ashes between the
private troops of rival racket gangs, political parties and business
houses.

"Which brings us to the local scene. On my way to the studio this
morning, I stopped at City Hall, and 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