Robert Silverberg - The Stochastic Man

For the first time a flicker of life showed in his eyes. He was enjoying the game.

“That Mayor Quinn is headed for higher office,” he said softly.

“Governor?”

“Higher.”

I made no immediate answer, and then I was unable to answer, for an immense silence had seeped out of the leather-paneled walls to engulf us, and I feared being the one to puncture it. If only the phone would ring again, I thought, but all was still, as becalmed as the air on a freezing night, until Lombroso rescued us by saying, “We think he has a lot of potential, too.”

“We have big plans for him,” I blurted.

“I know,” said Carvajal. “That’s why I’m here. I want to offer my support.”

Lombroso said, “Your financial aid has been tremendously helpful to us all along, and—”

“What I have in mind isn’t only financial.”

Now Lombroso looked to me for help. But I was lost. I said, “I don’t think we’re following you, Mr. Carvajal.”

“If I could have a moment alone with you, then.”

I glanced at Lombroso. If he was annoyed at being tossed out of his own office, he didn’t show it. With characteristic grace he bowed and stepped into the back room. Once more I was alone with Carvajal, and once more I felt ill at ease, thrown awry by the peculiar threads of invulnerable steel that seemed to lace his shriveled and enfeebled soul. In a new tone, insinuating, confidential, Carvajal said, “As I remarked, you and I are in the same line of work. But I think our methods are rather different, Mr. Nichols. Your technique is intuitive and probabilistic, and mine — Well, mine is different. I believe perhaps some of my insights might supplement yours, is what I’m trying to say.”

“Predictive insights?”

“Exactly. I don’t wish to intrude on your area of responsibility. But I might be able to make a suggestion or two that I think would be of value.”

I winced. Suddenly the enigma lay unraveled and what was revealed within was anticlimactically commonplace. Carvajal was nothing but a rich political amateur who, figuring that his money qualified him as a universal expert, hungered to meddle in the doings of the pros. A hobbyist. An armchair politico. Jesus! Well, make nice for him, Lombroso had said. I would make nice. Groping for tact, I told him stiffly, “Of course. Mr. Quinn and his staff are always glad to hear helpful suggestions.”

Carvajal’s eyes searched for mine, but I avoided them. “Thank you,” he whispered. “I’ve put down a few things to begin with.” He offered me a folded slip of white paper. His hand trembled a little. I took the slip without looking at it. Suddenly all strength seemed to go from him, as if he had come to the last of his resources. His face turned gray, his joints visibly loosened. “Thank you,” he murmured again. “Thank you very much. I think we’ll be seeing each other soon.” And he was gone. Bowing himself out the door like a Japanese ambassador.

You meet all kinds in this business. Shaking my head, I opened his slip of paper. Three things were written on it in a spidery handwriting:

1. Keep an eye on Gilmartin.

2. Mandatory national oil gellation — come out for it soon.

3. Socorro for Leydecker before summer. Get to him early.

I read them twice, got nothing from them, waited for the familiar clarifying leap of intuition, didn’t get that either. Something about this Carvajal seemed to short my faculties completely. That ghostly smile, those burned-out eyes, these cryptic notations — every aspect of him left me baffled and disturbed. “He’s gone,” I called to Lombroso, who emerged at once from his inner room.

“Well?”

“I don’t know. I absolutely don’t know. He gave me this,” I said, and passed the slip to him.

“Gilmartin. Gellation. Leydecker.” Lombroso frowned. “All right, wizard. What does it mean?”

Gilmartin had to be State Controller Anthony Gilmartin, who had clashed with Quinn a couple of times already over city fiscal policy but who hadn’t been in the news in months. “Carvajal thinks there’ll be more trouble with Albany about money,” I hazarded. “You’d know more about that than I do, though. Is Gilmartin grumbling about city spending again?”

“Not a word.”

“Are we preparing a batch of new taxes he won’t like?”

“We would have told you by now if we were, Lew.”

“So there are no potential conflicts shaping up between Quinn and the controller’s office?”

“I don’t see any in the visible future,” Lombroso said. “Do you?”

“Nothing. As for mandatory oil gellation—”

“We are talking about pushing through a tough local law,” he said. “No tankers entering New York Harbor carrying ungelled oil. Quinn isn’t sure it’s as good an idea as it sounds, and we were getting around to asking you for a projection. But national oil gellation? Quinn hasn’t been speaking out much on matters of national policy.”

“Not yet.”

“Not yet, no. Maybe it’s time. Maybe Carvajal is on to something there. And the third one—”

“Leydecker,” I said. Leydecker, surely, was Governor Richard Leydecker of California, one of the most powerful men in the New Democratic Party and the early front runner for the presidential nomination in 2000. “ Socorro is Spanish for ‘help,’ isn’t it, Bob? Help Leydecker, who doesn’t need any help? Why? How can Paul Quinn help Leydecker, anyway? By endorsing him for President? Aside from winning Leydecker’s good will, I don’t see how that’s going to do Quinn any good, and it isn’t likely to give Leydecker anything he doesn’t already have in his pocket, so—”

“Socorro is lieutenant-governor of California,” Lombroso said gently. “Carlos Socorro. It’s a man’s name, Lew.”

“Carlos. Socorro.” I closed my eyes. “Of course.” My cheeks blazed. All my list-making, all my frantic compiling of power centers in the New Democratic Party, all my sweaty doodling of the past year and a half, and yet I had still managed to forget Leydecker’s heir apparent. Not socorro but Socorro, idiot! I said, “What” he hinting at, then? That Leydecker will resign to seek the nomination, making Socorro governor? Okay, that computes. But get to him early? Get to whom?” I faltered. “Socorro? Leydecker? It comes out all muddy Bob. I’m not getting a reading that makes any sense.”

“What’s your reading of Carvajal?”

“A crank,” I said. “A rich crank. A weird little mar with a bad case of politics on the brain.” I put the note in my wallet. My head was throbbing. “Forget it. I humored him because you said I should humor him. I was a very good boy today, wasn’t I, Bob? But I’m not required to take any of this stuff seriously, and I refuse to try. Now let’s go to lunch and smoke some good bone and have some very shiny martinis and talk shop.” Lombroso smiled his most radiant smile and patted my back consolingly and led me out of the office. I banished Carvajal from my mind. But I felt a chill, as though I had entered a new season and the season wasn’t spring, and the chill lingered long after lunch was over.

In the next few weeks we got down in earnest to the job of planning Paul Quinn’s ascent — and our own — to the White House. I no longer had to be coy about my desire, bordering on need, to make him President; by now everyone in the inner circle openly admitted to the same fervor I had found so embarrassing when I first felt it a year and a half earlier. We were all out of the closet now.

The process of creating Presidents hasn’t changed much since the middle of the nineteenth century, though the techniques are a bit different in these days of data nets, stochastic forecasts, and media-intensive ego saturation. The starting point, of course, is a strong candidate, preferably one with a power base in a densely populated state. Your man has to be plausibly presidential; he must look and sound like a President. If that isn’t his natural style, he’ll have to be trained to create a sense of plausibility around himself. The best candidates have it naturally. McKinley, Lyndon Johnson, FDR, and Wilson all had that dramatic presidential look. So did Harding. No man ever looked more like a President than Harding; it was his only qualification for the job, but it was enough to get him there. Dewey, Al Smith, McGovern, and Humphrey didn’t have it, and they lost. Stevenson and Willkie did, but they were up against men who had more of it. John F. Kennedy didn’t conform to the 1960 ideal of what a President should look like — sage, paternal — but he had other things going for him, and by winning he altered the model to some degree, benefiting, among others, Paul Quinn, who was presidentially plausible because he was Kennedyesque. Sounding like a President is important, too. The would-be candidate has to come across as firm and serious and vigorous, yet charitable and flexible, with a tone communicating Lincoln’s warmth and wisdom, Truman’s spunk, FDR’s serenity, JFK’s wit. Quinn could hold his own in that department.