Percival opened his mouth and spoke. He spoke in a rather wobbly and shrill little voice.

"I presume, Father," he said, "that the encouraging sounds you are directing at me are onomatopoeic in origin and are designed to stimulate the faculty of imitation. Nevertheless, I must beg you not to continue making such utterances."

Helen and I gaped at each other. "He talked!" I choked out. "He talked like a professor! You heard him!"

Helen stared, wide-eyed. "But he never said a word before—not a word!"

Percival appeared to be bored. "Really, you could hardly expect me to join in the sort of unintelligent conversation that goes on in this house!"

Yeah, that was the effect of EE's electronic impulses on the unborn. Every EE course that Helen and I had ever taken was in Percival's brain when he was born! The fact that we'd had our own knowledge erased hadn't affected him in the least.

And I was going to have a son that would look up to me. That is a laugh. Our Percival loves his parents, but we will never see the day when we know half as much as he did when he was born!

It was the same with all the other kids born after EE, of course. Every last one of them came into the world equipped with a full cargo of knowledge.

You know how it's changed things. They had to cut the voting and office-holding age to zero, of course.

We couldn't restrict office to adults, when our own kids were ten times smarter than we were.

Half of Congress is under ten years old these days, and the big offices are mostly filled with kid geniuses. I hear there's a twelve-year old out in California that they're grooming for President.

What gets me, though, is this:

These kids of ours still keep piling new knowledge into their brains with EE. Now, twenty or thirty years from now, what are their kids going to be like? I do some wondering about that.

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