She sighed. “Jule—Jule… You are going to have to start from absolute scratch. The education you had, a bachelor’s degree, is now meaningless. By the time you are through the equivalent of what you used to call grammar school, human knowledge will have doubled again. It will be 512 times what it was when you were a child in 1940.”

“I don’t want or expect to develop into a nuclear scientist. If the kids can pick up an ordinary layman’s education, I can too,” he said stubbornly. “We’ve been over this before.”

She shook her head in despair. “Even that, Jule. Today’s children take chemical and electronic stimulants—temporarily, while they are studying—to increase their intelligence quotients and receptivity.”

“Well, why can’t I take them too?”

“Because you are in your middle thirties. Actually, of course, you are pushing seventy, but physically and mentally you are a man in his thirties. You see, Jule, a person continues to grow, both mentally and physically, until he is approximately twenty-five years of age. From then on, he begins to deteriorate. We can slow down the process, but we cannot eliminate it entirely. The stimulants we utilize to increase intelligence and learning aptitude work best on youth. After the age of twenty-five, they slack off in effectiveness. Indeed, at the age of fifty or so, they are meaningless. Perhaps this will be overcome in the future, as new advances are made in the field, but for the present the use of such stimulants would not do you very much good.”

“Jesus!” Julian protested. “So even the eight-year-olds have a head start on me.”

“In more ways than one,” she agreed unhappily. “This is their world: they were born into it; they are perfectly at home in it. For you, it is as though you had landed on an alien planet. Everything is new to you; they have been assimilating their surroundings ever since they were in the cradle.”