"Going to America is a start," said Graff. "And American passports aren't restricted the way Polish passports are."

"We'll talk about it," said John Paul. "Come back later."

"Are you insane?" asked Helena as soon as they were out of earshot. "Isn't it obvious what the boy is planning?"

"No to the insanity, yes to the obviousness."

"These vids are going to be even more embarrassing for you than the earlier ones were for Sillain."

"Not really," said Graff.

"Why, because you intend to cheat the boy after all?"

"If I did that, then I truly would be insane." He stopped on the curb, apparently meaning to finish this conversation before getting back into the van with the others. Had he forgotten that what he was saying now was still being recorded?

No, he knew it. He wasn't speaking to her alone.

"Captain Rudolf," he said, "you saw, and everyone will see, that there was no way we could get that boy willingly into space. He doesn't want to go. He doesn't care about the war. That's what we've accomplished with this stupid repressive policy in the noncompliant nations. We have the best we've ever seen, and we can't use him because we've spent years creating a culture that hates the Hegemony and therefore the Fleet. We pissed on millions and millions of people in the name of some stupid population control laws, in defiance of their core beliefs and their community identity, and because the universe is statistically more likely to be ironic than not, of course our best chance at another commander like Mazer Rackham popped up among the ones we pissed on. I didn't do that, and only fools would blame me for it."

"So what was that all about? This agreement you promised? What's the point?"

"To get John Paul Wieczorek out of Poland, of course."

"But what difference does that make, if he won't go up to Battle School?"

"He's still... he still has a mind that processes human behavior the way some autistic savants process numbers or words. Don't you think it's a good thing to get him to a place where he can get a real education? And out of a place where he'll be constantly indoctrinated with hatred for the Hegemony and the I.F.?"

"I think that's beyond the scope of your authority," said Helena. "We're with the Battle School, not some Committee to Shape a Better Future by Moving Children Around."

"I'm thinking of Battle School," said Graff.

"To which John Paul Wieczorek will never go, as you just admitted."

"You're forgetting the research we've been conducting. It may not be final in some technical scientific sense, but it's already conclusive. People reach their peak ability as military commanders much earlier than we thought. Most of them in their late teens. The same age when poets do their most passionate and revolutionary work. And mathematicians. They peak, and then it falls off. They coast on what they learned back when they were still young enough to learn. We know within a window of about five years when we have to have our commander. John Paul Wieczorek will already be too old when that window opens. Past his peak."

"Obviously you've been given information I don't have," said Helena.

"Or figured it out," said Graff. "Once it was obvious John Paul was never going to Battle School, my mission changed. Now all that matters is we get John Paul out of Poland and into a compliant country, and we keep our word to him, absolutely, to the letter, so he knows our promises will be kept even when we know we've been cheated."

"What's the point of that?" asked Helena.

"Captain Rudolf, you're speaking without thinking."

He was right. So she thought.

"If we have more time before we need our commander," she said, "then do we have time for him to marry and have children and then the children grow up enough to be the right age?"

"Just barely, yes. We have just barely enough time. If he marries young. If he marries somebody who is very, very brilliant so the gene mix is good."

"But you aren't going to try to control that, are you?"

"There are many steps on the continuum between controlling something and doing nothing at all."

"You really do think in the long term, don't you?"

"Think of me as Rumpelstiltskin."

She laughed. "All right, now I get it. You're giving him the wish of his heart, today. And then, long after he's forgotten, you're going to pop up and ask for his firstborn child."

Graff clapped an arm across her shoulder and walked with her toward the waiting van. "Only I don't have some stupid loophole that will let him get out of it if he can guess my name."

TEACHER'S PEST

This was not the section of Human Community that John Paul Wiggin had tried to register for. It wasn't even his third choice. The university computer had assigned it to him because of some algorithm involving his seniority, how many first-choice classes he had received during his time there, and a slew of other considerations that meant nothing to him except that instead of getting one of the top-notch faculty he had come to this school to study with, he was going to have to suffer through the fumbling of a graduate student who knew little about the subject and less about how to teach it.

Maybe the algorithm's main criterion was how much he needed the course in order to graduate. They put him here because they knew he couldn't drop.

So he sat there in his usual front-row seat, looking at the backside of a teacher who looked like she was fifteen and dressed like she had been allowed to play in her mother's closet. She seemed to have a nice body and was probably trying to hide it behind frumpiness—but the fact that she knew she had something worth hiding suggested that she was no scientist. Probably not even a scholar.

I don't have time to help you work through your self-visualization problems, he said silently to the girl at the chalkboard. Nor to help you get past whatever weird method of teaching you're going to try out on us. What will it be? Socratic questioning? Devil's advocate? Therapy-group "discussion"?

Belligerent toughness?

Give me a bored, worn-out wreck of a professor on the verge of retirement over a grad student every time.

Oh well. It was only this semester, next semester, a senior thesis, and then on to a fascinating career in government. Preferably in a position where he could work for the downfall of the Hegemony and the restoration of sovereignty for all nations.

Poland in particular, but he never said that to anyone, never even admitted that he had spent the first six years of his life in Poland. His documents all showed him and his whole family to be naturalborn Americans. His parents' unlosable Polish accents proved that to be a lie, but considering that it was the Hegemony that had moved them to America and given them their false papers, it wasn't likely anybody was going to press the issue.

So write your diagrams on the board, Little Miss I-Want-to-Grow-Up-to-Be-a-Perfesser. I'll ace your tests and get my A and you'll never have a clue that the most arrogant, ambitious, and intelligent student on this campus was in your class.

At least that's what they told him he was back when they were recruiting him. All except the arrogant part. They didn't actually say that. He just read it in their eyes.

"I wrote all this on the board," said the grad student with chalk, "because I want you to memorize it and, with any luck, understand it, because it's the basis of everything else we'll discuss in this class."

John Paul had already memorized it, of course, just by reading it. Because it was stuff he hadn't seen before in his outside reading, it was obvious her "method" was to try to be "cutting edge," full of the latest—and most likely to be wrong—research.

She looked right at him. "You seem particularly bored and contemptuous, Mr.... Wiggin, is it? Is that because you already know about the community selection model of evolution?"