“We need someone like that,” McEvoy said. “But I can’t go sending a child into that vault.”
“Of course not. The one I’m thinking of is seventeen years old, and decidedly not a child.
Just about the most perfectly adaptable human being I’ve ever worked with. Fully cooperative, intelligent…possibly just the one you need.” The psychologist paused, looked intently at McEvoy. “Possibly. I think I would have to counsel against it, but I couldn’t say yes or no. Nobody has the right to make that kind of decision for another person.”
“I know, I know.” McEvoy nodded excitedly. “But do you think he might be willing to try this with us?”
Ed Benedict smiled. “She might. Why don’t you ask her and find out?”
—4—
Gail Talbot disliked John McEvoy from the first moment she set eyes on him. For one thing, he was positively ancient—forty years old at least, and therefore utterly uninteresting to a lively girl of seventeen who regarded anyone over twenty-eight as practically in the grave.
But there was more to it than that. There was a violent, ruthless intensity about this man that scraped her nerves. She had encountered this type before: the raw, unyielding, hard-driving and ambitious ones. Everything went fine, just as long as you agreed with them, but cross them just once, and whammo! She knew. Her father had been like that—just one of the twenty-odd reasons she had spent about half her time in juvenile court during the last four years, until somebody at the Hoffman Center had checked out her psych-testing scores and noticed the staggering discrepancy between her social performance and her actual intellectual potential.
The judge had been glad enough to get rid of her, especially after Ed Benedict had practically guaranteed that the way things were going the court was soon going to have a highly intelligent, belligerent and incorrigibly anti-social young lady on its hands—and she had been ordered to Hoffman Center custody. Her father had been glad to get rid of her, too; he was already bone-weary of the court appearances, the fines and warnings, the rebellion and anger and night-long battles that always started out as “reasonable discussions” and ended up screaming fights. And as for her mother…Gail blocked on that one and turned her blue eyes to McEvoy. At least McEvoy was sober.
He was telling her eagerly about something he wanted her to investigate—a
“phenomenon,” he kept calling it—and she was confused and bored, but she listened. She yawned, and nodded cleverly in all the right places, and pushed her black hair down into place behind her right ear, a nervous habit that was a red flag to Ed Benedict but of which she was only dimly aware. “This cube isn’t like anything you’ve ever seen before,” McEvoy was saying. “And you could have trouble, because it might affect you in some completely unforeseen way. It just hangs there in space all by itself, and glows a little. We think it may be a three-dimensional slice through a fourth dimension, and so far nobody has even been able to look at it without getting badly shaken up or killed.”
Gail stared at him in disbelief. “You mean you just want me to go into a room and look into a box or something?”
“Well…yes,” McEvoy said lamely.
“And tell you what I see inside? Is that all?”
“That’s right. I mean, no! I mean, it may not be all that simple…” McEvoy floundered, thrown completely off balance now by this quiet, black-haired girl who was watching him with a slightly malicious gleam in her clear blue eyes. “I mean, it may require more than you expect, but we need somebody to look at it—”
“Why bother?” Gail cut him off flatly.
“Because there’s something there we don’t understand.” McEvoy was getting angry and raising his voice. “Because we have to know what it is.”
“That’s fine for you and your physicists. But what’s in it for me?”
“Maybe nothing. Nothing but helping to investigate something that somebody has to investigate. Maybe nothing but having a part in a really major discovery.”
“Maybe nothing but having my brains jogged loose,” Gail said. “So why me?”
“Because you may be the only person in the world who can do it,” McEvoy roared in exasperation. “One more disaster and we’re finished. All through! We’ll have to close it down.”
The girl studied him. Bored or not, she was not stupid. She had heard everything McEvoy had been saying about this project; he had been fair, which was good because there was nothing she hated worse than a liar, and she understood the danger perfectly. Of course, she had been warned in advance, as well. Ed Benedict had urged her to stay away from McEvoy and his project; he’d practically begged her to say no. Now McEvoy reminded her strangely of Ed…some of the same intensity of purpose, the same contagious aura of excitement. Of course, there was no comparison, really; nobody was quite like Ed Benedict, and her feelings toward him always made her feel goopy and confused. Yet oddly enough she knew she wanted to say yes to McEvoy now just precisely because Ed Benedict had begged her to say no. After all, he didn’t own her.
“All right,” she said. “When do we start?”
“Start! Well…right now. I mean, as soon as we can get you briefed.” Once again McEvoy was off balance; the resistance had crumbled too easily. “But you have to understand that this little ‘box’ you’re going to look at may be dangerous. It may affect you very strangely.”
Gail Talbot sighed. “Mister, after all the garbage I’ve had thrown at me in the past four years, I think I could take anything. You name it.”
McEvoy eyed her sourly for a minute. “Yes,” he finally agreed. “I think you probably could.”
—5—
It was cold in the vault, and very dark. As the door clanged shut behind her she paused, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the glow emanating from the center of the room. She stood shivering in the dead silence of the place, and for the first time in her seventeen years Gail Talbot realized that she was afraid.
She knew that in a way she wasn’t really alone in there. Outside the vault a dozen people were watching every move she made through thick, insulated panels of oneway glass. McEvoy sat at the main power switch, clenching the intercom microphone in his hand.
Ed Benedict was there, too, still furious that his last-minute attempt to talk her out of it had failed. Poor, good-hearted Ed, who had tried so hard to be fair, and then when the chips were down practically fell over himself trying to make her decision for her! And all the others: the Hoffman Center medical team, half a dozen engineers and technicians from McEvoy’s staff, help available at any instant if she needed it.
Yet for all that, she knew that it was really she and she alone who was standing in this dark, cold room. All the help in the world might not be enough, if she needed it. There was danger here, and she had to face it alone. It was too late now to turn back. Others had tried and failed, but they had had no preparation at all. Now she was the best hope they had of finding out about this glowing cube that shimmered in the center of the vault. Maybe their last hope; they couldn’t keep on this way. She had the training, the experience, and the one odd, vital ability that the others had lacked. Yet now, in the darkness and silence, she was terribly afraid.