by John Saul
But Jeff wasn’t listening to him. “If you want to see something neat,” he interrupted, “you should see what my brother’s got”
“Your brother?” Josh asked. “Where is he?”
“Next door,” Jeff replied. “Come on.”
He led Josh to the room adjoining his own. Without bothering to knock, he pushed the door open and walked in. In contrast to the chaos in his own room, this room was neat and tidy, the bed made, all the clothes put away in the closet and dresser. The desktop was bare save for a computer, and all the books were neatly arranged on the shelves.
A boy sat at the computer terminal, his fingers flying over the keyboard, his eyes glued to the monitor. If he was aware he was no longer alone in the room, he gave no sign. Jeff nudged Josh, held his finger to his lips, then crept up behind the other boy. Abruptly, he grabbed his brother’s chair and spun him around. “My brother, the computer nerd,” he announced.
Josh’s eyes widened.
Sitting in the chair was a carbon copy of Jeff. He glanced from one face to the other, searching for differences.
There seemed to be none.
Each of the boys had the same black, curly hair, the same dark brown eyes, the same square jaw.
“This is Adam,” Jeff announced. “He’s my kid brother by ten whole minutes.”
Adam’s face flushed and he tried to push Jeff away, but Jeff held onto the chair and began pushing it toward Josh. “This is Josh MacCallum,” he told his twin. “He wants to see your virtual reality setup.”
“Can’t you knock?” Adam complained. “You’re not supposed to come into people’s rooms when their doors are closed. And I’m right in the middle of something.”
“You’re always in the middle of something,” Jeff told him. “And don’t be a creep—lighten up and have some fun. Get the helmet and glove, and show Josh how it works.”
For a moment Josh thought Adam was going to argue with Jeff. He watched in silence as the twin brothers stared at each other. In a few seconds, almost as if Jeff held some sort of power over him, the defiance drained out of Adam’s eyes. Though neither of the boys had spoken, Josh had the eerie feeling that they had nonetheless had some kind of argument, and that Jeff had clearly won it. Silently, Adam left his chair and went to the dresser.
Jeff grinned mischievously at Josh. “He’s a nerd, but he does what I tell him to. Wait’ll you try this. It’s really cool.”
A moment later Jeff was fitting a strange kind of helmet onto Josh’s head, along with a heavy glove that went on his right hand.
“I can’t see anything,” Josh protested as the front of the helmet dropped in front of his eyes.
“You’re not supposed to,” Jeff told him. “Just sit in the chair and wait a minute while Adam gets it hooked up.”
“We’re not supposed to—” Adam began, but Jeff cut him off.
“Just do it, Adam, okay? It’s not like this is some kind of big secret. Josh’ll probably have one himself by next week!”
Adam made no reply, and Josh let himself be guided into the chair, and waited to see what was going to happen.
A moment later the front of the helmet came to life. A picture appeared before his eyes, an image of the room he was in. It was so perfect in every detail that he would have sworn the helmet had somehow turned transparent.
“Turn your head,” Jeff instructed, the sound of his voice coming through speakers within the helmet itself.
Josh did, and the image of the room shifted.
“Get up and move around,” Jeff told him.
Josh hesitated, but finally stood up and took a tentative step forward. Again the image shifted, exactly matching the perspective he’d have had without the helmet.
“It’s all digitized,” Jeff explained. “If the cable was long enough, you could wander all over the house, and everything would show up in the helmet.”
“Wow,” Josh breathed. “Awesome!”
“You ever want to fly?” Jeff asked.
“Huh?”
“Watch.”
Within seconds the image changed, and Josh found himself in the cockpit of some kind of airplane, peering out the window at the scenery below. But he could also see the controls of the plane.
“See the joystick?” he heard Jeff ask. “Use your right hand to control it.”
“But—But it’s not real,” Josh objected.
“Just try it,” Jeff told him. “Use your right hand, and pretend you’re reaching for the stick.”
As he mimed the action with his right hand, which was still inserted into the bulky glove, he saw his hand on the screen of the helmet, moving toward the joystick.
As he “touched” it, something in the glove stimulated his hand, so that he imagined he could feel the object he appeared to be clutching.
“Now, fly,” Jeff told him.
Josh, entranced by what was happening, moved the joystick to the right, and the “plane” appeared to bank over, the horizon tipping, the view of the landscape below veering sharply. Almost instinctively he straightened the “plane” out.
“Wh-What happens if I crash?” he asked.
He heard Jeff laugh. “Maybe you die,” the other boy said. “Why don’t you try it?”
There was a mocking note to Jeff’s voice, a note that Josh had heard before, from the kids in Eden.
Certain that Jeff was laughing at him, he defiantly pushed forward on the joystick.
The “plane” plunged downward, and Josh felt dizzy as the image on the screen—a landscape of the coastline, with cliffs dropping away to the beach and the sea—raced up at him.
“Better pull it up,” Jeff teased.
Josh waited, certain that nothing was going to happen. But as the “plane” dove lower, and the sea itself came rushing up at him, he finally lost his nerve. He jerked his hand backward, and the phantom joystick reacted instantly. The “plane” pulled up, and for an instant Josh could almost feel the forces of gravity pulling at him.
And then the screen filled with the face of a cliff, and it was too late. The “plane” smashed into the cliff, the window shattering as the roar of the crash exploded in his ears.
Screaming in spite of himself, Josh jerked the glove off his hand and ripped the helmet from his head. Pale and shaking, he stared at Jeff, who was laughing out loud now.
“Is that cool?” Jeff demanded. “Is that cool, or what? Jeez, you look like you’re gonna puke!”
For a second Josh truly thought he was going to throw up. The whole experience had been so real, so frightening.
And Jeff had done it to him on purpose—
No!
Jeff had warned him what would happen if he crashed, warned him to pull up on the stick.
And nothing, really, had happened to him. He was all right. He was still in the room, and he wasn’t hurt at all.
And Jeff had warned him. He wasn’t like the kids at home, who always seemed to be waiting for something to happen to him, setting traps for him to fall into.
Jeff had just been showing him how it worked.
As his feeling of nausea passed, he managed a weak smile. “It’s neat,” he agreed. “But how does it work?”
Jeff’s grin broadened. “You really want to know?”
Josh nodded.
Jeff leaned forward to whisper in Josh’s ear.
“Magic,” he said. “It works by magic.”
For just a moment, Josh almost believed him.
6
“Another twenty minutes,” George Engersol said.
Brenda MacCallum automatically glanced up at the clock. Even as she watched, the hand ticked forward another minute, pausing at nineteen minutes before five. She’d been sitting here, waiting, for nearly three hours.
Since two o’clock Josh had been alone in a room adjoining Engersol’s office in one of the two new buildings that stood on the grounds between the Academy and the main campus of the university, working on the battery of tests that would finally determine his el
igibility for the school.
For the first hour, Brenda had tried to pretend that she wasn’t worried, that whatever the tests contained, Josh would pass them with flying colors. She’d listened in rapt fascination as Engersol, a man of about forty-five, with iron-gray hair and horn-rimmed glasses that, though they had gone out of style at least twenty years ago, still looked perfect on his craggy face, explained to her more of the details about how the Academy had been structured and what they were trying to accomplish. And not only for their students, but for gifted children everywhere. The more she heard, the more Engersol had impressed Brenda—with his ideas and the simplicity with which he was able to explain them. It was clear to her that Engersol regarded his students not merely as gifted children to be taught, but almost as if they were his own children. His paternalism toward them permeated every phrase he uttered, and it was only reluctantly that she had finally shifted her attention to Josh’s image on the closed circuit television screen mounted on the wall of the director’s office.
“Does he know we’re watching him?” she asked now.
“Not unless the camera isn’t hidden as well as it should be,” Engersol replied. “Knowing he was being watched would be too distracting, and would skew the results of the test.”
“But it seems—I don’t know, it seems sort of wrong to be watching him without him knowing it.”
Engersol shook his head. “Not really. Part of what I need to know is how he goes about the testing procedure. If he knows he’s being watched, he’ll unconsciously do whatever he thinks I might expect of him. For instance, look what he’s doing now. And keep in mind I told him he was free to go about the tests any way he wants.”
As Brenda watched, Josh flipped quickly through the thick booklet that contained the test, then frowned and started over again. But on the second run-through he paused here and there, then quickly marked a spot on the answer sheet.
“What’s he doing?” Brenda asked.
“What I’ve done is structured the test differently from most such things. There are no separate sections to it—everything’s mixed up together. There might be a problem in algebra, immediately followed by an analogy, or one of the aptitude identifiers.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.” Brenda sighed, wondering, not for the first time, where Josh’s brilliance had come from. Certainly not from herself, she reflected ruefully. Despite Engersol’s efforts to make everything he’d said clearly understandable, she’d still had to struggle to keep from getting lost every now and then.
“I’m not only interested in how well he does on the test, but how he goes about working on it,” Engersol went on. “The whole concept of the function of intelligence fascinates me. Some of the children, for instance, seem to concentrate only on certain areas of the test, mathematics, of course, being the most popular. In fact, I suspect what Josh is doing right now is going through the math problems, solving them as fast as he can, getting the easy part out of the way first. Often, however, the brightest of the children start with the hardest problems, getting the worst of the work out of the way while they’re still fresh. You never know until you score it, but I can tell a lot simply by watching them work.” He nodded toward the monitor, where Josh had abruptly stopped, frowned uncertainly, then flipped back to the third page. A moment later he went all the way to the back of the book and began paging quickly toward the front, his eyes scanning the problems so fast, Brenda could hardly believe he was actually reading them.
“He’s not,” Engersol replied when she voiced her question. “He’s discovered one of the tricks, and I think he’s checking himself out.”
“Tricks?” Brenda asked.
“There are a lot of duplicate problems. Let’s see what he does next.”
In the room where he was working, Josh’s mind was racing. So far, the test had been pretty easy. He’d glanced through the whole thing, and immediately realized that if he were going to get through it in the required time, he’d have to work fast.
He’d started with the math, where he didn’t really have to think. All he had to do was look at the numbers, and the answers were pretty clear, especially since all he really needed was a pretty good guess. After all, who would really think the cube root of 27 could be 9? On a lot of the problems he’d simply been able to eliminate the wrong answers and mark the right one.
But there were so many of them …
And then an idea came to him. He was going at it the wrong way. He didn’t have to solve all the problems. If he got the hardest ones right, it would be obvious he knew the answers to the easiest ones.
He flipped through the booklet once again, searching for something he couldn’t solve at all.
He gazed at an advanced calculus equation, and his heart sank. He didn’t know anything about calculus at all.
Feeling the first twinge of doubt since he’d begun the test, he kept going through the book, searching for questions that challenged his math, but that he at least knew how to work out.
And then he noticed that he was repeating a problem he’d already solved. He flipped forward, finding the same problem on the next to the last page. Frowning, he leafed through the book once again, quickly spotting more duplicate problems. He thought for a moment. Should he find all the duplicates, and make sure he put down the same answers on each of them?
But that was stupid. Once he’d gotten a right answer, why even bother to repeat it? He decided to ignore the duplicates, just leaving them blank.
He went back to work, solving one problem after another until he’d gotten down to the point where he didn’t have to think about them at all, then abandoned the math questions, skipping over them as if he didn’t even see them.
He went to work on the analogies, searching immediately for the most obscure problems and the words he couldn’t define.
While he puzzled out the analogies with part of his mind, he simultaneously leafed through thetest book, picking out his purely subjective choices in the aptitude questions, which were mixed in with the objective questions that dealt with his knowledge and ability to reason. Soon a rhythm developed and he was flying through the book, part of his mind processing the more difficult problems while the rest of his concentration focused on the questions that had no right answers, but were designed to build a profile of his talents and interests.
His confidence grew as his involvement in the test deepened.
He was going to ace the test, like he’d aced all the other tests he’d ever taken.
In Engersol’s office Brenda stared at the screen in puzzlement. “I don’t get it,” she murmured. “What’s he doing?”
George Engersol made no answer, for he, too, was staring at the monitor, his gaze seeming almost to bore right into the image on the screen. Josh MacCallum was working in a way he’d never seen before—he appeared to be flipping the pages almost randomly, as if he weren’t even bothering to read the questions anymore, but simply picking an answer at random from the multiple choices.
Had he given up?
But if he had, and was just marking answers at random, why was he even using the test book anymore? Why wasn’t he simply going through the answer sheets, marking numbers?
A bell sounded in both Engersol’s office and the adjoining room.
Josh, his thoughts interrupted by the sudden noise, looked up at the clock and was surprised to see that the allotted three hours had passed.
His eyes shifted to the sheets on which he’d marked his answers, and he felt a vague queasiness in his stomach.
At least a quarter of the questions weren’t marked at all. And how many of the ones he’d answered were wrong?
But it wasn’t possible—he’d never failed to complete a test before, not even the ones they’d said no one was supposed to finish. He’d always done them all, finishing with plenty of time left over.
And now he’d failed.
He wasn’t going to get into the Academy at all!
A wave of frustration crashed in
on him, and he picked up the pencils that were arranged neatly on the table in front of him and hurled them across the room. Then, snatching up the test booklet, he burst through the door to Dr. Engersol’s office.
“There wasn’t enough time!” he yelled, his face red, his eyes screwed into tiny slits. “Nobody could finish your stupid test!” Flinging the book at Dr. Engersol, he stormed out of the office, slamming the door behind him. Feeling her own face turning crimson with embarrassment, Brenda leapt to her feet and started after him.
“I’m sorry,” she said over her shoulder. “I don’t know what got into him. I’ll make him apologize.”
Before she could leave the room, George Engersol stopped her. “It’s all right, Mrs. MacCallum,” he said, grasping her arm and leading her back toward the chair. “Believe me, no matter where he’s gone or what he’s doing, someone is keeping an eye on him.”
Brenda froze. What was he saying? Did they watch all the kids here, all the time? But why?
And then she thought she knew the answer. They would do whatever they had to do to prevent exactly the sort of thing Josh had done on Monday. The last thing this school would want was for their students to do themselves any harm.
“But he still can’t act that way!” she grumbled. “He hasn’t any right to be rude to you, no matter what he thinks!”
Engersol smiled thinly. “Well, at least I know where he gets his temper, anyway,” he observed. “I’m not sure he’s any angrier than you are right now.”
“But he—”
“He just experienced the hardest test he’s ever taken,” Engersol said. “He didn’t finish it—couldn’t finish it—and he’s feeling totally frustrated. But he’s right about one thing,” he went on, his smile broadening. “No one can finish that test in the allotted time. That’s part of the point of it—I need to know how the kids react to being stymied. And Josh reacted very, very well.”
Brenda gaped. “Well? You call that fit reacting well?”
Engersol chuckled. “In terms of Josh, yes. It tells me he’s not lazy, and that he likes to get things done. All he wanted to do was finish the test, Mrs. MacCallum, and I frustrated him, which was part of the test. And frankly, I’d rather see him get mad than just accept the limitations of even an intellect as good as his. So let’s let him cool off, and find out how he did, all right?” Going to the next room, he picked up the sheets that were covered with Josh’s answers to the hundreds of questions that had been posed, and frowned.