American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 (20 page)

Rog had to go to Earth during the last week; there are types of fence-mending that simply can’t be done by remote control.

After all, votes come from the precincts and the field managers count for more than the speechmakers. But speeches still had to be made and press conferences given; I carried on, with Dak and Penny at my elbow—of course I was much more closely with it now; most questions I could answer without stopping to think.

There was the usual twice-weekly press conference in the offices the day Rog was due back. I had been hoping that he would be back in time for it, but there was no reason I could not take it alone. Penny walked in ahead of me, carrying her gear; I heard her gasp.

I saw then that Bill was at the far end of the table. But I looked around the room as usual and said, “Good morning, gentlemen.”

“Good morning, Mr. Minister!” most of them answered. I added, “Good morning, Bill. Didn’t know you were here. Whom are you representing?”

They gave him dead silence to reply. Every one of them knew that Bill had quit us—or had been fired. He grinned at me, and answered, “Good morning,
Mister Bonforte
. I’m with the Krein Syndicate.”

I knew it was coming then; I tried not to give him the satisfaction of letting it show. “A fine outfit. I hope they are paying you what you are worth. Now to business—— The written questions first. You have them, Penny?”

I went rapidly through the written questions, giving out answers I had already had time to think over, then sat back as usual and said, “We have time to bat it around a bit, gentlemen. Any other questions?”

There were several. I was forced to answer “No comment” only once—an answer Bonforte preferred to an ambiguous one.

Finally I glanced at my watch and said, “That will be all this morning, gentlemen,” and started to stand up.

“Smythe!” Bill shouted.

I kept right on getting to my feet, did not look toward him. “I mean you, Mr. Phony Bonforte-Smythe!” he went on angrily, raising his voice still more.

This time I did look at him, with astonishment—just the amount appropriate, I think, to an important official subjected to rudeness under unlikely conditions. Bill was pointing at me and his face was red. “You impostor! You small-time actor! You
fraud!
”

The London
Times
man on my right said quietly, “Do you want me to call the guard, sir?”

I said, “No. He’s harmless.”

Bill laughed. “So I’m harmless, huh? You’ll find out.” 

“I really think I should, sir,” the
Times
man insisted. 

“No.” I then said sharply, “That’s enough, Bill. You had better leave quietly.”

“Don’t you wish I would?” He started spewing forth the basic story, talking rapidly. He made no mention of the kidnaping and did not mention his own part in the hoax, but implied that he had left us rather than be mixed up in any such swindle. The impersonation was attributed, correctly as far as it went, to illness on the part of Bonforte—with a strong hint that we might have doped him.

I listened patiently. Most of the reporters simply listened at first, with that stunned expression of outsiders exposed unwillingly to a vicious family argument. Then some of them started scribbling or dictating into minicorders.

When he stopped I said, “Are you through, Bill?” 

“That’s enough, isn’t it?”

“More than enough. I’m sorry, Bill. That’s all, gentlemen. I must get back to work.”

“Just a moment, Mr. Minister!” someone called out. “Do you want to issue a denial?” Someone else added, “Are you going to sue?”

I answered the latter question first. “No, I shan’t sue. One doesn’t sue a sick man.”

“Sick, am I?” shouted Bill.

“Quiet down, Bill. As for issuing a denial, I hardly think it is called for. However, I see that some of you have been taking notes. While I doubt if any of your publishers would run this story, if they do, this anecdote may add something to it. Did you ever hear of the professor who spent forty years of his life proving that the
Odyssey
was not written by Homer—but by another Greek of the
same name?
”

It got a polite laugh. I smiled and started to turn away again.

Bill came rushing around the table and grabbed at my arm.

“You can’t laugh it off!” The
Times
man—Mr. Ackroyd, it was —pulled him away from me.

I said, “Thank you, sir.” Then to Corpsman I added, “What do you want me to do, Bill? I’ve tried to avoid having you arrested.”

“Call the guards if you like, you phony! We’ll see who stays in jail longest!
Wait until they take your fingerprints!
” I sighed and made the understatement of my life. “This is ceasing to be a joke. Gentlemen, I think I had better put an end to this. Penny my dear, will you please have someone send in fingerprinting equipment?” I knew I was sunk—but, damn it, if you are caught by the Birkenhead Drill, the least you owe yourself is to stand at attention while the ship goes down. Even a villain should make a good exit.

Bill did not wait. He grabbed the water glass that had been sitting in front of me; I had handled it several times. “The hell with that! This will do.”

“I’ve told you before, Bill, to mind your language in the presence of ladies. But you may keep the glass.”

“You’re bloody well right I’ll keep it.”

“Very well. Please leave. If not, I’ll be forced to summon the guard.”

He walked out. Nobody said anything. I said, “May I provide fingerprints for any of the rest of you?”

Ackroyd said hastily, “Oh, I’m sure we don’t want them, Mr. Minister.”

“Oh, by all means! If there is a story in this, you’ll want to be covered.” I insisted because it was in character—and in the second and third place, you can’t be a little bit pregnant, or slightly unmasked—and I did not want my friends present to be scooped by Bill; it was the last thing I could do for them. We did not have to send for formal equipment. Penny had carbon sheets and someone had one of those lifetime memo pads with plastic sheets; they took prints nicely. Then I said good morning and left.

We got as far as Penny’s private office; once inside she fainted dead. I carried her into my office, laid her on the couch, then sat down at my desk and simply shook for several minutes. Neither one of us was worth much the rest of the day. We carried on as usual except that Penny brushed off all callers, claiming excuses of some sort. I was due to make a speech that night and thought seriously of canceling it. But I left the news turned on all day and there was not a word about the incident of that morning. I realized that they were checking the prints before risking it—after all, I
was
supposed to be His Imperial Majesty’s first minister; they would want confirmation. So I decided to make the speech since I had already written it and the time was scheduled. I couldn’t even consult Dak; he was away in Tycho City.

It was the best one I made. I put into it the same stuff a comic uses to quiet a panic in a burning theater. After the pickup was dead I just sunk my face in my hands and wept, while Penny patted my shoulder. We had not discussed the horrible mess at all.

Rog grounded at twenty hundred Greenwich, about as I finished, and checked in with me as soon as he was back. In a dull monotone I told him the whole dirty story; he listened, chewing on a dead cigar, his face expressionless.

At the end I said almost pleadingly, “I
had
to give the fingerprints, Rog. You see that, don’t you? To refuse would not have been in character.”

Rog said, “Don’t worry.”

“Huh?”

“I said, ‘Don’t worry.’ When the reports on those prints come back from the Identification Bureau at The Hague, you are in for a small but pleasant surprise—and our ex-friend Bill is in for a much bigger one, but not pleasant. If he has collected any of his blood money in advance, they will probably take it out of his hide. I hope they do.”

I could not mistake what he meant. “Oh! But, Rog—they won’t stop there. There are a dozen other places. Social Security . . . Uh, lots of places.”

“You think perhaps we were not thorough? Chief, I knew this could happen, one way or another. From the moment Dak sent word to complete Plan Mardi Gras, the necessary coverup started. Everywhere. But I didn’t think it necessary to tell Bill.” He sucked on his dead cigar, took it out of his mouth, and looked at it. “Poor Bill.”

Penny sighed softly and fainted again.

Somehow we got to the final day. We did not hear from Bill again; the passenger lists showed that he went Earthside two days after his fiasco. If any news service ran anything I did not hear of it, nor did Quiroga’s speeches hint at it.

Mr. Bonforte steadily improved until it was a safe bet that he could take up his duties after the election. His paralysis continued in part but we even had that covered: he would go on vacation right after election, a routine practice that almost every politician indulges in. The vacation would be in the
Tommie
, safe from everything. Sometime in the course of the trip I would be transferred and smuggled back—and the Chief would have a mild stroke, brought on by the strain of the campaign.

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 that 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.