Although I’m a tricky old rascal, and ornery if I have to be, and slippery as five hundred years of public life can make one.
After that long, said the senator, parenthetically, you have no more illusions, not even of yourself.
I couldn’t stomach it, he decided. I couldn’t live with myself if I went crawling to New York—and a thing has to be pretty bad to make me feel like that. I’ve never crawled before and I’m not crawling now, not even for an extra hundred years and a shot at immortality.
Cross that one off, too, said the senator.
THREE: Maybe someone could be bribed.
Of all the possibilities, that sounded the most reasonable. There always was someone who had a certain price and always someone else who could act as intermediary. Naturally, a world senator could not get mixed up directly in a deal of that sort.
It might come a little high, but what was money for? After all, he reconciled himself, he’d been a frugal man of sorts and had been able to lay away a wad against such a day as this.
The senator moved a rook and it seemed to be all right, so he left it there.
Of course, once he managed the continuation, he would have to disappear. He couldn’t flaunt his triumph in the party’s face. He couldn’t take a chance of someone asking how he’d been continuated. He’d have to become one of the people, seek to be for-gotten, live in some obscure place and keep out of the public eye.
Norton was the man to see. No matter what one wanted, Norton was the man to see. An appointment to be secured, someone to be killed, a concession on Venus or a spaceship contract—Norton did the job. All quietly and discreetly and no questions asked. That is, if you had the money. If you didn’t have the money, there was no use of seeing Norton.