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racket gangs, political
parties and business houses.
"Which brings us to the local scene. On my way to the studio this
morning, I stopped at City Hall, and found our genial Chief of Police
Delaney, 'Irish' Delaney to most of us, hard at work with a portable
disintegrator, getting rid of record disks and recording tapes of old and
long-settled cases. He had a couple of amusing stories. For instance, a
lone Independent-Conservative partisan broke up a Radical-Socialist
mass meeting preparatory to a march to demonstrate in Double Times
Square, by applying his pocket lighter to one of the heat-sensitive
boxes in the building and activating the sprinkler system. By the time
the Radicals had gotten into dry clothing, there was a, well, sort of,
impromptu Conservative demonstration going on in Double Times
Square, and one of the few things the local gendarmes won't stand for is
an attempt to hold two rival political meetings in the same area.
"Curiously, while it was the Radicals who got soaked, it was the
Conservatives who sneezed," Mongery went on, his face glowing with
mischievous amusement. "It seems that while they were holding a
monster rally at Hague Hall, in North Jersey Borough, some person or
persons unknown got at the air-conditioning system with a tank of
sneeze gas, which didn't exactly improve either the speaking style of
Senator Grant Hamilton or the attentiveness of his audience. Needless
to say, there is no police investigation of either incident. Election
shenanigans, like college pranks, are fair play as long as they don't
cause an outright holocaust. And that, I think, is as it should be,"
Mongery went on, more seriously. "Most of the horrors of the
Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries were the result of taking politics
too seriously."
Pelton snorted again. That was the Literate line, all right; treat politics
as a joke and an election as a sporting event, let the
Independent-Conservative grafters stay in power, and let the Literates
run the country through them. Not, of course, that he disapproved of
those boys in the Young Radical League who'd thought up that

sneeze-gas trick.
"And now, what you've been waiting for," Mongery continued. "The
final Trotter Poll's pre-election analysis." A novice Literate advanced,
handing him a big loose-leaf book, which he opened with the reverence
a Literate always displayed toward the written word. "This," he said, "is
going to surprise you. For the whole state of Penn-Jersey-York, the poll
shows a probable Radical-Socialist vote of approximately thirty million,
an Independent-Conservative vote of approximately ten and a half
million, and a vote of about a million for what we call the
Who-Gives-A-Damn Party, which, frankly, is the party of your
commentator's choice. Very few sections differ widely from this
average--there will be a much heavier Radical vote in the Pittsburgh
area, and traditionally Conservative Philadelphia and the upper Hudson
Valley will give the Radicals a much smaller majority."
They all looked at one another, thunderstruck.
"If Mongery's admitting that, I'm in!" Pelton exclaimed.
"Yeah, we can start calling him Senator, now, and really mean it," Ray
said. "Maybe old Mongie isn't such a bad sort of twerp, after all."
"Considering that the Conservatives carried this state by a substantial
majority in the presidential election of two years ago, and by a huge
majority in the previous presidential election of 2136," Mongery, in the
screen, continued, "this verdict of the almost infallible Trotter Poll
needs some explaining. For the most part, it is the result of the untiring
efforts of one man, the dynamic new leader of the Radical-Socialists
and their present candidate for the Consolidated States of North
America Senate, Chester Pelton, who has transformed that
once-moribund party into the vital force it is today. And this
achievement has been due, very largely, to a single slogan which he
had hammered into your ears: Put the Literates in their place; our
servants, not our masters!" He brushed a hand deprecatingly over his
white smock and fingered the badges on his belt.
"There has always been, on the part of the Illiterate public, some

resentment against organized Literacy. In part, it has been due to the
high fees charged for Literate services, and to what seems, to many, to
be monopolistic practices. But behind that is a general attitude of
anti-intellectualism which is our heritage from the disastrous wars of
the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries. Chester Pelton has made
himself the spokesman of this attitude. In his view, it was men who
could read and write who hatched the diabolical political ideologies and
designed the frightful nuclear weapons of that period. In his mind,
Literacy is equated with 'Mein Kampf' and 'Das Kapital', with the
A-bomb and the H-bomb, with concentration camps and blasted cities.
From this position, of course, I beg politely to differ. Literate