Four hours later Randy Boggs sat on his bunk, listening to his roommate, Wilker, James, DOC 4495878, eight years for receiving, second felony offense.

"Hear they moved on you, man, that Ascipio, man, he one mean fucker. What he want to do that for? I can't figure it, not like you have anything on him, man."

Wilker, James kept talking, like he always did, on and on and goddamn on but Randy Boggs wasn't listening. He sat hunched over aPeople magazine on his bunk. He wasn't reading the periodical, though. He was using it as a lap desk, on top of which was a piece of cheap, wide-lined writing paper.

"You gotta understand me man," Wilker, James said. "I'm not saying anything about the Hispanic race. I mean, you know, the problem is they just don't see things the way normal people do. I man, like, life isn't…"

Boggs ignored the man's crazy rambling and finally touched pen to paper. In the upper left-hand corner of the paper he wrote "Harrison Men's Correctional Facility." He wrote the date. Then he wrote:

Dear to who it may concern:

You have to help me. Please.

After this careful beginning Randy Boggs paused, thought for a long moment and started to write once more.

2

Rune watched the tape once and then a second time. And then once more.

She sat in a deserted corner of the Network's newsroom, a huge open space, twenty feet high, three thousand square feet, divided up by movable partitions, head-high and covered with gray cloth. The on-camera sets were bright and immaculate; the rest of the walls and floors were scuffed and chipped and streaked with old dirt. To get from one side of the studio to the other, you had to dance over a million wires and around monitors and cameras and computers and desks. A huge control booth, like the bridge of the StarshipEnterprise, looked out over the room. A dozen people stood in clusters around desks or monitors. Others carried sheets of paper and blue cardboard cups of coffee and videocassettes. Some sat at computers, typing or editing news stories.