Pass/Fail (2012)

by David Wellington

  Jake nodded.

  “Let’s say Mr. Z had already spoken to Mr. Y and told him that Student X might come and ask the question. Now, Mr. Z needs to make sure that Mr. Y doesn’t answer it. So what would Mr. Z do? He might tell Mr. Y that if he so much as thought about answering it, Mr. Y would be fired from his job. And that if that wasn’t enough to convince him to keep his mouth shut, maybe Mr. Y knew for a fact that Mr. Z could do a lot worse to a person than just fire him.”

  “This hypothetical Mr. Z is capable of just about anything,” Jake agreed.

  “Exactly. Now maybe Mr. Y really, really wants to help Student X. Maybe he feels extremely sorry that he can’t. My question for you, Jake, is this. Would it be fair for Student X to expect an answer?”

  Jake looked down at the box in his hands. “I guess not.”

  Mr. Irwin smiled. “Logic problems are always fun, because they have easy answers. Okay, you’re all set up.”

  Jake frowned. “Huh? What’s in this box?”

  “Your lie detector,” Mr. Irwin said. “No assembly required.”

  Chapter Twenty

  The machine was about eight inches square, an enameled steel box with a shiny silver hand grip mounted on either side. On its face was a needle gauge and a single knob marked GAIN. It was scratched and dented in several places, and someone had scraped away some of the enamel so that it said GO PANTHERS! on one side. The rivets on part of its face had come loose and it was held together there with duct tape.

  “It’s called a galvanometer,” Jake explained. He sounded desperate even to himself. “They use it in the electronics unit to show how even human bodies conduct electricity. It also works as a primitive kind of lie detector. Whenever a person’s emotional state changes, the amount of sweat on their skin changes, too. That’s called the galvanic skin response. Modern lie detector machines are called polygraphs and they measure a bunch of different things: pulse, respiration, brain activity—and GSR, which many people think is the most important and hardest to fool.”

  Megan watched him with cold eyes.

  He could feel himself sweating already. He’d found a nice unoccupied room, a practice room at the back of the music rooms, and set up his lie detector on a table with two chairs. Then he’d sent Cody to go find and fetch Megan. It had taken a very long time for him to return. Jake wondered if that meant she had been reluctant to come or whether Cody had just had trouble finding her. He glanced at his friend, who just shrugged.

  “Come on, sit down,” Jake said, gesturing at one of the chairs. “I promise, if this shows I’m lying, I’ll never bother you again.”

  “Is that what I’m supposed to want?” Megan asked. “To have you leave me alone?”

  “You haven’t said a word to me in nearly a week. Every morning I wait for you on the way to school and you’re never there.”

  Megan folded her arms and looked away. “I’ve been having my mom drive me. What I want, Jake, is for you to not be crazy. I want you to get help. You don’t have to prove anything to me.”

  “I think I do,” Jake told her. “Please.”

  “It won’t prove anything,” she insisted. “I never thought you were lying. I think you honestly believe all this weird stuff. I think you believe it so strongly you’ve even convinced your sidekick here.”

  “Hey!” Cody said. “I’m not a—”

  She held up her hands by way of apology. Cody didn’t look satisfied but he shut up.

  Jake stared down at the machine as if it had already failed him. She was right, of course. It was possible he was crazy, that he had hallucinated everything, and that this wouldn’t prove a thing. But he’d worked so hard to make this happen, to get her here. “Just give it one chance,” he said. “Please. At least let me show you how it works. You can go first so you can see there’s no trick.”

  She walked over to the table but didn’t sit down. “Will it hurt?” she asked. “Does it zap you or something?”

  “Not at all. There’s no power cord, see? And no batteries in it, either. It’s a completely passive device. It just measures the current going through your own body. This knob,” he said, touching the black plastic GAIN control, “adjusts the sensitivity. That’s all there is to it.”

  She sighed deeply. But then she sat down. Jake smiled at her and showed her how to hold the grips. They were smooth where generations of Fulton High students had grabbed them during countless demonstrations over decades of physics classes. Jake wondered if the galvanometer had ever been used for this purpose before.

  “So what now?” she said. “It feels a little cold.”

  “That’s just the metal. It’ll warm up in your hands. Now Cody will ask you a couple questions. You just answer them as you please, either lie or tell the truth, and watch the needle.”

  She nodded.

  “Is your name Megan Gottschalk?” Cody asked. They had found a book on lie detectors in the school library and had learned that you were supposed to ask a series of what were called baseline questions first. These established the GSR when the subject was calm and collected.

  “Yes,” Megan said.

  The needle on the gauge failed to move.

  “Are you a student at this school?” Cody asked.

  “Yes.”

  Again, no movement.

  “Is your hair blue?”

  “Yes,” Megan said, and even she laughed out loud when the needle fluttered against its scale.

  Cody adjusted the gain knob and asked, “Do you still like Jake?”

  Megan’s lips pressed tightly together. “It’s complicated—” she began, but she stopped when the needle jumped wildly. She let go of the handles and sat back in her chair, not looking at either of the boys.

  I’ve still got a chance, Jake realized. She still likes me. He just needed to get past her idea that he was crazy. This was the start of convincing her. It was working!

  “My turn,” he said.

  She shrugged, still looking away.

  He turned the box around on the table so it was facing the other chair. He sat down there and tried to calm himself down. He hadn’t felt truly calm since the end of their date. It was possible to fool the galvanometer, he knew. Hardened criminals could supposedly fake out a lie detector test any number of ways. It was also possible that the subject would be so frightened of the test that even truthful answers would make the needle jump. He had to keep it together so that didn’t happen.

  “Okay,” he said. “When I grab the handles, you start asking me questions. Anything you want to know,” he said. “Ask me if I made up my story. Ask me if I really care about you.”

  “Can I ask if you wear boxers or briefs?” Megan asked, her voice icy with sarcasm. But she was looking at him again.

  “Anything,” he told her. “Starting now.” He reached forward and grabbed the handles. Then something funny happened.

  His eyes went very wide.

  “Jake,” she said, “is something wrong?”

  The needle hovered a fraction of an inch above zero. Meanwhile, the worst pain Jake had ever felt in his entire life was searing its way up his arms. He felt like his hands were burning where they touched the metal grips. He felt like his hair was standing straight up from his head and tiny lightning bolts were zig-zagging across his scalp. He felt like he was going to die.

  Somehow the machine was sending live electricity into his body. Somehow it was slowly electrocuting him. It must have malfunctioned—but no, that was impossible. It didn’t plug into the wall. It didn’t even have any batteries. Mr. Irwin had assured him it was totally passive and completely incapable of hurting a human being. Mr. Irwin, who had also practically said out loud that he was in on the Curriculum. That he was one of the Proctors.

  Mr. Irwin had lied.

  “Jake, let go. Just—just let go,” Megan said. “Jake, you’re scaring me! Let go of that thing!”

  “I… can’t,” Jake said, even as he felt the skin on his hands start to scorch.

  C
hapter Twenty-One

  Cody tried to grab the box away from Jake. The second his hands touched it his legs went out from under him and he jumped backwards shrieking as if he’d been bitten by a wild animal.

  “Jesus,” he said, clambering back up to his feet. “The whole thing’s rigged. Jake, you have to let go of this thing.”

  “Why can’t you let go?” Megan asked, reaching for Jake’s arms. She looked like she was going to pull him off the box.

  “Don’t!” he said. “You’ll get shocked, too.” He had to grit his teeth to keep from shouting at her. The pain was intense and it wasn’t going away or getting any easier to bear. “Somehow it’s got me trapped. I keep telling my hands to let go but they aren’t obeying me.”

  “Yeah. Yeah! I know about this,” Cody said, grabbing the edge of the table. “When you’re getting shocked with electricity, your muscles contract. You can’t help it. When guys try to break out of prison by climbing an electric fence, this same thing happens—their hands contract around the wires and they can’t let go.”

  “Well how do we turn this thing off?” Megan demanded, but Cody didn’t get a chance to answer, even if he knew.

  The door of the practice room opened quietly and a Proctor walked in, dressed in the traditional blue serge suit and mirrored mask.

  Megan let out a gasp. Not a scream. Jake was proud of her for not screaming—she’d never seen a Proctor before. She’d thought they were a delusion until the one walking in the door.

  Cody started running toward the Proctor as if he would knock it down but the Proctor just held up one gloved hand and said “Sleep,” in the buzzing fan voice Jake had come to know all too well. Instantly Cody collapsed on the floor in a heap. Jake hoped he hadn’t hit his head on the floor on the way down.

  “What are you doing to him?” Megan demanded. Jake was a little surprised to see that she hadn’t fallen asleep herself. A little surprise was all he could manage—the rest of his brain was taken up by the overwhelming pain. He could feel sweat rolling down his face and he was having trouble breathing it hurt so much.

  The Proctor took a step toward the table. Megan took a step back.

  “Jake is undergoing a test of his pain threshold,” the Proctor droned. “It will be over shortly. Jake, you may observe the needle gauge of the galvanometer.”

  “What?” Jake demanded. He stared at the needle. It was still hovering just a little above zero. “Yeah? So what?” he asked. Then he saw what he was supposed to see.

  What he should have seen before. If he’d been smart, if he hadn’t been so worried about convincing Megan he was telling the truth, he might have noticed and saved himself a lot of trouble. There were some scratches in the enamel paint just above the needle gauge. They looked like random scuff marks unless you knew they were supposed to be letters. About two-thirds of the way between zero and maximum, someone had scratched a rough P into the paint. A little farther toward maximum, maybe a sixteenth of an inch farther, were the letters AFC.

  He knew instantly what they meant. P was for Pass. AFC was for Automatic Failure Condition.

  “Megan,” he said, “this is going to be tricky. I need your help.”

  She turned to face him but she couldn’t stop glancing back at the Proctor.

  “Pretend he’s not there,” Jake told her. “Please. I want you to turn the gain knob all the way down.”

  “I’ll get shocked, like Cody,” she said.

  “No, not if you’re careful. The knob is plastic, so it doesn’t conduct electricity. Please. Just all the way to the left, as if you were turning it off.”

  She nodded and reached for the knob. She was very careful not to touch any part of the metal surface of the box. With a trembling hand she twisted the knob all the way to the left.

  Jake was not surprised when the needle failed to move. The pain didn’t go away. It didn’t even drop in intensity. There was no way to turn the current off, then, or even down. Up, on the other hand, would probably work.

  “Okay,” he said. “Now turn it the other way. Just a little.”

  She nodded and rotated the knob very, very slowly to the right.

  The needle lifted a fraction of an inch. Jake’s arms went rigid as the current racing through his hands increased. The pain burst through his head, stronger than before, more demanding. He thought he was going to cry. He was very worried he might wet himself.

  He had to go further, if he wanted to pass.

  “Okay, I see how it works,” he said. “You have to turn it up until the needle reaches the P there. Do you see the P?”

  “Yes,” Megan said. She looked back at the Proctor.

  “Don’t look at him! He’s not doing anything. You need to move the knob to the P, as fast as you can. But—and this is very important—don’t turn it too far. You have to be very careful not to turn it all the way to where it says AFC.”

  “What happens then?” Megan asked.

  I’ll die, Jake thought. The current will be strong enough to kill me. If he told her that, however, he would scare her. He might scare her so much she wouldn’t be able to turn the knob at all. “It’s just bad. Don’t worry about that. Do you trust me?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Cool. You’re going to get me out of this, Megan. You’re going to save my life, and then we’ll be even. Now, are you ready?”

  She bit her lower lip and nodded. Then she reached for the knob. With one quick motion she twisted it almost all the way to the right.

  Jake felt like wild animals were eating their way up his arms, starting at his fingers and palms. The electricity surged through him making every muscle in his body jump, making his hair start to smoke, making him feel like he was going to explode—

  —and then everything went black.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Jake’s return to consciousness was a slow and unpleasant process.

  Inside his head, in the dark, it had been warm and safe. Nobody was trying to hurt or kill him. He didn’t have anything to prove. He didn’t have any tests to pass. Nothing happened in there, ever, which meant nothing bad could happen.

  Then he heard Megan’s voice calling him. She sounded very far away and oddly distorted, as if she were shouting up at him from the bottom of a well. Or maybe he was at the bottom and she was shouting down. She kept calling his name and asking him questions but he couldn’t hear well enough to know how he was supposed to answer them. Occasionally he heard Cody calling him, as well.

  He tried to ignore them, but because there was no other sound where he was, that proved impossible. So he started trying to shout back, to tell them to leave him alone. That meant learning how to use his mouth and lungs all over again.

  Then he opened his eyes and pain came rushing into the world. There was light everywhere and it was buzzing, ringing in his ears. No, wait, that didn’t make any sense, light didn’t buzz—

  “His eyes are open,” Megan said, sounding excited. Sounding like this was the best thing that had ever happened to her.

  Jake wasn’t so thrilled by it. He started to close his eyes again and the comfortable darkness started rolling back over him like a soothing fog—

  “Oh no you don’t,” Megan insisted, and she grabbed at his arms and pulled him upwards, pulled at him until he was sitting up. He hadn’t realized he was lying down. There was dirt on his face and he rubbed at his cheeks and mouth to clear it away. Instead he got a face full of goopy cream that smelled like medicine. “Where am I?” he asked.

  “The ruins,” Cody told him. Cody’s shadow fell across Jake’s eyes and that helped a little. “Megan wanted to take you to the nurse’s office but I figured they would just shoot you full of arsenic there. I mean, they clearly want to kill you.”

  Jake shook his head. “No. They’re willing to kill me. But they don’t want to kill me. That makes all the difference, the way they see it.” He slowly turned his head. There was Megan, squatting down next to him.

  “Hi,” he said,
sleepily.

  “Hi, yourself.” She pressed one palm against his forehead and frowned at him. “I’m glad to see I didn’t kill you.”

  He smiled at her. It felt good to have her touch him, to have her close by. In the week since she’d decided he was crazy he’d been missing her terribly.

  “So what happened?” he asked.

  She looked away. “I turned the knob, just like you told me to. You—well, you screamed. It was hard to stay focused with you screaming right in my ear but I did it, I turned the needle all the way to P. Then it dropped back to zero, almost instantly, and you let go of the handles and fell out of your chair. You were totally out of it and I started yelling at the Proctor, I was kind of convinced you were dead, and—”

  “Then I woke up,” Cody told him. “I guess the Proctor woke me up. He was just walking out of the room as if nothing had happened and I was lying on the floor staring at the ceiling, that’s all I knew. But I figured I should follow him. See where he went.”

  “I had to stay with you,” Megan said. “I had to make sure you were okay.”

  Cody went on, “I followed him half way to the teacher’s wing, but then he just disappeared. He turned a corner and when I went around that same corner he was nowhere to be seen. I think they must have a secret passage there somewhere.”

  “Then Cody came back to us,” Megan finished, “and we agreed we couldn’t just leave you there. So we carried you here. There were kids in the halls—it must have been between periods—and they just stared at us, nobody even offered to help. There was one kid, in a black t-shirt, he asked if you were dead and I just didn’t know. I didn’t even answer him. Cody thought this would be a safe place so we brought you here and—”

  “And—” Cody said.

  Jake held up one goopy hand to stop them.

  “Thanks,” he said. He was looking at Megan.

  She smiled back.