“Approximately fifteen centimeters on average, sir,” said the box.
Dad laughed out loud and Billy gaped at the box, astonished at the answer. “That’s what I thought,” said Dad.
“What? What did you think?” asked Billy.
“Well, did Bunter ever see a baseball diamond?”
“Sure. I drew him a picture.”
“You drew him a picture. And how far apart were the bases on the picture?”
Billy stopped. “Oh,” he said. “I see.” He smiled crookedly at the box. “Bunter, you dummy, that was a picture. Not a real baseball diamond.”
“ ‘First, you have this diamond, see?’ ” said the box in Billy’s voice. “I beg your pardon, Master Bill,” it said in its own voice. “Please explain.” Billy just shook his head in astonishment.
“Well, well,” said Dad. “I see we have a bit of a problem with recognizing representations; and a bit of a temper, too. And we can do impressions. Isn’t that something.” He started to clear the table. “You know what, Billy? I think you hit on the crux of Jim’s problem with these things. I’m going to give Jim a call about this, but let me make a suggestion. Try to keep Bunter in active mode and keep on doing what you’re doing; you know, talk to it and explain things, and just generally keep it around. I want to see what happens.”
“I don’t get it. Is there something wrong? Is Bunter broken?”
“Not at all. Just a little more complex than we thought. His command of the language fooled you. Fooled me. He can do arithmetic, he knows enough physics to figure out what would happen if you dropped a rock off a cliff, but he hasn’t got anymore common sense than the average infant. Stands to reason, I guess. He was wiped only, what, last night?”
“Yeah, he was,” said Billy, warming to Burner’s defense. “So you can’t expect him to know everything. He hasn’t had any time.”
“Right. But what’s interesting isn’t so much what he’s learning as the way he’s learning it. Babies can’t talk about how they learn. Bunter can. This should be very interesting.” He closed the dishwasher and started to wipe down the counter. “All right, my boy. I’ve still got some tilings to finish up in the Dungeon. You get started on your homework, now. No more baseball for a while.”
A short while later, Billy sat at the desk in his room. The box was propped up against the lamp before him. He rested his chin in one hand, and doodled on his paper with the other—circles, squares and slashes. “Bunter?” he said, looking into the camera’s eye.
“Yes, Master Bill.”
“Is it true what Dad said? Can you do math problems?”
“I can calculate. Yes.”
“OK. Try this. How would you divide three apples among two boys? Fairly?”
Later that night, Detective William “Wild Bill” Phillips, undercover cop, stood by the window in his darkened stakeout, cold eyes scanning the vacant lot below. It was quiet just now, peaceful in the moonlight, but some thing would break tonight. He could feel it. Better check in with his backup. “Can you hear me?” he whispered.
“Yes,” came the answer through his earpiece.
“Can you see me?”
“No.” Billy sighed and turned away from his bedroom window and the view of the backyard.
“Let’s try some light.” He turned on the desk lamp. “Can you see me now?”
“No.”
Billy looked closely at the backpack hanging on a hook at the rear of his open closet. “Well, I can see you clear as anything.”
There was no response. Billy turned on more lights, crossed to the closet and examined the bag critically without touching it. Like almost everything else associated with his school, the knapsack was uniform, although Billy liked to think of it as “official.” This backpack was the official school carryall, a plain black nylon affair with a single pouch on the back and the school’s logo, the face of a smiling Ben Franklin, printed in white on the pouch. Dad thought the picture looked funny and called the knapsack Billy’s oatmeal bag because of the picture, for reasons Billy had never asked about. You had to have one at Franklin; all your stuff had to go to and from school in the official bag.
Billy leaned over and studied the logo, looking for the small hole he had picked out of the fabric in Ben’s right cheek. He found the hole, but couldn’t see anything behind it. “Can you see anything at all, Bunter?”
“No, Master Bill,” whispered his earpiece.
“Why didn’t you say so? Here I’m thinking you just didn’t have enough light.”
“I did not have enough light,” Bunter said flatly, as if that explained the situation. Billy opened the pouch and pulled out the box. “Well, I guess that’s not going to work. I’ll have to figure out some way to strap your eye up against that hole so you don’t move. Or maybe Dad will get the remote eye done soon.” He climbed up on the bed and set the box up over his shoulder.
“You’re as bad as Tik-Tok sometimes, you know?” Billy set the book on his lap and opened it to his mark. “We’ve got to get you to school somehow. Sometimes you’re pretty dumb.” He looked over his shoulder to check the line of sight. “Sorry, I didn’t mean dumb exactly, but ignorant. There’s a lot of plain regular stuff you don’t know and I bet you could learn it if you went to school. Can you see the book?”
“Yes.”
“OK, here we go. ‘Chapter Five. The Roses Repulse the Refugees...’ ”
A week or so later, Billy sat attentively in Miss Barstow’s classroom. It was a dreary day outside, raw and threatening rain; the bright lights and warmth indoors made it easy to pay attention. Besides, Bunter was coming to class now, too.
Miss Barstow pulled the world map down from its overhead roller and moved over to the big globe in the far corner of the room. Billy shifted obviously in his seat, trying to give the impression that he was merely turning to face her, keeping his gaze straight ahead. At the first opportunity, though, he shifted his eyes to the right so that he could make out his official bag hanging over his official coat on his official named coat hook at the back of the room. The angle looked clear to him.
He brought his eyes back to the globe and Miss Barstow, licked his lips and left them partly open. “This is geography,” he breathed, without moving his mouth. “Can you see the globe?”
“Yes,” was the equally quiet response in his left ear. He nervously touched his neck on that side, trying not to think of the bit of cotton he’d placed to hide the earpiece. After three days, he was going to have to come up with something else. At least sticking the mike pin under the knot of his tie seemed to work fine.
“On this map,” Miss Barstow was saying, “if we want to fly from New York to Japan, and we want to go by the shortest way, it looks like we just draw a straight line from one to the other. Like this.” She pulled a pointer across the flat map, pulling a wavering red line out of New York as she went. “It almost goes through Oregon and then out across the sea and all the way across the Pacific Ocean and not near much of anything until we get to Tokyo.” She tapped Tokyo and the line thickened and straightened. “It doesn’t look like there is any quicker way to get to Tokyo, does there?” A few kids dutifully shook their heads at the rhetorical question.
“Now look at the globe.” She turned it in its mount so that the North pole faced the class. “If I draw the same route that we have on the flat map, it doesn’t look like the shortest route at all, does it?” She drew in a line of red light with her finger, more or less along the 40th parallel, this time to fewer shaking heads. “Maybe I could fly this way,” a green line dipping south through Hawaii, “or this way,” a yellow arc along the line of the Aleutians, “or even this silly line right over the North Pole.” A blue line formed under her hand. “What do you think? What is the shortest route from New York to Tokyo?”