"Huh," said O'Hare, looking from the robot to his wife. And then the reflexes of half a century took over. "Well, your time's valuable, Dr. William," he said, "so why don't we just get on with this examination? And we can talk about the problems of this district while we do. As I guess you know, I've always been a leader in the fight for robot rights—" And Carrie slipped gratefully away.
Fiorello O'Hare's vote-getting skills had been tested in more than two dozen elections, from his first runs for the school board and then the county commission—a decade before Carrie had been old enough to vote—through twenty-two terms in the Congress of the United States. Twenty-two terms: from the old days when a congressman actually had to get in a plane or a car and go to Washington, D.C., to do his job, instead of the interactive-electronics sessions that had made the job attractive again. And against twenty-two opponents. The opponents had come in all shapes and sizes, pompous old has-beens when O'Hare was a crusading youth, upstart kids as he grew older. Male or female, black or white, peaceniks and pro-lifers, spenders and budget-balancers—O'Hare had beaten them all. He had, at least, beaten every one of them who dared contest the Twenty-Third Congressional District, anyway. He had not done as well the time he made the mistake of trying for Governor (fortunately in an off year, so his House seat was safe), and not well at all the time when he had hopes for the Senate, even once for the vice-presidency. The primaries had ended one of those dreams. The national convention slew the other. O'Hare learned his lesson. If he stayed in Congress he was safe, and so were his committee chairmanships and his powerful seniority.
After all these years, Caroline O'Hare could no longer remember all the opponents her husband had faced by name. If she could dredge them out of her recollections at all, it was by a single mnemonic trait. This one was Mean. That one was Hairy. There was a Big and a Scared and a Dangerous. Classified in those terms, Carrie thought as they swept into the underground garage of the Shriner's Auditorium, this year's opponent was a Neat. He wore a neat brown suit with a neatly tied brown scarf and neatly shined brown shoes. He was chatting, neatly, with a small and self-assured group of his supporters as the O'Hares got out of their car and approached the elevator, and when he saw O'Hare he gave his opponent a neat, restrained smile of welcome.
The neat opponent was riding on a record of six years as the very successful mayor of a small city in the district. Mayor had been quite a vote-getter in the home town, according to the data-file printout Carrie had ordered. Her husband disdained such things—"I'm a personal man, Carrie, and I deal with the voters personally, and I don't want to hit key issues or play to the demographics; I want them to know me." But he must have retained a little bit of the data, for, when he saw the other group, he hurried over, smile flashing, speech ready on his lips. "A great pleasure to see you here, Mr. Mayor," he cried, pumping the Mayor's hand, "and to congratulate you again on the fine job you've been doing in Elk City!"
"You're very kind." Mayor smiled, nodding politely to Carrie—neat nod, neat smile, neat and pleasant voice.
"Only truthful," O'Hare insisted as the elevator door opened for them. "Well, it's time to do battle, I guess, and may the best man win!"
"Oh, I hope not," the Mayor said politely. "For in that case, as I am mechanical, it would surely be you."
O'Hare blinked, then grinned ruefully at his wife. Cordiality toward his opponents was an O'Hare trademark. It cost nothing, and who knew but what it might soften them up? Not many opponents had played that back to O'Hare. Carrie saw him pat the Mayor's arm, stand courteously aside as they reached the auditorium floor and bow the other party out. But his expression had suddenly become firm. He was like a current breaker that had felt a surge of unexpected and dangerous power. It had opened unaware, but now it had reset itself. It would be ready for the next surge.
But actually, when the surge came, O'Hare wasn't.
The first rounds of the debate went normally. It wasn't really a true debate, of course. It was more like a virtuoso-piece ballet, with two prima ballerinas each showing off her own finest bits. A couple of perfect entrechats matched by a string of double fouettés, a marvelous grand jeté countered by a superb pas en l'air. O'Hare went first. His greatest strengths were the battles he had won, the fights he had led, the famous figures he had worked with. Not just politicians. O'Hare had been the intimate of ambassadors and corporation tycoons and scientists—he had even known Amalfi Amadeus himself, the man whose hydrogen fusion power had made the modern Utopia possible. O'Hare got an ovation after his first seven-minute performance. But so did his opponent. The Mayor was a modest and appealing figure; how handsome they made robots these days! The Mayor, talking about its triumphs in Elk City, had every name right, every figure detailed; how precise they made them! What O'Hare offered in glamour, the Mayor made up in encyclopedic competence… and then Carrie saw how the trick was done.
Against all advice, the Congressman in his second session was telling the audience about the highlights of their summer photo safari along the Nile. Against Carrie's expectations, the audience was enjoying it. Even the Mayor. As O'Hare described how they had almost, but not quite, seen a living crocodile and the actual place where a hippopotamus had once been sighted, the Mayor was chuckling along with everyone else. But while it was chuckling it was reaching for its neat brown attache case; opened it, pulled out a module of data-store microchips, opened what looked like a pocket in the side of its jacket, removed one set of chips and replaced them with another.
It was plugging in a new set of memories! How very unfair. Carrie glanced around the crowded audience to see if any of the audience were as outraged as she, but if they were they didn't show it. They were intent on the Congressman's words, laughing with him, nodding with interest, clapping when applause was proper. They were a model audience, except that they did not seem to notice, or to care about, the unfairness of the Mayor. But why not? They certainly looked normal and decent enough, so friendly and so amiable and—
So neat.
Carrie's hand flew to her mouth. She gazed beseechingly at her husband, but he was too wily a campaigner to have failed to read the audience. Without a hitch, husbanding his time to spend it where it would do the most good, he swung from the pleasures of the summer holiday to the realities of his political life. "And now," he said, leaning forward over the lectern to beam at the audience, "it's back to work, to finish the job you've been electing me for. As you know, I was one of the sponsors of the Robot ERA. A lot of voters were against that, in the old days. Even my friends in political office advised me to leave that issue alone. They said I was committing political suicide, because the voters felt that if the amendment passed there would be no way anybody could tell the difference between a human and a mechanical any more, and the country would go to the dogs. Well, it passed— and I say the country's better off than ever, and I say I'm proud of what I did and anxious to go back and finish the job!" And he beamed triumphantly at his opponent as the applause swelled and he relinquished the floor.
But the Mayor was not in the least disconcerted. In fact, it led the clapping. When it reached the podium it cried, "I really thank you, Congressman O'Hare, and I believe that now every voter in the district, organic and mechanical alike, knows just how right you were! That amendment did not only give us mechanicals the vote. It not only purged from all the data stores any reference to the origins of any voter, mechanical or organic, but it also did the one great thing that remained to do. It freed human beings from one more onerous and difficult task—namely, the job of selecting their elected officials. What remains? Just one thing, I say—the task of carrying this one step further, by electing mechanicals to the highest offices in the land, so that human life can be pure pleasure!"