Departures

“And you have at last begun to master your own minds and use them directly, not merely through the clumsy mediation of the body.” He glanced at something on the desk in front of him: whatever an alien uses for a paperweight, maybe. It lifted up about six inches and hung in the air. I didn’t think it was special effects. What I thought was more like, No wonder Michael was such a good place hitter.

“Of the three,” he went on, “this last is the key, for without control of the mind, no race can truly be said to be mature. We searched for it long in you, and began to fear you lacked it. Then one of our investigators”-remember how the picture cut away to a redheaded black man in a Gators cap? That’s Flush, all right-”found a member of your folk using the talent in one of your games. Where it exists, it can be trained. We shall do this for you: it is the least we can do to welcome you among us. We will be landing soon, my friends. You are no longer alone.”

The screen went blank after that, right? And you’ve seen the broadcasts since, everything we’ll gain by joining this Confederacy of theirs: the trade, the ideas, far horizons when we’d almost forgotten what that meant. Everybody’s going nuts celebrating the end of war, the end of poverty, the end of everything bad. I sure hope they’re right.

But I’m a little worried. That “mature” thing Grayface was talking about. All I’ve been thinking of is that goddamn knuckleball and what it must have looked like to Michael, especially when he was used to shoving things around with his own mind and looking for evidence we could do it, too.

Well, ”soon” is tomorrow now. But their ship is armed. They said so. I wonder what happens when they realize we can’t.

Like I said, I’m a little worried.

GLADLY WOLDE HE LERNE

What could be more important for any society than making its next generation better and smarter people than the current one? Yet to whom do we entrust so much of the task of raising our children? All too often, to day-care workers who can’t find work much above the minimum wage and to teachers who majored in education because it was easy. We get what we pay for, though, here as anywhere else. The probability of “Gladly Wolde He Lerne” reflecting reality is effectively zero. Too bad.

Only the cold, green-blue glow of mercury vapor lamps lit the campus lot when Ted Collins pulled in. He had to park a long way from the lecture hall. He hauled his attach? case off the front passenger seat and locked the car. Then, already weary from a full day’s work, he trudged over the asphalt toward the hall.

It was more than half full when he came in. Even so, it was quiet; the rest of the educators there were as worn as he was. Some of the superintendents, administrators, program specialists, and supervisors looked fresh out of college. Others, like him, were a few years older, already experienced in managing school district affairs.

Whatever their backgrounds-Collins himself was an assistant superintendent for education planning and research-they all had one thing in common. They were all ambitious enough to go to night school to learn what they needed to know to advance in the educational bureaucracy.

Professor Vance walked in. She strode briskly to the podium and tapped at the microphone to make sure it worked. Collins took out his notebook and a pen. He’d heard from people who had been through this course that Vance didn’t believe in wasting time.

She didn’t. As soon as she found the mike was live, she plunged straight into her lecture: “Anyone can be a success at the district level. Policies are blurred there, responsibilities vague; very often you never see the actual clients who depend on you for educational services. If you hope to go farther in education, you’ll have to lose that pervasive vagueness. You got by with it at the university, you can get by with it at district offices, but it’s a fatal handicap in an actual school setting. Here’s what I mean…”

By the time that first lecture was done, Collins wondered what had possessed him to want to become a principal in the first place. He thought about dropping the class and staying comfortably in his present job. He shook his head. When he started something, he wasn’t the sort to back away from it.

He ended up acing Vance’s course. He took the others he needed, one or two a semester, always at night, as he could fit them into the rest of his life. He went through an internship program at an actual junior high school campus. He took the state-required examination for certification. Before long, he got an interview. The committee let him hang for two weeks before they let him know he’d been accepted. Kranz Elementary School had itself a new principal.