But Steinfeld bulled grimly on. "You don’t want me to talk about it. You’ve become expert in not thinking about it, and you don’t want me to undermine that expertise. Tough. You wanted something to think about. So think about this: you’re Jack Brendan Smoke. You’re American. You were in Amsterdam when the war broke out, to see a psychiatrist at the Leydon clinic. Before that, you won the United Nations Literary Committee prize for your Search for a Contemporary Reality. You were the spokesman for all the people who felt lost in the accelerated rate of change. You wrote a second series of essays in which you said, generally, that there were people manipulating the Grid for political ends, and you named Worldtalk. You predicted a return of fascism and you quoted something you’d heard about the Second Circle, the secret inner circle of the Second Alliance. The ones who make the SA’s long-term goals ... That essay was never published. Evidently someone at your publishing company was SA. Some men came to the clinic in ski masks. You were taken in the night and they—"