MacRoscope (10 page)

Easier said than done. He did not know those boys by sight, and had to take their word when they answered to the names he laboriously pronounced. There was increasing merriment that he thought stemmed from his errors in pronunciation — until two answered at once on “Brown” and he realized that they were covering for an absent student.

He remembered, with relief, the seating chart. He could check them that way… as soon as each boy was seated where he belonged. “All right, engineers — you know where you sit. Move. From now on, I want every one of you in the proper place.”

“My place is home!” one quipped, and the rest joined in with a too-boisterous laughter.

His next task was to discover where they stood in engineering, so that he could start teaching meaningfully. It was a general course, mostly electronics, and the textbook was good except that it was sadly out of date. He would have to extrapolate from it, filling in the advances of the past decade, or the training would be almost useless.

One of the boys casually took out a cigarette and lit it.

Ivo snapped to classroom awareness. “Hey! You—” he looked at the seating chart — “Boonton. What are you doing?”

“Smoking,” the boy replied, as though surprised at the challenge.

“Isn’t there a school rule against student smoking?”

“It’s permitted for seniors in the technical wing, sir.”

Ivo looked about, suspecting that the boy was lying. Others in the class were covering smirks. They were trying the substitute out, as he had been warned they would.

This was the time for toughness. The principal had put it plainly to the group of volunteers: “Either the instructor rules the students or the students rule the instructor. If you’re weak, they will know it. Put your foot down. The whole authority of the public school system stands behind you. Most of our kids are good kids, but they need to be governed firmly. Don’t let the few bad apples take over.”

Platitudes galore, he had thought at the time — was it only an hour ago? — but probably good advice. Now was the time to apply it. He affected a boldness he did not feel and laid down the local law.

“I don’t care what the technical-wing rules are for what grades. I will not permit the fire hazard of smoking in my classroom. Put that weed away immediately.”

Then they all were on him. “What do you mean?”

“Mister Hoover lets us smoke!”

“How do you expect us to concentrate?”

“Cheeze!”

Ivo hesitated, suddenly unsure. He did not want to be a martinet. “All right, Boonton. You may smoke in class—” there was a spontaneous cheer — “
if
you can show me a note from the principal approving it.”

Silence.

Then the boy jumped up. “I’ll go see him right now! He’ll tell you it’s okay!”

Ivo let him go. He spent the rest of the period trying to pin down how much the boys knew about engineering of any type and how far into the text they had progressed. It was hard, taking over a functioning class from another teacher, and he could see that much effort would inevitably be wasted in the changeover, simply because of the differing styles of the two men.

Boonton never came back. Ivo didn’t have time to be concerned with that. Probably the principal had been busy.

The bell rang for the end of the period, and he realized that he had really accomplished nothing. All he had done was call the roll and argue about smoking and try to find some place to start. As they cleared out and the next bunch came in, he remembered that he hadn’t even given them a homework assignment. What a beginning!

The room was a mess. Balls of paper littered the floor, chairs were scattered, assorted slop was on the desks and strands of colored wire lay in odd places. And here he had to do it all over again with a new class!

Somehow he made it. But that afternoon he received a note from the principal, suggesting that he try to settle his problem in class instead of aggravating the students and involving the front office. That was how he learned that Boonton had simply gone home for the day with a story about being prejudicially kicked out of class by a temporary teacher. His mother had called the principal in a fury, and the reprimand was being duly relayed to the concerned teacher.

Ivo reread the note, appalled. No one had bothered to check his version of it. It appeared that any student could make any charge against any teacher — and be believed without question.

There were limits. He went to the principal’s office at the beginning of his daily free-period, but the man was too busy to see him. Finally he settled down in the teachers’ lounge and wrote a report covering the situation. That neatly used up the time he had planned to use for reviewing the lessons for the following day, but at least it would settle the matter.

“Ha!” Afra said.

Ivo was jolted back to reality: this was Harold Groton’s experience, not his own.

“I was dead tired the end of that first day,” Groton continued. “As nearly as I could tell, I had cleaned up enough debris and mispronounced enough names to last me for a normal year — but I hadn’t taught anybody any engineering. And to top it all off, I received three calls at my home from irate parents complaining about my mistreatment of their hard-working angels. The last one was at one a.m. I think that was when I really began to understand what it meant to be a teacher.

“The next day was worse. The word was out that I could be taken. Everyone seemed to know that I’d had trouble with the office, and the students were determined to run me down. They talked out of turn, they slept in class, they looked at comic books; I couldn’t make all of them pay attention all the time. I saw that few of them cared about the subject or had any real thought for the future, and the ones who needed instruction most were the ones who refused even to listen when it was offered. They drew pictures of girls and hotrods in their notebooks, and there was always some obscene word on one of the blackboards. I’d erase it, not making an issue of it — as I’d been advised — but another would be there again next period. There’d be an anonymous noise while I was talking — a clicking or a harmonica note or something similar — and it would stop the moment I did. I couldn’t ignore it because every time it happened the whole class got out of control and became noisy, and I couldn’t pin it down either. And the thing was, they knew as well as I did what would happen if I cracked down on anyone and sent him to the principal’s office for discipline.
I’d
get spoken to, not the student, for letting things get out of control. It was
my
responsibility.

“Hell,” Groton said, “is a roomful of rebellious juveniles — and a pusillanimous administration. I was committed, and I refused to quit — but I became obsessed with the progress of the negotiations between the state authority and the FEA.”

“FEA?” Ivo asked.

“Florida Education Association. That was the teachers’ group, and they still may be, for all I know. I really came to appreciate their stand. I never worked so hard in my life, in the face of such abuse. Oh. the newspapers were full of editorials! ‘Wonderful Volunteers Filling In For Errant Teachers,’ ‘Nobody Cares About Our Innocent Children,’ ‘Governor Unavailable For Comment’ and so on. But I was in a position, as I had not been before, to comprehend the truth. The boys were a lot less innocent than the editorialists! I was a scab — a strikebreaker — and while I think there may have been some better way to protest, the teachers certainly had compelling arguments on their side.

“The extra pay had seemed nice at first, like so much lagniappe. It enhanced my normal gross by a good fifty percent. But it wasn’t worth it! For one thing, my time was never my own; I was grading papers every night and trying to do something about the ones with identical mistakes — pretty sure sign of cheating, but not
proof
— and preparing for the next day’s sessions. I had trouble sleeping. I kept seeing those vulpine young faces peering at me, waiting for any slip, eager for my attention to wander so that they could sling another spitwad at the windowpane. And I realized that their regular teacher had to do this all the time — for no more pay than that fifty percent!

“But the worst shock came at the end. The teacher walkout collapsed after a couple of weeks, and most of them came back to fill their old places. I went back to my own job with voluminous relief. It was the weight of the world off my shoulders! But I paid one more visit to that school, after things were settled, because I wanted to meet the man I had replaced. I wanted to apologize to him for my ignorance and interference, and congratulate him for being a better man than I was. The education had been mine, really, and I had learned a lot of respect for him, knowing how good a job he had done under such conditions. I had seen his books and records, and knew he was a very fine engineer, too;
he
was right up to date, even if the texts he had to use weren’t.

“But he wasn’t there. His classes had been redistributed among other teachers. The school board had refused to hire him back. It turned out that he was an officer of the FEA, and one of the organizers of the walkout. So the board had its revenge on him and those like him, even though they were among the best teachers in the system. The mediocre teachers they kept; those were not ‘troublemakers’ who insisted on pushing for school improvements. I learned that this was happening all over the state, and I knew that the educational system there was never going to be the same again. They had brutally purged their most dedicated men and women, the ones who cared the most, rather than admit that the teachers’ complaints were valid.”

“Why didn’t they pay their teachers more?” Ivo asked. “Buy better texts, and so on? Why did they let so many other states forge ahead where it counted?”

“The state was in a financial bind at the time. If they had allocated more for the teachers, they would have had to do the same for the other neglected professions — the police, the social workers, even migrant labor. That would have meant an increase in taxes—”

“Oh.”

“Or a closing of tax loopholes,” Brad added. “And that would have been even worse for the special interests in power at the time.”

Ivo had a sudden vision of the proboscoids of planet Sung, abusing their resources into extinction.
This is how it happens
, he thought. Public apathy led to control by the special interests and unscrupulous individuals, and the trend was disastrous.

Had Brad known that the conversation would take this turn? Was this his way of showing Ivo that the tide had to be turned at this last frontier, the frontier of space? Senator Borland, representing the reactionary power of—

Groton smiled. “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to run on like that. I don’t usually—”

“You never told me, dear,” Beatryx said. “Nobody likes to advertise his mistakes. That’s why I tried to forget what my ‘teaching’ really was. It still gets to me, when I think about it — that hellish two weeks — it seemed like several months. It was a long time before I felt really settled again. Before I could forget that terrible insecurity of responsibility without authority, of degradation at the hands of the precious youth of our country, of the bitterness at unworkable and unfair policies and useless effort.”

Yet he had not done anything
about
it himself, Ivo thought. How could mankind turn about, when even those who were shocked by the visible carnage merely retreated from it?

“At least I know better now,” Groton said. “Now that I have Beatryx. And I stay out of ‘causes.’ Maybe I just had to get the mistaken idealism out of my system before settling down.”

Oh.

Brad took Ivo to the confrontation. Afra was busy elsewhere, and he tried to keep his mind off her.

Senator Borland reminded him, shockingly, of the catatonic Dr. Johnson Afra had introduced him to in the infirmary. Borland’s manner dissipated that initial impression in a hurry, however; he was younger and far more forceful than the scientist could ever have been. Ivo tried not to think of him automatically as the enemy. Borland had probably had nothing to do with the closing of schools and suppression of teachers.

It was amazing that one so young as Brad should be trusted to deal with such a man. But Brad was — Brad.

The Senator arrived with his personal secretary: a noisy young man who could only be properly described as a “flunky.” The flunky did the talking, speaking of Borland always in the third person as though he were not present, while Borland himself looked alertly about as though not concerned with the dialogue.

“You!” the flunky cried imperiously, spying Brad. “You’re American, right? The Senator wants to talk to you.”

Brad approached slowly. Ivo could tell he was repressing irritation; he was hardly one to be ordered about abruptly.

The flunky consulted his clipboard. “You’re Bradley Carpenter, right? Boy genius from Kennedy Tech, right? The Senator wants to know what you’re pulling here.”

“Astronomy,” Brad said. There was a small stir among the assembled personnel of the station, and one big man with the Soviet insignia on his lapel smiled, not hesitant to show his contempt of the capitalist hierarchy. The West Europeans kept straight faces, though one had to cough. Borland had no power over them, but there were courtesies to maintain.

“Stargazing. Uh-huh,” the flunky remarked. “The Senator means to put a stop to needless and wasteful expense. Do you have any idea how much of the taxpayer’s hard-earned money you’ve squandered here in the past year?”

“Yes,” Brad replied.

“The Senator means to get to the bottom of this foolishness. This—” There was a doubletake. “What?”

“None.”

“None what?”

“None squandered. You seem to assume that the purpose of research is the production of tangible commodities. The research is not in error; your definitions are.”

Borland swung around to cover Brad. He touched one finger to his subordinate’s arm and the youth froze. “Hold on there, lad. Suppose you prove that statement. What’s so special about your telescope, makes it worth this many billion dollars? Just give me the tourist-class rundown, now.”