The only progress he ever made was in that brief time when he almost literally discovered his roommate.Frank Heywood was the ideal person to share a small room with Lucas Martino. A quiet, calm type who never spoke except when it was absolutely necessary, he seemed to fit his movements about the room so that they never interfered with Lucas’. He used the room only to sleep and study in, slipping out whenever he had any free time. When Lucas thought about it, some weeks after the year began, he decided that Frank, like himself, had been too busy for friendship or anything more than enough politeness to let them live in peace. But, evidently, Frank also settled down and began to find a little leisure, because it was his roommate, and not Lucas, who initiated the short friendship between them. “You know,” Frank astonished him by saying one night, “you are without a doubt the big gun in this student body.”
Lucas looked over from his desk, where he had been sitting with his chin in his hands. “Who, me?”
“Yes, you.” Heywood’s expression was completely serious. “I mean it. The word around the campus is you’re a grind. That’s a lot of bushwah. I’ve watched you, and you don’t hit the books half as hard as most of these monkeys. You don’t have to. One look and it’s in your head for keeps.”
“So?”
“So you’ve got brains.”
“Not many morons get into a school like this.”
“Morons?” Frank gestured scornfully. “Hell, no! This place is the cradle of next generation’s good old American know-how, the hope of the future, the repository of all our finest young technical minds. And most of them couldn’t give you the square of plus one without scratching their behinds and thinking about it for an hour. Why? Because they’ve been taught what book to look it up in, not how to use it. But not you.”
Lucas looked at him in amazement. For one thing, this was by far the longest thing Frank had ever said to him. For another, here was a completely new viewpoint-an attitude toward Tech and everything it represented that he had never heard before, and never considered.
“How do you mean that?” he asked, curious to learn as much about it as he could.
“Like this: the way things are taught around here, the only way most people can get through is by memorizing what they’re told. I’ve been talking to some of these jokers. I’ll bet you I can find ten guys right on this floor who can repeat their texts back word for word, right down to the last comma, and do it like somebody pulling a tapeworm up his throat hand over hand. I will also bet you that if it turns out, fifteen years from now, that some Commie typesetter deliberately fouled up the words in the text, Western science is going to be shot to hell because nobody’ll have initiative enough to figure out what should have been there. Particularly not those ten guys. They’d keep on forever designing missile control systems that tuned in WBZ, because that was the way the book said to do it.”
“I still don’t follow you,” Lucas said, frowning.
“Look — these guys aren’t morons. They’re pretty damned bright, or they wouldn’t be here. But the only way they’ve ever been taught to learn something is to memorize it. If you throw a lot of new stuff at them in a hurry, they’ll still memorize it — but they haven’t got time to think. They just stuff in words, and when it comes time to show what they know, they unroll a piece. Yard goods.
“I say that’s a hell of a dangerous thing to have going on. I say anybody with brains ought to realize what he’s doing to himself when he stuffs facts down indiscriminately. I say anybody who did realize it would want to do something about it. But these clucks aren’t even bothered by it enough to wrinkle their foreheads. So, considering everything, I say they may have brains, but they don’t have brains enough.
“Now, you I’ve watched. When I sit here looking at you doing up your notes, it’s a pleasure. Here’s a guy with a look on his face as if he’s looking at a love letter, for Christ’s sake, when he’s reading an electronics text. Here’s a guy who fills out project reports like a man building a good watch. Here’s a guy that’s chewing before he swallows — here’s a guy who’s doing something with what they give them. Here, when you come right down to it, is a guy this place was really set up to produce.”
Lucas raised his eyebrows. “Me?”
“You. I get around. I guess I’ve at least taken a look at every bird on this campus. There’s a few like you on the faculty, but none in the student body. A few come close, but nobody touches you. That’s why I say out of all the students here, all four classes, you’re the guy to watch. You’re the guy who’s going to be really big in his field, I don’t give a damn if it’s civil engineering or nuclear dynamics.”
“Electronic physics, I think.”
“O.K., electronic physics. My money’s on the Commies to be really worried about you in a few years’ time.”
Lucas blinked. He was completely overwhelmed. “I’m the illegitimate son of Guglielmo Marconi,” he said in reply. “You notice the similarity in names.” But he couldn’t do more with that defense than to put a temporary stop to Heywood’s trend of conversation. He had to think it over — think hard, to arrange all this new data in its proper order.In the first place, here was the brand-new notion that a difference from other people was not necessarily bad. Then, there was the idea that somebody actually thought enough of him to observe his behavior and analyze it. That was not something he expected from people other than his parents. And, of course, the second conclusion led to a third. If Frank Heywood was thinking along lines like these, and if he could see what other people couldn’t, then Frank, too, was a person different from most.That could mean a great deal. It could mean that he and Frank could at least talk to each other. Certainly it meant that Frank, despite his disclaimer, was just as capable as he — perhaps more so, since Frank had seen it and he had not.In many ways, Lucas found this an attractive train of thought. If he accepted any part of it, it automatically meant he also accepted the idea that he was some kind of genius. That in itself made him look at the whole hypothesis suspiciously. But he had very little or no real evidence to refute it. In fact, it was the kind of hypothesis that made it possible to reinterpret his whole life, and thus reinterpret every piece of evidence that might have stood against it.
For several more weeks, he went through a period of great emotional intoxication, convinced that he had finally come to understand himself. In those weeks, he and Frank talked about whatever interested Lucas at the moment, and carried on serious discussions long into the night. But the feeling of being two geniuses together was an essential part of it, and one night Lucas thought to ask Frank how he was doing at his studies.
“Me? I’m doing fine. Half a point over passing grade, steady as a chalkline.”
“Half a point?”
Heywood grinned. “You go to your church and I’ll go to mine. I’ll get a sheepskin that says Massachusetts Institute of Technology on it, the same as yours.”
“Yes, but it’s not the diploma—”
“—it’s what you know? Sure, if you’re planning to go on from there. I could, to be completely honest, give even you a run for the money when it comes to that. But why the hell should I? I’m not going to sweat my caliones off at Yucca Flat for the next forty years, draw my pension, and retire. Uh-uh. I’m going to take that B.S. from MIT and make it my entrance ticket into some government bureau, where I’ll spend the next forty years sitting behind a desk, freezing my caliones off in an air-conditioned office, and someday I’ll retire on a bigger pension.”
“And-and that’s all?”