There were ways and means, of course. There always were. And he would find them, for he knew all the dodges. After five hundred years in world government, you got to know them all. If you didn’t know them, you simply didn’t last.
Mentally he listed the possibilities as they occurred to him.
ONE: A person could engineer a continuation for someone else and then have that person assign the continuation to him. It would be costly, of course, but it might be done.
You’d have to find someone you could trust and maybe you couldn’t find anyone you could trust that far—for life continua-tion was something hard to come by. Most people, once they got it, wouldn’t give it back.
Although on second thought, it probably wouldn’t work. For there’d be legal angles. A continuation was a gift of society to one specific person to be used by him alone. It would not be transferable. It would not be legal property. It would not be something that one owned. It could not be bought or sold, it could not be assigned.
If the person who had been granted a continuation died before he got to use it—died of natural causes, of course, of wholly natural causes that could be provable—why, maybe, then—But still it wouldn’t work. Not being property, the continuation would not be part of one’s estate. It could not be bequeathed. It most likely would revert to the issuing agency.
Cross that one off, the senator told himself.
TWO: He might travel to New York and talk to the party’s executive secretary. After all, Gibbs and Scott were mere messengers. They had their orders to carry out the dictates of the party and that was all. Maybe if he saw someone in authority—
But, the senator scolded himself, that is wishful thinking. The party’s through with me. They’ve pushed their continuation rack-et as far as they dare push it and they have wrangled about all they figure they can get. They don’t dare ask for more and they need my continuation for someone else most likely—someone who’s a comer; someone who has vote appeal.
And I, said the senator, am an old has-been.