"H. Beam Piper & J. J. McGuire - Null-ABC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

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.