Null-ABC Part 6

"This stuff," Martha Collins said, poking at the pile of letter disks.

"I suppose about half of it is threats, abuse and obscenities, and the other half is from long-winded bores with idiotic suggestions and ill-natured gripes. I'll use that old tag line, again--'hoping you appreciate our brevity as much as we enjoyed yours--'"

"Yes. That'll be all right." He looked at his watch. "I'm going to make a personal building-tour, instead of using the TV. The animals are sort of restless, today. The election; the infantile compulsion to take sides. If you need me for anything urgent, don't use oral call.

Just flash my signal, red-blue-red-blue, on the hall and cla.s.sroom screens. Oh, Doug!"

Yetsko, his length of rubber hose under his arm, ambled out of Pres...o...b..'s private office, stopping to stub out his cigarette. The action reminded Pres...o...b.. that he still had his pipe in his mouth; he knocked it out and pocketed it. Together, they went into the hall outside.

"Where to, first, captain?" Yetsko wanted to know.

"Cloak-and-Dagger Department, on the top floor. Then we'll drop down to the shops, and then up through Domestic Science and Business and General Arts."

"And back here. We hope," Yetsko finished.

They took a service elevator to the top floor, emerging into a stockroom piled with boxes and crates and cases of sound records and cans of film and stacks of picture cards, and all the other impedimenta of Illiterate education. Pa.s.sing through it to the other end, Pres...o...b.. unlocked a door, and they went down a short hall, to where ten or fifteen boys and girls had just gotten off a helical escalator and were queued up at a door at the other end. There were two Literate guards in black leather, and a student-monitor, with his white belt and rubber truncheon, outside the door.

Pres...o...b.. swore under his breath. He'd hoped they'd miss this, but since they hadn't, there was nothing for it but to fall in at the tail of the queue. One by one, the boys and girls went up, spoke briefly to the guards and the student-monitor, and were pa.s.sed through the door, Each time, one of the guards had to open it with a key. Finally, it was Pres...o...b..'s turn.

"B, D, F, H, J, L, N, P, R, T, V, X, Y," he recited to the guardians of the door.

"A, C, E, G, I, K, M, O, Q, S, U, W, Y," the monitor replied solemnly.

"The inkwell is dry, and the book is dusty."

"But tomorrow, there will be writing and reading for all," Pres...o...b.. answered.

The guard with the key unlocked the door, and he and Yetsko went through, into an utterly silent sound-proofed room, and from it into an inner, noisy, room, where a recorded voice was chanting:

"Hat--_huh-ah-tuh._ H-a-t. Box--_buh-oh-ksss_. B-o-x.

Gun--_guh-uh-nnn_. G-u-n. Girl--_guh-ih-rrr-lll_," while pictures were flashed on a screen at the front, and words appeared under them.

There were about twenty boys and girls, of the freshman-year age-bracket at desk-seats, facing the screen. They'd started learning the alphabet when school had opened in September; now they had gotten as far as combining letters into simple words. In another month, they'd be as far as diphthongs and would be initiated into the mysteries of silent letters. Maybe sooner than that; he was finding that children who had not been taught to read until their twelfth year learned much more rapidly than the primary grade children in the Literate schools.

What he was doing here wasn't exactly illegal. It wasn't even against the strict letter of Fraternity regulations. But it had to be done clandestinely. What he'd have liked to have done would have been to have given every boy and girl in English I the same instruction this selected group was getting, but that would have been out of the question. The public would never have stood for it; the police would have had to intervene to prevent a riotous mob of Illiterates from tearing the school down brick by brick, and even if that didn't happen, the ensuing uproar inside the Fraternity would have blown the roof off Literates' Hall. Even Lancedale couldn't have survived such an explosion, and the body of Literate First Cla.s.s Ralph N. Pres...o...b.. would have been found in a vacant lot the next morning. Even many of Lancedale's supporters would have turned on him in anger at this sudden blow to the Fraternities' monopoly of the printed Word.

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 pa.s.sword 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 pa.s.sed on through a door across the room, into another sound-proofed room. The work of soundproofing and part.i.tioning the old stockroom had been done in the last semester of his first year at Mineola High, by members of the graduating cla.s.s of building-trades students, who had then gone their several ways convinced that they had been working on a set of music-cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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. Pres...o...b.., catching the teacher's eye, nodded and smiled. This was a third-year cla.s.s, of course, but from h-a-t spells hat to Swinburne in three years was good work.

There were three other cla.s.ses, 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 Pres...o...b.. 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--cla.s.ses 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 Pres...o...b.. called English Illiterature. The cla.s.s 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 audio-visual 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 cla.s.s wide awake, since Custer's Ma.s.sacre 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.

Pres...o...b.. 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 cla.s.sroom screen, which had been flickering green and white, suddenly began flashing Pres...o...b..'s wanted-at-office signal.

Pres...o...b.. 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 Pres...o...b.. approached.

"Are you alone?"

"Doug Yetsko's all," Pres...o...b.. 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 circ.u.mstances 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."

Pres...o...b.. 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."

Pres...o...b.. 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 a good idea, Ralph. If you hadn't thought of it, I was going to suggest it. Land on the central stage, ask for Sergeant Coccozello of the store police, and give my name. Even aside from everything else, it'd be a good idea to have somebody there who can read and dares admit it, till a new crew of Literates can get there. You were speaking about the possibility of kidnaping; how about the boy? Ray?"

Pres...o...b.. nodded. "I'll have him come here to my office, and stay there till I get back; I'll have Yetsko stay with him." He turned to where the big man in black leather stood guard at the door. "Doug, go get Ray Pelton and bring him here. Check with Miss Collins for where he'd be, now." He turned back to the screen. "Anything else, Frank?"

"Isn't that enough?" the brewer-Literate demanded. "I'll call you at the store, after a while. 'Bye."

The screen darkened as Cardon broke the connection. Pres...o...b.. got to his feet, went to his desk, and picked up a pipe, digging out the ashes from the bowl with an ice pick that one of the teachers had taken from a sixteen-year-old would-be murderer. He checked his tablet gun, made sure that there was an extra loaded clip in the holster, and got two more spare clips from the arms locker. Then, to make sure, he called Pelton's store, talking for a while to the police sergeant Cardon had mentioned. By the time he was finished, the door opened and Yetsko ushered Ray Pelton in.

"What's happened?" the boy asked. "Doug told me that the Senator ...

my father ... had another heart attack."

"Yes, Ray. I don't believe he's in any great danger. He's at the store, resting in his office." He went on to tell the boy what had happened, exactly and in full detail. He was only fifteen, but already he had completed the four-year reading course and he could think a great deal more logically than seventy per cent of the people who were legally ent.i.tled to vote. Ray listened seriously, and proved Pres...o...b..'s confidence justified by nodding.

"Frame-up," he said succinctly. "Stinks like a glue factory of a put-up job. Something's going to happen to Russ Latterman, one of these days."

"I think you'd better let Frank Cardon take care of him, Ray,"

Pres...o...b.. advised. "I think there are more angles to this than he told me. Now, I'm going over to the store. Somebody's got to stay with Claire. I want you to stay here, in this room. If anybody sends you any message supposed to be from me, just ignore it. It'll be a trap.