Politician (6 page)

Cost the city a fortune!“ He seemed more indignant at the vandalism than concerned about personal safety. ”Damned agitators from outside, stirring up trouble!"

More bricks flew, denting the car. Now it looked serious. The people were surging closer, shaking their fists, cursing. For the first time I was aware of personal danger. These men were angry, and I had become the focus of their rage. There was no more justice in this than in the adulation of the Hispanics; I was merely a symbol. But they might very well kill me if they could. The police cordon had disappeared, overrun by the crowd.

The mayor nudged the chauffeur. “Call the riot police,” he snapped. “Tell them to lob a gas grenade here!”

But as the chauffeur started to make the call, a brick smashed down the antenna. Suddenly we were unable to call out.

“Try to bull through them,” the mayor cried in desperation. “They're really out for blood this time!”

“This time?” Spirit asked. “You have had similar riots?”

“It's the recession. Lot of local unemployment. Hard feelings. We rounded up the known troublemakers, but we must've missed some.”

So things were not entirely rosy on Jupiter! Indeed, the man who had started this aggression was now barring the progress of the car with his body, buttressed by a dozen cohorts. He was shouting and gesturing toward us. It looked bad.

“Crowd control procedure,” I said. “Cover me, Spirit.”

She reached into her blouse and brought out a pencil-laser pistol. “Covered.”

“Hey, you aren't supposed to be armed,” the mayor protested. “Weapons are banned in—”

Spirit pointed the laser at his nose and he stopped talking.

I jumped out of the car and ran ahead. For a moment no one realized what I was doing; then a worker pointed at me and shouted.

But by that time I had reached the leader. I caught him by the right arm, spun him around, and applied a submission lock. “Walk quietly with me,” I told him.

“Hey, what the—” he started, then cut off as I abruptly tightened the lock, putting him in pain. He was a big, muscular man, much larger than I, but he had never had combat training and was helpless in my grip.

“You can't do that!” another man cried, reaching for me.

From the car, a beam from Spirit's laser burned a hole in his shirt and stung his chest. It was only a momentary flash, just enough to make him jump. Jump he did, falling back, staring at the car.

“We're from the Navy, remember? We know how to shoot,” I told him. “That was just a warning. Stand clear.”

The others stood clear, realizing that we did indeed know how to conduct ourselves in a fighting situation, and that the presence of the weapon made us far from helpless. Most folk, even those in an enraged mob, are rendered uncertain when abruptly faced with superior will and power. We were exploiting that uncertainty, not giving them time to regroup.

A kind of hush descended on the crowd as I marched the labor leader to the car. Spirit's gaze remained on the crowd, not on me, and she fired again, stinging the hand of a man who was getting ready to throw another brick. She had acute reflexes and perfect marksmanship; with that confidence I was able to concentrate on my own job. I got the leader into the car.

“Sit there,” I told him, indicating the seat I had vacated. “Put your arm around the young lady.”

“That spic?” he demanded angrily. “I wouldn't touch her with—”

Spirit's laser tube swung around to bear on his nose.

“Uh, yeah, sure,” he said, disgruntled. He took the seat and moved his left arm.

“Keep your filthy Saxon hands to yourself!” the girl snapped in Spanish.

“Suffer yourself to be touched by this man,” I told her in the same language. “We want to show the crowd how tolerant their leader is.”

Her eyes widened as she caught on. She smiled sweetly. “Come here, you Saxon tub of sewage,” she said in dulcet Spanish tones. “Put your big fat stinking white paw on me, snotface.” I have of course cleaned up her actual terminology somewhat.

Like the mayor, the leader couldn't understand the words but knew he was being mocked. “Listen, slut, I'd as soon hang that meat of yours up with the other pigs,” he muttered, his gaze flicking across her bared breast.

I perched on the side of the car. “Say what you will, both of you, but keep smiling.” I smiled, too, and waved to the crowd, and so did Spirit, but she did not conceal her laser weapon, still pointed at the leader's head.

The mayor forced a smile of his own. “Very good,” he muttered fatalistically.

The car moved on, and the crowd reluctantly parted. We had taken a hostage and deprived the opposition of its leader; the riot was fizzling out.

The mayor nodded. “By damn, it's working,” he said. Then he stood up, faced the crowd, and gestured expansively. “Hubris! Hubris!” he cried. “Hubris! Hubris! Hubris!”

After a moment some in the crowd picked up the cadence. “Hubris! Hubris!” Soon all were chanting.

We continued to smile and wave, and the labor leader continued to embrace the Latin girl. The parade had resumed.

“Because you have been kind enough to join us,” I said to the labor leader while I continued to watch the crowd, “and to help pacify the throng by your generous gesture of tolerance, I believe you should be rewarded.” Spirit was watching the crowd on the other side, knowing I would alert her if anything needed her attention on my side. We both knew that we could not relax until we were beyond this section of the city.

“You mean I can let go of this Spanish sass?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“God, my wife's going to kill me!”

“Tell your wife the truth: There was a laser at your head. It was duress.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, glancing again at the breast. It was a well-formed one, young and perky. “I'd never touch anything like that if there weren't a weapon on me.”

Another camera-saucer floated near. “But there is a weapon on you, isn't there, you Saxon slob,” the girl said in English, delighted. And, as the saucer-lens took it all in, she twisted about, plastered her anatomy against him, grabbed his head in both her hands, and kissed him wetly on the mouth.

“Gross,” he muttered, but he did not seem totally displeased.

“What is it you desire most?” I asked.

He had to crack an honest smile. “You had to ask that right now, didn't you?”

“I mean you collectively—the workers in the street.”

“No secret there, Navy boy. We want jobs.”

I turned to the mayor, who was still woodenly beaming for crowd and camera. “Why don't you have jobs?”

“The recession,” the mayor said. "Nyork's been hit bad. Twenty-five percent of our industrial capacity's dormant. Companies closed down, moved out. We passed preferential tax measures, allocated choice real estate, upgraded our educational program, and still can't get enough new business in to stop the slide.

So it just gets worse, and the unemployment and welfare rolls are murdering us."

“We don't want welfare, we want jobs!” the leader exclaimed.

“So do we,” the girl said.

“You? You've got our jobs!”

“Dishwashing? Maid work? Street cleaning?” she asked derisively. “My brother's a competent mechanic, and he's out of work, too. We don't like welfare any better than you do.”

“Nobody likes welfare,” the mayor said. “Especially the taxpayer who has to pay for it. But the jobs just aren't there.”

“Where are the jobs?” I asked. I have a talent for reading people and knew that these people—labor leader, girl, and mayor—were speaking honestly now.

"Mostly down south, where you're going, and west. The companies get this will-o'-the-wisp gleam in their corporate eyes and take off for greener pastures. By the time they learn it's illusion, they're stuck.

They'd be better off right here in Nyork, if they only knew it."

“Then someone should tell them,” I said.

“We've been trying. We run ads, we make reports—it just doesn't register.”

“Ads and reports are impersonal,” I said. “Suppose two people like this man and this woman's brother—trained, competent workers who really do want to work—suppose they went to prospective companies and laid it on the line? Would that influence them to return?”

The mayor shrugged. “It couldn't do worse than we've done.”

“Why not try it, then? Appoint a select committee of workers—Saxon, Black, Hispanic—and pay them to go out and brace those companies. Arm them with the best information you've got, so they can really make their case. You can be sure they'll put their hearts into it, because they really do want those jobs. If there's any way to get through, to make those company execs appreciate the excellent company climate you have here, they'll do it. All you need is to get their attention, get them to take you seriously; then wonderful things might follow.”

The mayor frowned. “That's not standard procedure—”

“To hell with standard procedure!” the girl exclaimed. “My brother needs a job! He's got a silver tongue when he's hungry!”

“Don't we all,” the labor leader agreed.

“You'd do it?” she asked him. “You'd go with my brother, to—”

“I'd go to hell with the devil for jobs for me and my crew,” he said.

“You know, you don't seem so bad, for a Saxon cesspool.”

He glanced once more at her anatomy. “I could say the same about a 'Spanic pig, but my wife—”

“Remember that laser,” she said, and kissed him again, more lingeringly than before. She was young, but she had evidently had some practice.

I looked at the mayor. “Will you do it?”

He spread his hands. “I may be a fool, but it won't be the first time. I'll set up the committee and give it a year. If it produces—”

“It'll produce!” the leader and girl said together.

“Know something, Captain?” the mayor said to me. “You're a born politician.”

“It's a necessary skill for a Hispanic officer,” I said.

The parade continued, and it seemed happier now.

We took an airplane from the state of Empire to the state of Sunshine. We had never been in one of these before, so we were fascinated all over again. The shuttle ship had not been the same, though it had planed down into the atmosphere. This vehicle had huge projecting wings on either side that planed much more emphatically against the Jupiter atmosphere as the craft jetted forward at relatively high velocity.

That, and an assist from the gee-shield, enabled this heavier-than-gas vehicle to fly. We got clear of the city, rising above the water-cloud layer, then looped around and accelerated roughly southward at gee for ten minutes. That got us up to about twenty-eight thousand miles per hour velocity, at which point we coasted. The lift provided by the wings was so great at this speed that the pilot turned down the gee-shield to forty percent, so that we experienced approximately normal Earth-gee as a fraction of Jupiter's own greater gravity. Thus we did not have to suffer through a meal in free-fall, which was a blessing.

The meal was somewhat casually served, plunked down on small trays before us, but the stewardesses were shapely, so I was satisfied. Spirit seemed less satisfied but put up with it. As with the shuttle descent, the other passengers were plainly bored with the ride; obviously the meal was mostly to give them something to do. Some snoozed after eating, some read magazines, and some watched the little flat-screen video images set into the backs of the seats before them. Curious, I turned ours on and discovered a news report in progress, showing my own parade of the day before. “Welcome, hero,”

Spirit murmured, nudging me.

I looked out the window-porthole. The plane was racing over the nether clouds, so that I could see monstrous cloud shapes passing like armies. Close clouds fascinated me; they did not exist in space or on airless moons. It was dusk at the moment at this part of Jupiter; though I could not see the direct rays of the sun, I did see the relative brightness of the cloud surface below us and the faint glow of the cloud layer above. We were zooming between the two, a sandwich of clouds, and the experience was moderately surrealistic. I could imagine us traveling forever in this limbo, traversing the vast entirety of Jupiter, never roosting, never resting. The notion had a certain muted appeal.

Then, all too soon, we were warned to fasten our seat belts, and the deceleration and descent commenced. The airplane simply turned around and accelerated backward in the manner of a spaceship, its wings reoriented appropriately. I dare say this particular maneuver would not have been feasible in the days of the primitive aircraft of old Earth, which were strictly one-way affairs, but, of course, technology has advanced in half a millennium. For that matter our cruising velocity would have been well beyond escape velocity on Earth. But Jupiter's escape velocity is quintuple that of Earth's, so we were in no danger of flying free. I used to wonder how the escape velocity could be quintuple when the gee was only two and a half times Earth's, until I realized that the total size of Jupiter's gravity well is much larger than Earth's; size does make a difference.

We dropped through the turbulence of the cloud layer and homed in on the city of Ybor. This bubble seemed small, only half Nyork's diameter and perhaps only an eighth the population, but it was still a big city. There was nothing like this out on the moons!

Landing was routine, with similar procedure as for the shuttle. Soon Spirit and I were ensconced at a downtown hotel.

There is no need to detail the details of our settling in. We elected not to reside in Ybor itself, as most of our lives had been spent in space, and even our planetary residence—technically the large moons of Jupiter shouldn't be called planets, but we do think of them that way—had been in a smaller dome than this. We simply felt more comfortable in small vessels. So we checked the ads and explored the region, renting a tiny bubble-car to travel to the various addresses. For Ybor, like Nyork and the other major cities of North Jupiter, did not exist in solitude; it was the center of a metropolitan collection of bubbles of varying sizes. There was constant local traffic to and from Ybor's nether port, and we joined it.

Our car was only ten feet in diameter, with harnesses for five riders. Its thick hull was translucent so that we could see in every direction. It had a powerful fan that collected atmosphere from around the bubble and blasted it behind, propelling the bubble forward. There was also a compressor that operated when the fan was idle, so that gas could be ejected with much greater force for emergency use. The fan and compressor were powered by oxygen; that is, the oxygen combined with the ambient hydrogen for combustion, yielding water. The oxygen had been processed originally from water, as there is virtually no free oxygen in the Jupiter atmosphere. It is not entirely coincidence that the occupied level is right where water precipitates.

I suppose I should clarify something here. If oxygen is the source of our power, and it requires energy to obtain it, whence comes the power to produce it? The answer is CT—contra-terrene matter, popularly called antimatter or null-matter—the same thing that powers the ships of the Navy. Rods of null-iron are merged with rods of terrene iron, converting into total energy: that is what powers our civilization. Iron is used because it can be handled magnetically; it is of course impossible to handle contra-terrene matter safely any other way. Even with magnets it's tricky; special attract-repulse circuits are necessary to prevent the CT from flying into the magnets themselves and blowing up the entire installation. So CT

power is no small-bubble matter; only major cities and military vessels use it directly, with scattered exceptions. CT merging is used to generate electricity, which is then used for most other purposes, including the production of oxygen, which is then the fuel of choice for small motors, such as this one in the car-bubble.

And where does the CT iron come from? Well, much of the best iron comes from Mars, which was thought to be a barren desert-planet until the Moslem sheikhs discovered a huge natural cache of the power-metal. Oh, there is iron elsewhere; the rocky fragments in the vicinity of the major planets have it, and Jupiter and Saturn are major producers of it. But the iron of Mars is of high quality and easy to mine, and the Martian reserves are huge; this is the source of choice. That gives Mars economic leverage disproportionate to its physical or political importance as a planet. The pure terrene iron is processed in special gravity laboratories sponsored by Jupiter, Saturn, or Uranus, popularly called Black Hole Labs; the actual mechanism is beyond my understanding, but basically a rod of terrene iron is subjected to such gravitational stress that it inverts, becoming CT iron. Thus gravity-shielding technology is the ultimate source of civilized power. This, again, is no small-bubble operation; only the major planets can handle it.

Thus a small planet like Mars has the leverage of the raw material, while a large planet like Jupiter has the leverage of Black Hole technology. It leads to interesting economic interactions.

Yet power does not derive from nothing, either politically or physically. What is the ultimate source of this chain? Opinions differ; it seems that either it is the literal destruction of matter, which might have a deleterious consequence for our universe in the course of a few billion years, or it is the gravity well of the major planets, which might eventually render them into minor planets. Assuredly the human species will be long departed before anything like this occurs.

At any rate we fanned along the highway, and it was another novel experience. The route was actually a jet of atmosphere, one of the myriad that twist along in the eddy-currents of the levels of the gale that is the Jupiter environment. Here at the southern edge of the equatorial band the turbulence was greater than at most places, but actually it wasn't obvious; it simply meant that there were some currents that moved faster than the average, and some that moved slower, and some that twisted around like serpents. They flexed constantly, but the change in position was usually only a few feet per day, and any given jet tended to return to its original position after a few days. This made car-bubble traffic convenient; it was only a matter of blowing one's bubble into the appropriate current, then riding the current to one's destination. It wasn't fast but it conserved energy.

The channels were bounded by glowing netting, so it was impossible to get lost in the wider atmosphere.

Cars thronged this one, virtually touching each other. Brightly colored police bubbles tried to keep order, but there weren't enough of them. Private bubbles jockeyed endlessly for position, narrowly avoiding collisions. I became nervous; this was entirely too crowded!

We passed an intersection. The two jets of atmosphere passed each other skew, not actually touching, but the netting connected so that bubbles could move from one to the other. They did so in a tangled three-dimensional clover-leaf pattern.

We maneuvered from jet to jet, Spirit studying the map on the car's little vid-screen while I watched the other bubbles and sought to avoid the collisions that their reckless motions threatened. The cars were of all colors, and of course had transparent domes, so that I was reminded of the strings of glistening soap bubbles we blew as children. The scene was really rather pretty when viewed that way: lines of bright spheres against the backdrop of the layer of clouds.

After a brief trip that seemed much longer, we reached the suburb-bubble we sought. This was Pineleaf, a private development. Its radius was only one hundred feet, and its apartment cells were all on one level, so that its comfortable capacity was three hundred people. The volume of a sphere varies by the cube of its radius, so the little ones suffer. Ten one-hundred-foot spheres do not equal the capacity of one one-thousand-foot sphere. Far from it! It took a thousand of those little spheres to match the big one.

That was one reason most people lived in the big ones: rents were cheaper. But our Navy retirement pensions put us in an income bracket that permitted upper-middle-class residence, and that meant a little bubble.

Even so, we were surprised as we blew up to it. “It's smaller than a spaceship,” Spirit remarked.

Of course the larger ships of the Jupiter Navy were of entirely different construction, but I shared her impression. Residential developments were supposed to be larger than ships.

We approached the entrance and locked on to an admission port. We opened the hatch and climbed through, into the receiving chamber of the bubble. We gave the suited attendant our car key, and he climbed into our vehicle and sealed it off. He would take it to one of the parking hooks, secure it, and return to this office; that was why he was suited. We were in atmosphere, but the pressure was five bars; we might as well have been under water. The attendant's suit was braced for the pressure; we, as civilians, wore no protective gear. This, too, was a little eerie to one accustomed to the rigors of space duty, but I knew we would get used to it. Civilian ways are not military ways, after all; it was our job to adapt. When we were ready to leave, another attendant would bring our car around to the south pole egress for us.

“Oops,” Spirit murmured. “I think we should have tipped him.”

I had heard of that. Tipping was a pernicious custom that centuries of consumer dissatisfaction had not succeeded in eradicating. Employees of establishments expected to be paid token sums for performing their offices, the implication being that if such graft were not forthcoming, damage to the visitor's property might result. But this, too, was part of civilian life.

Inside the bubble the construction was typical but simpler than that of the big cities. There was not only an open lift for the descent to the residential cylinder, but also steps and a simple slide. We took the slide.

It was banked to compensate for centrifugal acceleration; objects do not fall in an apparent straight line within a spinning sphere, as I have mentioned. This bubble completed its revolution in ten seconds, so we were picking up a lot more lateral motion than vertical. Regardless, we slid down like children, and for an instant I felt as if I were fifteen again, and Spirit twelve. Even at that age, she had been some girl!

“Do you still have your finger-whip?” I asked her as we came to rest at the base.

“I can get one,” she replied, laughing. The finger-whip had been a juvenile weapon, a length of nearly invisible line weighted at the end, which attached to one of her fingers. When someone attacked her, she could sling that line at his face with devastating effect. It requires skill to use such a whip well, and she had had that skill. Today, the same coordination manifested in her deadly accurate aim with a laser-pistol.

We made our way to the registration office, which was beside a tiny park. Perhaps back on old Earth plants had been taken for granted, but here at Jupiter the semblance of nature was prized. A flower garden, a bit of lawn, some trimmed bushes, a dwarf pine tree, the smell of green, growing things—it was indeed precious. The moment we stood in that park, all four hundred square feet of it, we wanted to live here. Surely the proprietors of the Pineleaf subdivision had set up the park there for that very reason, to sweep prospective renters off their emotional feet so that they would not balk at the price. We knew that, yet we felt its impact. Man is a feeling creature more than a rational one.

We rented an apartment of two cells. It had sanitary and cooking facilities, two beds, closet space, and a picture window looking up into the central air space of the bubble, which made it seem roomier. The feeling of elbow room is also important to the human animal, even when we know it is illusory.

We performed the routines of settling in, getting our phone number listed, mailbox assigned, learning the peculiarities of this particular bubble, meeting our neighbors, and so on. There was just a hint of reserve in some cases, which I suspect was the covert objection of Saxons to having Hispanics in their midst.

Theoretically Jupiter is an amalgamated society, free from interculture friction, but in practice it falls short, as we had seen in Nyork. Well, I hoped to do something about that, in due course. For now, we just wanted to get along.