The school

III.

As if the interview had already gone somewhat farther than he desired, Dr. Nagle arose from behind the desk. “I’m sure you would be more interested in seeing some of our actual procedures. Suppose we look in on some of the people.”

They left the office and went out along the loggia that led past a number of rooms. Montgomery’s heartbeat increased at Nagle’s apparent implication that there was no question of his acceptance by the Institute. If he did a good job of his assignment here and provided a thorough exposé of the crackpot theories upon which the Institute was evidently founded, he ought to be in line for a promotion.

Dr. Nagle stopped with his hand on a doorknob. “This is our music class. We’ll be breaking into the middle of a session, but it will be all right if we don’t disturb the performer.”

Montgomery started to ask what possible reason there could be for a music class in an Institute supposedly devoted to advanced technology, but he didn’t get a chance. A wave of sound burst upon them as Nagle opened the door slowly. Montgomery caught sight of an enormous stage occupied by a symphony orchestra of at least a hundred pieces. Nagle beckoned him forward and closed the door.

There was a feeling of unreality about the place. While the music crashed and sang in torrents of melody, Montgomery stared about. The room facing the stage was tiny, and there were only five men present. Four of these seemed to be concentrating their attention, not on the orchestra, but on the fifth man, whose head nodded and jerked in rhythm with the music.

“Sit down,” Nagle whispered."

The back of the sandy-haired fifth man in the group seemed strangely familiar. Montgomery shifted until he got a better side view. Then he inhaled with involuntary sharpness. It was Norcross, the top design engineer who had first interested Gunderson in the Institute. Montgomery wondered why he was the center of interest now. Possibly he was the composer of the symphony? That seemed merely fantastic. Montgomery was certain he possessed no such talent.

In spite of his tense curiosity the major leaned back and gave himself over to the flowing warmth of the music. He was no critic. He didn’t know whether it was good or not. But it sounded good. As it picked up tempo to an almost frantic pace, they were joined by Soren Gunderson and Dr. Kenneth Berkeley.

The face of Norcross was filmed with perspiration now. His hands beat time as if he were actually conducting the orchestra himself. Then with a triumphant crash of sound the performance came to an end.

Norcross sank down in his chair, stretching his feet at full length and fanning his face wearily. The four other men gathered round and clapped his shoulder in hearty congratulations.

“Boy, I didn’t think I’d ever make it through that last movement!” Norcross exclaimed. “I bit off a little more than I could chew.”

Montgomery was scarcely listening. The stage had suddenly gone dark and the orchestra had vanished as if never there at all. And the stage was not enormous, after all. It was no wider than the end of the small room.

Montgomery was still staring as Norcross turned around and spotted Gunderson. He jumped to his feet and rushed forward with extended hand. “Soren! You made it, after all! I didn’t think you were ever going to get the lead out and leave that kite factory. How’d you like my music? Believe it or not, six months ago I couldn’t play a tin whistle.”

Gunderson took his friend’s hand warmly. “I’m no musician, but it sounded good to me. I had no idea you went in for composition. And I expected you to be spending all your time with stress analysis and engine-loading figures. How come the music?”

Montgomery interrupted before Norcross could make any answer. A slow, tight feeling was advancing along the skin of his back. “What happened to the orchestra?” he said.

As if he had made a joke, this was a cue for general laughter among all the men of the Institute. Dr. Nagle held up a hand even as he joined in the amusement. “I think we had better enlighten our visitors,” he said, “before we have a blown gasket or two.”

He gestured toward the stage. “There was no orchestra, of course. What you see is merely a shadow box in which the projections of the student’s mind are made visible and audible. You perhaps didn’t notice the small headpiece Mr. Norcross was wearing, but through it the impulses of his mental composition were conveyed to the mechanism of the shadow box and made perceptible to everyone in the room.”

“You mean you composed the music and imagined the motions of the orchestra as you went along!” Gunderson exclaimed incredulously.

Norcross nodded. “It’s tough going at first, but you can learn it. I hope we got a good tape. I want my wife to hear it. That’s about the best one I’ve done yet.”

Montgomery felt as if the whole situation had become completely unreal. In a moment someone would break down and give the trick away. The shadow box was some kind of movie projection device. It had to be. Nobody could be good enough to do what was claimed. Certainly not Martin Norcross, airplane engineer and designer —

But they were beginning to move out of the room and Nagle was speaking again. “If any of you still question the presence of a music department in an engineering school, let me assure you that what you have just seen and heard is a rigorous mental exercise on a par with anything you will ever do in creative science. You can estimate for yourselves the number of factors that must be coordinated and manipulated and kept under absolute control at all times. It is an excellent engineering practice!”

They entered an adjoining room which contained a dozen seats and had one wall that resembled a blackboard except that it was a smooth milky whiteness. At Nagle’s bidding, Norcross donned another headset. It was a small, narrow band that clamped a pair of thin electrodes above his ears.

“Show us your next electronic design problem,” said Dr. Nagle.

Norcross scanned through some sheets in a notebook. “It’s an airborne radar,” he said. “Thirty-mile range —”

Almost at once there began to appear on the white wall a schematic diagram. A little shaky at first, it grew in complexity with startling rapidity. Beside the components there appeared electrical or mechanical specifications. In a little less than ten minutes the intricate diagram was completed. Norcross took off the headset. “I think it’ll work,” he said, “but I wouldn’t want to guarantee it!”

“It will work,” said Nagle confidently. He turned to the others. “These items are part of Mr. Norcross’ graduation program, incidentally. This is the kind of routine all our students go through before they leave.”

Montgomery continued to regard the wall with the same sense of unreality that had come upon him in the other room. He touched a finger to its smooth, glassy surface. The markings were on the other side.

“We photograph them for permanent record,” said Nagle. “Except when it’s a mere practice session which the pupil does not wish to keep. For most of that kind of work, however, we use the small three-dimensional box.”

He went to the rear of the room and drew away from the wall a four-foot cube on rollers. He pressed a button at one side and the thing became luminous in the interior.

“Would you care to demonstrate?” he suggested to Norcross again.

The latter plugged his headset into the side of the panel at the cube’s bottom edge. Almost instantly, a small silver airplane appeared inside the cube. Realistically, jet fire poured from the engine. The plane maneuvered as if in actual flight, diving, climbing, rolling.

“Perhaps you’d like to try it?” Nagle suggested to Gunderson.

Grinning a little nervously, the engineer took the headset from Norcross and adjusted it to his own head. He stared into the now empty interior of the cube. “What do I do?” he said.

“Build a copy of your XB-91 and put it through its paces,” Nagle suggested.

Slowly there appeared a fuzzy, highly asymmetrical outline of the Ninety-one. Gunderson laughed uncertainly at his own creation. “Looks more like the ghost ship of the Ancient Mariner. What the devil’s the matter with the engines on the right wing? They won’t fire up.”

“Turn the plane around,” Norcross suggested.

Clumsily the model turned on its own axis, the tail disappearing in the process. Gunderson restored it. The engines on the left wing were out now, while the others were going.

“Can’t keep it lit up on both sides,” he complained. He felt moisture starting out on his forehead in the strain of maintaining the image.

“That’s a lot better than most of us do the first crack,” said Norcross. “We engineers pride ourselves on our visual ability. This shows us where we really stand.”

Gunderson shook his head unhappily and took the headpiece off. He extended it to Montgomery. “Try your luck, Gene. See if you can build a Ninety-one, complete with wings and tail.”

Montgomery felt as if something had frozen inside him. He couldn’t have taken the headpiece if his life depended on it, he thought later. “No,” he said thinly. “I’m going to expose my ignorance in private, first.”

There was a great deal more to see and learn, Dr. Nagle told them, but the afternoon had grown late, and they were dismissed with the request to return the following morning. Montgomery felt shaken by what he had seen. And all the way back to the hotel he cursed the schoolboy fright that had kept him from accepting the headpiece of the visualizer cube. He had acted like a bashful kid at a party game and he couldn’t understand it. Nagle caught it, however. As if he understood exactly what was going on in Montgomery’s mind, he had taken the headpiece and changed the subject before anyone else could say anything. The director had been willing to spare him embarrassment, but it increased Montgomery’s irritation that it should have been so obvious to Nagle.

The prospect of making a telephone report to Dodge was another source of sharp irritation. He postponed it until after dinner, and then decided the colonel could just as well go without his report.

He took a long walk down to the beach and sat on the rocks until after it grew dark. Then, gradually, as if daring to peek through the crack of a door into some closet of nightmares, he allowed himself to consider what he had seen at the Institute that afternoon. He wanted to dismiss it all as trickery and a hoax, but it wouldn’t go away that easily. Norcross appeared perfectly honest in his part of the demonstration. Montgomery couldn’t see how he could have been duped after spending as long as he had at the Institute. Nor was there any purpose evident in such duping.

The only reasonable conclusion was that the engineer had been endowed with near-superhuman abilities during his slay. But Montgomery wasn’t prepared to accept this kind of answer without a struggle.

When he got back to the hotel a call from Dodge was awaiting him. He wished then that he had done the calling. He would have been better prepared with a story that would sound halfway reasonable. Certainly he couldn’t tell the truth over the phone. The colonel would think he’d gone crazy.

But Dodge was mostly interested in whether Montgomery was going to be admitted or not.

“I’m pretty sure they’re going to let me in,” said the major. "Nagle acted as if there would be no question about it at all.”

“Did you get a look at anything to give you an idea what’s going on?”

“No. I had a long talk with Nagle. He seems to be off on some kind of a phobia against schools. Apparently, if we burned down the buildings and fired all the teachers and professors everything would be all right, in his opinion.”

The colonel grunted. “That’s about the kind of thing Spindem thought we’d find. I’ve been thinking seriously of assigning him to come out there and work with you closely on this. The thing we need to know is how they manage to suck in the top talent of our military suppliers. They must have quite a trick to do that.”

“I’ll try to find out, sir, and keep you informed,” said Montgomery.

He hung up, hoping he’d be able to nail down the answer before Dodge sent Spindem out. That would be just a little more than he could take, he thought.

The following morning he was introduced to the counselor, Don Wolfe, as soon as he appeared at the Institute. Wolfe was a much younger man than either Nagle or Berkeley, but he shared the same calm assurance that he knew what it was all about. This irked Montgomery, but he hoped he could continue to keep the irritation under control and not get himself thrown out prematurely. He forced himself to listen attentively.

“Dr. Nagle gave me a run-down on the things he discussed with you yesterday,” said Wolfe. “Unless you have some questions, we’ll go into the matter of how the effects are produced.”

“The only question is whether or not I’m being accepted for work here,” said Montgomery.

Wolfe smiled. “Evidently Dr. Nagle forgot to mention that you are the one who decides that. We have quite a few people who don’t stay with us very long — after they see what I am going to show you today!”

He led the way out of the office and across the court to another building. Inside this, he took Montgomery to a small room which was lined on one side with panels of electronic equipment of some kind. It was decorated pleasantly over soundproof wall board. The furnishings consisted of a couple of chairs and a table and a couch.

Wolfe indicated a chair and gestured toward the panels. “This is the Mirror — sometimes known affectionately among Institute members as Nancy the Nemesis, or Minnie the Monster. At any rate, you’ll have some rare moments here if you decide to join us.”

“What does it do?” said Montgomery.

“As a mirror should, it offers you a look at yourself.”

Montgomery frowned. “That doesn’t seem to make very much sense.”

“It doesn’t at first to most of the people who come here. You’ve been warned away from it all your life. When you went to school they gave you an I.Q. test and put a label on you, which you were taught never to question. You were stupid, average, or brilliant and there was absolutely nothing you could do about it if your category was lower than you would have liked. Your attention was directed to the exterior world as it was described to you. And agreement with that description was demanded. If you saw wiggles where woggles were described, you learned to agree that they were woggles — or you had another tag applied to you: academic failure.

“In view of these discrepancies you were more than willing to agree after a time that it was best not to try to look into this sealed box you wear on top of your spinal column. That is the almost universal attitude we encounter.”

“And now I’m invited to take a look into the box, is that it?” Montgomery looked dubiously at the panels of the Mirror. “Minnie, the mechanical psychoanalyst!”

Wolfe smiled. “She’s been called that before, too. But that’s the one name that’s wholly inaccurate from the standpoint of function. The machine does nothing to interpret you to yourself. It doesn’t tell you anything or offer advice on how to adapt and get along better in the world. It does absolutely nothing but hold up a reflection for you to observe and make your own conclusions. It has only one control feature built in — and this is quite necessary. The extent of the reflection is governed automatically by your own fear level.”

“Fear —!”

“Yes. You will find that in spite of the simplicity of Socrates’ admonition it is quite a fearful thing to attempt to know thyself. So instead of taking a full, unobstructed view at first it is necessary to take a knothole view, so to speak. Get a tiny peek at one aspect of yourself and digest that and learn to live with it before broadening the outlook.”

“I fail to see why there should be any fear involved in this — as long as a man hasn’t committed some crime which he’s afraid to face.”

“We don’t need anything as melodramatic as criminal acts. You’ll see. As an indicator, however, you might consider the common, publicly acknowledged fact that Man uses twenty per cent or less of his available brain power. This is regarded quite sadly with clucked tongues about what a shame and a waste it is — but any determined effort to increase this percentage is greeted almost with fury. Psychoanalysis is a fair target for anybody’s humor. To ascribe one’s deficiencies to cruelties and inadequate care in childhood is to acknowledge ignoble surrender. You’ll find it quite curious that there should be such antipathy toward investigating and increasing the powers of the individual. It requires a genuine self-appraisal to be effective. And this is simply too painful. It has to be fought: ‘No thanks, I’m not crazy yet.’ ‘There’s nothing wrong with my brain!’

“There are two main causes for this reaction. The deficiencies of orthodox psychiatry cause it to miss the boat more often than not. It essays to deal with the explosive forces of human esteem - inadequately. The Mirror has no such drawbacks. It permits you to ask: Who am I? What am I doing? What do I know? And gives you a source of a perfect, undistorted answer: yourself. This is strong meat, however. A full, reflexive view is loaded with absolute terror. That’s why we begin with the knothole picture and expand gradually.”

“I still seem to miss the connection between all this and the ability of an engineer to build a better airplane — which was the initial incentive that brought most of us here.”

“That won’t remain a mystery very long,” said Wolfe. “You will examine the ten thousand agreements you have made with your professors and with other engineers that This is the Right Way to Proceed. You’ll examine the ten thousand agreements you’ve made that your ability is not sufficient to do the job before you. One by one you’ll examine each of these tiny homeostats which control your thinking now — and decide whether it’s worth keeping. Every derogation of yourself, every acceptance of someone else’s solution to a problem without working it through for yourself, is such a homeostat. Some of them you will keep. Most you will throw away, and wonder why you ever saddled yourself with them in the first place!”

It was becoming the most incredible mass of hokum he had ever heard, Montgomery thought. If it were not for the Norcross demonstrations, which still had to be explained, he would have given up now and called for Dodge to come in and take over. He regarded the panels of the Mirror with a degree of fear as Wolfe rose and began manipulating controls there — it was not the kind of fear Wolfe had been talking about, however, it was fear of how far he could go with this mechanical hypnotic-psychoanalytic gadget without risking harm to his own brain. He wished now that he had pushed Dodge’s suggestion that Spindem be sent out. As much as he disliked the psychiatrist, he felt his advice would be valuable — and protective! — now.

Wolfe was holding out a small head-piece similar to those Montgomery' had already seen. “You can try it out if you like, work with it as long as you care to — or walk out now and forget everything we’ve told you.”

Montgomery’s face felt moist. He wished he were free to take the last alternative. He thought of Dodge, and the possible promotion that might come out of his investigation.

“I’ll try it,” he said. “What do I do?”

“Just put this on and take it easy. You can lie down or sit in the easy-chair. When you are through take off the headpiece and the circuits of the Mirror will shut themselves off automatically.”

He helped Montgomery adjust the metal tabs on either side of his skull. The major took the easy-chair and leaned back. “Nothing’s happening,” he said. “Something must be wrong.”

Wolfe smiled. “It’s working, all right. Come in to the office if you care to when you’re through.”

He left the room, closing the door softly. Montgomery sat in the chair, swearing to himself — not quite so softly.

How had he ever got sucked into this in the first place?