“Uh huh. Are we surprised at this, Wade?”
“No no, of course not, but it’s not known, it’s been hidden, and this guy is offering us proof. And you know Texacon is one of Winston’s biggest campaign contributors.”
This had been a seven-hour wonder in Winston’s last campaign; despite the latest campaign finance recomplication campaign, The Washington Post had managed to publish an exposé identifying overlarge contributions to Paul Winston from Texacon, among several other major corporations. It was true that the contributions had been laundered sufficiently to be in compliance with the recomplication, and Winston’s poll ratings had climbed rather than dropped after the exposé, but the allegations were there, and Winston himself had never denied them.
“Hmmmm,” Phil was humming, “hmmm, hmmmmm, and so you’re saying?”
“Winston gets big campaign contributions from Texacon, only marginally legal. He blocks Antarctic Treaty reratification in committee. The Treaty’s ban on mineral extraction goes into limbo. Then Texacon is found down in Antarctica drilling for oil!”
Phil started to laugh. He interrupted himself: “You know there’s no linkage there, Wade, you know that. They’re totally innocent. Winston is blocking the Treaty because he wants to harass the President, and Texacon contributed money to him because he’s the kind of guy they like to support. And they’re drilling in Antarctica because they drill everywhere. I’ll bet no one on either side of that equation is explicitly working a quid pro quo. It’s just business as usual, guys on the same team doing their thing.”
“But the appearance.”
“Yeah sure. Big favors for big money. Bribery, we’ll call it. I’ll say that right on the floor of the Senate. I can press that issue hard being so clean myself. All my contributions come in coin rolls.”
It was true that Phil had once financed a campaign by asking all his supporters to send the coins piling up in their houses, a move that had brought in a lot of money as well as sparked a million jokes and political cartoons about spare change, etc., all the more pointed in that Phil had indeed in one of his OWE stints spent three months living as a street beggar.
“It gives you a crowbar to pry at him with,” Wade said.
“Yes.” Silence as Phil thought it over. “Bad timing though I must say, given how busy I am here.”
“You need to go to Washington with this,” Wade said firmly. “You need to drop into town like a bomb and take it to Winston, see if you can use this oil stuff to put the heat on enough to get him to let the Treaty out of committee. Hell, maybe even drive him out of the chair. Maybe even out of the Senate!”
“Fat chance.”
“But it is a chance! The Ethics Committee might go chaotic and swerve and throw him out. The moment is here, Phil, and it’s important.”
“What I do out on the road is important too.”
“Of course, Phil, of course! But you wouldn’t have to stay off the road for long. Depending. I mean if you picked up some momentum, then maybe you would want to stay. Things are riding in the balance here,” Wade finding it oh so easy to read back some of Phil’s midnight rambling, “we’re at an unstable moment in history, the teeter-totter is wavering there in the middle, co-opification versus the Götterdämmerung, they’ve got the guns but we’ve got the numbers! The time is ripe, Phil, ripe for you to come falling down out of space onto our side of the teeter-totter and catapult them out of there!”
“Hmm, yes, well. It would be nice to stick a pin in Winston anyway, at least.”
“It sure would! That bastard. Pop him like a balloon.”
“Indeed. Hmm, yes—but I’ve got a lot of commitments out here. I don’t know what I could do about that.”
“I’ll represent you where I can, Phil. I’m thinking of staying in New Zealand a while longer, try to tie up some of the loose ends of this Antarctic business, see what I can do. After that I could cover for you out on the road, and of course keep track of this Antarctic situation for you, and I can keep making reports to you, be your eyes for you so to speak, like I’ve been doing here, while you kick their ass in Washington.”
“Hmm, yes … So you’ve got solid evidence Texacon has been drilling in Antarctica since the last campaign?”
“Photos in color, Sam said. Photos from space that read their phone numbers off the screens on their wrist phones.”
“Cool. Interesting. Drop back in like a bomb. Blow their minds. That would be fun, wouldn’t it? Might even get the Antarctic Treaty ratified. That would be a coup. Although it’s funny—if it works, then you’ve got to say it was those ecoteurs that did it—they found the right part of the system and gave it a whap, it’s admirable in a way.”
“Don’t say that on the floor of the Senate.”
“You don’t think I should?”
“Lawmakers endorsing law-breaking? No. It’s unseemly.”
“Obscene? Come on, Wade. Its lawmakers know better than anyone that laws are more a matter of practical compromise than any kind of moral imperative.”
“Just don’t say that on the floor of the Senate.”
“We’ll see. I never know for sure what I’ll say when the moment comes. But just between you and me, I admire those ecoteur guys.”
“Because they took action.”
“Okay, Wade, okay. I’ll go to Washington. I’ll talk to Glen and Colleen here, and John back at the office, we’ll try to set it up. Get those photos to me, and we’ll work from there.”
“They’re on their way. I sent them to the office.”
“I’m in Samarkand, Wade. Send them here too. And try to call during business hours. Call me tomorrow, and we’ll continue this.”
“Sure thing.”
Wade sat on his hotel bed, feeling himself vibrate. He liked Phil Chase; he wanted to keep working for him. And co-opification was going to be a long hard campaign. But if he could keep Phil convinced that he was on the edge of winning, or at least in the heart of the battle, then Phil would stay in Washington, and Wade would have to be out on the road, serving as his eyes. Which meant that Wade was going to have to keep finding things big enough to keep Phil in Washington in order to be able to stay out on the road, with the chance of occasionally coming to Christchurch. In short, making Phil save the world in order to create the off chance of returning to Antarctica. It almost made sense.
After a while, feeling time suddenly heavy on his hands, he went out and took the shuttle bus into downtown Christchurch. He looked out the windows at the trees and the low clouds, stunned by the greens and the warm wet air. Sixty Fahrenheit, they said. He couldn’t imagine what D.C. would feel like. Oh but it was October. It would be cold in D.C. Cold, well—it would be cool.
In downtown Christchurch he wandered, overwhelmed at every turn. Smells of coffee, food cooking, Kiwi voices. The faces from Masterpiece Theatre. Next to the Avon River, a statue of Scott, in concrete forever, wearing what Wade saw now was ridiculous gear. On the pedestaclass="underline" to search, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Tennyson’s immortal concrete. Ta Shu had told him that right around the time Scott had died, his two-year-old son had rushed into his mother’s bedroom in England and said “Daddy’s not coming home.” You could be immortalized in concrete, or see your kid grow up. Better a live donkey than a dead lion, Shackleton had said. Scott hadn’t agreed. But which would the world choose? What story did they like better?