She glanced toward the door of Pelton’s private rest room.
“Poor Senator!” she said softly. “He hates Literacy so, and his own children are Literates, and his program against Literacy is being twisted against itself!”
“But you agree that we’re right and he’s wrong?” Prestonby asked. “You must, or you’d never have come to me to learn to read.”
“He’s such a good father. I’d hate to see him hurt,” she said. “But, Ralph, you’re my man. Anything you’re for, I’m for, and anything you’re against, I’m against.”
He caught her hand, across the table, forgetful of the others in the office.
“Claire, now that everybody knows—” he began.
“Top emergency! Top emergency!” a voice brayed out of the alarm box on the wall. “Serious disorder in Department Thirty-two! Serious disorder in Department Thirty-two!”
The voice broke off as suddenly as it had begun, but the box was not silent. From it came a medley of shouts, curses, feminine screams and splintering crashes. Prestonby and Claire were on their feet.
“You have wall screens?” he asked. “How do they work? Like the ones at school?”
Claire twisted a knob until the number 32 appeared on a dial, and pressed a button. On the screen, the Chinaware Department on the third floor came to life in full sound and color. The pickup must have been across an aisle from the box from whence the alarm had come; they could see one of Pelton’s Illiterate clerks lying unconscious under it, and the handphone dangling at the end of its cord. The aisles were full of jostling, screaming women, trampling one another and fighting frantically to get out, and, among them, groups of three or four men were gathered back to back. One such group had caught a store policeman; three were holding him while a fourth smashed vases over his head, grabbing them from a nearby counter. A pink dinner plate came skimming up from the crowd, narrowly missing the wired TV pickup. A moment later, a blue-and-white sugar bowl, thrown with better aim, came curving at them in the screen. It scored a hit, and brought darkness, though the bedlam of sound continued.
II
Cardon looked at his watch as he entered the Council Chamber at Literates’ Hall, smoothing his smock hastily under his Sam Browne. He’d made it with very little time to spare, before the doors would be sealed and the meeting would begin. He’d been all over town, tracking down that report of Sforza’s; he’d even made a quick visit to Chinatown, on the off chance that “China” had been used in an attempt at the double concealment of the obvious, but, as he’d expected, he’d found nothing. The people there hardly knew there was to be an election. Accustomed for millennia to ideographs read only by experts, they viewed the current uproar about Literacy with unconcern.
At the door, he deposited his pocket recorder—no sound-recording device was permitted, except the big audiovisual camera in front, which made the single permanent record. Going around the room counterclockwise to the seats of his faction, he encountered two other Lancedale men: Gerald K. Toppington, of the Technological Section, thin-faced, sandy-haired, balding; and Franklin R. Chernov, commander of the local Literates’ guards brigade, with his ragged gray mustache, his horribly scarred face, and his outsize tablet-holster almost as big as a mail-order catalogue.
“What’s Joyner-Graves trying to do to us, Frank?” Chernov rumbled gutturally.
“It’s what we’re going to do to them,” Cardon replied. “Didn’t the chief tell you?”
Chernov shook his head. “No time. I only got here fifteen minutes ago. Chasing all over town about that tip from Sforza. Nothing, of course. Nothing from Sforza, either. The thing must have been planned weeks ago, whatever it is, and everybody briefed personally, and nothing on disk or tape about it. But what’s going to happen here? Lancedale going to pull a rabbit out of his hat?”
Cardon explained. Chernov whistled. “Man, that’s no rabbit; that’s a full-grown Bengal tiger! I hope it doesn’t eat us, by mistake.”
Cardon looked around, saw Lancedale in animated argument with a group of his associates. Some of the others seemed to be sharing Chernov’s fears.
“I have every confidence in the chief,” Toppington said. “If his tigers make a meal off anybody, it’ll be—” He nodded in the direction of the other side of the chamber, where Wilton Joyner, short, bald, pompous, and Harvey Graves, tall and cadaverous, stood in a Rosencrantz-Guildenstern attitude, surrounded by half a dozen of their top associates.
The Council President, Morehead, came out a little door onto the rostrum and took his seat, pressing a button. The call bell began clanging slowly. Lancedale, glancing around, saw Cardon and nodded. On both sides of the chamber, the Literates began taking seats, and finally the call bell stopped, and Literate President Morehead rapped with his gavel. The opening formalities were hustled through. The routine held-over business was rubber-stamped with hasty votes of approval, even including the decisions of the extemporary meeting of that morning on the affair at Pelton’s. Finally, the presiding officer rapped again and announced that the meeting was now open for new business.
At once, Harvey Graves was on his feet.
“Literate President,” he began, as soon as
