Visitor from the East

Visitor from the East by Harry Turtledove

“Oh, hell,” Bill Williamson said when the alarm clock assassinated a particularly juicy dirty dream. Cussing at it didn’t make it shut up. Resigned that the dream was dead — he’d never be so limber in real life — the governor of the state of Jefferson hit the top of the clock with a massive fist. He got the OFF button and didn’t break the clock, though not from lack of effort.

Yawning, he sat up in bed. “So early?” his wife muttered.

“Sorry, Louise,” Bill said. “But I’ve got to get to the coast to greet the visitor, and Yreka ain’t exactly coastal.”

He lumbered into the bathroom and did what needed doing in there, then pulled a pair of shorts up over the thick, reddish hair on his legs. His wallet sat in one pocket; his keys clinked in the other. Out he went, to grab some breakfast before he hit the road.

Ceilings in the Governor’s Mansion were thirteen feet tall. Doorways were ten feet high. Bill, at nine-two, didn’t need to worry about ducking or bashing his head every time he went through one. Charlie “Bigfoot” Lewis, the second Governor of Jefferson — and the one who built the mansion during Coolidge prosperity — had been a sasquatch himself, and ran it up on a scale that suited his own comfort. Too big for humans, he’d figured, was easier to deal with than too small for his own folk. Bill blessed him for that.

“Here you go, Governor,” the steward said when he walked into the dining room. “Coffee’s hot, and breakfast’ll be up in a minute.”

“Thanks, Ray.” Bill drank coffee by the quart mug. He was halfway down his first cup when Ray brought him eight fried eggs, a pound of bacon, and a dozen slices of wheat toast. As he plowed through the food, he hoped he wouldn’t get hungry while he was driving.

The Stars and Stripes and the state flag of Jefferson flew in front of the mansion. Jefferson’s banner was green, with the state seal centered on the field: a gold pan with two X’s that symbolized the double crosses northern California and southern Oregon had got from Sacramento and Salem till they formed their own state in 1919. After World War I, self-determination was all the rage in Europe, and they’d run with it here, too. That neither Sacramento nor Salem was exactly sorry to see the seceders go hadn’t hurt.

Below the flagpole sat the Governor’s car: a 1974 Cadillac Eldorado he fondly called “the Mighty Mo.” The Detroit behemoth wasn’t quite the size of a battleship, but it came close. It was five years old now, getting long in the tooth, but he kept it anyway. Since the Arab oil crisis, cars had shrunk like wool washed hot. For someone Bill’s size, they’d gone from dubious to impossible. The Mighty Mo got next to no mileage, of course, and gas was six bits a gallon. Bill didn’t care. If the state wouldn’t pay, he would.

He slid into the left rear seat: the driver’s seat, with a long, long shaft for the steering wheel. The ignition was on the column, not on the dash. A good thing, too, he thought, starting the car.

Like the Governor’s mansion, the Capitol had gone up before the Depression hit. Wings and colonnades and gilded dome showed off Jefferson’s wealth, or maybe delusions of grandeur. The government office building next door? A square WPA block, as ugly as it was functional. The miracle was that it had got built at all.

Barbara Rasmussen waited in front of the office building. The Governor’s publicist was highly functional, too, but far from ugly: a shapely blonde with big blue eyes. To use Jimmy Carter’s immortal and immoral phrase, Bill had looked on her with lust in his heart a time or two. He was married, but he wasn’t blind. Sasquatches and little people had been getting it on since long before blondes came to Jefferson — not all the time, but every so often. Some stories said one of Bill’s great-grandmothers was a little person. He didn’t know if that was true, or care.

Barbara got into the right — and only — front seat. “Morning, Governor,” she said. “Early enough for you?”

“Oh, pretty much,” he answered, miming a yawn. She laughed. He sometimes wondered if she was interested in a roll in the hay with him. Some little women (not at all in the Louisa May Alcott sense of the words) hopefully looked for sasquatch men to be big all over. They were seldom disappointed in that. Other ways? Men were men and women were women, big or small. Sometimes they clicked, sometimes they didn’t.

None of which mattered right now. His size thirty-two right foot swung from brake to gas. Away the Mighty Mo went. He drove south on Jefferson State Highway 3 to the 299, then west toward the coast. What Jefferson called state highways would have been narrow, twisty, no-account two-lane blacktop roads anywhere else. That was partly because the state hadn’t really bounced back after Hoover’s name became a swear word, partly because the terrain was so rugged.