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

The "North American Anthem," which had replaced the "Star-Spangled Banner" after the United
States-Canadian-Mexican merger, came to an end. The students and their white-smocked teachers,
below, relaxed from attention; most of them sat down, while monitors and teachers in the rear were
getting the students into the aisles and marching them off to study halls and classrooms and workshops.
The orchestra struck up a lively march tune. He leaned his left elbow—Literates learned early, or did not
live to learn, not to immobilize the right hand—on the lectern and watched the interminable business of
getting the students marched out, yearning, as he always did at this time, for the privacy of his office,
where he could smoke his pipe. Finally, they were all gone, and the orchestra had gathered up its
instruments and filed out into the wings of the stage, and he looked up to the left and said, softly:

"All right, Doug; show's over."

With a soft thud, the big man dropped down from the guard's cubicle overhead, grinning cheerfully. He
needed a shave—Yetsko always did, in the mornings—and in his leather Literates' guard uniform, he
looked like some ogreish giant out of the mythology of the past.
"I was glad to have you up there with the Big Noise, this morning," Prestonby said. "What a mob! I'm still
trying to figure out why we have such an attendance."

"Don't you get it, captain?" Yetsko was reaching up to lock the door of his cubicle; he seemed surprised
at Prestonby's obtuseness. "Day before election; the little darlings' moms and pops don't want them out
running around. We can look for another big crowd tomorrow, too."

Prestonby gave a snort of disgust. "Of course; how imbecilic can I really get? I didn't notice any of them
falling down, so I suppose you didn't see anything out of line."

"Well, the hall monitors make them turn in their little playthings at the doors," Yetsko said, "but hall
monitors can be gotten at, and some of the stuff they make in Manual Training, when nobody's watching
them—"

Prestonby nodded. Just a week before, a crude but perfectly operative 17-mm shotgun had been
discovered in the last stages of manufacture in the machine shop, and five out of six of the worn-out files
would vanish, to be ground down into dirks. He often thought of the stories of his grandfather, who had
been a major during the Occupation of Russia, after the Fourth World War. Those old-timers didn't
know how easy they'd had it; they should have tried to run an Illiterate high school.

Yetsko was still grumbling slanders on the legitimacy of the student body. "One of those little angels
shoots me, it's just a cute little prank, and we oughtn't to frown on the little darling when it's just trying to
express its dear little personality, or we might give it complexes, or something," he falsettoed
incongruously. "And if the little darling's mistake doesn't kill me outright and I shoot back, people talk
about King Herod!" He used language about the Board of Education and the tax-paying public that was
probably subversive within the meaning of the Loyalty Oath. "I wish I had a pair of 40-mm auto-cannons
up there, instead of that sono gun."

"Each class is a little worse than the one before; in about five years, they'll be making H-bombs in the
lab," Prestonby said. In the last week, a dozen pupils had been seriously cut or blackjacked in hall and
locker-room fights. "Nice citizens of the future; nice future to look forward to growing old in."

"We won't," Yetsko comforted him. "We can't be lucky all the time; in about a year, they'll find both of us
stuffed into a broom closet, when they start looking around to see what's making all the stink."