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 That ... I do not know. There is so much ...
 The university can spare you for a half hour.
 They are fortunate to have me.
 They are. Half past three? 
 That would be good. I must go. Another student, and I must beat
notes.
I went back to the tests. More than half the class clearly hadn t read the
assignment. In one way, it
made things very easy. It doesn t take that long to flunk students who
have no idea of the question. What
takes time is determining the degree of knowledge exhibited. When there
isn t any, it s quick. Half the
class flunked, and only one student received an A. There were two B s, and
the rest of those who
passed got C s.
I gathered up both papers and exams and stuffed them into my folder, then
headed back over to
Smythe for my eleven o clock.
I offered a smile to Gertrude, who was raking leaves across the green under
a gray sky. She smiled
vacantly back and continued raking, happy with the routine work. Hector
did not even look up from his
perfectly placed piles of soggy leaves.
Natural Resources lA was the intro course, and most of us in the
department had to teach it some of
the time. Although it was basic, very basic, you would have thought none of
the students had ever even
considered the environment and natural resources.
We were working on the water cycle. Now, the whole basis of the water cycle
is pretty simple.
There s so much water in the world. The amount doesn t change much, and the
question really is how
much is usable for plant and animal life, particularly human beings, and
how changes in the cycle affect
that.
 There s enough water in the world that if the earth s surface were
flat, which obviously it s not, we d
all be a mile under water. So why, Miss Haasfeldt, do we have drought
conditions in the Saheel?
 There s not enough water there.
I smiled. It was hard, but I smiled.  A little more detail, please. A
drought means that there isn t
enough water. With all that water in the oceans, why do we have a drought
in mid-north Africa?
 Well, it s the wind patterns ...
 What about the wind patterns?
I tried not to shake my head too much. After all, they would be the ones
running society before too
long.
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After the intro course, I ducked by the snack line in the student activities
building and picked up a
sandwich and tea. I ate alone, quickly, before I headed down to the post
centre.
Besides two advertising circulars and the weekly edition of Newsweek,
there was a letter from my
Top
Page No 60
mother.
 See! exclaimed Maurice.  We do deliver the good material.
 Sometimes.
 Bother on ye, Doktor.
I grinned and opened the letter.
Dearest Johan,
I appreciated your letter of last week, and was delighted that you had
managed to bring back the
apple trees and even the old pear. While I do miss the old place, my
visits to you in the warmer
months are more than enough, and I certainly do not miss the winters!
Anna and I went to New Amsterdam yesterday to see Miss Singapore. It was
good, but terribly
depressing. I am glad you did not enter the Air Corps until after that sad
situation was over. Your
father always felt that we should have annexed the Sandwich Islands much
earlier, and that having a
big naval base at Pearl Harbor would have prevented much of the
disaster in the Pacific. I don t
know, only that the play was most moving.
I know that Llysette makes you happy she seems very warm but you
come from very
different backgrounds, and I hope you will be gentle with her. She needs
much kindness, I think. I
also wonder if the war in Europe took a little something out of her. I cannot
say what it might be, and
you can discount this as an old woman s fancy.
Here a few leaves still hang on the trees, but they will be gone before
long. You were kind to
invite me up again, but that week we are going to visit Aunt Elisabet in
Baltimore. She is ninety-three,
and I do not know how much longer she will be around. She still does
beautiful needlework, though.
I enjoyed your article. The finer points were beyond me, but I did get the
message. Anna liked it,
too, and she made a copy for Douglas. He posted it in his office.
I hope you can see your way clear to stop by when you get a chance in
that busy schedule of
yours ...
I folded the letter back into the envelope as I finished climbing the
stairs up to the lower campus.
My two o clock was Environmental Politics 2B. Since most of them had taken
the previous course
from me, they knew what to expect. Most of them actually had read at
least some of the assignment.
By the follow-on 2B class, we worked more on a discussion basis.
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 Mr. Quellan, what are the basic trade-offs between incentive-based and
command-and-control
environmental laws?
 Well, uhhh ... When you give businesses incentives, it s in their
interest to follow the laws. 
 Please be more specific. Do you mean it s not in their interest to
follow a command-and-control law
that will fine them or put them in prison?
 No, sir. I mean, I meant that with incentives they make money or lose
less money by following the
law. They will obey a command law, but they don t want to.
 Why not?
Sometimes it was like pulling teeth. We hashed through that section,
finishing up just before half-past
three. I rushed down to Delft s and still got there before Llysette, but
not by much.
Victor had just set the chocolate and biscuits on the table when she stepped [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]