unfamiliar men strewing stun grenades up and down the length of the hallway.

Twenty seconds later, staff and guests in the lobby were treated to the sight of Louella, a former Miss April, sprinting out of the elevator doors stark naked, still laughing and giggling, and running toward the front entrance, pursued the entire way by an old man with his erect penis sticking out of his fly.

A doorman, reflexes honed by years of practice, cleared the way. Louella ran through the open door, into the horseshoe drive, and jumped into the back of a windowless van. The door slammed shut, the van burned rubber and shot forward out of the drive, revealing something that had been hiding on the other side of it: Cyrus Rutherford Ogle, flanked by two dozen TV cameramen and still photographers, all of whom were busily recording the quickly changing facial expressions of Jeremiah Freel, and his vanishing penis.

"Come back to lose another election, Jeremiah?" Ogle said.

Freel's mouth dropped open and his nose wrinkled into a snarl. His eyes jumped back and forth between Ogle and the cameraman.

Then he charged.

Cy Ogle stood his ground, hands in the pockets of his trench coat.

Freel dove the last six feet, wrapped his arms around Ogle's thighs, and bent his head back, mouth open to bite into Ogle's genitals.

Ogle took his hand from his pocket, holding a small cylindrical object. His index finger twitched and fired a long stream of Mace directly into Freel's open mouth. Freel went into violent convul­sions and fell to the horseshoe drive, thrashing, foaming, and howling like a wounded animal.

"Welcome to public relations hell," Ogle said, and then climbed into a waiting car. As it drove away, he was able to look back and watch Freel convulsing on the drive in front of the hotel, surrounded now by photographers and cameramen who were all aiming their lenses downward.

The final, and by far the most important, debate of the presidential campaign was held on the evening of Friday, November 1, four days before Election Day, in a lecture hall at Columbia University. The participants were the President of the United States, William Anthony Cozzano and Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane. The moderator was the president of the hosting univer­sity. He fielded questions among the three presidential candidates and a panel of four journalists, who were all of the first rank.

All three of the candidates had spent the last couple of days mostly in seclusion, honing their skills in mock debates. McLane and the President had both brought in mimics to simulate the other two candidates, and spent hours in exhausting practice sessions, during which simulated journalists would throw out the most difficult, vicious, twisted questions imaginable.

The advance people had been at the auditorium for a solid day. Lecterns had to be arranged on the stage. Lights had to be focused and adjusted. Camera placement had to be worked out. All of these were subject to intensive negotiation. A wrongly placed spotlight in '84 had emphasized the bags under Mondale's eyes and made him look older than Reagan. The height of each lectern had to be adjusted relative to the height of the candidate. The color of the set and the color of the lights affected what kind of suits would look best; standins had to be brought onstage, wearing different suits, in order to decide which looked best. Makeup had to be tried out; makeup artists had to have rooms in which to work, and no one candidate's could be bigger, better equipped, or closer to the stage than any other's.

Though an audience was going to be present in the hall, its only real function was to provide a bit of ambient noise: applause (to be kept under control as much as possible) and possibly the occasional outburst of laughter, though using humor in these circumstances was probably too risky to be considered. In the current political climate, humor was a zero-sum game. The impression that the candidates made on the live audience was unimportant. A huge video screen was erected above the stage so that the people and the journalists in the hall could see the TV feed, which was the only thing that mattered.

The same feed was piped into a large, low-ceilinged room beneath the auditorium and displayed on a couple of dozen monitors. This room was filled with long tables where journalists could set up their laptop computers, plug into telephone lines, and file their stories. This was the room where the spin doctors from the three campaigns would circulate before, during, and after the debate, explaining to the reporters what was happening.

It was the single largest gathering of explosively tense people on the face of the earth. Tense people don't like surprises. Therefore, there was a great deal of shock and unhappiness in that hall when, ten minutes before air time, just as the President and Tip McLane were emerging from their makeup rooms and taking their positions on the stage, Cyrus Rutherford Ogle appeared, walked up to the moderator, and informed him that William A. Cozzano would not be participating in tonight's debate because he had more important things to do.

Pandemonium was a term coined by Milton to refer to the capital of Hell, where all of the demons were together in one place. From this it naturally came to mean any central headquarters of wicked­ness. Over time, though, as happens with many good words, its meaning had been diluted to mean any place that was noisy and chaotic. Nowadays, a person could speak a pandemonium at a birthday party full of two-year-olds.

Cy Ogle preferred the old definition of the word. No other word could possibly have described the situation in the auditorium after he strolled on to the stage and made his announcement. There was no doubt in his mind that if not for the presence of witnesses, the campaign staffs of the President, Tip McLane, the panel of journalists, and the organizers of the debate would drag him outside and hang him from a stately tree on the Columbia campus. Outside of an actual lynching, never had so much hostility been directed against one man by so many people for so many reasons. Consequently he could scarcely prevent himself from grinning through the whole thing.

There was an initial phase during which people merely screamed at him, then ran off into the wings to spread the news to other people, who ran out to scream at him some more. This probably would have gone on for quite some time if not for the fact that air time was rapidly approaching. So it got compressed into a very intense couple of minutes. A tone of emotional restraint was imposed by the technical types, who had a show to put on.