Arthur pins him with a challenging stare. “Trying to make a difference in this world. Virginia thinks that trying to make a difference is a waste of time. I suppose you think the same. You all do. A lot of talk about how bad things are, how we have to change things—but when it comes to a question of action, it turns out to be nothing but talk.”

“Don’t be so sure!”

“No?” Arthur’s tone is careless, his grin sardonic; he looks down to arrange the papers in his bag. Offended, Jim rises to it.

“No! Why don’t you tell me what you have in mind?”

“I’ve got some posters in here. I’m going to do an information blitz in the mall. Here—” He pulls one out, hands it up to Jim without looking at him.

From one angle it’s a holo of a wave at the Pipeline, a perfect tube about to eat some ecstatic goofy-footed surfer. Shift the poster just a bit, though, and it becomes a holo of a dead American soldier, perhaps taken in Indonesia. The legs are gone. Under this apparition bold letters proclaim:

DO YOU WANT TO DIE?

Open Wars in Indonesia, Egypt, Bahrain, and Thailand.

Covert Wars in Pakistan, Turkey, South Korea, and Belgium.

There Are American Soldiers in Every One.

350 of Them Die EVERY DAY.

THE DRAFT IS BACK. YOU COULD BE NEXT.

Jim rubs his chin. Arthur laughs at him. “So?” he taunts. “Want to come with me and put these up?”

“Sure,” Jim says, just to shut off that contemptuous look. “Why not?”

“It could land you in jail, that’s why not.”

“Freedom of speech, right?”

“They have ways around that. Littering. Defacement. These things have to be lased off, they have molecular-ceramics bonds on the back.”

“Hmph. Well, so what? Are you planning to get caught?”

Arthur laughs. “No.” He stares at Jim, a curious look in his eye. Despite the events of the night—Jim’s ping-pong victory, his jump in bed with Arthur’s ex-ally … or perhaps because of them, somehow … Arthur seems to have some curious kind of moral high ground, from which he speaks down to Jim. Jim doesn’t understand this; he only feels it.

“Come on, then.” Arthur’s up and off to the door. Jim follows him out and just has time to register the scowl on Virginia’s face, there in the kitchen. Oops.

“Let’s start at the north end and work our way back here,” says Arthur as they descend to the ground floor of the mall. They get on the empty people mover and track through the complex to South Coast Village, buried under the northward expansion of the mall proper. “Good enough. Let’s keep it fast, say twenty minutes total. But casual. Watch out for the mall police.”