The bottom newel post caught me in the belly, and I passed out — no more than a couple of seconds.
Robert had yanked open the door and was running for a teacher before I hit.
I should have ruptured myself. Apparently all I did, though, was knock all my air out and, temporarily and very slightly, atort my right spermatic. Because I’d gone unconscious, however, and people were wondering whether I’d hit my head, I spent the night in observation at the hospital.
In the patients’ lounge were several of those large-sized pulp magazines that I recognized as the type I’d seen (but never read) last summer at camp. I selected the one with the most interesting cover — girl, bikini, bubble-helmet, monster — and took it back to my bed and read my first two science-fiction stories.
One climaxed with a tremendous spaceship battle, the dénouement of which was someone figuring out that the death ray the enemy used was actually nothing more than light, slowed way down, so that its energy potential went way up. I don’t remember one character, or one situation besides the battle; I doubt if I would want to. But the idea, connected forever in my memory with a marvelous illustration (I’m sure it was by Virgil Finlay, though I’ve never run across the magazine again) of bubble-helmeted spacemen entering a chamber of looming vampire monsters, remains.
The other story I read that night leaves me with this recollection: Some Incredibly Ancient Aliens (in the lead illustration, they are all veined heads and bulging eyes) are explaining to someone (the hero? the villain?) that the brain is never used to full capacity by humans, but they, you see, have been using theirs, which are much larger than humans’ anyway, to full capacity now for centuries. And they are very tired.
And at school, a couple of weeks later, Robert mentioned to me that he had just read a wonderful book that I must take a look at: Rocketship Galileo. He had read it twice already. It was, he explained, probably one of the best books in the world. He even volunteered to get it out of the school library for me that afternoon (I had several books overdue and couldn’t take out any myself till they were returned), which he did…
Too much enthusiasm among my friends for something has often been a turn-off for me — often to my detriment. I still have not read Heinlein’s Rocketship Galileo, though Robert, after I finally returned the book to the library, unread, actually bought a copy and gave it to me.
That year’s history study was divided into one term of ancient Greek history and one term of Roman. The climax of the Greek term was a daylong Greek Festival which our class put on for the rest of the school. The morning of Festival Day, the whole school, in the auditorium, watched a play competition, where several short, original plays “on Greek themes” were performed, one of which was voted best by a board of teachers.
For that year’s Festival, I had written one of the plays (a comedy in which I took the part of Pericles — I believe he was having labor problems with the slaves over the construction of the Parthenon). It took second to a play by a girl who had muscular dystrophy, a speech impediment, and who used to cry all the time for no reason. Backstage in my toga, furiously jealous, I vigorously applauded the announcement of her triumph, among the rest of the clapping actors from the various play-companies, while she limped out on stage to receive her wreath of bay-leaves. Congratulating her, and the happy members of the cast of her play, I decided the Greek Festival was a waste.
I can only remember one dialogue exchange from my play. I hated it; another cast member had written it and insisted on inserting it, and I had finally acquiesced to keep peace. (Socrates: “How is the Parthenon coming along, Pericles?” Pericles [through gritted teeth]: “It’s all up but the columns.”) But I still have the opening of the prize-winning play by heart, with only that one morning’s viewing:
The curtains had opened and a chorus of Greek women in blue veils walked across the stage, growing light with dawn, reciting:
The women turned, walked back again — reciting what, I no longer recall. But I still remember that “attacked” as one of the most exciting words I had ever heard. Terminating the sentence with its clutch of harsh consonants, while all the other sounds fluttered behind it in memory, spoken by six ten-year-old girls at ordinary volume, it had — to me — the force of a shout.
Martha, who wore leg braces and walked funny and couldn’t talk properly and had rightfully won her prize over my glib, forgettable wise-cracks, had shown me for the first time that a single word, placed properly in a sentence, could give an effect at once inevitable, astonishing, and beautiful.
After a very un-Greek lunch in the third floor dining room, everyone went up to the tenth-floor gymnasium, where we held a junior Olympics. The boys had wrestling matches, discus throwing, high jumping, and broad jumping. The girls ran hurdle races, chariot races, and did jumping too. Then there was a final relay where boys and girls, in hiked-up togas, ran — their papier maché torches streaming crêpepaper fire — around and around the gym.
It was that dull.
In English that term we had read the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as a good handful of traditional myths — most of which I was familiar with from My Book House. We even tackled one or two Greek plays in translation; and over one English period, Mrs. T, my favorite English teacher from my whole elementary school days, explained to us the etymology of “calligraphy,” “geology,” “optical,” “palindrome,” “obscene,” and “poet.”
In Math, to coordinate with our Greek unit, we devoted one day a week to Geometry. Using “only the tools Pythagoras accepted” (i.e., a compass and a straight edge), we went about discovering simple geometric relationships about the circle and various inscribed angles. We constructed a demonstration to show that the area of a circle, as the limit of the sum of its sectors cut ever smaller and placed alternately, approaches a parallelogram with a base of πr, and a height of r, to wit, an area of πr2And Robert gave me another book, which I did read this time, called The Black Star Passes, by John W. Campbell. Again, I remember neither plot nor characters. But I do recall that someone in it had invented a Very Powerful Mathematical Tool called “the multiple calculus,” about which author Campbell went on with ebullient enthusiasm. We had already been taught, on the other four days of the week, the basic manipulative algebraic skills, adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing polynomials. At home, I stumbled through the Encyclopedia Britannica article on Infinitesimal Calculus (which went on about somebody named Newton as enthusiastically as Campbell had gone on about his mathematician); days later I went down to the High School Library on the school’s third floor, got out a book; got out another; and then three more. Then I bought a Baron’s Review of Trigonometry. And then I got some more books.
But the school term was over again.
At summer camp that year I was assigned to a tent at the bottom of the tent colony. My iron-frame bed, which I made up that first afternoon with sheets so starched they had to be peeled apart (and the inevitable olive drab army blanket), was next to the bed of a boy named Eugene. I didn’t like him. I don’t think anybody else in the tent did either. But he made friendly attempts at conversation — mostly about his father, who, you see, edited Galaxy: “Don’t you know what Galaxy is? It’s the science-fiction magazine! Don’t you like science fiction? Well, then what does your father do?”