The big oak desk was already beginning to show signs of age. Nothing lasted like it was supposed to. Not desks, not people and not-it would seem-representative republics.

Smith fretted briefly at the loosening veneer of his desk's surface as he opened his bottom drawer. He pulled out a cherry-red telephone, the only item in the drawer. The phone had no dial.

Smith set the dialless red phone reverently atop the desk, careful to keep the base perfectly parallel to the desk's edge.

Feeling a thrum of excitement in his narrow chest, he bracketed the phone with both hands before sitting calmly back in his seat. With a deep breath, he checked his Timex.

It was 10:55 a.m. Phil Rand and his telephone company workmen had taken longer than anticipated. Even so, Smith had gotten back in time. He had precisely three minutes.

Another deep breath. There was no sense wasting time.

Leaning forward, he searched the underside of the desk with his fingers. Depressing a hidden stud near his right knee, Smith watched as a computer monitor rose like some modern Leviathan from beneath the surface of the desk. A keyboard was revealed at his fingertips.

Smith quickly set to work scanning the digests culled for him by the CURE mainframes. Computers were becoming more and more a daily fixture in American life. Most banks and many businesses these days were turning to computerized systems. The government was blazing a trail that federal and even local law enforcement was starting to follow. Crude military computer networks were growing interdependent. A global network of computers was sparking hesitantly to life. The CURE director envisioned a day-perhaps even in his lifetime-where computers would become as common an appliance as the television. For the moment the CURE mainframes were a secret part of the vanguard of the coming age.

CURE had many unwitting operatives on its payroll. Thousands of people in all walks of life, peppered throughout the country. A web of informants, none of them knowing the others, not one having any clue they were part of some greater information-gathering system.