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
