Politician (17 page)

Our apartment was in a shambles; this bubble had evidently received a worse shaking than had Ybor. It would not have been at all comfortable here, physically or psychologically. In my mind I saw the other suburb-bubble plummeting to its ghastly doom, and I shuddered. Jupiter was a monster!

But the storm was past, and we had survived. That was what counted. Now I would have to see what I could do as a state senator to alleviate the problems of those who had suffered more than we had. At least I had a notion how they felt.

In the last year of my four-year term Megan discussed strategy with me for my next effort. “You are now forty, which is coming into prime time for a politician, and you have good, solid credits and a loyal constituency. It is time for your first try for governor.”

“My first try?”

“You will lose,” she said matter-of-factly. “Your support statewide is too thin. But you can make a creditable showing, and that will prepare you for the second try, which should be more successful.”

“I would distrust a commander who planned to lose the first battle, to gain experience for the second.”

“Fortunately, few political campaigns are run by military men.” She kissed me warmly. Over the years our relationship had ripened, and our love had become correspondingly strong. I had always known I would love her but had not been certain she would love me. That concern had abated. Though her love had been glacially slow in its development, it had also been glacially certain. It had flowered at last with something less than volcanic force—metaphor-mix permitting—but persisted like hardened lava. There are those who suppose that a woman in her forties is not worthwhile as a love object, that her form and fire are gone. The truth is that a literate, feeling, competent woman is never past her prime. There is, to put it colloquially, one hell of a lot more to a woman than sex appeal, but in Megan I had that, too. She was, indeed the ten most beautiful women, and well worth the wait.

It was more complicated, running for governor, than it had been running for the relatively minor office of state senator. Technically I was running for the nomination for governor, because Sunshine is essentially a one-party state on the local level. The Ybor bay region had two parties, but that was atypical. If I could get the nomination the election would follow almost automatically. I needed a lot more campaign money, and I needed significant endorsements, and I had to do an extraordinary amount of campaigning. I could no longer speak to PTA meetings and impromptu gatherings in parks; I had to travel fast and far and with an entourage. I needed my staff with me, and I did not want to be dependent on commercial carriers to get me to my appointments on time.

“A campaign car,” Megan said. “It may seem a trifle quaint today, but it is feasible and it makes sense.”

“A what?” I asked blankly.

“In the old days politicians campaigned from trains,” she explained. “It was convenient and cheap and it got the job done.”

“I'm game,” I said.

Spirit returned to be my campaign manager for this effort. Megan remained as my strategist, preferring to take no overt part, but she consulted frequently with Spirit. My secretary Shelia knew exactly how much money we had to work with and where our contacts were. My bodyguard and my gofer were drafted again to handle the details of campaigning; this was the way it had to be, for a lean campaign. Together, these five women decided where I should go and how I should spend my time. It was reminiscent of my time as captain in the Navy, when women had mostly run my show.

I should explain that a train, in the Jupiter atmosphere, is not the same as the archaic vehicles that roamed old Earth on metal rails but does have its affinities. Indeed, those affinities were deliberately strengthened by the transport companies, who played upon the vested nostalgia of our culture. A train is a chain of transport bubbles linked by means of special flexible airlocks and towed by a tug. It takes relatively long for such a string of beads to accelerate to effective velocity, but a good deal of freight can be transported in that manner cheaply. There are special train routes established between major cities, marked by glowing buoys, and the trains have the right of way over any other vehicles that may intrude on such routes, because the trains are unable to halt or maneuver rapidly. It can be quite comfortable aboard a train, however; in fact, train travel was once considered to be the ultimate in luxury. I was intrigued.

What we could afford, it turned out, was a rental unit. This was an old dining car converted to residence after being retired from active duty and now used mainly for novelty occasions. It was shaped like a cylinder rounded off at the ends, so as to be aerodynamic; that was important for any vehicle traveling rapidly in atmosphere. It was so narrow I was sure rotation would be unfeasible; how would it provide gee?

The answer was obvious: It used natural planetary gee. Its gravity shield deflected approximately sixty percent of Jupiter's gravitrons, leaving enough to provide precisely Earth-normal gee. What prevented the car from plummeting down toward compression and destruction? The buoyancy of the other cars in the train. Inanimate freight required no weight and was easier to handle in free-fall, so full gee-shielding was used in them. It was the same principle as dirigibles, or passenger balloons that once floated in old Earth's atmosphere; the relatively large volume of diffuse balloon provided buoyancy to offset the small volume of dense payload, and so the whole was suspended stably. Only the freight cars were not gaseous; they were absolutely solidly filled, with the gee-shielding making them as light as balloons. I remember a minor historical note about the buoyancy of lead-filled balloons on Earth that did not float well. Today, of course, lead balloons readily float, with null-gee.

There is another intriguing parallel to the old times of Earth: the railroad discovered that freight was more lucrative and easier to handle than people, as it did not complain about delays and didn't even require oxygen to breathe. It could simply be loaded, sealed, and shipped. But the railroads were subsidized by the government, because of the great expense in starting up, so were expected to cater to public need.

As a result, they served that need nominally but with increasing ungraciousness, trying to discourage voluntary passengers. The prices of tickets moved up; delays were so common that trains hardly ever arrived at their destinations on time, and personnel were discourteous. But such was the society's romance with the concept of trains that it took many decades for the companies to discourage a significant fraction of their passenger market. Even today, there were those who, contrary to all common sense, insisted on using this form of transport. I, it seemed, had become one of these.

The car, inside, was reasonably sumptuous. There was room for our family and several staff members.

Spirit saw to the room assignments, and Megan kept Hopie out of mischief. There were cabins for Shelia, Ebony, and Coral. I was, in a manner of speaking, just along for the ride.

Of course we had to align our timetable with that of the railroad. That was awkward, because the freight trains were not scheduled with political campaigns in mind, or, indeed, with any living folk in mind. But it was cheap. The cheapest possible way for a party our size to travel the state, in style.

We worked it out. We set up a campaign route that meshed with convenient freight-train schedules. We hooked on to the first freight train, paid the rental, and headed for a date with Ami, across the state.

The start was slow, as the distant engine cranked up. It was an old-fashioned chemical burner that spewed its exhaust into the atmosphere, leaving a trail of smoke that slowly dissipated behind. We watched from the old-fashioned observation windows; since the car did not spin, such apertures were feasible. We saw the buoys flashing by for a while, faster and faster as the train slowly accelerated, until they were pretty much of a blur, and the route seemed almost enclosed in the fashion of the netted highways. But this soon got boring, even for little Hopie, and we turned our attention back inside. Travel really wasn't all that exciting, not when the surroundings were largely featureless.

In Ami I encountered something new, unfamiliar, and disturbing. Several men in the audience periodically yelled terse objections to my points. They were not reasoned refutations, merely opposition, such as

“Says who!” or “That's bull!” They put me off my verbal stride.

I got through by ignoring the gibes, but I was disturbed. After the speech I consulted with Spirit and Megan.

“It's heckling,” Megan explained. “Every politician suffers it eventually. It's a sign of success.”

“Success! They were interfering with my speech!”

Spirit was more practical. “I gather this is a tactic of the opposition?”

“Of course,” Megan said. “Such men are for hire, relatively cheap. But a candidate who is sure of success does not bother with such a minor tactic.”

“I still don't like it,” I said. “How can I stop it?”

“Let me consider,” Spirit said.

Megan glanced at her. “I don't think I want to know what you are going to come up with,” she murmured.

My next address was in Kyst, the southernmost bubble of the band. We drove down through a long highway that was a scenic wonder. It followed the five-bar contour, but the dynamics of the planet and the fringe of the band caused the cloud cover to dip, so that first it loomed low, then intersected the route, so that special fog-cutting buoys were necessary. It was like an eerie tunnel through foam that seemed always about to stifle out. As usual, Spirit and I gawked, while the Jupiter natives of our party ignored it. Little Hopie, now a pert four years old, sat in my lap and shared my enthusiasm; she liked traveling. She was a charming child, and increasingly people were remarking how much she resembled me. We had not made a secret of the fact that she was adopted but did not advertise it, either, so most people assumed she was ours by blood rather than by choice. That hardly bothered me.

The clouds dropped below the highway, so it was like emerging from some nether realm to the surface.

The light was stronger here, and because there was a fracture zone in the next cloud layer above, some halfway direct light came down. To an Earth person all this would have seemed shrouded in gloom but bright enough. As we rose somewhat above the cloud surface the light touching it sharpened the fringe so that it resembled an enormous mountain slope. Rifts in it seemed like reaches of dark water, as I explained to Hopie while Megan smiled tolerantly. Thus we were, in our innocent and childlike fancy, driving along a narrow length of land, or a series of islands, bright fragments surrounded by the enormous silent sea. But, of course, I am a dreamer, and perhaps it was wrong for me to infect the child with that virus. On the other hand, I thought wryly, maybe it was in her genes: a fascination for the kingdom by the sea.

Kyst was a delight, seemingly perched on the last major cloud-isle of the series, overlooking the southern reaches of the planet. Some distance farther along, I knew, was the giant Redspot, but here nothing like that showed. Jupiter is big, and thousands of miles can separate adjacent territories. We had traveled at quite high velocity, our auto-bubble boosted by special jets, but still the drive had taken several hours.

The hecklers had also made the trip. I had two speeches scheduled here, on consecutive days, and the hecklers were present in force at the first. News must have spread that I was not apt at dealing with them, and so they swarmed like the proverbial stinging flies. I suffered through, not daring to take any overt notice of them, for fear I would be drawn into a type of exchange I could not profit from. But my audience became increasingly restless as their interference went unchecked.

However, I saw the personnel of my staff quietly taking pictures of the culprits, so I knew Spirit was working on something. Ebony was stalking each one with her camera. That reassured me.

After the program Spirit explained, “Now we know exactly who they are. As they enter next time we'll touch them with mustard-six. You will have the activator at your podium.”

Slowly I smiled. Mustard-six was the colloquial name for a rather special, if minor, preparation used in Navy training drills. It burned like fire when activated by a particular electronic signal but was otherwise quiescent. It was considered a nuisance device, not a dangerous one, as it lost its effect only after a few seconds of activation, but no victim ever forgot those seconds! I remembered it from my time in officer training school; I had had to infiltrate a mock enemy position, and every time I blundered into an activation zone, I regretted it. “Just remember,” the training officer had reminded us. “In real action those errors will cost you more than burns. Then the antipersonnel agents will be real.” The lesson had been effective.

I proceeded with my address on the following day. Soon the heckling commenced. I gave it a few minutes, so that every individual heckler had his chance to sound off and the audience had opportunity to appreciate what was going on. Then I said, “I would like to take an impromptu survey. Will all those who harbor un-Jupiterian sentiments please rise and make yourselves known?” Then I switched on the mustard-six activator.

Six hecklers leaped out of their chairs, exclaiming loudly.

I turned off the juice after a one-second jolt. The hecklers were abruptly free of discomfort. They stood bemused, not understanding what had happened, as the other members of the audience chuckled.

“Thank you,” I said graciously. “I am glad to know your true nature. I happen to support Jupiter myself; indeed, I chose to be a naturalized citizen of this great planet. But tastes do differ, and you certainly have a right to follow your own beliefs. It's a free planet! I hope someday you will come to respect it as I do.”

The audience applauded patriotically. Sheepishly the hecklers resumed their seats, and I resumed my speech. My audience was now somewhat more responsive.

After a while the heckling resumed. They had been paid to do a job. I paused. “Is there by chance any person here whose mother was a baboon?” I inquired, and hit the switch.