I glanced about, and the woman sitting next to me was Kasia!

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

COLLEGE, TOWN, AND GOWN.

"Mickolai!"

We were on our feet and embracing as our chairs fell to the floor around us.

"I take it that you two have met?" the professor said, but we ignored him.

"Well then, there appears to be nothing for it, I'm afraid. Heis the general, after all. Class is dismissed for an hour."

The others filed out, leaving us alone. After a while, we unclenched to catch our breaths and look earnestly into each other's eyes.

"Kasia, can it really be you? How could you possibly be here?"

"It's really me, and getting here didn't take much planning. Lech got shot up and I had to eject behind the enemy lines. I was captured and given the choice of being shot or enlisting in the Serbian Army. Then when they put me in a new tank, she told me that I was back in the Croatian Army, and before too long I was selected to be a colonel. I was the only one promoted out of the five Kashubian POWs who were enlisted here. But why are we standing here talking? Eva! Take us to my cottage!"

And we were there.

"Eva? Well, that explains why I didn't know you were here sooner. The other half of the tanks are Agnieshkas, and she would have recognized you right off." I said as Kasia was busily taking off my clothes and I fumbled with hers.

"Soyou are the hero that everyone has been talking about! I should have known!"

"I'm a hero all right. Hero first class, with thunderbolts and an oak leaf cluster!"

"That's wonderful," she said, kissing me while shoving me into bed. "Now, shut up."

I shut up, and it was a few hours before we got back to the classroom.

"Now that we'refinally all back together, we can begin the orientation lecture," the professor said. "You may call me Professor Cee. It will be at least two months before the division that we command will be even partly trained, and we will be using that time to train you, the division's officers, as well. Your course of training will be quite extensive and will take eight years to complete. Upon satisfactory completion of the course, you will each be granted a Ph.D. in Military Science.

"The time difference between two months and eight years will cause us no difficulty because the computational abilities of a Combat Control Computer are such that I can keep you all in Dream World at Combat Speed, which subjectively is approximately fifty times as fast as normal time. We shall have time enough to complete the course while only two months go by in the real world. You may look on this as being one of the fringe benefits of your currently exalted positions, for as of the moment that this class first started, your life spans each became fifty times longer. At least subjectively they will seem to be that much longer, and what else is there?

"You are all hearing me in your native language, and from this time on, language barriers will no longer exist for you, at least while you are physically in the Combat Control Computer.

"The personas of your previous tanks have been brought along, to function as your personal servants, and do whatever you wish during your free time. Due to the special conditions of our rescue, all of these have one of two feminine personalities, but they will soon be adapting themselves to your personal requirements.

"Another slight anomaly is that you are all ex-tankers, since those inserted into the artillery have not yet had the chance to be attuned to their computers, and due to time constraints had to be unfortunately eliminated from the selection process. However, as only two of you have any experience at actually fighting in a tank, the imbalance should have no great effect.

"With regards to your training, there will be a lecture and demonstration period five days a week from seven in the morning until noon, with ten-minute coffee breaks at eight and ten. You each will have a private tutorial session with me from three until five in the afternoon. You are encouraged to spend lunch together in the dining room here, and to get to know one another well. Saturdays will be spent on military maneuvers and battle simulations.

"Your Sundays are your own. There will be considerable homework and private study, but the rest of your time will be yours to organize as you wish, except that you are required to spend at least a half hour a day in some sort of physical activity. A sound mind in a sound body, and all that. It needn't be as rigorous as the PT program for enlisted personnel, however, and almost any sport will do. I'm partial to fencing, myself, and you are all invited to join the school team, if you are so minded. Beginner's classes are held at two in the afternoon in the gym, starting tomorrow.

"I am available at any time to help you with any problems that you might have. Even during the lecture periods, you can always have me stop and go over anything that you're unsure of, and while we're doing that, the others in the class won't even notice it, since the lectures themselves are rather like recordings that I've done up the night before, while you students are sleeping.

"That's about it, except to say that since we will be operating on a different time scale than the rest of the world, it will be convenient for us to adopt our own separate calendar. For our own purposes, I therefore declare this to be Monday, January second, Year One. It is now local noon, and I suggest that we retire to our dining room."

We filed out of the small classroom and into a spacious hallway with vaulted Gothic ceilings and decorative armorial crests on the walls.

"Quite a place," one of my fellow students said.

"I rather like it," the professor said. "The University and the surrounding area is modeled after the English universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Not as they actually are, of course, but as they should have been.

We call it Oxbridge. Ah, here we are."

We were ushered into a venerable dining room with a single large table and seven chairs. The decor had an early Renaissance feel to it, but it looked lived in and comfortable.

A pair of young waitresses in conservative black-and-white outfits took our individual orders, and served us soup and salads.

The professor stood and said, "We will be working quite closely together for the next few years, so I imagine that it is time for us to become acquainted on a social level. Mickolai, since you are our general and leader, why don't you stand and tell us something about yourself."

"I hope that you don't mind if I stay seated," I said. "I'm just not used to being very formal. About me?

Well, my name is Mickolai Derdowski. I'm twenty four years old, I'm a Kashubian, and am part of the forces that were hired by the Croatians to defend them from the Serbians. I was born on Earth, and was an engineering student until I was evicted and sent to New Kashubia against my will. I was doing engineering work there before I joined the expeditionary forces. I guess that that's about all that I can say."

"Except that you would have graduatedcum laude had you been permitted to attend school for three weeks more, and that you are solely responsible for rescuing all of us, and our entire division besides, from the enemy," the professor said.

"Well, we're not out of the woods yet," I said.

"Nonetheless, my boy, we all owe you our heartfelt thanks." He applauded me and the rest joined in. I felt embarrassed, but there was nothing I could do about it.

"And now you, young lady. From the scene you made in the classroom, we gather that you know our fine young general here. Please tell us something more about yourself," he continued.

"Well, I'm Katarzyna Garczegoz, but everybody just calls me Kasia. Mickolai and I plan to get married as soon as we can find a Catholic priest. I don't suppose that any of you . . ."

"I'm afraid not, my dear, nor is there one in the entire division. The Serbians, of course, are Greek Orthodox, and I regret to say that they did not offer any members of the Catholic clergy the option of joining their military."

"Another thing we can love them for," Kasia said. "To get back to the introductions, I'm twenty-three, and I hold a degree in Sociology from the University of Warsaw. I was working as an electrician in New Kashubia before I joined the army."

The professor then invited the other lady at the table to speak, a voluptuous, long-legged blond who looked like she belonged in a good quality men's magazine with a staple in her navel.

"My name is Maria Buich . . ." she started out.

"Maria Buich! I used to know a Maria Buich. She was my son's third grade teacher. But she was middle-aged and very overweight," a big man said from across the table.

"And I know you, Mirko Jubec! You were loud-mouthed and rude five years ago and you are louder mouthed and ruder now! All right! So I'm forty-eight and fat! But we can look however we want to here, and I ask you men, do you want me to look this way or the way I really am?"

"My dear lady, I assure you that we all appreciate the way you have worked to lighten our day with your loveliness," said a big blond young man with an Arnold Schwarzenegger body. "You ladies are not the only ones with a bit of healthy vanity. It happens that I am seventy-two years old and I have a bad back.

But if I can be young and healthy, why shouldn't I do it?"

"Thank you, sir," she said with a wink that suggested a later meeting. "As I was saying, I'm forty-eight and I was a schoolteacher before those horrible Serbians invaded our homeland. I was also the school's bandmaster and the coach of the girl's field hockey team."

Schwarzenegger's name turned out to be Semo Birach, but everybody else seemed to notice his resemblance to the old movie star, since later that day someone called him "Conan," in honor of Schwarzenegger's greatest role, and the name stuck. He'd been a fisherman for over fifty years, both on the original Adriatic Sea on Earth and on the one here on New Yugoslavia.

Neto Kondo was a small, wiry sort, with startling red hair and a very quiet disposition. He was thirty one, and before the war, he'd been an agricultural implement repairman. He seemed to see everything and say nothing, and I soon picked him as being one of the brightest of the bunch.

The big boorish fellow, Mirko Jubec, was a farmer, and he looked the part. Thick, solid, and slow moving except when he was in a hurry, he was slow talking on those rare occasions when he opened his mouth without putting food into it. But when he did talk, I found that it was wise to listen, and when he was in a hurry, it was best to not be in his way.

All told, my schoolmates seemed to be a very mixed bag, and I couldn't help wondering at first why the Combat Control Computer had picked this particular bunch of diverse individuals out of the ten thousand that he had to choose from. It was weeks before I finally realized that they were all remarkably intelligent, they each had a deep-seated moral integrity, and what is more, they all had a very strong killer instinct.

These were people who were willing to do whatever was necessary to get the job done, clean and fast, or fast and dirty.

Lunch went pleasantly by, except for the way that Maria kept glaring at Mirko. He'd certainly found the quickest way to rub her in the wrong direction. I had the feeling that something had gone on between them long before the war, but I never found out what it was.

The professor then suggested that we take a walk so that he could show us the campus.

"You'll find that things here aren't as changeable as they usually are in Dream World," he said. "It's simply that with so many of us using the same environment, it would become entirely too confusing if it tried to adapt itself to each one of us. Your own homes are a different matter, of course. There are about four thousand other students on campus, as well as about eight hundred instructors of one classification or another. You'll find that our small group is something of an elite, though."

It was a brisk spring day, just the sort of weather to make our academic tweeds really appropriate. The buildings of the campus were all venerable structures, the youngest of them being about five hundred years old. They seemed to form a veritable forest of Gothic towers and halls, but the solidity of it all was somehow comforting.

The professor pointed out the Office of the Registrar, which we didn't have to bother with. The attempt at reality wasn't taken to ridiculous extremes. Here was the student union and the library. There was the gymnasium, which was normally well used by all the other students on the campus, but where each of us always had a reservation to use anything, anytime we wanted it. It was really more of a major sports complex, with Olympic-sized swimming pools, track and field arenas, and dozens of huge rooms specializing in every sport imaginable.

"It's a lot bigger on the inside than out," Mirko said.

"True, my boy, but then we don't have to be doctrinaire about anything in Dream World, do we?"

"You can do anything in Dream World, can't you, Professor Cee?" Maria asked.

"Well, almost anything, my dear girl."

"Almost?" I said. "I thought the possibilities were infinite!"

"They are, old man, but there are still some things that are not possible. Don't worry about it. We'll get into a discussion of infinities in the course of our class work in a few months."

"Yes, sir. But please tell me, what is it that one could not do in Dream World?"

"Independent physical research for one thing, my boy. If you were to construct an apparatus to determine the existence of a previously unknown subatomic particle, I assure you that you could not possibly learn anything that was not already in my memory modules."

I said, "I see. All we can learn here is what you, the Combat Control Computer, already know."

"Yes, although to what extentI am the Combat Control Computer is a rather philosophical question. I assure you that I don't feel like a computer. It seems to me that I am as normal a human being as any of the rest of you. Or perhaps I have simply been programmed to respond that way. I don't let it bother me and neither should you. Simply take things as they appear to be, and you'll get along fine."

"What other things can't we do here?" Maria asked.

"I think that I'll leave that as an exercise for the student. Listen up, class. You are each to think up three impossible things before breakfast tomorrow."

The professor was like that. Questions were often answered with bigger questions and had an assignment thrown in. But we all learned that if you didn't ask questions, you were in bigger trouble yet.

The north half of the campus was surrounded by a wilderness of woods, meadows, and streams, cut through with walking paths and bridle trails. The south half was taken up by the Town, a city of perhaps five thousand people who didn't seem to do much but supply goods and services to the University. I mean, there wasn't any industry or even farming going on. But then, you really don't know what most of the people do in most of the cities you pass through. They all seem to be going about their own private errands.

There were a lot of book shops, clothiers, restaurants, and taverns about, and the professor admitted to being partial to one of them in particular.

"Should any of you ever need a drinking companion, I can generally be found in the tap room of the Old Phoenix. They brew quite a nice porter there."

Our own homes were in a line just west of the campus, with the town to the south and the forests starting immediately north.

"My own home is in line with yours, and I should like to extend a permanent invitation to each one of you. Just drop by any time the mood strikes you. For now, though, it's time for your tutorial sessions, so we'd best return to my offices on campus."

He had six offices, and was waiting in all of them for us. I looked into three of them before I noticed that my name was on one of the doors.

"Confusing, isn't it?" Said the second Professor Cee as he pointed me to the next room over.

I sat down at a desk that was identical to the one I used in the classroom. Even the pencils were in the same position.

"It actually is the same desk," he said. "It also magically appears in your den at home whenever you are there. The purpose is simply to save you the bother of hauling your study materials about. Pretend that there is a secret crew of furniture movers, if you wish."

"That doesn't trouble me, sir, but how can you possibly talk to all six of us at once?"

"I really don't know, my boy. To me, it seems that I give each of you a tutorial in turn, but the electronics and the programming of it all are quite beyond me. I could have one of the mathematics professors talk to you about it if you wish."

"You mean that you yourself don't know how you're programmed, or how your circuits work?"

"Why on earth should I? Can you tell me about the precise chemical reactions presently going on in your own hypothalamus? Or which of your brain's neurons are presently firing and to what purpose? Why should an individual be bothered with such trivia?"

"I don't know, but shouldn'tsomebody know what's going on?"

"There are subroutines that are presently taking care of all the internal maintenance that is required by the Combat Control Computer. Some other personality is currently monitoring what is going on in the outside world, and will notify us if our attention is required. But certainly none of this is important to the task at hand, and we shouldn't be bothered with it any more that you should be bothered with keeping your own heart beating. It is sufficient that you be notified if it should cease doing so."

"Uh, I suppose so."

"Good. Now, first I want to ascertain your current knowledge of world history. . . ."

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.

HOME LIFE AND HISTORY.

Kasia was already home when I got back to our cottage, and she'd been busy. The place was bigger now, with one wing that held two study dens as well as a considerable library and another that held rooms for Agnieshka and Eva, our "servants." I noticed that the servants' rooms each had a door to the outside, so that they could come and go without bothering us. Why this was needed when anyone could flick in or out without bothering with doors was beyond me, but all three of my ladies seemed to be satisfied with the arrangements. Before long, Eva and Agnieshka had decorated their own rooms to suit themselves. Was this just more window-dressing, or did their programs really have an esthetic sense?

Theysaid they did, but that too could be just more of the same window-dressing.

"It looks like we'll be doing a fair amount of entertaining, so I think that the living room and the dining room should be enlarged, don't you think, dear?"

"Whatever makes you happy, but, you know, I sort of like it the way it is."