Read Ebook: The last class by Banks Richard Adkins Dan Illustrator

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Ebook has 115 lines and 6589 words, and 3 pages

Illustrator: Dan Adkins

Release date: November 20, 2023

Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1962

The Last Class

Illustrated by ADKINS

"And now, children," said Miss Hippiness, her smile shooting deep wrinkles across her face like the cracks up the scarred sides of the ancient, empty sky-scrapers of New York.

The twelve children in the cozy classroom came to attention. It was not her words, it was the tone, the creaking smile.

"And now, children," said Miss Hippiness again, sitting down on the old-fashioned straight chair she affected, "have you all put away your atomic blocks?"

"Yes, teacher," came the chorus of sweet young voices.

"Your electronic jackstraws? Your pencil-mnestics?"

"Yes, teacher."

"And have you all put the pretty little activator pills in your mouths?"

They nodded. Miss Hippiness raised her hand for silence.

"Thirty dear, dear seconds, children," she said.

A sigh of pleasure suddenly smoked up from the twelve young faces as the pills took effect, and they remembered. Poor little darlings, to be so terribly fooled, said Miss Hippiness to herself.

If it was only possible for them to remember THIS part of the day, outside--and not to have it blacked out by the pills half an hour from now. To remember this part of the day, above all other parts, on into adulthood. What a different world they would create....

"So we come to the nice nice part of our day," she said. "We are going to talk again about the 20th Century."

The children fidgeted in pleasure. She had turned on the sun five minutes ago and its beams through the window highlighted the youngness, the eagerness of their faces, turned so trustingly to her.

Here and there the sunlight flashed silver glints for instants on the tiny identification discs, smaller than 20th Century dimes in their foreheads and half hidden in the hairlines where they were inset in each person nowadays at birth.

A small hand shot up.

"Yes?" said Miss Hippiness.

"Can we talk about the gangsters?" Marymarymary asked.

Another small hand jerked up, eagerly.

"Yes?" said Miss Hippiness.

"Can we talk about wars and bombs and things?" Henry Sixhenry asked.

Miss Hippiness beamed on them. "Children, children," she scolded in fake sternness, "of course we can. But we've talked about them all so often. Isn't there something else you'd rather hear?"

The little hands sprouted like fast weeds.

"Miss Hippiness--" "Miss Hippiness--"

She was called Miss Hippiness, even to her face now, and she didn't dislike it. Somewhere inside her the name had begun to give out a pulsing warmth like a tiny real sun. Fifty years ago she would have disintegrated any child who would have dared to call her such a name.

Her eyes flicked at the disintegrator, still standing in its corner opposite the matter transmitter. But it was a dusty, dirty old thing. She hadn't used it in years. At home, she still had the hair ribbon--they had been in style briefly that year among certain types of families--the last little girl had been wearing the day she had walked so defiantly into the disintegrator.

More frequently, the last year or so, Miss Hippiness had been troubled by nightmares in which the little girl's face peppered everything. Strange. She didn't remember the faces of those other children she had forced to march into the machine. But then, she had been much younger in those days, so much more a part of this contemporary world. And of course, that was before she had begun delving so avidly into history.

Miss Hippiness had been teaching the first grade in the same school--Official Learning Dome 111, called OLD Triple-One--for almost sixty years and she had been a great teacher. She had never been a really large woman or a fat one. It was just that she tended to massiveness in the one part of her anatomy, and ten years ago she had let the massiveness really bloom.

Never again had she given in to the pressures of fashion in a world where hips and breasts came and went on women like hemlines of the 20th Century.

The 20th Century!

Miss Hippiness let a dreaminess invade her eyes.

"Children," she said in her fond voice, "the 20th Century has never been duplicated. It stands unique in history. Think of the richness of that far age when a person could actually choose what he was going to do in life, and where there were still hunger and sickness and want and--"

"And wars," said little Charley Tencharles.

"Yes," said Miss Hippiness. "And accidents hurting people faster than seconds in a clock. And people fighting each other and cursing each other with words we don't even know any more."

"Like someday-vitch," cried Marymarymary.

Miss Hippiness rolled her eyes in joy. "It was son of a bitch, dear," she said. "It was a string of tiny real words that slished off the tongue like a string of bright little silver daggers."

"Yes, teacher," the children chorused, squirming in wonder.

"And there were the gangsters, those wonderful, wonderful eccentric persons, like the robinhoods and beowulfs I've told you about. And yes, there were the bombs that went bam and boom and wham, and made beautiful colors and high gorgeous mushrooming clouds--like the pictures in the ancient book I smuggled in to show you the other day."

"And people blown to bits," said Stan Thirtystanley in a fake grownup voice.

"To little itsy-bitsy bits," Miss Hippiness cried. "The 20th Century, children. Ah, what happiness to have lived then, the whole world violent and dangerous and seething and exciting like a string of storybooks every inch of the way around the equator. But where you could be an individual--your own boss, they used to call it."

She couldn't sit now. She raised her massive hips off the straight chair and began pacing up and down the room, her face like an ancient television screen. And the children's eyes followed her like hungry puppies after a mama dog.

"It was the final splurge, children, of the individual man," she said. "Nowadays we have a world of people, all the same, all dull, all safe and healthy and secure. Then it was a world of persons. And in between every bit of violence there was a cozy bit of restful safety. In between every bit of anger there was a silent bit of cozy peace. For every tragic moment there was a moment of sunny happiness."

"And were people really, really allowed to die by themselves?" asked Charley Tencharles.

She stopped and bent a loving glance on him. In the 20th Century he would have been called Teacher's Pet. He was a dear and a doll and an angel.

"Oh, many, many good people," she said, a catch in her voice, "died by themselves. Imagine, some were taken by old age! And, as we said last week, there were those wonderful sicknesses. A person could die of one of those. Nobody in the whole 20th Century had a card in the central bureau which had on it the date of their death. Think of it, children."

She was wound up now, coming to the new part she had to tell them. The part about electronics, which had been an infant science at the start of the 20th Century. Matter transmitters were not known, nor disintegrators. Robots were just on the horizon. Radio and television came to flower. Man was just beginning to step off the face of the world into deep space. And there were so few people on earth that there were open fields all over every continent. Fine blowing trees everywhere, and real, live wild flowers.

"Man started the 20th Century in complete privacy," she said, her vast hips quivering as she paced. "Then came the time--this was during the years of the gangsters--when electronics helped man put tiny ears in rooms, behind pictures on the walls, so private speech could be recorded. And telephones--did I tell you what telephones were?--could be tapped, as they called it, so other people could listen in when you had secrets to tell a friend."

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