“Naturally there’s a principal; there has to be. And he wants to talk to you before you go back. Come on now, like a good boy, and don’t make it necessary for me to turn in a bad report about you. Miss Smith wouldn’t like that at all, would she?”
“No, I guess she wouldn’t,” Ronnie said, suddenly contrite. “All right, sir, I’ll go.”
Ronnie had learned about principals in school, but he had never seen one. He had always assumed that the little red schoolhouse was too small to need one and he still couldn’t understand why it should. Miss Smith was perfectly capable of conducting the school all by herself. But most of all, he couldn’t understand why the principal should live in a place like the terminal—if it was a terminal—and not in the valley.
However, he accompanied the truant officer dutifully, telling himself that he had a great deal to learn about the world and that an interview with a principal was bound to teach him a lot.
They entered the building through an entrance to the left of the archway and walked down a long bright corridor lined with tall green cabinets to a frosted glass door at the farther end. The lettering on the glass said: EDUCATIONAL CENTER 16, H. D. CURTIN, PRINCIPAL.
The door opened at the truant officer’s touch and they stepped into a small white-walled room even more brightly illumined than the corridor. Opposite the door was a desk with a girl sitting behind it, and behind the girl was another frosted glass door. The lettering said: PRIVATE.
The girl looked up as the truant officer and Ronnie entered. She was young and pretty—almost as pretty as Miss Smith.
“Tell the old man the Meadows kid finally showed up,” the truant officer said.
The girl’s eyes touched Ronnie’s, then dropped quickly to a little box on her desk. Ronnie felt funny. There had been a strange look in the girl’s eyes—a sort of sadness. It was as though she was sorry that the truant officer had found him.
She told the little box: “Mr. Curtin, Andrews just brought in Ronnie Meadows.”
“Good,” the box said. “Send the boy in and notify his parents.”
“Yes, sir.”
The principal’s office was unlike anything Ronnie had ever seen before. Its hugeness made him uncomfortable and the brightness of its fluorescent lights hurt his eyes. All the lights seemed to be shining right in his face and he could hardly see the man behind the desk.
But he could see him well enough to make out some of his features: the high white forehead and receding hairline, the thin cheeks, the almost lipless mouth.
For some reason the man’s face frightened Ronnie and he wished that the interview were over.
“I have only a few questions to ask you,” the principal said, “and then you can be on your way back to the valley.”
“Yes, sir,” Ronnie said, some of his fear leaving him.
“Were your mother and father unkind to you? Your real mother and father, I mean.”
“No, sir. They were very good to me. I’m sorry I had to run away from them, but I just had to go back to the valley.”
“Were you lonesome for Nora and Jim?”
Ronnie wondered how the principal knew their names. “Yes, sir.”
“And Miss Smith—were you lonesome for her?”
“Oh, yes, sir!”
He felt the principal’s eyes upon him and he shifted uncomfortably. He was so tired; he wished the principal would ask him to sit down. But the principal didn’t and the lights seemed to get brighter and brighter.
“Are you in love with Miss Smith?”
The question startled Ronnie, not so much because he hadn’t expected it, but because of the tone in which it was uttered. There was unmistakable loathing in the principal’s voice. Ronnie felt his neck grow hot, and then his face, and he was too ashamed to meet the principal’s eyes, no matter how hard he tried. But the strange part of it was, he didn’t understand why he was ashamed.
The question came again, the loathing more pronounced than before: “Are you in love with Miss Smith?”
“Yes, sir,” Ronnie said.
Silence came and sat in the room. Ronnie kept his eyes down, fearfully awaiting the next question.
But there were no more questions and presently he became aware that the door behind him had opened and that the truant officer was standing over him. He heard the principal’s voice: “Level Six. Tell the tech on duty to try Variant 24-C on him.”
“Yes, sir,” the truant officer said. He took Ronnie’s hand. “Come on, Ronnie.”
“Where’re we going?”
“Why, back to the valley, of course. Back to the little red schoolhouse.”
Ronnie followed the truant officer out of the office, his heart singing. It seemed almost too easy, almost too good to be true.
Ronnie didn’t understand why they had to take the elevator to get to the valley. But perhaps they were going to the roof of the building and board a ’copter, so he didn’t say anything till the elevator stopped on the sixth floor and they stepped out into a long, long corridor lined with hundreds of horizontal doors so close together that they almost seemed to touch.
Then he said: “But this isn’t the way to the valley, sir. Where are you taking me?”
“Back to school,” the truant officer said, the warmth gone from his voice. “Come along, now!”
Ronnie tried to hold back, but it wasn’t any use. The truant officer was big and strong and he dragged Ronnie down the long antiseptic corridor to a recess in which a gaunt woman in a white uniform was sitting behind a metal desk.
“Here’s the Meadows kid,” he said. “The old man says to change the plot to 24-C.”
The gaunt woman got up wearily. Ronnie was crying by then and she selected an ampoule from a glass cabinet beside the desk, came over and rolled up his sleeve and, despite his squirming, expertly jabbed the needle into his arm.
“Save your tears till later,” she said. “You’ll need them.” She turned to the truant officer. “Curtin’s guilt complex must be getting the better of him. This is the third 24-C he’s prescribed this month.”
“The old man knows what he’s doing.”
“He only thinks he knows what he’s doing. First thing you know, we’ll have a whole world full of Curtins. It’s about time someone on the Board of Education took a course in psychology and found out what mother love is all about!”
“The old man’s a graduate psychologist,” the truant officer said.
“You mean a graduate psychopath!”
“You shouldn’t talk like that.”
“I’ll talk the way I please,” the gaunt woman said. “You don’t hear them crying, but I do. Twenty-four-C belongs back in the twentieth century and should have been thrown out of the curriculum long ago!”
She took Ronnie’s arm and led him away. The truant officer shrugged and returned to the elevator. Ronnie heard the metal doors breathe shut. The corridor was very quiet and he followed the woman as though in a dream. He could hardly feel his arms and legs, and his brain had grown fuzzy.
The gaunt woman turned off into another corridor and then into another. Finally they came to an open door. The woman stopped before it.
“Recognize the old homestead?” she asked bitterly.
But Ronnie hardly heard her. He could barely keep his eyes open. There was a bed in the shelf-like cubicle beyond the horizontal door, a strange bed with all sorts of wires and dials and screens and tubes around it. But it was a bed, and for the moment that was all he cared about, and he climbed upon it gratefully. He lay his head back on the pillow and closed his eyes.
“That’s a good boy,” he heard the woman say just before he dropped off. “And now back to the little red schoolhouse.”
The pillow purred and the screens lit up and the tapes went into action.
“Ronnie!”
Ronnie stirred beneath the covers, fighting the dream. It had been a horrible dream, filled with stork trains and strange people and unfamiliar places. And the worst part of it was, it could be
true. Nora had told him many times that some morning, when he awoke, he would be on the stork train, bound for the city and his parents.
He fought harder and harder, kicking at the covers and trying to open his eyes.
“Ronnie,” Nora called again. “Hurry up or you’ll be late for school!”
His eyes opened then, of their own accord, and instantly he knew that everything was all right. There was the bright morning sunlight streaming into his attic bedroom, and there were the nostalgic branches of the backyard maple gently brushing his window.
“Coming!” He threw back the covers and leaped out of bed and dressed, standing in a warm puddle of sunlight. Then he washed and ran downstairs.
“It’s about time,” Nora said sharply when he came into the kitchen. “You’re getting lazier and lazier every day!”
Ronnie stared at her. She must be feeling ill, he thought. She had never spoken to him like that before. Then Jim came in. He hadn’t shaved and his eyes were bloodshot.
“For Pete’s sake,” he said, “isn’t breakfast ready yet?”
“In a minute, in a minute,” Nora snapped back. “I’ve been trying to get this lazy brat out of bed for the last half hour.”
Bewildered, Ronnie sat down at the table. He ate in silence, wondering what could have happened in the brief span of a single night to change Nora and Jim so. Breakfast was pancakes and sausage, his favorite dish, but the pancakes were soggy and the sausage was half raw.
He excused himself after his second pancake and went into the living room and got his books. The living room was untidy and had a moldy smell. When he left the house, Jim and Nora were arguing loudly in the kitchen.
Ronnie frowned. What had happened? He was sure that things hadn’t been this way yesterday. Nora had been kind then, Jim soft-spoken and immaculate, and the house neat.
What had changed everything?
He shrugged. In a moment, he would be in school and see Miss Smith’s smiling face and everything would be all right again. He hurried down the bright street, past the rustic houses and the laughing children on their way to school. Miss Smith, his heart sang. Beautiful Miss Smith.
The sun was in her hair when he walked in the door and the little bun at the back of her neck was like a golden pomegranate. Her cheeks were like roses after a morning shower and her voice was a soft summer wind.
“Good morning, Ronnie,” she said.
“Good morning, Miss Smith.” He walked on clouds to his seat.
The lessons began—arithmetic, spelling, social studies, reading. Ronnie wasn’t called upon to recite till reading class, when Miss Smith told him to read aloud from the little red primary reader.
He stood up proudly. The story was about Achilles and Hector. Ronnie got the first sentence off fine. He didn’t begin to stumble till the middle of the second. The words seemed to blur and he couldn’t make them out. He held the primer closer to his eyes, but still he couldn’t read the words. It was as though the page had turned to water and the words were swimming beneath the surface. He tried with all his might to see them, but his voice stumbled worse than ever.
Then he became aware that Miss Smith had walked down the aisle and was standing over him. She was carrying a ruler and her face was strange, sort of pinched and ugly. She snatched the book from his hands and slammed it on the desk. She seized his right hand and flattened it out in her own. The ruler came down on his palm with stinging force. His hand tingled and the pain shot up his arm and went all through him. Miss Smith raised the ruler, brought it down again—
And again and again and again.
Ronnie began to cry.
* * *
The principal had had a long hard day and he didn’t feel much like talking to Mr. and Mrs. Meadows. He wanted to go home and take a relaxing bath and then tune in on a good telempathic program and forget his troubles. But it was part of his job to placate frustrated parents, so be couldn’t very well turn them away. If he’d known they were going to come ’coptering out to the educational center, he would have put off notifying them till morning, but it was too late to think of that now.
“Send them in,” he said wearily into the intercom.
Mr. and Mrs. Meadows were a small, shy couple—production-line workers, according to Ronnie’s dossier. The principal had little use for production-line workers, particularly when they spawned—as they so frequently did—emotionally unstable children. He was tempted to slant the interrogation lights into their faces, but he thought better of it.
“You were notified that your son was all right,” he said disapprovingly, when they had seated themselves. “There was no need for you to come out here.”
“We—we were worried, sir,” Mr. Meadows said.
“Why were you worried? I told you when you first reported your son missing that he’d try to return to his empathic existence and that we’d pick him up here as soon as he showed up. His type always wants to return, but unfortunately we can’t classify our charges prior to placing them on the delivery train, since doing so would require dispelling the empathic illusion at an inopportune time. Dispelling the illusion is the parents’ job, anyway, once the child is integrated in reality. Consequently, we can’t deal with our potential misfits till they’ve proven themselves to be misfits by running away.”
“Ronnie isn’t a misfit!” Mrs. Meadows protested, her pale eyes flashing briefly. “He’s just a highly sensitive child.”
“Your son, Mrs. Meadows,” the principal said icily, “has a pronounced Oedipus complex. He bestowed the love he ordinarily would have felt for you upon his fictitious teacher. It is one of those deplorable anomalies which we cannot foresee, but which, I assure you, we are capable of correcting, once it reveals itself. The next time your son is reborn and sent to you, I promise you he won’t run away!”
“The corrective treatment, sir,” Mr. Meadows said, “is it painful?”
“Of course it isn’t painful! Not in the sense of objective reality.”
He was trying to keep his mounting anger out of his voice, but it was difficult to do so. His right hand had begun to twitch and that made his anger all the worse, for he knew that the twitching meant another spell. And it was all Mr. and Mrs. Meadows’ fault!
These production-line imbeciles! These electrical-appliance accumulators! It was not enough to free them from the burden of bringing up their children! Their piddling questions had to be answered, too!
“Look,” he said, getting up and walking around the desk, trying to keep his mind off his hand, “this is a civilized educational system. We employ civilized methods. We are going to cure your son of his complex and make it possible for him to come and live with you as a normal red-blooded American boy. To cure him of his complex, all we need to do is to make him hate his teacher instead of love her. Isn’t that simple enough?
“The moment he begins to hate her, the valley will lose its abnormal fascination and he will think of it as normal children think of it—as the halcyon place where he attended elementary school. It will be a pleasant memory in his mind, as it’s intended to be, but he won’t have any overwhelming urge to return to it.”
“But,” Mr. Meadows said hesitantly, “won’t your interfering with his love for his teacher have some bad effect upon him? I’ve done a little reading in psychology,” he added apologetically, “and I was under the impression that interfering with a child’s natural love for its parent—even when that love has been transferred—can leave, well, to put it figuratively, scar tissue.”
The principal knew that his face had gone livid. There was a throbbing in his temple, too, and his hand was no longer merely twitching; it was tingling. There was no doubt about it: He was in for a spell, and a bad one.
“Sometimes I wonder,” he said. “Sometimes I can’t help but wonder what you people expect of an educational system. We relieve you of your offspring from the day of their birth, enabling both parents to work full time so they can afford and enjoy all the luxuries civilized beings ar
e entitled to. We give your offspring the best of care: We employ the most advanced identification techniques to give them not only an induced elementary education but an empathic background as well, a background that combines the best elements of Tom Sawyer, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and A Child’s Garden of Verses.
“We employ the most advanced automatic equipment to develop and maintain unconscious oral feeding and to stimulate the growth of healthy tissue. In short, we employ the finest educational incubators available. Call them mechanized extensions of the womb if you will, as some of our detractors insist upon doing, but no matter what you call them, there is no gainsaying the fact that they provide a practical and efficient method of dealing with the plethora of children in the country today, and of preparing those children for home high school and correspondence college.
“We perform all of these services for you to the best of our ability and yet you, Mr. Meadows, have the arrogance to express doubt of our competence! Why, you people don’t realize how lucky you are! How would you like to be living in the middle of the twentieth century, before the invention of the educational incubator? How would you like to have to send your son to some rundown firetrap of a public school and have him suffocate all day long in an overcrowded classroom? How would you like that, Mr. Meadows?”
“But I only said—” Mr. Meadows began.
The principal ignored him. He was shouting now, and both Mr. and Mrs. Meadows had risen to their feet in alarm. “You simply don’t appreciate your good fortune! Why, if it weren’t for the invention of the educational incubator, you wouldn’t be able to send your son to school at all! Imagine a government appropriating enough money to build enough old-style schools and playgrounds and to educate and pay enough teachers to accommodate all the children in the country today! It would cost more than a war! And yet, when a workable substitute is employed, you object, you criticize. You went to the little red schoolhouse yourself, Mr. Meadows. So did I. Tell me, did our methods leave you with any scar tissue?”
Mr. Meadows shook his head. “No, sir. But I didn’t fall in love with my teacher.”
Memories of the Future Page 2