half an hour before the building was closed for the weekend. It was a good library. The assessment rate in prosperous San Benedicto was high, and books had been purchased wisely. In the card catalogue Elvin found listed a number of up-to-date references that he could use; but there was nothing on the shelves. Five minutes before closing time, he asked the librarian for help.

"I don't suppose there's anything in," she answered. "We've had a perfect run on books all morning."

"You mean everything in the library is out?"

"Everything worthwhile." She beamed. "And most of the borrowers were your tenth graders, too, Mr. Elvin. You've certainly done a wonderful job of inspiring that class to do serious reading. Why, do you know Mabel Travis has been in here three times today? She took out seven books as soon as the library opened, and she had them back by nine-thirty. Said she'd read them all, too."

"Seven books in less than two hours?" Elvin laughed.

"I suppose she thought she had. Poor little Mabel! She hasn't much to work with, you know. But it was her new attitude I liked—so intense, so serious. And she was doing such heavy reading, too."

Elvin walked back to the Schermerhorn ranch, enjoying the noon-day warmth. San Benedicto was crowded with Saturday shoppers. He met his students everywhere, and always they commented on the practical joke he had played on them. By the time he was back in his room, the fiction of the joke was thoroughly established in his own mind. He almost believed it himself.

He glanced again at the transparent cylinder of spheres. A chemist might be able to analyze the contents and say where the jar had originated. Perhaps Miss Gerkin could do it. She had taught science for more than twenty years at San Benedicto High. Yet Elvin knew he couldn't ask her for help. If the colored balls turned out to be nothing more than hard candy, then by inescapable logic he would have to accept the fact that he was suffering from a major hallucination. It was more comfortable not to know the truth.

The idea of candy, however, brought up another association. Mrs. Schermerhorn had said that earlier in the evening Bill Blake had won a jar of candy as a prize. Bill Blake was the prize joker of the tenth grade. Elvin had what seemed to be an intuitive flash of understanding. The rocket had been a joke, all right, but it had been aimed at Elvin. The kids had rigged it up before he came home from the show. During the night they had come back and taken the stage setting away.

Elvin spent the rest of the weekend planning his revenge. He didn't think of it as that, but rather disciplinary action. Yet he knew the class would get the point and possibly even heed the implied warning. In five years Elvin had reduced the complex process of teaching to one workable rule: break the class, or the kids will break you.

Now he chose the classical cat-whip of a surprise test to crack them back into line. He spent Sunday planning it and duplicating the pages. He was scrupulously careful to be fair—at least as he defined the term. The examination covered nothing that had not been discussed in class. But Elvin taught grammar, and no field of the abstract allows such devious application of the flimsy nonsense passing for rules.

On Monday morning, with a thin smile, Elvin was ready for them. He had tenth grade English first period. As he passed out the mimeographed pages, he waited for waves of groaning to sweep the room. Nothing happened. He felt an annoying pang of anger. A hand shot up.

"Yes, Charles?" he snapped.

"If we finish before the end of the period, can we have free reading?"

"I doubt you'll finish, Charles. This test is ten pages long."

"But if we do—"

"By all means, yes."

Gary Elvin leaned back in his chair and surveyed, with satisfaction, the thirty heads bent studiously over their desks. For perhaps five minutes the idyll lasted, until Donald Schermerhorn brought his test up to the desk and asked permission to go to the library. Elvin was both amazed and disappointed; but at once he reassured himself. The test had been simply too hard for Donald.

Nonetheless, as soon as Donald was out of the room, Elvin checked his examination against the key. As he turned through the pages, his fingers began to tremble. Donald had answered everything—and answered it correctly. Before Elvin had finished checking Donald's test, ten more students had left theirs on the desk and headed for the school library.

Within ten minutes Elvin was fighting a disorganizing bewilderment far worse than the rocket-hallucination. Every examination was completed, and none that he checked had as much as one mistake. Elvin wished he could believe that whole-sale cheating had taken place, but he knew that was impossible because of the precautions he always took.

All of the tenth graders were back from the library by that time. They had each brought two or more books. Elvin's body went rigid with anger when he saw what was currently passing among them for the skill of reading. They were methodically turning pages almost as quickly as they could move their hands from one side of the books to the other, all with the appearance of engrossed attention.

Elvin banged a ruler on his desk. One or two faces looked up. "This has gone far enough!" he cried. "You asked for the privilege of free reading, but I do not intend you to make a farce of it." A hand went up. "Yes, Marilyn?"

"But we are reading, Mr. Elvin. Honestly."

"Oh, I see." His voice was thickly sarcastic. "And what's the title of your book?"

"Toynbee's Study of History."

"You've given up Grace Livingston Hill? Could you summarize Toynbee for us, Marilyn?"

"In another ten minutes, Mr. Elvin. I still have sixty pages to read."

Elvin turned savagely to another girl. "Mabel Travis! What are you reading?"

The buxom girl looked up languidly. For a split second her big eyes seemed focused on a distant prospective. "Why—why this, Mr. Elvin." She held up her book so he could see the title.

"Hypnotism in Theory and Practice," he snorted. And Mabel's I/Q was 71! "You've outgrown the comics, Mabel?"

"In a sense, yes, Mr. Elvin."

Elvin was saved from further disorientation by the interruption of an office messenger with a special bulletin announcing a second period assembly. By the time he had read it, his anger was under control. He let the reading go on and spent the rest of the period plodding through the examinations. There was not an error in any of the papers. From the prospective of the day's events, Elvin later realized that, however personally unnerving, his own particular crisis had been a minor one.

The first full scale public disaster came during the assembly, when the entire student body—nearly one hundred and fifty youngsters—was gathered in the auditorium. The principal, as always, rose to lead them in the Alma Mater. He was a huge, hatchet-faced, white-haired man, the terror of evil-doer and faculty members alike. He had a tendency to give a solemn importance to trivial things and to overlook the great ones; and there was no mistaking the awed, almost religious fervor with which he sang the school song—which was, perhaps, only natural, since he had written it himself.

On that disastrous morning he suddenly burst into a dance as the student body barrelled into the first chorus. He snatched up the startled girls' counselor and improvised a little rumba. Slowly the students' voices fell silent as they watched. Under the sweating leadership of the music teacher, the school orchestra held the pace for another bar or two, until one of the players stood up and rendered a discordant hot lick on his trumpet.

A trio of caretakers carried the struggling principal off the platform and shouting teachers herded the students on to their next classes. Thirty minutes later the word-of-mouth information was carefully spread through the