The news ticker on the wall was up and running, again giving shorthand selections off the wire services. GM, it said, was rehiring twenty thousand workers for its plants around Detroit in anticipation of increased auto sales. The callback would take nine months, the announcement didn't say, and was the result of a call from the Secretaries of Commerce and Labor, but it was enough to excite interest in auto stocks, and that excited interest in machine tools. By 12:05:30. the Dow was up five points. Hardly a hiccup after the five-hundred-point plummet seven days before, but it looked like Everest on a clear day from the floor of the NYSE.

"I don't believe this," Mark Gant observed, several blocks away in the Javits Federal Office Building.

"Where the hell is it written down that computers are always right?"

George Winston inquired with another forced grin. He had his own worries. Buying up Citibank was not without dangers, but his move, he saw, had the proper effect on the issue. When it had moved up three points, he initiated a slow sell-off to cash in, as other fund managers moved in to follow the trend. Well, that was predictable, wasn't it? The herd just needed a leader. Show them a trend and wait for them to follow, and if it was contrarian, so much the better.

"First impression—it's working," the Fed Chairman told his European colleagues. All the theories said it should, but theories seemed thin at moments like this. Both he and Secretary Fiedler were watching Winston, now leaning back in his chair, chewing on a pen and talking calmly into a phone. They could not hear what he was saying. At least his voice was calm, though his body was that of a man in a fight, every muscle tense. But after another five minutes they saw him stretch tense muscles and smile and turn and say something to Gant, who merely shook his head in wonderment as he watched his computer screen do things that it didn't believe possible.

"Well, how about that," Ryan said.

"Is it good?" President Durling asked.

"Let's put it this way: if I were you I'd give your speechwriter a dozen long-stemmed red roses and tell her to plan on working here another four years or so."

"It's way too early for that, Jack," the President replied somewhat crossly.

Ryan nodded. "Yes, sir, I know. What I mean to tell you is, you did it. The markets may—hell, will fluctuate the rest of the day, but they're not going to free-fall like we initially expected. It's about confidence, Boss. You restored it, and that's a fact."

"And the rest of it?"

"They've got a chance to back down. We'll know by the end of the day."

"And if they don't?"