What Rough Beast?

by Jefferson Highe.

[Sidenote: _When you are a teacher, you expect kids to play pranks. But with tigers--and worse?_]

Standing braced--or, as it seemed to him, crucified--against the length of the blackboard, John Ward tried to calculate his chances of heading off the impending riot. It didn't seem likely that anything he could do would stop it.

"Say something," he told himself. "Continue the lecture, _talk_!" But against the background of hysterical voices from the school yard, against the bra.s.s fear in his mouth, he was dumb. He looked at the bank of boys' faces in front of him. They seemed to him now as identical as metal stampings, each one completely deadpan, each pair of jaws moving in a single rhythm, like a mechanical herd. He could feel the tension in them, and he knew that, in a moment, they would begin to move. He felt shame and humiliation that he had failed.

"Shakespeare," he said clearly, holding his voice steady, "for those of you who have never heard of him, was the greatest of all dramatists.

Greater even," he went on doggedly, knowing that they might take it as a provocation, "than the writers for the Spellcasts." He stopped talking abruptly.

Three tigers stepped out of the ceiling. Their eyes were gla.s.sy, absolutely rigid, as if, like the last of the hairy mammoths, they had been frozen a long age in some glacial creva.s.se. They hung there a moment and then fell into the room like a furry waterfall. They landed snarling.

Something smashed viciously into the wall beside Ward's head. From the back of the room, someone's hand flashed a glitter of light. Ward leaped away and cut across the end of the room toward the escape chute. Holding his ring with its identifying light beam before him, he leaped into the slot like a racing driver. Behind him, the room exploded in shouts and snarls. The gate on the chute slammed shut after him, and he heard them scratching and banging at it. Without the identifying light, they would be unable to get through. He took a long breath of relief as he shot down the polished groove of the slide into the Mob Quad. The boys he'd left behind knew how to protect themselves.

They were all there--Dr. Allenby, McCarthy the psych man, Laura Ames the pretty gym teacher, Foster, Jensen--all of them. So it had been general then, not just his group which had rioted. He knew it was all the more serious now, because it had not been limited to one outbreak.

"You, too, Ward?" Dr. Allenby said sadly. He was a short, slender man with white hair and a white mustache. He helped Ward up from where he had fallen at the foot of the escape slide. "What was it in your cla.s.sroom this time?"

"Tigers," Ward said. Standing beside Allenby, he felt very tall, although he was only of average height. He smoothed down his wiry dark hair and began energetically brushing the dust from his clothing.

"Well, it's always something," Allenby said tiredly.

He seemed more sad than upset, Ward thought, a spent old man clinging to the straw of a dream. He saw where the metaphor was leading and pushed it aside. If Allenby were a drowning man, then Ward himself was one. He looked at the others.

They were all edgy or simply frightened, but they were taking it very well. Some of them were stationed at the gates of the Quad, but none of them, as far as he could see, was armed. Except for McCarthy. The psych man was wearing his Star Watcher helmet and had a B-gun strapped at his side. Probably had a small force-field in his pocket, Ward thought, _and_ a pair of bra.s.s knuckles.

"So--the philosophy king got it too," McCarthy said, coming over to them. He was a big man, young but already florid with what Ward had always thought of as a roan complexion. "Love, understanding, sympathy--wasn't that what was supposed to work wonders? All they need is a copy of Robinson Crusoe and a chance to follow their natural instincts, eh?"

"One failure doesn't prove anything," Ward said, trying not to be angry.

"_One_ failure? How often do they have to make us. .h.i.t the slides for the safety of the Mob Quad before you adopt a sensible theory?"

"Let's not go through all that again. Restraint, Rubber hoses and Radiological shock--I've heard all about the 3 Rs."

"At least they work!"

"Oh, yes, they work fine. Except that they never learn to read and they can't sign their names with anything but an X."

"It was progressive education that destroyed reading," McCarthy said heatedly. "And they don't _need_ to sign their names--that's what universal fingerprinting is for."

"Please, gentlemen," Dr. Allenby interrupted gently. "This kind of squabbling is unbecoming to members of the faculty. Besides," he smiled with faded irony, "considering the circ.u.mstances, it's hardly a proper time."

He pointed to the windows over the Quad where an occasional figure could be seen behind the gla.s.s. Lucky it was unbreakable, Ward thought, hearing the wild hysterical yelling from inside.

"Mob Quad," Allenby said bitterly. "I thought I was naming it as a joke.

The original Mob Quad was at Merton College, Oxford. One of the old defunct universities. _They_ had a Mob Quad to shelter students and professors from the town mobs. Professors _and_ students, gentlemen--they were a united front in those days. I suppose no one could have predicted our present circ.u.mstances."

"That's all history," McCarthy said impatiently. "Bunk. This is _now_, and I say the thing to do--"

"We know." Allenby waved him to silence. "But your way has been tried long enough. How long is it since Los Angeles Day, when the U.N.

buildings were bombed and burned by the original 3R Party in order to get rid of Unesco? Two hundred forty-three years next June, isn't it?

And your Party had had all that time to get education back on what it calls a sane program. Now _n.o.body_ is educated."

"It takes time to undo the damage of progressive education," McCarthy said. "Besides, a lot of that junk--reading, writing--as I've often told Ward--"

"All right," Ward broke in. "But two and a half centuries is long enough. Someone must try a new tack or the country is doomed. There isn't much time. The Outs.p.a.ce invaders--"

"The Outs.p.a.ce invaders are simply Russians," McCarthy said flatly.

"That's a convenient view if you're an ostrich. Or, if you want to keep the Pretend War going, until the Outs.p.a.cers take us over."

McCarthy snorted contemptuously. "Ward, you d.a.m.ned fool--"

"That will be all, gentlemen," Allenby said. He did not raise his voice, but McCarthy was silent and Ward marveled, as he had on other occasions, at the authority the old man carried.

"Well," McCarthy said after a moment, "what are you going to do about _this_?" He gestured toward the windows from which shouts still rang.

"Nothing. Let it run its course."

"But you can't do _that_, man!"

"I can and I will. What do you think, John?"

"I agree," Ward said. "They won't hurt each other--they never have yet.

It'll wear itself out and then, tomorrow, we'll try again." He did not feel optimistic about how things would be the next day, but he didn't want to voice his fears. "The thing that worries me," he said, "are those tigers. Where'd they come from?"

"What tigers?" McCarthy wanted to know.

Ward told him.

"First it was cats," McCarthy said, "then birds ... now tigers. Either you're seeing things or someone's using a concealed projector."

"I thought of the projector, but these seemed real. Stunned at first--as if they were as surprised as I was."

"You have a teleport in your cla.s.s," Allenby said.

"Yes--maybe that's the way it was done. I don't know quite what to make of it," Ward said. If he voiced his real suspicion now, he knew it would sound silly. "I know some of them can teleport. I've seen them. Small things, of course...."

"Not in _my_ cla.s.ses," McCarthy said indignantly. "I absolutely forbid that sort of thing."

"You do wrong, then," Allenby said.

"It's unscientific!"

"Perhaps. But we want to encourage whatever wild talents they possess."