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progress reports." It was such hot stuff that Mills had insisted on the electronic programs being stored in a government-controlled underground vault. There, it would not be pilferable by some industrial spy.
    But Eve snorted, setting off ripples in the flesh at her throat. She had the trick of switching from the nasally sensuous to imperious tones without pause. "Not the electronics, goddammit, I'm talking about viewer reaction. Boren, you're asking for a level of message control that assumes viewers will
never
compare videotapes,
never
start a brush-fire under some Indy congressman once they have proof you're tailoring messages to each holo set."
    Mills reflected on the lifetime appointments of media commissioners and waved the objection away. "Not that the Indys could do anything about it," he said.
    "Legally? No, your risks aren't legal; they're charismatic." In media research, 'charisma' no longer referred strictly to people. Any message that approached overwhelming credibility was said to be charismatic. Eve was working on it. "As long as John Q. talks to his neighbor, you'll get some coalition of fruitcakes who'll call FBN's credibility on the carpet. Even if you cleaned up your act afterward, it'd be bye-bye charisma—and bye-bye to some network ad accounts for FBN. Is that what you want?"
    Mills, sitting on an arm of Eve's ample couch, sighed and retrieved the fax sheet. "So the problem is still word-of-mouth," he mused. "Which means we work harder to alienate the bastards from one another."
    "Divide and conquer," Eve chuckled. "Welcome to media theory. Nice to know my chief exec is still capable of an intuitive leap."
    Sharply: "Don't patronize me, Eve. Papa spank."
    "What would ums do," she cooed, sapphire insets winking in her fingernails as she reached out to knead the calf of his leg; "tie me down like old times? A wittle domestic westwaint for baby?"
    He shifted his leg away. "How about lifting your pass to the synthesizer lab? Would that be enough restraint for you?"
    A shrug; the sausagelike fingers flirted in the air. "Go ahead, bugfucker, then you'd need someone else to deal maintenance doses to your bloody Chinese slaveys."
    "Someone easier to deal with than you are, my dear," said Mills, and let his threat lapse. "By the way: Young's protocol people expect us to put in an appearance when he presents those S & R citations in Santa Fe. Formal, of course."
    "A politician after my own heart," she murmured, "parading his hit teams as saviors and reaping public applause for it."
    "I don't know if the rover bunch will be there," he said, well aware that a man licensed to kill embodied raw potency to Eve Simpson.
    "You know how I hate public display," she said, and Mills knew it was self-display she meant. "Will we be screened?"
    "Not from the Prez, but they'll split-screen the dais to make the Secret Service happy. Nobody will see you—us—except Young and a few others like, oh, Lon Salter. You can ogle the beefcake all you like," he said wryly.
    "It's not window-shopping I like; it's trying things on."
    "Don't put yourself in a bind with Young over it, Eve. The President has some strict ethics about drugging his people."
    Delighted laughter, as though Mills had sprung a salacious joke. "Shyster ethics: if you might get punished for it, it's unethical." Long ago, Mills had learned Eve's method of bedding a man who did not fancy tussling with cellulite. She merely laced his food with lobotol, a controlled substance developed to aid hypnotists in making the most intractable patient highly suggestible. While fuddled in this fashion, a man would believe whatever Eve told him, e.g., that she was the most desirable sexual provender he could possibly imagine. And he would further believe that he had hungered all his life to test the adage that whatever one can imagine, one can do.
    Mills had discovered Eve's ploy two years previously, after waking one morning with a swirling recollection of boffing his blousy