"Please.." Gregg was nearly sobbing. His head throbbed with, the pain of holding Puppetman back. He wanted to rip his skull open and gouge out the demanding power with his bare hands.

"SOON, then, goddamn it! Soon, or I'll make you crawl again. I'll strip you naked and make you beat yourself off in front of the press. Do you hear me? I'll eat you if I can't have anyone else. Gimli's right in that."

Puppetman raked his mind again and Gregg gasped with the pain. "Leave me alone!" he shouted. His knotted fingers tore the curtains from the wall in a fury. Thev crashed to the ground in a thunder of rods and hooks. Gregg hurled his coffee cup across the room, splattering the plush furniture and burning his hand. "Just leave me alone!" he screamed, his fingers dragging at his face.

"Gregg!"

"Senator!"

Ellen had come from the bedroom. At the same time, Billy Ray burst in through the hall door. Both of them stared at Gregg and the wreckage of the room, Ellen with a stark horror on her face, and her hands folded protectively over her stomach. "My god, Gregg," she said. It was a whisper this time. "I heard you arguing… I thought there was somebody else here…" Her voice trailed off.

Gregg blinked stupidly, shocked. For the first time Gregg realized that Puppetman had spoken out loud. He'd been holding a goddamn out-loud conversation with Puppetman and hadn't known. The horror of it made him moan.

Ellen glanced at Ray.

Billy looked from Ellen to Gregg, stared for long seconds. Then he backed out of the suite, closing the door behind him. Gregg was gasping in the middle of the room. He forced his breathing to slow. He tried to shrug, to pretend it had been nothing. "Ellen…" he began, but couldn't say anything.

He was suddenly crying, like a child frightened of the dark.

Ellen came to him with a brave smile, cradling his head on her shoulder and stroking his hair. "It's okay, Gregg," she murmured, but he could hear the terror in her voice. "It's okay now. Everything's all right. I love you, darling. You just have to rest." Words. Just words.

Gregg could hear Gimli's laughter and-for just a moment-he wondered why Ellen seemed to ignore it.

"The great state of Iowa! God's country! Corn country!" (Tachyon wondered how the man could keep up this kind of enthusiasm after so many ballots.) "Casts four votes for Senator Al Gore!"

The Omni Convention Center made Tachyon think of a giant funnel. People, like tiny grains of spices, all clinging to the precipitous sides while gravity tried to tumble them willy-nilly into the level area of the basketball court. It was an exaggeration of course, but the facility did give the alien vertigo.

Dribbling powdered sugar down his coat front, Tachyon hurriedly balanced his cruller on top of his coffee cup, snatched up his fountain pen, and jotted down the number. Then glanced at the running totals in five columns each headed by an initial. Gore was definitely floundering. Only a matter of time now. Hartmann had crawled painfully to nineteen hundred. Tach drew the back of his hand across his gritty, aching eyes. His session with the Secret Service had lasted until five. By then it seemed pointless to go to bed.

"Your boy's in trouble," said Connie Chung, sliding into a folding chair behind him. The headset with its antenna made her look like a lopsided insect.

"My boy, as you put it, is doing just fine. Once Gore drops out-"

"You're going to be in for a rude shock."

"What do you mean?" asked Tach, alarmed.

"He's faced with a choice between three Northern liberals and a conservative Southerner. What do you think-"

"No," said Tach with loathing.

She brushed sugar from his chin. "You really are a baby at this, Doctor. Watch and learn." She started away then looked back and added, "Oh, by the way, Gore's called a press conference for ten o'clock."

The phone rang during Jack's first Camel of the day. For a moment he couldn't find his briefcase, then discovered it under the coffee table. He picked up the receiver and collapsed on the couch. His caller was Amy Sorenson.

"We're in trouble. Gregg wants your ass over here." Jack stared at the ceiling through gummed eyes. "What's the problem?"

"Gore's called a press conference for later this morning. He's dropping out, and he's gonna tell his people to support Barnett."

"That cocksucker! That yuppie cocksucker!" For once Jack wasn't conscious of using bad language in front of a woman. He jumped off the couch, knocking the coffee table halfway across the room. "He's going to be Barnett's veep, right?"

"Looks that way."

"Prince Albert in a fucking can."

"And some wild card talent carved up a member of the Fourth Estate in Peachtree Mall last night, so guess who's gonna be capitalizing on it. Just get over here."

The staff meeting couldn't resolve anything except to hold on and hope-for defections. Gore's endorsement couldn't be anything but the result of some major payoff, and it might offend some of his followers who couldn't stomach Barnett.

Hartmann gained another 104 delegates on the fourth ballot, so Jack's worst fears weren't realized. But Barnett picked up nearly three hundred, and the momentum was definitely his. On his little two-inch Sony, Jack heard Dan Rather relate stories of party power brokers trying to form an `anyone but Hartmann movement. Speculations about a dream Dukakis/Jackson ticket were spiced with pointed reminders that Jackson had more delegates, and perhaps the ticket should be Jackson/Dukakis. Analysts wondered whether Jackson was willing to eat crow in order to be vice president.

Apparently he wasn't. The ABH movement, as Rather began calling it, seemed to remain the fantasy of a few party hacks and the Barnett campaign staff, who regarded "Anyone but Hartmann" as the equivalent of "Why not the Firebreather?"

Anyone but Hartmann. Jack couldn't believe he was hearing this. Why the hell wasn't it Anyone but Barnett?

A secret ace, he thought. Maybe there's a secret ace. The Gremlins from the Kremlin as an alternate hypothesis was definitely losing ground.

At first it went well. Sara could do this walking in her sleep, the mechanical interviews, stuff of every third Sunday supplement article and human interest story on the tank town ten o'clock news: What's it like to be a joker in America?

It wasn't good journalism. It was something she specifically despised: families-of-dead-shuttle-astronauts, how-doesit-feel-to-be-raped reporting. But of course this wasn't journalism at all; it was survival.

It all went fine until she was recognized.

The jokers camped in the park came from all over: California, Idaho, Vermont, even a few from Alaska and Hawaii. While the better-read of them would recognize her name she was one of the premiere writers on wild card matters in the world, after all-she wasn't a broadcast journalist. Everybody knew Connie Chung's face, nobody knew hers. That had always satisfied her.

But there were a lot of her old buddies from J-town here, too. She hadn't even thought what their reaction to her would be until a furred, taloned hand took her shoulder and spun her away from the joker mother and two desperately disparate children she was unspooling inanities from, into a hot blast of spoiled-meat predator's breath.

"Just what do you think you're doing here?" a voice asked. The first panicked reaction was still echoing in the corridors of Sara's brain, it's him I wish I had a gun dear God Ricky Ricky, when she recognized the person who'd accosted her. She was hard to mistake: six feet from the black moist nose at the end of her wedge-shaped head to the tip of her tail, round-eared, bandit-masked, black guard hairs over buff fur shading toward silver on her belly, like a Disneymation anthropomorphic ferret made real. The only thing she wore was a green vest studded with Hartmann buttons and bitter joker slogans: WHY BE NORMAL? and JJS! and TAKE A NAT TO LUNCH. Sara knew her well; she should have been just another teenaged Italian girl wearing a dowdy, blue-plaid skirt to St. Mary's. She'd been busted for the first time at fourteen, during a Free Doughboy demonstration.