“Erin, I have to tell you. You look rotten,’’ she muttered, sticking out a furred and tired-looking tongue. “I prescribe coffee for your condition, Doctor. Preferably intravenously.”

When Snaresbrook came into her waiting room she saw that Dolly was already there, turning the pages on a worn copy of Time. She looked at her watch.

“Patients steal all the new magazines, would you believe it? Rich patients, or they wouldn’t be here, they even pinch the toilet paper and bars of soap. Sorry I’m late.”

“No, that’s fine, Doctor, it’s all right.”

“We’ll have some coffee, then get to work. You go in, I’ll be just a moment.”

Madeline had the mail ready and she flipped quickly through it, glancing up when the door flew open. She smiled insincerely at the angry General.

“Why are you and the patient still in this hospital?

Why have my orders for moving him not been carried out?”

General Schorcht snapped the words like weapons. Erin Snaresbrook thought of many answers, most of them quite insulting, but she was too tired for a shouting match this early in the day.

“I will show you, General. Then maybe you will climb down off my back.” She threw the correspondence onto the desk, then pushed by the General and out into the hall. She stamped toward the intensive-care unit where Brian was, heard the General’s heavy footsteps behind her. “Put this on,” she snapped, and tossed General Schorcht a sterile mask. “Sorry,” she said, took the mask and fixed it into position over the other’s nose and mouth; it’s not easy to fit one of the things with only one hand. When her own mask was in place she opened the door to the ICU just enough so they could see in. “Take a good look.”

The figure on the table was barely discernible behind the network of pipes, tubes, wires, apparatus. The two arms of the manipulator were positioned over him, the multibranching fingers dropping down into the opening in the cloth. The flexible tube of the oxygen mask wormed out from under the drapes and there were drips and tubes plugged into arms and legs and into almost every orifice of the unconscious body. Lights flickered on one of the complex machines; a nurse looked at a readout on the screen and made an adjustment. Snaresbrook let the door swing shut and pulled the mask from the General’s face.

“You want me to move all that? While the connection apparatus is in place — and in operation? It is working with the internal computer now to reroute nerve signals.”

She turned on her heel and left: General Schorcht’s continuing silence was answer enough.

She was humming cheerfully when she entered her office and turned on the hulking coffee machine. Dolly sat on the edge of her chair and Erin pointed a spoon at her.

“How about a nice strong espresso?”

“I don’t drink coffee.”

“You should. It is certainly easier on the metabolism than alcohol.”

“I can’t sleep, it’s the caffeine you see. Nor do I drink alcohol either.”

Nodding sympathetically over the coffee, an answer to the unanswerable, Snaresbrook sat down at her desk and brought up on the screen the transcribed notes of their previous interview.

“You told me a lot of very vital things last time you were here, Dolly. You not only have a good memory but a deep understanding. You were a good and affectionate mother to Brian, that is obvious in the way you speak about him.” She glanced up and saw that the other woman was blushing lightly at this casual compliment; life had not been that kind to Dolly and compliments very rare. “Do you remember when Brian reached puberty?” Erin asked, and the blush deepened.

“Well, you know, it’s not as obvious as with girls. But he was young I think, around thirteen.”

“This is most important. Up until now we have been tracking his emotional life as a small child, then going on to follow his learning patterns and intellectual history. That is all going very well. But major emotional and physiological changes take place with the onset of puberty. That time and area must be explored in depth, charted as well as we can. Do you remember him dating — or having any girlfriends?”

“No, nothing like that. Well there was a girl he saw for a bit, she would come around the house to use his computer sometimes. But it didn’t seem to last very long. She was the only one. Then of course there was the matter of their age difference, she was much older than him. So the relationship could only have been platonic. I do remember that she was a pretty little thing. Name of Kim.”

“Kim, I want you to take a look at your screen right now,” Dr. Betser said. “You had trouble with this last week and until you know exactly what is happening you won’t be able to move on to the next step. Now look at this.”

The instructor had typed the equations into his own computer — which not only displayed them on the screen in front of the class but entered them into the desk computers of all the students at the same moment.

“Show us how to do it,” he said and switched command to her. All eyes were on the screen as Kim reluctantly touched her keyboard.

All eyes except Brian’s. He had worked out the solution within a minute after the problem had been entered. College was becoming as frustrating as high school had been. He spent almost all of his class time waiting for the others to catch up with him. They were a stupid and despicable lot who looked down on him like some kind of freak. All of them were four, five years older than he was — while most of them stood a head taller. At times he felt like a midget. And it wasn’t just paranoia on his part — they really did hate him, he was sure of it. Disliked him because he was younger, out of place here. Plenty of jealousy too, since he did the work so much better and faster than they did. How had people who really knew how to think, like Turing or Einstein or Feynman, how had they managed to live through school?

He looked at his screen and tried not to groan as the girl made a hash of it. It was too awful to watch. He casually pushed his pocket calculator against the side of his terminal and punched in a quick code. A list of Italian verbs appeared in a window on the screen and he scrolled through them, memorizing the new ones.

Brian had discovered, very early on, that the school tapped into every student’s computer and recorded all the data that was entered into it. This was made obvious by some of the questions they had asked him, knowledge they could only have obtained in this underhand way. Once he had discovered it, he made sure that the school computer was just used for schoolwork. He had observed that his teachers, Dr. Betser in particular, were quite certain that their words were golden — and would be quite upset if they discovered that during their lectures he had been running war games or accessing data bases instead of giving them a hundred percent attention. But there were ways around everything. If all of the computers in the schoolroom had been connected by cables it might have been easier — or harder to misdirect information. But now narrow-band infrared links, like ethernet systems, filled the room with invisible communication. Every computer had a digitally tunable LED, a light-emitting diode, that transmitted on low-noise channels. A photodetector picked up messages it was tuned to. Brian’s solution to this was to build an intercepting device into what appeared to be a pocket calculator. When it was placed at the side of his computer it intercepted the incoming signal and rebroadcast it. So he could do whatever he wished without anyone being able to detect the operation. What was on the screen was for his eyes alone! Allattare to feed or to nurse… allenare to exercise, to train.

He was still keeping track of the class and became vaguely aware that Dr. Betser’s voice was taking on that weary, nagging tone.