Null-ABC | Page 6

aisles and marching them off
to study halls and classrooms and workshops. The orchestra struck up a
lively march tune. He leaned his left elbow--Literates learned early, or
did not live to learn, not to immobilize the right hand--on the lectern
and watched the interminable business of getting the students marched
out, yearning, as he always did at this time, for the privacy of his office,
where he could smoke his pipe. Finally, they were all gone, and the
orchestra had gathered up its instruments and filed out into the wings of
the stage, and he looked up to the left and said, softly:
"All right, Doug; show's over."
With a soft thud, the big man dropped down from the guard's cubicle
overhead, grinning cheerfully. He needed a shave--Yetsko always did,
in the mornings--and in his leather Literates' guard uniform, he looked
like some ogreish giant out of the mythology of the past.
[Illustration:]
"I was glad to have you up there with the Big Noise, this morning,"
Prestonby said. "What a mob! I'm still trying to figure out why we have
such an attendance."

"Don't you get it, captain?" Yetsko was reaching up to lock the door of
his cubicle; he seemed surprised at Prestonby's obtuseness. "Day before
election; the little darlings' moms and pops don't want them out running
around. We can look for another big crowd tomorrow, too."
Prestonby gave a snort of disgust. "Of course; how imbecilic can I
really get? I didn't notice any of them falling down, so I suppose you
didn't see anything out of line."
"Well, the hall monitors make them turn in their little playthings at the
doors," Yetsko said, "but hall monitors can be gotten at, and some of
the stuff they make in Manual Training, when nobody's watching
them--"
Prestonby nodded. Just a week before, a crude but perfectly operative
17-mm shotgun had been discovered in the last stages of manufacture
in the machine shop, and five out of six of the worn-out files would
vanish, to be ground down into dirks. He often thought of the stories of
his grandfather, who had been a major during the Occupation of Russia,
after the Fourth World War. Those old-timers didn't know how easy
they'd had it; they should have tried to run an Illiterate high school.
Yetsko was still grumbling slanders on the legitimacy of the student
body. "One of those little angels shoots me, it's just a cute little prank,
and we oughtn't to frown on the little darling when it's just trying to
express its dear little personality, or we might give it complexes, or
something," he falsettoed incongruously. "And if the little darling's
mistake doesn't kill me outright and I shoot back, people talk about
King Herod!" He used language about the Board of Education and the
tax-paying public that was probably subversive within the meaning of
the Loyalty Oath. "I wish I had a pair of 40-mm auto-cannons up there,
instead of that sono gun."
"Each class is a little worse than the 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 Century 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, children 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