ised his voice. "I call
for an immediate vote on this amended motion, which I, personally,
endorse most heartily, and which I hope to see carried unanimously."

"Now, wait a minute!" Joyner objected. "This motion ought to be
debated--"

"What do you want to debate about it?" Chernov demanded. "You
presented it, didn't you?"

"Well, I wanted to give the Council an opportunity to discuss it, as
typical of our problems in dealing with Black ... I mean,
non-Fraternities ... Literacy--"

"You mean, you didn't know it was loaded!" Cardon told him. "Well,
that's your hard luck; we're going to squeeze the trigger!"

"I withdraw the motion!" Joyner shouted.

"Literate President," Lancedale said gently, his thin face lighting
with an almost saintly smile, "Literate Joyner simply cannot withdraw
his motion, now. It has been properly seconded and placed before the
house, and so has my own humble contribution to it. I demand that the
motion be acted upon."

"Vote! Vote! Vote!" the Lancedale Literates began yelling.

"I call on all my adherents to vote against this motion!" Joyner
shouted.

"Now look here, Wilton!" Harvey Graves shouted, reddening with anger.
"You're just making a fool out of me. This was your idea, in the first
place! Do you want to smash everything we've ever done in the
Fraternities?"

"Harvey, we can't go on with it," Joyner replied. He crossed quickly
to Graves' seat and whispered something.

"For the record," Lancedale said sweetly, "our colleague, Literate
Joyner, has just whispered to Literate Graves that since I have
seconded his motion, he's now afraid of it. I think Literate Graves is
trying to assure him that my support is merely a bluff. For the
information of this body, I want to state categorically that it is
not, and that I will be deeply disappointed if this motion does not
pass."

An elderly Literate on the Joyner-Graves side, an undersized man with
a bald head and a narrow mouth, was on his feet. He looked like an
aged rat brought to bay by a terrier.

"I was against this fool idea from the start!" he yelled. "We've got
to keep the Illiterates down; how are we ever going to do that if we
go making Literates out of them? But you two thought you were being
smart--"

"Shut up and sit down, you old jackass!" one of Joyner's people
shouted at him.

"Shut up, yourself, Ginter," a hatchet-faced woman Literate from the
Finance Section squawked.

Literate President Morehead, an amiab