“Don’t you laugh either,” I said. “But something is bothering me too. The lack of contact I suppose. Though I can’t imagine what could possibly go wrong at this time.” “We’ll know in a few hours,” she said, most practically. “Now get down to the brig and send James up for his food.” As she was saying this the spacesuited Bolivar clumped in, his helmet in his hand.
“Done!” he announced. “The last one is in place. Now Harapo has but to speak and the whole world will listen. Dig out that moth-eaten beard again. Dad, because you’re going on camera!” “Best news I ever heard. We’re heading home!” The captain, who still thought we were a gang of killers, was immensely relieved when he was asked to compute a landing orbit. Though from the look of fear on his face when I popped the gas capsule under his nose he must have thought it was the end. It wasn’t. Just sleep gas to keep them all quiet while we landed the ship. The coded message had been sent and now it was up to me to bring the ghip in for what could be a difficult landing. “I laugh at difficult landings,” I muttered as I punched the new coordinates into the computer.
Our orbit brought us out of the night into a golden dawn, down through a thin layer of clouds towards the ground below. Where no spaceport was visible.
“I hope they followed your directions about the hole,” Angelina said, scowling attractively into the viewscreen. “It will be there. We can count upon de Torres.” I was right. The dark mouth of the opening yawned in the middle of the field near the castle. A radio beacon guided us in, but I cut it off when we were two hundred meters up and made the delicate part of the landing myself. Jets flaring, my attention on the radar and lower screens, I dropped the ship down into the immense hole in the ground. We touched with the slightest of bumps and I killed all the power.
“Done,” I announced. “When the dummy barn is put over the hole this spaceship will have disappeared. Until after the election. Though the crew will not have their freedom I am sure they will appreciate the hospitality here.” We were climbing up to the bow port while I talked. It swung open at the touch of a button and sunlight streamed in. A construction crane was just swinging a gangway into place so we could make a graceful exit. We strolled across it to greet the marquez himself, who was waiting at the far end. But instead of joy and welcome his face was a study in darkest gloom.
“It is terrible,” he said. “A painful tragedy. The end is upon us.” Angelina and I exchanged a single glance. Had our premonitions of doom been right? “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“You wouldn’t know, you were out of touch. All the work wa[itf*fl riiinf"rl “You wouldn’t like to tell me why?” I grated through clenched teeth.
“The election. Zapilote has declared a state of emergency and changed the date. It is taking place tomorrow morning. There is nothing we can possibly do in the little time remaining. He is sure to be re-elected again.”
Chapter 27
If you’re holding your breath, why then a day is a long time. But if you are trying to fix an election, then a day is no time at all. And a day was ail that we had left.
It is hard to admit defeat, particularly for one like myself who, if you will excuse me saying so, has never been defeated. Nor was I going to be this time!
“It won’t work!” I announced loudly. “That putrid politico is not getting away with it. “ They stood in awe of this statement, so forcefully and firmly declared. It was only after some hesitation that Bolivar asked the all-important question. “How are you going to stop him?” How indeed? I hadn’t the slightest idea.
“That will be revealed tomorrow. It takes a bigger man than Zapilote to put the skids under Slippery Jim diGriz.” I turned and marched resolutely away before there were any more embarrassing questions. What was I going to do? That vital question flickered about in my frontal lobes, and occasionally dropped into my temporal lobe, and once even into my cerebellum, without producing an answer. I returned to our suite where I bathed in perfumed water and scrubbed myself until every pore gleamed. Then I shaved, and brushed my teeth, took an upper-then a downer to get myself off the ceiling-and still no answer was forthcoming. As a last resort I tucked into a healthy breakfast, then washed it down with countless cups of black coffee. Followed by even more coffee laced with ancient ron. The results were no better.
“Face it, Jim,” I said, sitting on the balcony and staring out at the view, “you have lost the election.” It was almost a relief to come to that conclusion. It cleared the air. He who fights and pulls his freight, lives to fight another date. Count your losses and get out. Lick your wounds-then return. Because there was just no way that the 151 planet-wide election system could be fixed in a single day. As things stood now it really didn’t matter how many people voted for Harapo. Their votes went in one end of the crooked voting machines and votes for Zapilote came out the other.
As soon as I faced this indisputable fact the glimmerings of an idea began tapping faintly for attention. But why? What was important about this bit of bad news? I paced the floor, smoked a cheroot, scratched my head, poured some ron, rubbed my chin and did all of the other things that are supposed to make the brain tick over. One of them must have worked because I was suddenly electrified, leaping into the air and clicking my heels together. Or rather thudding them together, since I was barefoot. I grabbed for the phone and punched in de Torres’s personal number. It took a moment for the call to go through, and when his face appeared on the screen it was bouncing up and down with the sky in the background.
“What is it?” he asked. There was a regular thudding sound beating time behind his voice. Then I realized that he must have gone riding and that the telephone pickup was in the pommel of the saddle.
“Just a question if you don’t mind. This planet is now theoretically an established democracy, isn’t it?” He bounced and nodded. “Theoretically is the right word. We have a constitution that promises everything, though of course we receive nothing. Our motto should be that there are no fixed rules. Anyone can be bribed, anyone corrupted. On paper, yes, we are a democracy...” “Well that paper is what I am interested in. Where can I see a copy of this constitution?” “In my library. It is in the memory banks, but there is also a bound volume on the stand between the windows. Why do you ask?” “All will be revealed very soon. Thanks.” I pulled on some clothes and hurried down to the library, tiptoeing past the tall windows that opened out onto the balcony, because I could see Angelina and the boys having coffee there. It wasn’t quite time for explanations yet.
The constitution was just where the marqu6z had said. I opened it and groaned. There were over nine thousand pages of fine print. I obviously had my work cut out for me.
There was no point in going through the massive thing page by page and scribbling out handwritten notes. Never keep a dog and bark for yourself; that’s one of my mottoes. I turned on the library computer, dredged the constitution up from the memory stacks and punched it into current memory. I then wrote a simple search program and went to pour myself a drink while it began dredging through the massive thing for some nuggets of gold.
It wasn’t easy. There did not seem to be much coherence to the constitution. It was written in a half-dozen styles, all of them obfuscatory of course, and contained repetitions and redundancies galore. After awhile I began to see why. It soon became obvious that Zapilote had not written the thing, but instead must have clobbered it together from a number of other documents. This was both good news and bad. Bad in that I had to scan almost every page myself, good because there was such a variety of material. There had to be something I could use among all this legal rubbish.