oice was chanting:

"Hat--_huh-ah-tuh._ H-a-t. Box--_buh-oh-ksss_. B-o-x.
Gun--_guh-uh-nnn_. G-u-n. Girl--_guh-ih-rrr-lll_," while pictures were
flashed on a screen at the front, and words appeared under them.

There were about twenty boys and girls, of the freshman-year
age-bracket at desk-seats, facing the screen. They'd started learning
the alphabet when school had opened in September; now they had gotten
as far as combining letters into simple words. In another month,
they'd be as far as diphthongs and would be initiated into the
mysteries of silent letters. Maybe sooner than that; he was finding
that children who had not been taught to read until their twelfth year
learned much more rapidly than the primary grade children in the
Literate schools.

What he was doing here wasn't exactly illegal. It wasn't even against
the strict letter of Fraternity regulations. But it had to be done
clandestinely. What he'd have liked to have done would have been to
have given every boy and girl in English I the same instruction this
selected group was getting, but that would have been out of the
question. The public would never have stood for it; the police would
have had to intervene to prevent a riotous mob of Illiterates from
tearing the school down brick by brick, and even if that didn't
happen, the ensuing uproar inside the Fraternity would have blown the
roof off Literates' Hall. Even Lancedale couldn't have survived such
an explosion, and the body of Literate First Class Ralph N. Prestonby
would have been found in a vacant lot the next morning. Even many of
Lancedale's supporters would have turned on him in anger at this
sudden blow to the Fraternities' monopoly of the printed Word.

So it had to be kept secret, and since adolescents in possession of a
secret are under constant temptation to hint mysteriously in the
presence of outsiders, this hocus-pocus of ritual and password and
countersign had to be resorted to. He'd been in conspiratorial work of
other kinds, and knew that there was a sound psychological basis for
most of what seemed, at first glance, to be mere melodramatic
claptrap.

He and Yetsko passed on through a door across the room, into another
sound-proofed room. The work of soundproofing and partitioning the old
stockroom had been done in the last semester of his first year at
Mineola High, by members of the graduating class of building-trades
students, who had then gone their several ways convinced tha