Billy knew from experience not to comment at this point, regardless of how attractive he found the display, or he’d just have to sit through a lecture on how TV used to work. He jiggled around in his chair while he waited. Jack was starting to get really cranky when he found the cursor, a little red biplane, in the upper left corner. Curse you and worse, Red Baron, and your little dog, too. I am not going to pull you into the “About” box unless you’re selling me a flight out of here, which you’re not. He grabbed the plane with his thumb and crashed it into the “Listings” button at the bottom of the screen. The plane changed to a little stopwatch, three-quarters red, that started to count down immediately. He bit a knuckle and sighed. Forty-five seconds tonight. “Estimated set-up time” they called it. Bull. You must really think I’m stupid if you think I’m going to believe that it takes that long to grab the listings or that you have to do it this way. You just want me to watch your promos a while longer. Which, against his will, Jack did and fumed some more.
Finally the screen dissolved to two rows of white text boxes arranged in a time grid on a blue background, the cursor a simple white arrow. And hadn’t that taken some doing, he reflected. He’d had to come on like a wild-eyed crypto extremist and threaten to invoke every community-standard suppression right in the law to get the service to default his display to only the two free services. In light of today’s events, it had been dismayingly easy to convince them that he found even the titles of some of the shows on the pay channels offensive. What the hell. They probably thought he was a member of some kind of splinter Amish sect and ran his system with a hand-crank; the morons probably even believed it. He had what he wanted.
The yellow vertical line through the display showed that the current time was, mercifully, within a minute of the free real-time start of shows on both channels. He blew out a breath and tried to force off some of his mood with it.
“What’ll it be Billy, comedy or drama?” he asked. “We’ve got Abbott and Costello about to start on comedy, Bonanza on drama.” Mindful of the day’s pressures on both of them, he went on to offer, “There’s Lucy and Leave it to Beaver and Secret Agent up later on, too. I’ll skip-load one of them instead, if you want, so we can watch it now.”
Billy fingered Burner’s sling and fidgeted, unable to decide. He said nothing.
Jack read the program descriptions. “The Abbott and Costello has ‘Who’s on First’ tonight,” he prompted. “It’s about baseball. I don’t think you know it, do you?”
“OK,” said Billy, “Abbott and Costello. That all right with you, Dad?”
“No problem. Here we go.” Jack clicked the “Real-time” button on the “Comedy” row just as the clock rolled over. The screen bumped into hi-def and cut to the full-width image of a wooden stage curtained in red velvet. He remembered to turn the sound back on in time to pick up the familiar opening, “Heeyyy Abb—bottt!”
This time, Jack Phillips was already waiting in the rear booth of the deli. When Sue Waters came in, he caught her attention with a wave; she walked back and slipped into the bench opposite him to find coffee and cake waiting.
“The day’s a little sunny for undercover work, isn’t it Jack?”
He looked distracted. “I guess. I’m not getting any sense of closure on this Barstow thing, Sue.”
“What is it that you want, exactly?”
“I’m not sure anymore. Before I went in to see her yesterday, I guess I was still thinking conspiracy and looking for evidence. Failing that, I suppose I wanted to show her that Billy wasn’t trouble, that he was just,” he shrugged, “brighter than the other kids.”
“And?”
He shook his head. “It was like I went through some kind of bizarre mind warp. The gist of it, I think, was that she was willing to think of Billy as emotionally retarded by a couple of years and at that she acted like she was doing me a favor. But then there was this whole undercurrent that was downright spooky.” He paused, then shook his head again. “You know those old war movies where there’s some Nazi or Communist political officer attached to a military unit? There’s always a scene in there where the political officer argues with the commander in some kind of strange ideological language. You know what the individual words mean but the concepts are crazy. It was like that. Very strange. Scary.”
“I know the scene. It’s just before the loyal lieutenant arranges an accident for the commissar.”
“Yeah. But I left my lead pipe at home yesterday.”
Waters sipped her coffee and calmly said, “Affective cohorts. Conformal behavior groupings. Planned peer integration.”
He stared at her. “Don’t you go all pod people on me, too. You know about this?”
“Oh, sure. It’s all the rage at in-service training nowadays; they’ve been turning out ed graduates with it for a few years. Some of us old fogies are calling it the fourth R: reading, ’riting, rithmetic and right-thinking.”
“So this isn’t just some strange thing with Barstow.”
“Nope. It’s the new wave in the Trad schools these days.”
“Isn’t that in violation of Trad charter? Teaching values? I thought that was limited to CS schools.”
She looked at him with pity. “Jack, come on. It’s simply not possible to explain anything to anyone without also saying something about your values.”
“I’m just repeating what the law is.” He sounded defensive. “Anyway, what I thought it was.”
She grimaced. “The whole thing is just about labels, I think. If a parent is offended enough to take the school to court and the school loses, why, then the school was teaching values. The CS schools openly teach stuff that would get them sued elsewhere. That’s why you think they’re teaching values. We, on the other hand,” she raised her right hand as if taking an oath, “are pure as the driven snow. We never teach values; we just teach alternate ways of knowing. She dropped the hand and shook her head. “Not my idea, mind you. That’s how they settled it in the courts.”
“Are all the teachers doing this?” he asked.
“Yes. No. Well, we’re not all doing it,” she waved a hand, “religiously. But it is part of the core.”
“So what?”
“Remember how the system works. If something is part of the core, the students are evaluated on it. The teachers are rated based on their students’ performance in those evaluations. It’s a tidy little self-cleansing system. If I don’t teach social conformity then my kids won’t pass it; if my kids don’t pass it then eventually I’m shown the door and replaced with someone who will teach it. I’ve got to do the minimum to get my kids past the evaluation or I’m out. I can’t do anything for anybody if I’m out.”
“So you knew all this the last time we talked and you didn’t tell me.” He tried to look hurt. “Why?”
She sighed. “Last time we talked you were haring off on your own conspiracy theory. You couldn’t listen to anything else. I had a feeling that this was the real issue, but you had to find out for yourself. You wouldn’t have believed me.”
He reflected on this for a moment, then said, “You’re right. I had my own agenda then.” Then, with some heat he added, “But now that I do know what’s going on, I want Billy out of that class!”