And not only did I know it, but by the time I got to the Senate hearing room it appeared that all of Washington knew it too. I testified quickly, along the same lines I had testified before, and when I was through Senator Praggler recessed the hearing and took me out to brunch. “I can’t figure you out, Robin,” he said. “Didn’t your fire change your mind about anything?”
“No, why should it? I’m talking about the long pull.”
He shook his head. “Here’s somebody with a sizeable position in food mine stocks-you-begging for higher taxes on the mines! Doesn’t make sense.”
I explained it to him all over again. Taken as a whole, the food mines could easily afford to allocate, say, ten percent of their gross to restoring the Rockies after scooping out the shale. But no company could afford to do it on its own. If we did it, we’d just lose any competitive position, we’d be undersold by everybody else. “So if you put through the amendment, Tim,” I said, “we’ll all be forced to do it. Food prices will go up, yes-but not a lot. My accountants say no more than eight or nine dollars a year, per person. And we’ll have an almost unspoiled countryside again.”
He laughed. “You’re a weird one. With all your do-gooding- and with your money, not to mention those things-“ he nodded at the Out bangles I still wore on my arm, three of them, signifying three missions that had each scared the hell out of me when I earned them as a Gateway prospector, “why don’t you run for the Senate?”
“Don’t want to, Tim. Besides, if I ran from New York I’d be running against you or Sheila, and I don’t want to do that. I don’t spend enough time in Hawaii to make a dent. And I’m not going to move back to Wyoming.”
He patted me on the shoulder. “Just this once,” he said, “I’m going to use a little old-fashioned political muscle. I’ll try to get your amendment through for you, Robin, though God knows what your competitors are going to do to try to stop it.”
After I left him I dawdled back to the hotel. There was no particular reason to hurry back to New York, with Essie in Tucson, so I decided to spend the rest of the day in my hotel suite in Washington-a bad decision, as it turned out, but I didn’t know that then. I was thinking about whether I minded being called a “do-gooder” or not. My old psychoanalyst had helped me along to a point where I didn’t mind taking credit for things I thought deserved credit, but most of what I did I did for me. The revegetation amendment wouldn’t cost me a dime; we’d make it up in raising prices, as I had explained. The money I put into space might pay off in dollar profits-probably would, I figured-but anyway it was going there because space was where my money had come from. And besides, I had some unfinished business out there. Somewhere. I sat by my window on the penthouse floor of the hotel, forty-five stories up, looking toward the Capitol and the Washington Monument, and wondered if my unfinished business was still alive. I hoped so. Even if she was hating me still.
Thinking about my unfinished business made me think of Essie, by now arriving in Tucson, and that gave me a twinge of worry. We were about due for another attack of the 130-day fever. I hadn’t thought about that early enough. I didn’t like the idea of her being three thousand kilometers away, in case it was a bad one. And, although I am not a jealous person, even if it was a mild, but lecherous and orgiastic one, as they seemed to be becoming more and more frequently, I really preferred that she be lecherous and orgiastic with me.
Why not? I called Harriet and had her make me reservations on an afternoon flight to Tucson. I could conduct my business as well from there as anywhere else, if not quite as comfortably. And then I started conducting some of it. Albert first. There was nothing significantly new, he said, except that the boy seemed to be developing a bad cold.
Zak Bagans, Kelly Crigger
L. Sprague de Camp, Fletcher Pratt