"What?"

"I don't trust you when you use long words. I get the idea you're trying to con a poor boy from the welfare sections."

"You've come a long way from there."

"Don't bullshit me. What kind of setup is Combined Media offering?"

"I thought you weren't interested."

"Just tell me, will you?"

The manager was back on the defensive. "Okay, okay. You may not believe it, but I spent a solid three days making sure this deal would be acceptable. They tell me that all the hardware they need could be built into your stage suit. It would be miniaturized and, where necessary, disguised as zips, studs, jewelry and what have you. Also any bits you don't want made available will be erased. You have full control of the finished product."

"I'd still be trailing wires all over the stage. How the hell am I supposed to work like that?''

"There won't be any wires. It'll be a radio link between you and the recording banks."

"I thought that they had to stick things into your skull."

"There'd be one micro implant in the back, of your neck. Fitting it is quite painless and could be disguised by a necklace or a high-collared shirt."

The superstar smiled wryly. "You've taken care of just about everything, haven't you?"

The manager shrugged. "That's what I'm paid for."

"I suppose you're going to ask me to reconsider now?"

The manager looked intently at the superstar. "There is one thing I ought to tell you."

The superstar raised an eyebrow. "What?"

"If you were to blow this off, Combined Media could get very mean about it."

"So?"

"They have a lot of influence among the networks."

"They couldn't hurt me."

"You're not that big."

"This is blackmail."

"They're like that."

The superstar swung his chair around and stared out of the window again. This time it wasn't a petulant gesture. He looked thoughtful. Finally he swiveled back to look at his manager.

"Listen, Tom, I got to think about this. I'll call you tomorrow.''

WANDA-JEAN'S EYES WERE GLUED TO the monitor screen that was built into the game booth. The dazzling smile of Bobby Priest was filling the screen.

"Okay, we're back and it's time for Personality Fall Down."

The face of Priest dissolved into dozens of tiny repeating images. "Wildest Dreams" was heavily graphicized. It never let the viewer alone for a single moment, teasing, titillating, never really allowing the picture to come to rest, bouncing its audience around in a continual state of contrived excitement.

"Just to remind everyone how this part of the show works. You'll see four contestants in the booths in front of us."

Cut to the four contestants standing in transparent cylindrical pods. They were bathed in the beams of a dozen or more revolving searchlights, and CO2 fog, sliced by slashing blue and gold lasers, drifted around them.

"I will start to read the personality profile of either a figure from history or a current celebrity. Contestants can jump in at any time when they think they know the identity of the personality being profiled."

Bobby Priest was filling the screen again. His teeth flashed like a neon sign and the sequins of his body tux dazzlingly reflected the lights and the lasers. He glowed like Mr. Electric.

"Sounds easy, right? Well, home folks, it would be easy if the contestants weren't standing over the vat!"

Bass electronics surged in a deep bowels-of-hell version of a Bach fugue. The close-up of Priest became a neon leer.

"The longer the contestant delays answering, the wider the floor on which they're standing slides open. Too long a delay or a wrong answer, and the floor vanishes altogether and the contestant goes down into the vat!''

The mists parted and the vat was revealed. It was a circular chromium-plated tank maybe five feet deep and twenty feet across. It was filled with a heavy viscous goop, about the consistency of molasses, primarily Day-Glo pink but streaked with lazy swirls of poisonous yellow and green that made it look like something from a toxic-horror show.

Bobby Priest dominated the screen again.

"Okay, contestants, are you ready for the next personality profile?"

Back to the four contestants. In unison, they all nodded brightly. The bass electronics picked up tempo, an urgent, anxious, rock 'n' roll pulse.

Bobby Priest's eyes had a twinkle that was scarcely pleasant.

"Don't forget, scenes from the life of each contestant are available on the current IE catalog."

The contestants nodded again, less brightly this time.

"Okay, players. Here we go."

On the waist-high panels in front of the contestants, four red lights came on. The audience noise that was pumped into the booths faded out. Each of them was alone in soundproof silence. Their four tense faces came on the monitor in a four-way split screen.

The voice of Bobby Priest came through loud and relentlessly clear.

"He was born in Clay County, Missouri, in 1847."

The floor under Wanda-Jean's feet split down the middle. Slowly but surely the gap started to grow wider.

"He married Zerelda Mimms in 1874."

The gap was now an inch wide, and Wanda-Jean could see right down into the vat. Bubbles slowly burst, leaving brief liquid craters. It looked like the surface of Jupiter in miniature, just six feet below her.

"During the war between the states he served with Bloody Bill Anderson in-"

There was a loud raucous buzzing. A green light came on beside a red one. Someone had hit the answer button. Wanda-Jean's head flashed around. The anxious face of the blond guy next to her came up on the screen. It was immediately replaced by the beaming Bobby Priest.

"Okay, okay. Paul here thinks he knows the answer. That's Paul Lindstrom, from right here in town. Shall we see if Paul's got the right answer, folks?"

The yell of the crowd agreeing with Priest crashed into Wanda-Jean's booth.

"Okay, Paul, what's your answer?"

"My answer's Jesse James, Bobby."

Pauls tense face came back onto the screen, then gave way to Bobby, leeringly building up the tension.

"Well, Paul…" He consulted a blue card in his hand. "… the correct answer is… Jesse James."

The applause was like a physical buffeting to Wanda-Jean, a punishing slap in the face for not having got the answer. The gap between her feet seemed to beckon oily, eager to claim her. There was a brief shot of the floor under Paul snapping shut, then Bobby Priest was back dominating the screen.

"Okay, contestants, here we go again, and let's see who'll be the first to fall down!"

The mob bayed its eagerness to see someone fall into the mud.

"Are you ready with the answer buttons?"

The contestants nodded again. Nobody could miss the answer button. It was right in the center of the flat shelf-like panel that ran across the front of each contestant's booth. On one side of the button were the lights that indicated that the question had been asked or answered and the speaker that relayed all outside sounds. On the other side was a seven-inch color monitor that showed the contestants what was being broadcast to the hundred million viewers.

Wanda-Jean caught sight of a medium shot of herself enclosed in the pod: long legs, blond hair, and white bodysuit. She looked like a thing in a test tube, something that had been created there, a vat-grown bimbo poised to be tipped back into the primal ooze that had spawned her.

"Okay then, let's go to question number two."

The sound of Bobby Priest's voice booming out of the pod's speaker jerked Wanda-Jean back to the reality of the moment. She had to concentrate. If she didn't answer one of the next four questions, she would drop through the wide open floor straight into the pink goop. If she answered wrongly, the floor would snap wide open straightaway. The only way was to get an answer right. A correct answer made the floor slide all the way shut again.