Memories of the Future Read Online Free

go home and take a relaxing bath and then tune in on a good telempathic program and forget his troubles. But it was part of his job to placate frustrated parents, so be couldn’t very well turn them away. If he’d known they were going to come ’coptering out to the educational center, he would have put off notifying them till morning, but it was too late to think of that now.
    “Send them in,” he said wearily into the intercom.
    Mr. and Mrs. Meadows were a small, shy couple—production-line workers, according to Ronnie’s dossier. The principal had little use for production-line workers, particularly when they spawned—as they so frequently did—emotionally unstable children. He was tempted to slant the interrogation lights into their faces, but he thought better of it.
    “You were notified that your son was all right,” he said disapprovingly, when they had seated themselves. “There was no need for you to come out here.”
    “We—we were worried, sir,” Mr. Meadows said.
    “Why were you worried? I told you when you first reported your son missing that he’d try to return to his empathic existence and that we’d pick him up here as soon as he showed up. His type always wants to return, but unfortunately we can’t classify our charges prior to placing them on the delivery train, since doing so would require dispelling the empathic illusion at an inopportune time. Dispelling the illusion is the parents’ job, anyway, once the child is integrated in reality. Consequently, we can’t deal with our potential misfits till they’ve proven themselves to be misfits by running away.”
    “Ronnie isn’t a misfit!” Mrs. Meadows protested, her pale eyes flashing briefly. “He’s just a highly sensitive child.”
    “Your son, Mrs. Meadows,” the principal said icily, “has a pronounced Oedipus complex. He bestowed the love he ordinarily would have felt for you upon his fictitious teacher. It is one of those deplorable anomalies which we cannot foresee, but which, I assure you, we are capable of correcting, once it reveals itself. The next time your son is reborn and sent to you, I promise you he won’t run away!”
    “The corrective treatment, sir,” Mr. Meadows said, “is it painful?”
    “Of course it isn’t painful! Not in the sense of objective reality.”
    He was trying to keep his mounting anger out of his voice, but it was difficult to do so. His right hand had begun to twitch and that made his anger all the worse, for he knew that the twitching meant another spell. And it was all Mr. and Mrs. Meadows’ fault!
    These production-line imbeciles! These electrical-appliance accumulators! It was not enough to free them from the burden of bringing up their children! Their piddling questions had to be answered, too!
    “Look,” he said, getting up and walking around the desk, trying to keep his mind off his hand, “this is a civilized educational system. We employ civilized methods. We are going to cure your son of his complex and make it possible for him to come and live with you as a normal red-blooded American boy. To cure him of his complex, all we need to do is to make him hate his teacher instead of love her. Isn’t that simple enough?
    “The moment he begins to hate her, the valley will lose its abnormal fascination and he will think of it as normal children think of it—as the halcyon place where he attended elementary school. It will be a pleasant memory in his mind, as it’s intended to be, but he won’t have any overwhelming urge to return to it.”
    “But,” Mr. Meadows said hesitantly, “won’t your interfering with his love for his teacher have some bad effect upon him? I’ve done a little reading in psychology,” he added apologetically, “and I was under the impression that interfering with a child’s natural love for its parent—even when that love has been transferred—can leave, well, to put it figuratively, scar tissue.”
    The principal knew that his face had gone