The group in the Lone Ranger uniforms, he saw, were standing in front of a huge tri-dimensional animated portrait of Chester Pelton. As he watched, the pictured candidate raised a clenched fist, and Pelton’s recorded and amplified voice thundered:
“Put the Literates in their place! Our servants, not our masters!”
He recognized the group leader of the Radical-Socialists—the masks were too small to be more than token disguises—and beckoned to him, at the same time walking toward his ’copter. The man in black with the white-handled pistols followed him, spurs jingling.
“Hello, Mr. Cardon,” he said, joining him. “Nothing to it. We got a tip they were coming to sabotage Big Brother, over there. Take out our sound-recording, and put in one of their own, like they did over in Queens, last week. The town clowns got here in time to save everybody’s face, so there wasn’t any shooting. We’re staying put till they go, though.”
“Put the Literates in their place! Our servants, not our masters!” the huge tridianimate bellowed.
Over in Queens, the Independents had managed to get at a similar tridianimate, had taken out the record, and had put in one: I am a lying fraud! Vote for Grant Hamilton and liberty and sound government!
“Smart work, Goodkin,” he approved. “Don’t let any of your boys start the gunplay. The city cops are beginning to get wise to who’s going to win the election, tomorrow, but don’t antagonize them. But if any of those Ku Kluxers tries to pull a gun, don’t waste time trying to wing him. Just hold on to that fiery something-or-other on his chest and let him have it, and let the coroner worry about him.”
“Yeah. With pleasure,” Goodkin replied. “You know, that nightshirt thing they wear is about the stupidest idea for a storm-troop uniform I ever saw. Natural target in a gunfight, and in a rough-and-tumble it gets them all tangled up. Ah, there go a couple of coppers to talk to them; that’s what they’ve been waiting on. Now they can beat it without looking like they been run out by our gang.”
Cardon nodded. “Tell your boys to stay around for a while; they may expect you to leave right after they do, and then they’ll try to slip back. You did a good job; got here promptly. Be seeing you, Goodkin.”
He climbed into his own ’copter and started the motor.
“Put the Literates in their place!” the tri-dimensional colossus roared triumphantly after the retreating Independents. “Our servants, not our masters!”
At eight thousand, he got the ’copter onto the lower Manhattan beam and relaxed. First of all, he’d have to do something about answering Slade Gardner’s telecast propaganda. That stuff was dangerous. The answer ought to go on the air by noon, and should be stepped up through the afternoon. First as a straight news story; Elliot Mongery had fifteen minutes, beginning at 1215—no, that wouldn’t do. Mongery’s sponsor for that time was Atomflame Heaters, and Atomflame was a subsidiary of Canada Northwest Fissionables, and Canada Northwest was umbilicus-deep in that Kettle River lease graft that Pelton had sworn to get investigated as soon as he took office. Professional ethics wouldn’t allow Mongery to say anything in Pelton’s behalf on Atomflame’s time. Well, there was Guthrie Parham, he came on at 1245, and his sponsor was all right. He’d call Parham and tell him what he wanted done.
The buzzer warned him that he was approaching the lower Manhattan beacon; he shifted to manual control, dropped down to the three-thousand-foot level, and set his selector beam for the signal from Pelton’s Purchasers’ Paradise. Down toward the tip of the island, in the section that had been rebuilt after that Stalin Mark XV guided missile had gotten through the counter-rocket defenses in 1987, he could see the quadrate cross of his goal, with public landing stages on each of the four arms, and the higher central block with its landing stage for freight and store personnel. Above the four public stages, helicopters swarmed like May flies—May flies which had mutated and invented ritual or military drill or choreography—coming in in four streams to the tips of the arms and rising vertically from the middle. There was about ten times the normal amount of traffic for this early in the morning. He wondered, briefly, then remembered, and cursed. That infernal sale!
Grudgingly, he respected Russell Latterman’s smartness, and in consequence, the ability of Wilton Joyner and Harvey Graves in selecting a good agent to plant in Pelton’s store. Latterman gave a plausible impersonation of the Illiterate businessman, loyal Prime Minister of Pelton’s commercial empire, Generalissimo in the perpetual war against Macy & Gimbel’s. From that viewpoint, the sale was excellent business—Latterman had gotten the jump on all the other department stores for the winter fashions and fall sports trade. He had also turned the store into a madhouse at the exact time when Chester Pelton needed to give all his attention to the election.
Pressing the button that put on his private recognition signal, he rose above the incoming customers and began to drop toward the private landing stage, circling to get a view of the other four stages. Maybe the sale could be turned to some advantage, at that. A free souvenir with each purchase, carrying a Pelton-for-Senator picture-message—
He broke off, peering down at the five-hundred-foot-square landing stage above the central block, then brought his ’copter swooping down rapidly. The white-clad figures he had seen swarming up the helical escalator were not wearing the Ku Klux robes of the Independent-Conservative storm troops, as he had first feared—they were in Literate smocks, and among them were the black leather jackets and
