bull session. The talk ranged through every possible subject and was kept spiced by Arensa's original and usually radical ideas.
However, no matter what was discussed, the subject usually worked around to girls and then broke up with the un-startling conclusion: "There's no sense in talking about it-there aren't any girls in the Randolph. Let's turn in."
Almost as entertaining was the required seminar in "Doubt." The course had been instituted by the present commandant and resulted from his own observation that every military organization-with the Patrol no exception- suffered from an inherent vice. A military hierarchy automatically places a premium on conservative behavior and dull conformance with precedent; it tends to penalize original and imaginative thinking. Commodore Arkwright realized that these tendencies are inherent and inescapable; he hoped to offset them a bit by setting up a course that could not be passed without original thinking.
The method was the discussion group, made up of youngsters, oldsters, and officers. The seminar leader would chuck out some proposition that attacked a value usually regarded as axiomatic. From there on anything could be said.
It took Matt a while to get the hang of it. At his first session the leader offered: "Resolved: that the Patrol is a detriment and should be abolished." Matt could hardly believe his ears.
In rapid succession he heard it suggested that the past hundred years of Patrol-enforced peace had damaged the race, that the storm of mutations that followed atomic warfare were necessarily of net benefit under the inexorable laws of evolution, that neither the human race nor any of the other races of the system could expect to survive permanently in the universe if they deliberately forsook war, and that, in any case, the Patrol was made up of a bunch of self-righteous fatheads who mistook their own trained-in prejudices for the laws of nature.
Matt contributed nothing to the first discussion he attended.
The following week he heard both mother love and love of mother questioned. He wanted to reply, but, for the life of him, could think of no other answer than "Because!" Thereafter came attacks on monotheism as a desirable religious form, the usefulness of the scientific method, and the rule of the majority, in reaching decisions. He discovered that it was permissible to express opinions that were orthodox as well as ones that were unorthodox and began to join the debate by defending some of his own pet ideas.
At once he found his own unconscious assumptions that lay behind his opinions subjected to savage attack and found himself again reduced to a stubborn and unvoiced "Because!"
He began to catch on to the method and found that he could ask an innocent question that would undermine someone else's line of argument. From then on he had a good time.