Which, of course, was exactly what Cornelius wanted. She had been outflanked.

She spent a sleepless night trying to figure out what to do next.

Michael:

At first the School seemed a good place to Michael. Better than

the village, in fact.

The clothes were clean and fresh. The food was new and sometimes tasted strange, but there was always-a lot of it. In fact there were refrigerators that lit up and had food and drink inside, food the children could help themselves to whenever they wanted. Michael found he missed baobab fruit, though.

There were lots of children here, from very small to young teenagers. They lived in dormitories, which were bright and clean.

At first the children had been wary of each other. They had no common language, and children who could speak to each other tended to gather in groups. There was nobody who spoke

Michael’s language, however. But he was used to being alone.

This was a place called Australia. It was a big empty land. He saw maps and globes, but he had no real understanding of how far he had come from the village.

Except that it was a long way.

There were lessons. The teachers were men and women called Brothers and Sisters.

Sometimes the children would be gathered in a room, ten or fifteen of them, while a teacher would stand before them and talk to them or have them do work, with paper and pen or softscreen.

Michael, like some of the other children, had a special softscreen that could speak to him in his own tongue. It was comforting to hear the little mechanical voice whisper to him, like a remote echo from home.

The best times of all were when he was allowed to go explore, as if the softscreen were a window to another world, a world of pictures and ideas.

He had no interest in languages or music or history. But mathematics held his attention from the start.

He drank in the symbols, tapping them onto his softscreen or scratching them on paper, even drawing in the dust as he had at home. Most of the symbols and their formalism were better than the ones he had made up for himself, and he discarded his own without sentiment; but sometimes he found his own inventions were superior, and so he kept them.

He loved the strict rigor of a mathematical proof — a string of equations, statements of truth, which nevertheless, if manipulated correctly, led to a deeper, richer truth. He felt as if his own view of the world were crystallizing, freezing out like the frost patterns he watched inside the refrigerators, and his thinking accelerated.

Soon, in math class, he was growing impatient to be forced to work at the same pace as the other children.

Once, he grew restive.

That was the first time he was punished, by a Sister who yelled at him and shook him.

He knew that that was a warning: that this place was not as friendly as it seemed, that there were rules to learn, and that the sooner he learned them the less harm would come to him.

So he learned.

He learned to sit quietly if he was ahead of the rest. He could do his work almost as effectively that way anyhow.

Michael seemed to be the one who enjoyed mathematics the most. But most of the children had one or two subjects in which they excelled. And then it was Michael’s turn to sit and struggle, and the others’ turn to race ahead, risking the wrath of the teachers.

Any children who showed no such talent were soon taken out of the School. Michael didn’t know what happened to them.

It was a paradox. If you weren’t smart enough you were taken out of the School. If you were too smart you were punished for impatience. Michael tried to learn this rule too, to show just enough ability but not too much.

It didn’t matter anyhow. Most of his real work he did in his head, in the dark, and he never told anybody about it.

There were many visitors: adults, tall and dressed smartly, who walked around the classes and the dormitories. Sometimes they brought people with cameras who smiled as if the children were doing something of great importance. Once a woman even took away Michael’s softscreen, looking at the work he had recorded there with exclamations of surprise. He was given another softscreen, but of course it was empty, containing none of the work he had completed. But that didn’t matter. Most of it was in his head anyhow.

There was a girl here called Anna, a little older and taller than the rest, who seemed to learn the rules more quickly than the others. She had big gray eyes, Michael noticed: gray and watchful. She would speak to the others — including Michael, through his softscreen — trying to help them understand what was wanted of them.

It meant she was in line for punishment more often than most of the others, but she did it anyway.

Many of the children drew blue circles on their books or their softscreens or their skin or the walls of the dormitories. As did Michael, as he had for a long time. He didn’t know what that meant.

Those days — in retrospect, strange, bright days — didn’t last long.

Michael couldn’t know it, but it was the publicizing of the

Carter prophecies — the end-of-the-world news — that forced

the change in the Schools, including his own.

Because suddenly people grew afraid: of the future, of their

own children.

Leslie Candolfo

Frankly our biggest problem, since this damn end-of-the-world Carter bullshit broke, has been absenteeism. We’re up over 100 percent nationally. Not only that but productivity is right down, and our quality metric program shows a massive decline in all functions — except Accounting, for some reason. We’ve also had a number of incidents of violence, immoral behavior, and so forth in the workplace, some but not all related to alcohol and/or drugs.

It’s as if they all believe this pseudoscience bullshit about there being no tomorrow. But of course the clock punchers expect us to keep on providing salaries and bonuses and medical benefits, presumably right up until doomsday itself, with maybe an advance or two.

I know our competitors are suffering, too. But we can’t go on like this, ladies and gentlemen; our costs are skyrocketing, our profits hemorrhaging.

I’m pleased to see the federal government is finally taking some positive action. Gray-suited spokesmen denouncing Carter and Eschatology as moonshine were all very well. What they are doing now — pumping out free twenty-four-hour sports, comedy, softsoaps, and synth-rock on TV — is a somewhat more practical

response.

We’ve already installed giant video walls in our workplaces in Tulsa and Palm Beach. Productivity took a hit, of course, but happily nowhere near as bad as in other sites without the wall-to-wall pap. We’ve also provided free e-therapy up to four hours a week per permanent employee. For now I agree with the government analysis that an anesthetized workforce is preferable to a workforce plunged into existential gloom.

But this is just a palliative. We have to find a long-term way to handle this. The end of the world may or may not be inevitable.

Our stockholder meeting is inevitable, however. I’m open to further suggestions.

“The Voice of Reason”

›Mail this on to ten people you know, and tell them to send it to ten people they known and so on. We have to inoculate the species against the contagion of madness that is plaguing humankindi or this damn Carter hypothesis is going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. HOW TO DEBUNK CARTER

› 1) First of all, don’t dismiss it as nonsense. The hypothesis may be wrong-headed, but it’s not irrational and it’s not illogical. We aren’t dealing with the usual airhead crap here. It’s more potent than that.