Ray, sliding back onto the bench, returned to his food.
"Jimmy's book had pictures," he complained, forking up another mixture
of eggs, bacon, toast and honey.
"Book?" Claire echoed. "Oh, the instructions for the 'copter?"
"Pipe down, both of you!" Pelton commanded. "The newscast--"
Literate First Class Elliot C. Mongery, revealed by a quick left
quarter-turn of the pickup camera, wore the same starchy white smock,
the same Sam Browne belt glittering with the badges of the
organizations and corporations for whom he was authorized to practice
Literacy. The tablet on his belt, Pelton knew, was really a
camouflaged holster for a small automatic, and the gold stylus was a
gas-projector. The black-leather-jacketed bodyguards, of course, were
discreetly out of range of the camera. Members of the Associated
Fraternities of Literates weren't exactly loved by the non-reading
public they claimed to serve. The sight of one of those starchy,
perpetually-spotless, white smocks always affected Pelton like a red
cape to a bull. He snorted in disdain. The raised eyebrow toward the
announcer on the left, the quick, perennially boyish smile, followed
by the levelly serious gaze into the camera--the whole act might have
been a film-transcription of Mongery's first appearance on the video,
fifteen years ago. At least, it was off the same ear of corn.
"That big hunk of cheese," Ray commented. For once, Pelton didn't
shush him; that was too close to his own attitude, at least in
family-breakfast-table terminology.
"... First of all; for the country, and especially the Newer New York
area, and by the way, it looks as though somebody thought somebody
needed a little cooling off, but we'll come to that later. Here's the
forecast: Today and tomorrow, the weather will continue fine; warm in
the sun, chilly in the shadows. There won't be anything to keep you
from the polls, tomorrow, except bird-hunting, or a last chance at a
game of golf. This is the first time within this commentator's memory
that the weather has definitely been in favor of the party out of
power.
"On the world scene: You'll be glad to hear that the survivors of the
wrecked strato-rocket have all been rescued from the top of Mount
Everest, after a difficult and heroic effort by the Royal Nepalese Air
Force.... The results of last week's election in Russia are being
challenged by twelve of the fourteen parties represented on the
ballot; the only parties not hurling accusations of fraud are the
Democrats, who won, and the Christian Communists, who are about as
influential in Russian politics as the Vegetarian-Anti-Vaccination
Party is here.... The Central Diplomatic Council of the Reunited
Nations has just announced, for the hundred and seventy-eighth time,
that the Arab-Israel dispute has been finally, definitely and
satisfactorily settled. This morning's reports from Baghdad and Tel
Aviv only list four Arabs and six Israelis killed in border clashes in
the past twenty-four hours, so maybe they're really getting things
patched up, after all. During the same period, there were more
fatalities in Newer New York as a result of clashes between the
private troops of rival racket gangs, political parties and business
houses.
"Which brings us to the local scene. On my way to the studio this
morning, I stopped at City Hall, and found our genial Chief of Police
Delaney, 'Irish' Delaney to most of us, hard at work with a portable
disintegrator, getting rid of record disks and recording tapes of old
and long-settled cases. He had a couple of amusing stories. For
instance, a lone Independent-Conservative partisan broke up a
Radical-Socialist mass meeting preparatory to a march to demonstrate
in Double Times Square, by applying his pocket lighter to one of the
heat-sensitive boxes in the building and activating the sprinkler
system. By the time the Radicals had gotten into dry clothing, there
was a, well, sort of, impromptu Conservative demonstration going on in
Double Times Square, and one of the few things the local gendarmes
won't stand for is an attempt to hold two rival political meetings in
the same area.
"Curiously, while it was the Radicals who got soaked, it was the
Conservatives who sneezed," Mongery went on, his face glowing with
mischievous amusement. "It seems that while they were holding a
monster rally at Hague Hall, in North Jersey Borough, some person or
persons unknown got at the air-conditioning system with a tank of
sneeze gas, which didn't exactly improve either the speaking style of
Senator Grant Hamilton or the attentiveness of his audience. Needless
to say, there is no police investigation of either incident. Election
shenanigans, like college pranks, are fair play as long as they don't
cause an outright holocaust. And that, I think, is as it should be,"
Mongery went on, more seriously. "Most of the horrors of the Twentieth
and Twenty-first Centuries were the result of taking politics too
seriously."
Pelton snorted again. That was the Literate line, all right; treat
politics as a joke and an election as a sporting event, let the
Independent-Conservative grafters stay in power, and let the Literates
run the country through them. Not, of course, that he disapproved of
those boys in the Young Radical League who'd thought up that
sneeze-gas trick.
"And now, what you've been waiting for," Mongery continued. "The final
Trotter Poll's pre-election analysis." A novice Literate advanced,
handing him a big loose-leaf book, which he opened with the reverence
a Literate always displayed toward the written word. "This," he said,
"is going to surprise you. For the whole state of Penn-Jersey-York,
the poll shows a probable Radical-Socialist vote of approximately
thirty million, an Independent-Conservative vote of approximately ten
and a half million, and a vote of about a million for what we call the
Who-Gives-A-Damn Party, which, frankly, is the party of your
commentator's choice. Very few sections differ widely from this
average--there will be a much heavier Radical vote in the Pittsburgh
area, and traditionally Conservative Philadelphia and the upper Hudson
Valley will give the Radicals a much smaller majority."
They all looked at one another, thunderstruck.
"If Mongery's admitting that, I'm in!" Pelton exclaimed.
"Yeah, we can start calling him Senator, now, and really mean it," Ray
said. "Maybe old Mongie isn't such a bad sort of twerp, after all."
"Considering that the Conservatives carried this state by a
substantial majority in the presidential election of two years ago,
and by a huge majority in the previous presidential election of 2136,"
Mongery, in the screen, continued, "this verdict of the almost
infallible Trotter Poll needs some explaining. For the most part, it
is the result of the untiring efforts of one man, the dynamic new
leader of the Radical-Socialists and their present candidate for the
Consolidated States of North America Senate, Chester Pelton, who has
transformed that once-moribund party into the vital force it is today.
And this achievement has been due, very largely, to a single slogan
which he had hammered into your ears: _Put the Literates in their
place; our servants, not our masters!_" He brushed a hand
deprecatingly over his white smock and fingered the badges on his
belt.
"There has always been, on the part of the Illiterate public, some
resentment against organized Literacy. In part, it has been due to the
high fees charged for Literate services, and to what seems, to many,
to be monopolistic practices. But behind that is a general attitude of
anti-intellectualism which is our heritage from the disastrous wars of
the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries. Chester Pelton has made
himself the spokesman of this attitude. In his view, it was men who
could read and write who hatched the diabolical political ideologies
and designed the frightful nuclear weapons of that period. In his
mind, Literacy is equated with '_Mein Kampf_' and '_Das Kapital_',
with the A-bomb and the H-bomb, with concentration camps and blasted
cities. From this position, of course, I beg politely to differ.
Literate men also gave us the Magna Charta and the Declaration of
Independence.
"Now, in spite of a lunatic fringe in the Consolidated Illiterates'
Organization who want just that, Chester Pelton knows that we cannot
abolish Literacy entirely. Even with modern audio-visual recording,
need exists for some modicum of written recording, which can be
rapidly scanned and selected from--indexing, cataloguing, tabulating
data, et cetera--and for at least a few men and women who can form and
interpret the written word. Mr. Pelton, himself, is the owner of a
huge department store, employing over a thousand Illiterates; he must
at all times have the services of at least fifty Literates."
"And pays through the nose for them, too!" Pelton growled. It was more
than fifty; and Russ Latterman had been forced to get twenty extras
sent in for the sale.
"Now, since we cannot renounce Literacy entirely, without sinking to
_fellahin_ barbarism, and here I definitely part company with Mr.
Pelton, he fears the potential power of organized Literacy. In a word,
he fears a future Literate Dictatorship."
"Future? What do you think we have now?" Pelton demanded.
"Nobody," Mongery said, as though replying to him, "is stupid enough,
today, to want to be a dictator. That ended by the middle of the
Twenty-first Century. Everybody knows what happened to Mussolini, and
Hitler, and Stalin, and all their imitators. Why, it is as much the
public fear of Big Government as the breakdown of civil power because
of the administrative handicap of a shortage of Literate
administrators that is responsible for the disgraceful lawlessness of
the past hundred years. Thus, it speaks well for the public trust in
Chester Pelton's known integrity and sincerity that so many of our
people are willing to agree to his program for socialized Literacy.
They feel that he can be trusted, and, violently as I disagree with
him, I can only say that that trust is not misplaced.
"Of course, there is also the question, so often raised by Mr. Pelton,
that under the Hamilton machine, the politics, and particularly the
enforcement of the laws, in this state, are unbelievably corrupt, but
I wonder--"
Mongery paused. "Just a moment; I see a flash bulletin being brought
in." The novice Literate came to his side and gave him a slip of
paper, at which he glanced. Then he laughed heartily.
"It seems that shortly after I began speaking, the local blue-ribbon
grand jury issued a summons for Chief Delaney to appear before them,
with all his records. Unfortunately, the summons could not be served;
Chief Delaney had just boarded a strato-rocket from Tom Dewey Field
for Buenos Aires." He cocked an eye at the audience. "I know Irish is
going to have a nice time, down there in the springtime of the
Southern Hemisphere. And, incidentally, the Argentine is one of the
few major powers which never signed the World Extradition Convention
of 2087." He raised his hand to his audience. "And now, until tomorrow
at breakfast, sincerely yours for Cardon's Black Bottle, Elliot C.
Mongery."
"Well, whattaya know; that guy was plugging for you!" Ray said. "And
see how he managed to slide in that bit about corruption, right before
his stooge handed him that bulletin?"
"I guess every Literate has his price," Chester Pelton said. "I wonder
how much of my money that cost. I always wondered why Frank Cardon
sponsored Mongery. Now I know. Mongery can be had."
"Uh, beg your pardon, Mr. Pelton," a voice from the hall broke in.
He turned. Olaf Olafsson, the 'copter driver, was standing at the
entrance to the breakfast nook, a smudge of oil on his cheek and his
straw-colored hair in disorder. "How do I go about startin' this new
'copter?"
"What?" Olaf had been his driver for ten years. He would have been
less surprised had the ceiling fallen in. "You don't know how to start
it?"
"No, sir. The controls is all different from on the summer model.
Every time I try to raise it, it backs up; if I try to raise it much
more, we won't have no wall left on the landing stage."
"Well, isn't there a book?"
"There ain't no pictures in it; nothing but print. It's a Literate
book," Olaf said in disgust, as though at something obscene. "An'
there ain't nothin' on the instrument board but letters."
"That's right," Ray agreed. "I saw the book; no pictures in it at
all."
"Well, of all the quarter-witted stupidity! The confounded imbeciles
at that agency--"
Pelton started to his feet. Claire unlocked the table and slid it out
of his way. Ray, on a run, started for the lift and vanished.
"I think some confounded Literate at the Rolls-Cadipac agency did
that," he fumed. "Thought it would be a joke to send me a Literate
instruction book along with a 'copter with a Literate instrument
board. Ah, I get it! So I'd have to call in a Literate to show me how
to start my own 'copter, and by noon they'd be laughing about it in
every bar from Pittsburgh to Plattsburg. Sneaky Literate trick!" They
went to the lift, and found the door closed in their faces. "Oh,
confound that boy!"
Claire pressed the button. Ray must have left the lift, for the
operating light went on, and in a moment the door opened. He crowded
into the lift, along with his daughter and Olaf.
On the landing stage, Ray was already in the 'copter, poking at
buttons on the board.
"Look, Olaf!" he called. "They just shifted them around a little from
the summer model. This one, where the prop-control used to be on the
old model, is the one that backs it up on the ground. Here's the one
that erects and extends the prop,"--he pushed it, and the prop snapped
obediently into place--"and here's the one that controls the lift."
An ugly suspicion stabbed at Chester Pelton, bringing with it a
feeling of frightened horror.
"How do you know?" he demanded.
Ray's eyes remained on the instrument board. He pushed another button,
and the propeller began swinging in a lazy circle; he pressed down
with his right foot, and the 'copter lifted a foot or so.
"What?" he asked. "Oh, Jimmy showed me how theirs works. Mr. Hartnett
got one like it a week ago." He motioned to Olaf, setting the 'copter
down again. "Come here; I'll show you."
The suspicion, and the horror passed in a wave of relief.
"You think you and Olaf, between you, can get that thing to school?"
he asked.
"Sure! Easy!"
"All right. You show Olaf how to run it. Olaf, as soon as you've
dropped Ray at school, take that thing to the Rolls-Cadipac agency,
and get a new one, with a proper instrument board, and a proper
picture book of operating instructions. I'm going to call Sam Huschack
up personally and give him royal hell about this. Sure you can handle
it, now?"
He watched the 'copter rise to the two thousand foot local traffic
level and turn in the direction of Mineola High School, fifty miles
away. He was still looking anxiously after it as it dwindled to a tiny
dot and vanished.
"They'll make it all right," Claire told him. "Olaf has a strong back,
and Ray has a good head."
"It wasn't that that I was worried about." He turned and looked, half
ashamed, at his daughter. "You know, for a minute, there, I thought ... I
thought Ray could read!"
"Father!" She was so shocked that she forgot the nickname they had
given him when he had announced his candidacy for Senate, in the
spring. "You didn't!"
"I know; it's an awful thing to think, but--Well, the kids today do
the craziest things. There's that Hartnett boy he runs around with;
Tom Hartnett bought Literate training for him. And that fellow
Prestonby; I don't trust him--"
"Prestonby?" Claire asked, puzzled.
"Oh, you know. The principal at school. You've met him."
Claire wrinkled her brow--just like her mother, when she was trying to
remember something.
"Oh, yes. I met him at that P.T.A. meeting. He didn't impress me as
being much like a teacher, but I suppose they think anything's good
enough for us Illiterates."
* * * * *
Literate First Class Ralph N. Prestonby remained standing by the
lectern, looking out over the crowded auditorium, still pleasantly
surprised to estimate the day's attendance at something like
ninety-seven per cent of enrollment. That was really good; why, it was
only three per cent short of perfect! Maybe it was the new rule
requiring a sound-recorded excuse for absence. Or it could have been
his propaganda campaign about the benefits of education. Or, very
easily, it could have been the result of sending Doug Yetsko and some
of his boys around to talk to recalcitrant parents. It was good to see
that that was having some effect beside an increase in the number of
attempts on his life, or the flood of complaints to the Board of
Education. Well, Lancedale had gotten Education merged with his
Office of Communications, and Lancedale was back of him to the limit,
so the complaints had died out on the empty air. And Doug Yetsko was
his bodyguard, so most of the would-be assassins had died, also.
The "North American Anthem," which had replaced the "Star-Spangled
Banner" after the United States-Canadian-Mexican merger, came to an
end. The students and their white-smocked teachers, below, relaxed
from attention; most of them sat down, while monitors and teachers in
the rear were getting the students into the aisles and marching them
off to study halls and classrooms and workshops. The orchestra struck
up a lively march tune. He leaned his left elbow--Literates learned
early, or did not live to learn, not to immobilize the right hand--on
the lectern and watched the interminable business of getting the
students marched out, yearning, as he always did at this time, for the
privacy of his office, where he could smoke his pipe. Finally, they
were all gone, and the orchestra had gathered up its instruments and
filed out into the wings of the stage, and he looked up to the left
and said, softly:
"All right, Doug; show's over."
With a soft thud, the big man dropped down from the guard's cubicle
overhead, grinning cheerfully. He needed a shave--Yetsko always did,
in the mornings--and in his leather Literates' guard uniform, he
looked like some ogreish giant out of the mythology of the past.
[Illustration:]
"I was glad to have you up there with the Big Noise, this morning,"
Prestonby said. "What a mob! I'm still trying to figure out why we
have such an attendance."
"Don't you get it, captain?" Yetsko was reaching up to lock the door
of his cubicle; he seemed surprised at Prestonby's obtuseness. "Day
before election; the little darlings' moms and pops don't want them
out running around. We can look for another big crowd tomorrow, too."
Prestonby gave a snort of disgust. "Of course; how imbecilic can I
really get? I didn't notice any of them falling down, so I suppose you
didn't see anything out of line."
"Well, the hall monitors make them turn in their little playthings at
the doors," Yetsko said, "but hall monitors can be gotten at, and some
of the stuff they make in Manual Training, when nobody's watching
them--"
Prestonby nodded. Just a week before, a crude but perfectly operative
17-mm shotgun had been discovered in the last stages of manufacture in
the machine shop, and five out of six of the worn-out files would
vanish, to be ground down into dirks. He often thought of the stories
of his grandfather, who had been a major during the Occupation of
Russia, after the Fourth World War. Those old-timers didn't know how
easy they'd had it; they should have tried to run an Illiterate high
school.
Yetsko was still grumbling slanders on the legitimacy of the student
body. "One of those little angels shoots me, it's just a cute little
prank, and we oughtn't to frown on the little darling when it's just
trying to express its dear little personality, or we might give it
complexes, or something," he falsettoed incongruously. "And if the
little darling's mistake doesn't kill me outright and I shoot back,
people talk about King Herod!" He used language about the Board of
Education and the tax-paying public that was probably subversive
within the meaning of the Loyalty Oath. "I wish I had a pair of 40-mm
auto-cannons up there, instead of that sono gun."
"Each class is a little worse than the one before; in about five
years, they'll be making H-bombs in the lab," Prestonby said. In the
last week, a dozen pupils had been seriously cut or blackjacked in
hall and locker-room fights. "Nice citizens of the future; nice future
to look forward to growing old in."
"We won't," Yetsko comforted him. "We can't be lucky all the time; in
about a year, they'll find both of us stuffed into a broom closet,
when they start looking around to see what's making all the stink."
* * * * *
Prestonby took the thick-barreled gas pistol from the shelf under the
lectern and shoved it into his hip pocket; Yetsko picked up a
two-and-a-half foot length of rubber hose and tucked it under his left
arm. Together, they went back through the wings and out into the
hallway that led to the office. So a Twenty-second Century high school
was a place where a teacher carried a pistol and a tear-gas projector
and a sleep-gas gun, and had a bodyguard, and still walked in danger
of his life from armed 'teen-age hooligans. It was meaningless to ask
whose fault it was. There had been the World Wars, and the cold-war
interbellum periods--rising birth rates, huge demands on the public
treasury for armaments, with the public taxed to the saturation point,
and no money left for the schools. There had been fantastic
"Progressive" education experiments--even in the 'Fifties of the
Twentieth Century, in the big cities, children were being pushed
through grade school without having learned to read. And when there
had been money available for education, school boards had insisted on
spending it for audio-visual equipment, recordings, films, anything
but textbooks. And there had been that lunatic theory that children
should be taught to read by recognizing whole words instead of
learning the alphabet. And more and more illiterates had been shoved
out of the schools, into a world where radio and television and moving
pictures were supplanting books and newspapers, and more and more
children of illiterates had gone to school without any desire or
incentive to learn to read. And finally, the illiterates had become
Illiterates, and literacy had become Literacy.
And now, the Associated Fraternities of Literates had come to
monopolize the ability to read and write, and a few men like William
R. Lancedale, with a handful of followers like Ralph N. Prestonby,
were trying--
The gleaming cleanliness of the corridor, as always, heartened
Prestonby a little; it was a trophy of victory from his first two days
at Mineola High School, three years ago. He remembered what they had
looked like when he had first seen them.
"This school is a pig pen!" he had barked at the janitorial force.
"And even if they are Illiterates, these children aren't pigs; they
deserve decent surroundings. This school will be cleaned, immediately,
from top to bottom, and it'll be kept that way."
The janitors, all political appointees, Independent-Conservative
party-hacks, secure in their jobs, had laughed derisively. The
building superintendent, without troubling to rise, had answered him:
"Young man, you don't want to get off on the wrong foot, here," he had
said. "This here's the way this school's always been run, an' it's
gonna take a lot more than you to change it."
The fellow's name, he recalled, was Kettner; Lancedale had given him
a briefing which had included some particulars about him. He was an
Independent-Conservative ward-committeeman. He had gotten his present
job after being fired from his former position as mailman for
listening to other peoples' mail with his pocket recorder-reproducer.
"Yetsko," he had said. "Kick this bum out on his face."
"You can't get away with--" Kettner had begun. Yetsko had yanked him
out of his chair with one hand and started for the door with him.
"Just a moment, Yetsko," he had said.
Thinking that he was backing down, they had all begun grinning at him.
"Don't bother opening the door," he had said. "Just kick him out."
After the third kick, Kettner had gotten the door open, himself; the
fourth kick sent him across the hall to the opposite wall. He pulled
himself to his feet and limped away, never to return. The next
morning, the school was spotless. It had stayed that way.
Beside him, Yetsko must also have returned mentally to the past.
"Looks better now than it did when we first saw it, captain," he said.
"Yes. It didn't take us as long to clean up this mess as it did to
clean up that mutinous guards company in Pittsburgh. But when we
cleaned that up, it stayed cleaned. This is like trying to bail out a
boat with a pitchfork."
"Yeah. I wish we'dda stayed in Pittsburgh, captain. I wish we'd never
seen this place!"
"So do I!" Prestonby agreed, heartily.
No, he didn't, either. If he'd never have come to Mineola High School,
he'd never have found Claire Pelton.
* * * * *
Sitting down again at the breakfast table with her father, Claire
levered another cigarette out of the Readilit and puffed at it with
exaggeratedly bored slowness. She was still frightened. Ray shouldn't
have done what he did, even if he had furnished a plausible
explanation. The trouble with plausible explanations was having to
make them. Sooner or later, you made too many, and then you made one
that wasn't so plausible, and then all the others were remembered, and
they all looked phony. And why had the Senator had to mention Ralph?
Was he beginning to suspect the truth about that, too?
I hope not! she thought desperately. If he ever found out about that,
it'd kill him. Just kill him, period!
Mrs. Harris must have turned off the video, after they had gone up to
the landing stage. To cover her nervousness, she reached up and
snapped it on again. The screen lit, and from it a young man with dark
eyes under bushy black brows was shouting angrily:
"... Most obvious sort of conspiracy! If the Radical-Socialist Party
leaders, or the Consolidated Illiterates' Organization Political
Action Committee, need any further evidence of the character of their
candidate and idolized leader, Chester Pelton, the treatment given to
Pelton's candidacy by Literate First Class Elliot C. Mongery, this
morning, ought to be sufficient to remove the scales from the eyes of
the blindest of them. I won't state, in so many words, that Chester
Pelton's sold out the Radical-Socialists and the Consolidated
Illiterates' Organization to the Associated Fraternities of Literates,
because, since no witness to any actual transfer of money can be
found, such a statement would be libelous--provided Pelton had nerve
enough to sue me."
"Why, you dirty misbegotten illegitimate--!" Pelton was on his feet.
His hand went to his hip, and then, realizing that he was unarmed and,
in any case, confronted only by an electronic image, he sat down
again.
"Pelton's been yapping for socialized Literacy," the man on the screen
continued. "I'm not going back to the old argument that any kind of
socialization is only the thin edge of the wedge which will pry open
the pit of horrors from which the world has climbed since the Fourth
World War. If you don't realize that now, it's no use for me to
repeat it again. But I will ask you, do you realize, for a moment,
what a program of socialized Literacy would mean, apart from the
implications of any kind of socialization? It would mean that inside
of five years, the Literates would control the whole government. They
control the courts, now--only a Literate can become a lawyer, and only
a lawyer can become a judge. They control the armed forces--only a
Literate can enter West Point or Fort MacKenzie or Chapultepec or
White Sands or Annapolis. And, if Chester Pelton's socialization
scheme goes into effect, there will be no branch of the government
which will not be completely under the control of the Associated
Fraternities of Literates!"
The screen went suddenly dark. Her father turned, to catch her with
her hand still on the switch.
"Put it back on; I want to hear what that lying pimp of a Slade
Gardner's saying about me!"
"Phooy; you'd have shot it out, yourself, if you'd had your gun on. I
saw you reaching for it. Now be quiet, and take it easy," she ordered.
He reached toward the Readilit for a cigarette, then his hand stopped.
His face was contorted with pain; he gave a gasp of suffocation.
Claire cried in dismay: "You're not going to have another of those
attacks? Where are the nitrocaine bulbs?"
"Don't ... have any ... here. Some at the office, but--"
"I told you to get more," she accused.
"Oh, I don't need them, really." His voice was steadier, now; the
spasm of pain had passed. He filled his coffee cup and sipped from it.
"Turn on the video again, Claire. I want to hear what that Gardner's
saying."
"I will not! Don't you have people at party headquarters monitoring
this stuff? Well, then. Somebody'll prepare an answer, if he needs
answering."
"I think he does. A lot of these dumbos'll hear that and believe it.
I'll talk to Frank. He'll know what to do."
Frank again. She frowned.
"Look, Senator; you think Frank Cardon's your friend, but I don't
trust him. I never could," she said. "I think he's utterly and
entirely unscrupulous. Amoral, I believe, is the word. Like a savage,
or a pirate, or one of the old-time Nazis or Communists."
"Oh, Claire!" her father protested. "Frank's in a tough business--you
have no idea the lengths competition goes to in the beer business--and
he's been in politics, and dealing with racketeers and labor unions,
all his life. But he's a good sound Illiterate--family Illiterate for
four generations, like ours--and I'd trust him with anything. You
heard this fellow Mongery--I always have to pause to keep from
calling him Mongrel--saying that I deserved the credit for pulling the
Radicals out of the mud and getting the party back on the tracks.
Well, I couldn't have begun to do it without Frank Cardon."
* * * * *
Frank Cardon stood on the sidewalk, looking approvingly into the window
of O'Reilly's Tavern, in which his display crew had already set up the
spread for the current week. On either side was a giant six-foot
replica, in black glass, of the Cardon bottle, in the conventional shape
accepted by an Illiterate public as containing beer, bearing the red
Cardon label with its pictured bottle in a central white disk. Because
of the heroic size of the bottles, the pictured bottle on the label bore
a bottle bearing a label bearing a bottle bearing a bottle on a
label.... He counted eight pictured bottles, down to the tiniest dot of
black. There were four-foot bottles next to the six-foot bottles, and
three-foot bottles next to them, and, in the middle background, a
life-size tri-dimensional picture of an almost nude and incredibly
pulchritudinous young lady smiling in invitation at the passing throng
and extending a foaming bottle of Cardon's in her hand. Aside from the
printed trademark-registry statements on the labels, there was not a
printed word visible in the window.
He pushed through the swinging doors and looked down the long room,
with the chairs still roosting sleepily on the tables, and made a
quick count of the early drinkers, two thirds of them in white smocks
and Sam Browne belts, obviously from Literates' Hall, across the
street. Late drinkers, he corrected himself mentally; they'd be the
night shift, having their drinks before going home.
"Good morning, Mr. Cardon," the bartender greeted him. "Still drinking
your own?"
"Hasn't poisoned me yet," Cardon told him. "Or anybody else." He
folded a C-bill accordion-wise and set it on edge on the bar. "Give
everybody what they want."
"Drink up, gentlemen, and have one on Mr. Cardon," the bartender
announced, then lowered his voice. "O'Reilly wants to see you.
About--" He gave a barely perceptible nod in the direction of the
building across the street.
"Yes; I want to see him, too." Cardon poured from the bottle in front
of him, accepted the thanks of the house, and, when the bartender
brought the fifteen-dollars-odd change from the dozen drinks, he
pushed it back.
He drank slowly, looking around the room, then set down his empty
glass and went back, past two doors which bore pictured half-doors
revealing, respectively, masculine-trousered and feminine-stockinged
ankles, and opened the unmarked office door beyond. The bartender, he
knew, had pushed the signal button; the door was unlocked, and,
inside, O'Reilly--baptismal name Luigi Orelli--was waiting.
"Chief wants to see you, right away," the saloon keeper said.
The brewer nodded. "All right. Keep me covered; don't know how long
I'll be." He crossed the room and opened a corner-cupboard, stepping
inside.
The corner cupboard, which was an elevator, took him to a tunnel below
the street. Across the street, he entered another elevator, set the
indicator for the tenth floor, and ascended. As the car rose, he could
feel the personality of Frank Cardon, Illiterate brewer, drop from
him, as though he were an actor returning from the stage to his
dressing room.
The room into which he emerged was almost that. There was a long
table, at which two white-smocked Literates drank coffee and went over
some papers; a third Literate sprawled in a deep chair, resting; at a
small table, four men in black shirts and leather breeches and field
boots played poker, while a fifth, who had just entered and had not
yet removed his leather helmet and jacket or his weapons belt, stood
watching them.
Cardon went to a row of lockers along the wall, opened one, and took
out a white smock, pulling it over his head and zipping it up to the
throat. Then he buckled on a Sam Browne with its tablet holster and
stylus gas projector. The Literate sprawling in the chair opened one
eye.
"Hi, Frank. Feels good to have them on again, doesn't it?"
"Yes. Clean," Cardon replied. "It'll be just for half an hour, but--"
He passed through the door across from the elevator, went down a short
hall, and spoke in greeting to the leather-jacketed storm trooper on
guard outside the door at the other end.
"Mr. Cardon," the guard nodded. "Mr. Lancedale's expecting you."
"So I understand, Bert."
He opened the door and went through. William R. Lancedale rose from
behind his desk and advanced to greet him with a quick handshake,
guiding him to a chair beside the desk. As he did, he sniffed and
raised an eyebrow.
"Beer this early, Frank?" he asked.
"Morning, noon, and night, chief," Cardon replied. "When you said this
job was going to be dangerous, I didn't know you meant that it would
lead straight to an alcoholic's grave."
"Let me get you a cup of coffee, and a cigar, then." The white-haired
Literate executive resumed his seat, passing a hand back and forth
slowly across the face of the commo, the diamond on his finger
twinkling, and gave brief instructions. "And just relax, for a minute.
You have a tough job, this time, Frank."
They were both silent as a novice Literate bustled in with coffee and
individually-sealed cigars.
"At least, you're not one of these plain-living-and-right-thinking
fanatics, like Wilton Joyner and Harvey Graves," Cardon said. "On top
of everything else, that I could not take."
Lancedale's thin face broke into a smile, little wrinkles putting his
mouth in parentheses. Cardon sampled the coffee, and then used a
Sixteenth Century Italian stiletto from Lancedale's desk to perforate
the end of his cigar.
"Much as I hate it, I'll have to get out of here as soon as I can," he
said. "I don't know how long O'Reilly can keep me covered, down at the
tavern--"