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James Cozzano resigned from the board of directors of the import-export company in Texas and stated that he had been taken
for a ride.

Wednesday, October 30:

COZZANO
          
29%

PRESIDENT
            
18%

MCLANE
                
38%

UNDECIDED
           
12%

OTHER
                   
3%

The farmer who had accused CBAP of polluting the water and killing the fish retracted his statement, saying it had been based upon information given to him by an unknown "expert" who had
since disappeared. Chemical analysis of the bodies of the fish
showed that they had been killed by a common agricultural
pesticide, which was available at any farm supply business, and
which was not produced at CBAP.

The retired nurse who had told the story about Christina
Cozzano's drug addiction was found dead in her garage in Peoria; she had committed suicide by breathing car exhaust.

The wife of Tip McLane's running mate stated in an interview
that she had not meant, in any way, to say negative things about
Eleanor Richmond.

William A. Cozzano canceled all of his campaign appearances for
the rest of the week, saying that he needed to prepare for the big debate on Friday night.

Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane, in an informal interview with
Markene Caldicott on his campaign plane, deplored the way the presidential campaign had gone negative.

The President of the United States, addressing a Boy Scout jamboree in Arizona, said that he didn't blame young people for
sometimes losing faith in politics, and promised that, when
reelected, he would appoint a presidential commission to look into the state of America's elections.

The anchorman of the CBS
Evening News,
in a rare editorial, said
that the presidential campaign had reached new depths this year,
and stated that his organization was taking steps to make sure that
it would not happen again.

At the private hotel that serves as Jeremiah Freel's headquarters, security remained tight. The elevators were turned off except when
someone very important was expected, or three times a day when
room service was brought up from the kitchen.

For the fourth morning in a row, the waitress named Louella
brought Jeremiah Freel his dish of stewed prunes. This did not go
unnoticed by Freel. Louella was a hard woman not to notice. It was
almost inconceivable that any woman, clad in the dowdy uniform
of a hotel waitress, could appear sexy. But Louella managed. She
must have taken her uniform home and modified it somehow,
dropped the neckline, raised the hem. Every day, she was showing
a little more cleavage, and every day, when she placed the breakfast
tray on the table in front Jeremiah Freel, she bent down a little bit
lower, gave him a longer and deeper look down into the front of
her dress.

Today he could no longer restrain himself. His hand darted
down into her blouse, quick as a striking cobra, and caught her
nipple. Not hard enough to hurt. But hard enough to keep her
where she was.

"Mr. Freel," said one of his minders. One of the hated men in
suits who surrounded him at all times.

"Shut up, asswipe!" Freel said.

Louella was staring straight into Freel's eyes. She wasn't angry at
all. She was almost amused. She was interested. She licked her lips
and said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Freel, but fresh fruit isn't on today's menu." Her face was about four inches from Freel's. She was
wearing a lot of perfume and Freel could smell it wafting up from
the middle of her hot cleavage.

"Then what do I have here?" Freel said, squeezing her nipple.

"You don't have a damn thing," Louella said, "unless you can
get us a little bit of privacy." She looked around accusingly at all of
the men in suits: four of them in this room alone.

"Get the fuck out!" Freel shouted.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Freel, you know we can't allow that!" said the
head honcho, a guy who would only identify himself as Al. Al was
clearly getting a little nervous. "Ma'am," he said to Louella, "I'm
afraid you'll have to leave."

"But I can't," Louella said, "until Mr. Freel lets go of me. And I can tell you he's not the kind of man who lets go until he gets what
he wants."

"Get the fuck out," Freel said, "or this whole campaign goes up
in flames. Can't you see I need to get laid?"

This appeal to simple, basic human needs got through to Al. He
broke eye contact and thought about it for a second. "Well, okay,"
he finally said. "Come on guys, let's leave them alone."

All of Freel's minders got up and backed out of the room staring fixedly at Louella's backside. Louella turned around and yelled at
them on their way out. "And I don't want you standing outside the door listening, either. You get back to your own rooms and watch
TV of something."

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 convul
sions 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.

56

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 univer
sity. 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 w
as 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 wicked
ness. 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.