Rog would have to unsort some fingerprints, but he could safely wait a year or more for that.
Election day I was happy as a puppy in a shoe closet. The impersonation was over, although I was going to do one more short turn. I had already canned two five-minute speeches for grand network, one magnanimously accepting victory, the other gallantly conceding defeat; my job was finished. When the last one was in the can, I grabbed Penny and kissed her. She didn't even seem to mind.
The remaining short turn was a command performance; Mr. Bonforte wanted to see me as him before he let me drop it. I did not mind. Now that the strain was over, it did not worry me to see him; playing him for his entertainment would be like a comedy skit, except that I would do it straight. What am I saying? Playing straight is the essence of comedy.
The whole family would gather in the upper living room there because Mr. Bonforte had not seen the sky in some weeks and wanted to and there we would listen to the returns, and either drink to victory or drown our sorrows and swear to do better next time. Strike me out of the last part; I had had my first and last political campaign and I wanted no more politics. I was not even sure I wanted to act again. Acting every minute for over six weeks adds up to about five hundred ordinary performances. That's a long run.
They brought him up the lift in a wheel chair. I stayed out of sight and let them arrange him on a couch before I came in; a man is entitled not to have his weakness displayed before strangers. Besides, I wanted to make an entrance.
I was almost startled out of character. He looked like my father! Oh, it was just a family resemblance; he and I looked much more alike than either one of us looked like my father, but the likeness was there and the age was right, for he looked old. I had not guessed how much he had aged. He was thin and his hair was white.
I made an immediate mental note that during the coming vacation in space I must help them prepare for the transition, the resubstitution. No doubt Capek could put weight back on him; if not, there were ways to make a man appear fleshier without obvious padding. I would dye his hair myself. The delayed announcement of the stroke he had suffered would cover the inevitable discrepancies. After all, he had changed this much in only a few weeks; the need was to keep the fact from calling attention to the impersonation.
But these practical details were going on by themselves in a corner of my mind; my own being was welling with emotion. Ill though he was, the man gave off a force both spiritual and virile. I felt that warm, almost holy, shock one feels when first coming into sight of the great statue of Abraham Lincoln. I was reminded of another statue, too, seeing him lying there with his legs and his helpless left side covered with a shawl; the wounded Lion of Lucerne. He had that massive strength and dignity, even when helpless: The guard dies, but never surrenders.
He looked up as I came in and smiled the warm, tolerant, and friendly smile I had learned to portray, and motioned with his good hand for me to come to him. I smiled the same smile back and went to him. He shook hands with a grip surprisingly strong and said warmly, I am happy to meet you at last. His speech was slightly blurred and I could now see the slackness on the side of his face away from me.
I am honored and happy to meet you, sir. I had to think about it to keep from matching the blurring of paralysis.
He looked me up and down, and grinned. It looks to me as if you had already met me.
I glanced down at myself. I have tried, sir.
'Tried'! You succeeded. It is an odd thing to see one's own self.
I realized with sudden painful empathy that he was not emotionally aware of his own appearance; my present appearance was his and any change in himself was merely incidental to illness, temporary, not to be noticed. But he went on speaking. Would you mind moving around a bit for me, sir? I want to see me you us. I want the audience's viewpoint for once.
So I straightened up, moved around the room, spoke to Penny (the poor child was looking from one to the other of us with a dazed expression), picked up a paper, scratched my collarbone and rubbed my chin, moved his wand from under my arm to my hand and fiddled with it.
He was watching with delight. So I added an encore. Taking the middle of the rug, I gave the peroration of one of his finest speeches, not trying to do it word for word, but interpreting it, letting it roll and thunder as he would have done and ending with his own exact ending: A slave cannot be freed, save he do it himself. Nor can you enslave a free man; the very most you can do is kill him!
There was that wonderful hushed silence, then a ripple of clapping and Bonforte himself was pounding the couch with his good hand and calling, Bravo!
It was the only applause I ever got in the role. It was enough.
He had me pull up a chair then and sit with him. I saw him glance at the wand, so I handed it to him. The safety is on, sir.
I know how to use it. He looked at it closely, then handed it back. I had thought perhaps he would keep it. Since he did not, I decided to turn it over to Dak to deliver to him. He asked me about myself and told me that he did not recall ever seeing me play, but that he had seen my father's Cyrano. He was making a great effort to control the errant muscles of his mouth and his speech was clear but labored.
Then he asked me what I intended to do now. I told him that I had no plans as yet. He nodded and said, We'll see. There is a place for you. There is work to be done. He made no mention of pay, which made me proud.
The returns were beginning to come in and he turned his attention to the stereo tank. Returns had been coming in, of course, for forty-eight hours, since the outer worlds and the districtless constituencies vote before Earth does, and even on Earth an election day is more than thirty hours long, as the globe turns. But now we began to get the important districts of the great land masses of Earth. We had forged far ahead the day before in the outer returns and Rog had had to tell me that it meant nothing; the Expansionists always carried the outer worlds. What the billions of people still on Earth who had never been out and never would thought about it was what mattered.
But we needed every outer vote we could get. The Agrarian Party on Ganymede had swept five out of six districts; they were part of our coalition, and the Expansionist Party as such did not put on even token candidates. The situation on Venus was more ticklish, with the Venerians split into dozens of splinter parties divided on fine points of theology impossible for a human being to understand. Nevertheless, we expected most of the native vote, either directly or through caucused coalition later, and we should get practically all of the human vote there. The Imperial restriction that the natives must select human beings to represent them at New Batavia was a thing Bonforte was pledged to remove; it gained us votes on Venus; we did not know yet how many votes it would lose us on Earth.
Since the nests sent only observers to the Assembly, the only vote we worried about on Mars was the Human vote. We had the popular sentiment; they had the patronage. But with an honest count we expected a shoo-in there.
Dak was bending over a slide rule at Rog's side; Rog had a big sheet of paper laid out in some complicated weighting formula of his own. A dozen or more of the giant metal brains through the Solar System were doing the same thing that night, but Rog preferred his own guesses. He told me once that he could walk through a district, sniffing it, and come within two per cent of its results. I think he could.
Doc Capek was sitting back, with his hands over his paunch, as relaxed as an angleworm. Penny was moving around, pushing straight things crooked and vice versa and fetching us drinks. She never seemed to look directly at either me or Mr. Bonforte.