Memories of the Future Read Free Page A

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