«No. Tell me.»
«It’s like this, Max. Every congressman has some bill he personally wants to put through, usually something he wants to get for his home state, for his constituents, so they’ll vote him back into office. Senator Cornhusker, let’s say, from Iowa wants a new and higher parity price on com. We horse trade, I vote for his bill and he votes for mine.»
«Good God,» I said. «There are a hundred and two senators. You mean you’ll have to make a hundred and one—»
«Max, you’re not thinking straight. Fifty-two votes is a majority. I can count on at least thirty-five—there are that many who’ll vote for it in any case. That leaves only seventeen—or twenty to play safe—votes I’ll have to trade for.»
«But the House of Representatives—»
«Will be tougher. But the starduster lobby will help. They’ll know exactly which votes can be counted on anyway and how to swing enough others. They’ll handle the liaison work, fix it so I can trade for blocks of votes there—one vote in the senate is worth eight house votes since the last reapportionment. And I won’t have to do all the trading myself, either; the lobby can line up at least a few representatives who’ll want that bill through badly enough to do some trading themselves.»
«That sounds like it will take time. Is there any chance of getting it through this coming session? I mean, if you get well fast enough to get there say a month before adjournment?»
She shook her head definitely. «Max, even if I hadn’t been injured, even if I was there now, I wouldn’t try pushing it through this session. This is ninety-eight, a presidential election year. President Jansen will run for re-election—and probably win. He’s mildly on our side; he’ll not veto the bill if it comes to him after re-election. But just before election he’d almost have to.»
«What if he’s not re-elected?»
«I think he will be, but it shouldn’t matter too much to us if he isn’t. Whoever’d beat him would be almost certain to be a middle-of-the-roader who’ll approve a small expansionist bill like ours even though he’d veto, as Jansen would, any really big new move—like trying to colonize another planet or trying to build a starship.»
«How can you be sure? Sure, I mean, that he’d be a middle-of-the-roader?»
«Because neither party would dare run a deep-dyed conservationist any more than they’d dare run a rabid starduster. Luckily the split there isn’t on party lines—and the starduster vote is big enough that neither party would dare have it solidly in opposition. And be glad it’s that way, Max, for right now. If party lines were drawn that way, we’d be in the minority.»
«I can see that. But one thing I can’t see. Woman, since you’re smart enough to figure politics like that, how come you were dopey enough to let Jupiter become an issue in that special election? Telling those reporters you were going to back a new rocket damn near lost you the job.»
«I know. I would have lost it except for what you did. But it wasn’t really my mistake, Brad—Dr. Bradly of Caltech—made it. He let it slip that he’d worked out details of the project and that I was going to back it in Congress if I got in. The reporters came to me for confirmation—and I couldn’t let Brad down, could I? I couldn’t call him a liar.»
«No, you couldn’t,» I said. «But why did he do such a damn fool—»
«Max!» Her voice was a little sharp. «Brad’s dead, remember. And anyway it was he who sold me on the project. It was his idea.»
«I’m sorry,» I said.
She smiled again. «All right, let’s forget it. Tell me—» She looked toward the doorway as we heard footsteps coming toward it. The nurse appeared there. «It’s been half an hour, Mrs. Gallagher. You told me to remind you.»
«Thanks, Dorothy.» She looked back at me. «Max, what I was just going to ask you will take quite a bit of time for you to answer. So for now let’s just arrange a time for you to come back.»
We set it for Friday evening at seven.
I bought a pair of six-inch optical glass blanks to grind myself a lens for a reflecting telescope. I wanted to be able to do a lot of looking, without having to go to an observatory to do it, at Big Jupe and his moons.
I’d have lots of time to look if there wasn’t a chance of the project getting started for at least another year.
I started grinding. It’s a long, tedious job, but it would help pass the time for me.
Friday evening Ellen Gallagher was sitting up in a chair, wearing a housecoat. She looked better, less pale.
She said, «Sit down, Max. All right, we’ll start where we left off. I was going to bring the conversation around to you. What do you want?»
«You know damn well what I want. I want to ride that rocket. But we both know damned well that I can’t, so that’s that. Next to riding it, I want to help you get it through Congress, help build it, watch it take off, and then live long enough to watch it land again. I want to know that we’ve taken one more step out toward where we’re going.»
«That’s what I thought. Yes, I can fix it for you to work on the rocket. But as for your helping get it through Congress—no, definitely not. That’s not your department. It’s my job and I can do it.»
«I don’t seem to recall having done too badly—»
«Max, that was different. You didn’t get me elected, you know. You got my opponent defeated. Sure, the result was the same. But something like that wouldn’t help a bill through Congress. What would you do? Burglarize congressmen’s offices to get something to blackmail them with?»
«I could argue with people.»
«Max, you’d do more harm than good in Washington. Stay away from the place. Promise me you will?»
«All right. I guess you’re right.»
«Good. Now about what kind of a job we can get you on the project, once it’s started—well, Ricky Shearer told me you were a rocket mech and that he thought but wasn’t sure that you were an ex-spaceman. Are you?»
I nodded.
«Honorable discharge? Where’s your discharge button?»
«In a drawer someplace. I don’t wear it. Don’t feel I should wear it for something I did so many years ago.»
«Start wearing it. Your having been a spaceman will help. Now start from scratch and tell me your background and your qualifications.»
«All right,» I said. I sighed. «Scratch was in the year nineteen hundred and forty, in Chicago, Illinois. I was the son of poor but honest parents.»
«No com, Max. Tell this straight. It may be important.»
«Okay, sorry. Well, I was seventeen in fifty-seven when work was started on the space station project, the space station that was to be our first step toward the moon and then the planets.
«I was space-nutty, of course, like a few million other kids. Hell, in those days all kids were space-nutty. Of course I wanted to be a spaceman. Every seventeen-year-old in his right mind wanted to be a spaceman.
«But I was smarter than most of them because I figured out—or guessed—the right way to get in, ahead of the rush. I enlisted in the air corps, for pilot training, just before the rush started. Only a month later the word got around that when a space corps was formed, spacemen would be drawn from the air force, the pick of the best pilots would be the first chosen. And suddenly over a million kids tried to enlist in the air force all at once.»
I grinned. «And of course the air force could take only a few of them and it got to be harder to get in the air force than—than to get elected to Congress. They were able to take just about one out of every thousand applicants.
«But there was I with my little piccolo, already in pilot training. And I made the grade. Cot to be a hot ship pilot, a jet pilot—and knew I’d get into the space corps eventually. But not in the first class, because there were several hundred pilots ahead of me, ones who had priority over me because they’d been in the air force longer. There were three hundred in the first class at space school, the class that started in fifty-eight, while the rockets they’d be flying were still on the drafting board. Those big three-step deals, tall as a ten story building and able to lift only a few hundred pounds of pay load up to the orbit they were going to put the space station in.