In the United States, von Neumann became a renegade mathematician, a mind for hire, increasingly seduced by power and by those who could wield it. He would charge exorbitant fees to sit with people from IBM, RCA, the CIA, or the RAND Corporation, sometimes for no longer than a couple of minutes, and worked on so many private and government projects that he seemed to possess the ability to be in many places at the same time.
