It is the campus of Holden Preparatory Academy.
It is spring, but many another spring must pass before the ambitious ivy
climbs to smother the gray granite walls, before the stripling trees grow
stately, before the lawn is sturdy enough to withstand the crab grass and
the students. Anecdote and apocrypha have yet to evolve into hallowed
tradition. The walks ways are bare of bronze plaques because there are no
illustrious alumni to honor; Holden Preparatory has yet to graduate its
first class.
It is youth, a lusty infant whose latent power is already great enough
to move the world. As it rises, the world rises with it for the whole
consists of all its parts; no man moves alone.
The movement has its supporters and its enemies, and between them lies a
vast apathy of folks who simply don't give a damn. Its supporters deplore
the dolts and the sluggards who either cannot or will not be educated.
Its enemies see it as a danger to their comfortable position of eminence
and claim bitterly that the honored degree of doctor is being degraded.
They refuse to see that it is not the degradation of the standard but
rather the exaltation of the norm. Comfortable, they lazily object to the
necessity of rising with the norm to keep their position. Nor do they
realize that the ones who will be assaulting their fortress will
themselves be fighting still stronger youth one day when the mistakes are
corrected and the program streamlined through experience.
On the virgin lawn, in a spot that will someday lie in the shade of a
great oak, a group of students sit, sprawl, lie. The oldest of them is
sixteen, and it is true that not one of them has any reverence for
college degrees, because the entrance requirements demand the scholastic
level of bachelor in the arts, the sciences, in language and literature.
The mark of their progress is not stated in grades, but rather in the
number of supplementary degrees for which they qualify. The honors of
their graduation are noted by the number of doctorates they acquire.
Their goal is the title of Scholar, without which they may not attend
college for their ultimate education.
But they do not have the "look of eagles" nor do they act as if they felt
some divine purpose fill their lives. They do not lead the pack in an
easy lope, for who holds rank when admirals meet? They are not dedicated
nor single-minded; if their jokes and pranks start on a higher or lower
plane, it is just because they have better minds than their forebears at
the same time.
On the fringe of this group, an olive-skinned Brazilian co-ed asks:
"Where's Martha?"
John Philips looks up from a diagram of fieldmatrics he's been using to
lay out a football play. "She's lending moral support to Holden. He's
sweating out his scholar's impromptu this afternoon."
"Why should he be stewing?"
John Philips smiles knowingly. "Tony Dirk put the triple-whammy on him.
Gimmicked up the random-choice selector in the Regent's office. Herr von
James is discoursing on the subjects of Medicine, Astronomy, and
Psychology--that is if Dirk knows his stuff."
Tony Dirk looks down from his study of a fluffy cloud. "Anybody care to
hazard some loose change on my ability?"
"But why?"
"Oh," replies Philips, "we figure that the first graduating class could
use a professional _Astrologer_! We'll be the first in history to have
one--if M'sieu Holden can tie Medicine, Astronomy, and Psychology into
something cogent in his impromptu."
It is a strange tongue they are using, probably the first birth-pains of
a truly universal language. By some tacit agreement, personal questions
are voiced in French, the reply in Spanish. Impersonal questions are
Italian and the response in Portuguese. Anything of a scientific nature
must be in German; law, language, or literature in English; art in
Japanese; music in Greek; medicine in Latin; agriculture in Czech.
Anything laudatory in Mandarin, derogatory in Sanskrit--and _ad libitum_
at any point for any subject.
Anita Lowes has been trying to attract the attention of John Philips from
his diagram long enough to invite her to the Spring Festival by reciting
a low-voiced string of nuclear equations carefully compounded to make
them sound naughty unless they're properly identified with full
attention. She looks up and says, "What if he doesn't make the
connection?"
Philips replies, "Well, if he can prove to that tough bunch that there
is no possible advance in learning through a combination of Astronomy,
Medicine, and Psychology, he'll make it on that basis. It's just as
important to close a door as it is to open one, you know. But it's one
rough deal to prove negation. Maybe we'll have James the Holden on our
hands for another semester. Martha will like that."
"Talking about me?"
There is a rolling motion, sort of like a bushel of fish trying to leap
back into the sea. The newcomer is Martha Fisher. At fifteen, her eyes
are bright, and her features are beginning to soften into the beginning
of a beauty that will deepen with maturity.
"James," says Tony Dirk. "We figured you'd like to have him around
another four months. So we gimmicked him."
"You mean that test-trio?" chuckles Martha.
"How's he doing?"
"When I left, he was wriggling his way through probability math, showing
the relationship between his three subjects and the solution for random
choice figures which may or may not be shaded by known or not-known
agency. He's covered Mason's History of Superstition and--"
"Superstition?" asks a Japanese.
Martha nods. "He claimed superstition is based upon fear and faith, and
he feared that someone had tampered with his random choice of subjects,
and he had faith that it was one of his buddies. So--"
Martha is interrupted by a shout. The years have done well by James
Holden, too. He is a lithe sixteen. It is a long time since he formed his
little theory of human pair-production and it is almost as long since
he thought of it last. If he reconsiders it now, he does not recognize
his part in it because everything looks different from within the circle.
His world, like the organization of the Universe, is made up of schools
containing classes of groups of clusters of sets of associations created
by combinations and permutations of individuals.
"I made it!" he says.
James has his problems. Big ones. Shall he go to Harvard alone, or shall
he go to coeducational California with the hope that Martha will follow
him? Then there was the fun awaiting him at Heidelberg, the historic
background of Pisa, the vigorous routine at Tokyo. As a Scholar, he has
contributed original research in four or five fields to attain
doctorates, now he is to pick a few allied fields, combine certain phases
of them, and work for his Specific. It is James Holden's determination to
prove that the son is worthy of the parents for which his school is
named.
But there is high competition. At Carter tech-prep, a girl is struggling
to arrange a Periodic Chart of the Nucleons. At Maxwell, one of his
contemporaries will contend that the human spleen acts as an ion-exchange
organ to rid the human body of radioactive minerals, and he will someday
die trying to prove it. His own classmate Tony Dirk will organize a
weather-control program, and John Philips will write six lines of odd
symbols that will be called the Inertiogravitic Equations.
Their children will reach the distant stars, and their children's
children will, humanlike, cross the vast chasm that lies between one
swirl of matter and the other before they have barely touched their home
galaxy.
No man is an island, near or far on Earth as it is across the glowing
clusters of galaxies--nay, as it may be in Heaven itself.
The motto is cut deep in the granite over the doorway to Holden Hall:
YOU YOURSELF
MUST LIGHT THE FAGGOTS
THAT YOU HAVE BROUGHT