Rafe, give it to me! Try me! I can copy it!
"Then Abdullah abd Almahdi faintly said the stone was shoddy,
But he thought that, in a pinch, he might bid fifty cents himself.
There ensued a slight commotion where he could repent the notion,
And Abdullah was promoted to the Oriental Shelf."
Rafe! Stop singing that stupid song and give me the stuff! She can't learn anything if you just think about that theory stuff. She already knows that! Come on! Give!
Lenny Poe grabbed a pencil and a sheaf of paper from the colonel's desk and began writing frantically as the Song of the Egyptian Diamond stopped suddenly.
Words. Nonsense words. That's all most of the stuff was to Lenny. It didn't matter. He spelled them as he thought they should be, and if he made a mistake, Rafe would correct him.
Rafe tried to keep a picture of the words as they would look if printed while he thought them verbally, and that helped. The information came across in the only way it could come across—not as concepts, but as symbols.
Lenny hardly noticed that the Secretary of Defense and the President had come into the room. He didn't even realize that Colonel Spaulding was feeding him fresh sheets of paper.
Lenny didn't seem to notice the time passing, nor the pain in his hand as the muscles tired. He kept writing. The President left with the Defense Secretary and came back again after a while, but Lenny ignored them.
And when it was over, he pushed pencil and paper aside and, massaging his right hand with his left, sat there with his eyes closed. Then, slowly, a smile spread over his face.