The school

IV.

He sat tensely for at least five minutes, pressing the tips of his fingers together and waiting for some manifestation from the apparatus. When nothing had occurred at the end of that time he allowed himself to relax a trifle. It appeared he was not going to be overwhelmed with some kind of mechanical hypnosis trying to convince him he was a five-star genius, misunderstood and unsung, anyway. How long should he sit here before going back to the hotel and reporting to Dodge, he wondered.

Of course, if he had it his way, he never would report to Dodge — ever again. Dodge was an administrative windbag who knew virtually nothing whatever of the research processes he was called upon to program and direct. It was more important to him to keep Senator Graham’s sixth cousin happy as director of a study that was way over his head than it was to find a way of shrinking the size of the XB-91.

But, then, his own position was not so different. He considered it superior to that of the engineers doing the actual work. In reality, he was little more than an office boy in gold braid —

He sat up sharply. What the devil was going on? What kind of thinking was that? He held an important post — a very important post. Without his coordinating efforts the XB-91 wouldn’t have been built for another year, at least. Anybody could push a slipstick back and forth, but it took someone who understood the engineering and possessed the administrative qualities —

His thought ceased momentarily in a swirl of confusion. He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes, clinging to the single concept of his key importance as Liaison Officer over construction of the XB-91. He had to cling to that idea. It was suddenly of overwhelming importance.

And then it was gone. A swirl of panic surged in his belly. He felt as if he were trying to reach out for something lost and forever beyond him. But it was gone, and he glimpsed what was left.

He was not merely Dodge’s kind; he was worse. He pretended to be an engineer. Dodge didn’t make the pretense.

He had a degree in engineering, but he was no engineer. He never had been. He knew the formulas and he could find things in the handbooks, but a new, complex problem that had no handbook solution left him in panic. None of his kind, who spent their time telling the genuine engineers what ought to be done, could do the job themselves if it were turned over to them.

He was as close as he could get. His training had won him a commission and he’d stayed on, ending up in R&D liaison. He had to be proud of it. It was all he’d ever have —

And now he didn’t have even that. He’d forced himself never to recognize it before — that he was a fake, a phony, a completely false front hiding an unbearable incompetency. He bent forward, burying his face in his hands, and wept.

The panic subsided and a slow, diffuse anger seeped through him. He looked up at the panels of the Mirror, as if aware for the first time that the machine had something to do with the stabbing recognition that had passed through him.

He felt the pressure of the headpiece against his skull and tore it away with a single motion that hurled it against the panel, shattering a meter face and crushing the headpiece. The anger stayed with him and he wished that he might tear the place down. But Dodge would do it better, he thought with some satisfaction. He and Dodge and Spindem — they’d really rip the place apart when the time came.

He left the room quietly. He saw no one about as he went out of the grounds and across the street to his car. He drove back to the hotel and put in an immediate call to Colonel Dodge. It took only a moment to reach him.

“Montgomery,” he said. They selected their scrambler code and he went on. “I got a look at the inside for the first time today. I think Spindem ought to be here.”

“Just a moment, I want the doctor to hear this.” There was a click and a moment of silence, then Dodge asked him to go on.

“They’ve got a machine,” said Montgomery. “Something dreamed up by one of the original designers for the Inquisition. I had to get away from it. I felt like I was going crazy. I’m willing to bet that plenty of men have graduated from here straight to the nut house.”

“But what does it do?" Dr. Spindem demanded.

Suddenly Montgomery wished he hadn’t called. He felt like he couldn’t talk about it any more. His anger was spent. He answered wearily. “I don’t know. It just gets hold of your mind and suddenly you’re convinced that everything you’ve ever done has been wrong. There’s nothing right about anything.”

“Are you going back?” said Colonel Dodge.

“Don’t do it!” Spindem exclaimed. “I’ll get away sometime tomorrow, but don’t do a thing until I get there. Your sanity may depend on it.”

“Don’t worry,” said Montgomery. “I’m not sticking my head in that noose again for anybody.”

He went down to the beach in the afternoon sunshine and there he had the chattering shakes. He threw pebbles at the sea gulls wheeling over the rocks. He stomped up and down on the sand. But he couldn’t stop the trembling of his muscles.

So he wasn’t really an engineer! So he had always made like a big shot to cover it up! What difference did it make? The work he’d done had been useful.

But it was no good. He slumped down on a rock and let the shaking possess him. He’d kidded himself. That’s where the trouble lay. He’d kidded himself — and now he couldn’t kid himself any longer. Everything that had supported him was gone. Maybe it was flimsy and phony, but it wasn’t right to strip it away like this. Now that it was gone, however, he could never again walk into a conference and hold his head up as if he were the equal of the men on the other side of the table. He never had been their equal, but he had been able to function under the illusion he was their superior. Now, he could no longer function at all.

His hand grasped a weed stalk and drew idly in the sand. A wing section formed, a curiously irregular wing section that would have provoked laughter in any engineering group. But the laws of air flow and lift were not quite the same at eighty to a hundred thousand feet as they were at sea level. His section could have shortened the span of the Ninety-one by twenty per cent. He was sure of it. Why had he never tried to get it tested?

He didn’t quite know. He’d told himself it was a wild idea that had no merit. Could the truth be that he had been unwilling to face the possibility of ridicule for his unorthodox engineering venture?

He didn’t know the answer to that, either. He only knew that something had been taken from him that enabled him to function, and now he had to have it back, or he’d never be able to function again. He had to see Wolfe and the people at the Institute. It was a sudden obsession with him. They had taken it away; they could give it back.

It was late when he reached the Institute, but Don Wolfe was still in his office. “I rather expected you’d be back today,” he said. “You gave us quite a shock when we saw the taped record of your experience with the Mirror this morning. Your fear tolerance level is higher than any we’ve seen yet. You’ve got more guts to take an honest look at yourself than anybody who’s gone through here up to now. Usually, it takes a week or two to blast out as much as you got in an hour.”

“I imagine I’m supposed to be pleased,” said Montgomery sarcastically. “I want back what I had before. I may have been a four-flusher, but at least I got along and did a job. You took away that ability. You’ve got to give it back!”

Wolfe was shaking his head very slowly and smiling faintly. “There’s a fundamental principle inherent in the Mirror,” he said. "It holds up an image, but it does not force you to look. You see nothing but what you are willing to see. There is only one answer for you now: go back and look again and ask yourself why you had to be content with the character of a phony big shot instead of being a productive individual in your own right.”

Montgomery knew that unaccountably he was going to do it. He must have known the moment he decided to come back. The Mirror was hypnotic — or narcotic — in its effect. He had to come groveling back and see if there was any answer to the question of his inability to be an engineer honestly without the false front of his uniform and R&D assignment.

Don Wolfe accompanied him back to the room. He saw that the damage of his burst of anger had been repaired. Wolfe made no mention of it.

“I’m going to wait for you in my office. Will you come over when you’re through?”

Montgomery nodded mechanically, as if in a daze. His hands were trembling faintly as he sat down and put on the headpiece. Like a hophead, he thought. You hate the stuff and can’t leave it alone. How can I ever get away from this thing now?

Wolfe observed him for a moment with a slightly worried frown. “I can turn down the fear-level control a bit, if you want me to,” he said. “Since your own acceptance point is so high, it might be easier on you —”

Montgomery waved him away. “Leave it alone. I want to know what goes on — I’ve got to find out.”

He settled back and closed his eyes as Wolfe closed the door behind him. A feeling of peace and serenity began to flow through him and he knew he should have stayed that morning without breaking off in anger as he had done. He should have seen it through then.

It was strange, though, that he could regard himself almost happily now, recognizing full well the phoniness that had adorned his entire career. After the initial panicky confusion it seemed almost a relief to feel it being stripped away. It was a relief — and now he saw why.

A thousand fears and apprehensions had gone into the support of his false front. Every time he’d gone to an engineering conference there was a constant panic that he would make some absurd break that would bring laughter around his head from the engineers. Half the muscles of his body maintained an agonizing tension in anticipation of it. And he’d prided himself on the exhaustion with which he left those meetings. He'd go home and flop on the sofa at the end of the day and tell Helen what a “rough one we had today.”

He began laughing, a slow chuckle at first that quickly rose to almost uncontrollable spasms verging on hysteria, as he caught full sight of the ludicrous spectacle he made staggering under the weight of his self-created burden that had no existence for anyone else.

Slowly, the laughter died. And the panic came back. Not as strong as it was the first time, but it was there. He felt helpless and unanchored. It was all right to laugh at himself for behaving like a fool, but that didn’t change the fact that he had done the best he could under the circumstances. He was incompetent. He could never be an engineer like Soren Gunderson if he admitted he was all the fools who ever lived. Nothing could change the real picture of his inadequacy.

But why? he asked himself. The panic seemed to freeze a little and lose some of its violence as he probed the black screen where the shadows of himself were in hiding. He wasn’t a moron. Way back in school they’d tagged him, as Wolfe had said. They gave him an I.Q. test and wired on a label. But it was a good label. It put him way up in the top one per cent of the population as far as intellectual ability went.

In spite of this he’d been a complete bust. Or perhaps because of it? he wondered. He’d once felt sorry for those far below him in the merely average levels. But they were the successful ones now. Somebody had made an extensive study once, he remembered, about high I.Q. failures. He wondered what they found out.

Probably nothing. A man should be able to answer his own questions, but there was no answer in sight as far as he could see. He’d tried to do everything right in school, from the first day to the last. Top honors, all the way through. They’d patted him on the head approvingly, as if he were a pet pup. In the grades there’d been a time when he was shunned as the teacher’s favorite.

Homeostatic controls, Dr. Nagle said. What did that mean, anyway? What controls had he agreed to accept during his school days? The concept made no sense —

He gasped in sudden helplessness as if a flood poured down upon him while he sat chained, unable to move. Black waves washed forward, sweeping over him. His body strained upward, as if seeking the air, then he slumped before the flood, babbling and whimpering in terror.

He didn’t know how long he lay there. It seemed as if forever, and there was a dark whispering of leaves in his ears and the flashing of bright-edged pages before his eyes. The leaves of the calendar of all the days, and the pages of all the books —

But it was utterly insane. School had not been these dark days of terror. It had been warm and friendly. Warm and friendly — while they pinned on his mind each of ten thousand tiny homeostats to see that he never moved out of line. He was the teacher’s pet with the I.Q. of a genius.

And for daring to glimpse behind their professional smiles and watch the little machines they attached to his cortex they would shake him with this terror.

He couldn’t endure it. He cried out for them to take him back. He wouldn’t look again, he promised. He would believe forever that they loved him and he wouldn’t tell anyone about the little machines in his mind.

The black waves receded. He sat up, drenched with sweat. Drops of it fell from his chin to his shirt front. He opened his eyes dazedly and glanced up at the panels of the Mirror. I’m going crazy, he thought numbly. The machine is driving me crazy —

Nagle and Berkeley and Wolfe had found out why he was here. That was it. They knew who he was and why Dodge had sent him. He had been a fool to think they would let him in that easy. They had set the machine so that it would make a babbling idiot out of him, and when they got through with him no one would believe anything he said about the Institute. He glared up at the panels. If he could only reach up there and smash something to turn it off. But he couldn’t get up. All his strength was gone. Maybe in a minute more — if he could just sit here without thinking.

Dimly, he remembered Wolfe saying all he had to do was remove the headpiece and the machine would shut down. The thought struck him with panic again. He couldn’t do that. He had to keep it on his head. He had to wear it forever, he thought —

He couldn’t keep from thinking. He couldn’t keep from thinking that something had gone wrong. Something terribly wrong along the line somewhere. He should have come out of school competent and able — and he’d come out a dud. It didn’t matter whose fault it was. What mattered was why it happened. He’d done everything they told him to. Every single thing. He’d even let them dim the high ecstasy of new worlds.

That’s what mathematics had been for him. He knew something of the history of astronomy and computation when he came to high-school geometry and algebra. He expected it to be the opening of a door to a bright, new world.

But Mr. Carling didn’t see it that way. Mr. Carling was a tired, mousy little man who had taught too many courses in Plane Geometry and Algebra II. There was no mystery or magic in it for him. As soon as school was over he had to change to his good, brown suit and other shoes and go out selling ready-made suits of men’s clothes. Sometimes he even let the class wait while he was showing samples to one of the other teachers.

Even so, Eugene Montgomery doggedly solved all the unreal problems assigned by Mr. Carling out of the textbook fairyland that didn’t fit any world either of them knew anything about. He got a straight A all the way through, too. He accepted Mr. Carling’s word that geometry was very useful to a manufacturer in knowing how many dustpans he could press out of a certain amount of sheet metal, and it helped the oil companies in knowing how many ships they’d have to have to transport so much oil across the ocean. He gave up the vision of a world of abstract beauty and light he’d glimpsed before encountering Mr. Carling and the ready-made suit business.

Mr. Pond, the physics teacher who didn’t like confusion in the physics lab, so there had been no lab work during the course —

Mr. Raily, who was very solemn, and spoke every day of the obligations of world citizenship and the duties of the individual toward his group —

Miss Thompson, who couldn’t explain why it was necessary to diagram English sentences, but for whom he obediently did it —

Professor Adams, who constantly interrupted his lectures on Statics with remarks on the high obligation of the engineer towards his profession and the public to see that only standard practices are ever employed —

To each one he had adapted himself. They poured it out in lectures and texts. He gave it back in examinations and recitations. And they commended him for his high scholarship.

And none had ever asked: “Do you have an idea that is better than this, Eugene Montgomery?”

No one had ever asked if he had any ideas at all. It didn’t seem to matter. As long as he could function as a mental brick wall, bouncing back all they gave out, it was adequate.

But it had been pleasant — warm and friendly and pleasant. He remembered those years as the best of his life. There was no terror there. It was absurd to —

Now it was coming back. Slow, dark waves lapping at the edge of his mind. And he knew why it was there — yes, because he dared look upon himself as a student. The dark, lapping waves were the alternative to docile obedience and absorption of all he was taught. He would have brought them swirling up uncontrollably about his head in those high-school years if he’d dared allow himself to think Mr. Carling was an old fool, deaf, dumb and blind to the wonder of the beautiful thing he was murdering. There might have been a dozen in that class who could have been shown its light and beauty if their tender vision had been nourished carefully.

But Mr. Carling made certain they would never see. With his steady bumbling, that was in itself the peak of efficiency, he blinded their eyes beyond all recovery. And that was his purpose, Eugene Montgomery thought in sudden agonizing fury. Everyone knew it. Principal Martin, the School Board, everyone in the community — there was no one who was not aware of what little suit-salesman Carling was doing. And they did nothing about it.

Homeostat. He fastened down efficiently and tightly his little homeostat that said you mustn’t see this beauty — it leads along too many strange paths to too many strange worlds. It’s an ugly thing that you must hate forevermore.

Montgomery had known what was happening even as his own vision closed, and he was helpless to do anything against it. If he had tried to oppose them, even in his private thoughts, he would have been a prey to panic. Now, with the help of the Mirror, he could watch it creeping up on him, feel it flowing through his veins — and not succumb to it. Rather, he felt a strength rising up in him for having dared look upon this hidden nightmare, and slowly the dark lapping waves receded until they were all gone.

He sat there for a long time, waiting for something more. But he knew that was all for the present. He had seen himself for what he was and he had to live with it and understand it. Obsequiously, he had knuckled under to every whim of dogma handed out, never daring to question or propose a radically different thought of his own.

He was a coward. But he could look upon that naked, unpleasant fact now without flinching because he knew that somewhere in the Mirror he would find the means of changing it.