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.
