someone came along and suggested that because he’d been in perfect health all his life, they’d like to start tracking him to see what’s going to happen. But apparently this outfit in Boston had some reason to think mere was going to be something special about Randy and the others and started tracking them early.”
“What are you saying, Jim?” Lucy asked, sure she already knew what was coming.
“I’m saying that it seems to me we might have some kind of clue about Randy after all. I think tomorrow one of us better get in touch with CHILD, and find out just what this survey is about, and how Randy fits in. Apparently there is something special about Randy. We’d better find out what it is.”
As she went to bed later that night, Lucy wondered what could possibly come of talking to the Children’s Health Institute for Latent Diseases. Was Jim just sending her off on another wild-goose chase?
Still, it would be something to do, and anything, right now, was better than nothing.
With nothing to do, she would go crazy, and she couldn’t allow herself to do that.
Not until she knew what had happened to her son.
Chapter 12
AFTER ONLY THREE DAYS at the Academy, Randy Corliss had grown accustomed to the routine. For the first time, he felt as though he belonged somewhere. The sense of being alone in the world, of being somehow set apart from the other kids his age, was gone. At the Academy he was like all the other boys.
School at the Academy wasn’t like school in Eastbury. Here, all the classes were compressed into the morning, except for physical education, and the things they studied seemed to Randy much more interesting than the things they had been taught at home. Also, at the Academy everyone seemed to care whether or not you learned. It wasn’t like the public schools at all. As long as Randy could remember, if he got bored with something and stopped paying attention, no one seemed to care. All his teachers had just gone along at their own pace, never noticing that their students had lost interest.
But here, everything seemed to go faster. Here, they expected you to learn, so you learned. And they spent most of their time on subjects Randy liked. A lot of history, which Randy liked because most of history seemed to be, one way or another, about war, and Randy found war fascinating. There was, to his young mind, something wonderful about men marching into battle. And the way Miss Bowen taught it, war was almost like a game. You obeyed the rules, and did exactly as you were told, and you won. Time after time, in lesson after lesson, Randy learned that battles were lost only because the troops had not done as they’d been told. To him, it all made perfect sense, because as he thought about it, he realized that in all his nine years, the only times he’d really gotten into trouble were the times he’d disobeyed someone.
At the Academy it was the same way. As long as you followed the routine, everything went fine. When you were supposed to do something, you did it. If you failed, you did it again until you got it right. But the main thing was to do as you were told. Otherwise things happened.
The quick hand of retribution had fallen on Randy only once, on the night after he’d arrived at the Academy. It had been dinnertime, and Peter had come to his room to take him down to the dining room. Randy had been reading, and the end of the chapter was only two pages away. He had told Peter he’d be down in a minute and finished the chapter.
By the time he got to the dining room, his place at the table was gone—even his chair—and none of the other boys even looked at him. Miss Bowen got up from the staff table. Dinner was at six o’clock, she said, not five after six; he’d missed it. He was about to protest that the other boys hadn’t even started to eat yet, but as he faced her, something in the woman’s eyes told him that anything he might say would be useless. He was sent to his room and spent the rest of the evening by himself. No one came to his room, no one even spoke to him, though he left his door open all night From then on Randy was careful to