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laughing. He was sold. The film was spectacular. It looked like the greatest city since Paris. Alan saw Reliant’s role in it all: data transport, video, phones, networked transportation, RFID tagging for shipping containers, technology in the hospitals, schools, courtrooms. The possibilities were endless, beyond even what he or Ingvall or anyone else had even imagined. Finally the film reached its crescendo, the camera lifting skyward to reveal the whole of the King Abdullah Economic City at night, glittering, fireworks blooming over it all.
    The lights came up.
    Again they were in a showroom of mirrors and yellow couches.
    â€”Not bad? Mujaddid said.
    â€”Not bad at all, Alan said.
    He looked to Yousef, whose expression was blank. If he had a joke to make, doubts to express, and it seemed he did, he knew better than to do so now, in this room, with the lights on.
    â€”Let’s see the model of the industrial district, Sayed said.
    They were soon in a room filled with drawings of factories, warehouses, trucks being loaded and unloaded. The idea, Sayed explained, was that they would be manufacturing things that used Saudi oil — plastics, toys, even diapers — and shipping them all over the Middle East. Maybe Europe and the United States too.
    â€”I understand you were in manufacturing for a time? Sayed asked.
    Alan was at a loss.
    â€”We do our research, Mr. Clay. And I owned a Schwinn as a kid. Ilived in New Jersey for about five years. When I was in business school, Schwinn was one of our case studies.
    Always the case studies. Alan had participated in a few of them, but after a while it was too depressing. The questions from those wise-ass students masquerading as earnest young go-getters. Why didn’t you anticipate the popularity of BMX bikes? And what about mountain bikes? You got murdered there. Was it a mistake to have shopped out all the labor to China? This coming from kids whose experience with business was summer lawn-cutting. How did your suppliers become your competitors? That was a rhetorical question. You want your unit cost down, you manufacture in Asia, but pretty soon the suppliers don’t need you, do they? Teach a man to fish. Now the Chinese know how to fish, and ninety-nine percent of all bicycles are being made there, in one province.
    â€”It was interesting for a period, though, wasn’t it, Sayed said, when you had the Schwinns made in Chicago, the Raleighs made in England, the Italian bikes, the French… For a time you had real international competition, where you were choosing between very different products with very different heritages, sensibilities, manufacturing techniques…
    Alan remembered. Those were bright days. In the morning he’d be at the West Side factory, watching the bikes, hundreds of them, loaded onto trucks, gleaming in the sun in a dozen ice-cream colors. He’d get in his car, head downstate, and in the afternoon he could be in Mattoon or Rantoul or Alton, checking on a dealership. He’d see a family walk in, Mom and Dad getting their ten-year-old daughter a World Sport, the kid touching the bike like it was some holy thing. Alan knew, and the retailer knew, and the family knew, that that bike had been made by hand a few hundred miles north, by a dizzying array of workers, most of them immigrants — Germans, Italians, Swedes, Irish, plenty of Japanese and ofcourse a slew of Poles — and that that bike would last more or less forever. Why did this matter? Why did it matter that they had been made just up Highway 57? It was hard to say. But Alan was good at his job. Not such a difficult job, to sell something like that, something solid that would be integral to a thousand childhood memories.
    â€”Well, that’s gone, Alan said, hoping to be finished with it.
    Sayed was not finished.
    â€”Now it’s a matter of putting different stickers on the same bikes. They’re all built in the same handful of