Interface by Neal Stephenson, J. Frederick George

lizard-eyed, an d didn't talk much, because he was always thinking everything o ut two hundred years into the future.
    And now he was standing in her hallway, with a cop, quiet and m otionless as a fire hydrant, hands in the pockets of his trench coat, st aring at the wallpaper, thinking.
    She undid the locks and opened the door. The cop stepped aside, cl earing a wide space between Mel and Mary Catherine. "Your pa needs you," Mel said. "I got a chopper. Let's go."
    Springfield Central had started out as your basic Big Old Brick H ospital with a central tower flanked symmetrically by two slightly sh orter wings. Half a dozen newer wings, pavilions, sky bridges, and parking ramps had been plugged into it since then, so that lo oking at it from the window of the chopper, Mary Catherine co uld see it was the kind of hospital where you spent all your time wa ndering around lost. The roofs were mostly flat tar and pea- gravel, totally dark at this time of night, though in areas that were perpetually shaded, patches of snow glowed faintly blue under the starlight. But the roof of one of the old, original wings was a patch of high noon in the sea of midnight. It bore a red square with a white Swiss cross, a red letter H in the center of the cross, and some white block numerals up in one corner. Well off to the side, new doors - electrically powered slabs of glass - had been cut into the side of the old building's central tower.
    It made her uneasy. This wasn't Dad's style. As the governor of one of the biggest states in the union, William A. Cozzano could have lived like a sultan. But he didn't. He drove his own car and he did his own oil changes, lying flat on his back in the driveway of their house in Tuscola in the middle of the winter while frostbitten media crews photographed him in the act.
    Zooming around in choppers gave him no thrill. It just reminded him of Vietnam. He took this to the point where he probably wouldn't have known how to get a chopper if he had needed one. Which is why he had to have people like Mel, people who knew the extent of his power and how to use it.
    "We have limited information," Mel said, on the way down. "He suffered an episode of some kind in his office, shortly after eight o'clock. He is fine and his vital signs are totally stable. They managed to extract him from the state-house without drawing a whole lot of attention, so if we play this thing right we may be able to get through it without any leaks to the media."
    In other circumstances, Mary Catherine might have resented Mel's talk of media leaks at a time like this. But that was his job. And this kind of thing was important to Dad. It was probably the same thing that Dad was worrying about, right now.
    If he was awake. If he was still capable of worrying.
    "I can't figure out what the problem would be," Mary Catherine said.
    "They're thinking stroke," Mel said.
    "He's not old enough. He's not fat. Not diabetic. Doesn't smoke. His cholesterol level is through the floor. There's no reason he should have a stroke." Just when she had herself reassured, she remembered the tail end of the message she'd heard on her answer-ing machine, the one that mentioned Sipes. The neurologist. For the first time it occurred to her that the message might have been about her father. She felt a sick panicky impulse, a claustrophobic urge to throw the helicopter door open and jump out. Mel shrugged. "We could burn up the phone lines getting more info.    But it wouldn't help him. And it would just create more pot ential leaks. So just try to take it easy, because in a few minutes we 'll know for sure."
    The chopper made an annoyingly gradual soft descent on to the ho spital roof. Mary Catherine had a nice view of the capitol dome out her window, but tonight it just looked malevolent, like a sin ister antenna rising out of the prairie to pick up emanations from dist ant sources of power. It was a tall capitol but not a big one. Its small ness always emphasized,