Evolution

“Ye gods, now we’re in for it. We’ve got two celebrities going head to head.” Ellen beamed and rubbed her hands together. “This is going to be good.”

Ron had been watching this exchange, his head swiveling back and forth like a spectator at a tennis match. “Um, Ellen, Mike might not need you as a back seat driver.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Back seat driver? What’s that?”

“Oh, uh… crap. It’s an expression I picked up from Mike. It’s someone who sits in the back seat and tells the driver what to do.”

“The back seat of what?”

Helplessly, Ron shrugged. “Never mind. Just don’t try to run his life for him, OK?”

Ellen looked exasperated. She sat back, crossed her arms, and glared at them. “Men are boring!”

Days followed nights followed days followed nights. Anne Lister, unelected, served out the final months of her husband’s term in office. No one challenged her authority to do so, in spite of the fact that there were no formal guidelines for transfer of power to a successor in the event of the death of the incumbent. Campaigns were under way for the regularly scheduled elections in late December, but Anne paid scant attention to them. She had no intention of remaining in power past the end of the year. She neither endorsed nor condemned the candidates running for her seat. Her one and only goal was to hold her government together for a few more months, have the baby, and leave Luna.

Roberta Lith called Samuel Watts. The next day, a new picture was found. It was the Moon again, with a face, but this time the face was Anne’s, with hand on chin and a raised eyebrow, contemplating Mars, which had been painted across the corridor on the opposing wall. By slow and subtle degrees, the pressure began to build. Onwards to Mars.

Edgar Rice did his part to help both women. For Anne, he began to slant his editorials. It was a small thing, but he was determined to help give her the ground swell of support she would need to bring Alan’s scheme to completion.

For Roberta, whose identity he had learned from Watts, he gave her the one slight push she needed to take her from a purely local phenomenon to a more global one. Acting on behalf of

The Crisium Observer, he had begun giving her regular full-color reproductions on the editorial page. It had not taken long before The New London Times and The Besselton Herald picked them up. A few of the more progressive papers on Earth had followed suit. Virtually overnight, she was in syndication… for something that had started as graffiti.