The clerk told me they didn’t have one there, but for ten bucks he looked again and told me someone had checked out an hour ago, in the middle of the night, and that if I wanted to take a room that hadn’t been made up yet I could have it. I took it.
The room was a mess all right; the someone who’d just checked out had been a couple and obviously they’d done a lot of drinking and had had a fight in addition to using the bed and several of the towels. They’d got their money’s worth even if they’d stayed there only half the night.
But I didn’t give a damn about that. I pulled a chair over to the window and sat there, keeping watch on the lights of Treasure and the sky over it while I read the tabloid I’d bought on Angel. Skimmed it, rather, since there wasn’t anything in it on what I was interested in, the special election.
I put it down after a while and just watched for a rocket, and I thought about a lot of things. I thought about Bill’s son, Billy. At six, he still had the Dream; he still wanted to be a spaceman. He wanted the stars. I wondered if I’d helped make him that way or whether it had been space opera on the viddy, and then I decided that it didn’t matter. As long as he had the Dream, and if he kept it. One more starduster he’d be. One more crackpot. And every one of us counts. When there are enough of us—
Fog began to drift over the harbor as the sky grayed with dawn and I knew I wouldn’t be able to see a rocket any more if one took off or landed, so I went to sleep. There in the chair, not wanting to lie in or even on that rumpled messy bed. But I slept soundly.
The maid woke me, trying the door.
There was bright sunshine out the window and my wrist watch told me it was eleven o’clock and that I must have slept about seven hours. I was stiff when I got up out of the chair.
But I went to the door before she got away and told her I was going out for a short while and would appreciate it if she cleaned the room. Stiff, dirty and unshaven, I went downstairs for breakfast. Cleaning up and shaving could wait till the bathroom was cleaned up and had fresh towels. I wondered if the maid would think I messed up the room like that and then I decided it didn’t matter what she thought.
When I came back the room was clean and orderly and I took a shower and shaved. The stiffness was gone and I decided I felt pretty good.
I phoned Treasure Island and asked for the head mech, Rory Bursteder. His voice came on and I said, «This is Max, Rory. How’s everything?»
He said, «Max who?»
«Max No Difference,» I told him.
Rory roared, «Max Andrews! You son of a bitch you, where you been the last year?»
«Here and there. Mostly New Orleans.»
«Where you calling from?»
I told him.
«Get the hell over here fast. Start you right in.»
I said, «I don’t want to start work for about a week yet, Rory. Something I want to look into here, first.»
«Oh. The election, maybe?»
«Yeah. I just heard about it yesterday, up in Seattle. What’s the score?»
«Come on over and I’ll tell you. Or—wait a minute, got any plans for this evening?»
«Nope.»
«Then eat with me and the old lady. We’re still in Berkeley so this is halfway there for you. I’m off at six; meet me at the gate then and we’ll go the rest of the way together.»
«Swell,» I said. «But listen, what take-offs or landings are there this afternoon?»
«Only one. Paris rocket takes off at five-fifteen. Okay, I’ll leave word at the gate to get you in at five.»
Rory’s wife Bess is a wonderful cook. Not that I hadn’t enjoyed the meals at Bill’s, but Merlene is a little on the fancy side as a cook, worries as much about how a dish looks as how it tastes. Bess Bursteder’s cooking is old-fashioned and German, but she makes dumplings so light they need the thick rich gravy to keep them from rising off the plate and floating away, and the meat was so tender that it must have come from Circassian virgins, young ones.
We washed it down with ale and then sat back and relaxed. I couldn’t have got up if I’d wanted to.
I said, «Now tell me about the election deal, Rory.»
«Well—it looks like a fair chance.»
«That’s not what I meant, although I want to hear that too. Listen, all I heard was a few sentences of a newscast yesterday. All I know is some dame named Gallagher is running for senator from California and if she gets in she plans to introduce and back a bill making an appropriation to cover an expedition to go around Jupiter.»
«That’s right.»
«But damn it, that’s all I know. What are the details? First, how come a special election? I thought the governor of a state could appoint someone to finish the unexpired term of a senator who dies while in office.»
«You’re ten years out of date. Revised Statutes of nineteen eighty-seven—if a senatorship is vacated by death with more than half of the unexpired term remaining a special election must be held at a date to be set before the next session of Congress.»
«Oh. Well, that answers that. Now, who the hell is this Gallagher woman?»
«Ellen Gallagher, forty-five, widow of Ralph Gallagher who died while he was mayor of Los Angeles six or seven years ago. She struck out on her own in politics after that—she’d been active in them before, but only to work in her husband’s interests. Two terms in the California assembly since then, now running for senator. Next question.»
«What makes her tick? Is she a starduster?»
«No. But she’s a friend of Bradly of Caltech. Know of him?»
«I’ve read some of his stuff. A little stodgy, but good.»
«One of us, within limitations. He still kowtows to the relativists, thinks we’ll never exceed the speed of light. But anyway he sold the Gallagher dame on the Jupiter run—only hell, why didn’t she keep her hatch shut about it until after she got in? California’s pretty conservationist and jetting off may cost her the election.»
«We’ll have to see it doesn’t. Who’s bucking her?»
«Guy named Layton, Dwight Layton, of Sacramento. Ex-mayor there and has a machine. Crooked as they come. Conservationist.»
I shuddered. «Is that all?»
«He’s buying a lot of viddy time and he’s a smooth talker. He says mankind is wasting his most valuable resource, uranium, spending it in prodigious quantities to maintain valueless minor colonies on a dead moon and dead Mars. Earth is impoverishing itself in the futile effort to make a long-since-proved-impractical dream come true. Over a hundred billion dollars spent on Mars alone, and what is there of value to us on Mars? Sand and lichens, not enough air to support human life, bitter cold. Yet we spend more millions every year to supply a few dozen people who are mad enough to try—»
«Shut up,» I said. «That’s enough.»
Bess said, «Scram, you boys. I want to clear the table.» We helped her. Afterward, over some ale in the living room, I said to Rory, «All right, I’ve got the picture now. What can I do about it?»
He sighted. «Well—to start with, you can vote. Got here just in time to register; tomorrow’s the last day. You’ll have to come over to Berkeley again to do it because you’ll have to claim a year’s residence to vote, see, and you can give this address; we’ll say you’ve been rooming with us that long.»
«Good,» I said.
Bess said, «Except that it’s silly for you to go back across the bay tonight and then come back here just to register. Stay with us tonight and register in the morning before you go back.»
«Swell; thanks, Bess.»
Rory said, «Should have thought of that myself. Well, to get back to what you can do about the election; you’ve got plenty of friends in San Francisco so you can register in a few precincts over there. You can probably be set to cast three or four votes next Tuesday.»