I.Q.
By Mack Reynolds
Copyright © 1961 by Mack Reynolds
This edition published in 2011 by eStar Books, LLC.
www.estarbooks.com
ISBN 9781612103082
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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In a time when teaching machines and batteries of educational tests seem to be determining the intellectual nobility of the next generation, this story has meaning for all of us.
I.Q.
By Mack Reynolds
On the way over to the Administration offices Professor Roy Thomas McCord was stopped several times by students and colleagues offering congratulations. He tried to protest their prematureness but they brushed his objections aside. They all knew he'd come through.
He'd expected in the period it would take to stroll to Peterson's office to find time to read a few pages of the book of verse he'd brought along, but he was interrupted often enough that he gave up.
A youngster named Doolittle, an earnest chap in Physics who probably was going to flunk out this term, took off his hat and said breathlessly, "Everybody says you've made it, sir."
"Thanks." Roy said. "Everybody seems to think so but me. Quite the most difficult tests I've ever seen. It should give the I.R.M.s quite a mechanical headache grading them. Good heavens, Doolittle, put your hat back on. Do you think I'm a lady?" He laughed in embarrassment.
Doolittle said earnestly, "Academician. Only the third one this school has produced. And you're hardly more than thirty, sir."
"Well, that's no reason to take your hat off."
"It is for me, sir."
"Oh, get along with you, Doolittle. But thanks, again."
In Peterson's anteroom, Nadine looked up from her desk and beamed at him. "It's all over that you took highest awards, Professor McCord. Or should I say, Academician McCord?"
Roy tried to keep from flushing. "I haven't heard officially, Nadine. But anyway, the name is Roy, if you'll recall"
"Hardly," she grinned back at him. "We can hardly call the school's only living Academician by his first name."
His smile was a bit on the wan side. "I'm not sure I'm going to like it then." She was speaking in jest but there was all too much truth in what she said.
Nadine said, "Superintendent Peterson is waiting for you. Just go right in." She chuckled her soft Nadine laugh. "In fact, sir, I doubt if you'll ever be waiting in this office for an appointment ever, ever, again. Not even a 'Superintendent of Deans allows an Academician to wait on him."
"Go on with you," Roy said uncomfortably. "And don't call me sir. You make me feel old."
"Your mother called," Nadine said after him. "Said to be sure you didn't forget this afternoon."
"All right," he said over his shoulder. "Thanks, Nadine."
Adam Peterson wasn't ordinarily the type to gush, but today he was absolutely overflowing. Of course, it didn't hurt the school's reputation, nor his, to have produced a scholar of Roy Thomas McCord's aptitudes.
He shook hands drastically.
Roy said, "Well, I suppose your enthusiasm indicates it's official. All the way over here I've been getting congratulations."
"It's official all right, all right," Peterson glowed. "Sit down, Roy. Here, this chair. Great Scott, man. I suppose I should really call you sir."
Roy laughed uncomfortably.
"At any rate, the examinations put you twelfth in the nation. Twelfth ! And at the age of . . ."
"Thirty-two," Roy supplied.
"Such a short time!"
Roy took the heavy leathern chair. "Such a long time," he said.
Peterson had hustled over to his small, portable bar and was examining his stock. "A drink, of course. This calls for celebration!"
"Sherry would be fine," Roy said.
Peterson came back with the drinks and handed the new Academician his Spanish wine. The usually glum faced Superintendent of Deans was the one expressing the elation he evidently expected in the other. He took his own chair and beamed. "Salud!" he said.
Roy muttered a standard response and sipped at the wine.
Peterson said, "What do you mean, such a long time?"
Roy made a wry face, in self deprecation. "Twenty-five years," he said. And then, with seeming non-relevancy, "Youth."
The older man frowned at him.
"Great Scott, man, you've reached one of the highest points possible in the Educational Sequence."
Roy looked down into his glass of wine. "Would you believe me if I told you that I wish I'd dropped out somewhere back along the line?"
"Dropped out?" Peterson didn't understand.
The new Academician seemed to change subjects. He said, "By the way, how did I do in Creative Ability?"
Peterson scowled. "Well, you know, Roy, not even an Academician is free to check the exact result of tests. Not unless, of course, it's his task-field. It might give him an unfair advantage in further examinations,"
"I know," Roy said wearily. "I just meant broadly. In relation to my other ratings."
Peterson said uncomfortably, "Actually, it was your weakest, Roy . . ."
The Academician winced.
". . . with Mathematical Aptitude strongest. Somewhat to my surprise, your M. A. was the nation's highest."
"Why surprise?" Roy said, depressed.
The older man shifted bulky shoulders. "Well, your work here while adequate, of course — always adequate, of course — has never shown the absolute genius in the field that your aptitude would indicate."
It was Roy's turn to shrug. "Well, as you know, aptitude doesn't mean that you will ever use it. Frankly, mathematics bore me."
"And me," Peterson chuckled. "But, to get on to business. I suppose we shall have to provide you with a larger suite of offices. You'll be able to take over some of the social duties of the faculty officers, Roy. In fact, there's a delegation from ..."
Roy interrupted. "I don't suppose there's any manner in which I could drop away." His tone indicated that he didn't expect an affirmative answer.
Peterson's enthusiasm fell off in one split second. He all but gaped. "Drop away!" he blurted. "You mean leave the university? Drop away! You're considering deserting us for another school? Great Scott, Roy . . ."
Roy McCord was shaking his head. "Not just this school, Adam, education as a field. My rank entitles me to retirement at my own discretion."
"Retirement! You're not even forty years of age! Roy, the strain has been too much. You need a vacation. Retirement! Great Scott . . ." The Superintendent was on his feet again. He grabbed the sherry bottle from the bar, hurriedly refilled the other's glass. "A vacation! Perhaps to Common Europe. You'll be feted in every university on the continent. An Academician at the age of thirty-two. The Education Sequence of Europe will be at your feet."
"That's what I'm afraid of," Roy said bitterly. "I'd never see anything except the insides of schools, never talk to anybody but a bunch of doddering old scholars."
Peterson sank back into his chair again, aghast. "Roy! What are you saying? You sound as though you have no affection for your Sequence."
Roy McCord snorted. "Frankly, I haven't. Is that unknown?"
The Superintendent collected himself. "Not unknown, of course, but certainly rare. From your earliest youth you've been carefully tested, rated, channeled in the direction your apti
tudes indicated. Had you been mechanically inclined, you would have eventually wound up in a Sequence where your abilities would have best suited you and the nation. Had you shown aptitude for medicine you would have eventually been channeled into that Sequence, finally gaining the level your competence permitted."
Roy said bitterly, "And had my Creative Ability so indicated, I might have wound up a poet."
Peterson said uncomfortably, "Actually, your Creative Ability is high, not fantastically so, but quite high. It's just that it is so eclipsed by your other aptitudes, Roy. But, I don't understand. You've reached the heights in our Sequence, in the field of education. What would you rather do?"
"I think I would rather be a poet than the world's most celebrated scholar, Adam."
"A poet!" The other grunted skeptically. "Your aptitudes indicate that even had you gone into the artistic field, your work would hardly startle the world." "Nor would I expect it to, or necessarily want it to. Why must the greatest painters work in oil; what is wrong with the sketch, the watercolor? Listen." He took up the book he had been carrying under his arm and read.
"Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in.
Fate, you thief, who loves to get Sweets into your list, put that in.
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me.
Say I'm growing old, but add,
Jenny kissed me."
"Very sweet," Peterson nodded. "Seems to me I recall it from my own student days, but I forget the poet."
"Leigh Hunt," Roy said. "A little poet, eclipsed by his contemporaries, Keats, Shelley, Byron. But, frankly, I prefer the little poets." He added softly, "I would prefer to be an Emily Dickinson, a Stephen Crane, a Thomas Hood."
"Look here," Adam Peterson said. "Let's face reality. All of us have hobbies, methods of relaxing from our work. Write your little poems in your leisure hours. Why not? But your field is education, and you are a phenomenon in it."
Roy McCord was shaking his head. "You can't. Or, at least, I can't. You need relaxation. Your mind free of all except your creative urge. You need to be able to spend long hours in the shade of a tree, or on a shell strewn beach, or perhaps in watching without distraction of any sort the twig of a maple, ridged inch deep in the pearl of snow. If I were to be a poet, I would have to be all poet. Just as today I am all scholar."
Peterson was on his feet and pacing. "See here, Academician McCord. You can't drop out of this Sequence at your age. You owe it to your fellows, to society, to continue."
Roy looked at him flatly. "I do?"
Peterson said, "I'm going to reiterate some truths which you already know, but which perhaps need repeating. For the first time in the history of civilization, man has achieved a society in which he assumes his place according to his ability and by no other means. There is no ruling property class, no priesthood, no militaristic state to arbitrarily decide our status. It makes no difference who your parents were, nor how much treasure you might have accumulated by whatever means; you take your position in our culture according to your aptitudes."
"No test is perfect," Roy muttered.
"Of course, and that is why we continually work to improve them. Actually, they have reached a high level of competence. The tests are compiled by men but are given and evaluated by machine, and there have been no known cases of mistakes within recent memory. Roy, this system works, and it's good. In the past, a man had status in his culture based on the most fantastic of reasons. Prime among them was the possession of money, possibly the greatest status symbol of all. Also ranking high was the position in society of your parents and relatives. The extreme example of this, of course, was the feudalistic nobilities in Europe and elsewhere, but it also existed in the United States especially in New England and the South.
"Today? Today, Roy, you achieve status by your own abilities. Long ago man solved the problem of the production of abundance. There is no poverty, everyone possesses all he needs. We can no longer award our geniuses, our heroes, with wealth —since there is wealth for all. We honor them, instead, with rank. Each man contributes to society what he can and those who can contribute more, through their greater abilities, their genius, are awarded with such titles as Doctor, Supervisor, Superintendent, or, in our own Educational Sequence, Academician/'
The Supervisor of Deans went on. "You have been so highly honored, Roy McCord, because our tests indicate your aptitudes as high as any. But for you now, after twenty-five years of continual studies, to drop away and not utilize your abilities would be a betrayal of the hundreds of thousands, the millions of our citizens who, because their aptitudes were less than your own, work in the mines, in the mills, and in the fields. They contribute their share to society so that persons such as you and me, in a different and possibly gentler Sequence, may eat, be clothed and sheltered."
Peterson summed it up. "You have the right to retire on your rank at this stage, Academician Roy McCord. But I don't think you will be able to do so."
Roy stood up wearily. "No, I suppose you're right," he said. He looked down at the book of verse and said, irrelevantly, "I've often wondered what the Acropolis looked like by moonlight."
As he left the Superintendent's office, Nadine said to him, "Your mother called again, Roy ... ah, Academician McCord. She said to remind you that . . ."
"I know, I know," Roy said almost tartly. "She's having in all her friends and neighbors for a celebration."
Nadine looked up at him. "Well, I'm not surprised. How many of her friends have a son who has won your honors?"
Roy sighed. "Yes, and how she revels in it. It was bad enough with my Doctor's degree. But now!"
Nadine laughed at him. "Go and take your medicine, Hero."
He grinned ruefully in response and left.
His father met him at the door of their suburban house. Actually, as a Senior Technician Warren McCord wouldn't ordinarily have resided in this part of the city. Even in this advanced society, rank had its prerogatives; perhaps few, compared to cultures of the past, but still prerogatives. One of them was to segregate itself, and that, of course, was understandable. An artist who had reached the heights found his most compatible companionship among doctors, scientists, educators who had achieved the equivalent in their own fields.
This was a neighborhood that reeked with prestige, and the McCord family resided here as a result of Roy's fantastic progress in the Educational Sequence.
Actually, Roy McCord would have preferred to have lived in a more Bohemian quarter where he might have found time occasionally to associate with the off trail artists who were his envy. Each culture, and each generation of that culture, has its equivalent of a Lost Generation, a beatnik element, or its Angry Young Men. Within himself, didn't find it difficult to identify with them. Whenever he paused in his work to realize this, he had to smile in deprecation. What would Peterson think if he knew it; and, above all, what would Dora McCord, Roy's mother, think?
Warren McCord, a man of not quite sixty, looked an older version of his son. There was the same weary, rueful — perhaps wistful — expression that so easily broke into a smile for another's sake, but failed to indicate happiness within.
He grinned sourly at Roy now. "You're in for it," he said. "Every biddy your mother has known for the past thirty years — ever since you were born — is in the garden."
"Good Lord," Roy muttered.
His father looked at him oddly. "Congratulations, son." He held out a hand to shake. "You don't seem overly pleased by your accomplishment."
Roy said irritably, "Accomplishment? What accomplishment? The only thing that's happened is that the grading computers have informed the Educational Sequence that I have one of the highest aptitudes in the field. That doesn't mean I've accomplished anything."
His father looked away, as though embarrassed. He cleared his throat and said, "No one in your family, on either side, has ever attained such an honor."
; Roy felt contrition, although he didn't exactly know why. "Well," he said, "I hope that I'm able to deliver something in keeping with what those damn testing machines seem to think I'm capable of."
Warren McCord said, "You don't really have to worry about that, you know. Not really. The computers might indicate a man has great aptitude for scientific research and he might be placed in a position to utilize his abilities — but that doesn't necessarily mean he'll come up with some startling new discovery. It all works on percentages."
"I suppose so," Roy sighed. "Well, Dad, let's go face the celebrity hunters."
In the garden, Dora McCord was beaming with a radiance that almost made up to Roy for the grind of the afternoon. Long years ago he'd explained to himself that she was a status seeker of a type that should have become extinct a century or so earlier. All her life she'd been depressed by the lack of her husband's ability to rise above the rank of Senior Technician. Actually, Roy suspected his father had gone further than his real abilities in achieving even that rank. Only by exertion far beyond the call of duty, and far beyond that of his fellows, had the elder McCord achieved to Senior Technician. He w T as proud of the attainment, small as it was.
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