He flips the card over. The back is divided into several dozen fingernail-sized icons. Some of them are little snapshots of the front pages of newspapers. Many of them are colorful, glowing rectangles: miniature television screens showing live video.
“That’s impossible,” Hiro says. “I’m sitting in a VW van, okay? I’m jacked in over a cellular link. You couldn’t have moved that much video into my system that fast.”
“It was not necessary to move anything,” the Librarian says. “All existing video on L. Bob Rife was collected by Dr. Lagos and placed in the Babel/Infocalypse stack, which you have in your system.”
“Oh.”
Chapter Fourteen
Hiro stares at the miniature TV in the upper left corner of the card. It zooms toward him until it’s about the size of a twelve-inch low-def television set at arms’ length. Then the video image begins to play. It’s very poor eight-millimeter film footage of a high school football game in the sixties. No soundtrack.
“What is this game?”
The Librarian says, “Odessa, Texas, 1965. L. Bob Rife is a fullback, number eight in the dark uniform.”
“This is more detail than I need. Can you summarize some of these things?”
“No. But I can list the contents briefly. The stack contains eleven high school football games. Rife was on the second-string Texas all-state team in his senior year. Then he proceeded to Rice on an academic scholarship and walked onto the football team, so there are also fourteen tapes of college games. Rife majored in communications.”
“Logically enough, considering what he became.”
“He became a television sports reporter in the Houston market, so there are fifty hours of footage from this period—mostly outtakes, of course. After two years in this line of work, Rife went into business with his great-uncle, a financier with roots in the oil business. The stack contains a few newspaper stories to that effect, which, as I note from reading them, are all textually related—implying that they came from the same source.”
“A press release.”
“Then there are no stories for five years.”
“He was up to something.”
“Then we begin to see more stories, mostly from the Religion sections of Houston newspapers, detailing Rife’s contributions to various organizations.”
“That sounded like summary to me. I thought you couldn’t summarize.”
“I can’t really. I was quoting a summary that Dr. Lagos made to Juanita Marquez recently, in my presence, when they were reviewing the same data.”
“Go on.”
“Rife contributed $500 to the Highlands Church of the Baptism by Fire, Reverend Wayne Bedford, head minister; $2,500 to the Pentecostal Youth League of Bayside, Reverend Wayne Bedford, president: $150,000 to the Pentecostal Church of the New Trinity, Reverend Wayne Bedford, founder and patriarch; $2.3 million to Rife Bible College, Reverend Wayne Bedford, President and chairman of the theology department; $20 million to the archaeology department of Rife Bible College, plus $45 million to the astronomy department and $100 million to the computer science department.”
“Did these donations take place before hyperinflation?”
“Yes, sir. They were, as the expression goes, real money.”
“That Wayne Bedford guy—is this the same Reverend Wayne who runs the Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates?”
“The same.”
“Are you telling me that Rife owns the Reverend Wayne?”
“He owns a majority share in Pearigate Associates, which is the multinational that runs the Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates chain.”
“Okay, let’s keep sifting through this,” Hiro says.
Hiro peeps out over his goggles to confirm that Vitaly is still nowhere near the concert. Then he dives back in and continues to go over the video and the news stories that Lagos has compiled.
During the same years that Rife makes his contributions to the Reverend Wayne, he’s showing up with increasing frequency in the business section, first in the local papers and later in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. There is a big flurry of publicity—obvious PR plants—after the Nipponese tried to use their old-boy network to shut him out of the telecommunications market there, and he took it to the American public, spending $10 million of his own money on a campaign to convince Americans that the Nipponese were duplicitous schemers. A triumphal cover on The Economist after the Nipponese finally knuckled under and let him corner the fiberoptics market in that country and, by extension, most of East Asia.
Finally, then, the lifestyle pieces start coming in. L. Bob Rife has let his publicist know that he wants to show a more human side. There is a personality journalism program that does a puff piece on Rife after he buys a new yacht, surplus, from the U.S. Government.
L. Bob Rife, last of the nineteenth-century monopolists, is shown consulting with his decorator in the captain’s quarters. It looks nice as it is, considering that Rife bought this ship from the Navy, but it’s not Texan enough for him. He wants it gutted and rebuilt. Then, shots of Rife maneuvering his steerlike body through the narrow passages and steep staircase of the ship’s interior—typical boring gray steel Navy scape, which, he assures the interviewer, he is going to have spruced up considerably.