that the company is contemplating some broader action that may be… that could be construed as…” He stops and shakes his head without finishing the sentence. We are all looking at him. His eyes are very shiny, as if he were about to cry.
“I shouldn’t have come,” he says after a moment. “This was a big mistake. I’ll pay for the meal, but I have to go now.”
He pushes back his chair and gets up; I see him at the cash register with his back to us. None of us says anything until he has gone out the front door.
“He’s crazy,” Chuy says.
“He’s scared,” Bailey says.
“He hasn’t helped us, not really,” Linda says. “I don’t know why he bothered—”
“His brother,” Cameron says.
“Something we said bothered him even more than Mr. Crenshaw or his brother,” I say.
“He knows something he doesn’t want us to know.” Linda brushes the hair off her forehead with an abrupt gesture.
“He doesn’t want to know it himself,” I say. I am not sure why I think that, but I do. It is something we said. I need to know what it was.
“There was something, back around the turn of the century,” Bailey says. “In one of the science journals, something about making people sort of autistic so they would work harder.”
“Science journal or science fiction?”I ask.
“It was—wait; I’ll look it up. I know somebody who will know.” Bailey makes a note on his hand-comp.
“Don’t send it from the office,” Chuy says.
“Why—? Oh. Yes.” Bailey nods.
“Pizza tomorrow,” Linda says. “Coming here is normal.”
I open my mouth to say that Tuesday is my day to shop for groceries and shut it again. This is more important. I can go a week without groceries, or I can shop a little later.
“Everybody look up what you can find,” Cameron says.
At home, I log on and e-mail Lars. It is very late where he is, but he is awake. I find out that the original research was done in Denmark, but the entire lab, equipment and all, was bought up and the research base shifted to Cambridge. The paper I first heard about weeks ago was based on research done more than a year ago. Mr. Aldrin was right about that. Lars thinks much of the work to make the treatments human-compatible has been done; he speculates on secret military experiments. I do not believe this; Lars thinks everything is a secret military experiment. He is a very good game player, but I do not believe everything he says.
Wind rattles my windows. I get up and lay a hand on the glass. Much colder. A spatter of rain and then I hear thunder. It is late anyway; I shut down my system and go to bed.
Tuesday we do not speak to one another at work, other than “good morning” and “good afternoon.” I spend fifteen minutes in the gym when I finish another section of my project, but then I go back to work.
Mr. Aldrin and Mr. Crenshaw both come by, not quite arm in arm, but as if they were friendly. They do not stay long, and they do not talk to me.
After work, we go back to the pizza place. “Two nights in a row!” says Hi-I’m-Sylvia. I cannot tell if she is happy or unhappy about that. We take our usual table but pull over another one so there is room for everybody.
“So?” Cameron says, after we’ve ordered. “What have we found out?”
I tell the group what Lars said. Bailey has found the text of the old article, which is clearly fiction and not nonfiction. I did not know that science journals ever published science fiction on purpose, and apparently it only happened for one year.
“It was supposed to make people really concentrate on an assigned project and not waste time on other things,” Bailey said.
“Like Mr. Crenshaw thinks we waste time?” I say.
Bailey nods.
“We don’t waste as much time as he wastes walking around looking angry,” Chuy says.
We all laugh, but quietly. Eric is drawing curlicues with his colored pens; they look like laughing sounds.
“Does it say how it was going to work?” Linda asks.
“Sort of,” Bailey says. “But I’m not sure the science is good. And that was decades ago. What they thought would work might not be what really works.”
“They don’t want autistic people like us,” Eric says. “They wanted—or the story said they wanted—savant talents and concentration without the other side effects. Compared to a savant we waste a lot of time, though not