That the city would take its well-earned place among the wonders of the world, Murdock had no doubt; that he would still be in office at the time of its completion was extremely unlikely, since, even at maximum speeds of construction, it would be impossible to do it in less than twenty-five years. There was nothing to do but put it to a vote of all the people.
Murdock worded his proposition, however, with the canny instinct for outguessing human nature which had brought him to his present estate: While supposedly stressing the fact that a continuing Presidential program even after the man was out of office was unprecedented, he actually made it known by his phrasing of the proposition that such an extension would divide the contingent tax-bite per citizen into twenty-five painless morsels, rather than the four rather large gulps they would have had to swallow during his tenure.
Political savants say that it was this latter point which strongly influenced the resounding pro-vote from the people. Be this as it may, work on the incomparable city was begun. Once the program had been inaugurated, the thing was out of Murdock's hands, and he began working upon his third plank at once.
Neutrality had become the bugbear of political ambition by 1968. The collapse of the John Birch movement in 1965, during the nationwide riots which sprang up during that bloody year, had still not removed one of the foremost contentions of that organization, to wit: One must either be pro-American or anti. The idea of any citizen being indifferent to the success or failure of a government proposal was distasteful to the masses, and this feeling grew in intensity up until the year of Murdock's election. It is said that this was the prime factor in his being elected, that he declared an end to "wishy-washy Americanism, once and for all". Very shortly after the beginning of work on the indestructible city, therefore, Murdock put the following proposition to a vote:
"Proposed: That political apathy be put to an end by means of the removal of the 'Undecided' element in the national vote, by demanding that each citizen miss no more than three votes in any quarter of the year, or have his voting privilege revoked until such time as he be declared, by competent authority, of a more civic-minded turn of inclination."
This poll was not as sweeping a one as those formerly called for by the President. It split at approximately seventy-to-thirty percent, in favor of the proposition. The salient fact that such a vote was patently unfair to the people whom it would most directly influence—the nonvoters—seemed to escape everybody. And so the proposition became a bill, and was duly appended to the Constitution of the United States, becoming Article XXVIII.
All voting machines in the country were forthwith modified to allow only a vote of pro or con to be registered. Murdock's promised platform was on its way to completion, and the old gentleman settled back for a restful remainder of his tenure, thinking up approaches to the public fancy in the upcoming election of 1976. This being the bicentennial anniversary of the founding of the country, he toyed with ideas of a simple wave-the-flag, rah-rah-rah, Cornwallis-to-Khruschev-victory sort of campaign that would stun the sensibilities of the simple-minded, and dim the doubts of country-loving thinkers. He was in the process of drawing up such a campaign, and had just placed a question mark in parentheses after the words "Fireworks at the Rally" when his unexpected and fatal cerebral hemorrhage caught him in mid-pen-stroke, and Lester Murdock fell dead across his desk.