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.