These arrivals went at their project with stop watches and slide rules.
They calibrated themselves and James with the cold-blooded attitude of
racetrack touts clocking their favorite horses. Where James had simply
taken what he wanted or what he could at any single sitting, then let
it settle in his mind before taking another dose of unpremeditated
magnitude, these fellows ascertained the best effectiveness of each
application to each of them. They tried taking long terms under the
machine and then they measured the time it took for the installed
information to sink in and settle into usable shape. Then they tried
shorter and shorter sittings and measured the correspondingly shorter
settling times. They found out that no two men were alike, nor were any
two subjects. They discovered that a man with an extensive education
already could take a larger sitting and have the new information
available for mental use in a shorter settling time than a man whose
education had been sketchy or incomplete.
They brought in men who had either little or no mathematics and gave them
courses in advanced subjects. Afterwards they provided the foundation
mathematics and they calibrated and measured the time it took for the
higher subject to be understood as it aligned its information to the
whole. Men came with crude English and bluntly read the dictionary and
the proper rules of grammar and they were checked to see if their early
bad-speech habits were corrected, and to what degree the Holden machine
could be made to help repair the damage of a lifelong ingrained set of
errors. They sent some of these boys through comparison dictionaries in
foreign tongues and then had their language checked by specialists who
were truly polylingual. There were some who spoke fluent English but no
other tongue; these progressed into German with a German-to-English
comparison dictionary, and then into French via a German-to-French
comparison and were finally checked out in French by French-speaking
examiners.
And Professor White's block diagram grew complex, and Dr. Persons's
histograms filled pages and pages of his broad notebooks.
It was the first time that James Holden had ever seen a team of
researchers plow into a problem, running a cold and icy scientific
investigation to ascertain precisely how much cause produced how much
effect. Holden, who had taken what he wanted or needed as the time came,
began to understand the desirability of full and careful programming. The
whole affair intrigued him and interested him. He plunged in with a will
and gave them all the help he could.
He had no time to be bored, and he did not mark the passage of time until
he arrived at his thirteenth birthday.
Then one night shortly after his birthday, James Holden discovered women
indirectly. He had his first erotic dream.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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