* * * * *

Sitting down again at the breakfast table with her father, Claire
levered another cigarette out of the Readilit and puffed at it with
exaggeratedly bored slowness. She was still frightened. Ray shouldn't
have done what he did, even if he had furnished a plausible
explanation. The trouble with plausible explanations was having to
make them. Sooner or later, you made too many, and then you made one
that wasn't so plausible, and then all the others were remembered, and
they all looked phony. And why had the Senator had to mention Ralph?
Was he beginning to suspect the truth about that, too?

I hope not! she thought desperately. If he ever found out about that,
it'd kill him. Just kill him, period!

Mrs. Harris must have turned off the video, after they had gone up to
the landing stage. To cover her nervousness, she reached up and
snapped it on again. The screen lit, and from it a young man with dark
eyes under bushy black brows was shouting angrily:

"... Most obvious sort of conspiracy! If the Radical-Socialist Party
leaders, or the Consolidated Illiterates' Organization Political
Action Committee, need any further evidence of the character of their
candidate and idolized leader, Chester Pelton, the treatment given to
Pelton's candidacy by Literate First Class Elliot C. Mongery, this
morning, ought to be sufficient to remove the scales from the eyes of
the blindest of them. I won't state, in so many words, that Chester
Pelton's sold out the Radical-Socialists and the Consolidated
Illiterates' Organization to the Associated Fraternities of Literates,
because, since no witness to any actual transfer of money can be
found, such a statement would be libelous--provided Pelton had nerve
enough to sue me."

"Why, you dirty misbegotten illegitimate--!" Pelton was on his feet.
His hand went to his hip, and then, realizing that he was unarmed and,
in any case, confronted only by an electronic image, he sat down
again.

"Pelton's been yapping for socialized Literacy," the man on the screen
continued. "I'm not going back to the old argument that any kind of
socialization is only the thin edge of the wedge which will pry open
the pit of horrors from which the world has climbed since the Fourth
World War. If you don't realize that now, it's no use for me to
repeat it again. But I will ask you, do you realize, for a moment,
what a program of socialized Literacy would mean, apart from th