After a moment Spofforth looked at him—not just a bit to the right of him in the way that Mandatory Politeness required, but directly at him. “Good morning,” Spofforth said, in his strong, controlled voice. “Is something wrong?”
“Well…” Carpenter said, “I’m not sure.” He seemed disturbed by the question. “What do you think, Perry?”
Perry, the Dean of Studies, rubbed his nose with his forefinger. “Somebody called, Dean Spofforth. On the University Line. Called twice.”
“Oh?” Spofforth said. “What did he want?”
“He wants to talk to you,” Perry said. “About a job. A summer teaching…”
Spofforth looked at him. “Yes?”
Perry went on nervously, his eyes avoiding Spofforth’s. “What he wants to do is something that I couldn’t understand on the telephone. It’s a new thing—something he said he had discovered a yellow or two ago.” He looked around him until his gaze found that of the fat man in the brown suit. “What was it he said, Carpenter?”
“Reading?” Carpenter said.
“Yes,” Perry said. “Reading. He said he could do reading. Something about words. He wants to teach it.”
Spofforth sat up at the word. “Someone has learned to read?”
The men looked away, embarrassed at the surprise in Spofforth’s voice.
“Did you record the conversation?” Spofforth asked.
They looked at one another. Finally, Perry spoke. “We forgot,” he said.
Spofforth suppressed his annoyance. “Did he say he would call back?”
Perry looked relieved. “Yes, he did, Dean Spofforth. He said he would try to establish a connection with you.”
“All right,” Spofforth said. “Is there anything else?”
“Yes,” Perry said, fobbing his nose again. “The usual curriculum BB’s. Three suicides among the student body. And there are plans recorded somewhere for the closing down of the East Whig of Mental Hygiene; but none of the robots could find them.” Perry . seemed pleased to be able to report a failure among the staff robots. “None of the Make Sixes knew anything about them, sir.”
“That’s because I have them, Dean Perry,” Spofforth said. He opened his desk drawer and took out one of the little steel balls— the BB’s, they were called—that were used to make voice recordings. He held it out to Perry. “Play this into a Make Seven. He’ll know what to do about the Mental Hygiene classrooms.”
Perry, somewhat shamefaced, took the recording and left. Carpenter followed him out of the room. When they were gone Spofforth sat at his desk for a while, wondering about the news of the man who said he could read. He had heard of reading often enough when he was young, and knew that it had died out long before. He had seen books—very ancient things. There were still a few of them left undestroyed in the University Library.
Spofforth’s office was big, and very pleasant. He had decorated it himself, with prints of shore birds and with a carved oak sideboard he had taken from a demolished museum. On the sideboard was a row of small models of Robotic Engineering, roughly showing the history of anthropoid forms that had been used in the development of the art. The earliest, on the far left, was of a wheeled creature with a cylindrical body and four arms—very early, and somewhere between a servomechanism and an autonomous mechanical being. The model was made of Permoplastic and was about six inches tall. The robot had been, during its brief span of usefulness, called a Wheelie; none had been made for centuries.
To the right of the Wheelie was a more manlike shape, somewhat close to that of a contemporary moron robot. The statuettes became more detailed, more human, as they proceeded from left to right, until they concluded with a miniature of Spofforth himself—sleek, entirely human in appearance, poised on the balls of his feet and with his eyes, even in the model, seeming alive.
A red light began to blink on Spofforth’s desk. He pressed a button and said, “Spofforth here.”
“My name is Bentley, Dean Spofforth,” the voice on the other end said. “Paul Bentley. I’m calling from Ohio.”
“Are you the one who can read?” Spofforth said.
“Yes,” the voice said. “I taught myself how. I can read.”
The great ape sat wearily on the overturned side of a bus. The city was deserted.
At the center of the screen a white vortex appeared and began to enlarge and whirl. When it stopped it had filled more than half the screen. It became clear that it was the front page of a newspaper, with a huge headline.
Spofforth stopped the projector with the headline on the screen. “Read that,” he said.
Bentley cleared his throat nervously. “Monster Ape Terrifies City,” he read.
“Good,” Spofforth said. He started the projector again.
The rest of the film had no written words on it. They watched it in silence, through the ape’s final destructive rampage, his pathetic failure to be able to express his love, on through to his death as he fell, as though floating, from the impossibly tall building to the wide and empty street below.
Spofforth threw the switch that brought the lights back on in his office and made the bay window transparent again. The office was now no longer dark, no longer a projection room. Outside, amid the bright flowers of Washington Square, a circle of elderly graduate students sat on the unkempt grass in their denim robes. Their faces were vacant. The sun was high, distant, in the June sky. Spofforth looked at Bentley.
“Dean Spofforth,” Bentley said, “will I be able to teach the course?”
Spofforth watched him thoughtfully for a moment, and then said, “No. I’m sorry. But we should not teach reading at this university.”
Bentley stood up awkwardly. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I thought…”
“Sit down, Professor Bentley,” Spofforth said. “I believe we can use this skill of yours, for the summer.”
Bentley seated himself. He was clearly nervous; Spofforth knew that his own presence was overwhelming.
Spofforth leaned back in his chair, stretched, and smiled at Bentley amiably. “Tell me,” he asked. “How did you learn to read?”
The man blinked at him a moment. Then he said, “From cards. Reading cards. And four little books: First Reader, and Roberto and Consuela and Their Dog Biff, and…”
“Where did you get such things?” Spofforth asked.
“It was strange,” Bentley said. “The university has a collection of ancient porno films. I was trying to cull material for a course, when I came upon a sealed box of old film. With it were the four little books and the set of cards. When I played the film it was not porno at all. It showed a woman talking to children in a classroom. There was a black wall behind her and she would make marks on it that were white. For example, she would make what I later learned was the word ‘woman,’ and then the children would all say ‘woman’ together. She did the same for ‘teacher’ and ‘tree’ and ‘water’ and ‘sky.’ I remembered just having looked through the cards and seeing a picture of a woman. It had the same marks she had made under it. There were more pictures, more white marks on the black wall, more words spoken by the teacher and by the class.” Bentley blinked, remembering. “The teacher was wearing a blue dress and her hair was white. She seemed to smile all the time…”
“And then you did what?” Spofforth said.
“Yes.” Bentley shook his head, as if trying to shake away the memory. “I played the film again, and then again. I was fascinated by it, by something that was going on in it that I felt was… was…” He stopped, helpless for a word.
“Important?” Spofforth asked.
“Yes. Important.” Bentley looked at Spofforth’s eyes for a brief moment, against the rule of Mandatory Politeness. Then he looked away, toward the window, outside of which the stoned graduate students still sat silent, their heads nodding occasionally.