A Galaxy Of Strangers

by Lloyd Biggle Jr

  She glanced down the list of names and picked out hers. Boltz, Mildred. English, tenth grade. Time, 10:15. Channel 6439. Zero. Year’s average, zero.

  “The subject has something to do with the tricks you can use,” Stewart said. “Here’s a Marjorie McMillan at two o’clock. She teaches eleventh-grade English, and her Trendex is sixty-four. That’s very high. Let’s see how she does it.” He set the dials.

  At precisely two o’clock Marjorie McMillan appeared, and Miss Boltz’s first horrified impression was that she was disrobing. Her shoes and stockings were piled neatly on the floor. She was in the act of unbuttoning her blouse. She glanced up at the camera and recoiled in mock fright.

  “What are you cats and toms doing in here?” she cooed. “I thought I was alone.”

  She was a trim blonde, with a flashy, brazen kind of prettiness. Her profile displayed sensational curves. She smiled, tossed her head, and started to tiptoe away.

  “Oh, well, as long as I’m among friends—”

  The blouse came off. So did the skirt. She stood before them in an alluringly brief costume that consisted exclusively of shorts and a halter. The camera recorded its scarlet and gold colors brilliantly. She pranced about in a shuffling dance step, flicking the switch for a closeup of the blackboard as she danced past her desk.

  “Time to go to work, all you cats and toms,” she said. “This is called a sentence.” She read aloud as she wrote on the blackboard. “The—man—ran—down—the—street. ‘Ran down the street’ is what the man did. We call that the predicate. Funny word, isn’t it? Are you with me?”

  Miss Boltz uttered a bewildered protest. “Eleventh-grade English?”

  “Yesterday we talked about verbs,” Marjorie McMillan said. Do you remember? I’ll bet you weren’t paying attention. I’ll bet you aren’t even paying attention now.”

  Miss Boltz gasped. The halter suddenly came unfastened. Its ends flapped loosely, and Miss McMillan snatched at it as it started to fall. “Nearly lost it that time,” she said. “Maybe I will lose it, one of these days. And you wouldn’t want to miss that, would you? Better pay attention. Now let’s take another look at that nasty old predicate.”

  Miss Boltz said quietly, “A little out of the question for me, isn’t it?”

  Stewart darkened the screen. “Her high rating won’t last,” he said. “As soon as her students decide she’s really not going to lose that thing—but let’s look at this one. Tenth-grade English. A male teacher. Trendex is forty-five.”

  He was young, reasonably good-looking, and clever. He balanced chalk on his nose. He juggled erasers. He did imitations. He took up the reading of that modern classic, Saddle Blankets and Six Guns, and he read very well, acting out parts of it, creeping behind his desk to point an imaginary six-gun at the camera. It was quite realistic.

  “The kids will like him,” Stewart said. “He’ll probably last pretty well. Now let’s see if there’s anyone else.”

  There was a history teacher, a sedate-looking young woman with a brilliant artistic talent. She drew sketches and caricatures with amazing ease and pieced them together with sprightly conversation. There was an economics teacher who performed startling magic tricks with cards and money. There were two young women whose routines approximated that of Marjorie McMillan, though in a more subdued manner. Their ratings also were much lower.

  “That’s enough to give you an idea of what you’re up against,” Stewart said.

  “A teacher who can’t do anything but teach is frightfully handicapped,” Miss Boltz said thoughtfully. “These teachers are just performers. They aren’t teaching their students—they’re entertaining them.”

  “They have to cover the subject matter of their courses. If the students watch, they can’t help learning something.”

  Jim Pargrin had remained silent while they switched from channel to channel. Now he stood up and shook his graying head solemnly. “I’ll check engineering. Perhaps we could show some films for you.

  Normally that’s frowned upon, because we haven’t the staff or the facilities to do it for everyone, but I think I could manage it.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “That’s very kind of you. And thank you, Lyle, for helping out with a lost cause.”

  “The cause is never lost while you’re still working,” he said.

  They left together. Long after the door closed after them, Miss Boltz sat looking at the blank TV screen and wondering how long she would be working.

  For twenty-five years on barren, inhospitable Mars she had dreamed of Earth. She had dreamed of walking barefoot on the green grass, with green trees and shrubs around her; and over her head, instead of the blurring transparency of an atmosphere dome, the endless expanse of blue sky. She had stood in the bleak Martian deserts and dreamed of high-tossing ocean waves racing toward a watery horizon.

  Now she was back on Earth, living in the unending city complex of Eastern United States. Streets and buildings impinged upon its tiny parks. The blue sky was almost obscured by air traffic. She had glimpsed the ocean once, from an aircab.

  But they were there for the taking, the green fields and the lakes and rivers and ocean. She had only to go to them. Instead, she had worked. She had slaved over her class materials. She had spent hours writing and revising and gathering her examples, and more hours rehearsing herself meticulously, practicing over and over her single hour of teaching before she exposed it to the devouring eye of the camera.

  And no one had been watching. During those first two weeks her students had turned from her by the tens and hundreds and thousands, until she had lost them all.

  She shrugged off her humiliation and took up the teaching of The Merchant of Venice. Jim Pargrin helped out personally, and she was able to run excellent films of background material and scenes from the play.

  She said sadly, “Isn’t it a shame to show these wonderful things when no one is watching?”

  “I’m watching,” Pargrin said. “I enjoy them.”

  His kindly eyes made her wistful for something she remembered from long ago—the handsome young man who had seen her off to Mars and looked at her in very much the same way as he promised to join her when he completed his engineering studies. He’d kissed her good-bye, and the next thing she heard he’d been killed in a freak accident. There were long years between affectionate glances for Miss Mildred Boltz, but she’d never thought of them as empty years. She had never thought of teaching as an unrewarding occupation until she found herself in a small room with only a camera looking on.

  Pargrin called her when the next Trendex ratings came out. Did you get a copy?” “No,” she said.

  “I’ll find an extra one and send it up.”

  He did, but she knew without looking that the rating of Boltz, Mildred, English, tenth grade, and so on, was still zero.

  She searched the libraries for books on the technique of TV teaching. They were replete with examples concerning those subjects that lent themselves readily to visual presentation, but they offered very little assistance in the teaching of tenth-grade English.

  She turned to the education journals and probed the mysteries of the New Education. She read about the sanctity of the individual and the right of the student to an education in his own home, undisturbed by social distractions. She read about the psychological dangers of competition in learning and the evils of artificial standards; about the dangers of old-fashioned group teaching and its sinister contribution to delinquency.

  Pargrin brought in another Trendex rating. She forced herself to smile. “Zero again?”

  “Well-not exactly.”

  She stared at the paper, blinked, and stared again. Her rating was .1—one tenth of one per cent. Breathlessly she performed some mental arithmetic. She had one student! At that moment she would have waived all of her retirement benefits for the privilege of meeting that one loyal youngster.

  “What do you suppose they’ll do?” she asked.

  ‘That contract of yours isn
’t anything to trifle with. Wilbings won’t take any action until he’s certain he has a good case.”

  “It’s nice to know that I have a student,” she said and added wistfully, “Do you suppose there are any more?”

  “Why don’t you ask them to write to you? If you got a lot of letters, you could use them for evidence.”

  “I’m not concerned about evidence,” she said, “but I will ask them to write. Thank you.”

  “Miss-ah-Mildred-“

  “Yes?”

  “Nothing. I mean, would you like to have dinner with me tonight?” “I’d love to.”

  A week went by before she finally asked her students to write. She knew only too well why she hesitated. She was afraid there would be no response.

  But the morning came when she finished her class material with a minute to spare, and she folded her hands and forced a smile at the camera. “I’d like to ask you a favor. I want each of you to write me a letter. Tell me about yourself. Tell me how you like the things we’ve been studying. You know all about me, and I don’t know anything about you. Please write to me.”

  She received eleven letters. She handled them reverently, and read them lovingly, and she began her teaching of A Tale of Two Cities with renewed confidence.

  She took the letters to Jim Pargrin, and when he’d finished reading them she said, “There must be thousands like them—bright, eager children who would love to learn if they weren’t drugged into a kind of passive indifference by all this entertainment.”

  “Have you heard anything from Wilbings?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “He asked me to base your next Trendex on two thousand samples. I told him I’d need a special order from the board. I doubt if he’ll bother.”

  “He must be getting ready to do something about me.”

  “I’m afraid so,” Pargrin said. “We really should start thinking of some line of defense for you. You’ll need a lawyer.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll offer any defense. I’ve been wondering if I shouldn’t try to set myself up as a private teacher.”

  Pargrin shook his head. “There are private schools, you know. Those that could afford it would send their children there. Those that couldn’t wouldn’t be able to pay you, either.”

  “Just the same, when I have some time I’m going to call on the children who wrote to me.”

  “The next Trendex is due Monday,” Pargrin said. “You’ll probably hear from Wilbings then.”

  Wilbings sent for her on Monday morning. She had not seen him since that first day, but his absurd appearance and testy mannerisms had impressed themselves firmly upon her memory. “Are you familiar with the Trendex ratings?” he asked her.

  Because she knew that he had deliberately attempted to keep her in ignorance, she shook her head innocently. Her conscience did not protest.

  He patiently explained the technique and its purpose. “If the Trendex is as valuable as you say it is,” she said, “why don’t you let the teachers know what their ratings are?”

  “But they do know. They receive a copy of every rating.” “I received none.”

  “Probably an oversight, since this is your first term. However, I have all of them except today’s, and that one will be sent down as soon as it’s ready. You’re welcome to see them.”

  He went over each report in turn, ceremoniously pointing out her zeros. When he reached the rating of .1, he paused. “You see, Miss Boltz, out of the thousands of samples taken, we have found only one student who was watching you. This is by far the worst record we have ever had. I must ask you to retire voluntarily, and if you refuse, then I have no alternative—”

  He broke off as his secretary tiptoed in with the new Trendex. “Yes. Thank you. Here we are. Boltz, Mildred—”

  His finger wavered comically. Paralysis seemed to have clogged his power of speech. Miss Boltz found her name and followed the line across the page to her rating.

  It was twenty-seven.

  “Evidently I’ve improved,” she heard herself say. “Is there anything else?”

  His voice, when he finally was able to speak, had risen perceptibly in pitch. “No. Nothing else.”

  As she went through the outer office she heard his voice again, still high-pitched, squawking angrily from his secretary’s communicator. “Pargrin. I want Pargrin down here immediately.”

  He was waiting for her in the cafeteria. “It went all right, I suppose,” he said, with studied casualness.

  “It went too well.”

  He took a large bite of sandwich and chewed solemnly. “Jim, why did you do it?” she demanded. He blushed. “Do what?” “Arrange my Trendex that way.”

  “Nobody arranges a Trendex. It isn’t possible. Even Wilbings will tell you that.” He added softly, “How did you know?”

  “It’s the only possible explanation, and you shouldn’t have done it. You might get into trouble, and you’re only postponing the inevitable. I’ll be at zero again on the next rating.”

  “That doesn’t matter. Wilbings will take action eventually, but now he won’t be impulsive about it.”

  They ate in silence until the cafeteria manager came in with an urgent message for Mr. Pargrin from Mr. Wilbings. Pargrin winked at her. “I think I’m going to enjoy this. Will you be in your office this afternoon?”

  She shook her head. “I’m going to visit my students.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

  She looked after him thoughtfully. She sincerely hoped that he hadn’t gotten himself in trouble.

  On the rooftop landing area she asked the manager to call an air-cab for her. While she waited, she took a letter from her purse and reread it.

  My name is Barrel Wilson. I’m sixteen years old, and I have to stay in my room most of the time because I had Redger disease and part of me is paralyzed. I like your class, and please, could we have some more Shakespeare?

  “Here’s your cab, ma’am.”

  “Thank you,” Miss Boltz said. She returned the letter to her purse and stepped briskly up the cab ramp.

  Jim Pargrin ruffled his hair and stared at her. “Whoa, now. What was that again? Classroom?”

  “I have nine students who are coming here every day to go to school. I’ll need some place to teach them.”

  Pargrin clucked his tongue softly. “Wilbings would have a hemorrhage!”

  “My TV class takes only five hours a week, and I have the entire year’s work planned. Why should anyone object to my holding classes for a selected group of students on my own time?” She added softly, “These students need it!”

  They were wonderful children, brilliant children, but they needed to be able to ask questions, to articulate their thoughts and feelings, to have their individual problems dealt with sympathetically. They desperately needed each other. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of gifted children were being intellectually and emotionally stifled in the barren solitude of their TV classes. It was stark tragedy.

  “What Wilbings doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” Pargrin said. “At least, I hope it won’t. But—a classroom? There isn’t anything remotely resembling one in the building. Could you use a large studio? We could hang a curtain over the glass so you wouldn’t be disturbed. What hours would your class meet?”

  “All day. Nine to three. They’ll bring their lunches.”

  “Whoa, now. Don’t forget your TV class. Even if no one is watching—”

  “I’m not forgetting it. My students will use that hour for a study period. Unless—could you arrange for me to hold my TV class in this larger studio?”

  “Yes. I can do that.”

  “Wonderful! I can’t thank you enough.”

  He shrugged his shoulders and shyly looked away.

  “Did you have any trouble with Mr. Wilbings?” she asked.

  “Not much. He thought your Trendex was a mistake. Since I don’t take the ratings personally, the best I could do was refer him to the Trendex engineer.”


  “Then I’m safe for a little while. I’ll start my class tomorrow.”

  Three of the students arrived in power chairs. Ella was a lovely, sensitive girl who had been born without legs, and though science had provided her with a pair, she did not like to use them. Darrel and Charles were victims of Redger disease. Sharon was blind. The TV entertainers failed to reach her with their tricks, but she listened to Miss Boltz’s every word with a rapt expression on her face.

  Their intelligence level exceeded by far that of any other class in Miss Boltz’s experience. She felt humble, and not a little apprehensive; but her apprehension vanished as she looked at their shining faces that first morning and welcomed them to her venture into the Old Education.

  She had two fellow conspirators. Jim Pargrin personally took charge of the technical aspects of her hour on TV and gleefully put the entire class on camera. Lyle Stewart, who found the opportunity to work with real students too appealing to resist, came in the afternoon to teach two hours of science and mathematics. Miss Boltz laid out her own study units firmly. History, English, literature, and social studies. Later, if the class continued, she would try to work in a unit on a foreign language. That Wednesday was her happiest day since she returned to Earth.

  On Thursday morning a special messenger brought in an official-looking envelope. It contained her dismissal notice.

  “I already heard about it,” Jim Pargrin said when she telephoned him. “When is the hearing?”

  “Next Tuesday.”

  “It figures. Wilbings got board permission for a special Trendex. He even brought in an outside engineer to look after it, and just to be doubly sure, they used two thousand samples. You’ll need an attorney. Know any?”

  “No. I know hardly anyone on Earth.” She sighed. She’d been so uplifted by her first day of actual teaching that this abrupt encounter with reality stunned her. “I’m afraid an attorney would cost a lot of money, and I’m going to need what money I have.”

  “A little thing like a Board of Education hearing shouldn’t cost much. Just you leave it to me—I’ll find an attorney for you.”