Cardon shook his head. "No, Chet; they were for you, all the way. Your daughter exposed her Literacy to save your life. Your son and his teacher came to your store and fought for you. But there are Literates who want to see you defeated, and they're the ones who made that audio-visual, secretly, of the ceremony in which your son and daughter took the Literates' Oath and received the white smock, and they're going to telecast it this evening at twenty-one hundred. Coming on top of the stories that have been going around all afternoon, and Slade Gardner's speech, this morning, they think that'll be enough to defeat you." "Well, don't you?" Pelton gloomed. "My own kids, Literates!" He seemed to have reached a point at which he was actually getting a masochistic pleasure out of turning the dagger in his wounds. "Who'd trust me, after this?" "No, Chet; it isn't enough to beat you--if you just throw away that crying towel and start fighting. They made one mistake that's going to wreck them." "What's that, Frank?" Pelton brightened, by about one angstrom unit. "The timing, of course!" Cardon told him, impatiently. "I thought you'd see that, at once. This telecast comes on at twenty-one hundred. Your final speech comes on at twenty-one thirty. As soon as they've shown this business of Claire and Ray taking the Literate Oath, you'll be on the air, yourself, and if you put on any kind of a show worth the name, it won't be safe for anybody in this state to be caught wearing a white smock. Now, if they'd only had the wit to wait till after you'd delivered that speech you've been practicing on for the last two weeks, and then spring this on you, that would have been different. They'd have had you over a barrel. But this way, you have them!" Pelton took another gulp from the tall glass at his elbow, emptying it. "Fix me up another of these, Frank," he said. "I feel like a new man, already." Then his face clouded again. "But we have no time to prepare a speech, now, and I just can't ad lib one." Cardon drew a little half-inch record-disk from his pocket case. "Play this off," he said. "I had it fixed up, as soon as I got wise to what was going to happen. The voice is one of the girls in my office, over at the brewery. Pronunciation, grammar, elocution and everything correct." Pelton snapped the disk onto his recorder and put in the ear plug. Then, before he pressed the stud, he looked at Cardon curiously. "How'd you get onto this, anyhow, Frank?" he wanted to know. "Well ... I hope you don't ask me for an accounting of all the money I've been spending in this campaign, because some of the items would look funny as hell, but--" "No accounting, Frank. After all, you spent as much of your own money as you did of mine," Pelton interrupted.