Null-ABC by H. Beam Piper John McGuire

Author:H. Beam Piper,John McGuire
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

“Top emergency! Top emergency! “ a voice brayed out of the alarm box on the wall. “Serious disorder in Department Thirty-two! Serious disorder in Department Thirty-two! “

The voice broke off as suddenly as it had begun, but the box was not silent. From it came a medley of shouts, curses, feminine screams and splintering crashes. Prestonby and Claire were on their feet.

“You have wall screens?” he asked. “How do they work? Like the ones at school?”

Claire twisted a knob until the number 32 appeared on a dial, and pressed a button. On the screen, the Chinaware Department on the third floor came to life in full sound and color. The pickup must have been across an aisle from the box from whence the alarm had come; they could see one of Pelton’s Illiterate clerks lying unconscious under it, and the handphone dangling at the end of its cord. The aisles were full of jostling, screaming women, trampling one another and fighting frantically to get out, and, among them, groups of three or four men were gathered back to back. One such group had caught a store policeman; three were holding him while a fourth smashed vases over his head, grabbing them from a nearby counter. A pink dinner plate came skimming up from the crowd, narrowly missing the wired TV pickup. A moment later, a blue-and-white sugar bowl, thrown with better aim, came curving at them in the screen. It scored a hit, and brought darkness, though the bedlam of sound continued.

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.

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