It was a surprise to him, then, when one of the Vice-President’s aides appeared at his side and bent over to whisper, “The Vice-President would like to speak with you privately after her speech is finished. Would you follow me, please?”
Brumado folded his napkin neatly and placed it beside his half-empty coffee cup. Excusing himself in an inaudible whisper to the nine others at the table, he got up and tiptoed swiftly past the other tables in the darkened hotel dining room, following the dark-suited aide out into the kitchen.
Power is visible in small ways, Brumado understood. The kitchen staff usually would be busy cleaning up the six hundred sets of dinner dishes, clashing silverware and clattering pots while the speaker on the other side of the swinging doors tried to talk over their clamor. For the Vice-President, though, they sat and waited until her speech was finished. Brumado smiled at them as they whispered among themselves and glanced at their wristwatches. Overtime pay. Does it compensate them enough for spending an extra hour away from home?
At last the Vice-President finished and her audience applauded thunderously. Just enough time for the media crews to get tape on the eleven o’clock news.
She swept through the swinging doors, Secret Service guards in front and in back of her, so commanding a presence that the tired, bored kitchen help rose to their feet automatically.
Yet she was tiny, not much over five feet tall, a petite woman who worked hard to avoid gaining weight. Even so she dominated any room she entered. Her face glowed with energy, her eyes so deeply blue they seemed almost violet; their twin laser-beam glances could peel the hide off a rhinoceros. Her hair was a light ashy blonde, a shade that hid gray well, rich and thick yet cropped short enough to tell any woman who looked at her that she had no time for frivolities such as curlers and sets.
“There you are,” she said as she spied Brumado standing in front of the long counter piled high with dirty dishes.
He fell in beside her as they paced toward the back of the kitchen and the doors that opened onto the loading docks and delivery access road.
“Right in the middle of my dinner,” the Vice-President said, waving a flimsy sheet of paper, “this came in from Houston.”
Brumado took the sheet from her without breaking stride and scanned it swiftly.
Looking back at the Vice-President he said, “Dr. Li apparently has no qualms about extending the rover excursion…”
“It’s that damned Indian!” The Vice-President stopped at the doors and her whole entourage, Brumado included, stopped with her. Except for three of the Secret Service agents, who slipped through like wraiths to check the area outside.
“You mean Dr. Waterman.”
“He’s been a troublemaker from the first minute they landed! Why’s he want to change the mission plan? What’s he after?”
Brumado answered softly, “I’m sure he had valid scientific reasons. If…”
But the Vice-President was already shaking her head vehemently. “He’s trying to upstage everybody else. He wants all the glory for himself. Thinks he’ll come back here a hero.”
“I have seen the tape you refused to release to the media,” Brumado said, putting a little iron into his voice. “He does not seem to be interested in politics in any way.”
“Not much! By the time he gets back home they’ll be running him for the Senate. It’s happened before. In New Mexico, too.”
“You are worried that he might become politically active-against you?”
“I’m worried that my enemies will latch onto him and use him against me, just the way the liberal Republicans used Eisenhower against Taft.”
Brumado bowed his head slightly, thinking furiously. If this woman becomes the next president she will certainly be against funding further expeditions to Mars. Especially if she believes that one of our scientists is being used by her opposition.
“You’ve got no idea how much pressure is building up around this Indian,” the Vice-President was saying, her angry voice like fingernails on a chalkboard. “It’s not only the Indian rights activists. It’s the high-tech gang, too. They’re forming alliances with the Hispanics and the ghetto blacks. It’s the old Rainbow Coalition again, plus the techies, with a real honest-to-god Indian scientist hero to be their figurehead!”