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Was Travis Frailey aging or was the connection faulty? Leo was just pleased to get any human being on the other end to accept his daily report, but he couldn’t help noticing that Frailey looked tired.
Leo: “Are you getting my reports?”
Travis: “Getting them five by five.”
Leo: “You don’t get back to me.”
Travis: “Sorry. I realize how important your campaign tour is, but we just don’t have the staff. I’m running a number of programs, some of them even outside the election process.”
Leo: “You look tired. You probably should have been the one doing this tour instead of me. I sleep great on the train!”
Travis: “No thanks. I’m not trading you.”
Leo: “Was there anything to this idea I picked up in Montana, that we can transmit our thoughts?”
Travis: “I asked around. As far as I know, nobody else is working on it. But you’d be amazed at the number of new technology ideas that are being submitted. The people who aren’t humping to survive every day are using their time to create and invent. I don’t even know how to explain it, except that we don’t have the constraint of having to convert every new idea into ways to make money for somebody else. The inventors are going wild, and some of this stuff, maybe even the one you came across, looks like it will actually work.
‘Personally, none of it makes a lot of difference to me. I’m just wishing they would hurry up and restore air travel. It would make my life simpler if we could just hold real-time physical conferences instead of having to switch communications centers all the time.”
Leo: “I’ve really started to like trains. As we get all of them them electrified and faster, maybe we won’t ever go back to air travel.”
Travis: “Maybe. But neither one of us has time to chat. What happened in your last stop?”
Leo: “Ok. I just pulled out of Sacramento. All the issues there were about agriculture and I’ve covered that somewhat before. They’re wanting open borders, by the way. They had a big labor shortage that got a lot worse because of nationalism. Since our side started taking over, they have been completely ignoring international immigration agreements. They welcome every worker they can get, and they say that they are treating farm workers a lot better than they did in the old days. I didn’t have any way to confirm it.
‘I didn’t get any feedback from you about Portland. They want open borders, too, because they’re a shipping center and the more cargo they can handle, the better they like it. They seem to think that open borders is already policy, but I don’t think I’ve seen any policy on it and I told them so.
‘I had a little trouble in Spokane. They let me make my whole stump speech, thousands of people, pronouncing it “Spo-CANE,” then, afterward when it was too late, they told me it was “Spo-CAN.” But other than looking like a fool and making our entire revolutionary process look like idiots, I did OK there.
‘The only actual demand they presented me was wanting to be designated a historical center. Apparently, a lot of things happened to the working class around there and in some mining district nearby. Free speech. They claimed to be the main contributor to free speech. I didn’t exactly promise them anything, but I didn’t see any reason I shouldn’t encourage them to build themselves up as a history center.
‘Travis, it’s a little bit hard for me to keep on encountering everybody’s problems and not knowing what to say to them. I’d like to say I’m getting better at winging it, but the truth is that the only talent I’m developing is ducking issues.”
Travis: “I wouldn’t say that. I showed your little speech in Bismarck to some of the leaders at the Center, and they think you’re getting to be a master rhetorician.”
Leo: “All that happened in Bismarck is that I refined my method of ducking. But thanks.”
Travis: “You’re a long way from home, but you’re as far as you’re going. From now on, you’ll be on your way home. You have Elko next, right?”
Leo: “Right. What do they do in Elko?”