«You’re right» I said. «Forget it. In what way is Layton a crook? What’s he done?»
«As mayor of Sacramento, he got rich awfully suddenly. The rumor is that it was kickbacks on public construction contracts. But it’s covered up damned well. The income tax boys investigated him last year on the strength of the rumors and had to give him a clean bill of health.»
«Must have a good accountant.»
«He is a good accountant. Was near the top in that field before he got into politics. He’s clever, and there isn’t a thing against him. If we even intimate there is, he can sue the bejesus out of us.»
«What if I intimate it? Hire viddy time with my own money, having no connection with the Gallagher campaign? What if I accuse him openly and don’t mind being sued?»
He shook his head slowly. «It would still react against Ellen. You can’t attack one candidate in an election without automatically associating yourself with the other one. No, I’m afraid there’s not a thing you can do, Mr. Andrews, that won’t do us more harm than good. Nothing on a large scale, that is. Of course we’ll appreciate your vote and whatever votes you can swing among your friends.»
And he held out his hand to me, showing the interview was over.
I wandered around a while, thinking. I wanted to do some thinking, plenty of it, before I settled for anything as weak as voting a few times myself and helping swing a few or even a few dozen other votes. Even a few hundred votes wouldn’t help much, the way her campaign manager had talked when he’d finally leveled with me.
I found myself passing Union Square. There was a platform in the middle and a guy on it talking; his voice was amplified and you could hear it all over the square.
«Jupiter,» he said, as though it was a swear word. «This woman proposes to spend our money—and it would take at least a billion dollars of it—to send a rocket around Jupiter. A billion dollars that we’ll have to pay, money out of our pockets, bread out of our mouths!
«A billion dollars, and what are we buying for it? Another worthless planet? Not even that. Just a closer look at another worthless planet. The rocket wouldn’t even land. It couldn’t land.»
There was a small crowd around the platform, but people all over the square, passing on every side of it, were listening, hearing, even though they walked on about their business.
I thought of going up to the platform, climbing up on it and slapping him silly. My hands itched to do it. But it wouldn’t help and it would only land me in jail so I couldn’t even vote myself.
So I didn’t. For once I was sensible.
«The planet Jupiter. Four hundred million miles away, more than eight times as far as Mars, a planet on which man can never land. It has a poisonous atmosphere of methane and ammonia, so thick that at the bottom it is liquid under pressures so great that the strongest rocket would be crushed like an eggshell, an atmosphere thousands of miles deep and in constant turbulence. Below that atmosphere? A layer thousands of miles thick, under terrific pressure. Our telescopes tell us these things about Jupiter, tell us that it is not fit for man. We already know that this giant planet has so strong a gravitational pull that a spaceship cannot even approach it closely without crashing—or should I say splashing?—into it. We already know that its moons are more barren, colder, more inhospitable than our own. And yet Mrs. Gallagher wants to waste a billion dollars of our money to …»
Hands balled in my pockets, I made myself stand there quietly and listen, just so I’d get mad enough to try to do what I’d decided would give Ellen Gallagher her only chance to win the election.
It was noon when I got to Sacramento. The jetport was jammed—I think it was because of a convention of some kind—and I had a lot of trouble getting a helicab into town. But by half past one I was in front of the building on K Street in which Dwight Layton had his office suite.
A minute later I was in the outer office of the suite.
The receptionist was tough, but not too tough; I fast-talked my way past her on the story that my business was highly personal and that it concerned the campaign and seriously affected Mr. Layton’s chances. And no, it wasn’t anything I could take up with his campaign manager or his secretary or anybody but Mr. Layton himself.
He was busy just then and I had to wait twenty-seven minutes, but I got in.
I gave him a phony name and started an excited crackpot spiel about unfair tactics that the God damned stardusters were using against him in the campaign. Still talking excitedly, I let him ease me out within a minute.
I could have held out longer, but a minute had been long enough for me to get a look at the layout of his office, the kinds of locks on the inner and outer doors, and the make and size of his safe. It was a big but old-fashioned job that any good mech could open in ten minutes with the right tools.
I bought all the things I’d need and a brief case to carry them in. I killed time until nine o’clock and then burgled Layton’s office.
No burglar alarm; that’s the one chance I’d taken.
I didn’t even have to open the safe. I tried the desk first. It had one locked drawer and in the drawer, the only thing in it, was a red ledger. The entries in it were in Layton’s handwriting—I compared it with the writing on other papers in the desk to make sure. Names, dates and amounts, even notations of what sales to the city of Sacramento they represented percentages of. Enough evidence to send him to jail half a dozen times over.
Strange and systematic is the mind of an accountant.
There might have been money in the safe and it wouldn’t have hurt my conscience to take it, but I didn’t want to risk tarrying. I had what I’d come for and it was more important than money. I didn’t want to crowd my luck.
I mailed it in a plain wrapper to Richard Shearer at the St. Francis.
I went back to San Francisco and to bed.
Just before noon I phoned Shearer.
«Did you get a package?» I asked him.
«God yes. Who is this?»
«The man who sent it. Leave us name no names, particularly over the telephone. Have you done anything with it yet?»
«I’m still deciding the best way to use it. I’m sweating.»
«Quit sweating,» I said. «Turn it over to the state police, that’s all. But in front of an office full of reporters, to whom you furnish photographic copies of a few of the juiciest pages.»
«But where do I say I got it?»
«Where did you get it? It was mailed to you a plain wrapper from Sacramento. You can turn the wrapper over to the cops too. It hasn’t any fingerprints on it and the address is in block lettering. Your hunch is that somebody in Layton’s organization hates his guts. And that’s what Layton himself will probably figure, if that matters. He won’t find any evidence of a burglary and he probably hasn’t even missed it yet.»
«Listen, what do you want out of this? What can we do for you?»
«You can do two things for me. The first is to buy me a drink and over that I’ll tell you the second. I’ll be in the Big Dipper Bar in fifteen minutes. I’ll know you if you don’t know me.»