He rolled over heavily and collapsed into complete unconsciousness.
When he awakened it was still dark and his pains were gone. Nahataspe was crooning a healing song very softly. He stopped when he saw Royland’s eyes open. “Now you know about break-the-sky medicine,” he said.
“Better than anybody. What time is it?”
“Midnight.”
“I’ll be going then.” They clasped hands and looked into each other’s eyes.
The jeep started easily. Four hours earlier, or possibly two months earlier, he had been worried about the battery. He chugged down the settlement road and knew what would happen next. He wouldn’t wait until morning; a meteorite might kill him, or a scorpion in his bed. He would go directly to Rotschmidt in his apartment, defy Vrouw Rotschmidt and wake her man up to tell him about 56c, tell him we have the Bomb.
We have a symbol to offer the Japanese now, something to which they can surrender, and will surrender.
Rotschmidt would be philosophical. He would probably sigh about the Bomb: “Ah, do we ever act responsibly? Do we ever know what the consequences of our decisions will be?”
And Royland would have to try to avoid answering him very sharply: “Yes. This once we damn well do.”
Theory of Rocketry
MR. EDEL TAUGHT SIX ENGLISH classes that year at Richard M. Nixon High School, and the classes averaged 75 pupils each. That was 450 boys and gills, but Mr. Edel still tried to have the names down cold by at least the third week of the semester. As English 308 stormed into his room he was aware that he was not succeeding, and that next year he would even stop trying, for in 1978 the classes would average 82 pupils instead of 75.
One seat was empty when the chime sounded; Mr. Edel was pleased to notice that he remembered whose it was. The absent pupil was a Miss Kahn, keyed into his memory by “Kahn-stipaded,” which perhaps she was, with her small pinched features centered in a tallow acre of face. Miss Kahn slipped in some three seconds late; Edel nodded at his intern, Mrs. Giovino, and Mrs. Giovino coursed down the aisle to question, berate and possibly to demerit Miss Kahn. Edel stood up, the Modern Revised Old Testament already open before him.
“You’re blessed,” he read, “if you’re excused for your wrongdoing and your sin is forgiven. You’re blessed if God knows that you’re not evil and sly any more. I, King David, used to hide my sins from God while I grew old and blustered proudly all day. But all day and all night too your hand was heavy an me, God . . .”
It would be the flat, crystal-clear, crystal-blank M.R.O.T. all this week; next week he’d read (with more pleasure) from the Roman Catholic Knox translation; the week after that, from the American Rabbinical Councils crabbed version heavy with footnotes; and the week after that, back to M.R.O.T. Thrice blessed was he this semester that there were no Moslems, Buddhists, militant atheists or miscellaneous cultists to sit and glower through the reading or exercise their legal right to wait it out in the corridor. This semester the classes were AllAmerican: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish—choice of one.
“Amen,” chorused the class and they sat down; two minutes of his fifty-minute hour were gone forever.
Soft spring was outside the windows, and they were restless.
Mr. Edel “projected” a little as he told them: “This is the dreaded three-minute impromptu speech for which English Three Oh Eight is notorious, young ladies and gentlemen. The importance of being able to speak clearly on short notice should be obvious to everybody. You’ll get nowhere in your military service if you can’t give instructions and verbal orders. You’ll get less than nowhere in business if you can’t convey your ideas crisply and accurately.” A happy thought struck him: great chance to implement the Spiritual Values Directive. He added: “You may be asked to lead in prayer or say grace on short notice.” (He’d add that one to his permanent repertoire; it was a natural.) “We are not asking the impossible. Anybody can talk interestingly, easily and naturally for three minutes if they try. Miss Gerber, will you begin with a little talk on your career plans?”
Miss Gerber (“Grapefruit” was the mnemonic) rose coolly and driveled about the joys of motherhood until Mrs. Giovino passed her card to Edel and called time.
“You spoke freely, Miss Gerber, but perhaps not enough to the point,” said Edel. “I’m pleased, though, that you weren’t bothered by any foolish shyness. I’m sure everybody I call on will be able to talk right up like you did.” (He liked that “like” the way you like biting on a tooth that aches; he’d give them Artificial Grammar Deemphasis . . .) “Foster, may we hear from you on the subject of your coming summer vacation?” He jotted down a C for the Grapefruit.
Foster (“Fireball”) rose and paused an expert moment. Then, in a firm and manly voice he started with a little joke (“if I survive English Three Oh Eight”), stated his theme (“a vacation is not a time for idling and wasted opportunity”), developed it (“harvest crew during the day for physical—my Science Search project during the evenings for mental” ), elevated it (“no excuse for neglecting one’s regular attendance at one’s place of worship”) and concluded with a little joke (“should be darned glad to get back to school!”).
The speech clocked 2:59; it was masterly; none of the other impromptus heard that morning came close to it.
“And,” said Mr. Edel at lunch to his semi-crony Dr. Fuqua, Biology, “between classes I riffled through the grade cards again and found I’d marked him F. Of course I changed it to A. The question is, why?”
“Because you’d made a mistake,” said Fuqua absently. Something was on his mind, thought Edel.
“No, no. Why did I make the mistake?”
“Well, Freud, in The Psychology of Everyday—”
“Roland, please, I know all that. Assume I do. Why do I unconsciously dislike Foster? I should get down on my knees and thank God for Foster.”
Fuqua shook his head and began to pay attention. “Foster?” he said. “You don’t know the half of it. I’m his faculty adviser. Quite a boy, Foster.”
“To me, just a name, a face, a good recitation every time. You know: seventy-five to a class. Whats he up to here at dear old Tricky Dicky?”
“Watch the funny jokes, Edel,” said Fuqua, alarmed.
“Sorry. It slipped out. But Foster?”
“Well, he’s taking an inhuman pre-engineering schedule. Carrying it with ease. Going out for all the extra-curricular stuff the law allows. R.O.T.C. Drill Team, Boxing Squad, Math Club, and there I had to draw the line. He wanted on the Debating Team too. I’ve seen him upset just once. He came to me last year when the school dentist wanted to pull a bad wisdom tooth he had. He made me make the dentist wait until he had a chance to check the dental requirements of the Air Force Academy. They allow four extractions, so he let the dentist yank it. Fly boy. Off we go into the whatsit. He wants it bad.”
“I see. Just a boy with motivation. How long since you’ve seen one, Roland?”
Dr. Fuqua leaned forward, his voice low and urgent. “To hell with Foster, Dave. I’m in trouble. Will you help me?”
“Why, of course, Roland. How much do you need?” Mr. Edel was a bachelor, and had found one of the minor joys of that state to be “tiding over” his familied friends.
“Not that kind of trouble, Dave. Not yet. They’re sharpening the ax for me. I get a hearing this afternoon.”
“Good God! What are you supposed to have done?”
“Everything. Nothing. It’s one of those ‘best interests’ things. Am I taking the Spiritual Values Directive seriously enough? Am I thinking about patting any adolescent fannies? Exactly why am I in the lowest quarter for my seniority-group with respect to voluntary hours of refresher summer courses? Am I happy here?”
Edel said: “These things always start somewhere. Who’s out to get you?”
Fuqua took a deep breath and said in a surprisingly small voice: “Me, I suppose.”
“Oh?”
Then it came out with a rush. “It was the semester psy
chometrics. I’d been up all night almost fighting with Beth. She does not understand how to handle a fifteen-year-old boy—never mind. I felt sardonic so I did something sardonic. And stupid. Don’t ever get to feeling sardonic, Dave. I took the psychometric and I checked their little boxes and I told the god-damned truth right down the line. I checked them where I felt like checking them and not where a prudent biology teacher ought to check them.”
“You’re dead,” Mr. Edel said after a pause.
“I thought I could get a bunch of the teachers to say they lie their way through the psychometrics. Start a real stink.”
“I’d make a poor ditch digger, Roland, but—if you can get nine others, I’ll speak up. No, make that six others. I don’t think they could ignore eight of us.”
“You’re a good man,” Dr. Fuqua said. “I’ll let you know. There’s old McGivern—near retirement. I want to try him.” He gulped his coffee and headed across the cafeteria.
Edel sat there, mildly thunderstruck at Fuqua’s folly and his own daring. Fuqua had told them the kind of bird he was by checking yes or no on the silly-clever statements. He had told them that he liked a drink, that he thought most people were stupider than he, that he talked without thinking first, that he ate too much, that he was lazy, that he had an eye for a pretty ankle—that he was a human being not much better or worse than any other human being. But that wasn’t the way to do it, and damned well Fuqua had known it. You simply told yourself firmly, for the duration of the test: “I am a yuk. I have never had an independent thought in my life; independent thinking scares me. I am utterly monogamous and heterosexual. I go bowling with the boys. Television is the greatest of the art forms. I believe in installment purchasing. I am a yuk.”
That these parlor games were taken seriously by some people was an inexplicable, but inexorable, fact of life in the twentieth century. Edel had yukked his way through scholarships, college admissions, faculty appointment and promotions and had never thought the examinations worse than a bad cold. Before maturity set in, in the frat house, they had eased his qualms about psychometric testing with the ancient gag: “You ain’t a man until you’ve had it three times.”
Brave of him, pretty brave at that, to back up Fuqua . . . if Roland could find six others.
Roland came to him at four o’clock to say he had not even found one other. “I don’t suppose —no. I’m not asking you to, Dave. Two, it wouldn’t be any good.”
He went into the principal’s office.
The next day a bright young substitute was teaching biology in his place and his student advisees had been parceled out among other teachers. Mr. Edel found that young Foster had now become his charge.
The 72 pupils in his English 114 class sat fascinated and watched the television screen. Dr. Henley Ragen was teaching them Macbeth, was teaching about nine hundred English 114 classes throughout the state Macbeth, and making them like it. The classroom rapport was thick enough to cut and spread with a shingle. The man’s good, Edel thought, but that good? How much is feedback from their knowing he’s famous for his rapport, how much is awe of his stupendous salary, still nowhere equal to nine hundred teachers’ salaries?
Dr. Henley Ragen, el magnífico, portentously turned a page; there was grim poetry in the gesture. He transfixed the classroom (nine hundred classrooms) with Those Eyes. Abruptly he became Macbeth at the Banquet prepar’d. With nervous hilarity he shouted at his guests: “You know your own degrees; sit down! At first and last, the hearty welcome!” Stockstill at a lectern he darted around the table bluffly rallying the company, slipped off to chat, grimly-merry, with the first Murtherer at the door, returned to the banquet, stood in chilled horror at the Ghost in the chair, croaked: “The table’s full.”
Mr. Edel studied the faces of his 72 English 114ers. They were in hypnotic states of varying depths, except Foster. The Fireball was listening and learning, his good mind giving as well as taking. The intelligent face was alive, the jaw firm, and around him eyes were dull and jaws went slack. Foster could speak and write an English sentence, which perhaps was the great distinguishing mark between him and the rest of English 114. Blurted fragments of thought came from them, and the thoughts were clichés a hundred times out of a hundred.
Dr. Henley Ragen growled at them: “We are yet but young in deed . . .” and his eyes said the rest, promising horrors to come. He snapped the book shut like a pistol’s bang; the 114ers popped out of their trances into dazed attentiveness. “Notebooks!” said Ragen (qua Ragen) and, 72 gun-fighters quick on the draw, they snapped out books and poised their pens. Ragen spoke for ten minutes about the scene; every so often Those Eyes and an intensification of That Voice cued them to write a word or a phrase, almost without glancing at the paper. (Later each would look at his notes and not be surprised to find them lucid, orderly, even masterful summations of the brief lecture.)
As Dr. Henley Ragen bluffly delivered a sort of benediction from the altar of learning, Mr. Edel thought: well, they’ve got the Banquet Scene now; they’ll own it forever. The way they own the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, the Ode to the West Wind, Arrowsmith. A good deal better than nothing; pauca sed matura. Or so he supposed.
That afternoon from three to five Mr. Edel was available to his advisees; it was a period usually devoted to catching up on his paper work. Beyond making out the student’s assignment schedule, a task traditionally considered beyond the capacity of the young, he had done no advising in years. And Foster appeared.
His handshake was manly, his grin was modest but compelling. He got to the point. “Mr. Edel, do you think I could swing an Enrichment Project in English?”
The teacher hardly knew what he meant. “Enrichment? Well, we haven’t been doing that lately, Foster. I suppose its still in the optional curriculum—”
“Yes sir, form sixty-eight, English, paragraph forty-five, section seven. ‘Opportunities shell be afforded to students believed qualified by advisors to undertake projects equivalent to College Freshman English term papers and the grades therefor shall be entered on the students‘ records and weighed as evidence in assigning students’ positions in the graduating class.”
Mr. Edel had found Fosters card by then and was studying it. The boy’s schedule was brutal, but his grade average was somewhere between B-f-and A. “Foster,” he told him, “there’s such a thing as a breaking point. I—I understand you want very much to go to Colorado Springs.” (Poor Fuqua! What had become of . . .?)
“Very much, sir. They expect the best—they have a right to expect the best. I’m not complaining, Mr. Edel, but there are girls with straight-A averages who aren’t working as hard as I am. Well, I’ve just got to beat them at their own game.”
Mr. Edel understood. It wasn’t just girls, though mostly it was. There was a type of student who was no trouble, who did the work, every smidgen of it, who read every word of every assigned page, who turned in accurate, curiously dead, echoless, unresonant papers which you could not in decency fault though you wanted to tear them up and throw them in their authors’ bland faces. You had a curious certainty that the adeptly-memorized data they reeled back on demand vanished forever once the need for a grade was gone, that it never by any chance became bone of their bone to strengthen them against future trials. Often enough when you asked them what they hoped to be they smilingly said: “I am going to teach . . . Foster, now. A boy who fought with the material and whipped it. He said: “Why so strong, Foster? What’s it about?”
The boy said: “Space, partly. And my father. Two big challenges, Mr. Edel. I think I’m a very lucky fellow. Here I am with a new frontier opening up, but there are lots of fellows my age who don’t see it. I see it because of my father. It’s wonderful to have a challenge like that—can I be the man he is? Can I learn even more, be a better leader, a better engineer?”
Mr. Edel was moved deeply. “Your father just missed spaceflight, is that it?”
“By a whisker,” Foster said regretfully. “Nothing can be d
one about it except what I’m doing.” “He’s an aero-engineer?”
“He can do anything,” Foster said positively. “And he has!”
A picture of the elder Foster was forming in Mr. Edel’s mind —young Fireball grown taller, solider and grizzled, the jaw firmed and controlled, the voice more powerful and sure. And, unquestionably, leather puttees.
Foster’s card said he had no mother, which made it more understandable. This fine boy was hard material honed to an edge, single-purposed. Did he have a young Hap Arnold here in his office? A Curtis LeMay? They had to come from somewhere, those driving, wide-ranging leaders and directors of millions. The slow-rolling conquest of space needed such men, first to navigate and pilot so no navigator or pilot would ever be able to snow them, then to move up step by step through research to command, then to great command.
“I’ll bet on you, Foster,” he said abruptly. “We can’t let the—the future English teachers outpoint you with their snap courses. You’ll do me a term paper on. . . on Henry V. First, read it. Read hell out of it and take notes. Get in touch with me when you think you’re ready to talk it over. I happen to be a bachelor; I have time in the evenings. And talk it over with your father, if you can persuade him to read along with you.”
Foster laughed. “I’m afraid Dad’s much too busy for Shakespeare, but I’ll try. Thanks, Mr. Edel.” He left.
Mr. Edel, with considerable trouble, found a pad of forms in his desk which covered Enrichment Projects, English, Advisor’s Permission for. He filled one out for Foster, looked it over and said, surprised: “Again, damn it!” He had checked the box for Permission Denied. He tore up the form—it was discolored anyway from being so long on the top of the pad—and meticulously made out another, checking the various boxes with exquisite care.
That night after dinner he tried to telephone Roland Fuqua, but service to his number had been discontinued. Alarmed, he buzzed over on his scooter to Fuquas apartment, one of a quarter-million in the Dearborn Village Development of Metropolitan Life & Medical. Roland’s hulking, spoiled and sullen boy Edward (who had unilaterally changed his name last year to Rocky) was the only person there, and he was on his way out: “to an orgy with some pigs,” if you believed him. He said “Little Rollo” was now a night-shift lab assistant in a petfood company’s Quality Control Department and this was his mother’s Bingo night. “You want I should give a message?” he asked satirically, overplaying the role of intolerably burdened youth.
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