Fistful of Digits by Christopher Hodder-Williams

Author:Christopher Hodder-Williams [Hodder-Williams, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Venture Press
Published: 2015-11-12T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

For Stranger it might well have been a perfectly ordinary social evening. He liked the loose links he still maintained with the academic world; and Dr Irene Pellings, lecturer in modern languages and departmental head of the Language Laboratory, was an old friend from the Cambridge days. She had said on the phone: “Richard, it’s just a small informal dinner.”

“What’s it for?”

“We’ll think of something.”

She did indeed think of something; for she was watching out for Stranger’s car from a window in the lab. The casual interception was discreetly executed; but she closed the door of the lab firmly behind them before she explained its purpose.

Irene was unapologetically robust. Rude things were said, from time to time, about a certain lack of allure and on this subject she was as sensitive as the average battleship, which (at any rate in nature) she startlingly resembled.

Only the very young and the very ignorant were so foolish as to address Dr Irene Pellings at breakfast and they did so only once.

Now, Dr Pellings gestured like a policewoman towards the cubicles — twenty-eight in all — where language students normally sat with earphones clamped to their heads and tape recorders rotating on the little desks before them.

As usual, Dr Pellings was brief. In her clipped, military style she gave a sort of verbal Situation Report. “These, Richard, are teaching machines. The lecturer, who sits at the back of the loom —”

“Why the back, old thing?”

“I’m not an old thing and don’t interrupt. The lecturer plays the teaching tape from his console at the back of the room, and this is automatically re-recorded by each individual machine — as you see, all the cubicles have one. The lesson is, shall we say, in colloquial French; and there are spaces between each phrase. During these intervals, the students can record, on to their own tape machines, their own version of each phrase. They then wind back the tape and compare their pronunciation with that of the voice on the master tape. They can then erase their first effort — without erasing the teaching voice — and have another go. And so on…improving their pronunciation each time.”

“Is all this in vacuo, darling?”

She threw him a breakfast look. “The lecturer can listen to any of the twenty-eight cubicles and check the progress of any student…There are many other things, more complex, that can be done with this equipment, but that is the basic principle.”

“Does it work?”

“Yes — remarkably well.”

Stranger threw his hands in the air and wiggled them. “Hurrah! May we now go and drink educational sherry?”

“Richard, will you never grow up? You know perfectly well I brought you here for a purpose.”

“Good heavens.”

“Yes. Good heavens…” She eyed him from the main forward gun turret, then led the way to the back of the room where the lecturer’s console stood on a dais. “The console,” she continued, “is at the back because students get self-conscious if it’s in front.”

“Why should they be any less self-conscious if it’s at the back? They can still get caught if they pick their noses.

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