C Kornbluth - His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

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 examination 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 seventy-two 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 magnifico, 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 prepared. 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 seventy-two 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 cliches 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, seventy-two gunfighters 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," Arroiusmith. 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 paperwork; beyond making out the students' 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 it's still in the optional curriculum—"

"Yes, sir, Form Sixty-eight, English, Paragraph Forty-five, Section Seven. 'Opportunities shall be afforded to students believed qualified by advisers to undertake projects equivalent to College Freshman English term papers, and the grades therefore shall be entered on the students' records and weighed as evidence in assigning students'

positions in the graduating class."

Mr. Edel had found Foster's card by then and was studying it. The boy's schedule was brutal, but his grade average was somewhere between B-plus 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 lot's 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 space flight, is that it?"

"By a whisker," Foster said regretfully. "Nothing can be done about it except what I'm doing."

"He's an aeroengineer?"

"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."