or private, personal ownership, based on land title, to
the upper stratosphere--with a strong hint that rights of passage no
longer applied without some recompense to the owner of the air.
Naturally, Deeds had filed the original with a computer-secretary to
turn out ten thousand duplicate copies, and the machine had done so,
folding the copies, slipping them into addressed envelopes and sending
them out under the senator's franking stamp.

The addresses on the envelopes, however, had not been those of the
senator's supporters. The letter had been sent to ten thousand
stockholders in major airline companies, and the senator's head was
still ringing from the force of the denunciatory letters, telegrams
and telephone calls he'd been getting.

* * * * *

And then there was Representative Follansbee of South Dakota. A set of
news releases on the proposed Follansbee Waterworks Bill contained the
statement that the artificial lake which Follansbee proposed in the
Black Hills country "be formed by controlled atomic power blasts, and
filled with water obtained from collecting the tears of widows and
orphans."

Newsmen who saw this release immediately checked the bill. The wording
was exactly the same. Follansbee claimed that the "widows and orphans"
phrase had appeared in his speech on the bill, and not in the proposed
bill itself. "It's completely absurd," he said, with commendable calm,
"to consider this method of filling an artificial lake."
Unfortunately, the absurdity was now contained in the bill, which
would have to go back to committee for redefinition, and probably
wouldn't come up again in the present session of Congress. Judging
from the amount of laughter that had greeted the error when it had
come to light, Malone privately doubted whether any amount of
redefinition was going to save it from a landslide defeat.

Representative Keller of Idaho had made a speech which contained so
many errors in fact that newspaper editorials, and his enemies on the
floor of Congress, cut him to pieces with ease and pleasure. Keller
complained of his innocence and said he'd gotten his facts from a
computer-secretary, but this didn't save him. His re-election was a
matter for grave concern in his own party, and the opposition was,
naturally, tickled. They would not, Malone thought, dare to be tickled
pink.

And these were not the only casualties. They were the most blatant
foul-ups, but there were