The malls merged perfectly with the new elevated freeway system, and midcounty it was often possible to take an offramp directly into a parking garage, from which one could take an escalator through the maze of a mall’s outer perimeter, and return to your ap, or go to dinner, or continue your shopping, without ever coming within thirty feet of the buried ground. Everything you needed to do, you could do in a mall.

You could live your life indoors.

And none of that, of course, ever went away.

Chapter 67

67

Dennis gets a call from Washington, D.C. “Dennis? It’s Louis Goldman. I wanted to tell you about the latest developments in the Stormbee case. It’s looking very hopeful, I think.”

“Yeah?”

“We’ve been pursuing several avenues here, and a couple are really moving for us. We’ve been in contact with Elisha Francisco, the aide to Senator George Forrester. Forrester is head of the Senate Budget Committee, and he’s on the Armed Services Committee, and he’s been in a kind of a feud with the Air Force for about four years. So his office is always receptive to ammunition for this feud, and when I gave Francisco the facts of our case he jumped on the matter instantly.”

“And what can they do?” McPherson asks cautiously.

“They can do a lot! Essentially the GAO, the Congress’s watchdog, was steamrolled in our case, and Congress is touchy about being ignored like that. Senator Forrester has already asked the Procurements Branch of the Office of Technology Assessment for an independent report on the matter. That should be really interesting, because the OTA is as far out of the pressure points as you can be in this town. Procurements Branch at OTA has the reputation of being the most impartial assessment group that you can bring to bear on the military. Anyone in Congress can ask them for a report, and no one else has any leverage on them at all, so they pride themselves on giving a completely unbiased spread of the pros and cons, on anything. Nerve gas, biological warfare, persuasion technology, you name it, they’ll give you a report on it that sticks to technological efficiency and only that.”

“So we might see the report that the GAO should have made?”

“That’s right. And Forrester will hammer the Air Force with it, too, you can bet on that.”

“Can he get the Stormbee decision thrown out, then?”