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"You're forgetting the research we've been conducting. It may not be final in some technical scientific sense, but it's already conclusive. People reach their peak ability as military commanders much earlier than we thought. Most of them in their late teens. The same age when poets do their most passionate and revolutionary work. And mathematicians. They peak, and then it falls off. They coast on what they learned back when they were still young enough to learn. We know within a window of about five years when we have to have our commander. John Paul Wieczorek will already be too old when that window opens. Past his peak."
"Obviously you've been given information I don't have," said Helena.
"Or figured it out," said Graff. "Once it was obvious John Paul was never going to Battle School, my mission changed. Now all that matters is we get John Paul out of Poland and into a compliant country, and we keep our word to him, absolutely, to the letter, so he knows our promises will be kept even when we know we've been cheated."
"What's the point of that?" asked Helena.
"Captain Rudolf, you're speaking without thinking."
He was right. So she thought.
"If we have more time before we need our commander," she said, "then do we have time for him to marry and have children and then the children grow up enough to be the right age?"
"Just barely, yes. We have just barely enough time. If he marries young. If he marries somebody who is very, very brilliant so the gene mix is good."
"But you aren't going to try to control that, are you?"
"There are many steps on the continuum between controlling something and doing nothing at all."
"You really do think in the long term, don't you?"
"Think of me as Rumpelstiltskin."
She laughed. "All right, now I get it. You're giving him the wish of his heart, today. And then, long after he's forgotten, you're going to pop up and ask for his firstborn child."
Graff clapped an arm across her shoulder and walked with her toward the waiting van. "Only I don't have some stupid loophole that will let him get out of it if he can guess my name."
TEACHER'S PEST
This was not the section of Human Community that John Paul Wiggin had tried to register for. It wasn't even his third choice. The university computer had assigned it to him because of some algorithm involving his seniority, how many first-choice classes he had received during his time there, and a slew of other considerations that meant nothing to him except that instead of getting one of the top-notch faculty he had come to this school to study with, he was going to have to suffer through the fumbling of a graduate student who knew little about the subject and less about how to teach it.
Maybe the algorithm's main criterion was how much he needed the course in order to graduate. They put him here because they knew he couldn't drop.
So he sat there in his usual front-row seat, looking at the backside of a teacher who looked like she was fifteen and dressed like she had been allowed to play in her mother's closet. She seemed to have a nice body and was probably trying to hide it behind frumpiness--but the fact that she knew she had something worth hiding suggested that she was no scientist. Probably not even a scholar.
I don't have time to help you work through your self-visualization problems, he said silently to the girl at the chalkboard. Nor to help you get past whatever weird method of teaching you're going to try out on us. What will it be? Socratic questioning? Devil's advocate? Therapy-group "discussion"? Belligerent toughness?
Give me a bored, worn-out wreck of a professor on the verge of retirement over a grad student every time.
Oh well. It was only this semester, next semester, a senior thesis, and then on to a fascinating career in government. Preferably in a position where he could work for the downfall of the Hegemony and the restoration of sovereignty for all nations.
Poland in particular, but he never said that to anyone, never even admitted that he had spent the first six years of his life in Poland. His documents all showed him and his whole family to be natural-born Americans. His parents' unlosable Polish accents proved that to be a lie, but considering that it was the Hegemony that had moved them to America and given them their false papers, it wasn't likely anybody was going to press the issue.
So write your diagrams on the board, Little Miss I-Want-to-Grow-Up-to-Be-a-Perfesser. I'll ace your tests and get my A and you'll never have a clue that the most arrogant, ambitious, and intelligent student on this campus was in your class.
At least that's what they told him he was back when they were recruiting him. All except the arrogant part. They didn't actually say that. He just read it in their eyes.
"I wrote all this on the board," said the grad student with chalk, "because I want you to memorize it and, with any luck, understand it, because it's the basis of everything else we'll discuss in this class."
John Paul had already memorized it, of course, just by reading it. Because it was stuff he hadn't seen before in his outside reading, it was obvious her "method" was to try to be "cutting edge," full of the latest--and most likely to be wrong--research.
She looked right at him. "You seem particularly bored and contemptuous, Mr....Wiggi
n, is it? Is that because you already know about the community selection model of evolution?"
Oh, great. She was one of those "teachers" who had to have a goat in the class--someone to torment in order to score points.
"No, ma'am," said John Paul. "I came here hoping that you'd teach me everything about it." He kept every trace of sarcasm out of his tone; but of course that made it even more barbed and condescending.
