it?”
“Aren’t you pushing ahead too fast with this, Lew? It’s not like you just to issue ex cathedra instructions like this when you haven’t even studied the—”
“Maybe I can see the future, too,” I said.
I laughed. He didn’t.
Bothered as he was by my insistence on haste, Lombroso did the needful. We conferred with Mardikian, Mardikian spoke with Quinn, Quinn passed the word to the City Council, and the bill became law. The day Quinn was due to sign it, a delegation of oil-company lawyers showed up at his office to threaten, in their politely oily way, a harrowing court fight if he didn’t veto the measure. Quinn sent for me and we had a two-minute discussion. “Do I really want this law?” he asked, and I said, “You really do,” and he sent the oil lawyers away. At the signing he delivered an impromptu and impassioned ten-minute speech in favor of national mandatory gellation. It was a slow day for the networks, and the heart of Quinn’s speech, a lively two-and-a-half-minute segment about the rape of the environment and man’s determination not to acquiesce passively, made it into the night’s news programs from coast to coast.
The timing was perfect. Two days later the Japanese supertanker Exxon Maru was rammed off California and broke apart in a really spectacular way; the gelling system malfunctioned and millions of barrels of crude oil fouled the shoreline from Mendocino to Big Sur. That evening a Venezuelan tanker heading for Port Arthur, Texas, experienced some mysterious calamity in the Gulf of Mexico that spilled a load of ungelled oil on the shores of the whooping crane wildlife refuge near Corpus Christi. The next day there was a bad spill somewhere off Alaska, and, just as though these three awful spills were the first the world had ever known, suddenly everybody in Congress was deploring pollution and talking about mandatory gellation—with Paul Quinn’s brand-new New York City legislation frequently being mentioned as the prototype for the proposed federal law.
Gilmartin.
Gellation.
One tip remained: Socorro for Leydecker before summer. Get to him early.
Cryptic and opaque, like most oracular pronouncements. I was entirely stopped by it. No stochastic technique at my command yielded a useful projection. I doodled a dozen scenarios and they all came out bewildering and meaningless. What kind of professional prophet was I when I was handed three solid clues to future events and I could turn a trick on but one out of the three?
I began to think I ought to pay a call on Carvajal.
Before I could do anything, though, stunning news rolled out of the West. Richard Leydecker, governor of California, titular leader of the New Democratic Party, front-running candidate for the next presidential nomination, dropped dead on a Palm Springs golf course on Memorial Day at the age of fifty-seven, and his office and power descended to Lieutenant-Governor Carlos Socorro, who thereby became a mighty political force in the land by virtue of his control of the country’s wealthiest and most influential state.
Socorro, who now would command the huge California delegation at next year’s national New Democratic convention, began making king-making noises at his very first press conferences, two days after Leydecker’s death. He managed to suggest, apropos of practically nothing, that he regarded Senator Eli Kane of Illinois as the most promising choice for next year’s New Democratic nomination—thereby setting instantly into motion a Kane-for- President boom that would become overwhelming in the next few weeks.
I had been thinking about Kane myself. When the news of Leydecker’s death came in, my immediate calculation was that Quinn should now make a play for the top nomination instead of the vice-presidency—why not grab the extra publicity now that we no longer needed to fear a murderous struggle with the omnipotent Leydecker?—but that we still should contrive things so that Quinn
“Aren’t you pushing ahead too fast with this, Lew? It’s not like you just to issue ex cathedra instructions like this when you haven’t even studied the—”
“Maybe I can see the future, too,” I said.
I laughed. He didn’t.
Bothered as he was by my insistence on haste, Lombroso did the needful. We conferred with Mardikian, Mardikian spoke with Quinn, Quinn passed the word to the City Council, and the bill became law. The day Quinn was due to sign it, a delegation of oil-company lawyers showed up at his office to threaten, in their politely oily way, a harrowing court fight if he didn’t veto the measure. Quinn sent for me and we had a two-minute discussion. “Do I really want this law?” he asked, and I said, “You really do,” and he sent the oil lawyers away. At the signing he delivered an impromptu and impassioned ten-minute speech in favor of national mandatory gellation. It was a slow day for the networks, and the heart of Quinn’s speech, a lively two-and-a-half-minute segment about the rape of the environment and man’s determination not to acquiesce passively, made it into the night’s news programs from coast to coast.
The timing was perfect. Two days later the Japanese supertanker Exxon Maru was rammed off California and broke apart in a really spectacular way; the gelling system malfunctioned and millions of barrels of crude oil fouled the shoreline from Mendocino to Big Sur. That evening a Venezuelan tanker heading for Port Arthur, Texas, experienced some mysterious calamity in the Gulf of Mexico that spilled a load of ungelled oil on the shores of the whooping crane wildlife refuge near Corpus Christi. The next day there was a bad spill somewhere off Alaska, and, just as though these three awful spills were the first the world had ever known, suddenly everybody in Congress was deploring pollution and talking about mandatory gellation—with Paul Quinn’s brand-new New York City legislation frequently being mentioned as the prototype for the proposed federal law.
Gilmartin.
Gellation.
One tip remained: Socorro for Leydecker before summer. Get to him early.
Cryptic and opaque, like most oracular pronouncements. I was entirely stopped by it. No stochastic technique at my command yielded a useful projection. I doodled a dozen scenarios and they all came out bewildering and meaningless. What kind of professional prophet was I when I was handed three solid clues to future events and I could turn a trick on but one out of the three?
I began to think I ought to pay a call on Carvajal.
Before I could do anything, though, stunning news rolled out of the West. Richard Leydecker, governor of California, titular leader of the New Democratic Party, front-running candidate for the next presidential nomination, dropped dead on a Palm Springs golf course on Memorial Day at the age of fifty-seven, and his office and power descended to Lieutenant-Governor Carlos Socorro, who thereby became a mighty political force in the land by virtue of his control of the country’s wealthiest and most influential state.
Socorro, who now would command the huge California delegation at next year’s national New Democratic convention, began making king-making noises at his very first press conferences, two days after Leydecker’s death. He managed to suggest, apropos of practically nothing, that he regarded Senator Eli Kane of Illinois as the most promising choice for next year’s New Democratic nomination—thereby setting instantly into motion a Kane-for- President boom that would become overwhelming in the next few weeks.
I had been thinking about Kane myself. When the news of Leydecker’s death came in, my immediate calculation was that Quinn should now make a play for the top nomination instead of the vice-presidency—why not grab the extra publicity now that we no longer needed to fear a murderous struggle with the omnipotent Leydecker?—but that we still should contrive things so that Quinn
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