"I'll put you down for Venerian, Martian, and Venus trade talk. Your voice writer-you've looked over the equipment in your room?"
"Just glanced at it, sir. I saw there was a study desk and a projector."
"You'll find a spool of instructions in the upper righthand drawer of the desk. Play them over when you go back. The voice writer built into your desk is a good model. It can hear and transcribe not only the Basic vocabulary, but the Patrol's special vocabulary of technical words. If you will stick to its vocabulary, you can even write love letters on it-" Dodson glanced sharply at Lieutenant Wong, but Wong's face was impassive; Matt decided not to laugh.
"-so it's worth your while to perfect your knowledge of Basic even for social purposes. However, if you speak a word the machine can't find on its list, it will just 'beep' complainingly until you come to its rescue. Now about math-I see you have a condition in tensor calculus."
"Yes, sir," Matt admitted. "My high school didn't offer it."
Wong shook his head sadly. "I sometimes think that modern education is deliberately designed to handicap a boy. If cadets arrived here having already been taught the sort of things the young human animal can learn, and should learn, there would be fewer casualties in the Patrol. Never mind- we'll start you on tensors at once. You can't study nuclear engineering until you've learned the language of it. Your school was the usual sort, Dodson? Classroom recitations, daily assignments, and so forth?"
"More or less. We were split into three" groups."
"Which group were you in?"
"I was in the fast one, sir, in most subjects."
"That's some help, but not much. You're in for a shock, son. We don't have classrooms and fixed courses. Except for laboratory work and group drills, you study alone. It's pleasant to sit in a class daydreaming while the teacher questions somebody else, but we haven't got time for that. There is too much ground to cover. Take the outer languages alone-have you ever studied under hypnosis?"