Astounding British Edition, Vol. 9, No. 7 — page 11: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

ss >» I te ~ - = * \ NULL-ABC 7 = one before; in about five years, they'll be making H-bombs in the lab,” Prestonby said. In the last week, a dozen pupils had been seriously cut or blackjacked in hall and locker-room fights. “Nice citizens of the future; nice future to look forward to growing old in.” “We won't,” Yetsko comforted him. “We can’t be lucky all the time; in about a year, they'll find both of us stuffed into a broom closet, when they start looking around to see what’s making all the stink.” Prestonby took the thick-barreled gas pistol from the shelf under the lectern and shoved it into his hip pocket; Yetsko picked up a two-and-a-half foot length of rubber hose and tucked it under his left arm. Together, they went back through the wings and out into the hallway that led to the office. So a Twenty-second Cen- tury high school was a place where a teacher carried a pistol and a tear-gas projector and a sleep-gas gun, and had a bodyguard, and still walked in danger of his life from armed ’teen-age hooligans. It was meaningless to ask whose fault it was. There had been the World Wars, and the cold-war interbellum periods— rising birth rates, huge demands on the public treasury for armaments, with the public taxed to the saturation point, and no money left for the schools. There had been fantastic “Progressive” education experiments—even in the "Fifties of the Twentieth Century in the big cities, chil- dren were being pushed through grade school without having learned to read. And when there had been money available for education, school boards had insisted on spending it for audio-visual equipment, recordings, films, anything but textbooks. And there had been that lunatic theory that children should be taught to read by recognizing whole words instead of learning the alphabet. And more and more illiterates had been shoved out of the schools, into a world where radio and television and moving pictures were sup- planting books and newspapers, and more and more children of illiterates had gone to school without any desire or incentive, to learn to read. And finally, the illiterates had became Illiterates, and literacy had become Literacy. , And now, the Associated Fraternities ——~* liad — - ——— = o> _— “ > ee -——. of Literates had come to monopolize the ability to read and write, and a few men like William R. Lancedale, with a handful of followers like Ralph N. Prestonby, were trying—” The gleaming cleanliness of the cor- ridor, as always, heartened Prestonby a little; it was a trophy of victory from his first two days at Mineola High School, three years ago. He remembered what they had looked like when he had first seen them. “This school is a pig pen!” he had barked at the janitorial force. “And even if they are Illiterates, these children aren’t pigs; they deserve decent surroundings. This school will be cleaned, immediately, from top to bottom, and it'll be kept that way.” The janitors, all political appointees, Independent-Conservative — party-hacks, secure in their jobs, had laughed derisively. The building superintendent, without troubling to rise, had answered him: “Young man, you don’t want to get off on the wrong foot, here,” he had said. “This here’s the way this school’s always been run, an’ it’s gonna take a lot more than you to change it.” The fellow’s name, he recalled, was Kettner; Lancedale had given him a brief- ing which had included some particulars about him. He was an Independent-Con- servative ward-committeeman. He had gotten his present job after being fired from his former position as mailman for listening to other peoples’ mail with his pocket recorder-reproducer. “Yetsko,” he had said. “Kick this bum out on his face.” “You can’t get away with—” Kettner had begun. Yetsko had yanked him out of his chair with one hand and started for the door with him. “Just a moment, Yetsko,” he had said. Thinking that he was backing down, they had all begun grinning at him. “Don’t bother opening the door,” he — had said. “Just kick him out.” After the third kick, Kettner had gotten the door open, himself; the fourth kick sent him across the hall to the opposite wall. He pulled himself to his feet and limped away, never to return. The next oO —GOmichboo — <SiGO Lar ~