Sitting in the chair was a carbon copy of Jeff. He glanced from one face to the other, searching for differences.
There seemed to be none.
Each of the boys had the same black, curly hair, the same dark brown eyes, the same square jaw.
“This is Adam,” Jeff announced. “He’s my kid brother by ten whole minutes.”
Adam’s face flushed and he tried to push Jeff away, but Jeff held onto the chair and began pushing it toward Josh. “This is Josh MacCallum,” he told his twin. “He wants to see your virtual reality setup.”
“Can’t you knock?” Adam complained. “You’re not supposed to come into people’s rooms when their doors are closed. And I’m right in the middle of something.”
“You’re always in the middle of something,” Jeff told him. “And don’t be a creep — lighten up and have some fun. Get the helmet and glove, and show Josh how it works.”
For a moment Josh thought Adam was going to argue with Jeff. He watched in silence as the twin brothers stared at each other. In a few seconds, almost as if Jeff held some sort of power over him, the defiance drained out of Adam’s eyes. Though neither of the boys had spoken, Josh had the eerie feeling that they had nonetheless had some kind of argument, and that Jeff had clearly won it. Silently, Adam left his chair and went to the dresser.
Jeff grinned mischievously at Josh. “He’s a nerd, but he does what I tell him to. Wait’ll you try this. It’s really cool.”
A moment later Jeff was fitting a strange kind of helmet onto Josh’s head, along with a heavy glove that went on his right hand.
“I can’t see anything,” Josh protested as the front of the helmet dropped in front of his eyes.
“You’re not supposed to,” Jeff told him. “Just sit in the chair and wait a minute while Adam gets it hooked up.”
“We’re not supposed to—” Adam began, but Jeff cut him off.
“Just do it, Adam, okay? It’s not like this is some kind of big secret. Josh’ll probably have one himself by next week!”
Adam made no reply, and Josh let himself be guided into the chair, and waited to see what was going to happen.
A moment later the front of the helmet came to life. A picture appeared before his eyes, an image of the room he was in. It was so perfect in every detail that he would have sworn the helmet had somehow turned transparent.
“Turn your head,” Jeff instructed, the sound of his voice coming through speakers within the helmet itself.
Josh did, and the image of the room shifted.
“Get up and move around,” Jeff told him.
Josh hesitated, but finally stood up and took a tentative step forward. Again the image shifted, exactly matching the perspective he’d have had without the helmet.
“It’s all digitized,” Jeff explained. “If the cable was long enough, you could wander all over the house, and everything would show up in the helmet.”
“Wow,” Josh breathed. “Awesome!”
“You ever want to fly?” Jeff asked.
“Huh?”
“Watch.”
Within seconds the image changed, and Josh found himself in the cockpit of some kind of airplane, peering out the window at the scenery below. But he could also see the controls of the plane.
“See the joystick?” he heard Jeff ask. “Use your right hand to control it.”
“But — But it’s not real,” Josh objected.
“Just try it,” Jeff told him. “Use your right hand, and pretend you’re reaching for the stick.”
As he mimed the action with his right hand, which was still inserted into the bulky glove, he saw his hand on the screen of the helmet, moving toward the joystick.
As he “touched” it, something in the glove stimulated his hand, so that he imagined he could feel the object he appeared to be clutching.
“Now, fly,” Jeff told him.
Josh, entranced by what was happening, moved the joystick to the right, and the “plane” appeared to bank over, the horizon tipping, the view of the landscape below veering sharply. Almost instinctively he straightened the “plane” out.
“Wh-What happens if I crash?” he asked.
He heard Jeff laugh. “Maybe you die,” the other boy said. “Why don’t you try it?”
There was a mocking note to Jeff’s voice, a note that Josh had heard before, from the kids in Eden.
Certain that Jeff was laughing at him, he defiantly pushed forward on the joystick.
The “plane” plunged downward, and Josh felt dizzy as the image on the screen — a landscape of the coastline, with cliffs dropping away to the beach and the sea — raced up at him.
“Better pull it up,” Jeff teased.
Josh waited, certain that nothing was going to happen. But as the “plane” dove lower, and the sea itself came rushing up at him, he finally lost his nerve. He jerked his hand backward, and the phantom joystick reacted instantly. The “plane” pulled up, and for an instant Josh could almost feel the forces of gravity pulling at him.
And then the screen filled with the face of a cliff, and it was too late. The “plane” smashed into the cliff, the window shattering as the roar of the crash exploded in his ears.
Screaming in spite of himself, Josh jerked the glove off his hand and ripped the helmet from his head. Pale and shaking, he stared at Jeff, who was laughing out loud now.
“Is that cool?” Jeff demanded. “Is that cool, or what? Jeez, you look like you’re gonna puke!”
For a second Josh truly thought he was going to throw up. The whole experience had been so real, so frightening.
And Jeff had done it to him on purpose—
No!
Jeff had warned him what would happen if he crashed, warned him to pull up on the stick.
And nothing, really, had happened to him. He was all right. He was still in the room, and he wasn’t hurt at all.
And Jeff had warned him. He wasn’t like the kids at home, who always seemed to be waiting for something to happen to him, setting traps for him to fall into.
Jeff had just been showing him how it worked.
As his feeling of nausea passed, he managed a weak smile. “It’s neat,” he agreed. “But how does it work?”
Jeff’s grin broadened. “You really want to know?”
Josh nodded.
Jeff leaned forward to whisper in Josh’s ear.
“Magic,” he said. “It works by magic.”
For just a moment, Josh almost believed him.
6
“Another twenty minutes,” George Engersol said.
Brenda MacCallum automatically glanced up at the clock. Even as she watched, the hand ticked forward another minute, pausing at nineteen minutes before five. She’d been sitting here, waiting, for nearly three hours.
Since two o’clock Josh had been alone in a room adjoining Engersol’s office in one of the two new buildings that stood on the grounds between the Academy and the main campus of the university, working on the battery of tests that would finally determine his eligibility for the school.
For the first hour, Brenda had tried to pretend that she wasn’t worried, that whatever the tests contained, Josh would pass them with flying colors. She’d listened in rapt fascination as Engersol, a man of about forty-five, with iron-gray hair and horn-rimmed glasses that, though they had gone out of style at least twenty years ago, still looked perfect on his craggy face, explained to her more of the details about how the Academy had been structured and what they were trying to accomplish. And not only for their students, but for gifted children everywhere. The more she heard, the more Engersol had impressed Brenda — with his ideas and the simplicity with which he was able to explain them. It was clear to her that Engersol regarded his students not merely as gifted children to be taught, but almost as if they were his own children. His paternalism toward them permeated every phrase he uttered, and it was only reluctantly that she had finally shifted her attention to Josh’s image on the closed circuit television screen mounted on the wall of the director’s office.