H. Beam Piper by H. Beam Piper

Author:H. Beam Piper [Piper, H. Beam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Publisher: Ace Books
Published: 1950-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Cardon looked at his watch as he entered the Council Chamber at Literates' Hall, smoothing his smock hastily under his Sam Browne. He'd made it with very little time to spare, before the doors would be sealed and the meeting would begin. He'd been all over town, tracking down that report of Sforza's; he'd even made a quick visit to Chinatown, on the off chance that "China" had been used in an attempt at the double concealment of the obvious, but, as he'd expected, he'd found nothing. The people there hardly knew there was to be an election. Accustomed for millennia to ideographs read only by experts, they viewed the current uproar about Literacy with unconcern.

At the door, he deposited his pocket recorder—no sound-recording device was permitted, except the big audio-visual camera in front, which made the single permanent record. Going around the room counterclockwise to the seats of his faction, he encountered two other Lancedale men: Gerald K. Toppington, of the Technological Section, thin-faced, sandy-haired, balding; and Franklin R. Chernov, commander of the local Literates' guards brigade, with his ragged gray mustache, his horribly scarred face, and his outsize tablet-holster almost as big as a mail-order catalogue.

"What's Joyner-Graves trying to do to us, Frank?" Chernov rumbled gutturally.

"It's what we're going to do to them," Cardon replied. "Didn't the chief tell you?"

Chernov shook his head. "No time. I only got here fifteen minutes ago. Chasing all over town about that tip from Sforza. Nothing, of course. Nothing from Sforza, either. The thing must have been planned weeks ago, whatever it is, and everybody briefed personally, and nothing on disk or tape about it. But what's going to happen here? Lancedale going to pull a rabbit out of his hat?"

Cardon explained. Chernov whistled. "Man, that's no rabbit; that's a full-grown Bengal tiger! I hope it doesn't eat us, by mistake."

Cardon looked around, saw Lancedale in animated argument with a group of his associates. Some of the others seemed to be sharing Chernov's fears.

"I have every confidence in the chief," Toppington said. "If his tigers make a meal off anybody, it'll be—" He nodded in the direction of the other side of the chamber, where Wilton Joyner, short, bald, pompous, and Harvey Graves, tall and cadaverous, stood in a Rosencrantz-Guildenstern attitude, surrounded by half a dozen of their top associates.

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