Null-ABC | Page 9

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 play-back, 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