A rooster yelling at the top of its lungs woke me before dawn the next morning. It didn’t seem likely to shut up any time soon, and I doubted the New Shakers would be happy if I threw anything at their livestock, so I got up instead. I rang the bell as I’d been told, and a couple of minutes later, a quiet knock on the door announced the arrival of a middle-aged woman with two pitchers and a bowl. I took them and thanked her; she smiled and curtseyed, and headed off to somewhere else.
I started washing up, and only then realized two things. The first was that there weren’t any outlets for electricity in the room; the second was that the only thing I had to shave with was an electric shaver with no batteries. I finished washing and got dressed, hoping a day’s growth of beard wouldn’t be a faux pas by Lakeland standards. Maybe an hour later, I was sitting behind Colonel Pappas in the jeep as it rattled over a dirt road on its way to the Lakeland Republic’s annual drone shoot.
“How much do you know about modern drones?” Pappas had asked me the night before; when I admitted my ignorance, he laughed. “Fair enough. You start talking about drones, a lot of people think of the old first and second generation machines, the ones that used to launch rockets from a mile or so in the air. Those haven’t been in service anywhere since the ‘thirties—ever hear of the battle of Mosul?”
I tried to remember. “That was in the second Kurdistan war, wasn’t it?”
“Bingo. Both sides had drones, but the Kurds figured out that you can target them with old-fashioned antiaircraft guns, got a bunch of those in place without anybody being the wiser, and took out most of the Turkish drone force in an afternoon. After that, you had militaries all over the place figuring out ways to target drones, and that’s when the sort of drones you see these days started popping up on the drawing boards—observation drones way up where artillery can’t hit them, and attack drones flying at treetop level where they can hide from radar. Of course then they’ve got other vulnerabilities.”
“Can’t they reprogram their attack drones to fly high if they’re going to attack you?”
“Sure.” He grinned. “We’ve got plenty of old-fashioned antiaircraft guns, too.”
So there I was, jolting along a rough road with brown fields of stubble to the left and a line of trees to the right, and a moving dot up above the trees caught my eye. I turned to look; Pappas saw me move, turned in his seat, and handed me a pair of binoculars. Despite the joggling of the jeep, I managed to get the thing in focus: a lean angular shape with broad straight wings, flying low and fast.
As I watched, shards suddenly flew up from the middle of one wing. A moment later the outer half of the wing tumbled one way and the rest of the drone tumbled the other. I managed to follow it most of the way to the trees, then handed the binoculars back to Pappas.
“Wing hit?” he asked, pitching his voice to be heard above the jeep’s engine. I nodded. “That’s the easy one,” he went on. “Good shots aim for the engine or the fuel tank.”
A quarter mile or so on, as another drone came into sight, the road veered suddenly to the right, ducked through the trees, and stopped in an impromptu parking lot where jeeps were more or less lined up. Just past the parking lots was a cluster of olive-drab tents, and past those a fair-sized crowd. Off to the left, though, a bunch of horses were munching grass in a fenced-off field, and as I watched, a dozen or so people in Lakeland Army uniforms rode up on horses, got out of the saddles, and led the animals into the field.
The jeep stopped. “What’s with that?” I asked Pappas. “Cavalry in this day and age?”
“Nah, dragoons.” He figured out from my face that I didn’t know the word, and went on: “Mounted infantry—they ride to the battlefield and then dismount to fight. Most countries had lots of ‘em until the end of the nineteenth century, and we tried ‘em out in the war of ‘49 with good results. Transport’s a lot easier on the logistical end if the only fuel you need is hay.”
I got out of the jeep. Pappas hauled himself into his wheelchair, then handed me a pair of earplugs. “You’ll need these,” he said. “Drone rifles are .50 caliber, and they’re good and loud.”
We wove our way through the tents, through the crowd, and out to the places where the guns were firing. There were maybe two dozen of them in a big arc, each with twenty or so stations for shooters, though things were just getting under way and most of the stations didn’t have anyone at them yet. “Those are first timers doing their qualifying rounds,” Pappas said, pointing to one set of stations filling up quicker than the others; the earplugs muffled his voice but I could still hear him. “Over here, the expert marksmen—you’ll see some of the best shots in the Republic here today. Check this one out.”
“This one” was a short middle-aged woman in jeans and a buffalo plaid wool shirt, cradling a rifle that must have been as long as she was tall. Past her, I could see a dot against the morning sky. She lined up the shot with practiced ease. Even through the earplugs, the crack of the rifle was loud enough to sting.
A moment later, off in the distance, the dot vanished in a little red-orange flash.
“Sweet,” Pappas said. “Right in the fuel tank. That’s Maude Duesenberg—I don’t know how many drone shoot trophies she’s got on her mantle, but it’s got to be getting crowded.”
“Where do you get all the drones?” I asked him.
“Oh, most of ‘em we make ourselves. Expert class and proof-of-concept shooters get real drones—we buy them through smugglers in Chicago. You probably don’t want to know how many officers in how many countries sell us a couple of drones every year, list ‘em as crashed, and pocket the proceeds.”
I knew enough about the military back home to guess that the Atlantic Republic was on that list. Still, something else had sparked my curiosity. “What’s proof of concept shooting?”
“New or revived technologies. They’re over on this side—let’s check ‘em out.”
Instead of the shooter’s stations elsewhere on the arc, the place for proof-of-concept shooters was an open patch of mostly flattened grass with a long straight view ahead of it. There wasn’t much of a crowd there, just a couple of officers in the ubiquitous Lakeland trench coats, and several dozen kids watching with hopeful looks on their faces. Out on the grass were maybe twenty soldiers who looked even scruffier than I felt, manhandling what looked like a cannon on an oddly shaped mount.
“Oh my God,” Pappas said. “I know these guys—the 34th Infantry from Covington. I wonder what they’re up to; that can’t be an ordinary howitzer.”
I gave him a startled look. One of the officers standing there laughed, and said, “Good morning, sir. Yeah, Carlos and I have been wondering about that since they started setting the thing up.”
Introductions followed; Michael Berconi and Carlos Lopez Ruiz were captains in the Lakeland Army, down from Toledo to watch the proof-of-concept tests. “You probably don’t know about the 34th,” Lopez said to me. “They’re a bunch of maniacs. Every year they come up with some new stunt.”
“That’s for sure,” said Berconi. “You should have been here last year. We were standing here, and all of a sudden a bright red triplane—you know, like the Red Baron’s plane—comes over the trees there and starts blasting drones from above with a couple of machine guns. I heard later they spent two years building the damn thing.”
“I’m surprised the drones didn’t dodge it,” I said.
“They couldn’t see it,” Pappas told me. “Military frequency radar doesn’t reflect off of wood and fabric, and military drones only have video looking forward and down—though I understand that’s being changed. You’re not the only visitor from outside at these events.” He grinned, though there was an edge to it. “Though most of the others don’t announce themselves.”
The soldiers out on the open grass had finished setting up their cannon, and one of them spread his arms in what was pretty obviously a signal. “Here goes,” Pappas said. “You may want to put your hands over your ears; a 75-mm howitzer makes more noise than your earplugs’ll handle.”
I covered my ears. Off in the distance, a dot rose up into the air and came toward us in a zigzag pattern. About the time it got close enough that I could see more of it than a dot, the cannon went off, and Pappas wasn’t kidding; even with my hands over my ears, it packed a wallop. Something blurred the air downrange from where we stood; an instant passed, and then the drone shattered as though it had slammed into an unseen wall. The watching kids whooped; so did the soldiers, and then reloaded.
“What the ringtailed rambling—” Pappas began to say, then covered his ears; he’d spotted the next drone a moment after I had. The same process repeated, except that the second drone only lost half of one wing; that was enough to send it tumbling down onto the range, but the chief of the gun crew regaled the others with a string of profanity that would have gotten a standing ovation from Marines I knew back home. Then it was hands-over-ears time; they let the final drone get good and close before firing, and so I got a fine view as something slammed into it and sent the fragments tumbling down to the grass below.
Before the soldiers had finished whooping Pappas wheeled out toward them, shouting, “What the hell are you maniacs putting in that thing?” He was apparently no stranger to the 34th Infantry; they greeted him with sloppy salutes and big grins, and the crew chief and one of the others stood talking with him while the others started breaking the cannon down for transport.
A woman’s voice sounded behind me just then: “Excuse me, is this the place for proof-of-concept tests?”
I turned around. She was a twenty-something blonde in a big brown barn coat. “Yes,” I said. “They’re just packing up from the last test.”
“Oh, good.” She turned and waved, and someone hauling a cart with two bicycle wheels came out of the crowd. He turned out to be a young man of about the same age, in a fedora and trench coat that had seen quite a bit of hard wear; one of his shoulders was noticeably higher than the other.
“Are you with the soldiers?” she asked me.
“No, just visiting. I’m Peter Carr.”
“I’m Emily Franken, and this is my husband Jim.” Hands got shaken all around. The cart was full of what looked like antique radio gear—a couple of big metal boxes with dials, switches, and gauges all over the front, and something that I swear looked like a death-ray gun from some old skiffy vid. The kids craned their necks to look at it all, but had the common sense not to touch anything.
“Should I ask about that?” I motioned to the contents of the cart.
“Sure,” she replied. “It’s a maser—a microwave laser. It’s old tech—they made them in the 1950s, but nobody could figure out how to get real power out of them.” In response to my look of surprise: “There’s a lot of things like that—interesting bits of technology nobody followed up on.”
“What Emily’s not saying,” Jim interjected, “is that she spent two years studying quantum mechanics to find something that would mase steadily at room temperature, and published a couple of papers on the subject that are going to turn two or three branches of physics on their heads.”
“Oh, stop it,” she said, blushing.
“Not a chance. When we were in engineering school, Mr. Carr, Emily was the only person in class who came up with anything really interesting for me to build.”
“And Jim was the only one in the class who could build the things I needed for my projects—so of course we got married right after graduation.” Laughing: “When he proposed, he said I had to marry him, so I’d almost have the right last name to be a mad scientist, and a hunchbacked lab assistant too.”
He grinned, pushed his shoulder up further, and gave me a bug-eyed look. I laughed.
Out on the grass, the soldiers had the cannon and mount set up for transport, and hauled it back toward the parking lot and the jeeps. I wished the Frankens good luck, and they hauled the cart of electronic gear out onto the field. They passed Pappas as he came wheeling back, shaking his head.
“Even for the 34th, that’s pretty good,” he said when he reached me and the two captains. “You know what they were shooting? Grapeshot.”
Lopez and I looked blank, but Berconi let out a startled laugh. “Seriously?”
“God’s honest truth.” To the rest of us: “It’s something artillery used to use back in the Civil War and before—basically, the world’s biggest shotgun shell, with pellets half an inch across. We may actually want to give that a good hard look; it’d do the same thing to a helicopter.” With a motion of his head in the direction of the Frankens, who were busy setting up their gear: “What’s that all about?”
“Some kind of twentieth century microwave laser,” I said.
Pappas gave me a startled look, then turned to Berconi. “What’s on the schedule?”
“Standard three trials—but they’ve requested one with live ordnance.”
Pappas let out a long whistle. “This could get colorful.”
Out on the grass, the two had finished setting up their gear: a row of batteries, the two boxes, the death-ray-thing on a tripod, and cables connecting them. Emily Franken signaled that they were ready, and then got behind the ray-thing and aimed it downrange while her husband hunched over the two boxes and fiddled with the dials. The first drone appeared in the distance. I’m not sure what I was expecting—flashes and bangs, a beam of light, or what have you—but all that happened was that the drone suddenly dropped out of the air as though the Frankens had flipped the off switch at a distance.
A second drone met the same fate a few minutes later. “The third—” Pappas said.
“That’ll be the one with heat on board,” Berconi told him.
By the time the third drone went up people were beginning to drift over to the proof-of-concept range, wondering what was going on. As it came close enough to be more than a distant dot, I could see two missiles under each wing. Emily Franken crouched behind the device she was aiming, Jim twisted dials and fiddled with switches, and all of a sudden the drone vanished in a flash and a bubble of red fire. The sharp crack of the explosion, muffled by the earplugs I was wearing, arrived an instant later. The watching kids whooped in delight.
Berconi and Lopez hurried across the grass to the Frankens the moment the flaming wreckage of the drone was on the ground. “What do you think?” Pappas asked me.
“I have no idea,” I admitted. “What did they do, microwave the inside of the drones?”
“Good question. If I had to guess—well, you know how a radio antenna works? Radio waves hit a piece of metal the right length and set up a current in it? I wonder if they’ve tuned the thing so that it sets up electrical surges in the onboard computer chips and the fuses for the missiles.”
I gave him a horrified look. “You could fry anything electronic with that.”
“Not our gear. All our electronics use vacuum tubes—you hit those with a surge, they just shrug—but outside electronics? Pretty much, yeah.”
I considered him for a long moment, thinking about the military implications of a weapon that could fry electronics at a distance, and then wondered whether this whole business had been staged for my benefit. “You get a lot of mad scientists here in the Lakeland Republic?”
“You’d be surprised,” he said with a grin. “Lots of technologies that got invented in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were just plain abandoned even though they worked fine—there wasn’t a market yet, or something else got there first, or somebody bribed the right officials so government subsidies favored some other technology instead. A lot of engineers here spend their time going through old technical journals and what have you, looking for things that the Republic can use.”
“Like grapeshot,” I said.
“Bingo. Or masers, or dragoons—or for that matter canals and canal boats.”
By then the Frankens had their maser broken down and loaded on the cart, and they were hauling it away, still deep in conversation with Berconi. Lopez headed back our way, while a bunch of soldiers hauled something that looked like a hand-cranked Gatling gun out onto the grass. “Come on,” Pappas said then. “Unless you want to see more here, of course. The expert competition ought to start pretty soon.” I nodded, and followed him.
That’s how the day went. It must have been midnight, or close to it, when Pappas and I got back to the New Shaker gathering. The shooting went on until four in the afternoon; during a lull in the gunfire, a little after noon, we got into line outside a big olive-green tent in the middle of things, filed in, and left with glasses of beer and sausages and sauerkraut on big fresh-baked rolls. After the last drone was blown out of the air, people milled around while the judges conferred, and then it was time for trophies to be handed out—Maude Duesenberg, who I’d seen shooting earlier, squeaked out another win by a couple of points over a scruffy-looking kid from the mountain country off east. They shook hands, and he grinned; you could tell he was already thinking about how to get ready for next year’s shoot.
From there it turned into a big party, with plenty of food—somebody spent most of the day roasting a couple of pigs, just for starters—and no shortage of alcohol, either. Pappas and I ended up sipping moonshine around a fire with the guys from the 34th Infantry, who were already talking about what kind of stunt they were going to pull the following year. The ‘shine was pure enough that I’m honestly surprised that the whole lot of us weren’t lifted into the treetops by a sudden explosion, just from the vapors. As it was, I was tipsier than I usually let myself get by the time Pappas and I headed back to the jeep, and he was worse off than I was. Did you know a wheelchair can stagger? Trust me, I’ve seen it.
The next morning came too early, announced by the same overenthusiastic rooster as before. I got myself washed and dressed, and stumbled downstairs, to find Pappas looking as though he’d slept the clock around and was ready for anything. “I’m going to have to get the early train back,” he told me, “but Melanie says you want to see first tier up close, so she found someone to show you around Hicksville—a city councilwoman, I think.”
“If she can show me the nearest barber shop first,” I said, “I’d be happy.”
Pappas pulled out a pocket watch, glanced at it. “There’s one on Main Street,” he told me. “If we go now you’ll have time to take care of that before she shows up.”
That sounded like a good idea to me, so we said our goodbyes to the New Shakers and piled into the jeep for the ride back into town. This time there weren’t more than three or four wagons on the road that had been so crowded two days back; I gathered that most of the attendees were either sleeping off the consequences of the previous night or enjoying a leisurely morning. Fields and pastures eventually gave way to the outlying houses of the town, and then to the main street, which was paved—I hadn’t expected that—and lined on both sides with the sort of shops and city buildings you’d expected to see in an Old West history vid.
“City Hall’s there,” Pappas said as the jeep pulled up a few yards from the promised barbershop. He pointed to a three-story building of what looked like local stone half a block up the street. “Right next to the library. Ask for Ruth Mellencamp. All set? Hey, it was a pleasure.” We shook hands, I hauled my suitcase out of the jeep, and away it went.
The barbershop was a little hole in the wall place toward one end of the block. Just this side of it was another shop, no bigger, with LAKELAND RADIOTELEGRAPH SERVICE in bright yellow paint on the windows and a big antenna rising up above the roof. The sign on the door promised same day message delivery anyplace in the Lakeland Republic. That seemed pretty remarkable for a tier one county, but it suddenly occurred to me that they could do it by having a shop like this in every town of any size. Two customers stood inside, one writing something on a sheet of paper and the other standing at the counter talking with a clerk.
I shook my head and went into the barbershop, and found a half dozen guys ahead of me in line. I’d expected that; what I didn’t expect is that four of them were singing. They had books open in their laps—copies of the same songbook, I gathered after a fast glance—and were belting out some song I didn’t know, and doing it in pretty fair harmony. I sat down in the nearest available chair, tucked my suitcase back under the seat, and all of a sudden had to fight down an impulse to laugh. You can run into a phrase hundreds of times and never think about what it actually means; I must have read at least that many references to “barbershop quartets” without realizing that that’s what guys did in barbershops while waiting for a shave, back in the days when there weren’t loudspeakers in the ceiling blaring pop music everywhere and veepads sitting in everyone’s lap to make up for any lack of distraction. In the Lakeland Republic, obviously, those days were back.
I’m pretty sure that if I’d picked up a copy of the songbook from the table in front and joined in, nobody would have blinked, and in fact that’s what happened with two of the next three guys to come into the barber shop. The odd thing was that the songs weren’t the sort of thing I dimly associated with barbershop quartets. I didn’t know most of them, but like most people back home I’ve got pretty specific musical tastes—jazz on the one hand, and opera on the other. Still, they were pretty good. One that stuck in my memory had a rock beat, and something in the chorus about a girl named Lucy who was in the sky with diamonds. I made a note in my notebook to look it up once I got back home and could chase down the lyrics on the metanet.
It was a half hour or so later when I left the barbershop, feeling a lot less scruffy, and with another song’s chorus, something about turning to face the strange ch-ch-changes, ringing in my head. It wasn’t a bad introduction for the day I was about to have, for that matter.
I walked up the sidewalk that led to City Hall, went in, and asked for Ruth Mellencamp. She turned out to be short, plump, gray-haired, and businesslike, the kind of woman that looks like somebody’s slightly batty granny until she starts talking and you realize there’s a mind like a steel trap behind the cozy facade. “Pleased to meet you,” she said, shaking my hand. “Yes, Ms. Berger called down from Toledo two days ago. It’s not often we get visitors from outside here in Hicksville, and I admit I’m curious to see what you’ll think of our little town.”
“So far,” I said, “I know that it has decent train service and you can get an excellent shave at a barbershop here.”
She chuckled. “Well, that’s certainly a good start! Why don’t you stash your suitcase here and we can have a look at the town.”
“I was a little surprised to see paved streets and sidewalks here,” I said as we left the building. “I thought you didn’t have those in a first tier county.”
“They weren’t paid for with tax money,” she said. “About ten years ago, some of the business people in town got together, organized a corporation, got a charter from the legislature for it, and used that to raise money to pave six streets downtown. A lot of people contributed, and not just people who live in town. So the streets got built, a fund was set aside to repair them, and the corporation wound up its affairs and closed down.”
“I imagine you know,” I said, “just how odd that sounds to someone from outside.”
“Of course.” She gestured down the street, and we turned. “The thing is, that’s what corporations were originally: schemes for public betterment that were chartered by one of the old state governments for a fixed term, and allowed to raise money by stock sales for that reason alone. It wasn’t until clever lawyers twisted the laws out of shape in the interests of the railroad barons that corporations got turned into imaginary persons with more rights and fewer responsibilities than the rest of us.”
I remembered what Vinny Patzek told me about corporations at the Toledo stock market. “So you went back to the older way of doing things.”
“Exactly. We do that a lot here.”
“I’ve gotten that impression,” I said dryly, and she chuckled again.
Hicksville was a farm town’s farm town, and you could tell. The biggest store in town was a feed-and-seed with big silos out back, next to a rail siding where freight cars could pull up to take on loads of grain, and the next biggest business was a whiskey distillery—“you won’t find a better bourbon in the Republic,” Mellencamp told me—which also had its own rail siding, and a loading dock stacked with cases of bottles ready to ship. Another large building belonged to an organization called the Freemasons, which confusingly enough didn’t have anything to do with the building trades, and another belonged to something called the Grange, which I gathered was some kind of farmer’s organization. I made notes in my notebook and hoped I’d have time to look things up when I got back to Toledo.
The thing that struck me hardest, though, was how lively everything was. Thinking about the tier system when I was in Toledo, I’d conjured up a picture of log cabins, dirt roads, and the kind of squalor you get in the poorer rural districts of the Atlantic Republic these days, but that’s not what I saw all around me in Hicksville. What I saw instead was a bustling, prosperous community that somehow got by without the technologies everyone outside took for granted.
We’d just passed the Grange building when a policeman came strolling past us and smiled and said hi to us both. That didn’t surprise me, since Ruth Mellencamp was what she was, but he said the same thing to every person he passed, and stopped here and there to talk to people, as though he was everybody’s friend. It was only after he’d passed that it really sank in that he wasn’t wearing a flak jacket or a helmet and he didn’t have an assault rifle in his hands. Like the border guard I’d seen, he was wearing an old-fashioned uniform, this one of blue wool, and the only heat he had on him was a pistol at his hip. I shook my head, wondered how they managed. “I’m curious,” I said to my guide, “about the crime rate here.”
“In Hicksville, or the Lakeland Republic generally?”
“Both, actually.”
“I can get you some hard numbers when we head back to City Hall. The short version is that it’s lower than any other country in North America.”
“Any idea why?”
“Sure. On the one hand, anybody who’s willing to work can earn a living wage here, so you don’t have the extreme poverty and joblessness that drives so much crime elsewhere. On the other, we have a lot fewer laws.” I gave her a startled look, and she went on. “I’m not sure how much you know about the laws in the old United States.”
“Not a lot,” I admitted.
“Convoluted to the point of insanity,” she said. “You could hardly turn around and draw a deep breath without violating some law or regulation or other. We got rid of most of it; the only things our criminal law covers are significant crimes against persons and property. Then there were the drug laws—I hope those have been scrapped in your country.”
“No,” I said. “You’ve legalized drugs here?”
“Prohibition is a recipe for failure,” she replied at once. “It’s never worked anywhere it’s been tried, and it never will. When you come right down to it, the only thing you get from legal prohibition is a system of price supports for organized crime. Treat drug addiction as a medical issue rather than a legal one, the way most European countries do these days, and it’s much more manageable—and you get a lot fewer people in prison.” She shrugged. “Of course some people are going to break the law no matter what, but it’s q uite a bit easier to have a humane prison system when you aren’t throwing millions of people into the prisons for things that don’t actually need to be crimes.”
I thought about that as we came up to another big building of local stone, with HICKSVILLE SCHOOL carved over the door. “I don’t know whether you’re interested at all in our education system,” Mellencamp said.
“Actually, I am,” I told her. “Ours has problems; maybe I can pick up some useful ideas.” It was half a joke and half the understatement of the year—the public schools all over the Atlantic Republic are a disaster area, and the private schools charge more and more each year for an education that isn’t all that much better.
She beamed. “Maybe you can. We’re very proud of our school here.”
We went inside. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that there were no armed guards in flak jackets in the halls, but it still rattled me. The place was clean and pleasant, without the medium-security prison look that schools have back home. We went to the office, a cubbyhole in front with a desk for the secretary and a bunch of filing cabinets, and Ellencamp introduced me; the secretary had me sign in, said something pleasant, and away we went.
“People come here all the time,” Mellencamp explained. “People moving to the area who want to check out our schools, parents and grandparents who have free time and want to volunteer, that sort of thing. It’s very much part of the community.”
There were eight classrooms, one for each of the eight grades taught there. We slipped into the back of the second grade classroom, nodded a greeting to the teacher, and sat in wooden chairs up against the back wall. The room was about as plain as could be, a simple square space with a blackboard and a teacher’s chair and desk up in front, a round clock over the door, four big windows letting in light on the left, a teacher’s desk and chair up front, and rows of seats for the students, each with its little half-desk curving forward from one arm. Over on the wall opposite the windows, student art projects had been pinned up on a cork board; they looked bright and lively, and a couple showed some real talent.
The teacher was maybe thirty, brown-skinned, with her hair in a flurry of braids tied back loosely behind her neck. A blonde girl of sixteen or so was standing next to the desk, reading a story aloud, and the students were following along in their textbooks.
I leaned over to Mellencamp. “Who’s she?” I whispered, meaning the girl who was reading.
“An apprentice,” she whispered back, and motioned to a boy around the same age, brown-haired and red-cheeked, who was going from student to student, and now and then squatting down and murmuring something or pointing to some bit in the book. “So’s that one.”
I gave her a startled look, but decided not to risk interrupting.
The story wound to an end, and then the teacher started asking questions about it to one student after another—not the kind of simple you’d expect to see in a test back home, either. It sank in after a moment that she was actually asking the kids for their thoughts about this or that part of the story. I put my hand on my chin. It struck me as a very odd way to run a lesson—wasn’t the point of schooling to make sure that everyone in the class came up with the right answer when it was called for? Not in the Lakeland Republic, I gathered.
The reading lesson ended at ten-thirty sharp—it took me a while to remember how to read a clock with hands, but I managed it—and once it was over, the students and both apprentices got up and trooped out the door in a ragged but tolerably well behaved line. Ruth Mellencamp got to her feet once the last of them were gone, gestured for me to follow, and went to the front of the room. “Angie,” she said, “this is Peter Carr, who’s visiting from outside. Mr. Carr, Angela McClintock.”
We shook hands, said the usual polite things. “How long do you have before the next class?” I asked.
The teacher gave me a blank look, then smiled the you-don’t-get-it smile I’d seen too often for my liking. “They’ll be back in fifteen minutes, after morning recess.” It was my turn to wear a blank look, and her eyebrows went up. “Good heavens, you can’t expect second graders to sit still for an entire school day. Don’t the early grades have recesses where you’re from?”
“We probably should,” I allowed.
“You certainly should. If I kept them in much longer they’d be so restless they wouldn’t absorb a thing I taught them. This way, twenty minutes from now they’ll be ready to sit back down and pay attention to the next set of lessons.”
I nodded. “I was curious about the two young people who were helping you—apprentices?” She nodded, beaming, and I went on: “They look a little young to have gotten a teaching degree already—will they go to college and get that after their apprenticeship?”
That got me the blank look again, and this time it wasn’t followed by the too-familiar smile. Ruth Mellencamp came to the rescue. “They used to send teachers to college before the war,” she said. “I gather they still do that outside.”
“And I gather you don’t do that here,” I said.
“Good heavens, no,” said the teacher. “Why would we? You don’t need a college degree to teach second graders how to read—just patience and a little bit of practice.”
“But I’m sure you teach them more than reading,” I objected.
“Yes, but the same thing’s true of all the three C’s,” she said.
“That’s what we call the curriculum,” Mellencamp added, seeing the blank look start to appear on my face. “Literacy, numeracy, naturacy—those are the three C’s.”
I took that in. “So you teach them to read, and then—mathematics?”
“Literacy’s more than just reading,” McClintock said. “It’s the whole set of language skills—reading, grammar, spelling, logical reasoning, composition and speaking, so they can learn whatever interests them, think intelligently about it, and share what they find with other people. Numeracy’s the whole set of number skills—mathematics, sure, but also the trick of putting things in numerical terms and using math in the real world, so probability, statistics, everything you need to keep from being fooled or flummoxed by numbers.”
“Okay,” I said. “And—naturacy? I don’t even know the word.”
“The same principle,” said the teacher. “The whole set of natural science skills: learning how to observe, how to compare your observations to what’s already known or thought to be known, how to come up with hypotheses and figure out ways to test them—and also natural history, what living things you found here, how they interact with us, with their habitats, with other living things.”
“I suppose you don’t teach that in the schools back home,” said Mellencamp.
“There are college classes,” I said.
“Most of these kids will grow up to be farmers,” McClintock told me. “Most of those that don’t will be dealing with farmers and the farm economy here every day of their lives. How on Earth they’d be able to do that if they don’t understand soil and weather and how plants grow, I’m sure I don’t know.”
“Back before the war,” Mellencamp reminded her, “the big corporate farms tried to do without that.”
“Yes, and look what happened.” She shook her head. “I’m not sure we’ve learned everything we should have from the mistakes that were made back then, but that’s one I think we picked up.”
I thought about that on the train that afternoon all the way back to Toledo.