“Would you care to demonstrate?” he suggested to Norcross again.
The latter plugged his headset into the side of the panel at the cube’s bottom edge. Almost instantly, a small silver airplane appeared inside the cube. Realistically, jet fire poured from the engine. The plane maneuvered as if in actual flight, diving, climbing, rolling.
“Perhaps you’d like to try it?” Nagle suggested to Gunderson.
Grinning a little nervously, the engineer took the headset from Norcross and adjusted it to his own head. He stared into the now empty interior of the cube. “What do I do?” he said.
“Build a copy of your XB-91 and put it through its paces,” Nagle suggested.
Slowly there appeared a fuzzy, highly asymmetrical outline of the Ninety-one. Gunderson laughed uncertainly at his own creation. “Looks more like the ghost ship of the Ancient Mariner. What the devil’s the matter with the engines on the right wing? They won’t fire up.”
“Turn the plane around,” Norcross suggested.
Clumsily the model turned on its own axis, the tail disappearing in the process. Gunderson restored it. The engines on the left wing were out now, while the others were going.
“Can’t keep it lit up on both sides,” he complained. He felt moisture starting out on his forehead in the strain of maintaining the image.
“That’s a lot better than most of us do the first crack,” said Norcross. “We engineers pride ourselves on our visual ability. This shows us where we really stand.”
Gunderson shook his head unhappily and took the headpiece off. He extended it to Montgomery. “Try your luck, Gene. See if you can build a Ninety-one, complete with wings and tail.”
Montgomery felt as if something had frozen inside him. He couldn’t have taken the headpiece if his life depended on it, he thought later. “No,” he said thinly. “I’m going to expose my ignorance in private, first.”
There was a great deal more to see and learn, Dr. Nagle told them, but the afternoon had grown late, and they were dismissed with the request to return the following morning. Montgomery felt shaken by what he had seen. And all the way back to the hotel he cursed the schoolboy fright that had kept him from accepting the headpiece of the visualizer cube. He had acted like a bashful kid at a party game and he couldn’t understand it. Nagle caught it, however. As if he understood exactly what was going on in Montgomery’s mind, he had taken the headpiece and changed the subject before anyone else could say anything. The director had been willing to spare him embarrassment, but it increased Montgomery’s irritation that it should have been so obvious to Nagle.
The prospect of making a telephone report to Dodge was another source of sharp irritation. He postponed it until after dinner, and then decided the colonel could just as well go without his report.
He took a long walk down to the beach and sat on the rocks until after it grew dark. Then, gradually, as if daring to peek through the crack of a door into some closet of nightmares, he allowed himself to consider what he had seen at the Institute that afternoon. He wanted to dismiss it all as trickery and a hoax, but it wouldn’t go away that easily. Norcross appeared perfectly honest in his part of the demonstration. Montgomery couldn’t see how he could have been duped after spending as long as he had at the Institute. Nor was there any purpose evident in such duping.
The only reasonable conclusion was that the engineer had been endowed with near-superhuman abilities during his slay. But Montgomery wasn’t prepared to accept this kind of answer without a struggle.
When he got back to the hotel a call from Dodge was awaiting him. He wished then that he had done the calling. He would have been better prepared with a story that would sound halfway reasonable. Certainly he couldn’t tell the truth over the phone. The colonel would think he’d gone crazy.
But Dodge was mostly interested in whether Montgomery was going to be admitted or not.
“I’m pretty sure they’re going to let me in,” said the major. "Nagle acted as if there would be no question about it at all.”
“Did you get a look at anything to give you an idea what’s going on?”
“No. I had a long talk with Nagle. He seems to be off on some kind of a phobia against schools. Apparently, if we burned down the buildings and fired all the teachers and professors everything would be all right, in his opinion.”
The colonel grunted. “That’s about the kind of thing Spindem thought we’d find. I’ve been thinking seriously of assigning him to come out there and work with you closely on this. The thing we need to know is how they manage to suck in the top talent of our military suppliers. They must have quite a trick to do that.”
“I’ll try to find out, sir, and keep you informed,” said Montgomery.
He hung up, hoping he’d be able to nail down the answer before Dodge sent Spindem out. That would be just a little more than he could take, he thought.
The following morning he was introduced to the counselor, Don Wolfe, as soon as he appeared at the Institute. Wolfe was a much younger man than either Nagle or Berkeley, but he shared the same calm assurance that he knew what it was all about. This irked Montgomery, but he hoped he could continue to keep the irritation under control and not get himself thrown out prematurely. He forced himself to listen attentively.
“Dr. Nagle gave me a run-down on the things he discussed with you yesterday,” said Wolfe. “Unless you have some questions, we’ll go into the matter of how the effects are produced.”
“The only question is whether or not I’m being accepted for work here,” said Montgomery.
Wolfe smiled. “Evidently Dr. Nagle forgot to mention that you are the one who decides that. We have quite a few people who don’t stay with us very long — after they see what I am going to show you today!”
He led the way out of the office and across the court to another building. Inside this, he took Montgomery to a small room which was lined on one side with panels of electronic equipment of some kind. It was decorated pleasantly over soundproof wall board. The furnishings consisted of a couple of chairs and a table and a couch.
Wolfe indicated a chair and gestured toward the panels. “This is the Mirror — sometimes known affectionately among Institute members as Nancy the Nemesis, or Minnie the Monster. At any rate, you’ll have some rare moments here if you decide to join us.”
“What does it do?” said Montgomery.
“As a mirror should, it offers you a look at yourself.”
Montgomery frowned. “That doesn’t seem to make very much sense.”
“It doesn’t at first to most of the people who come here. You’ve been warned away from it all your life. When you went to school they gave you an I.Q. test and put a label on you, which you were taught never to question. You were stupid, average, or brilliant and there was absolutely nothing you could do about it if your category was lower than you would have liked. Your attention was directed to the exterior world as it was described to you. And agreement with that description was demanded. If you saw wiggles where woggles were described, you learned to agree that they were woggles — or you had another tag applied to you: academic failure.
“In view of these discrepancies you were more than willing to agree after a time that it was best not to try to look into this sealed box you wear on top of your spinal column. That is the almost universal attitude we encounter.”
“And now I’m invited to take a look into the box, is that it?” Montgomery looked dubiously at the panels of the Mirror. “Minnie, the mechanical psychoanalyst!”
Wolfe smiled. “She’s been called that before, too. But that’s the one name that’s wholly inaccurate from the standpoint of function. The machine does nothing to interpret you to yourself. It doesn’t tell you anything or offer advice on how to adapt and get along better in the world. It does absolutely nothing but hold up a reflection for you to observe and make your own conclusions. It has only one control feature built in — and this is quite necessary. The extent of the reflection is governed automatically by your own fear level.”