So it had to be kept secret, and since adolescents in possession of a secret are under constant temptation to hint mysteriously in the presence of outsiders, this hocus-pocus of ritual and password and countersign had to be resorted to. He’d been in conspiratorial work of other kinds, and knew that there was a sound psychological basis for most of what seemed, at first glance, to be mere melodramatic claptrap.
He and Yetsko passed on through a door across the room, into another soundproofed room. The work of soundproofing and partitioning the old stockroom had been done in the last semester of his first year at Mineola High, by members of the graduating class of building-trades students, who had then gone their several ways convinced that they had been working on a set of music-class practice rooms. The Board of Education had never even found out about it. In this second room, a Literate teacher, one of the Lancedale faction, had a reading class of twenty-five or thirty. A girl was on her feet, with a book in her hand, reading from it:
“We are not sure of sorrow;
And joy was never sure;
Today will die tomorrow;
Time stoops to no man’s lure;
And love, grown faint and fretful
With lips but half regretful
Sighs, and with eyes forgetful
Weeps that no loves endure.”
Then she handed the book—it was the only copy—to the boy sitting in front of her, and he rose to read the next verse. Prestonby, catching the teacher’s eye, nodded and smiled. This was a third-year class, of course, but from h-a-t spells hat to Swinburne in three years was good work.
There were three other classes, a total of little over a hundred students. There was no trouble; they were there for one purpose only—to learn. He spoke with one of the teachers, whose class was busy with a written exercise; he talked for a while to another whose only duty at the moment was to answer questions and furnish help to a small class who were reading silently from a variety of smuggled-in volumes.
“Only a hundred and twenty, out of five thousand,” Yetsko said to him, as they were dropping down in the elevator by which they had come. “Think you’ll ever really get anything done with them?”
“I won’t. Maybe they won’t,” he replied. “But the ones they’ll teach will. They’re just a cadre; it’ll take fifty years before the effects are really felt. But some day—”
The shops—a good half of the school was trades-training—were noisy and busy. Here Prestonby kept his hand on his gas-projector, and Yetsko had his rubber hose ready, either to strike or to discard in favor of his pistol. The instructors were similarly on the alert and ready for trouble—he had seen penitentiaries where the guards took it easier. Carpentry and building trades. Machine shop. Welding. ’Copter and TV repair shops—he made a minor and relatively honest graft there, from the sale of rebuilt equipment. Even an atomic-equipment shop, though there was nothing in the place that would excite a Geiger more than the instructor’s luminous-dial watch.
Domestic Science—Home Decorating, Home Handicrafts, Use of Home Appliances, Beautician School, Charm School. He and Yetsko sampled the products of the Cooking School, intended for the cafeteria, and found them edible if uninspired.
Business—classes in recording letters, using Illiterate business-machines, preparing Illiterate cards for same, filing recordings—always with the counsel, “When in doubt, consult a Literate.”
General Arts—Spanish and French, from elaborate record players, the progeny of the old Twentieth Century Linguaphone. English, with recorded-speech composition, enunciation training, semantics, and what Prestonby called English Illiterature. The class he visited was drowsing through one of the less colorful sections of “Gone With The Wind.” World History, with half the students frankly asleep through an audiovisual on the Feudal System, with planted hints on how nice a revival of same would be, and identifying the clergy of the Middle Ages with the Fraternities of Literates. American History, with the class wide awake, since Custer’s Massacre was obviously only moments away.
“Wantta bet one of those little cherubs doesn’t try to scalp another before the day’s out?” Yetsko whispered.
Prestonby shook his head. “No bet. Remember that film on the Spanish Inquisition, that we had to discontinue?”
It was then that the light on the classroom screen, which had been flickering green and white, suddenly began flashing Prestonby’s wanted-at-office signal.
Prestonby found Frank Cardon looking out of the screen in his private office. The round, ordinarily cheerful, face was serious, but the innocent blue eyes were as unreadable as ever. He was wearing one of the new Mexican charro-style jackets, black laced with silver.
“I can’t see all your office, Ralph,” he said as Prestonby approached. “Are you alone?”
“Doug Yetsko’s all,” Prestonby said, and, as Cardon hesitated, added: “Don’t be silly, Frank; he’s my bodyguard. What could I be in that he wouldn’t know all about?”
Cardon nodded. “Well, we’re in a jam up to here.” A handwave conveyed the impression that the sea of troubles had risen to his chin. He spoke at some length, describing the fight between Chester Pelton and Stephen S. Bayne, the Literate strike at Pelton’s Purchasers’ Paradise, Pelton’s heart attack, and the circumstances of Claire’s opening the safe. “So you see,” he finished. “Maybe Latterman tried to kill Pelton, maybe he just tried to do what he did. I can’t take chances either way.”
Prestonby thought furiously. “You say Claire’s alone at the store with her father?”
“And a couple of store cops, sterling characters with the hearts of lions and the brains of goldfish,” Cardon replied. “And Russ Latterman, and maybe four or five Conservative goons he’s managed to infiltrate into the store.”
Prestonby was still thinking, aloud, now. “Maybe they did mean to kill Pelton; in that case, they’ll try again. Or maybe they only wanted to expose Claire’s literacy. It’s hard to say what else they’d try—maybe kidnap her, to truth-drug her and use her as a guest-artist on a Conservative telecast. I’m going over to the store, now.”
“That’s
