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 Praise for Teaching for Deeper Learning

....................
Jay McTighe and Harvey Silver bring together their wealth of
knowledge and ideas around powerful thinking skills, essential
questions, and concept-based curriculum to help teachers effect
deep learning and transfer. They had the insight to see how using
seven major thinking skills to facilitate greater knowledge acquisition
could become the springboard to the crafting of "big ideas"—the
transferable, conceptual understandings that reflect deep learning.
This easy-to-read book flows from chapter to chapter with practical
tools, ideas, and examples to guide the teacher in facilitating
meaning making.

Education offers a plethora of individual innovations, but when

curriculum and instruction leaders can combine the power of the best
ideas to create not only a higher-order end but also a clear means to
that end, then they have truly made a significant contribution to the
field. This book is one of those contributions.

—Dr. H. Lynn Erickson, author and presenter

This is the book you'll want to extend your instructional skills and
expand your backpack of strategies to support how the brain learns
best. By engaging thinking skills to help students actively process
information, teachers leverage the brain's executive functions to
deepen student understanding and achieve learning that lasts.

I have room for only five reference books on my desk, and

Teaching for Deeper Learning just took over the top spot.

—Judy Willis, MD, MEd, Board-certified neurologist, teacher, author,

and consultant

Because all the knowledge in the world is on the phone in nearly

every student's pocket, a person's ability to thrive in the modern
world is based on their ability to analyze the veracity of information,
make sense of its context and perspective, draw conclusions, take
responsible action (often in concert with others), assess the impact
of that action, and reassess based on new information. Teaching for
Deeper Learning gives teachers the tools to equip students with
these critical capacities.

—Michael R. Cornell, Superintendent, Hamburg Central School

District (New York)
 Teaching for Deeper Learning

Tools to Engage Students in Meaning Making

Jay McTighe and Harvey F. Silver

Table of Contents
Praise

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction

1. Framing Learning Around Big Ideas

2. Conceptualizing

3. Note Making and Summarizing

4. Comparing

5. Reading for Understanding

6. Predicting and Hypothesizing

7. Visualizing and Graphic Representation

8. Perspective Taking and Empathizing

9. Putting It All Together

References

Related ASCD Resources

About the Authors

Copyright

Publisher's note: This e-book has been formatted for viewing on

e-reading devices.

Select "Publisher Defaults," if your device offers that option, for

best viewing experience.
 If you find some figures hard to read on your device, try viewing
through an application for your desktop or laptop computer, such
as Adobe Digital Editions
(www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions).

© ASCD 2020
 Dedication

....................
Sir Isaac Newton said the reason he saw so far is that he stood on
the shoulders of giants. We have also worked with two giants:
Richard Strong and Grant Wiggins. They were wonderful friends,
colleagues, and education thought leaders. Although they are no
longer with us, their ideas are alive within this book, which we
humbly dedicate to them.
 Acknowledgments

....................
Writing this book was a labor of love for both of us. It's not a simple
task to synthesize ideas from nearly 100 years of collective work
developed over two parallel careers. Throughout the process, we
have had rich conversations, raised questions, and even debated
several points, but in the end, we think this text represents a truly
collaborative integration of the ideas of Understanding by Design®
and The Thoughtful Classroom™.

The publication of our book would not have been possible

without the help of a marvelous writing team. We would like to thank
Matthew Perini, a master craftsman and wordsmith whose guidance
and direction were essential in helping us achieve a synthesis of our
ideas; Abigail Boutz, a critical friend who helped ensure that our
writing was clear and our tools and strategies were practical and
user-friendly; Justin Gilbert, our internal editor who made sure that
all the details were correct and that the manuscript was delivered on
time; and Kimberly Nunez, whose willingness to jump in and help
throughout the process saved us more than once.

We would also like to acknowledge ASCD for its support

throughout the years and for giving us the opportunity to share our
ideas with the field. In particular, we thank the ASCD publishing
team, notably Stefani Roth, Genny Ostertag, and our capable editor,
Miriam Calderone, for their support from the book's inception to its
publication.

Finally, we give thanks to the thousands of teachers and

administrators with whom we have worked during our long careers.
We have learned so much from you, and we hope that our book will
give something back to the profession.

—Jay and Harvey

 Preface

....................
Legend has it that the world-renowned architect and thinker
Buckminster Fuller once told an aspiring young architect that a great
design must achieve four goals. Fuller framed these goals as the
following four simple questions:

1. Does the design meet its intended purpose?

2. Is it functional?
3. Will people like it?
4. Is it beautiful?

These four questions have guided the design of this book. First,
we set out with a clear purpose: to help educators make the critical
shift from providing information to students (a knowledge
consumption model) to empowering students to become active
meaning makers who seek deep understanding and are able to
transfer their learning.

Second, because it has been our experience that educators are

looking for resources that are practical and easy to implement in
their classrooms, we strove to make our book highly functional,
providing a wealth of ready-to-use tools and strategies to help you
put its ideas into practice immediately.
 To help us address the question Will people like it?, we have
tested and refined the book's ideas and tools in our workshops,
coaching partnerships, and professional development work in
schools. We are proud to say that the feedback from educators has
been extremely positive and enthusiastic.

Then there's that last question, the most subjective one of all: Is
it beautiful? One way to think of beauty is as something that is both
simple and deep, like a haiku—easy to comprehend but profound in
its effect. In writing a book full of simple tools designed to create
deep change in classrooms and schools, we sincerely hope that we
have met this beautiful standard of simplicity and depth. Most
important, we hope that we inspire you—a designer of instruction—
to see the beauty in what you teach, in how you teach it, and in the
impact your work has on students' futures.
 Introduction

....................
Mitosis versus meiosis, logarithms, the Battle of Hastings: can you
recall a time in high school or college when you "learned" something
and were able to pass a test on it, only to quickly forget it? Perhaps
the information was not important to you, or maybe you only learned
it by rote. Cognitive psychologists have characterized such learning
as inert knowledge—learning that was superficially acquired, never
really understood, and promptly forgotten (National Research
Council, 2000). Now contrast those examples with something that
you really understand—learning that has endured. What is the
difference in how you came to learn and understand it? What can
you now do because of that understanding?

These differences are familiar to us, and they underscore one of

the chief goals of this book: to promote deep and lasting learning
that enhances the retention of information, leads to conceptual
understanding, and equips students to be able to transfer their
learning to new situations.

But what does it mean to learn something deeply? We propose

that deep learning results in enduring understanding of important
ideas and processes. However, we also contend that understanding
must be "earned" by the learner. In other words, understanding is not
something that teachers can transmit simply by telling. Although we
can directly teach facts and procedures, understanding of
conceptually larger ideas and abstract processes must be
constructed in the mind of the learner. Students earn understanding
through the active mental manipulation of content via higher-order
thinking skills. We refer to this active construction of meaning by
students as meaning making.

When deep learning and understanding are the goals, the

teacher's role expands from that of primarily a dispenser of
information or modeler of a skill (the sage on the stage) to a
facilitator of meaning making (a guide on the side). More specifically,
teachers facilitate understanding of classroom content by helping
students process that content using thinking skills that engage them
in active meaning making.

In this book, we highlight the following seven thinking skills:

1. Conceptualizing
2. Note making and summarizing
3. Comparing
4. Reading for understanding
5. Predicting and hypothesizing
6. Visualizing and graphic representation
7. Perspective taking and empathizing

Use of these seven skills helps students achieve deep and lasting
learning by facilitating acquisition of information for greater retention
and retrieval, fostering active meaning making that leads to deeper
understanding of "big ideas," and building the ability to apply, or
transfer, learning to new situations both within school and beyond.
 Why These Skills?
Obviously, there are a great many thinking skills that can enhance
meaning making and understanding. So why did we select these
seven in particular? We have made these skills the focus of this
book for the following reasons:

They embody the essentials of good thinking. Good thinkers

employ these skills in school, at work, and in life. They are
deeply embedded in current academic standards and
standardized tests. What's more, they are the foundations of
more complex forms of reasoning, such as argument, inquiry,
and design.
They separate high achievers from their average- or low-
performing peers. Through our many years of research and
work in schools, we have found that successful students are
able to handle the cognitive demands of complex work and
rigorous content precisely because they enlist these skills to
help them. Students who struggle with complexity and learning
challenges tend to lack many of these thinking skills.
They are often undertaught. Considering how vital these skills
are to students' learning and academic success, it is striking
how rarely they are directly taught in our classrooms. In fact,
these skills are sometimes so hard to find that we might call
them the "hidden skills of academic success." But if we are to
hold ourselves responsible for preparing our students to meet
the demands of rigorous cognitive and content challenges, then
we must help them become better able to respond to such
challenges. Teaching and reinforcing these seven skills are how
such "response-ability" develops and how college and career
readiness is realized.
They give all teachers a manageable way to raise achievement
and increase student success. We intentionally selected skills
that cut across content areas and grade levels. No matter your
 grade or subject specialty, you can teach, assess, and
benchmark these skills with relative ease. Plus, seven is a
manageable number of skills to master—and we know from
experience just how crucial manageability is to successful
classroom implementation.

In sum, the thinking skills and tools that we've chosen to focus
on have a dual benefit: (1) as a means, they support active
construction of meaning by students, leading to deeper
understanding of core content; and (2) as an end, they provide
inherently valuable, transferable skills and tools that students can
use throughout school and life. The tools, therefore, are as much for
students as they are for you.
 How the Book Is Organized
While our primary goal in putting this book together was to provide
educators with concrete skills and tools for engaging students in
active meaning making and deep learning, we felt that the book
wouldn't be complete without also discussing what kind of content is
worth making meaning about, how to incorporate the featured skills
and tools into lesson and unit design, and how to build students'
capacity to use the tools independently. Thus, we've made sure to
address each of these important elements within the book's nine
chapters. Let's look at how the information is organized.

Chapter 1 discusses what's worth having students understand

and make meaning about. It emphasizes the importance of
establishing a conceptually based curriculum to ensure that teaching
and learning stay focused on important and transferable ideas, and it
presents practical tools and strategies for doing so.

Chapters 2–8 explore the seven meaning-making skills in depth.

The "how" section of each chapter is where you'll find practical and
proven tools and strategies for targeting the skill in the classroom,
along with illustrative examples that can help you use the tools and
strategies more effectively.

Chapter 9 provides specific ideas to help you incorporate the

book's strategies into your repertoire, as well as your students'. It
presents a tried-and-true instructional process for teaching students
to use the tools independently, illustrates how to infuse the skills and
tools within curriculum units to engage students in active meaning
making, and shows how you can use a curriculum Mapping Matrix to
map out the units over an entire year to ensure that you are focusing
on big ideas and systematically employing thinking skills to help
students understand these ideas.

Tools Make It Possible

Just as humans throughout history have used tools like the wheel,
the astrolabe, the mechanical plow, and the computer to make their
work easier and more effective, you can use the tools in this book to
enhance your work as an educator. Instead of abstract, hard-to-
implement ideas, these tools provide concrete and simple ways to
promote deep and active learning, a means of making abstract and
internal thinking processes visible, and a vehicle for bringing
principles of sound instruction into your classroom in a format that
both you and your students will enjoy.
 Chapter 1

Framing Learning Around Big

Ideas
....................
In the Introduction, we discussed the importance of actively
engaging students in meaning making. In Chapters 2–8, we'll
explore thinking skills and tools that can help students make
meaning of the content we teach. But what should we be teaching in
the first place? What's worth having students understand and make
meaning about? How can we design our curriculum in a way that
promotes deep learning and transfer?

To address these questions, we need to consider several factors

that affect a modern-day education. A fundamental characteristic of
our world is the fact that our collective knowledge base continues to
increase rapidly, with estimated doubling times that are expressed in
months rather than decades. Indeed, knowledge is expanding faster
than we're able to absorb it. And the accompanying reality that
ordinary people can now access much of that knowledge on a
smartphone means that contemporary schooling no longer requires
memorization of all pertinent information.
 A related trend has to do with the rapidity, and related
unpredictability, of changes in today's world. From technological
advances (e.g., automation and artificial intelligence) to political and
economic transformations, shifts in global migration patterns, and
climatic change, it is fair to say that we are no longer educating
learners for a stable and predictable world.

Focus on Big Ideas

Clearly, our world is changing dramatically—and the focus of our
teaching needs to change in response. Attentiveness to trends like
the ones described above has driven leading curriculum experts
(Erickson, 2007, 2008; Wiggins & McTighe, 2005, 2011, 2012) to
recommend that a modern curriculum be prioritized around a smaller
number of conceptually larger, transferable ideas. They make this
recommendation for four reasons:

1. There is simply too much information to be able to cover it all in

school. The explosion of knowledge means that we can address
only a relatively small amount of all possible content, especially
in history and the STEM subjects (science, technology,
engineering, and math). This makes it imperative to identify the
big ideas that are essential for students to understand and to
focus instruction accordingly.
2. Trying to cover too much content can result in superficial and
disengaged learning. By contrast, when we focus on fewer but
bigger ideas and transferable skills, we have more time to
engage students actively in making meaning of those big ideas.
Moreover, we can expand the use of performance tasks that
involve students in applying their learning in authentic and
 meaningful ways, leading to deeper learning and transfer
abilities.
3. An emphasis on larger ideas reflects our understanding of how
knowledge is best structured for retention and use. Research on
how experts' knowledge is organized relative to that of novices
reveals that "[experts'] knowledge is not simply a list of facts and
formulas that are relevant to their domain; instead, their
knowledge is organized around core concepts or 'big ideas' that
guide their thinking about their domains" (National Research
Council, 2000, p. 36).
4. The rapid changes and unpredictability of the modern world call
for learners who will be able to transfer their learning. Rote
learning of factual information will not, by itself, equip learners to
effectively apply it to new situations. Because transfer requires
an understanding of broader concepts and generalizations,
teaching for transfer requires focusing on conceptually bigger
ideas.

Please note that our recommended emphasis on big ideas and

transferable processes is not meant to minimize the importance
of teaching basic skills or foundational knowledge. We simply
propose that basic facts and skills should be treated as a means
to greater ends—in other words, as raw material for developing
the larger conceptual understandings that we want students to
walk away with. It is noteworthy that the most recent generation
of standards in the United States—including the Common Core
State Standards, the Next Generation Science Standards, and
the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social
Studies—all emphasize teaching for deep understanding of
 larger concepts rather than superficially covering vast amounts
of information.

Concept-Based Curriculum Design

The sheer volume of potential content and the corresponding
problem of "mile-wide, inch-deep" curriculum require curriculum
teams and individual teachers to be able to prioritize—that is, to
determine the most important curricular outcomes, as well as the
best use of available instructional time. By focusing curriculum
around conceptually important and transferable ideas, teachers can
go into greater depth to develop and deepen students'
understanding rather than simply trying to cover large volumes of
discrete facts.

In this chapter, we describe three approaches that teachers can

use to frame curriculum and instruction around important ideas:

1. A Study In … encourages teachers to plan their units to focus

on the key concepts to be understood rather than just topics,
skills, or texts.
2. Concept Word Wall reminds teachers to identify the key
concepts that will help students develop a deep understanding
of the content—and to make those concepts visible in the
classroom.
3. Essential Questions shows teachers how to frame their
content around open-ended and thought-provoking questions
that help students make meaning of and "uncover" the big
ideas.
A Study In …

A simple yet effective way to ensure that an instructional unit

maintains a conceptual focus rather than just addressing topics,
basic skills, or activities is to frame it as "a study in" a larger,
transferable concept or theme (Silver & Perini, 2010). Select an
appropriate concept or theme (see Figure 1.1 for a list of
possibilities), build it into your unit title, and use the selected concept
to focus instruction over the course of the unit. Here are some
examples of units that were framed in this manner:

Argument Writing: A Study in Craftsmanship

Impressionism: A Study in Revolution
The Four Seasons: A Study in Change
The Pentagon Papers: A Study in Deception
Four Films by Hitchcock: A Study in Obsession
Weight Training: A Study in Proper Technique
Whole Numbers: A Study in Rules and Relationships
Formal Versus Informal Forms of Address in Spanish: A Study in
Respect

Figure 1.1. Examples of Transferable Concepts and

Themes
abundance/scarcity
acceptance/rejection
adaptation
balance
caring
cause and effect
challenge
change/continuity
character
communication
community
competition
composition
conflict
convergence
cooperation
correlation
courage
craftsmanship
creativity
culture
cycles
defense/protection
democracy
design
discovery
diversity
environment
equality/inequality
equilibrium
equivalence
ethics
evolution
exploitation
exploration
fairness
freedom
friendship
harmony
honor
interactions
interdependence
interpretation
invention
justice
liberty
loyalty
maturity
mood
movement
needs and wants
order
organization
parts and wholes
patriotism
patterns
perseverance
perspective
prejudice
production/consumption
relationships
renewal
repetition
representation
revolution
rhythm
structure and function
supply and demand
survival
symbiosis
systems
tyranny

When deciding which concept to pick for a given unit, remember

that there's no "correct" choice; the choice should be supportive of
targeted standards and reflect whatever big idea or message you
want to highlight. A team of English language arts (ELA) teachers, for
example, considered framing a unit on argument writing as a study in
perspective, a study in balance, or a study in persuasion—but
ultimately decided on a study in craftsmanship because they wanted
to emphasize the idea that crafting an argument takes care and skill.
An art history teacher similarly considered different ways to frame a
unit on Impressionism but went with "Impressionism: A Study in
Revolution" because he felt that revolution best captured the central
idea that he wanted students to understand and remember: that the
Impressionists "overthrew" the established mode of painting and
replaced it with one that was radically different in terms of both style
and subject matter.
 Note that the idea of framing learning around larger concepts
and themes shouldn't be limited to teachers. In the next chapter, we'll
show you how to use this tool to engage students in identifying
concepts and themes that unite the factual information they learn in
class.

Concept Word Wall

Another simple way to keep classroom instruction focused on

big ideas is to create a Concept Word Wall. To do this, identify the
concepts, themes, or processes that will be the focus of a unit of
study and post them on a wall or bulletin board. The words you
choose can be specific to that unit or related to your discipline as a
whole, or larger concepts that have relevance across disciplines.
Ideally, your wall would contain a mixture of all three. A word wall on
food webs, for example, might include unit-specific concepts like
producers and consumers, broader science-related concepts like
ecosystem and energy, and universal concepts like renewal and
cycle.

Posting core concepts in an easily visible location serves to

keep them front and center in your mind as you teach; it also makes
students aware of the big ideas that are important to define, pay
attention to, and come to understand deeply. Once the words are up,
refer to and interact with them regularly—and encourage students to
do the same. Show students how the words on the wall function as
"conceptual Velcro," holding the facts and details from the unit
together. Visit (and have students visit) the wall to link specific details
or examples to larger concepts, add definitions, and identify
connections between concepts. Using the wall in this way helps to
grow students' understanding of both the individual concepts and the
unit topic as a whole.

Essential Questions

A third way of framing your curriculum around important ideas is

to use essential questions (EQs). Essential questions are open-
ended questions that reflect the big ideas we want our students to
come to understand. Rather than being designed to yield a single or
final "correct" answer, essential questions are designed to stimulate
thinking, spark discussion and debate, and raise additional questions
for further inquiry. As such, they support one of the primary goals of
a modern education, which is "to awaken, not 'stock' or 'train' the
mind" (Wiggins, 1989, p. 46).

The following list shows examples of EQs in different content

areas (McTighe, 2016). Notice how organizing your curriculum
around questions like these encourages students to explore—and
ensures teaching and learning stay focused on—core concepts
rather than isolated facts and details.

Dance: In what ways can motion evoke emotion?

Geography: How does where we live influence how we live?
Government: How should we balance the rights of individuals
with the common good?
Health/nutrition: What should we eat?
History: Whose "story" is this?
 Instrumental music: If practice makes perfect, what makes
"perfect" practice?
Literature: To what extent can fiction reveal truth?
Mathematics: When is the "correct" answer not the best
solution?
Reading/language arts: How do you read between the lines?
Science: How are science and common sense related?
Visual and performing arts: How does art reflect, as well as
shape, culture?
Writing: How do effective writers hook and hold their readers?

Because essential questions are connected to big ideas—

abstract, transferable concepts and processes—they are meant to
be explored over time. As students consider the questions, discuss
different "answers," and rethink their initial responses, they construct
meaning and deepen their understanding of the relevant content.
Over time, as their understanding deepens, we expect their
responses to become more sophisticated and better reasoned.

There are many strategies for generating essential questions.

One of the simplest involves identifying a big-idea understanding that
you want students to develop and then generating one or more
associated EQs, as shown in Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2. Examples of Understandings and

Companion Essential Questions
Big-Idea Understandings: True friendship is revealed during hard
times, not happy times.
Possible Essential Questions: Who is a "true friend," and how will
you know?

Big-Idea Understandings

A muscle that contracts through its full range of motion

generates greater force.
Follow-through improves accuracy.

Possible Essential Questions: How can you hit with greater power
without losing control?

Big-Idea Understandings: Statistical analysis and display often

reveal patterns in data, enabling us to make predictions with degrees
of confidence.

Possible Essential Questions: Can you predict what will happen in

the future? With what level of confidence?

Big-Idea Understandings: Great literature from various cultures

and time periods explores enduring themes and reveals recurrent
aspects of the human condition.

Possible Essential Questions: How can stories from other places

and times be about us?
Big-Idea Understandings: Humans process both verbal and
nonverbal messages simultaneously. Communication becomes more
effective when verbal and nonverbal messages are aligned.

Possible Essential Questions

What makes a great speaker?

How can a great speech be "more than words"?

When beginning to incorporate EQs into your repertoire, it can

help to keep in mind the following tips from McTighe and Wiggins's
(2013) Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student
Understanding:

1. Use two to four essential questions per unit to prioritize the

content, enabling students to focus on a few big ideas.
2. Post your essential questions prominently around the classroom
to serve as a constant reminder of their importance and to
encourage revisiting.
3. Frame the questions in student-friendly and age-appropriate
language to make them as accessible, relevant, and engaging
as possible for the sophistication level and experiences of your
students.
4. Pose follow-up questions to sustain and push student thinking—
for example, Because? What is your evidence for that? Who has
a different idea? What would you say to someone who
disagrees?

One final note: the practice of generating essential questions

isn't just for teachers. Because a modern education seeks to engage
students in meaning making and to develop self-directed learners,
students should be encouraged to develop their own questions—and
to pursue the answers through active inquiry.

Summing Up
In this chapter, we made the case that a modern-day curriculum
should be focused around important concepts that we want students
to come to understand. But designing instruction around big ideas is
only the start. If our goal is to prepare today's students for the
challenges they'll face both in and out of the classroom, we need to
think not only about what's worth teaching but also about how we
can help students make sense of the information they acquire and
apply their learning to new contexts. An effective way to help
students develop the necessary thinking and meaning-making skills
is to incorporate these skills into your everyday instructional design.
The tools and strategies in Chapters 2 through 8, and the
instructional planning processes in Chapter 9, will enable you to do
just that.
 Chapter 2

Conceptualizing
....................

The What and Why of Conceptualizing

In Chapter 1, we encouraged you to "think big"—to identify big ideas
and conceptual understandings within your content and frame
instruction around those ideas and understandings. The goal of this
chapter is to help students start thinking big as well. When we talk
about teaching students to think big, we don't just mean making
them aware of the larger concepts and understandings that unite the
factual knowledge they're acquiring in class; we mean helping them
"add up" that factual knowledge to construct those bigger
understandings for themselves. This skill—using facts, examples,
observations, and experiences to construct an understanding of
important concepts and conceptual relationships—is what we mean
by conceptualizing.

There is a dual benefit to organizing instruction around core

concepts and helping students learn to construct meaning for
themselves. First, thinking conceptually stimulates active meaning
making and leads to deep learning; it helps students understand and
retain more of what they learn in class by allowing them to unite what
would otherwise seem to be a random body of facts under larger
conceptual umbrellas. Second, teachers won't always be there to
identify and highlight what's important for students to understand. At
higher levels of education and in the "real world," learners must be
able to derive important understandings on their own ("What's the
big idea here?") and independently transfer those understandings to
new contexts. By helping students develop their conceptualizing
skills now, we equip them to do just that. Think, for example, of how
a student who comes to understand that living things need water to
survive in a biology class could then apply that understanding across
a variety of content areas—for example, to predict everything from
the impact of droughts (ecology/social studies) and water pollution
(ecology/agriculture/social studies) to patterns of settlement and
migration (history/geography) to the importance of controlling water
resources throughout history (history/geopolitics).

The How of Conceptualizing

The process of forming concepts and generalizations from
observations and examples is as natural to humans as breathing. It's
the way our minds work. Even very young children naturally look for
patterns, formulate concepts, and make generalizations that help
them interpret and make sense of the world around them. Picture
how a toddler comes to understand the concept of the color red by
looking for commonalities among red things that a parent points out.
Or how a slightly older child infers from examples that there's a
relationship between birthdays and cake, candles, and presents.

Despite this natural ability to induce concepts, students often

struggle when teachers try to implement a concept-based approach
in the classroom. Because the processes of forming concepts from
examples and linking concepts to form generalizations are abstract
and often unconscious, they're not processes that students
necessarily know how to do on demand. The problem is
compounded by the fact that students aren't commonly asked to do
this kind of inductive thinking in school; in traditional instructional
models, teachers typically cover—rather than asking students to
uncover—conceptual definitions and understandings.

The good news is that you can overcome these challenges by

building lessons that foster conceptual thinking and by structuring
and scaffolding your teaching in a way that makes the relevant
thinking processes more explicit and manageable for students. The
following five instructional tools are designed to help you achieve
these goals:

1. Concept Attainment challenges students to define core

concepts for themselves by comparing examples and
nonexamples to identify the critical attributes.
2. Concept Definition Map uses a visual organizer to help
students construct and articulate conceptual definitions.
3. A Study In … engages students in processing factual
information at the conceptual level by having them unite the
facts from a topic or text under a large conceptual umbrella.
4. Adding Up the Facts shows students how they can cluster
related facts and details to derive larger understandings and
 generalizations.
5. Connect-the-Concepts teaches students how to connect core
concepts to form generalizations that are supported by facts and
examples.

Concept Attainment

The value of organizing instruction around core concepts and

helping students gain a deep understanding of those concepts is
clear. What's sometimes less clear is how to help students develop
this level of understanding. Teachers' natural instinct—to "teach
concepts like vocabulary words, offering textbook definitions and
then quizzing kids on those definitions later" (Stern, Ferraro, &
Mohnkern, 2017, p. 53)—simply doesn't work, because
understanding a concept involves so much more than knowing a
simple, surface-level definition.

Concept Attainment, which is built on the work of Jerome Bruner

(1973), encourages teachers to use a different approach—an
inductive approach—to help students develop a deep understanding
of critical concepts. Instead of defining concepts for students,
teachers challenge students to define those concepts for themselves
by comparing examples and nonexamples to determine the critical
attributes. The process of extracting attributes from examples is fun
for students because it's akin to "playing detective"; it's also effective,
because it mimics the way we naturally come to understand and
define new concepts.
 The steps in a Concept Attainment lesson, along with a running
example from a science classroom, are as follows.

1. Identify a concept that you want students to understand deeply.

It should have at least one clear critical attribute. You can name
the concept at the start of the lesson or wait until the end to
reveal it.
Example: A science teacher used Concept Attainment to
develop students' understanding of a predator. But instead of
telling students that the target concept was predator, the teacher
said that they'd be working to identify the attributes of a "mystery
concept."

2. Develop yes and no examples of the concept. Yes examples

should include—and be designed to help students discover—all
the concept's critical attributes. No examples can include some
or none of the critical attributes.
Example: To help students grasp the concept of a predator, the
teacher developed a variety of yes examples, including cheetah,
tiger, killer whale, and eagle. No examples included sloth, koala,
cow, and brontosaurus.

3. Present some examples and challenge students to figure out

what the yes examples have in common and how they differ
from the no examples. Ask students to use their comparative
analysis to develop a tentative list of the concept's critical
attributes.
Example: After noticing that the yes examples were speedy
meat eaters while the no examples were slow vegetarians,
students put "speedy" and "meat eater" on their list of possible
attributes.
 4. Present additional yes and no examples. Have students use
these examples to test and refine their list of critical attributes.
Example: The teacher added praying mantis and Venus flytrap
to the yes examples, and rabbit and vulture to the no examples.
Learning that praying mantis was a yes example supported the
"meat eating" idea but led students to remove "speedy" from
their list of attributes. The new no example of vulture helped
students further refine their thinking, and they added "kills the
animals it eats, as opposed to consuming already dead animals"
to their list of attributes.

5. Help students review all the examples and develop a final and
accurate list of the concept's critical attributes. Then have
students define the concept in their own words, using examples
and attributes from the lesson to help them.
Example: After reviewing all the examples and helping students
refine their ideas, the teacher revealed that the concept students
had been working to understand was predator. Students then
defined predator as "an organism that kills and eats other
animals."

6. Develop a task that asks students to apply and test their

understanding of the concept.
Example: Students were given a new list with different animals
and challenged to determine which ones were predators.

Concept Attainment is a versatile tool that can be used to help

students grasp a wide variety of concepts—anything from folktales in
a primary grade classroom to contrast in a graphic design class to
hydrophobicity in chemistry. It's also a flexible tool in the sense that
yes and no examples can take any format—pictures, texts, objects,
and so on. An elementary teacher, for example, used pairs of yes
and no images like the ones in Figure 2.1 to help students derive an
understanding of symmetry.

Figure 2.1. Concept Attainment Examples for

Symmetry

Source: From Tools for Classroom Instruction That Works: Ready-to-Use Techniques for

Increasing Student Achievement (p. 199), by H. F. Silver, C. Abla, A. L. Boutz, and M. J.

Perini, 2018, Franklin Lakes, NJ: Silver Strong & Associates/Thoughtful Education Press

and McREL International. © 2018 Silver Strong & Associates. Used with permission.

An ELA teacher used a yes-no table like the one in Figure 2.2 to
help students discover the concept of personification.

Figure 2.2. A "Yes-No" Concept Attainment Table

for Personification
Yes (examples of the concept): Money talks.

No (nonexamples): Money comes in all different denominations.

Yes (examples of the concept): The city slowly awoke from its
slumber and dressed for the day.

No (nonexamples): The population in the city has nearly doubled in

the past 20 years.

Yes (examples of the concept): The dog wept from loneliness

when its owner died.

No (nonexamples): The dog got a new owner when its original

owner died.

Yes (examples of the concept): The telephone poles have been

holding their arms out for a long time. They must be tired.

No (nonexamples): The telephone poles were a stain on the

otherwise pristine landscape.

Yes (examples of the concept): The wind moaned as if in pain.

No (nonexamples): His presence was as welcome as a cool breeze

on a hot day.

To save time, look for existing texts or materials that can serve
as yes and no examples rather than creating examples from scratch.
A history teacher, for example, might use documents found online as
the yes and no examples for a Concept Attainment lesson aimed at
helping students understand the concept of a primary source
document, as distinct from a secondary source.

Concept Definition Map

Defining concepts for students doesn't lead to the same level of

understanding as when students construct definitions for
themselves. Unfortunately, many students don't know how to craft
thoughtful and thorough conceptual definitions. Concept Definition
Map (adapted from Schwartz & Raphael, 1985) corrects the problem
by using a visual organizer like the one in Figure 2.3 to help students
understand and gather the kinds of information that are required to
define a concept well (i.e., the larger category that the concept
belongs to, examples of the concept, and the concept's critical
attributes—especially those that distinguish it from other concepts in
the same category). Completing the organizer prepares students to
craft definitions in their own words that are both detailed and
personally meaningful, as exemplified by the definition of courage
that appears in Figure 2.3.
Figure 2.3. Concept Definition Map for Courage

Source: From Tools for Conquering the Common Core: Classroom-Ready Techniques for

Targeting the ELA/Literacy Standards (p. 117), by H. F. Silver and A. L. Boutz, 2015,

Franklin Lakes, NJ: Silver Strong & Associates/Thoughtful Education Press. © 2015 Silver

Strong & Associates. Used with permission.

Concept Definition Maps can be used to help students deepen

their understanding of familiar concepts like courage, war, hero, or
friendship. They can also be used to help students develop an
understanding of discipline-specific concepts that are new to them—
for example, mammal, fable, Romanticism, parallelogram, or
argument writing. In either case, constructing an initial definition
shouldn't be the endpoint. Students should be encouraged to revise
and refine their conceptual definitions over time in light of new
examples and information that they encounter—and to use the
definitions that they develop to inform and evaluate future learning
(e.g., Is this new person we're learning about exhibiting courage? Is
this conflict we're studying actually a war?). Students should also be
taught to use the tool independently—at least the idea, if not the
actual organizer. Train them to develop or test their understanding of
newly learned concepts by seeing if they can construct a definition
that accounts for all the components on a Concept Definition Map.

A Study In …

In Chapter 1, we presented A Study In … as a tool that teachers

could use to frame instructional units around larger, more universal
concepts as opposed to simple topics. This same tool can also be
employed to help students identify broad concepts and themes that
can unite, focus, and illuminate the content they're learning. The tool
trains students to do this kind of conceptualizing by helping them see
the facts in terms of larger concepts.

To use the tool in this way, challenge students to review what

they've learned about a topic or text and to identify a broader
concept or theme that can tie the information together. Invite
students to share their thinking by completing the following sentence:

I see (topic/text) as a study in (concept).

Then have students explain and justify their choices using

appropriate facts and examples. Training students to add a because
to the end of their "a study in" statements is a simple way to ensure
that they remember to support those statements with evidence. Here
are some examples:

I see the water cycle as a study in renewal because …

 I see Hamlet as a study in indecision because …
I see our community as a study in cooperation because …
I see equations as a study in balance because …
I see the circulatory system as a study in transportation because
…

Encourage students to choose broader, more universal

concepts that highlight a larger meaning or message, because these
will provoke deeper thinking and learning than narrow or literal ones.
Think how much more meaning students could extract from a lesson
on the sinking of the Titanic by characterizing it as a study in
arrogance rather than a study in icebergs! Because framing content
in terms of larger concepts can be challenging, you may want to
begin by having students practice with familiar topics or texts. A
summer vacation might be framed as a study in opportunity, while
Frog and Toad Together might be characterized as a study in
friendship.

Once students start working with "actual" content, try giving

them concepts to choose from rather than asking them to generate
concepts from scratch (see Figure 1.1, for a list of possibilities). At
the end of a unit on the U.S. civil rights movement, for example, you
might give students the following choice: "Do you see the civil rights
movement as a study in perseverance, a study in change, a study in
conflict, or a study in a different concept?" Besides sparking student
thinking, giving students multiple concepts to choose from reinforces
the idea that there's no one correct way to frame the information
from a unit—that any choice is fine, as long as it can be supported.
 Inviting students to view classroom content in terms of larger
concepts promotes understanding and retention by requiring
students to process and organize new material in a deep and
personal way. It encourages students to extract larger meanings and
messages instead of memorizing facts. And it facilitates connection
making and transfer. In other words, it helps students both remember
and think beyond the facts. Characterizing the civil rights movement
as a study in perseverance, for example, would certainly help
students remember key players and events. But it could also help
students recognize the transferable idea that perseverance can be
valuable to any struggle, whether personal or collective.

Adding Up the Facts

When we talk about teaching students to think more

conceptually, we're talking about teaching them to change the way
they think about the factual information they acquire in class—to
view facts not as content to be memorized but, rather, as raw
material to use in constructing important understandings. Because
the skill of "thinking big"—putting facts together to see larger
concepts, connections, and relationships—can be challenging for
students at first, it's a skill that needs to be practiced and scaffolded.

Adding Up the Facts (McTighe, 1996a) is a tool that provides

such scaffolding by inviting students to derive these kinds of
understandings using a small set of carefully selected facts. To use
this strategy, first identify an understanding that's worth developing
("I want students to understand that ___."). Then generate a small
Other documents randomly have
different content
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Armageddon,
1970
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
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you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Armageddon, 1970

Author: Robert W. Krepps

Illustrator: W. E. Terry

Release date: August 9, 2021 [eBook #66021]

Language: English

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ARMAGEDDON,

1970 ***
ARMAGEDDON, 1970
 By Geoff St. Reynard

As atomic weapons from space laid waste to

Earth's cities, Alan Rackham searched for the
traitors. Was it possible he sought himself?

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
October 1952
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
They tried to kill Alan Rackham about an hour after he had seen the
accident. They bungled the job. They shot at him from ambush—with
an ordinary automatic pistol—as he was walking up to his house; and
Brave, who had a sixth sense for danger which never failed him,
knocked Alan over at the very instant of the shot and sprawled across
him, a great solid shield holding him down and protecting him despite
his angry wrigglings. Brave's grenade pistol was in his hand before
the two of them hit ground, and he sent four quick shots at the
bushes, spaced so that the tiny hot fragments tore hell out of thirty
yards of shrubbery. Nobody yelled or groaned. Brave waited a full
minute, and then he rose cautiously, so that Alan could sit up and
brush himself off and swear as he spat out dirt. They went into the
house and Alan reported the assassination attempt to his immediate
superior, Dr. Getty. After that they didn't try again to kill Alan for a
long time.
The accident had been uncanny. It happened in the room where the
shells of the silver-colored disks were fitted together and welded,
before they were sent to the gargantuan baths that half-melted them
again to rechill them into solid masses of metal which nothing short
of a direct hit by a blockbuster would crack.
A welder, using one of the newly-developed torches that made the
old ones seem like match-flares by comparison, dropped it
accidentally. Its flame licked up and sprayed across the man's right
hand. It melted the protective glove like ice cream on a stove;
crisped away the skin and liquefied the flesh, charred the bones black
and left the welder no more than half a palm and two fingers before
he could jerk his hand out of the terrible blast of fire.
Alan and Brave were standing about twelve feet off, and there could
be no mistake as to what they saw then.
The welder turned off his torch with his left hand; he held the
remains of his right before his face, turned it and stared at it (the
blood coursing in little sluggish streams down the forearm, the
charcoal that had been bone sifting off into the air, the flesh a greasy
yellow-red mass like candle drippings), and he shook his head slowly,
an expression of annoyed mortification on his face. It was as though
he had cut himself while shaving, no more. He was simply piqued,
when he should have been shrieking with horror and unendurable
pain.
Alan and Brave ran to him. "My God, man," said Alan, shaken, "let
me get you to infirmary."
The welder stood up. "That's all right, Dr. Rackham. I can go myself.
This don't hurt." And then a curious look spread over his face, as if
he had just recollected a lesson taught him long ago. "It don't hurt
much," he amended. "I guess it's cauterized so bad I can't feel it yet.
Don't you worry, sir, I can make it."
He walked away, perfectly steady, carrying the almost destroyed hand
in front of his chest; and Alan was so dumbfounded he let him go.
The welder never reached the infirmary. No man saw him again, alive
or dead.
So an hour thereafter someone took a shot at Alan Rackham. Since
Brave had witnessed the accident too, and because neither of them
could account for the shooting except in connection with that strange
accident, it seemed stupid and pointless for an attempt to be made
on Alan's life alone; especially when a grenade pistol, one of those
lean evil handguns developed in 1959, would with one shot have cut
an eight-yard-wide swath in everything before it and eliminated both
of them. But there it was. They shot at Alan with an automatic—the
bullet nicked across his chest and spoiled a blue coat that was
practically new—and then they disappeared.
Alan's house, which he shared with Brave, was a four-room brick atop
a knoll on the outskirts of the colony. It was a perfect bachelor
establishment; the precipitron kept it free of dust and Brave's innate
neatness overcame Alan's careless disregard of surroundings to the
extent that dirty socks and unpressed trousers were not often to be
met with lying in corners or hanging over the backs of chairs. Brave
was a good everyday cook and Alan occasionally took a couple of
hours off to chef up a New Orleans style banquet for two. The living
room was lined with books and the plastiglassed-in lounging quarters
in the rear held racks of pipes and a well-stocked bar. They were very
comfortable there. It was only a ten-minute walk from Alan's
laboratory, and four minutes' ride from the center of the colony.
The colony was called Project Star. It was located on Long Island,
protected much as Oak Ridge had been in the '40s and '50s, and
Project Bellona in the early '60s; with electrified fences, and soldiers
carrying the latest weapons, and a ring of grotesque machinery all
around it, comprised of radar detectors and great ack-ack guns and a
number of generators that threw up a kind of primitive, partly-
effective force field. The force field would stop any aircraft or at least
cause it enough trouble to slow it down for the ack-ack.
Of course the artificial satellite, Albertus (named in honor of Dr.
Einstein), kept a watchful telescope on Project Star. But in that year
of 1970 it seemed to most men that all the caution and secrecy was
overly dramatic. After the collapse of Soviet Russia a decade before,
from internal causes precipitated by the successful fixing of the
American-controlled satellite Albertus in the heavens, and after the
almost Carthaginian peace imposed on Argentina when its dictator A-
bombed London, the world had quieted down considerably. America
was top dog in the nations and her supervision of the science of
other countries left little possibility of successful attack or even of
effective sabotage within the many colonies which worked on
advancements in weapons and other civilized phenomena, and on
space flight.

Nearly everyone believed that the purpose of Project Star was to

construct "flying saucers" (the inadequate name had stuck through
the years) for use in reaching out to the other planets. Only the men
who were working there, and a few others in government and in the
military forces, knew that the disks were not intended for extra-
terrestrial flight—there were rocket projects galore for that—but for
journeys in the atmosphere or slightly above it, at speeds incredible
even in 1970. The name Project Star had not been chosen to mislead
anyone, but it had done so and nobody bothered to correct the
impression. Secrecy had become an ingrained national habit in the
past thirty-odd years.
Dr. Alan Rackham was one of the scientists who worked on the
problem of fuel for the disks. He was not a member of the vastly
important handful who headed the colony and came equipped with
everything sacred and untouchable except halos, but he was
considered of enough consequence to rate a house of his own and an
assistant who was also an efficient bodyguard. This was Brave,
whose proper name was John Kiwanawatiwa.
Brave sat down in his own chair, a sturdy specially-built job, while
Alan called Dr. Getty on the visiphone to report the shooting. Brave
never sprawled out or slouched as his superior did. He sat straight, a
red-copper-colored man built to the scale of a Greek statue, about
half again life size. His arms and legs were tough as cable steel, his
chest a brawny barrel. He was a Navajo Indian, but his features were
more nearly those of a Sioux: a great finely-formed crag of a nose,
thin straight lips over white teeth, dark eyes that a hawk might envy
their piercing power, a wolf-trap jaw. His speech was that of an M.S.
of Carlisle and Oxford, except when he spoke with people he did not
know or like; then it became a parody of the nineteenth-century
storybook red man's gutteral discourse. At times, when he went with
Alan to meetings of the hierarchy (a few of whom, including Dr.
Getty, he cordially detested for their bland self-importance), he even
wore a bedraggled chicken feather sticking upright in his black hair,
stood behind Alan with folded arms and a fierce expression and
confined his remarks to "Ugh" and "Waugh." This gave both Alan and
himself a great deal of innocent pleasure.
For Alan Rackham was also a rebel against stuffiness and conceit. He
was a perfectly normal-looking man, of slightly more than middle
height, thirty-one years old, handsome enough if you liked lean bony
features and unruly brown hair; his muscular development was so
unobtrusive that no one ever guessed he had been a Marine and won
himself a DSC in Argentina. He enjoyed his work at Project Star, for
he had a scientist's inquiring mind; but he liked even more the huge
Indian with whom he lived, the girl in the metallurgy section who
wore his engagement ring, and the book of rather impudent
philosophy on which he worked during his free evenings.
He also loved a long drink, a thoughtful pipe, an involved practical
joke, and the moody Siamese cat, Unquote.

Now he turned from the visiphone, as the image of Dr. Getty faded
out on its screen, and he frowned at Brave. "Son," he said, "why
would anybody take a potshot at me?"
"What does Doc Pomposity say about it?" rumbled the Indian.
"Mainly blah, blah, blah."
"Naturally," nodded Brave. "You know, sagamore, I think it's that
accident. There was something cockeyed about it.... I don't care how
shocked the fellow was, or how quickly the flame seared up and
anesthetized the wound; there should have been plenty of pain in
that hand. And he didn't even yip when it happened. He only looked
peeved."
"Getty says he never got to infirmary. No one has seen him at all."
"Cockeyed," said Brave again. "The whole thing's a muddle." He
stared at Alan. "Boss, I have an instinct that warns me we're in for
trouble."
"That's an instinct? When I get shot at, this gives you an instinct?"
"The noble red man has an instinct," said Brave imperturbably,
"which sits in his belly and beats on a tomtom when trouble's
coming. I don't mean ghastly wounds that don't make men cry out,
or even lunatics laying for you thereafter—and there's a connection
between the two, that's sure. But I mean big trouble. There's
something in the air. I can't quite catch it, but it's been there for a
long time. Weeks and months, sirdar."
"You've been reading the thesaurus again. You know more synonyms
for 'master' than Roget. You mean this seriously, Brave? About
trouble?" He had a respect for the Indian's intuition which was based
half on his anthropological knowledge of the weird powers of certain
older races, and half on pure human superstition; at times when
Brave made his predictions, Alan felt as though a gypsy crone had
passed by him and whispered some incantation in his ear.
"I mean it, Alan. And the damned instinct has never been wrong yet.
It's beating in my guts right now like it did at Campana just before
hell broke loose."
"Well, batten down the hatches, then," said Alan resignedly, while the
hair on the back of his neck prickled and tried to stand up. "It's got
itself off to a fine start, your trouble. My tailor will never be able to
mend this jacket."
"Why don't you cook us some oysters Rockefeller and lobster
thermidor and all that Frenchified goop you brew up?" suggested
Brave. "If we're in for afflictions, we may as well meet 'em with
pleasantly full stomachs."
"Right. While I'm at it, you write a report of the incident—of both of
them—and sign my name. Getty'll never know the difference. He
thinks you haven't mastered Basic English yet."
"Ugh," said Brave. "Noble red man will inscribe li'l pictures on
birchbark for medicine man, while medicine man raises cain in frozen
food locker. Don't get that sauce too thin this time, patriarch. I can't
bear watery sauce on my lobsters."
 CHAPTER II

Next morning, while Alan was still dressing and yawning, and Brave
was clattering skillets in the kitchen, humming the allegro con
passionato movement from "Hard Hearted Hannah the Vamp of
Savannah," the door chimes bonged softly. Brave went to the
spywindow, surveyed the caller, and shifted his grenade pistol to a
handier position before opening the door. A stranger stood on the
threshold.
"Ichabod Crane," said Brave to himself, and aloud, "Yes?"
"Ah," said the stranger, "you would be the tough egg with the
unpronounceable name. Greetings, chieftain."
"How," said Brave with a straight face. "You want-um audience with
great sachem?"
"That I do, Lo."
"Oh, gad," groaned the Indian, "if I hear that weary old jest once
more I'll burst into tears and die. Come in, comedian. Dr. Rackham's
dressing."
"Thanks. Forgive me for the godawful gag, friend. I haven't eaten
breakfast yet and an empty stomach plays the devil with my sense of
humor." He rattled over to a chair and sat down. At least, thought
Brave, closing the door, you expected him to rattle. He was the
longest and thinnest bag of bones ever seen on Long Island. Fully six
feet eight, he was lean from the top of his narrow skull, which was
covered by an inch-long mat of straight stiff blond hair, to the soles of
his number twelve feet. If he had any fat in him at all it must have
been a very lonesome blob of fat indeed, well camouflaged and
utterly alone in a wilderness of stringy muscle, meager sinew, and
shaving-slender bones. His green eyes, perpetually half-lidded on
either side of a nose like the prow of a Chinese junk, were humorous
and sharp and as bright as polished emeralds.
Brave said to himself, Here is a shrewd customer, who isn't one-tenth
the fool he appears to be.
"You don't have an appointment with Dr. Rackham."
"No, I don't. A plump little meathead called Getty over at the central
offices said he'd be here, and I popped over on the chance. I want to
inveigle him onto a TV program of mine."
"Dr. Rackham is a busy man."
"So is President Blose of the U.S. of A., but he came on the program,
Lo. Pardon me," said the man, "there I go again. It's second nature. I
don't mean to offend, but I was a disk jockey once. Look, friend, my
name is Jim McEldownie. I'm Worlds of Portent McEldownie."
"I'm Lashings of Victuals Kiwanawatiwa, and my eggs are scorching,"
said Brave, going out to the kitchen. "The books are counted, so are
the pipes, and the first editions are booby-trapped. Don't get ideas."
"Injun, I could grow to love you," said McEldownie. "Listen, seriously,
don't you ever watch TV?"
"I do not."
"That explains it. Existing in the dark like this, you wouldn't have
heard of me. I run this klatch, see, called Worlds of Portent, onto
which I entice various important and pseudo-important characters,
and there I cajole and browbeat and query till they tell me all sorts of
fascinating lies, and the public laps it up like a bunch of silly cats."

Unquote, the Siamese, rose out of her hygienic playbox and gave him
a frozen glare. He recoiled. "My God," he said, "I seem to be
offending everyone this morning. Forgive me, puss."
Unquote snarled and collapsed in a boneless pile of beautiful fur. Alan
stuck his head into the room and said, "Where do you classify me?"
"Huh? Oh, hallo, Doc. You're important. Anybody from Project Star is
important. Whether the same can be said for those officials of our
mighty government who have gasped and babbled and turned blue
on Portent, I'm not one to declare. How about it, Doc? Will you
appear?"
"Talking about what? Fuel? That's all I really know."
"If you can talk for thirteen minutes about it, without violating any
regulations or giving away secrets, I want you. Fuel is hot stuff with
the space-minded John Q."
"What do you think, Brave? Should we do it?"
Brave said, "Too much time and no fun, that's how it sounds to me."
"Oh, I don't know. I've never been on the air."
"Please," said McEldownie, shuddering like a leafless willow in a high
wind. "The phrase is 'on the space.' Air belongs to that outmoded,
decadent, but apparently deathless medium called radio. There, I've
said it. Have you got any mouth-washing soap?"
"A positive Hilton Boil," said Brave in the kitchen. "A real yokked-up
comic. Wait till I've fed him and we'll hurl him out."
"All right," said Alan, "I'll do it. I'm a ham at heart. When do you
want me?"
"Tomorrow night at eight vacant?"
"As vacant as—" he was going to say "Dr. Getty's head," but caught
himself in time. The TV man's flippancy was contagious. "Quite
vacant. Give Brave the directions and we'll be there."
Brave said, "Breakfast is on. There are three plates and food for two.
I hope you eat lightly, Mr. Portent."
"McEldownie, but call me Jim. I eat like a bird."
The bird, thought Alan half an hour later, must be a starving turkey
buzzard; he sighed and stood up. "We're due at work, Jim. See you
at eight tomorrow, then?"
"Seven-fifteen. I have to brief you. Cheers, gentlemen. Apologize to
the cat for me. I insulted it a while back and it's been burning holes
in my neck ever since." He took himself off, still with the illusion of
rattling bonily. Alan and Brave washed up and strolled down to their
laboratory.
Nothing happened that day or the next, save for a thorough search
for the missing welder, which turned up no trace of him. At seven-
fifteen the two friends walked into the TV studio in Manhattan.
"Hi," said McEldownie, waving a long hand. "Sit down and let's gurgle
about fuel." They did so. At one point the lean man said, "An idea.
What if Brave were to stand behind you all through the program? It'd
look impressive as hell. Sinister Indian guards scientist even on
national hookup. 'No precaution too elaborate for our men,' says
head of Project Star. How about it?"
Alan looked at Brave. He would not expose his friend to stupid
ridicule. Brave winked. "Okay," said Alan. "But no gags."
"Abso-bloody-lutely. Play it for gravity. Show people that there is
danger connected with the business. And I think there is," he added
solemnly.
Alan stared. "Why do you say that?"
"I don't mean the TV, I mean your work out on Long Island. You can't
tell me that nobody in the world wishes our country any ill, chum. We
have enemies just as we always have had. Why else the ack-ack and
force screens?"
Alan did not answer. He thought of Brave's prediction of trouble, and
he was more impressed with this lanky comedian than he had been
before that moment.

Thirty seconds before the program time he sat down at the round
table opposite McEldownie, and Brave took up a forbidding posture
behind his chair.
His host began to speak, and suddenly Alan realized why the tall
blond irrepressible fellow had been trusted with a program of such
gravity as Worlds of Portent. As the cameras rolled and the brilliant
lights came on, the jester's motley dropped away from him and was
replaced by a cloak of earnest sobriety. His fantastic appearance
heightened the seriousness; it was as shocking and thought-
producing as if a scarecrow had begun to talk Schopenhauer.
He knew precisely how much to say; when to sit back and let Alan do
a monologue, and when to interrupt with a pertinent question. He
was a genius at his work.
And then, perhaps four or five minutes after the telecast had begun,
Alan became aware of two things, each quite extraordinary. First,
Brave had disappeared. Alan glanced back over his shoulder and
found the Indian had vanished. The lights were so bright that his
vision did not extend to the walls of the studio, so he presumed that
his friend was still there somewhere; but he had left the range of the
cameras. And secondly, something was happening to Alan's mind.
He tried to analyze the trouble, but he could not do it. He could only
touch a few salient points of it; the fact that although he was talking
very learnedly, and with (so far as he could tell) lucidity and vigor, he
was not controlling his tongue in the least. It was almost like being
drunk; there seemed to be a small entity perched on the root of his
tongue who was pulling the strings of speech. But whereas the
drunken entity was malicious and got him into all sorts of rows and
riots, this particular sprite was doing what seemed a fine job for him.
He knew quite well that he himself was not forming or directing the
words he spoke. It was unpleasant, to say the least.
And there was something else. His mind, freed of necessity to
concentrate on the program, was somewhere off in space, listening
intently ... listening to a voice from without and within, a voice that
inhabited the cold wastes of time and infinity as well as the bone-
bounded sphere of his brain.
Listen to me, Alan Rackham, said the voice. Wordlessly, yet with
words, from the farthest stretches of the galaxies and still existing in
the core of his own intellect, cold as hoarfrost, hot as berserker's
rage, gentle and persuasive as a doting mother, the voice said to him,
Listen to me.

He would not listen. It was good and evil both together, and if he
listened he would die. Yet it was said he would live. He would live
forever; if time can be measured in terms of endlessness, he would
not die. But he knew he would die. He struggled. The cameras picked
up no hint of the travail. His face was intense and good-humored and
his words were intelligent; and all the while he fought with the voice
and would not listen. He fought it for an hour, and for a month, and
till the end of the world came and beyond, and it spoke to him, fire
and ice in the same words, but without words, and then he began to
listen to it.
At this point six minutes of the telecast had gone by.
You are listening now, said the voice. You are listening, are you not?
I'm listening, God curse you.
I am taking you, Alan Rackham, as a bear takes a lamb, as a man
takes a woman, as a hand takes a glove and the glove takes the
hand.
I understand, curse you. Take me.
I am older than your whole race, and wiser than its cumulative
wisdom, and I come from the stars.
Of course, you come from the stars. You are myself, and I
understand you, friend.
Yes, I am yourself, wiser and stronger and older and beyond you in
every way, and I am you. You are my servant, my slave, and myself.
Certainly, master. Why do you tell me things I have always known?
You are not obeying when you follow me, for you follow yourself, you
who are now me.
You are God, are you not? said Alan in his mind. The Buddhists are
right.
No. Not God. I am the atom and I am the intergalactic void, you and
me and everything right and wrong. Have you learned your lesson?
It is a lesson I knew in the womb.
Now you are mine, said the voice, approving without an iota's loss of
the flame and frost of hatred and love blended flawlessly.
This is a pleasure beyond pleasure, sensation far above sensation.
This is maelstrom descent and flying into the sun. This is the
keenness of sexual transport to the nth power. I live for you.
Now you have it. Never forget it.
Never! swore Alan.
Now forget it.
I have forgotten it.
Now what do you have to do for me?
Whatever it is you wish.
Truly you are mine. Now you have forgotten me.
I have forgotten.
Who am I?
Who are you? asked Alan, perplexed.
Truly you have forgotten. What have you to say?
"So the problem of most importance confronting us then was, how
can we carry enough of this fuel to get us to the moon and back? It
took us seven years to solve that one, but as everyone knows, we
did. Then Van Horne discovered the hitherto unknown properties of
—" he was talking blithely, almost by rote, for this was history-book
stuff; and there had never been any sprite guiding his tongue at all,
nor any voiceless voice in the bitterness of the eternal chasm
between the stars and there was no memory anywhere in his
consciousness of such things, nor any lingering discomfortable feeling
that he had known a thing now forgotten....

CHAPTER III

They were driving out Queens Boulevard toward the colony, and Alan
said, "Why did you leave, Brave? Where'd you go?"
The great Indian spun the wheel for a curve. "Just back to the wall."
"Why?"
"Lights were too bright for my eyes."
Alan stared at him. "You could out-gaze the sun, you pokerfaced liar,
and you know it. Why did you leave?"
Brave glanced over at him. "Caliph, I hate to go on sounding like a
spae-wife, or the Witch of Endor. But never in all my life have I had
such a succession of ominous bodings. You'll think I'm turning raven
in my old age—"
"No, damn it, Brave, I know you can smell danger a mile or a month
away. Go ahead."
"Quoth the raven, then. I didn't feel happy about standing there.
Before we started, it seemed like a good quiet joke. But when we
were there and the lights came on, and the cameras started, I
suddenly had to step back out of sight. I had to, Alan. A couple of my
ghostly ancestors took me by the scruff and hauled me right away
from there."
"That would have made a nice tableau on TV."
Brave chuckled deep in his chest. "Running Lizard and Pony Sees-the-
Sky saving John Kiwanawatiwa from the white man's magic ... I
laugh, viceroy, but I swear it felt like that. The old desert-spawned
blood—the blood that doesn't tame down—boiled up under those
lights and cameras. It pulled the civilized flesh and bones away from
them. It whispered that things were wrong, wrong for an Indian and
wrong for his friend." He stepped on the gas viciously and the MG
spurted forward onto the Union Turnpike like a turpentined hound.
"Alan, I almost yanked you up and walked off with you under my
arm. I didn't like you sitting there in the bath of electrical magic."
"Why didn't you do it?" asked Alan curiously.
"Oh, hell, boss man. It's one thing to have these primeval urges, and
another to forget all your technical training and scientific knowledge
so completely that you'll follow the impulse. Do you bust a window
every time you'd like to?"
"Hmm." Alan was ill at ease. It seemed to him for a moment that
there was something to Brave's instinct, and that he should have
been snatched from those lights. Then he said, "I think it's merely
that someone had a shot at me the other day, and you've fretted
over that till you're seeing assassins behind every chair."
"Maybe. Maybe." Brave rocketed the little car along the dark highway,
across the miles to home, and all the while the tomtoms beat in his
blood and he knew that he should be afraid, that he should be coldly
and sanely afraid of some black hazard soon to come.

Don Mariner walked into their laboratory the following afternoon. He

was one of the top engineers on Project Star, a youngish-middle-aged
man running to flab and ever-thinning hair. Ordinarily good-humored,
today he had a long face and a crease between his eyes. Without a
word he spread a sheaf of blueprints and photostats out on a lab
table. Alan and Brave bent over them. Don's stubby finger traced the
outline of a flying disk, then stabbed at the fuel storage tanks and
several other sections of the interior.
"Look at this, you two. I've had it under my nose for three months
and it never struck me till today. Just look at it. See anything wrong?"
After a moment Alan said, "The fuel tanks are too big."
"My God! You ought to be the engineer instead of me. I ought to hire
out for a potato peeler. Three months it took me to see it."
"What's the point of it?" asked Brave. "If the disks are going to use
hornethylene, they won't need a tenth—not a hundredth that much
storage space, even if they want to circle the earth a dozen times
without landing."
"Here's another thing," said Don Mariner. "This closet for space suits.
Why? The stratosphere is the highest they're supposed to go, and
there's no need for space suits there. You want a space suit to crawl
around the outside of Albertus, but not to wear in a disk. If there's
trouble outside the shell you will simply land. Now look at these
instruments." He showed them another chart. "Are these instruments
for earth travel?"
"I don't know. Are they?"
"They are not. And also they're not the instruments Carey designed
for the disks last year. They're a new set entirely, and some of 'em I
don't understand myself, but I'll tell you this: they're not for earth
travel. They're what you'd want in a space rocket." He looked up, his
gray eyes bleak. "I faced Carey with 'em, and he swears they're his
old design; and Carey doesn't lie in the ordinary course of events. But
they're not, and I know it."
"What's the point?" asked Alan. The question was almost rhetorical;
he knew the answer.
"The point is, these disks we're building are supposed to be purely
and simply a faster means of traveling around Terra than any we
have now. But the man in the street, that faceless brainless little
cipher, believes they're for conquering the stars. And by Judas, he's
right! We're building interplanetary disks—and we're not supposed to
know it!"
The three men stared at one another.
"Who's keeping it from us?"
"And why?"
"There are plenty of rocket projects—so what if someone wants to try
a space disk instead? Why would he tell all his scientists and
technicians a pack of lies? There's no need for secrecy, for God's
sake!"
"But—my gosh," protested Alan, "no one man could keep a thing like
this from all the rest of us. There must be ten or twenty who know.
And details like these, the fuel tanks and instruments, they can't be
hidden from anybody!"
"So where does it lead us?"
"Up a narrow, dank, and ill-smelling blind alley," said Brave.
"Not so bl—"

There was a detonation outside the lab; a harsh, clangorous

thunderclap of a sound, like the bursting of a bomb full of wash tubs
and anchor chains. The three men were dashing for the door before
the reverberations had died away.
A disk had crashed on the airfield. Brave and Alan and Don piled into
a jeep and raced down toward it.
"I didn't know they had any ready for use," Alan shouted.
"Oh, yes. They haven't advertised it much, though. And this must be
the first test flight. I didn't know it was coming off today."
"You'd think we'd all have been invited to the takeoff. Big impressive
show, faithful workers get afternoon off, and all that."
"Hell," said Don, "if they're keeping the purpose of the things from
us, for no good reason that I can see, they might want to keep the
test flight secret too."
"How can they keep it secret? It obviously had to take off in plain
sight, and they couldn't shoo everyone indoors. No, I guess they just
didn't give a damn about us. Underlings, unimportant servants, that's
us," said Alan bitterly, with a flash prevision of the terrible idea that
would soon be obsessing him.
They pulled up beside the wreckage of the disk. There was no danger
of explosion, due to the peculiar properties of hornethylene. The
giant platter, with its raised top like a hot-dish cover and its bubble of
clear crystal beneath, lay crumpled and bent, one-third of its whole
edge accordioned in upon itself. Even as they came up the crystal
bubble inched open; not smoothly, as it should have done, but like a
damp-swollen door creaks away from its frame under heavy pressure.
The pilot thrust his legs out and dropped to the ground. Alan and a
dozen others ran to him.
"Hi," said he. "Guess I pulped this job up right."
"Good Lord, man, are you okay?"
"Not a nick. I just had time to see the ground coming up at me and
bingo, I was sitting there with my eyes popping. Anybody got a
drink?" He was cut to the pattern of all airmen since the days of
monoplanes: tall, narrow of hip and wide of shoulder, lean always-
tanned face, a wry grin on the mouth and horizon-hunger in the
eyes.
Somebody gave him a flask. "Were you alone?" asked Alan.
"Sure. They can't risk two guys in these things yet. We don't know
what they'll do. This one'll take some going over with a microscope
and tweezers; it's full of bugs. Someone jockey me to the main
offices?"
The crowd dispersed slowly; but Brave, putting an urgent hand on
Alan's arm—it enfolded his biceps and the fingertips met the thumb,
for Brave's hands were as outsize as the rest of him—held him there.
"Wait a minute, risaldar. I want to check something."
"Another instinct, Brave?"
"Plain horse sense. And I want to check it before the big boys clamp
a top secret sign on this wreck."
He reached up and gripped the edge of the crystal bubble. It resisted
him. He set his muscles and tugged with all his incredible strength.
The crushed metal hinges complained and shrieked and parted, and
the great bulbous sheet of plastiquartz fell to the ground, narrowly
missing him as he dodged back.
"I'll boost you up, and you can give me a hand."

Inside the disk, they crouched and went through the tunnel into the
control room. This comprised the entire central portion of the disk;
suspended within the shell, like a small kernel in a large nut, it was
held comparatively steady as the outer husk rocked and rolled and
flipped in its characteristic skipped-rock flight. Alan did not
understand the principle of this near-motionless suspension of the
control room within an erratically weaving hull, although Don Mariner
had tried to explain it to him in patient two-syllable words. It involved
a knowledge of the newest developments in gyroscopics, which the
young fuel expert did not comprehend. Brave had a fairly good idea
of the basic laws involved, but wisely had never tried to beat it into
his friend's head. Alan on fuel, on chemistry, on philosophy, was
superb; Alan on dynamics or any other branch of mechanics was
deplorable.
They looked around the room. Nearly all the equipment was still in its
place, for the clamps that held it during the astonishing speeds the
disk could maintain in flight had held it still in the shattering instant
of the crash. But the entire control board, the panels of instruments
and the wide mirrors that gave the pilot a view of the earth and air
from every angle, had all been shoved back and broken when the
saucer had struck its nose edge into the ground.
Brave walked over to the pilot's seat and stood silently surveying the
mess. At last he said, "Alan."
"Yes?"
"Look here."
Alan looked, and started as though he had been stabbed with a
hypodermic needle. "God ..." he said.
The control board had buckled back against the pilot's chair;
something beyond it, some ponderously heavy piece of machinery in
the space between central room and shell, had knifed through wall
and board as sharp and deadly as the blade of a guillotine. The metal
had sliced the center of the pilot's seat to within six inches of the
back.
No man could have sat there at the moment of the crash, as the pilot
averred he had done.
He would never have lived. He would have been cut in two....

CHAPTER IV
That night Alan and Brave rode across Project Star to the women's
building, where Alan's fiancee, Win Gilmore had a small apartment.
Win—short for Winifred, and God help the man who called her that—
opened the door before the sound of the diacoustic bell had died
away.
The first thing that struck you about Win was color: she looked as
though she had been put together by a Bergdorf Goodman display
artist with a genius for analogous chromas. Her hair was washed in a
pale aquamarine and dusted over with luminous flecks of mauve; it
was drawn back to the crown and clasped there by an abstract spiral
of silver, from which it fell in darkening waves down her naked back.
Her nylon jersey lounging outfit, cut with almost severe simplicity,
was graduated from pink to a deep violet hue. Her finger and toe
nails were lacquered with phosphorescent sapphire, and the lashes of
her blue eyes were dyed with mascara of the same glowing shade.
Her skin was a soft golden color, thanks to half an hour a day under
the sun lamps of the colony's gymnasium.
"How, oh squaw of rainbow brilliance," said Brave, holding up a hand
in grave salute. "I leave this warrior in your keeping, whilst I shuffle
down to the recroom and squander a few bucks on the pinball
machines."
"How, oh mountain that walks. Will you have a slug of Scotch first?"
"The noble red man, pampering his internal workin's, drinks only rum
this week. No thanks, Win. The gambling fever's got me. See you."
Alan closed the door behind him and took Win into his arms. He
kissed her, gently at first, then hard, their lips parted, warm on each
other as their bodies warmed, his hands strong and taut on her back;
he smoothed his fingers down the hollow of her spine, ran them up
into her soft hair. She said against his mouth, "You demolish that
toilsomely-wrought thatch, boy, and I'll demolish you." He laughed
and pushed her away and lit a cigarette, stray flecks of mauve from
her hair glittering on his fingers.
She went to the low cocktail table and picked up an already filled
glass. He took it from her. "Here's atomic dust in yer eye,
Winniefred," he toasted, and drank long and thirstily.
"Whoa, Nellie. Haven't you drunk anything today?"
"Only the dregs of woe," he said lightly, and then his lean face
changed and his eyes looked into a remote place which they did not
like. At once she touched his arm.
"Sit down, Alan." He did so automatically, and she perched tailor-
fashion on the edge of the couch beside him. "What's the matter?"
"I wish I knew."
"Just the blues? You been skipping meals? That always makes you
ethereal and moody. I'd as soon have Unquote with a toothache
around the place as you after you've missed your lunch."
"No, not the blues. Big trouble, sweetheart, that's been exploding
right and left with no rhyme to it. I've thought so much about it in
the last few hours that I doubt if I can even talk about it now."

Then, of course, he told her everything: beginning with the welder's

accident and eerie lack of pain, then the shot from the bushes,
Brave's indefinite fears climaxing at the telecast, Don Mariner's
discovery of the undreamt-of potentials of the disks, the crack-up
ending the almost-furtive test flight, and the pilot who lived when he
should have been butchered, Alan brought it all out; and as he
listened to his own words a dreadful idea was born and grew and
expanded throughout his intellect until suddenly he knew that here
was his answer, that no other could be rationally accepted. He sat
silently for minutes, while Win watched him, and gradually the color
swept out of his face and he began to shiver.
She put the glass into his hand. He drained off the last of the drink,
and she clicked open a deep drawer of the cocktail table and gave
him another, freshly mixed at a touch of her finger on the emerald
stud of the drawer.
"What is it, Alan? You've seen something in it, some connection
between these events. What is it?"
He took a shuddering breath through open lips and said, "Yes, I
know. I know what we have to fight."
"Fight? You mean there are enemies? You can deduce that from—"
"My God, yes, there are enemies." He turned, to fix her with a glare
like a lunatic's. "Listen, Win. We all have the desire to go out to the
other planets, and to the stars beyond our system. We've built a
score of rocket projects all over the continent because of that desire.
It's no secret, everyone has it. Right?"
"Sure, darling. Even I want to see—well, Mars, anyway."
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