Chapter 15 — SPIRIT

It was two years before the next presidential election for the United States of Jupiter, but that was barely time to do the job. Spirit was my campaign manager, of course; Megan was my strategist, and Shelia my coordinator. They worked together, organizing a complex political entity of publicity and fund-raising, hiring specialists for particular aspects, and dictating the very footsteps of my climb. I really had very little to do with this; I merely did as directed, much in the manner of Ebony, our gofer. In fact, sometimes when Ebony was overloaded, I helped her out; she promised not to tell on me. So if I seem to be glossing over much that is essential to a political campaign, it is not because it was neglected but because it wasn't in my department. The operation was somewhat like a military campaign—an analogy that would have appalled Megan—with every effort made to apply our maximum force to the key vulnerabilities of the enemy. The enemy in this case was the apathy of the public and the reputation of opposing politicians. Specifically Tocsin; somehow I had always known I would one day try my strength against him, to the political death.

I started with several considerable assets: I had a planetary reputation as the Hero of the Belt, now being refurbished by special ads and news releases. I had a national one as the "rescuer" of the bodies from Saturn and as the author of the first effective drug-control program of the twenty-seventh century. I had a sympathy vote as survivor of the fiasco of the impeachment and the Sunshine Massacre. I was also now the leading Hispanic candidate, with strong support among other minorities, too. My sister Faith had helped make such progress in the conversion of Hispanics to the language of English and the betterment of their situation that they were now becoming a potent nucleus of political force in that region, and they supported me absolutely. I was credited by some and condemned by others, with hiring a campaign staff calculated to appeal to minorities, because I had a Hispanic, a Black, a disabled person, and a Mongol, in addition to my Saxon wife. It hardly passed unnoticed that all were female. All of this was coincidental, as we had hired solely for convenience and merit, but Megan strongly recommended that I not use the word coincidence publicly.

These assets were basically raw material. They would not win any campaigns for me. I had to do that myself, by generating a great deal of new and favorable publicity. Some of that was handled by advertising, but our funds remained limited, as the wealthy special interests, who were not stupid, regarded me as their enemy. Most of it had to be done by making provocative public appearances. That is what I remember most clearly, rather than the many quiet strategy sessions.

The other face of that coin was Tocsin's liabilities, which I could exploit politically. He had catered shamelessly to the special interests, alienating a large segment of the ordinary population. He had gone in for extensive deficit spending, putting the government in dept at an extraordinary rate. To facilitate the printing of money to help cover this, he had cut the last tie of the Jupiter dollar to tangible value: gold. Now the paper money had nothing to halt its erosion of purchasing power. Inflation was increasing, and the common man was being squeezed between relatively fixed wages and rising prices. Crime and suicide were becoming more popular, and bankruptcies proceeded at a near-record rate. The economy was suffering a fundamental malaise that was to a significant extent traceable to the insensitive and wrongheaded policies of this administration. I could orate on all of this and find a responsive audience anywhere in northern Jupiter.

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 their 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 flash.

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.

"Like an execution chair! And look at the floor—see those wire bands that hold the tiles? Perfect ground. Field so strong it flickers even when a nongrounded object approaches. You know what would have happened if you'd used that thing?"

I worked it out. "High voltage—traveling along the stream—grounding through my body."

"You'd have been fried from the crotch down," she said. "If you didn't die outright from shock, you'd have wished you had. What a booby trap!"

"I was about to use that thing!" Casey said, looking faint.

"You'd only have used it once, sonny," she said. Casey was no youngster; he was in his fifties, but she still had twenty years on him and exploited it.

Coral touched my elbow. "Only a man would use a urinal, sir," she said. "You're the only male passenger aboard. It was rigged for you."

My knees felt weak. In the Navy I had been somewhat hardened to the prospect of sudden extinction, but that had been some time ago. "Casey, let's get down to your caboose," I said. "Mrs. Burton will see to this." Indeed she was already using her detector to trace the wiring, preparatory to nullifying and dismantling the system. I knew there would be no further danger, once she was done.

We traipsed to the caboose. "I don't know how it happened, gov'nor," Casey said, still shaken. "We don't run that sort of train!"

"Of course, you don't," I agreed. "But has this coach been in your train all along?"

"No, sir. The old one was in for refurbishing, so we picked this one up in Ybor. We sure thought it was okay."

"And it was okay," I agreed. "Until someone got in and booby-trapped it."

"Looks like somebody's out to get you, sir," he said.

"Looks as if somebody's out to get me," I agreed grimly.

"Why is that, if you don't mind my asking?"

"I conjecture that there are parties who fear my campaign to be president will be successful, and they do not want me in that office."

"So they try to kill you, just for that?" he asked incredulously.

"It is only a conjecture. I do have enemies from my past."

"Say, yeah! You're the one who cleaned up the Belt. Those druggies sure must be mad at you!"

So he was aware of my Naval record but not of my gubernatorial record. This was probably an insight into the way the average man outside the state of Sunshine perceived me. "It is true that I have always worked to eliminate crime, and the drug trade is perhaps the main source of criminal income."

"Yeah, they're bad customers, all right," he agreed. "I had a friend, got hooked on comet dust; they bled him dry, and when he couldn't pay anymore—" He grimaced. "I never saw a man so torn up. He looked like a damn zombie. He's dead now and better off for it. They say his suit popped a leak when he was working outside, but I know he holed it himself. He was a good engineer, too, before." He shook his head. "Think there's any more traps aboard, sir?"

"It seems likely," I said. "I regret this matter has put you at risk, too."

"Hell, man, if you hadn't of been a decent chap, you'd be dead now, and I'd be out of a job. If I hadn't of spit in that—" He broke off, the closeness of his own brush with electrocution catching up with him again. Casey had not been in Navy combat, and so did not have the background experience of violent death that I did. He was severely shaken, and I knew it would take him some time to adjust.

"Now we are warned," I said. "We'll rout out all the other traps."

We got on it. Mrs. Burton dismantled the urinal trap and discussed its details with Coral, my bodyguard. They agreed that this was a sophisticated device, requiring special expertise and no mean expense, and that it was surely only one of a number of traps. They would have to check the entire train before any of us could relax. "Meanwhile," Coral told me firmly, "you stay with me, close, Governor. I will taste your food first; I will use your facilities."

"But the sanitary—"

"You want privacy at risk of life?"

I looked helplessly at Megan, but she only nodded agreement. "Coral is only doing her job," she said. She was pale, not from the notion of another woman staying so close to me but because of the immediate threat of death. She had taken a tranquilizer but remained tense, and I could not honestly reassure her. For her sake, as much as my own, I had to abate this menace swiftly.

"Good luck using the urinal," I murmured to Coral.

Actually she didn't have to go that far, for Mrs. Burton was on that job. She checked them all out. No other urinals were pied, and no other electrical traps were found, but this did not alleviate our suspicion. "It means the other traps are different," Coral said tersely.

We elected to retire early. This first leg of the tour was a long one, by design; we had wanted to have several days to become acclimatized to the train, so my tour was starting in the state of Evergreen, with speeches scheduled in Attle and Kane. Thereafter we were scheduled for Ortland in Beaver, and on south to Langel and Cisco in Golden, where Megan's reputation guaranteed good reception. We were not speeding, so we had a good four days' travel. Thereafter we would have stops separated by no more than hours.

We were traveling above the residential zone of Jupiter, so were not intersecting any bubbles on the way out, but our route was taking us past the states of Dixie, Magnolia, Opportunity, Show Me, Sunflower, Cornhusk, Equality, Treasure, Gem, and perhaps others, their very names evoking marvelous images. Physically, the atmosphere of Jupiter in this band was fairly dull, for we were clear of the great turbulences of the south, but evocatively this was very special. I think every human being, in his deep psyche, really longs for the old planet and finds comfort in its figurative recreation. Our dreams survive our changing reality, and that is no bad thing.

Coral took the whole bed apart, remade it, then stripped and climbed in herself. "Now, wait..." I began, for I was standing beside it with Megan the whole time.

Coral smiled. "No seduction, sir," she reassured me. "Maybe chemical on sheets, or radiation; I know if I feel."

She was right, of course; some powder in the sheets could be toxic, and if I innocently lay in it—

"But that wouldn't be selective," I pointed out. "Obviously the traps are for me alone, if only because if any woman is taken out, I will be warned. They had no way of anticipating which bed I might be using."

She climbed out and stood for a moment, nude, considering. I had not before appreciated how well formed she was; her Saturnine skin was silken, her torso slender and extremely well toned, her breasts not large but perfectly shaped, her waist so small that her hips and posterior became pronounced. Coral was every bit as pretty in her fashion as her reptilian namesake, and as lithe, and her face was of matching quality. She certainly had not had to go into this sort of work; any man of any planet would have been glad to marry and support her. But she was her own woman, and I certainly respected that in her.

"Good point," she said. "Still, I check the rest." She proceeded to do just that, getting in each bed in the sleeping car. All were clean.

"You have a taste for young flesh?" Megan inquired when we were safely in bed together.

"Not any more," I mumbled, embarrassed.

"Your eyes bulged only from fatigue?" she teased me. She knew that I noticed and appreciated all flesh, but also that I touched none but hers. There was no jealousy in her.

"That must have been it," I agreed, reaching for hers.

"I cannot offer you the like of that," she continued. "Coral is a plum; I am a prune."

"I'm an old man; give me some prune juice," I said, and she laughed. She knew, as I did, that youth is only one aspect of sexuality, and a lesser one than love. Megan, as she was at the age of fifty-four, was all that I ever desired. A glimpse at a body like Coral's was, for me, passing fancy; Megan was reality. I kissed her almost savagely and had at her as if we were teenagers who would be forever separated on the morrow. Certainly there was some of that in it, after the death scare. Flattered, she responded in kind, and it was desperately good. Her adaptation to this side of marriage had been gradual but complete; she was now capable of passion approaching my own, when she knew it would please me. On this occasion it did indeed please me. Next day the quest for traps resumed. Coral stayed so close to me, she often touched, suspicious of everything. But it was not only that. "I am jealous of Megan," she confided when I looked askance.

She had stayed in the adjacent bed-cell overnight. Her duty required her to be as close to me as possible. She surely had overheard our lovemaking. She was not being coquettish; she was stating a fact we both understood. If I notice flesh so does the flesh also notice me; this is a situation I have lived with all my adult life. In this, Coral was no different from any of the girls of my staff. It was one of the things we all lived with and accepted. Perhaps this is typical of all politicians; I have never inquired.

Still no traps turned up, and that was bad because we were sure they existed. All of us felt the tension, especially Hopie. "I don't want anything to happen to you, Daddy!" she cried, hugging me tightly.

"Or to you," I said, kissing her on the forehead. Indeed, she was my only child, and my universe would have darkened without her.

"Her, too," Coral muttered. That was a corollary aspect: If Megan had my love as wife, Hopie had it as daughter, and the others were excluded. They suffered an amicable jealousy of any such attachment.

"Actually you're young enough," I reminded Coral, for she was eighteen years my junior and looked younger.

She quirked a smile. "I suppose I can't keep both jealousies, logically. But I do."

Jealousy is considered to be an ugly emotion. Somehow it never struck me that way. To me it seems more like a compliment.

I spent the morning reviewing my campaign material. It was important that I come across lucidly and powerfully from the outset, making no missteps. A single small-seeming error can ruin a year's political groundwork. So I rehearsed with Hopie, my willing audience; she had heard it all before but seemed never to tire of political themes. "Are you going to be Jupiter's first female president?" I asked her teasingly, to which she replied, "Maybe."

At noon I went to the lavatory to wash my hands. Normally I use the sonic cleaner, but this train was equipped only with the archaic basins, faucets, and wrapped bars of soap, and they intrigued me. I picked up a bar and began to unwrap it.

"Me first," Coral said, taking it from my hand.

"Harpy," I muttered. The harpies of mythology were ugly half-birds noted for snatching things from others. She ignored that. She wet her hands and squeezed the bar through them, pausing to smell it.

Nothing happened. "No poison," she concluded, satisfied.

"Unless it's just male poison," Hopie put in, laughing. She had followed us in; there was no longer any such thing as privacy for me.

It was a joke, but Coral stiffened. "Sex-differentiated enzymes—it just could be!" She took the bar and hurried away, leaving me to make do with unadorned water.

Soon she was back. "It was, sir. I ran it through my chem-kit. Affects only Y chromosome, so no effect on female. But you—if not death in hours, brain damage in days."

Hopie seemed about to faint. "I thought it was humor," she whispered.

"That enemy not laughing," Coral said grimly.

Not funny, indeed! Again I had survived largely by luck. Had Hopie not made her facetious remark...

Coral sent Ebony to check all the soap on board. Only one type was bad: the fancy-wrapped passenger-intended bars. The kind that a potential president might use, rather than one of the train crew. The differentiation remained; I was the only target.

"Bound to be something else," Coral muttered. "But this enemy clever, very clever. Not sure I'll catch the next." I did not like the sound of that. I wondered again exactly who my enemy was. Such cunning; the drug moguls were normally not that subtle.

We discussed it during lunch. We made no effort to conceal what had happened; we were all in this together, with Hopie sharing the risk. We had to make a team effort to win through.

Mrs. Burton summed it up: "One electric trap, one chemical trap. Third one must be something else. Something only the boss will encounter."

"Electric, chemical, physical," Coral said. "Maybe physical trap just for him. Spring-loaded knife where only he goes. But where that?" She had learned to speak almost perfect English during her years with me but tended to revert when concentrating on something.

"I have no plans to go anywhere alone," I said.

"See that you don't," Mrs. Burton said.

The porter met us after lunch. "Phone for you, sir."

It turned out to be an appeal from the city of Phis, in Volunteer. It seemed I had support there, and the mayor was begging me to make at least a whistle-stop in passing.

Such an appeal is hard for a politician to turn down. We consulted and agreed; we would pause at Phis for half an hour, no more, and I would speak a few words of encouragement from the campaign train. It seemed an excellent way to break in, and it might alleviate the tension of the death threat.

Casey brought the train about and followed a spur-track to the bubble. They were really eager to see us in Phis; their station was packed with cheering people. This was extremely gratifying but probably a fluke. I would be playing to sparsely filled houses on my regular tour.

As we passed through the maneuvers for entry to the station, Hopie was at my elbow, trying to tell me something. I'm afraid I was distracted and not paying attention; this really was not the occasion for the indulgence of childish prattle. This was, after all, to be my first campaign speech as a candidate for president of the United States of Jupiter. There were so many issues to develop, and there was so little time, and the manner of my delivery was so vital.

We were gliding to a halt in the station. "You'll have to let me go now, honey," I told Hopie gently. "I have a campaign address to give."

"Daddy, you aren't listening!" she exclaimed, and I saw with surprise that she was crying. Suddenly I realized how frustrating it must be for a child to be ignored. What did it matter if I won over the people at Phis if I alienated my own daughter?

"I'm sorry," I said sincerely. "I'm listening now."

"Daddy, I had a dream, sort of," she said, her tears abating. Sunshine follows rain very quickly, with teenagers.

"A dream," I agreed.

"Sort of. I don't think I was exactly asleep, so—"

"A vision," I said. "I have them sometimes. Maybe it runs in the family."

She smiled gratefully. "Maybe." It was a running joke: How could an adoptive child inherit a genetic trait? We maintained, for the sake of companionship, that it was possible. Indeed, Hopie's blood type matched mine, further evidence. "But this was a bad one."

"Sometimes they are. But often there is truth in them."

"Daddy, I saw you start to talk to the crowd, and then..."

"Don't keep me in suspense," I said, smiling.

"Then it all blew up. Daddy, I'm terrified!"

"Premonition of disaster? Hardly surprising, after what's happened on the Spirit of Empire. But you know that we detect and analyze all metals in my vicinity; if anyone brings a bomb, we'll know."

"Are bombs metal?"

"Well, no. Usually they are cased in metal, though, and have metal detonation wires, that sort of thing. It's hard to avoid metal entirely."

She seemed reassured. "So no one can bomb you when you speak?"

"Nothing is impossible, honey. But it does seem unlikely. For one thing I'll be inside the train, talking to them via loudspeaker. This is standard practice for politicians who are whistle-stopping; the train is kept sealed, so there's no foolishness about carrying in any disease or forgetting to close a port before going back out on the track. Fast and neat and sanitary. No one outside can throw anything inside, which is just as well, because some nuts may try to."

"Okay," she agreed. "I guess I'll let you talk. But if you see anything like a bomb—"

"I'll back off," I agreed. "This may be news to you, but I'm not really partial to explosions, up close."

She laughed, relieved.

Now I approached the mike. "This thing turned on?" I asked Mrs. Burton.

"Oops," she said, touching a switch. "Now it's on."

There was a rippling chuckle in the crowd outside. Her words had just been sent out to them.

I took the mike, opened my mouth, and paused, remembering Hopie's vision. Of course, it probably had been an animation of apprehension—that would soon be dissipated by reality—but as I had told her there was often truth in visions. I see no supernatural agency in this; a vision may be merely a form of intuition, a conjecture based on a collection of impressions assimilated on a subconscious level. Our brains are marvelous things and often know more than our conscious minds choose to realize. Just as I had not paid attention to Hopie before, so the conscious can ignore the unconscious. When the matter is important, sometimes the unconscious breaks through with a vision. It is an attention-getter of last resort. Or so I conjecture; I'm not expert on the matter.

Hopie had seen me start to talk to the crowd, and then everything had blown up.

A booby-trapped mike? But it was already on, and Mrs. Burton had used it. Some things were voice-activated, but obviously this was not.

Voice-activated? How about voice-coded? I shut my mouth tight and backed away, signaling Mrs. Burton to turn off the mike. Coral started forward, concerned. "Sir, is something—"

Mrs. Burton switched off the mike. "What's on your mind, Governor? Surely not stage fright!"

"Let's try a test record," I whispered. "One with my voice."

"Sure." We had made several recordings of single-issue spot discussions for backup use in case my voice got strained; that's another standard precaution. She put one on and turned on the mike, while the crowd outside looked on curiously. We retreated to another chamber.

"Hello, friends," my voice said on the loudspeaker. "My name is—"

The mike console exploded. Metal shrapnel blasted into the wall and cracked the shatterproof pseudoglass window. Hopie screamed.

In a moment there was silence. The broadcast chamber was a shambles; anybody in it would have been damaged beyond repair.

Coral nodded ruefully. "Voice-activated bomb, coded to your voice only," she said. "Sir, I failed you. I did not anticipate that."

"Fortunately Hopie did," I said, putting my arm around my daughter's heaving shoulders. I squeezed her. "I think you saved my life, cutesy."

"Oh, Daddy," she said, sobbing and turning into me.

In due course Mrs. Burton rigged another mike, one not booby-trapped, and I gave my address from the shambled chamber. I kept Hopie with me, holding her left hand with my right. "Someone tried to assassinate me," I told my audience firmly. "Don't worry; it wasn't anyone from Phis. My daughter anticipated it and saved my life; but for her I would have had trouble addressing you now. I think she deserves to participate." And I lifted her hand in a kind of victory gesture.

The crowd cheered so hard that the train vibrated, and Hopie blushed. No one had ever cheered her before.

My first presidential campaign address was a great success.