"You sounded a little pissed at me there is all." He sounded like a lovesick teenager. "I mean --" He broke off. "Your ass needed kicking, was all." Pause. "I'm not pissed at you, though. When are you coming for a visit?" "Got me," he said. "I guess I should, right?" He really sounded like a teenager. "You need to visit all the sites, check in on how we're doing." Pause. "Plus you should come hang out with me some." He almost pointed out all her warnings about only having a one-night stand and not missing the people he was away from and so forth, but stayed his tongue. The fact that she wanted him to come for a visit was overshadowing everything, even the looming crisis with the cops. "It's a deal." "Deal." "Well, bye." "Bye." He almost said, "You hang up first," but that would have been too much. Instead he just kept the phone at his ear until he heard her click. Suzanne was pointing and shooting like mad. Perry sat down on the cracked pavement beside her and unfolded his computer and started sending out emails, setting up a conference-channel. He gave Suzanne a short version of his talk with Hilda, being careful not to give a hint of his feelings for her. "She sounds like a sensible girl," Suzanne said. "You should go and pay her another visit." He blushed and she socked him in the shoulder. "Take your call," she said. The cops were giving them the hairy eyeball, and Perry screwed in his headset. The conference channel was filling up. Perry checked off names as reps from all the rides came online. There was a lot of tight, tense chatter, jokes about the fuzz. "OK," Perry said. "Let's get it started. There's cops blockading every ride, right? Use the poll please." He posted a poll to the conference page and it quickly got to 100 percent green. "So I just found the cops outside of mine, too, and I'm not sure what to do about it. I've got some dough for a lawyer, but I can't afford lawyers for everyone. To make that work, we'd have to fly attorneys to every city with a ride in it, and that's not practical as I'm sure you can tell." A half-dozen flags went up in the conference page. "I need someone to play moderator, 'cause I can't talk and mod at the same time. How about you, Hilda?" "OK," she said. "I'm Hilda Hammersen, from the Madison group. Post one-line summaries of your points and I'll set a speaker order." The conference page filled up. There was the official back channel at the bottom where the text was spilling by too fast for Perry to parse, and he knew that there were lots of unofficial back-channels in use, too. He covered the mic and sighed. He had nothing to say to these people. He didn't have any answers. "Right. So who knows what we should do?" The back-channel went crazy. Hilda started green-lighting speakers with their flags up.