Without speaking, he prepared her an identical drink and brought it around the bed and sat next to her, not touching. “You love him?”

“If you want a simple answer, yes.”

“But you haven’t been …”

“No; he’s funny that way. Shy. And you know I wouldn’t have kept anything like that secret from you.”

“I know. I’m just … it’s sudden.”

“It was sudden for me, too. Let’s both just think on it for a while.” She drank half the drink in a gulp and coughed. “So what’s the TE&S problem?”

“Have you talked to John and Ev about him?”

“Not yet. Ev’s not off till 1800; John’s probably napping. Meeting for dinner anyhow, remember?”

“I remember.” He looked at the wall for a long moment. “Eliot’s working from an unassailable position, of course. I need less TE&S than anybody in the Cabinet. I need less than half the people in this can need.” TE&S was the three-dimensional budget unit “Time, Energy, and Supplies,” time meaning manpower.

“You need a certain amount just to keep things going.”

“That’s been my argument. Keep a skeleton staff in case we do come back on line with New New. Of course I’d never say ‘in case’ in front of Eliot or Tania; it’s always when.

“So Eliot in his wisdom has said that I don’t need any staff at all. When we do hear from New New we’ll automatically acknowledge the signal, and then it’ll be at least a week before we can have any kind of back-and-forth conversation. Plenty of time for me to recall my staff from wherever they’ve been ‘temporarily reassigned.’ It’s logical, at least from Eliot’s point of view.”

“You don’t think those assignments would be temporary.”

“Exactly—or even worse, they’d be selectively temporary. Suppose it’s a couple of years? The only people I’d get back would be people who hadn’t been able to advance in their new positions. All my most talented would be better off in their new jobs, reluctant to come back and start over.”

He was growing animated, reliving the argument he’d had with Eliot. “And goddamnit, it’s not as if we sit around on our hands all day! We have to have strategies for all kinds of scenarios! What if New New comes back on just to slap us with another cybervirus? All the incoming data have to be isolated, analyzed, filtered. What if they come on for only a week or a month or a day? There’s a hierarchy of data we have to ask for, and that hierarchy changes every hour!”

“He should be able to see that. All those thousands of people working to reconstruct things. Why ask for stuff we already know?”

“Eliot sees what he wants to see.” Daniel finished off his drink and went around to fix another.