The epicenter of this earthquake is the Enron headquarters in Houston, familiar by now to television viewers around the world with its crooked-E logo out front. I read in a management book about the building's state-of-the-art trading floor where the Enron hotshots conducted the energy business of the nation, and in the National Enquirer about the plush upper-story "bachelor pads" where the Enron brass conducted their trysts with secretaries, but what I saw was a bland fifty-story glass tower, built in the smooth and ornament-free corporate style of the 1980s, and connected by many enclosed walkways to similar-looking office buildings in the neighborhood. From one of these climate-controlled tubes I could look down on the Antioch Baptist Church, one of the oldest African-American institutions in the city, its lot now little more than an island between the busy downtown streets, and its gothic tower with its somehow defiant sign, Jesus Saves, dwarfed by the encircling skyscrapers.

The ATMs here were still displaying jaunty Enron propaganda and a stock ticker was still telling passers-by where Enron stood in the market's all-knowing estimation (at a humble 29 cents on the day I visited), while an incongruous slogan touting Enron's "endless possibilities" zipped by underneath. In the tower next door, where laid-off Enron employees used computers to look for new jobs, the walls were still covered with framed motivational posters illustrating the company's four "values": "Respect," "Integrity," "Communication," "Excellence." Few of the ironies are lost on the skyscraper's inhabitants, one imagines. In fact, in the lobby someone had actually assembled a collection of embarrassing Enroniana, placed each slogan-bearing coffee cup or boasting paperweight under a museum-quality vitrine, and given the resulting works of "art" some sarcastic title: "A Lot of Bull." "Not a Shred of Evidence."

Bitterness of this sort isn't hard to come by in Houston. Mentioning Enron to the proprietors of a shop in the tony River Oaks neighborhood earned me an earful of righteous disgust toward Mrs. Ken Lay, who had tearfully announced on TV a few nights before that the company's demise might force her to sell off two of her many homes. Rachel Hernandez, who worked in Enron's relocation department until that operation was outsourced some years ago, told me she thought her former bosses deserved jail time for what they had done. And a former systems administrator for Enron Broadband named Barry La Valla recalled how Enron persuaded him to give up a house in Portland and take a significant pay cut to move to Houston, just six months before the company declared bankruptcy. Everywhere I heard angry stories of ruined 401(k)s, of personal losses in the range of $60,000, $100,000, a million.

But what surprised me was the number of former Enronites I came across who had more ambivalent feelings about the disgraced corporation, who were willing to accept the damage the company has inflicted on the nation and on their savings, and to defend what Enron did, or at least what Enron set out to do. This is partly because the company chose its employees well: They are, after all, traders and MBAs, true believers in free-market theory even though they themselves have now become international symbols of its resounding failure. For several of the people I talked to, Enron had been their first job out of college or even out of high school, and they knew no other world than the New Economy 1990s, with its saintly CEOs and its many shrines to Our Lady of Perpetual Privatization. How are you supposed to criticize the laissez-faire order when you've never heard a competing theory in your life?

Such weird ambivalence was also clearly a response to the fact that the international press corps has descended on Houston as though a whole flock of toddlers had been caught in wells, and has proceeded to make an instant mini-celebrity of every laid-off Enron employee who wants to play ball. Nearly everyone I met had been on TV, or had their picture in the paper, or told me about some other media moment. And with the entire world screaming for Ken Lay's head, many of the ex-Enronians have decided to cast themselves as voices of moderation. After all, they worked there, too: They contributed money to the infamous PAC, they cheered when electricity deregulation swept the nation, and when I talked to them they still referred almost universally to former CEO Jeffrey Skilling as "Jeff."

"It's a spectacle," says Bilal Bajwa, who came from Pakistan to work for Enron and whom I found searching for a new job from a computer in a downtown office building. "I might feel bitter a year down the road," but for now such emotions are lost in the glare. Instead of the usual disgruntled-former-employee mentality, what he notices among his ex-colleagues is a variation on the Stockholm syndrome, in which "the only one who defends the kidnapper is the kidnapped."

This curious contradiction came up again when I talked to John Allario, a smart and articulate energy business development professional who clearly understands the complex business dealings that brought Enron down. As such, he is in high demand among radio, TV and print reporters from around the world, fielding phone calls, in just the few hours that I spent with him, from ABC News and TV crews from France and Japan. He spends his time these days running an ex-Enron website called Laydoff.com, which burns with the outrage of the wrongfully terminated, magnified by the spectacular self-aggrandizement of Enron upper management. Allario's Enron career ended when he was simply told to clear out one day on his cell phone. And now, as he puts it on the website, "your 401k is depleted, your after-tax severance packages are reduced to one month's mortgage payment, and those who sent you packing are buying Hill Country or ski slope vacation properties with their exorbitant retention bonuses." He reads aloud from a typical e-mail to the Laydoff.com chat room: "I cannot express how incensed I am by the plight of you all." Allario also sells a line of T-shirts printed with anti-Enron jokes. (I bought one that reads: "Loss of job--$100,000. Watching 401K disappear--$225,000. Losses on company stock options--$505,000. Ten years hard time for guilty executives--Priceless.") He shows me a lucite computer mouse, a bit of Enroniana issued in 2000 to commemorate the first year of EnronOnline and marked with the staggering sum ("gross notional value") of $274,602,202,016. It's a perfect example of what was wrong with the company. "It is total obfuscation!" Allario says. "These figures are more than the GNP of Poland. Even if you knew what gross notional value meant, the calculations of these numbers were internal secrets, which were not open to verification by employees."

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