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had already written the chapter about it, and the trip would be superfluous.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
 
OUR LADY OF THE TAILSPIN
    Cliff won the election, and drove himself to his inauguration in a specially customized limousine, cutting more than a half hour off the ceremony’s previous record for speed. He raced the engine noisily whenever the motorcade was forced to pause along the way, and startled dignitaries when he slid across the polished floor on his stomach during the gala ball. Yes, Cliff was young, but not, everyone emphasized, as young as Van Walker had been. Win Woodhead had disappeared forever right after his defeat, either to seek out Van or to sulk without end, but August Dodd Woodhead came to the inauguration, to show that at his advanced age he no longer minded anything.
    Once in office, Cliff froze wages and encouraged the barter system whenever possible, since objects themselves were incapable of inflation. He made his father Secretary of Transportation, and they decreed hundreds of miles of highways to be public drag strips. He relished setting the limited fires his Secretary of the Interior suggested for the national parks’sake, and he ordained frequent jet defense drills that shattered windows with sonic booms. He announced that prosecuting drug users was too costly, and as he had with Shep, declared that everyone who wanted to use drugs could do so, only now in a special reservation fashioned from the state of Oregon, a sort of national Smoking Section. He was a champion of deregulation, and gave heavy tax breaks to American auto manufacturers, but he seemed sullen and mistrustful whenever he had to speak to foreigners, even the English. His tough position on American defense provoked some killings of Americans in Europe, but he responded by recalling all Americans, civilian or military, from overseas. This “Americans in America” policy wreaked havoc with international business, not to mention international marriages, but as terrorism discouraged travel, and protectionism made importing and exporting complicated, slowly a gargantuan medieval insularity developed.
    True to his
Manolog
days, the new chief executive also liked dropping out of sight for days at a time, which thrilled people only at first, and his animal freedom started to seem as dangerous as Van’s angelic weakness. Although Nestor wrote speeches for him including allusions to family and sharing, Cliff seemed gruff and distracted, and Carlotta felt no closer to him than she had in California. He was growing away from her without ever quite being hers. He may have felt it would be weak to rely on her, sympathetic as she was, but whenever he disappeared, it was she who had to put on a brave face for the press whilethey wondered if there were other women or just a secret hideout.
    To complicate the national paranoia, a sexually transmitted illness began to ravage the population. It was eventually discovered to have begun in the lambskin condoms prescribed in Van Walker’s administration to curb venereal disease. Apparently the lambs had been grazed on radioactive former bomb test-site prairies, and the mutant virus they acquired was hard to shake. People immediately stopped using condoms, but it was already too late. Fatal Urogenital Carnal Kinesis claimed its victims without any right to such claims, and often drove them mad first. Even Nestor, who had been careful to protect himself in his dalliances with Mexican girls, went from merely garrulous to incomprehensible, and his last words were something about the Wagon Train heading ever westward to the Milky Way.
    So, not only travel but socializing was curtailed, with television as the safe alternative, and this was where Carlotta entered her truly legendary phase. Under the supervision of the secretaries of State and of Health, she made numerous cheerful videos in which she seemed not only to have a nice romantic date with the viewer, she went on simulated vacations to Europe, bought