Cardon shook his head. "Not Literates-with-a-big-L; just people who
can read and write," he replied. "It's a kind of back-eddy sort of
place, and I imagine, a couple of hundred years ago, the community was
too poor to support one of these 'progressive' school systems that
made Illiterates out of the people in the cities. Probably couldn't
raise enough money in school taxes to buy all the expensive
audio-visual equipment, so they had to use old-fashioned textbooks,
and teach the children to read from them. They have radios, and TV, of
course, but they also have a little daily paper, and they have a
community library."
Lancedale was thoughtful, for a moment. "You know, Frank, there must
be quite a few little enclaves of lower-case-literacy like that, in
back-woods and mountain communities, especially in the west and the
south. I'm going to make a project of finding such communities,
helping them, and getting recruits from them. They'll fit into the
Plan. Well, I'll be seeing you some time tomorrow, I suppose?"
He watched Cardon go out, and then poured a glass of port for himself
and sipped slowly, holding the glass to the light and watching the
ruby glow it cast on the desk top. It had been over thirty years ago,
when he had been old Jules de Chambord's assistant, that the Plan had
been first conceived. De Chambord was dead these twenty years, and he
had taken the old man's place, and they had only made the first step.
Things would move faster, now, but he would still die before the Plan
was completed, and Frank Cardon, whom he had marked as his successor,
would be an old man, and somebody like young Ray Pelton would be ready
to replace him, but the Plan would go on, until everybody would be
literate, not Literate, and illiteracy, not Illiteracy, would be a
mark of social stigma, and most people would live their whole lives
without personal acquaintance with an illiterate.
There were a few years, yet, to prepare for the next step. The white
smocks would have to go; Literates would have to sacrifice their
paltry titles and distinctions. There would have to be a
re-constitution of the Fraternities. Wilton Joyner and Harvey Graves
and the other Conservative Literates would have to be convinced,
emotionally as well as intellectually, of the need for change. There
were a few of the older brothers who could never adjust their
thinking; they would have to be promoted to positions with higher
salaries and more impressive titles and no authority whatever.
But that was all a matter of tactics; the younger men, like Frank
Cardon and Elliot Mongery and Ralph Prestonby, could take care of
that. Certain changes would occur: A stable and peaceful order of
society, for one thing. A rule of law, and the liquidation of these
goon gangs and storm troops and private armies. If a beginning at that
were made tomorrow, using the battle at Pelton's store to mobilize
public opinion, it would still take two decades to get anything really
significant done. And a renaissance of technological and scientific
progress--Today, the manufacturers changed the 'copter models twice a
year--and, except for altering the shape of a few chromium-plated
excrescences or changing the contours slightly, they were the same
'copters that had been buzzing over the country at the time of the
Third World War. Every month, the pharmaceutical companies announced a
new wonder drug--and if it wasn't sulfa, it was penicillin, and if it
wasn't penicillin it would be aureomycin. Why, most of the scientific
research was being carried on by a few Literates in the basements of a
few libraries, re-discovering the science of two centuries ago.
He sighed, and finished his port, and, as he did probably once every
six months, he re-filled the glass. He'd be seventy-two next birthday.
Maybe he'd live long enough to see--