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white pulp more deeply than fie had intended. The result made him close his
eyes; it tasted like quick-frozen music.
They finished it in reverent silence and, wiping their mouths on their
chitons, lay back. After a while, Estelle said:
"I wish we could talk to them better." "Miramon can talk to us well enough,"
Web said somnolently. "He didn't have- to learn our language the hard way,
either. They do it here by machine, like we used to do it when we were Okies.
I wish we still did it that way." "Hypnopaedia?" Estelle said. "But I thought
that was all dead and done for. You didn't really learn anything that way;
just facts."
"That's right, just facts. It didn't teach you to relate. For that you have to
have a tutor. 'But it was good for learning things like 1 X 1 = 10, or the
tables in the back of the book, or the 850 words you most need to know in a
new language. It used to take only five hundred hours to cram all that stuff
into you, by EEG feedback, flicker, oral repetition, and I don't know what all
else- and the whole time, you were under hypnosis." "It sounds too easy,"
Estelle said sleepily. "The easy parts of things ought to be easy," Web said.
"What's the point of having to learn them by rote? That takes too much time.
You know yourself that something you can learn- in ten repetitions, or five,
it takes some kids thirty repetitions to learn. So you have to sit around
through twenty or twenty-five repetitions that you don't need. If there's
anything I hate about school, it's drill-all that time wasted that you could
actually be doing something with."
Suddenly Web became conscious of a peculiar flopping sound at the crest of the
hill behind him. He knew well enough that there were no dangerous animals left
on He, but he realized that he had been hearing the sound for some time while
he was talking; and the notion occurred to him that his definition of a
dangerous animal might not necessarily make a good match with that of a
Hevian.
Anyhow, he could hope; he could use a tiger to best, along about now. He
twisted quickly to his hands and knees.
"Don't be silly," Estelle said, without moving or even opening her eyes. "Ifs
cjnly Ernest."
The svengali appeared over the crest of the hill and came humping itself
through the tall grass in a symphony of desperate disorganization. It gave Web
only the briefest of glances, and then bent upon Estelle the reproachful stare
of an animal utterly betrayed, but still-it hoped you noticed-firm in the true
faith. Web stifled his impulse to laugh, for in fact he could hardly blame the
poor creature; since it was as brainless as it was sexless-despite its name-it
had been able to contrive no better way of keeping up with Estelle than to
follow her through her every move in the Matrix game, a discipline for which
it was so magnificently unequipped that it had only just now finished. It was
lucky that the children had not counted it as a player, or poor Ernest would
have been It to-Web thought with unfocussed uneasiness-the end of time.
"We could sign up for it here," Web said abruptly.
"For what? Hypnopaedia? Your grandmother wouldn't
let us."
Web turned around and sat up, plucking a long hollow blade of the bamboo-like
grass and sinking his grinding teeth thoughtfully into the woody butt end.
"But she isn't here," he said.
"No, but she will be," Estelle said. "And she's a school officer on the New
Earth. I used to hear her fighting about it with my father when I was a child.
She used to tell him he was out of his mind. She would say, "Why do kids need
all this calculus and history now? What good is it to somebody who's going to
have to go out and hoe a virgin planet?'. She used to make poor Dad stutter
something awful."
"But she isn't here," Web repeated, with a little unwilling exasperation. He
had just realized that Estelle's face with its closed eyes, so perfectly in
repose in the blue-white light of this one-day-long summer, was lovelier than
anything he had ever seen before. He found that he could not go on.
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