ere all gone, and the orchestra had gathered up its instruments and
filed out into the wings of the stage, and he looked up to the left
and said, softly:

"All right, Doug; show's over."

With a soft thud, the big man dropped down from the guard's cubicle
overhead, grinning cheerfully. He needed a shave--Yetsko always did,
in the mornings--and in his leather Literates' guard uniform, he
looked like some ogreish giant out of the mythology of the past.

[Illustration:]

"I was glad to have you up there with the Big Noise, this morning,"
Prestonby said. "What a mob! I'm still trying to figure out why we
have such an attendance."

"Don't you get it, captain?" Yetsko was reaching up to lock the door
of his cubicle; he seemed surprised at Prestonby's obtuseness. "Day
before election; the little darlings' moms and pops don't want them
out running around. We can look for another big crowd tomorrow, too."

Prestonby gave a snort of disgust. "Of course; how imbecilic can I
really get? I didn't notice any of them falling down, so I suppose you
didn't see anything out of line."

"Well, the hall monitors make them turn in their little playthings at
the doors," Yetsko said, "but hall monitors can be gotten at, and some
of the stuff they make in Manual Training, when nobody's watching
them--"

Prestonby nodded. Just a week before, a crude but perfectly operative
17-mm shotgun had been discovered in the last stages of manufacture in
the machine shop, and five out of six of the worn-out files would
vanish, to be ground down into dirks. He often thought of the stories
of his grandfather, who had been a major during the Occupation of
Russia, after the Fourth World War. Those old-timers didn't know how
easy they'd had it; they should have tried to run an Illiterate high
school.

Yetsko was still grumbling slanders on the legitimacy of the student
body. "One of those little angels shoots me, it's just a cute little
prank, and we oughtn't to frown on the little darling when it's just
trying to express its dear little personality, or we might give it
complexes, or something," he falsettoed incongruously. "And if the
little darling's mistake doesn't kill me outright and I shoot back,
people talk about King Herod!" He used language about the Board of
Education and the tax-paying public that was probably subversive
within the meaning of the Loyalty Oath. "I wish I had a pair of 40-mm
auto-cannons up there, instead of that sono gun."