Anthony, Piers - Tyrant 3 - Politician

by Anthony, Piers

  But first there was the problem of transportation. In my campaign for governor I had rented a car that hitched rides on freight trains, but now I had to do national campaigning. My schedule was tighter, I had a larger entourage, and freights did not necessarily go where I was going. The problem of expense remained; money is like oxygen to a political candidate, and travel for a group is expensive. We had only been able to raise so much by solicitations, as I was considered to be a far-out candidate; no Hispanic had ever won a major party nomination for president of the U. S. of J., let alone won the office. Of course, neither had any Black, Mongol, or woman. North Jupiter, touted as the greatest nation in the System, was regressive in some great ways, too. So my campaign was, as the saying goes, climbing the gravity well without a shield. But I seemed to have a better chance than any minority candidate before me, and I intended to accelerate.

  My staff huddled and concluded that the best and cheapest way to travel was still by train. Only this time we rented a whole train, locomotive and all. The days of passenger trains were fading on Jupiter, though not elsewhere in the System, so good equipment was now surplus and available for a fraction of its original value. The best bargains were in the older steam engines, with their matching antique cars, for these remained the most reliable heavy-duty items. I wondered why, suspecting that Jupiter's attention to quality was eroding in the modern day, but didn't argue. We wound up with a fine old luxury train, the Spirit of Empire, with seven ornate coaches. What significance there might be in that name I could not be sure; it is possible to put too much store in symbolism. Certainly my sister liked it, because of the coincidence of names, and perhaps it portended success.

  Each coach was about eighty-five feet long and ten feet wide, and looked very much like its ancient terrestrial ancestor. The engine puffed clouds of dissipating smoke. All in all, I found it a highly satisfying vehicle, for reasons that surely derived from the genetic fascination of the species of man with size, power, and motion. Hopie was delighted; she was thirteen years old now and reminded me extraordinarily of Spirit at that age, though I had never known Spirit at that age. I had known her to age twelve, and from age sixteen. I had never seen her in transition from child to woman. Now, in a fashion, perhaps I would.

  My term as governor of Sunshine was over; by the time Thorley's analysis had run its course and restored my honor to me, there was too little time remaining in my term to make it worthwhile. I was free to campaign fulltime. My secretary, Shelia, organized our office for portability, and the group of us presented ourselves at the station when our train came in. Of course, our baggage was moved aboard separately, and Ebony had been back and forth setting things up. We had other personnel who remained at my campaign headquarters in Ybor. We boarded, officially, as a group: Megan, Spirit, Shelia in her wheel-chair, Ebony, Coral, Mrs. Burton, Hopie, and me. There was a small crowd of supporters to cheer us on, and, of course, the train had its own staff of two engineers, cook, maid, and porter. So we were to be a group of a dozen folk, touring much of the planet. It promised to be interesting, even if my quest for high office proved unsuccessful.

  The railroad station was in the basement of Ybor, below the residential section, where gee was slightly high. It seemed cavernous, because it was mostly empty and poorly lighted. Gee and illumination combined to provide an illusion of great depth, though in fact we were now at the outer rim of the bubble. The cars stood beside the long loading platform, the tops of their wheels barely visible in the crevice at its edge. The glassy windows reflected the things of the station, making the whole scene seem stranger yet.

  "Ooo, I like it!" Hopie exclaimed, clinging tightly to my hand. She was now almost as tall as Spirit, but she wavered back and forth between child and adolescent, and this new experience put her at the younger range. "A real old choo-choo train!"

  I let the girls board first, then stepped on myself. I turned at the entrance platform, before the lock closed, and smiled and waved to the crowd, and they cheered. Then the panel interrupted the view, and I turned again to enter the coach.

  It was like an elegant dayroom, with swiveling couch-chairs and ornate pseudowood tables and fluffy curtains on the windows. Light descended from hanging chandeliers. The floor was lushly carpeted, with protective plastic over the spots wear was likely to be greatest.

  "Please take your seat, sir," the porter said. Originally a porter had been a person to carry bags, but evidently the job description had been amplified; he was making sure we were properly installed. "If you dim the lights you can see out the windows better."

  Hopie plumped into a seat next to mine and clasped her hands. "I want to see us pull out!"

  We doused the light. Sure enough, the station outside now became more visible, because the light was brighter there. The people were still standing on the platform, watching the train.

  There was a jolt; then the platform began to move. Correction: We began to move, ever so slowly, seeing the platform with its burden of people pass behind. Gradually we accelerated, so that the platform moved back at a walking, then at a running, pace. The vertical support pillars started to blur. Our weight increased because we were moving in the direction of the bubble's rotation, adding to the effective centrifugal force. Centrifugal force is, of course, nonexistent; we postulate it as a convenient way to perceive the constant acceleration that the vorticity of the rotating bubble generates in us. Every so often I bemuse myself by realizing how real that imagined force seems. There is no outward pull from the center, merely inertia, but since the moving bubble seems stationary to our perspective, we then assume that inertia is the force. Now; that pseudoforce was increasing because of our increased velocity of rotation.

  "If you will buckle in, sir," the porter reminded me gently.

  Oh, yes. I fastened the seat belt. I have always been a trifle absentminded when I'm thinking.

  "I like this part," Hopie said, her hands holding tight to the arms of her couch-chair.

  There was a warning whistle, a double note. Then the coach flung out of the station, going into free-fall, and simultaneously rotating a quarter turn to my right. The surface of the bubble had seemed to rise abruptly; now it descended again, and I saw that we were drifting parallel to Ybor's equator. My body was not entirely weightless, for now the engine was drawing the cars briskly forward, pressing us all back into our seats.

  In a moment we were out of Ybor's gravity shield. Now we felt Jupiter's own gravity-diffused more than halfway by the train's own gee-shield, to reduce it to Earth-normal. The city's centrifugal gee was at right angles to planetary gee; hence our need to rotate ninety degrees as we shifted from one to the other. We would suffer the same twist when we pulled in to the next city-station. It was a minor inconvenience, and for Hopie, no inconvenience at all.

  We unbuckled and relaxed. We were on our way. Naturally Hopie and I set out on a tour of the train the moment Ybor city fell behind; this was a novelty for both of us.

  First we saw the dining car. This was domed, with a restaurant in the dome that seated as many as eighteen people; they could peer out to either side and above, seeing the sights while they ate. Beneath it was a smaller restaurant for greater privacy, that I might use when entertaining some important supporter or local figure. There was also the sleeping car, with neat cubicles containing wall-to-wall beds; we agreed that we could hardly wait for evening to come so we could try it out. There was a conference car, with an officelike section and equipment; Shelia's files were already ensconced. There was a playroom car, set up for games and entertainments ranging from pool to commercial holovision; Hopie's mouth fairly watered at that. There was a baggage car, used also for supplies. And there was the caboose. This was where the train's own staff resided; they ate and slept there when not on duty, staying out of the way of the paying clientele. Naturally Hopie found it the most fascinating one of all, perhaps because it was tacitly forbidden; we were not supposed to intrude on the crew's privacy. We had rented their services, not th
eir lives.

  At the other end was the engine. This was my own principal interest, for I knew that the welfare of the train depended on it. We were not drifting, we were traveling; this meant that each unit had normal Earth gee and would plummet down into the prohibitive depths if not hauled along fast enough for the plane surfaces to grip the atmosphere. Of course, if we lost velocity, the individual gee-shields would automatically compensate, bringing our weight down to the point of flotation, but then we would all be drifting in air inside the cars, because there was no spin-gee here. We would be stranded in nowhere and have to signal for a tow.

  The engine was steam, but, of course, not exactly the ancient style. There was no wood or coal or oil to fire its boiler—not here in the Jupiter atmosphere! Its heat source was the same as for spaceships: CT iron.

  The problem with pumping CT iron in atmosphere was that it reacted as avidly with gas as with metal, and the interference of terrene hydrogen atoms caused the detonation to be unstable, and some CT molecules could be thrown out in the drive jet. So CT was severely restricted on-planet, permitted only in the heavily protected units of large cities or in special laboratories. CT was definitely not a do-it-yourself power supply. But in the heyday of the railroads, political clout had been brought to bear to permit CT in special locomotives. Thus the classic steam engine came to be a phenomenally heavy-duty apparatus whose firebox was a miniature seetee plant, sealed and buttressed to prevent any leakage, whose inordinate captive heat was used to produce the steam that ran the propeller wheels that urged it forward. Steam, being gaseous water, was too valuable to waste, so it was conserved. In the ancient steam engines of Earth, the steam pressure drove the cylinders and was then released into the atmosphere; this led to a constant depletion of water, which had to be periodically replaced. The steam engines of Jupiter funneled the expended steam into a condensation chamber, returning it to the form of water, which was then recycled into the CT firebox. Thus it was not steam but surplus heat that was radiated into the atmosphere, in the form of fast-moving hydrogen coolant. The process might seem cumbersome, but it worked. A steam engine was a huge, hot, powerful thing, a veritable dragon in the sky, which held a natural fascination for most people, me included.

  The chief engineer was Casey, a grizzled veteran of the old days. Not merely of the period of the heyday of the Jupiter rails but of the spirit of the Earthly railroads, too. He chewed mock tobacco—the real stuff, once used primarily for sneezing and smoke inhalation had been outlawed for centuries because of the savage cost it extracted in human health—and periodically expectorated it into a genuine imitation brass spittoon. The first time she saw him do that, Hopie jumped, then laughed at herself. Casey was like a page from history. He had his song, too, "Casey Jones," which he sang lustily in the manner of the migrant laborers with their own songs. I liked him immediately.

  The Spirit of Empire was more than a name to Casey; as he watched the dials, he saw in his fancy the coal going into the firebox and the steam puffing from the wheel cylinders. The engine itself was impressive enough, with its puffs of gray "smoke" from the exhaust of the heat exchanger; it was mostly coloring matter, to provide a visual confirmation of the volume of hydrogen passing through. Any failure of the condensation chamber or the heat dissipation system would be a serious matter, but the smoke also replicated as closely as feasible the appearance of the ancestral terrestrial engines. There was an enormous amount of nostalgia in the railroad, and it showed in many ways.

  The propellers themselves resembled wheels only when the engine was in the station; here in the atmosphere they were extended to the sides, bottom, and top, to form a hexagon, blasting six columns of gas at great velocity. Those propellers hurled the engine forward much as the turning wheels had once impelled the terrestrial locomotives. This mighty engine hauled the seven cars along behind. In the cars the vibration was damped, but here in the cab the brute force of it was manifest, shaking every part. Hopie clutched my arm with gleeful apprehension; certainly this was an impressive monster!

  We admired the quivering dials that told a story only the engineer could understand, and we watched the smoke pluming from the tall stack. It came out in powerful puffs and billowed voluminously as it carried back, and eddy currents from the nearest propeller curved it into interesting configurations as it passed.

  From here we could also see the railroad tracks ahead. These were actually two beams of light, used to guide the train on its course; as long as the engineer kept it between those tracks, all was well. The tracks glowed into the distance until they seemed to merge, seeming quite straight though they could be gradually curved by angling the generating units, causing the route to shift to avoid inclement turbulence. We were hurtling along between them at a velocity that only became apparent as we watched the track markers click rapidly by.

  Satisfied with our tour, we returned to the dining car, where the cook was serving lunch. For this first meal aboard the train, all eight of us gathered in the dome restaurant where we could further admire the distant smoke through the curving ceiling. Theoretically I was the leader and Megan was my consort, and Ebony, Shelia, Coral, and Mrs. Burton were mere employees, but we had long since abandoned pretense in private; we were more like a family. Hopie excitedly told the others about the wonders of the engine, and they listened with suitable expressions of interest. At first the cook and waitress (in other cars she became the maid) evinced muted disapproval of this un-hierarchical camaraderie, but slowly they relaxed, perceiving that it was genuine. A long train journey, like a space voyage, is a great leveler; social pretensions tend to fade, biding their time until the ride is over.

  After the meal, the ladies took turns in the powder room (as a former military man I was tempted to call it an ammunition dump but managed to keep my humor to myself), and I looked for the male lavatory (the head, in civilian parlance), which, of course, I had all to myself; the cook did not use the passenger facilities. Unfortunately I wasn't sure where it was, and Hopie, who naturally knew everything about the layout of the train already, was with the ladies, so could not direct me. I was at a minor loss. I didn't want to blunder randomly about, though there was no one to perceive my awkwardness aside from myself. We tend to be captive to our social foibles, however much our intellects deride this.

  Fortunately Casey came along the passage, evidently having turned over the helm to his assistant engineer. "Glad to see you!" I said.

  "Got to get to the caboose to take a leak," he muttered apologetically.

  This gave me pause. "You have to proceed the entire length of the train, from engine to caboose, bypassing all the facilities of the cars, just to—"

  "Yeah, they should've put one in the cab," he agreed. "Some engineers keep a li'l piss pot for emergencies, but that's a nuisance to clean."

  "Well, use the one in this car," I suggested.

  "Oh, no, sir, that wouldn't be right," he protested. "The help don't use the—"

  I clapped him on the shoulder. "Casey, when the train's in the station, I'm the candidate and you're the engineer. But out here in transit there's no one to know. Use the damn facilities."

  He looked at me to make sure I meant it, then acquiesced. "Sure thank you, sir, if you're sure. It's over this way." He led me to a door I should have spotted before; it was plainly marked with the silhouette of a gentleman in a top hat. We entered, and there was a spacious chamber with three sinks, two toilets, and a genuine archaic urinal. That was what we both needed at the moment.

  Casey approached it first, as I was standing, looking about at the elegant fixtures: tiled floor, separate stalls around the toilets, mirrors by the sinks, and even small, paper-wrapped bars of old-fashioned soap waiting to be used. No sonic cleansers here! Such conspicuous waste was awesome—and intriguing. We really were living in a bypath of primitive luxury.

  Casey hawked his mouthful of juice and spat. The globule sailed in a beautiful arc to score on the urinal. Just before it struck, there was a zapping f
lash.

  He stopped dead in his tracks. "What was that?"

  "A spark," I said. "Are these devices electrically cleaned?"

  "Naw. They flush with water, recycled. No current in 'em."

  Strange. A little mental claxon sounded. "Let's hold off on this a moment, Casey. It's probably foolish, but I'd like my technical manager to look into this."

  "Sure, bring him in. You rented the train."

  "It's Mrs. Burton. She's my stage manager, but she's handy with everything."

  "Oh." He seemed disgruntled.

  I returned to the restaurant and found Ebony. "Send Mrs. Burton down to the men's room," I told her.

  She raised a dark eyebrow but went in search of Mrs. Burton. Soon the latter appeared, flanked by Coral. "Boss, I can help you with a lot, but some things you've just got to manage by yourself," she said with a smile.

  "There's a complication," I said.

  "Something broken in the John?"

  "There was a spark in the urinal. Maybe just static charge, but—"

  "Not here," she assured me. "All these fixtures are decharged." She forged ahead, pausing at the door. "No one's on?"

  "None we know of," I said, and Casey grimaced, still not liking a woman poking about this room.

  She went in and approached the urinal. She held an all-purpose detector in her hand. As she got close she whistled. "Look at that needle jump! That thing's wired!"

  "Electrified?" I asked.