Read The Reproductive System (Gollancz SF Library) for Free Online Page A

on, he merely skimmed his lessons and school, and avoided bringing home any of the hated books. At home his only lapse was glancing at the back of the cereal box: ‘Niacin, Thiamine, Riboflavin …’ Surely, he reasoned, it was all right to read, as long as he did not understand.
    This idea of reading only the unreadable stayed with him until he asked his father for permission to study Latin and Greek.
    ‘What? If you want to go to college at all, you’ll by god become an engineer. Or else I’ll Latin you, god damn it !’
    Cal went off to the Miami Institute of Technocracy, then, to become an engineer. At the station, Codman nodded goodbye.
    MIT was small. There were just twenty students and one professor altogether, and in Cal’s class there were but three other students. The entire school occupied one large room above a dry-cleaning plant. In after years, Cal would always associate the smell of chemicals and the hiss of steam with Dr. Elwood Trivian.
    ‘You have an interest in the inimicable classics? I laud that, young man. We have, alack, no time to teach them here. They are, you cogitate, useless. I must deplore you to study science, and science alone.
    ‘I had a thorough grinding in the classics myself, and am today but a humble pedagod. Why, I earn less here in an entire year than I would in a single week on the railroad, steering a train ! And that takes no learning at all !’
    Half-way through his course, Cal switched his major from Engrg. Arts to Biophys. Arts. He wrote his father explaining that this had more to do with life. In a sense, he was telling the truth, for it enabled him to sit next to Mary Junes, whom he loved.
    Mary did not love him back; she was not likely to love him; she did not even know his name. She seemed to love Harry Stropp, their tall, thickset, swart classmate, who majored in Phys. Ed.
    She was a short, chunky, tough-looking girl with a great gob of yellow hair like dirty cotton. As everyday attire she wore borrowed sweatshirts, mixed and matched with dungarees and borrowed sweatpants. She seemed addicted to black cough drops. Her breath smelt of menthol, her hands were always sticky, and her wide, sluttish mouth was stained black. Cal dreamed of pasting a kiss on those gummy lips.
    He schemed to sit next to her in every class : Current events (where Dr. Trivian read his morning paper aloud), Phonics Praxis and Appreciation of Thermodynamics. Still, her nights were spent with Harry.
    Barthemo Beele, the fourth member of the class and a Journalism student, published the mimeo school paper,
The MIT Worker’s Torch
. He bitterly complained of seeing Mary and Harry kiss in public, in editorials headed : ‘Is Decency Finished?’
    One day Harry came down with a cold. After struggling through morning classes, he gave up and went home. Mary clicked a black cough drop deliciously, and winked at Cal.
    ‘What’s your name?’
    Harry arose from his sickbed in a week, to find he’d lost his girl to Cal.
    ‘I don’t care,’ he’d say, flexing his big arm and studying it. ‘She’s not the only pebble on the beach. There are plenty of other fish in the sea.’ He remained an absolute recluse, going swimming and fishing alone, and doing lots of road-work on the roof above the schoolroom. Cal felt terribly guilty every time he heard the sound of giant, sad tennis shoes on the roof, running tirelessly.
    The MIT Worker’s Torch
named Cal valedictorian of the class. On the same day, it announced the engagement of Miss Mary Junes to Barthemo Beele.
    ‘When did this happen?’ Cal asked her, holding up the mimeo sheet in a trembling hand.
    ‘Oh, you know that night last week, when you had to study?’
    ‘But—
engaged?
’
    ‘Yup. Right after graduation, me and Barty are going to live somewheres out West, where he’s got a swell job as a editor already. Isn’t that great?’
    Great. The next few days Cal knew not what he did. He wept unashamedly, tore up all her notes (‘Can I borrow