Interface by Neal Stephenson, J. Frederick George Read Free Book Online

gotten around to considering this question. "Well, actually, I could use it. Maybe."
    "You said you were in media," Aaron said.
    Ogle held one finger up. "Not exactly. I said I worked in the media industry. But I am not a media person, per se."
    "What are you?"
    "A scientist."
    "And what is your field of study?"
    "You, Aaron, are a biophysicist. You study the laws that determine the functioning of the body. Well, I am a political biophysicist. I study the laws that govern the functioning of the body politic."
    "Oh. Could you be a little more specific?"
    "People call me a pollster," Ogle said. "Which is like calling you a palm reader."
    4
    Eleanor Boxwood Richmond heard the State of the Union address on the radio, but she didn't really listen to it. She was driving a borrowed car down abandoned streets in Eldorado Highlands, an aborted suburb ten miles north of Denver. She had borrowed the car from Doreen, who lived in the trailer next to hers, several miles to the east, in the town of Commerce City.
    In case the police tried to phone with any news of her husband, Eleanor had dropped her football phone out her kitchen window, pulled it across the gap between her trailer and Doreen's, and fed it through the window of Doreen's bedroom. Eleanor's husband, Harmon, for whom she was searching, had obtained the football phone free of charge by subscribing to Sports Illustrated some years ago. Now the Sports Illustrated were still showing up on time, every week, while Harmon himself, depressed by unemployment and bankruptcy, had become more and more erratic. Some things you could at least count on.
    Eleanor felt foolish and humiliated every time she spoke on the football phone. It did not make looking for a job in the banking industry any easier. She would sit there in her trailer, which would be baking hot or freezing cold according to the outside tem perature. She kept the windows closed even in summer so that the screaming of Doreen's kids, and the heavy metal from the trailer on the other side, would not be audible to the person she was speaking to. She would telephone people wearing dark suits in air- conditioned buildings and she would hold the little plastic football to the side of her head and try to sound like a banker. So far she had not gotten any jobs.
    Back in the old days, when the whole family had lived together, happily, in their big house in this suburban development in Eldorado Highlands, they had had a phone in every room. In addition to the football phone they had had a sneaker phone; a cheap little Radio Shack phone that would always go off the hook unless you set it down firmly on a hard surface; and a couple of solid, traditional AT&T telephones. All of these phones had disappeared during the second burglary of their trailer and so they had been forced to get the football phone out of storage and use that instead.
    Eleanor Richmond had not seen her husband, Harmon, in two days. For the first day, this had been more of a relief than anything else, because usually when she did see him, he was half-reclined on their broken-backed sofa in front of the TV set, drinking. From time to time he would go out and get a Mcjob, work at it for a few days, quit or get fired, and then come back home. Harmon never lasted very long at Mcjobs because he was an engineer, and flipping burgers or jerking Slurpees grated on his nerves, just as talking on the football phone grated on Eleanor's.
    The neighborhood that Eleanor was driving through had been built on a perfectly flat high plains ranch in the early eighties. All of the houses were empty, and three-quarters of them always had been; as you drove down the curvy streets, you could look across yards that were reverting to short-grass prairie, in through the front windows of the houses, all the way through their empty interiors, out the back windows, across a couple of more yards, and through another similar house on another similar street.
    Eleanor and Harmon Richmond had