Janissaries and Other Stories

JIMMY JONES AND HIS WONDERFUL PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE. At summer camp in Maine, a nine-year old boy creates something impossible, and changes the world. CONVERSATION WITH GENIE. What would it be like to encounter a genie in the 21st century? SOLOMON. The fabled king reflects on his mistakes. THE LITIGATION GAME. The son of an average working class couple dies while attempting a daredevil feat, and his gruesome death is caught on film and becomes the basis for a sensational lawsuit in the television age. SIMPLE ECONOMICS. 1980 in Swampscott, Massachusetts: a boozy lawyer comes up with a foolproof scheme to make everybody rich. JANISSARIES. In Athens, a disillusioned scientist prepares to sell his discovery to the highest bidder, and the result could be world-wide devastation. A radical environmental group also wants the discovery, to advance its own agenda. In Washington, agents Steve Coffin and Pat Delorme, on loan to a department that no longer officially exists, must unravel the clues and race the clock to stop the new technology from being released. The hunt takes them from New York to Paris to a wild river in the Canadian Arctic. The environmental group E.L.F. (the Earth Liberation Front) really exists. It has been credited with the destruction of a ski resort in Vail, and other acts of environmental terrorism. The Office of Technology Assessment (O.T.A.) was created by the Technology Assessment Act of 1972 (2 U.S.C. 472) to serve the United States Congress by providing objective analyses of major public policy issues related to scientific and technological change. The O.T.A. began operations in January 1974, and ceased operations (officially), in 19__. The Janissaries are not real, but the technology to create them exists, in its infancy, and so does the software to program them.