Paul T. Freeman has spent his 39 years studying, learning, and believing in the objectives of Tarnover and Electric Skillet. Nick's plan is to lead him to areas where his high intelligence will question his perceptions and beliefs, resulting in the inevitable turning away from the power elite he serves. Ralph C. Hartz is the Deputy Director of the Bureau of Data Processing, and the man to whom Paul Freeman reports his progress on interrogating Nick. However he himself serves entrenched interests in Washington D.C. When Nick, with Paul's help, escapes with even more powerful codes than before, he is ruthlessly cast aside, not least because his superiors refuse to accept that the new codes must be disabled so soon after replacing the old ones. Ina Grierson, Kate's mother, lives in world of personal power but is as prone to paranoia as the lowest of her underlings. Good looking at the age of forty-something, she clings to her youthfulness, partly by taking younger lovers. The stress of living in a connected world is partly defused by luxury vacations, on one of which she meets "Sandy Locke". Later, after Kate is abducted she is jolted out of her complacency, and with the aid of software written by "Sandy" she is able to penetrate the government smokescreen. Reception Spider Robinson gave the novel a mixed review, saying that while "the book reads well ..., [i]ndividual sections are often brilliant, [and] the message is incisive and timely", that "as a story it limps" and that many characters, including the main antagonists, "are cut from cardboard". The New York Times reviewer Gerald Jonas was even more critical, saying that while Brunner was attempting to write "slice-of-life" fiction about a future society, the result of his arbitrary choices about social details is that "the entire fictional edifice collapses like a house of cards." Themes The novel was written shortly after two pivotal events of the 1970s, the resignation of Richard Nixon and the overthrow of the Chilean President Salvador Allende, which are cited in the novel as examples, in Nixon's case, of a failed attempt by organised crime to suborn the Presidency, and in the second, of the consequences of working against multinational commercial interests. Most of the characters live with the feeling that their lives could be turned upside down in an instant because of someone breaking into the data held on the network.