Messerschmidt stood up quietly. "I doubt if you'll find the election coming out in quite that way," he said, his voice still as calm as it had been throughout. "It might have been different if you hadn't so long persisted in fighting for the last generation's revolution." * * * * * Kimmensen sat stiffly in Jem Bendix's office. "Where's he now?" Bendix demanded, seething. "I don't know. He'll have left the building." Bendix looked at Kimmensen worriedly. "Joe--_can_ he win the election?" Kimmensen looked at Jem for a long time. All his rage was trickling away like sand pouring through the bottom of a rotted sack. "I think so." There was only a sick, chilling fear left in him. Bendix slapped his desk with his hand. "But he _can't_! He just _can't_! He's bulldozed the electorate, he hasn't promised one single thing except an army, he doesn't have a constructive platform at all--no, by God, he can't take that away from me, too!--Joe, what're we going to _do_?" He turned his pale and frightened face toward Kimmensen. "Joe--tonight, when the returns come in--let's be here in this building. Let's be right there in the room with the tabulating recorder. We've got to make sure it's an honest count." CHAPTER VI There was only one bare overhead bulb in the tabulator room. Bendix had brought in two plain chairs from the offices upstairs, and now Kimmensen sat side by side with him, looking at the gray bulk of the machine. The room was far down under the building. The walls and floor were cement, and white rime bloomed dankly in the impressions left by form panels that had been set there long ago. The tabulating recorder was keyed into every League communicator, and every key was cross-indexed into the census files. It would accept one vote from each mature member of every League family. It flashed running totals on the general broadcast wavelength. "It seems odd," Bendix said in a husky voice. "An election without Salmaggi running." Kimmensen nodded. The flat walls distorted voices until they sounded like the whispers of grave-robbers in a tomb. "Did you ask him why he wasn't?" he asked because silence was worse. "He said he didn't know whose ticket to run on." Kimmensen absorbed it as one more fact and let it go. "The first votes ought to be coming in." Bendix was looking at his watch. "It's time." Kimmensen nodded. "It's ironic," Bendix said. "We have a society that trusts itself enough to leave this machine unguarded, and now the machine's recording an election that's a meaningless farce. Give the electorate one more day and it'd have time to think about Messerschmidt's hate-mongering. As it is, half the people'll be voting for him with their emotions instead of their intelligence." "It'll be a close election," Kimmensen said. He was past pretending.