As it was in the beginning, more or less, there was The Man and then there was The Word and then there was The Plot. Irving Wallace mostly writes plots which don't need words--only a topical idea to keep them moving toward that Fan Club which ultimately converts books into vehicles. Hollywood hearsay (better than Rona Barrett's) hath it that this is around a million dollar screen property, prepaid before a word was committed to the page. But that's the modern book of Genesis according to standard publishing procedures. The R Document has a pretty busy story line which you can rough out if you're not dull normal. FBI Director Tynan has decided to push through the 35th Amendment (which would destroy the Bill of Rights) with the help of the subsubsecret R Document (a pilot program already instituted in a small Arizona company town where everyone is tongue-and-hand-tied). But our new Attorney General, Collins, via the last gasped confession of his predecessor, gradually assembles evidence to show that Tynan, a human data collector and extortionist, is guilty of everything from springing a man from the jail where he belongs to the attempted assassination of our president. This novel would suggest that Wallace has lost a little of his eager-beaver energy for the big action project--which this is, or even sex--to which lip service is hardly paid since the other activities are too exhausting. But it won't matter at all--Mr. Wallace, like the pinball machine, is one of the few things we can still rely on in a sluggish economy to make money go clink, clink, clunk.