Robert Silverberg - Dying Inside

Miss Mueller said, “Let’s run a few tests today. Victor, will you be our first guinea pig? Come to the front of the room.”

Grinning nervously, Victor Schlitz shambled forward. He stood stiffly beside Miss Mueller’s desk as she cut the cards and cut them again. Then, peering quickly at the top card, she slid it toward him. “Which symbol?” she asked.

“Circle?”

“We’ll see. Class, don’t say anything.” She handed the card to Barbara Stein, telling her to place a checkmark under the proper symbol on the blackboard. Barbara checked the square. Miss Mueller glanced at the next card. Star, David thought.

“Waves,” Victor said. Barbara checked the star.

“Plus.” Square, dummy! Square.

“Circle.” Circle. Circle. A sudden ripple of excitement in the classroom at Victor’s hit. Miss Mueller, glaring, called for silence.

“Star.” Waves. Waves was what Barbara checked.

“Square.” Square, David agreed. Square. Another ripple, more subdued.

Victor went through the deck. Miss Mueller had kept score: four correct hits. Not even as good as chance. She put him through a second round. Five. All right, Victor: you may be sexy, but a telepath you aren’t. Miss Mueller’s eyes roved the room. Another subject? Let it not be me, David prayed. God, let it not be me. It wasn’t. She summoned Sheldon Feinberg. He hit five the first time, six the second. Respectable, unspectacular. Then Alice Cohen. Four and four. Stony soil, Miss Mueller. David, following each turn of the cards, had hit 25 out of 25 every time, but he was the only one who knew that.

“Next?” Miss Mueller said. David shrank into his seat. How much longer until the dismissal bell? “Norman Heimlich.” Norman waddled toward the teacher’s desk. She glanced at a card. David, scanning her, picked up the image of a star. Bouncing then to Norman’s mind, David was amazed to detect a flicker of an image there, a star perversely rounding its points to form a circle, then reverting to being a star. What was this? Did the odious Heimlich have a shred of the power? “Circle,” Norman murmured. But he hit the next one—the waves—and the one after that, the square. He did indeed seem to he picking up emanations, fuzzy and indistinct but emanations all the same, from Miss Mueller’s mind. Fat Heimlich had the vestiges of the gift. But only the vestiges; David, scanning his mind and the teacher’s, watched the images grow ever more cloudy and vanish altogether by the tenth card, fatigue scattering Norman’s feeble strength. He scored a seven, though, the best so far. The bell, David prayed. The bell, the bell, the bell! Twenty minutes away.

A small mercy. Miss Mueller briskly distributed test paper. She would run the whole class at once. “I’ll call numbers from 1 to 25,” she said. “As I call each number, write down the symbol you think you see. Ready? One.”

David saw a circle. Waves, he wrote.

Star. Square.

Waves. Circle.

Star. Waves.

As the test neared its close, it occurred to him that he might be making a tactical error by muffing every call. He told himself to put down two or three right ones, just for camouflage. But it was too late for that. There were only four numbers left; it would look too conspicuous if he hit several of them correctly after missing all the others. He went on missing.

Miss Mueller said, “Now exchange papers with your neighbor and mark his answers. Ready? Number one: circle. Number two: star. Number three: waves. Number four. . . .”

Tensely she called for results. Had anyone scored ten hits or more? No, teacher. Nine? Eight? Seven? Norman Heimlich had seven again. He preened himself: Heimlich the mind-reader. David felt disgust at the knowledge that Heimlich had even a crumb of power. Six? Four students had six. Five? Four? Miss Mueller diligently jotted down the results. Any other figures? Sidney Goldblatt began to snicker. “Miss Mueller, how about zero?”

She looked startled. “Zero? Was there someone who got all 25 cards wrong?”

“David Selig did!”

David Selig wanted to drop through the floor. All eyes were on him. Cruel laughter assailed him. David Selig got them all wrong. It was like saying, David Selig wet his pants, David Selig cheated on the exam, David Selig went into the girls’ toilet. By trying to conceal himself, he had made himself terribly conspicuous. Miss Mueller, looking stern and oracular, said, “A null score can be quite significant too, class. It might mean extremely strong ESP abilities, rather than the total absence of such powers, as you might think.” Oh, God. Extremely strong ESP abilities. She went on, “Rhine talks of phenomena such as ‘forward displacement’ and ‘backward displacement,’ in which an unusually powerful ESP force might accidentally focus on one card ahead of the right one, or one card behind it, or even two or three cards away. So the subject would appear to get a below-average result when actually he’s hitting perfectly, just off the target! David, let me see your answers.”

“I wasn’t getting anything, Miss Mueller. I was just putting down my guesses, and I suppose they were all wrong.”

“Let me see.”

As though marching to the scaffold, he brought her the sheet. She placed it beside her own list and tried to realign it, searching for some correlation, some displacement sequence. But the randomness of his deliberately wrong answers protected him. A forward displacement of one card gave him two hits; a backward displacement of one card gave him three. Nothing significant there. Nevertheless, Miss Mueller would not let go. “I’d like to test you again,” she said. “We’ll run several kinds of trials. A null score is fascinating.” She began to shuffle the deck. God, God, God, where are you? Ah. The bell! Saved by the bell! “Can you stay after class?” she asked. In agony, he shook his head. “Got to go to geometry next, Miss Mueller.” She relented. Tomorrow, then. We’ll run the tests tomorrow. God! He was up all the night in a turmoil of fear, sweating, shivering; about four in the morning he vomited. He hoped his mother would make him stay home from school, but no luck: at half past seven he was aboard the bus. Would Miss Mueller forget about the test? Miss Mueller had not forgotten. The fateful cards were on her desk. There would be no escape. He found himself the center of all attention. All right, Duv, be cleverer this time. “Are you ready to begin?” she asked, tipping up the first card. He saw a plus sign in her mind.

“Square,” he said.

He saw a circle. “Waves,” he said.

He saw another circle. “Plus,” he said.

He saw a star. “Circle,” he said.

He saw a square. “Square,” he said. That’s one.

He kept careful count. Four wrong answers, then a right one. Three wrong answers, another right one. Spacing them with false randomness, he allowed himself five hits on the first test. On the second he had four. On the third, six. On the fourth, four. Am I being too average, he wondered? Should I give her a one-hit run, now? But she was losing interest. “I still can’t understand your null score, David,” she told him. “But it does seem to me as if you have no ESP ability whatever.” He tried to look disappointed. Apologetic, even. Sorry, teach, I ain’t got no ESP. Humbly the deficient boy made his way to his seat.

In one blazing instant of revelation and communion, Miss Mueller, I could have justified your whole lifelong quest for the improbable, the inexplicable, the unknowable, the irrational. The miraculous. But I didn’t have the guts to do it. I had to look after my own skin, Miss Mueller. I had to keep a low profile. Will you forgive me? Instead of giving you truth, I faked you out, Miss Mueller, and sent you spinning blindly onward to the tarot, to the signs of the zodiac, to the flying-saucer people, to a thousand surreal vibrations, to a million apocalyptic astral antiworlds, when the touch of my mind against yours might have been enough to heal your madness. One touch from me. In a moment. In the twinkling of an eye.