"So what? He's got to be stopped."
"Look, if you're so worried, then deliver a major speech on the Senate floor. About all these Japanese billions rolling in, absorbing companies, with a lot of samurai fanning out to take
names and kick ass across the boardrooms of America. It ought to get picked up by the Nightly News. Then we'll see what the country wants to do about it."
The problem, obviously, was what could the country do about it. And more than that, where would it eventually lead? Did anybody—Tam Richardson included—seriously believe this was merely a temporary helping hand? History had a practice of going in one direction—forward. So after Noda had acquired a lot of our high-tech outfits, maybe even kept them from going the way of Mostek and others, what next? More and more I was beginning to wonder if this was really preferable to our blundering along as best we could on our own.
After gazing at the sky a minute, he declared he was going to do exactly what I'd said. Blow the whistle. He was about to write a speech that would be read the length of America, maybe even in the White House—unless, as Henderson claimed, nobody there these days read anything but TelePrompTers. Nobody was going to buy off Jack O'Donnell.
I watched as he bulldozed a matron and her fur-collared pooch out of the way to grab the next cab for his midtown office. On the way back through the lobby I stopped off and grabbed a copy of Time. Had we made the weeklies yet?
Yep. Lead article, all about how the Japanese loved investing here. Going up in the elevator, though, I happened to flip past a profile of some recently disappeared luminary in the academic world, the guy who was supposed to have been the father of artificial intelligence. It occurred to me the piece might be of interest to Tam. She'd been so busy she was probably out of touch.
When I got back up to twelve, Noda was gone. Vanished almost as though he hadn't been there. I wanted to huddle with Tam about his evasive new song and dance, but since I was holding the magazine, I showed her the item. The rest of what happened you can probably guess. She had been out of touch.
"Oh, my God, Allan!"
"Friend of yours? I'm sorry."