Short Fiction · Null-A.B.C. (2/3) (3/7)

“… 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 an answer, if he needs answering.”

“I think he does. A lot of these dumbos’ll hear that and believe it. I’ll talk to Frank. He’ll know what to do.”

Frank again. She frowned.

“Look, Senator; you think Frank Cardon’s your friend, but I don’t trust him. I never could,” she said. “I think he’s utterly and entirely unscrupulous. Amoral, I believe, is the word. Like a savage, or a pirate, or one of the old-time Nazis or Communists.”

“Oh, Claire!” her father protested. “Frank’s in a tough business⁠—you have no idea the lengths competition goes to in the beer business⁠—and he’s been in politics, and dealing with racketeers and labor unions, all his life. But he’s a good sound Illiterate⁠—family Illiterate for four generations, like ours⁠—and I’d trust him with anything. You heard this fellow Mongery⁠—I always have to pause to keep from calling him Mongrel⁠—saying that I deserved the credit for pulling the Radicals out of the mud and getting the party back on the tracks. Well, I couldn’t have begun to do it without Frank Cardon.”

Frank Cardon stood on the sidewalk, looking approvingly into the window of O’Reilly’s Tavern, in which his display crew had already set up the spread for the current week. On either side was a giant six-foot replica, in black glass, of the Cardon bottle, in the conventional shape accepted by an Illiterate public as containing beer, bearing the red Cardon label with its pictured bottle in a central white disk. Because of the heroic size of the bottles, the pictured bottle on the label bore a bottle bearing a label bearing a bottle bearing a bottle on a label.⁠ ⁠… He counted eight pictured bottles, down to the tiniest dot of black. There were four-foot bottles next to the six-foot bottles, and three-foot bottles next to them, and, in the middle background, a life-size tri-dimensional picture of an almost nude and incredibly pulchritudinous young lady smiling in invitation at the passing throng and extending a foaming bottle of Cardon’s in her hand. Aside from the printed trademark-registry statements on the labels, there was not a printed word visible in the window.

He pushed through the swinging doors and looked down the long room, with the chairs still roosting sleepily on the tables, and made a quick count of the early drinkers, two thirds of them in white smocks and Sam Browne belts, obviously from Literates’ Hall, across the street. Late drinkers, he corrected himself mentally; they’d be the night shift, having their drinks before going home.

“Good morning, Mr. Cardon,” the bartender greeted him. “Still drinking your own?”

“Hasn’t poisoned me yet,” Cardon told him. “Or anybody else.” He folded a C-bill accordion-wise and set it on edge on the bar. “Give everybody what they want.”

“Drink up, gentlemen, and have one on Mr. Cardon,” the bartender announced, then lowered his voice. “O’Reilly wants to see you. About⁠—” He gave a barely perceptible nod in the direction of the building across the street.

“Yes; I want to see him, too.” Cardon poured from the bottle in front of him, accepted the thanks of the house, and, when the bartender brought the fifteen-dollars-odd change from the dozen drinks, he pushed it back.

He drank slowly, looking around the room, then set down his empty glass and went back, past two doors which bore pictured half-doors revealing, respectively, masculine-trousered and feminine-stockinged ankles, and opened the unmarked office door beyond. The bartender, he knew, had pushed the signal button; the door was unlocked, and, inside, O’Reilly⁠—baptismal name Luigi Orelli⁠—was waiting.

“Chief wants to see you, right away,” the saloon keeper said.

The brewer nodded. “All right. Keep me covered; don’t know how long I’ll be.” He crossed the room and opened a corner-cupboard, stepping inside.

The corner cupboard, which was an elevator, took him to a tunnel below the street. Across the street, he entered another elevator, set the indicator for the tenth floor, and ascended. As the car rose, he could feel the personality of Frank Cardon, Illiterate brewer, drop from him, as though he were an actor returning from the stage to his dressing room.

The room into which he emerged was almost that. There was a long table, at which two white-smocked Literates drank coffee and went over some papers; a third Literate sprawled in a deep chair, resting; at a small table, four men in black shirts and leather breeches and field boots played poker, while a fifth, who had just entered and had not yet removed his leather helmet and jacket or his weapons belt, stood watching them.

Cardon went to a row of lockers along the wall, opened one, and took out a white smock, pulling it over his head and zipping it up to the throat. Then he buckled on a Sam Browne with its tablet holster and stylus gas projector. The Literate sprawling in the chair opened one eye.

“Hi, Frank. Feels good to have them on again, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. Clean,” Cardon replied. “It’ll be just for half an hour, but⁠—”

He passed through the door across from the elevator, went down a short hall, and spoke in greeting to the leather-jacketed storm trooper on guard outside the door at the other end.

“Mr. Cardon,” the guard nodded. “Mr. Lancedale’s expecting you.”

“So I understand, Bert.”

He opened the door and went through. William R. Lancedale rose from behind his desk and advanced to greet him with a quick handshake, guiding him to a chair beside the desk. As he did, he sniffed and raised an eyebrow.

“Beer this early, Frank?” he asked.

“Morning, noon, and night, chief,” Cardon replied. “When you said this job was going to be dangerous, I didn’t know you meant that it would lead straight to an alcoholic’s grave.”

“Let me get you a cup of coffee, and a cigar, then.” The white-haired Literate executive resumed his seat, passing a hand back and forth slowly across the face of the commo, the diamond on his finger twinkling, and gave brief instructions. “And just relax, for a minute. You have a tough job, this time, Frank.”

They were both silent as a novice Literate bustled in with coffee and individually-sealed cigars.

“At least, you’re not one of these plain-living-and-right-thinking fanatics, like Wilton Joyner and Harvey Graves,” Cardon said. “On top of everything else, that I could not take.”

Lancedale’s thin face broke into a smile, little wrinkles putting his mouth in parentheses. Cardon sampled the coffee, and then used a Sixteenth Century Italian stiletto from Lancedale’s desk to perforate the end of his cigar.

“Much as I hate it, I’ll have to get out of here as soon as I can,” he said. “I don’t know how long O’Reilly can keep me covered, down at the tavern⁠—”

Lancedale nodded. “Well, how are things going, then?”

“First of all, the brewery,” Cardon began.

Lancedale consigned the brewery to perdition. “That’s just your cover; any money it makes is purely irrelevant. How about the election?”

“Pelton’s in,” Cardon said. “As nearly in as any candidate ever was before the polls opened. Three months ago, the Independents were as solid as Gibraltar used to be. Today, they look like Gibraltar after that H-bomb hit it. The only difference is, they don’t know what hit them, yet.”

“Hamilton’s campaign manager does,” Lancedale said. “Did you hear his telecast, this morning?”

Cardon shook his head. Lancedale handed over a little half-inch, thirty-minute, record disk.

“All you need is the first three or four minutes,” he said. “The rest of it is repetition.”

Cardon put the disk in his pocket recorder and set it for playback, putting the plug in his ear. After a while, he shut it off and took out the ear plug.

“That’s bad! What are we going to do about it?”

Lancedale shrugged. “What are you going to do?” he countered. “You’re Pelton’s campaign manager⁠—Heaven pity him.”

Cardon thought for a moment. “We’ll play it for laughs,” he decided. “Some of our semantics experts could make the joke of the year out of it by the time the polls open tomorrow. The Fraternities bribing their worst enemy to attack them, so that he can ruin their business; who’s been listening to a tape of Alice in Wonderland at Independent-Conservative headquarters?”

“That would work,” Lancedale agreed. “And we can count on our friends Joyner and Graves to give you every possible assistance with their customary bull-in-a-china-shop tactics. I suppose you’ve seen these posters they’ve been plastering around: If you can read this, Chester Pelton is your sworn enemy! A vote for Pelton is a vote for your own enslavement!”

“Naturally. And have you seen the telecast we’ve been using⁠—a view of it, with a semantically correct spoken paraphrase?”

Lancedale nodded. “And I’ve also noticed that those posters have been acquiring different obscene crayon-drawings, too. That’s just typical of the short-range Joyner-Graves mentality. Why, they’ve made more votes for Pelton than he’s made for himself. Is it any wonder we’re convinced that people like that aren’t to be trusted to formulate the future policy of the Fraternities?”

“Well⁠ ⁠… they’ve proved themselves wrong. I wonder, though, if we can prove ourselves right, in the long run. There are times when this thing scares me, chief. If anything went wrong⁠—”

“What, for instance?”

“Somebody could get to Pelton.” Cardon made a stabbing gesture with the stiletto, which he still held. “Maybe you don’t really know how hot this thing’s gotten. What we had to cut out of Mongery’s report, this morning⁠—”

“Oh, I’ve been keeping in touch,” Lancedale understated gently.

“Well then. If anything happened to Pelton, there wouldn’t be a Literate left alive in this city twelve hours later. And I question whether or not Graves and Joyner know that.”

“I think they do. If they don’t, it’s not because I’ve failed to point it out to them. Of course, there are the Independent-Conservative grafters; a lot of them are beginning to hear jail doors opening for them, and they’re scared. But I think routine body-guarding ought to protect Pelton from them, or from any isolated fanatics.”

“And there is also the matter of Pelton’s daughter, and his son,” Cardon said. “We know, and Graves and Joyner know, and I assume that Slade Gardner knows, that they can both read and write as well as any Literate in the Fraternities. Suppose that got out between now and the election?”

“And that could not only hurt Pelton, but it would expose the work we’ve been doing in the schools,” Lancedale added. “And even inside the Fraternities, that would raise the devil. Joyner and Graves don’t begin to realize how far we’ve gone with that. They could kick up a simply hideous row about it!”

“And if Pelton found out that his kids are Literates⁠—Woooo!” Cardon grimaced. “Or what we’ve been doing to him. I hope I’m not around when that happens. I’m beginning to like the cantankerous old bugger.”

“I was afraid of that,” Lancedale said. “Well, don’t let it interfere with what you have to do. Remember, Frank; the Plan has to come first, always.”

He walked with O’Reilly to the street door, talking about tomorrow’s election; after shaking hands with the saloon keeper, he crossed the sidewalk and stepped onto the beltway, moving across the strips until he came to the twenty m.p.h. strip. The tall office buildings of upper Yonkers Borough marched away as he stood on the strip, appreciatively puffing at Lancedale’s cigar. The character of the street changed; the buildings grew lower, and the quiet and fashionable ground-floor shops and cafés gave place to bargain stores, their audio-advertisers whooping urgently about improbable prices and offerings, and garish, noisy, crowded bars and cafeterias blaring recorded popular music. There was quite a bit of political advertising in evidence⁠—huge pictures of the two major senatorial candidates. He estimated that Chester Pelton’s bald head and bulldog features appeared twice for every one of Grant Hamilton’s white locks, old-fashioned spectacles and self-satisfied smirk.

Then he came to the building on which he had parked his ’copter, and left the beltway, entering and riding up to the landing stage on the helical escalator. There seemed to have been some trouble; about a dozen Independent-Conservative storm troopers, in their white robes and hoods, with the fiery-cross emblem on their breasts, were bunched together, most of them with their right hands inside their bosoms, while a similar group of Radical-Conservative storm troopers, with their black sombreros and little black masks, stood watching them and fingering the white-handled pistols they wore in pairs on their belts. Between the two groups were four city policemen, looking acutely unhappy.

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: