Politician by Piers Anthony
I glanced at Spirit when that news reached me, then at my secretary, who already had details flashing on her newscreen for me: the man was called Booker, and he had lost his job when an injury made him lame. He was running out of unemployment compensation but had been unable to get any other job despite being declared technically fit by the welfare office. Standards for unfitness had become ludicrous in some instances, as the government tried to cut down on expenses. I saw my opportunity.
“Are you ready for this?” I asked Shelia.
“Anything you say, boss,” she said bravely.
“I’ll handle it,” I told the local authorities.
“Not on your life, sir!” my SS guard protested. “We can’t let you march into a bomb-wielding maniac!”
“I’m sure he won’t let you into the office,” I said. “But this is a thing I must do; I am, after all, a politician, and this is a potentially newsworthy event.”
“Sir, you won’t need any news if you’re dead! We can’t let you expose yourself to such hazard.”
“Let me explain what I have in mind,” I said. And I explained. “Okay with you?” I concluded.
The man was amazed. “Let me clear it with my superior, sir.” He did so, and we proceeded to the site of the event.
A huge crowd was forming, cordoned off by the police, and more folk were coming in, attracted as much by my involvement as by the situation. I made my way through and approached the office. It overlooked a street-size mall that was now clear of pedestrians. “Señor Booker,” I called, naming him in Hispanic fashion to help identify myself. “I am Hope Hubris.” The camera was on me, which was exactly where I wanted it.
“Come in, Governor!” he called.
“I must bring my secretary,” I said.
“No way! It’s you alone!”
I stood my ground. “It is very important that my secretary be able to do her job,” I said. “Surely you would not deny her that.”
“Deny her that!” he repeated. “Listen, Hubris, they denied me my job! What do I care for—”
But I had signaled Shelia, and now she rolled down to join me. “Here is my secretary, Señor.”
There was a pause as the lame man peered at the crippled woman. It would have been difficult indeed for him to deny her in this circumstance. “Okay,” he said, realizing that on this front, at least, he had been outmaneuvered.
We entered the office, Shelia’s wheelchair preceding me. Three office workers were seated on the floor, leaning against one wall; Booker stood with his bomb by the opposite wall. Shelia and I came to a halt in the middle. Her eyes were on the miniature viewscreen mounted on her left armrest. She glanced briefly up at me and nodded slightly.
“Señor let’s sit down and work this out,” I said heartily. “Why did you ask for me?”
“Because you’re the only politician on the planet a regular man can trust,” Booker said. “You get things done when they can’t be done.”
I smiled. “You know the camera is on us; you are helping my campaign.”
“I think your campaign’s fine, Hubris; I hope you make president. We’ve got to get somebody in there to clean up this mess. But right now you’ve got to help me. I need a job.”
I frowned. “You know you cannot get a job by blowing up the employment agency. You have committed a crime, and for that they will make you pay. Surely you knew that before you decided to do this.”
He nodded. “Guess I wasn’t thinking straight. I realized too late. I said to myself, Booker, you’ve dug yourself a hole. A black hole! But then I thought, Hubris is in town. He can help me if anyone can. So I asked for you; never really thought you’d come.”
“My guards tried to stop me,” I admitted. “It is their job to see that I don’t get myself blown up before election day.”
“Yeah. Well, I don’t want to blow anybody up, but my wife, she’s sick, and my little boy needs surgery, and the money’s gone. What’s a man to do? If they’d just give me a job!”
Things began to add up. “Your son—when did the need for surgery develop?”
“Last year. He had a medical exam, and this irregularity in his heartbeat showed up on their graph. Said he’d have to have it operated on when he got older; something about a valve not closing right, so the blood didn’t always go right. Then I hurt my leg, and—”
“And they had a pretext to fire you,” I finished.
“Yeah. Said I couldn’t do the work well enough anymore. Hell, Hubris, I could do it okay; I’m no pro track runner, anyway! Then the welfare folk said I wasn’t sick enough for them, but I still couldn’t get a job.”
“That’s called falling through the crack,” I remarked.
“Yeah. Too sick to work, too fit not to. So what the hell’m I supposed to do—starve and let my family die?”
I resisted the impulse to editorialize on the unfairness of the system; that was self-evident. Meanwhile, I had spied a key that might unlock this situation. “Don’t you realize, Mr. Booker, that it wasn’t your leg that did it? It was your son.”
The bomb wavered in his arms. “What?”
“Your company had comprehensive medical insurance for all employees and their families, didn’t it? That would have covered the surgery on your son when it was time for it. But your company gets a rebate if the insurance claims are low; that’s standard practice. They knew your son’s surgery was coming and that it would be a large claim, so they acted to minimize it. That, too, is standard practice.”
“They—they fired me so they wouldn’t have to pay on my boy?” he asked, appalled.
“And the other companies declined to hire you for the same reason,” I said. “The welfare folk are right; you are fit enough to work. And you are willing. But your son is a serious liability.”
“But—”
“Of course, we can’t prove that,” I cautioned him, just as if this wasn’t being picked up by the camera for what would, with luck, be planetary news. “But it does make business sense.”
“But my boy’ll maybe die without that operation!”
“Señor, that is one problem with the present system of private insurance,” I told him, knowing that this was as fine a campaign issue as any. Tocsin had led the crackdown on supposed waste in welfare and medical insurance; now the consequence of applying business ethics to medicine was coming clear. “They seek, naturally enough, to minimize claims. They are interested in saving money. I believe that system should be reformed so that no children have to die for the sake of a company’s balance sheet. I can’t promise to get that changed right away, but I will certainly work on it.”
“All this—these months out of work, my wife taking it so hard that she lost her health—just to get out of paying for my boy?” He was still struggling with the enormity of it.
“Mr. Booker—” I was having trouble sticking to “señor,” but it’s hard to be letter-perfect in an extemporaneous situation. “You have been wronged, the way a great many workers are wronged. But you are no killer. You don’t want to hurt these people here at the employment office who have done you no injury and would have helped you if they could have. They can’t make a company assume the burden of your family’s medical expenses. But perhaps we can help your son. You need to get legal aid to institute a proceeding against your former employer on the grounds that he terminated you wrongfully. Win that case, and not only will they be liable for the expense of your son’s surgery, they also may be required to restore your job and pay punitive damages. It is certainly worth a try.”
“But—”
“But you have committed a crime. For that you will have to pay the penalty. But perhaps not a prohibitive one. If it were, for example, to turn out that your bomb was not real, then you would be guilty only of the threat of mayhem, not the reality. I believe any reasonable judge would take into consideration the provocation that drove you to an act of desperation. You might have to serve some time in prison, but not long, and meanwhile, your own legal initiative
Booker grabbed the top of his box with his left hand and lifted it off. “It’s just an empty box,” he said, showing it to the camera. “I couldn’t afford the makings of a real bomb.”
I turned to the camera. “The siege is over,” I announced. “Please have an attorney come with the police, to represent Mr. Booker. One competent in medical law.”
Booker looked at me. “You knew it was a bluff?”
I approached him, bringing Shelia forward with me. “See her screen, señor ? Beneath her chair she carries a metal detector with a computerized image alignment. It told her you had no bomb in there. But I didn’t come to give away your secret; I came to help you decide what was best for you. I think you will receive justice now, señor.”
We shook hands. “I knew I could trust you, Hubris.”
Needless to say, that incident made a good many more headlines than one of my routine campaign speeches would have. I had gambled and won—again. I cannot claim that there was not a healthy element of luck in this, but this is the nature of winning politics. Unlucky politicians lose.
So it went. There were no more direct attempts on my life, or at least none that could be demonstrated to be the result of organized malevolence, but we knew that Tocsin was not about to let me challenge him for his office with impunity. It was not a purely personal thing with him; he simply worked to see that no serious threats to his power developed. There were other candidates for the nomination, and awkward or embarrassing things happened to them with suspicious frequency, but nothing was ever traceable to the source. I had survived most successfully, partly because I had planned well—Megan remained invaluable for that—and partly because I worked hard and had several formidable assets. Spirit was matchless on supervising the nuts-and-bolts details of the campaign, and my staff was competent and dedicated. I made good progress.
Then we came to the hurdles of the primaries. Over the centuries there had been attempts to reform the confused primary system, but each state fought for its right to have its own, so nothing was ever done. The first was in the small state of Granite, and it generally had a disproportionate effect on the remaining campaign season. The polls favored me to come in third, but I suspected that I had more support than that, because, though my political base was not great and I lacked the money for much advertising, my voters should be highly motivated. If not, I would be in trouble, so it was nervous business, and I spent as much time in the bubbles of Granite as any candidate.
I did not win it. But I came in second, significantly stronger than predicted. That, in the legerdemain of politics, translated into an apparent win. Suddenly I was a much stronger candidate than I had seemed before, and the media commentators were paying much more attention to me. In their eyes I had become viable. They had much fun with the Hispanic candidate, but my issues were sound, the unrest of the populace continued to grow, and the aspirations of those who were sick of the existing situation focused increasingly on me. I showed up more strongly in the next primary, becoming a rallying point for the disaffected, and the third one I won. Then I was really on my way.
The party hierarchy did not endorse my candidacy, but I came in due course to the nominating convention with significant bloc support, and former President Kenson made a gracious speech on my behalf. The polls of the moment suggested that I had a better chance than the other candidates to unseat President Tocsin, because of my strong appeal to women and minorities, and that was a thing we all wished to accomplish. There was the customary interaction of overlapping interests, but Megan and Spirit and my staff handled that, so I won’t go into detail here. The hard-nosed essence was that though the party regulars were not thrilled with me, I had the most solid grass-roots support, and my ability to take the sizable Hispanic vote away from Tocsin without alienating the general populace was decisive. We did not make an issue of my female staff, but every woman was aware of it; I did not have to make promises to women any more than I did to Hispanics or Blacks, because they knew I would do right by them. I also picked up strong union support. As the convention proceeded a powerful groundswell of public sentiment buoyed my candidacy. The handwriting was written rather plainly on the wall: If the party regulars opposed me openly, they were liable to become irregulars, and the nomination would still be mine after a divisive battle. That could cost us all the election. It was to their interest to move graciously with the tide and to accept the first Hispanic nominee.
And so it came to pass. I chose as my running mate my sister Spirit, and there was massive applause from the distaff contingent for this innovation, and stifled apoplexy elsewhere. It was not the first time a woman had been selected for this office, but it was the first for a sibling of the presidential candidate. Oh, I knew the party regulars preferred a ticket balanced geographically and philosophically, but my argument was this: It was pointless to have a vice-presidential candidate whose major recommendation was that he did not match the locale or philosophy of the president. I wanted a running mate who understood and endorsed my positions exactly, so that in the event of my death in office my program would be carried out without deviation.
No person, male or female, fitted this definition better than did Spirit. There was grumbling in the back rooms, but this was my will, and it would not be denied. Many of the wives of delegates made their will known unmistakably to their spouses; what might seem a liability with male voters was an enormous asset with female voters. We seemed to have, on balance, a stronger ticket than the conventional system would have provided. There was one half-serious complaint: a delegate from Ami muttered that I had chosen the wrong sister. Faith was in attendance, of course; she demurred, blushing, looking prettier than she had in years. The Ami contingent, of course, had been absolutely solid for me from the outset of the campaign.
Now I was the official nominee, going into territory where no Hispanic had gone before. Now I had comprehensive party support, financial and organizational. I addressed monstrous and enthusiastic crowds. But the popularity polls were sobering; though my chances were indeed significantly better than those of any other nominee would have been, I remained six percentage points behind Tocsin. He was, after all, the incumbent, and had a secure base of power, seemingly unlimited funds provided by the special interests, and the name recognition and power over events of a sitting president. These were truly formidable assets. In addition, I knew, there remained sizable conservative and racist elements— the two by no means synonymous, as Thorley had shown me— that did not take to the halls to demonstrate but would never vote for a liberal Hispanic. Six points might not seem like much, out of a hundred, but when it meant that Tocsin was supported by forty-five percent of the responding population, and I by thirty-nine percent, it meant deep trouble. I had to campaign hard enough to make up the difference.
I did. I continued to use the campaign train; it had become a symbol. Now it had many more cars, for the Secret Service men, the big party supporters, and the media reporters. They all seemed to take pleasure in riding the same train with the candidate, and perhaps, to a degree, they shared the fascination with trains. On occasion Thorley was present, shuttling between my campaign and Tocsin’s, trenchantly torpedoing me at every turn. But I couldn’t help it: I liked the man, and I did owe him for two significant services. When I could discreetly do so, I had him in to the family car for a meal and chat; Megan, Spirit, and Hopie liked him also. He never commented on this in the media, though he now had the leverage to put anything into print he wished. It is possible for people to be personal friends but political adversaries, and very few others realized the full nature of our friendship or adversity. Spirit continued to provide him full information on our campaign, honoring my agreement; we kept no secrets from the press.
Indeed, this agreement was to prove fundamentally important and open the way for Thorley’s third significant service to me. One matter occurred that did have to be secret, and so we had to trust Thorley and even ask his
It happened in this manner. In the course of two months my campaign succeeded in drawing me up almost even with Tocsin despite his advantages, forty-two percent to forty-three percent. The election was now rated a dead heat; no one was certain which of us would win. It was my magnetic presence on stage that did it, my talent relating to ever-larger audiences, turning them on. As I gained, Tocsin pulled out all the nether stops, as was his wont when pressed. In addition to a phenomenal barrage of hostile advertising, there were anonymous charges against me, each with just enough substance to give it a semblance of credibility: I was a mass murderer (that is, I had killed a shipful of attacking pirates), I was a notorious womanizer (I had known many women sexually, as was required by Navy policy), I had been charged with mutiny as a Naval officer (but exonerated), and I had adopted a child who resembled me suspiciously. All these were subject to detoxification by clarification of the circumstances; I ignored them except when directly challenged, and then I answered briefly. With one exception: the last. That one I addressed by means of a challenge: “Show me the mother of this child.”
Would you believe it, three different Saxon women came forward, each claiming to have been my paramour fifteen years before and to have conceived by me and to have given up the baby for adoption by me because I had paid her to do so. But none could produce evidence of such payment, and when we had them blood-typed, two were shown to be impossible as parents of Hopie. The third was possible, but a search of her employment record showed that she had not missed a day in the critical period, and an old photograph of her in a bathing suit showed her definitely unpregnant when she would have had to be in the eighth month. Medical records concurred: no baby had been delivered of her in that year. “It is evident,” Thorley commented wryly, “that the girl’s mother has sufficient discretion to avoid publicity.” This was, I believe, the only period he remarked publicly on my family situation, because it had for the moment become legitimate news.