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.