them. Once they decided I wasn’t faking it just to freak them out, or as one of my little jokes, they wanted to find out what else was going on with me, so they took me to Princeton, where there’s this thing called Anomalies Research. Or was. I think they closed it down.”
“Anomalies . . . are you serious?”
“Yeah. Sounds more scientific than Psychic Research, I guess. It was actually part of the Princeton engineering department, if you can believe that. A couple of grad students ran the Rhine cards on me, but I pretty much zeroed out. I wasn’t even able to move much stuff around that day. Sometimes it’s just like that.” He shrugged. “They probably thought I was a faker, which was okey-doke with me. I mean, on a good day I can knock over a pile of blocks, just thinking about them, but that’ll never get me chicks. You agree?”
As someone whose big trick was knocking a pizza pan off a restaurant table without touching it, Luke did. “So did they slap you around?”
“I did get one, and it was a real hummer,” George said. “It was because I tried to make a joke. This bitch named Priscilla laid it on me.”
“I met her. She’s a bitch, all right.”
A word his mother hated even more than fuck, and using it made Luke miss her all over again.
“And you didn’t know what was on the cards.”
George gave him an odd look. “I’m TK, not TP. The same as you. How could I?”
“I guess you couldn’t.”
“Since I’d had the Rhine cards at Princeton, I guessed cross, then star, then wavy lines. Priscilla told me to stop lying, so when Evans looked at the next one, I told him it was a photo of Priscilla’s tits. That’s when she slapped me. Then they let me go back to my room. Tell you the truth, they didn’t seem all that interested. More like they were crossing t’s and dotting i’s.”
“Maybe they didn’t really expect anything,” Luke said. “Maybe you were just a control subject.”
George laughed. “Man, I can’t control jackshit in here. What are you talking about?”
“Nothing. Never mind. Did they come back? The lights, I mean? Those colored dots?”
“No.” George looked curious now. “Did they with you?”
“No.” Luke was suddenly glad that Avery wasn’t here, and could only hope the little kid’s brain radio was short-range. “Just . . . I did have a seizure . . . or thought I did . . . and I was afraid they might come back.”
“I don’t get the point of this place,” George said, sounding more morose than ever. “It almost has to be a government installation, but . . . my mother bought this book, okay? Not long before they took me to Princeton. Psychic Histories and Hoaxes, it was called. I read it when she was done. There was a chapter on government experiments about the stuff we can do. The CIA ran some back in the nineteen-fifties. For telepathy, telekinesis, precognition, even levitation and teleportation. LSD was involved. They got some results, but nothing much.” He leaned forward, blue eyes on Luke’s green ones. “And that’s us, man—nothing much. Are we supposed to achieve world domination for the United States by moving Saltine boxes—and only if they’re empty—or flipping the pages of a book?”
“They could send Avery to Russia,” Luke said. “He could tell them what Putin had for breakfast, and if he was wearing boxers or briefs.”
That made George smile.
“About our parents—” Luke began, but then Kalisha came running out, asking who wanted to play dodgeball.
It turned out they all did.
20
There were no tests for Luke that day, except of his own intestinal fortitude, and that one he flunked again. Twice more he went to the Star Tribune, and twice more he backed out, although the second time he did peep at the headline, something about a guy running over a bunch of people with a truck to prove how religious he was. That was a terrible thing, but at least it was something that was going on beyond the Institute. The outside world was still there, and at least one thing had changed in here: the laptop’s welcome screen now had his name instead of the departed Donna’s.
He would have to look for information about his parents sooner or later. He knew that, and now understood perfectly that old saying about no news being good news.
The following day he was taken back down to C-Level, where