It was a brisk spring day, just the sort of weather to make our academic tweeds really appropriate. The buildings of the campus were all venerable structures, the youngest of them being about five hundred years old. They seemed to form a veritable forest of Gothic towers and halls, but the solidity of it all was somehow comforting.
The professor pointed out the Office of the Registrar, which we didn’t have to bother with. The attempt at reality wasn’t taken to ridiculous extremes. Here was the student union and the library. There was the gymnasium, which was normally well used by all the other students on the campus, but where each of us always had a reservation to use anything, anytime we wanted it. It was really more of a major sports complex, with Olympic-sized swimming pools, track and field arenas, and dozens of huge rooms specializing in every sport imaginable.
“It’s a lot bigger on the inside than out,” Mirko said.
“True, my boy, but then we don’t have to be doctrinaire about anything in Dream World, do we?”
“You can do anything in Dream World, can’t you, Professor Cee?” Maria asked.
“Well, almost anything, my dear girl.”
“Almost?” I said. “I thought the possibilities were infinite!”
“They are, old man, but there are still some things that are not possible. Don’t worry about it. We’ll get into a discussion of infinities in the course of our class work in a few months.”
“Yes, sir. But please tell me, what is it that one could not do in Dream World?”
“Independent physical research for one thing, my boy. If you were to construct an apparatus to determine the existence of a previously unknown subatomic particle, I assure you that you could not possibly learn anything that was not already in my memory modules.”
I said, “I see. All we can learn here is what you, the Combat Control Computer, already know.”
“Yes, although to what extent I am the Combat Control Computer is a rather philosophical question. I assure you that I don’t feel like a computer. It seems to me that I am as normal a human being as any of the rest of you. Or perhaps I have simply been programmed to respond that way. I don’t let it bother me and neither should you. Simply take things as they appear to be, and you’ll get along fine.”
“What other things can’t we do here?” Maria asked.
“I think that I’ll leave that as an exercise for the student. Listen up, class. You are each to think up three impossible things before breakfast tomorrow.”
The professor was like that. Questions were often answered with bigger questions and had an assignment thrown in. But we all learned that if you didn’t ask questions, you were in bigger trouble yet.
The north half of the campus was surrounded by a wilderness of woods, meadows, and streams, cut through with walking paths and bridle trails. The south half was taken up by the Town, a city of perhaps five thousand people who didn’t seem to do much but supply goods and services to the University. I mean, there wasn’t any industry or even farming going on. But then, you really don’t know what most of the people do in most of the cities you pass through. They all seem to be going about their own private errands.
There were a lot of book shops, clothiers, restaurants, and taverns about, and the professor admitted to being partial to one of them in particular.
“Should any of you ever need a drinking companion, I can generally be found in the tap room of the Old Phoenix. They brew quite a nice porter there.”
Our own homes were in a line just west of the campus, with the town to the south and the forests starting immediately north.
“My own home is in line with yours, and I should like to extend a permanent invitation to each one of you. Just drop by any time the mood strikes you. For now, though, it’s time for your tutorial sessions, so we’d best return to my offices on campus.”
He had six offices, and was waiting in all of them for us. I looked into three of them before I noticed that my name was on one of the doors.
“Confusing, isn’t it?” Said the second Professor Cee as he pointed me to the next room over.
I sat down at a desk that was identical to the one I used in the classroom. Even the pencils were in the same position.
“It actually is the same desk,” he said. “It also magically appears in your den at home whenever you are there. The purpose is simply to save you the bother of hauling your study materials about. Pretend that there is a secret crew of furniture movers, if you wish.”
“That doesn’t trouble me, sir, but how can you possibly talk to all six of us at once?”
“I really don’t know, my boy. To me, it seems that I give each of you a tutorial in turn, but the electronics and the programming of it all are quite beyond me. I could have one of the mathematics professors talk to you about it if you wish.”
“You mean that you yourself don’t know how you’re programmed, or how your circuits work?”
“Why on earth should I? Can you tell me about the precise chemical reactions presently going on in your own hypothalamus? Or which of your brain’s neurons are presently firing and to what purpose? Why should an individual be bothered with such trivia?”
“I don’t know, but shouldn’t somebody know what’s going on?”
“There are subroutines that are presently taking care of all the internal maintenance that is required by the Combat Control Computer. Some other personality is currently monitoring what is going on in the outside world, and will notify us if our attention is required. But certainly none of this is important to the task at hand, and we shouldn’t be bothered with it any more that you should be bothered with keeping your own heart beating. It is sufficient that you be notified if it should cease doing so.”
“Uh, I suppose so.”
“Good. Now, first I want to ascertain your current knowledge of world history. . . .”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
HOME LIFE AND HISTORY
Kasia was already home when I got back to our cottage, and she’d been busy. The place was bigger now, with one wing that held two study dens as well as a considerable library and another that held rooms for Agnieshka and Eva, our “servants.” I noticed that the servants’ rooms each had a door to the outside, so that they could come and go without bothering us. Why this was needed when anyone could flick in or out without bothering with doors was beyond me, but all three of my ladies seemed to be satisfied with the arrangements. Before long, Eva and Agnieshka had decorated their own rooms to suit themselves. Was this just more window-dressing, or did their programs really have an esthetic sense? They said they did, but that too could be just more of the same window-dressing.
“It looks like we’ll be doing a fair amount of entertaining, so I think that the living room and the dining room should be enlarged, don’t you think, dear?”
“Whatever makes you happy, but, you know, I sort of like it the way it is.”
“You men never like to see the furniture rearranged! My mother told me that. Okay, we’ll leave these the way they are and build a bigger living room and dining room where the front yard is. Then we’ll move the whole place back thirty or forty meters to set it off nicely from the road.”
“Love, that will put the house in the middle of the lake!”
“So we’ll move the lake back fifty meters. We’ll call the old dining room the breakfast room, and the old living room the family room.”
“How can we have a family room without a family? You know, that’s another thing we can’t do in Dream World.”
“Then you only have to think up two more before breakfast.” She saw my expression and came over into my arms. “Oh, Mickolai, I didn’t mean to be flippant. I mean, you don’t really want children right now, do you?”
“Oh, not right now, in Dream World, but eventually, well, of course!”
“And so do I, eventually. But even if we were living in the real world, I think that I would want to wait a while, until the war was over, you know.”
“So we’ll call the old living room the rumpus room, and we might as well start rumpussing in it right now.” I picked her up and carried her to the couch.
And that started our eight-year long career as college students.
The course was challenging, and it took everything we had to keep up. While the arts and sciences were not totally neglected, our schooling was heavy on strategy, tactics, military history, and military engineering. There was a major emphasis on quickly solving unusual problems. Yet it was interesting, and looking back, I thoroughly enjoyed it.