“Based on three medals, two of which aren’t yours, and four months as Clerk of Records in a backwater province?” I said.
“It is a backwater province,” he replied. “It is time to leave it.”
“I have no problem with that,” I said. “But to think you can become the President of all South Africa…”
“It is the logical next step in the progression.”
“The progression?” I said, surprised. “You mean there’s more?”
He looked at me rather sadly, the way you might look at a pet that will never understand what you are trying to teach it.
“There is more.”
“The Presidency of South Africa”—an impossibility in itself—“isn’t enough?”
“When Tchaka became king of the Zulus, Zululand was perhaps ten square miles,” he shot back. “Was that enough?”
“He controlled only ten square miles; the President controls hundreds of thousands,” I said. “There’s a difference.”
“Only in degree,” replied Robert. “His world covered the southern tip of Africa. Mine extends as far as the eye can see.”
“So did his,” I argued.
Robert gave me another sad smile reserved for pets of limited intelligence. “He never looked up.”
5.
Lloyds of London had the odds against him at 200-to-1 with eleven weeks to go. The one casino in Las Vegas that booked bets on it lowered it to 175-to-1 in case there was a sympathy vote for the poor clerk who had the temerity to buck the entrenched political machine. Robert borrowed a thousand rands and bet on himself.
Two months before the election there was a debate between the three leading candidates. Well, actually, the two leading candidates and Robert. It was held in a stadium in Cape Town, rather than a holo studio, and some forty thousand people were in attendance. It was a bright, sunlit day, as almost all days on the Cape are, and it was estimated that more than eighty million people, in South Africa and elsewhere, were watching on their Tri D’s and their computers’ holoscreens.
They were about half an hour into the debate when it happened. Three gunmen—one armed with a laser gun, two with projectile pistols—burst onto the floor of the stadium. They must have been hiding in the laundry facilities in the back of the visiting teams’ clubhouse, and had killed half a dozen security men along the way. They raced onto the field where one of the network anchors was acting as moderator for the debate. One of them started yelling something—the sound system couldn’t pick it up—and then they began firing their weapons. The guards were taken by surprise, and soon lay dead on the stadium floor.
One man fired a shot at Robert, who threw himself to the ground. The bullet hit a woman in the stands. She screamed and pitched forward, dead.
The President was crouching down behind his podium, and the man with the laser pistol was burning his way through it. Two shots tore into the other candidate, blood spurted out of his throat, and he collapsed, writhing and twisting frantically for a few seconds, then lay absolutely still in an ever-increasing pool of his own blood.
And then, just as everyone thought there was more slaughter to come, Robert got to his feet and raced to the man with the laser, hurling himself against the man’s back and sending him sprawling. Somehow he got his hand on the gun as the two went down in a heap and he came up firing. The first blast of deadly light turned one of the pistols to molten metal, the second went right between the third man’s eyes. The man whose gun had melted threw himself at Robert, which was all but suicidal: I don’t think Robert had ever lost a fight since he began building his body up after that one experience as a boy. He reached out a long, powerful arm, grabbed the man by the throat, lifted him off the ground until the wild thrashing became feeble twitching, and then literally threw him away.
The first gunman, the one with the laser whom he had disarmed, got up, took one look into Robert’s eyes, didn’t like what he saw, spotted some police running onto the field, and raced to them, his arms in the air, screaming that he surrendered.
Robert walked over to where the President cowered behind the podium, gently lifted him to his feet, and kept a steadying arm around him until the medics arrived about a minute later.
It was not only an act of extreme heroism, but it had been seen by eighty million people, two-thirds of them eligible to vote in the upcoming election. That night Lloyds lowered his odds to four-to-one, and within a week, when matched against the President, it was six-to-five pick ‘em. By election day Robert was an odds-on favorite, and he won the way a heavy favorite should.
The morning after the election he issued executive pardons to the two surviving would-be assassins. There was some brief outrage in the press, but he pointed out that if he, who had literally risked his life to prevent them from killing the President, was willing to forgive them, what right did anyone else have to hold a grudge?
“That was a remarkable act of generosity,” I said when he and I were briefly alone in his office. I had been appointed his Chief of Staff, but it was entirely for show; he saw who he wanted, when he wanted.
“You have no idea,” he replied with an unfathomable smile.
“I think the people will love you all the more for it: a hero—but a hero with compassion.”
“The thought had crossed my mind,” he said dryly.
“I can’t get over how serendipitous it was,” I continued. “I think you were actually winning the debate, and it probably wouldn’t have won you ten extra votes. But those crazed killers showed up and suddenly you’re the biggest hero we’ve had since…well, Nelson Mandela was a Xhosa, so…since Shaka himself.”
“His name, as I keep telling you, was Tchaka,” replied Robert. “And the most serendipitous thing in the past month is that Lloyds paid off promptly.”
“I didn’t know you needed money.”
He shrugged. “If I hadn’t been elected, I wouldn’t have needed it.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“You will,” he replied. “The day after tomorrow Dlamini and Gumbi”—the two surviving assassins—“will be released. We’ll give the press a few days to ask them the usual endlessly stupid questions. Then, by next week, when the interest and the crowd have died down, you’ll pay them a visit.”
“And?”
“And give each of them half of my Lloyds winnings.”
“You hired them?” I said, wondering why I didn’t feel more shocked at the revelation.
“Be a realist, John,” he answered easily. “What killer in his right mind commits murder—or tries to—in front of eighty million viewers?”
I stared at him for a long moment. “Welcome to the wonderful world of politics,” I said bitterly.
He shook his head. “No, John,” he corrected me. “Welcome to winning.”
6.
I was Robert’s first major appointment—the Postmaster for all South Africa. I have to admit that he was an exceptionally effective President for the first year. The unions had a stranglehold on labor. He broke it. Not with armies of thugs as unions had been fought in the past, but with the carrot and the stick.
Every government agency, from the spaceport traffic controllers to the servants in the Parliament’s private dining room, was run with union labor. He went out of his way to antagonize the unions, and every time a union struck, he would fire all the members who were working for the government, declaring that that particular union or brotherhood of unions could no longer expect government contracts in the future. Then, a week later, he offered work to the same employees who had been fired, usually at twenty percent more than they had been making—and that came to even more money when they realized they did not have to pay union dues.
