The Director of the Budget was astonished. "Would he take it?"
Treasury cleared his throat. "As a matter of fact, I've asked him to stop by right about now." He hurled a medicine ball into the budgetary gut.
"Oof!" said the Director. "You bastard. Steiner would be perfect. He runs Standards like a watch. He treacherously fired the medicine ball at the Secretary of Raw Materials, who blandly caught it and slammed it back.
"Here he comes," said the Secretary of Raw Materials. "Steiner! Come and sweat some oleo off!"
Steiner ambled over, a squat man in his fifties, and said: "I don't mind if I do. Where's Willy?"
State said: "The President unmasked him as a traitor. He's probably been executed by now."
Steiner looked grim, and grimmer yet when the Secretary of the Treasury said, deadpan: "We want to propose you for Defense."
"I'm happy in Standards," Steiner said. "Safer, too. The Man's father took an interest in science, but The Man never comes around. Things are very quiet. Why don't you invite Winch, from the National Art Commission? It wouldn't be much of a change for the worse for him."
"No brains," the Secretary for Raw Materials said briefly. "Heads up!"
Sterner caught the ball and slugged it back at him. "What good are brains?" he asked quietly.
"Close the ranks, gentlemen," State said. "These long shots are too hard on my arms."
The ranks closed and the Cabinet told Steiner what good were brains.
He ended by accepting.
The Moon is all Republic. Mars is all Soviet. Titan is all Republic.
Ganymede is all Soviet. But Io and Callisto, by the Treaty of Greenwich, are half-and-half Republic and Soviet.
Down the main street of the principal settlement on Io runs an invisible line. On one side of the line, the principal settlement is known as New Pittsburgh. On the other side it is known as Nizhni-Magnitogorsk.
Into a miner's home in New Pittsburgh one day an eight-year-old boy named Grayson staggered, bleeding from the head. His eyes were swollen almost shut.
His father lurched to his feet, knocking over a bottle. He looked stupidly at the bottle, set it upright too late to save much of the alcohol, and then stared fixedly at the boy. "See what you made me do, you little bastard?" he growled, and fetched the boy a clout on his bleeding head that sent him spinning against the wall of the hut. The boy got up slowly and silently—there seemed to be something wrong with his left arm—
and glowered at his father.
He said nothing.
"Fighting again," the father said, in a would-be fierce voice. His eyes fell under the peculiar fire in the boy's stare. "Damn fool—"
A woman came in from the kitchen. She was tall and thin. In a flat voice she said to the man: "Get out of here." The man hiccupped and said:
"Your brat spilled my bottle. Gimme a dollar."
In the same flat voice: "I have to buy food."
"I said gimme a dollar!" The man slapped her face—it did not change—
and wrenched a small purse from the string that suspended it around her neck. The boy suddenly was a demon, flying at his father with fists and teeth. It lasted only a second or two. The father kicked him into a corner where he lay, still glaring, wordless and dry-eyed. The mother had not moved; her husband's handmark was still red on her face when he hulked out, clutching the money bag.
Mrs. Grayson at last crouched in the corner with the eight-year-old boy.
"Little Tommy," she said softly. "My little Tommy! Did you cross the line again?"
He was blubbering in her arms, hysterically, as she caressed him. At last he was able to say: "I didn't cross the line, Mom. Not this time. It was in school. They said our name was really Krasinsky. God damn him!" the boy shrieked. "They said his grandfather was named Krasinsky and he moved over the line and changed his name to Grayson! God damn him!
Doing that to us!"
"Now darling," his mother said, caressing him. "Now, darling." His trembling began to ebb. She said: "Let's get out the spools, Tommy. You mustn't fall behind in school. You owe that to me, don't you, darling?"
"Yes, Mom," he said. He threw his spindly arms around her and kissed her. "Get out the spools. We'll show him. I mean them."
President Folsom XXIV lay on his deathbed, feeling no pain, mostly because his personal physician had pumped him full of morphine. Dr.
Barnes sat by the bed holding the presidential wrist and waiting, occasionally nodding off and recovering with a belligerent stare around the room. The four wire service men didn't care whether he fell asleep or not; they were worriedly discussing the nature and habits of the President's first born, who would shortly succeed to the highest office in the Republic.
"A firebrand, they tell me," the A.P. man said unhappily.
"Firebrands I don't mind," the U.P. man said. "He can send out all the inflammatory notes he wants just as long as he isn't a fiend for exercise.
I'm not as young as I once was. You boys wouldn't remember the old President, Folsom XXII. He used to do point-to-point hiking. He worshipped old F.D.R."
The I.N.S. man said, lowering his voice: "Then he was worshipping the wrong Roosevelt. Teddy was the athlete."
Dr. Barnes started, dropped the presidential wrist, and held a mirror to the mouth for a moment. "Gentlemen," he said, "the President is dead."
"O.K.," the A.P. man said. "Let's go, boys. I'll send in the flash. U.P., you go cover the College of Electors. I.N.S., get onto the President Elect.
Trib, collect some interviews and background—"
The door opened abruptly; a colonel of infantry was standing there, breathing hard, with an automatic rifle at port. "Is he dead?" he asked.
"Yes," the A.P. man said. "If you'll let me past—"
"Nobody leaves the room," the colonel said grimly. "I represent General Slocum, Acting President of the Republic. The College of Electors is acting now to ratify—"
A burst of gunfire caught the colonel in the back; he spun and fell, with a single hoarse cry. More gunfire sounded through the White House. A Secret Serviceman ducked his head through the door: "President's dead? You boys stay put. We'll have this thing cleaned up in an hour—"
He vanished.
The doctor sputtered his alarm and the newsmen ignored him with professional poise. The A.P. man asked: "Now who's Slocum? Defense Command?"
I.N.S. said: "I remember him. Three stars. He headed up the Tactical Airborne Force out in Kansas four-five years ago. I think he was retired since then."
A phosphorus grenade crashed through the window and exploded with a globe of yellow flame the size of a basketball; dense clouds of phosphorus pentoxide gushed from it and the sprinkler system switched on, drenching the room.
"Come on!" hacked the A.P. man, and they scrambled from the room and slammed the door. The doctor's coat was burning in two or three places, and he was retching feebly on the corridor floor. They tore his coat off and flung it back into the room.
The U.P. man, swearing horribly, dug a sizzling bit of phosphorus from the back of his hand with a penknife and collapsed, sweating, when it was out. The I.N.S. man passed him a flask and he gurgled down half a pint of liquor. "Who flang that brick?" he asked faintly.
"Nobody," the A.P. man said gloomily. "That's the hell of it. None of this is happening. Just the way Taft the Pretender never happened in nineteen oh three. Just the way the Pentagon Mutiny never happened in sixty-seven."
"Sixty-eight," the U.P. man said faintly. "It didn't happen in sixty-eight, not sixty-seven."
The A.P. man smashed a fist into the palm of his hand and swore. "God damn," he said. "Some day I'd like to—" He broke off and was bitterly silent.
The U.P. man must have been a little dislocated with shock and quite drunk to talk the way he did. "Me too," he said. "Like to tell the story.
Maybe it was sixty-seven not sixty-eight. I'm not sure now. Can't write it down so the details get lost and then after a while it didn't happen at all. Revolution'd be good deal. But it takes people t' make revolution.