I knew all this because, of course, I’d gotten into his accounts.
Gibbs didn’t know it. Nobody did. I’d covered my tracks on that one, and a lot of others.
After leaving Brunhilde in student parking, I headed for the science wing. This could sometimes be the low point of the day, because the shortest route ran along a narrow footpath between the main building and a disused portable classroom. This area was known as The Pit, the designated smoking area, and as usual it was full of jerks busy putting a film of tar between their lungs and reality. Apart from the fact that it stank, The Pit was a nuisance because a lot of its denizens had a thing about the Awkward Squad.
Like Jason Murphy. He was a senior this year, by the grace of God and social promotion, and led a little gang who fooled around on Hondas pretending they were Harleys. In the Awkward Squad we called them the Tricycle Rats. That wasn’t quite accurate anymore; Jason’s father, a car dealer with the dumbest commercials on local TV, was letting him tool around in a demo Trans Am, and his buddies had abandoned their motorcycles for the joy of being seen in a hot car.
I’ll say this for Jason: no matter what his problems were, he was blessed with a sincere self-regard. He had an equally sincere contempt for anything intellectual, which for him started somewhere below Conan the Barbarian.
Judging from the smell coming downwind from The Pit, grass was the carcinogen of choice this morning. Jason and a couple of his buddies were sitting on the steps of the portable, all rigged out in the mandatory studded leather jackets and headbanger T-shirts. Jason was a stocky guy, a couple of inches shorter than I, but a lot heavier. He was cultivating a moustache to go with the lank brown hair that lay in oily tendrils down his neck.
“Hey hey,” said Jason, genial with cannabis. “It’s one of the mutants.”
“Naw,” said one of the buddies, “It’s Mr Spock. See the ears?”
“Mutant,” Jason overruled him. “Get outa here, mutant. This is human territory.”
I ignored him, and the smirks of the twenty or so other smokers. As I passed, something stung my neck like a wasp. Jason had flipped the glowing remains of his roach at me.
Feeling the heft of my knapsack, I debated whether to use it as a club, or drop it and go after the three of them with my bare hands. Most of the kids standing around hadn’t even noticed, but from the corner of my eye I could see Jason and his friends crouched, waiting, hoping to get a rise out of me.
Down in the basement of my personality, something rattled its chains and growled as it started climbing the stairs. Once or twice, when I was younger, it had gotten out. But I was, as Gibbs once put it, on TV. Under the eye of the authorities, I couldn’t afford the luxury of tangling.
So, with my neck burning, I started walking again, hearing their laughter and cursing silently because my ears were turning red - I could feel them - the way they always do when I get upset or excited. I made a mental contract with myself: as soon as I was allowed to get near a computer again, I would log Jason’s name and a lot of phony delinquent accounts into the records of every bill collector in California. Then I would get the registration numbers of his lousy little Honda and his stupid Trans Am, and I would put those vehicles on the “stolen” list of the California Highway Patrol. That would be for starters.
It was a relief to get away from The Pit, and from the gregarious mindlessness in the halls where you could smell the sex pheromones even over the girls’ Charlie and the boys’ Brut. Once inside Gibbs’ domain, I was safe.
That doman was a single large room, with tables and chairs clustered at one end facing his desk and a chalkboard; at the far end, the room held four long lab benches with electrical outlets, gas burners, and sinks. Against one long wall stood eight Apple IIc’s, interspersed with bookcases and filing cabinets; the other long wall was windows overlooking the track and football field. Everything was in immaculate order, but the janitors had little to do in here: Gibbs saw to it that we kept the place clean and tidy.
This morning, the lab benches held little gadgets attached to sphygmomanometers - instruments for measuring blood pressure. We’d set them up yesterday afternoon; today we were going to use them.
The Awkward Squad was gathering in the classroom end, talking quietly or reading. Pablo and Ronnie were playing blitz chess, with no more than fifteen seconds between moves, and giggling like maniacs. Eustis was running a program on one of the Apples. Six-foot Angela was hunched over in her chair, devouring yet another junk romance novel with a title like Love’s Palpitating Passion. She could go through two a day and still keep up with all her work.
Gibbs himself was perched as usual on his tall stool in front of his desk, with a podium beside him. The stool enabled him to keep his bum leg straight; it didn’t like to bend very much. He was going through the day’s ration of bureaucratic garbage, scanning each item quickly before dropping it in the rubbish bin nearby. When the buzzer sounded for the start of the first period, he put the remaining papers on the desk and glanced at the papers he’d stacked on the podium. The principle’s muffled voice came faintly down the hall from the next classroom. With Gibbs’s connivance, we’d sabotaged the lab speaker early in the semester; Angela calculated we’d gained an extra ninety minutes a month by that one criminal act.
“Good morning.”
The chess game stopped. Eustis left the computer. Angela put away her romance. We all mumbled good morning.
“Good to see everybody on time for a change. Anybody ripped? Anybody drunk?” This was a running gag; he’d made it very clear on day one, that anyone who got psychotropic before three in the afternoon was no longer in the Awkward Squad. One guy had tested Gibbs; Gibbs had passed, and the turkey was gone.
We all shook our heads at his question.
“Good. It could really mess up what we’re doing today, which is exploring biofeedback. Gassaway! What’s biofeedback?”
Bobby Gassaway sat up. He was a blond kid about my age, dough-faced, a little zitty, and pervertedly fond of grossly loud sport shirts.
“It’s a way to control body functions by conscious effort, sir.”
“Good. But it’s a strange phenomenon, because you do it indirectly. You don’t try to lower your blood pressure; you just try to keep a light burning, or a tone sounding, or a wave at a certain level on an oscilloscope. Now, this morning ᚓ”
The door opened, and we all turned to see who it was. It was a girl, a stranger: maybe 5’4”, straight blond hair falling across her shoulders, fine pale complexion, hazel eyes, high cheekbones, and a baleful expression. She was very slim, frail looking really, and she wore a grey skirt, white blouse, and blue cardigan. She carried a book bag over her left shoulder; her right hand held a can, and her right leg wore a brace.
“Can I help you?” Gibbs said.
She held up a handful of forms. “My name is Pat Llewellyn.” Her voice was deep, musical, and full of anger. “They told me in the office that I’m supposed to be here.”
“Ah, yes - I was told to expect you sometime this week. Come on in and find a seat. I’ll take your forms.”
She came into the room, limping heavily, and passed the forms to him with scarcely a look. Then she went on to a table off to one side in the second row, away from most of us. I thought she’d have been cute if she didn’t have such a grim expression.
Gibbs’ rumbling voice pulled my attention back where it belonged. “All right, this morning we’re seeing whether we can learn to consciously raise or lower our blood pressure. Now, this is not just fooling around, people. Biofeedback can be dangerous as well as helpful. I’ve got some notes on carrying out this experiment safely, and I want you to read them before we get going.”
He left the stool and started passing out the handouts. As he approached Pat Llewellyn, she said loudly and coldly: “Is that supposed to be a joke?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“If you’re doing a cripple imitation, it’s not a very good one.”
Woo. I
figured this girl would have a very short halflife in here. But GIbbs didn’t react to the bitter hostility in her voice and face.
“This is no imitation, Llewellyn. This is the best I can do.” His voice was quiet and matter-of-fact.
Pat’s face tightened into an angry mask, and she flushed with embarrassment as she stared at the empty chalkboard. Gibbs put a handout in front of her, then went back to his stool and sat down with just a hint of relief at being off his leg.
“All right,” he said. “After you read the handout, ask questions if you have any. Then we’ll pair off; one person monitors the other.” He named pairs, preventing another chess orgy by putting Pablio and Ronnie on opposite sides of the lab. “Llewellyn, you team up with Stevenson.”
“Who’s Stevenson… Sir?”
“In the Rugby shirt.”
I gave her what I considered a medium-friendly smile; she looked at me the way I usually look at a badly dissected frog.
“Some guys have all the luck.” Gassaway blared sarcastically.
“Shut up, Gassaway,” Gibbs said.
“Shut up, Gassaway,” I echoed.
We got ourselves set up after the usual chaos and confusion. I was being a little duller than usual, because I couldn’t keep my mind off whatever it was that had happened to me that morning. When I asked Pat whether she wanted to monitor first or be the subject, she put on the cuff and handed me the bulb. I obediently pumped it up and noted her blood pressure.
The first time around, we were supposed to lower our blood pressure. The sphygmomanometer was linked to a small feedback device; when pressure dropped below a specified point, a light atop the device would go on. Pat’s pressure was relatively high, which wasn’t surprising. She was so tense she almost vibrated.
“This your first day here?” Smooth line, huh?
“Are we doing an experiment or making small talk?”
I shrugged. “Well, the experiment’s going pretty slowly, so we might as well pass the time.”
Pat glared at me, then at the unlit bulb. “I think this is stupid. And it’s supposed to be a science class?”
“Ah,” I said. “This is no ordinary science class; this is the Awkward Squad.”
She looked slowly around at the other students, who were pumping up each other’s cuffs, giggling and chattering away. “I won’t argue with that. They told me it was some kind of special science course. I should’ve realised. When they say ‘special,’ it always means screwed up.”
“Speak for yourself.” Witty comeback, huh? “We like to think of ourselves as refugees from a higher plane of reality. Where you from?”
As if reading from a card, she rattled off the names: “Sacramento, Riverside, Sacramento again, Bakersfield, San Bernardino, Fairfield, now here. Name a hole west of Nevada, I’ve been there.”
“Your family travel a lot?”
“Not with me, they don’t. They gave up on me years and years ago. I kicked around some foster homes. Now I’m doing group homes. You know? Two underpaid bleeding-heart social workers pretending to be parents, and six jerks pretending to be human.”
I started tinkering with the innards of the feedback device. It was simpler than I’d expected.
“Why’d your folk give up on you?”
“I kept asking nosey questions about things that were none of my goddamn business.”
Pretty salty. “No, you didn’t.”
“Oh, no?”
“You’re too smart to ask dumb questions. You asked smart questions, and you were smart enough to tell when they gave you dumb answers. They’re the dumb ones, and they couldn’t handle you.”
That was no Sherlock Holmes deduction, but I twas close enough to the truth to make her nervous. I pumped up her cuff for hte umpteenth time. Still high. “Listen to the great expert,” she jeered.
“I’m not an expert,” I answered mildly. “But you’re here.”
“So what? You said yourself, this is the Awkward Squad.”
“That’s what we call it. The school calls us, ‘severely gifted.’”
“Severelyᚓ” She rocked back in her chair, laughing.
“They don’t really know what the hell to do with us, so they stick Gibbs with us and he tries to make something out of us.”
“You mean,” she asked incredulously, “everybody in here is really smart?”
“Not really smart. Just smart enough to get into high-quality trouble. Gassaway, for instance - he used to get his jollies going around giving everybody electric shocks. Last year he hotwired the p.a. system. Mr Gordon, the principle, nearly got electrocuted. Zap. Gassaway’s here. Pablo and Ronnie are always playing chess, and they don’t care whether they’re taking a pee or everybody else is singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’”
She studied me with a flicker of interest. “And what are you in for?”
“I broke into a bunch of banks up in Canada.”
She caught on much too quickly. “Computers, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“You steal anything?”
“No. I just liked to leave graffiti. You know, Stop Nuclear War, Bring Down Interest Rates. My favourite was If You Attempt to Erase This Message, All Your Records Will Be Erased.”
She laughed again. It was a little harsh, as if she didn’t get much practice. “And what did they do when they caught you?”
“Took away my computer and put me on two years’ probation. I thought at least they’d offer me a job, you know, showing ‘em how to stop other hackers. They said they already have enough crooks on the payroll.”
She laughed once more, more easily, and the light went on.
“Hey, you did it! Keep it up, keep the light on.”
“How? I don’t know howᚓ”
The light dimmed and went out as her blood pressure rose. I felt Gibbs coming up behind me.
“Just think about making the light go on, Llewellyn.”
She focused on the light bulb, and then relaxed a little; if I hadn’t been watching her so closely, I wouldn’t even have noticed. The light went back on, and brightened.
“Well done,” said Gibbs warmly, and she glanced up at him with a surprised half-smile, as if she hadn’t expected a compliment.
“But how am I doing it?”
“If we knew that,” Gibbs said, “we’d know a lot about ourselves. Some parts of our brains can do absolutely astounding things. Sometimes, with the right kind of feedback, we can get some conscious control over them. It’s a useful tool, but it can be dangerous.”
“Dangerous how, Mr Gibbs?” she asked.
“Well, as the handout said, you could theoretically push your blood pressure so low you’d go into shock. But the problem’s more complicated than that. You understand how your liver works?”
“No.”
“Nobody does, really. So you wouldn’t want to fool around with it, would you? Control what it was producing. Next thing you know, you could mess up your whole body chemistry and drop dead.”
“But if I fooled around,” I interjected, “I could learn how my liver works.”
“By trial and error? You’d have to be awfully curious to risk your neck like that.”
“I wouldn’t be the first. Plenty of scientists have experimented on themselves.”
“They were taking calculated gambles on the basis of known data. Interfering at random with your own internal functions would just be stupid.”
I didn’t agree for a second, but I let it pass. Pat didn’t.
“You want to know everything about everything,” She said. “Don’t you?”
“Eventually,” I admitted. “Mostly, I just don’t like secrets. Information should be free, like air and water. That’s why I asked you about yourself.”
She looked startled, and the light went off abruptly.
Gibbs frowned. “Hey, your blood pressure shouldn’t go up so fast.” He checked her cuff, then the gauge. It’s hardly gone up at all. Maybe you’ve got a defective machine.”
&
nbsp; “Uh, Mr Gibbs - I kind of tinkered with it.”
He impaled me with his the-last-time-was-your-last-chance look. “What now, Stevenson?” Gibbs said very slowly.
“Uh, well, I could see her blood pressure was a little high, sir, and she was under some stress being new in the class and all, so I just made the device a little more sensitive. So it would react faster to even a little drop in pressure, you know, give her some positive reinforcement, and bring her pressure down some more.”
“Do you think that was advisable, Stevenson, especially in the light of what you just read about sudden drops in blood pressure?”
Boy, I was skin diving in the deeps of the Excrement Ocean. “I, uh, said that her blood pressure was already a little high, so, so that didn’t seem like a likely threat.”
The cuff’s Velcro patches gave with a zzpp as Pat yanked the cuff from her arm. “So you were just manipulating me, huh? Very clever. Excuse me, Mr Gibbs, I’ve got to go to the john.”
She stood up and headed for the door, her cane thumping.
Gibbs leaned against the edge of the lab station and studied me with distaste. “See what I mean about tinkering with complicated systems? You haven’t been using this device fifteen minutes, and you’re already messing with it, with no idea in the whole blessed world what might happen next. You call that scientific?”
“Not exactly, sir. Well, in a way I knew exactly what the results would be.”
“Uh-huh?”
“I could see how to change the sensitivity threshold, and I could see that I wasn’t going to get results with her unless I did change it. And that’s what happened.”
“But did you know what Llewellyn’s reaction would be when she learnt you’d been tampering with her just like the machine?”
“Uh, no, sir. But I wouldn’t have said anything about it if you hadn’t noticed how her blood pressure went back up.”
“For tomorrow, Stevenson, I want you to be able to recite from memory the Nuremburg Convention on the use of human beings for experimental purposes.”
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