Miss Hippiness remembered instantly. She remembered Holmes as a child, but she knew what he was now. He headed the bureau known only by an electronic symbol. Too secret to name, it was said in high circles.
Miss Hippiness dropped her hands from little Charley's shoulders and covered her face. Things twitched and twirked like little knives somewhere deep inside her. Fear? Horror?
"You were my greatest, my very best teacher," said Holmes Oneholmes on the recording coming through little Charley's open lips. "And I have treasured your memory. So you know how hateful is my task this afternoon."
Miss Hippiness peeked at Charley's face through her fingers. His little blue eyes were blank, fastened to a spot high on the classroom wall behind her. There was no tiny bit of expression on his face.
She heard Holmes Oneholmes cough and his voice went on, official this time, all pupilness erased.
"Susan Fiftysusan," he said, "the latest recording from inside Charley Tencharles, which we have just heard, convicts you beyond reprieve. Where you found the human-wiretap information we do not know. But we'll find it, and destroy it. It is the order that your future disintegration date is hereby superseded. Instead of disintegration two years and ten days from now, you will proceed to the nearest disintegrator within the hour."
Miss Hippiness lowered her face and her old eyes began sparking. Nobody ever knew their disintegration dates which the computers put on the card at birth. Nobody ever knew when they had to march into one of those horrid machines and cease living. But to learn that her own had been set a mere two years away—and she in the prime of life....
"Son of a bitch," she said, using the first 20th Century epithet that came to mind.
"You are convicted," Holmes Oneholmes was saying, "of spreading sedition and danger to our entire world in an unthinkable way, tampering with the minds of our children—"