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impersonation.
But these practical details were going on by themselves in a corner of my mind; my own being was
welling with emotion.ifi though he was, the man gave off a force both spiritual and virile. I felt that warm,
almost holy, shock one feels when first coming into sight of the great statue of Abraham Lincoln. I was
reminded of another statue, too, seeing him lying there with his legs and his helpless left side covered with
a shawl: the wounded Lion of Lucerne. He had that massive strength and dignity, even when helpless:
"The guard dies, but never surrenders."
He looked up as I came in and smiled the warm, tolerant, and friendly smile I had learned to portray,
and motioned with his good hand for me to come to him. I smiled the same smile back and went to him.
He shook hands with a grip surprisingly strong and said warmly, "I am happy to meet you at last." His
speech was slightly blurred and I could not see the slackness on the side of his face away from me.
"I am honored and happy to meet you, sir." I had to think about it to keep from matching the blurring
of paralysis.
He looked me up and down, and grinned. "It looks to me as if you had already met me."
I glanced down at myself. "I have tried, sir."
"'Tried'! You succeeded. It is an odd thing to see one's own self."
I realized with sudden painful empathy that he was not emotionally aware of his own appearance; my
present appearance was "his"-and any change in himself was merely incidental to illness, temporary, not
to be noticed. But he went on speaking. "Would you mind moving around a bit for me, sir? I want to see
me-you-us. I want the audience's viewpoint for once."
So I straightened up, moved around the room, spoke to Penny (the poor child was looking from one
to the other of us with a dazed expression), picked up a paper, scratched my collarbone and rubbed my
chin, moved his wand from under my arm to my hand and fiddled with it.
He was watching with delight. So I added an encore. Taking the middle of the rug, I gave the
peroration of one of his finest' speeches, not trying to do it word for word, but interpreting it, letting it roll
and thunder as he would have done-and ending with his own exact ending: "A slave cannot be freed,
save he do it himself. Nor can you enslave a free man; the very most you can do is kill him!"
There was that wonderful hushed silence, then a ripple of clapping and Bonforte himself was
pounding the couch with his good hand and calling, "Bravo!"
It was the only applause I ever got in the role. It was enough.
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He had me pull up a chair then and sit with him. I saw him glance at the wand, so I handed it to him.
"The safety is on, sir."
"I know how to use it." He looked at it closely, then handed it back. I had thought perhaps he would
keep it. Since he did not, I decided to turn it over to Dak to deliver to him. He asked me about myself
and told me that he did not recall ever seeing me play, but that he had seen my father's Cyrano. He was
making a great effort to control the errant muscles of his mouth and his speech was clear but labored.
Then he asked me what I intended to do now. I told him that I had no plans as yet. He nodded and
said, "We'll see. There is a place for you. There is work to be done." He made no mention of pay, which
made me proud.
The returns were beginning to come in and he turned his attention to the stereo tank. Returns had
been coming in, of course, for forty-eight hours, since the outer worlds and the districtless constituencies
vote before Earth does, and even on Earth an election "day" is more than thirty hours long, as the globe
turns. But now we began to get the important districts of the great land masses of Earth. We had forged
far ahead the day before in the outer returns and Rog had had to tell me that it meant nothing; the
Expansionists always carried the outer worlds. What the billions of people still on Earth who had never
been out and never wouldthought about it was what mattered.
But we needed every outer vote we could get. The Agrarian Party on Ganymede had swept five out
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