Astounding British Edition, Vol. 9, No. 7 — page 7: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

NULL-ABC 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 meet- ings 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 sys- tem 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 ap- proximately thirty million, an Indepen- dent-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 OS te tO eS * See ce oe Sa te _— ; ~ —~ ge EY 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, thunder- struck. “If Mongery’s admitting that, I’m in!” Pelton exclaimed. “Yeah, we can start calling him Senator, now, and really mean it,” Ray said. “May- be 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 pre- vious presidential election of 2136,” Mon- gery, 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 can- . didate 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 deprecat- ingly 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 atti- tude. In his view, it was men who could read and write who hatched the diabolical political ideologies and designed the fright- — ful 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 VOUT eS : ’ Y " Y he 2 ey c » Pa. ea” wa’. ee » | Eomicbooks