"Okay."
"Now it's down to you," Dr. Darkkon finished, settling back, so that his image careered wildly around the screen. "We'll have to see how long it takes you to come up with something workable."
In the end, it took just over eight months. By then, Cadel had been promoted to ninth grade and had begun to worry a few of the more intelligent teachers on the Crampton staff. The trouble was, they couldn't quite work out exactly why he worried them. Perhaps it was his obvious isolation. Perhaps it was his placid blue gaze. Or perhaps it was his tendency to be hanging around on the sidelines during those peculiar events that seemed to overtake the school more and more often, as Cadel moved quickly up the educational ladder.
First there was the brawl that occurred among a baseball team waiting to bat. (Cadel was on that team, hovering at the edge of the fight.) Then there was the teacher who slapped another teacher in full view of several students—including Cadel. Then there was the sprinkler system in one of the science labs that suddenly turned itself on and doused the whole lab with a strange, red, strong-smelling, jamlike substance. (Cadel wasn't anywhere in the vicinity, but he had used the classroom.) There was the teacher who was found passed out in the school vegetable garden, drunk, wearing only his jockey shorts. (He couldn't remember what had happened.) There was the case of the disappearing gym mats, the mysterious sighting of a "green pig" in the cafeteria, and stories of a haunted art cupboard. Finally, there was the incident of the teacherless morning.
This occurred after Cadel had been promoted to grade ten (having waltzed through his ninth-grade syllabus in record time). One Monday morning, the students of Crampton turned up at school to discover that none of their teachers was present. So the kids milled around for a while—some went home; some stayed. At last the vice principal appeared, at about half past ten, and from then on, the staff trickled in until three-quarters of them were at their posts. The rest telephoned with various excuses, mostly to do with being ill, though one had to wait for a plumber to mend a burst pipe and one didn't telephone at all until the next day: He had been lost on a weekend hiking trip.
The teachers who
did
make it had all been held up by a peculiar combination of traffic problems, rail delays, stopped watches, and the wide-ranging failure of telephone company wake-up calls. They were completely flummoxed.
There was one teacher, though—a math teacher named Mrs. Brezeck—who felt that Cadel might have done something to her fancy new digital watch. The watch possessed certain functions that she never used, and Cadel had been advising her on their finer points the Friday before Monday's fiasco. She had spent half an hour on Sunday reprogramming international times and dates, according to Cadel's specific instructions.
Could she have accidentally programmed the watch to "reboot" during the night, and lose a few hours?
The answer, of course, was that she had—and that there had been nothing accidental about it. But Cadel wouldn't confirm her suspicions. He simply gazed at her, looking puzzled. He could do that very well. And she went away unsatisfied, with a niggling sense of unease.
From that day on, she watched Cadel more closely. There was something about him that she didn't quite trust.
As for Cadel, these amusing little experiments boosted his self-confidence whenever his cell-phone research hit a snag. He had a lot of electronic theory to master before he could present his father with a blueprint for his computer phone. He had to plunge into the murky world of DRAM, SRAM, ROM, and EPROM, of bootstrap loaders and chip sets, of transistors and capacitors. He also had to read up on nanobiometrics, using information fed to him by Dr. Darkkon. He loved nanobiometrics. He loved learning about alkanethiols, ATPase nanoturbines, and ion channel switch biosensors. It was a fascinating new world. But welding the two specialties together wasn't easy.
He was forced to appeal to his father for help, not once, but many times. Though he hated to do it, he didn't have a choice. Not if he was going to have a computer phone by the time his twelfth birthday rolled around.
His circuitry plans, when he finished them, had to be transmitted to Dr. Darkkon with Thaddeus's help. There followed three months of waiting, which Cadel found very hard to deal with. He spent a lot of it studying the plans for a new sports hall at Crampton. It occurred to him that if he did a bit of research on wind-loading, structural pressure points, and other aspects of architectural theory, he might be able to sabotage the new building—which was, after all, just a little system unto itself.
Finally, a week before his twelfth birthday, he arrived at Thaddeus's office to find a brightly wrapped package waiting for him.
He stared at it, then at Thaddeus.
"Is it...?" he queried, breathlessly.
"Have a look," Thaddeus responded.
"Did
he
wrap it? Himself?"
"I wrapped it." Thaddeus's tone was dry. "You don't realize what it involved, getting this thing into the country, Cadel. It wasn't easy. It had to be smuggled."
"Does it work?"
"Of course it works," said Thaddeus. "Didn't you hear what I said? He wouldn't have gone to so much trouble if it didn't
work.
"
Cadel picked up the little package and slowly pulled off its silver ribbon. He was holding his breath. When the machine inside the parcel was finally exposed, he saw that it looked just like his own cell phone. Right down to the scratch on the liquid crystal display.
"Wow," said Cadel reverently.
"Dr. Darkkon didn't send an instruction book," Thaddeus drawled. "I just hope you can remember what you told him."
Cadel looked up. There were tears in his eyes. As he blinked them away, he felt a light touch on his cheek.
"Happy birthday, Cadel," Thaddeus murmured. "Many happy returns."
It was thanks to Dr. Darkkon, and the marvelous computer phone, that Cadel finally met Kay-Lee McDougall.
Before Cadel turned thirteen, several important things happened.
First, he began to grow. His voice broke, and a few soft, dark hairs appeared above his mouth. Noticing this, Mrs. Piggott suddenly decided to redecorate his room. The sailing boats and nursery-school colors disappeared, to be replaced by muted shades of cream and gold and chocolate. A state-of-the-art desk was installed to match the new built-in bookshelves, concealed lighting, silk scatter cushions, and framed posters. Lanna had selected a poster of James Dean, another of Jimi Hendrix, and a third of a contemporary pop star whose name always escaped Cadel, but whose brooding intensity must have appealed to Mrs. Piggott. While Cadel didn't like the subjects of these posters any more than he had liked the sailing boats, he much preferred the new room to the old. It felt like a hotel room, but he didn't mind that, because it also had a serious look. And Cadel was a serious sort of person.
The second thing that happened was his promotion to grade eleven, despite the misgivings of every teacher at the school. Though bigger than he had been, he wasn't
that
big. Beside his new, older classmates he looked like a baby; the girls actually called him "baby," when they addressed him at all. For a while they treated him like a doll, or a mascot, and would ruffle his hair and coo over the size of his feet. But they quickly began to resent the way he topped every class.
Soon he was being ignored, much to the concern of his teachers. Despite their attempts to "integrate" him, with buddy schemes and age-specific sports programs and quiet talks with the library monitors, Cadel usually spent his lunchtimes reading.
"Though he's really no
worse
off than he was in seventh or ninth grade," his English teacher fretted. "I mean, he was a loner then. Things are no different now, I suppose."
"He'll be a loner all his life," another teacher pointed out. "It's just the way he is. You know his IQ's off the chart, don't you? I mean, really off the chart."
"He's certainly left
me
behind," Cadel's math teacher remarked. "I just let him do what he wants. He's been looking into quantum computers—I've been sending his work off to my old math professor at the university. Personally, I can't make head nor tail of it. Can you, Anna?"
Mrs. Brezeck shrugged. She never commented on Cadel. She just watched him and kept her thoughts to herself. When he was moved up to twelfth grade, a couple of weeks before his thirteenth birthday, she welcomed him into her four-unit math group without enthusiasm. Already, she had begun to entertain suspicions about his role in the collapse of the new sports hall.
This collapse was another important event that occurred during Cadel's stint in eleventh grade. After nearly a year of construction, the dazzling new complex had been almost ready for its grand opening. It had contained two basketball courts, a small swimming pool, two changing rooms, a scattering of bathrooms, and a gym, as well as various cupboards, lockers, and electronic switchboards. Money had been poured into its rows of louvred windows, its dramatic roofline, its polished wooden fittings, its lavish trophy-display cabinet. Some of the staff had complained that the school principal, a former health-and-fitness teacher, was pursuing his dream at the expense of Crampton's library and computer science department. The librarian in particular was very bitter about what she called the "Taj Mahal." (Her library was squeezed into a double classroom near the boys' bathroom.) But work had proceeded, and three days before the grand-opening ceremony, Crampton's principal had invited a group of municipal councilors to inspect the brand-new complex.
Together they had approached the building from the east, admiring the front door and the red-brick path sweeping up to it. From a second-story window in the science block, Cadel had watched his principal gesturing toward the sports hall's gleaming steel roof. One of the councilors had admired the choice of native shrubs planted on either side of the path. Then the principal had stepped up to the bank of glass doors at the front of the building, opened the middle one with a flourish, and...
Whoosh!
With a gigantic roar, the building's eastern end had collapsed. The principal and his guests had run for their lives as a huge cloud of dust enveloped half the school.
Everyone had rushed outside to have a look. The fire brigade had been called. It had all been very exciting.
Cadel, however, wasn't entirely pleased with the end result of his sabotage. Though he had planned it with immense care (not actually wanting to
kill
anyone), the collapse had been incomplete. The rear part of the sports hall had remained standing, though of course it was eventually demolished. Cadel would have preferred the full, comic effect of the entire structure tumbling down. It would have been funnier and more creatively satisfying.
Still, it wasn't a bad trick. Thaddeus certainly appreciated it. And because Cadel didn't much like sports, he neither felt nor displayed any concern at the destruction of the new complex. Mrs. Brezeck noticed this. She also noticed in his workbooks a number of diagrams and calculations that seemed to have some bearing on things like steel-girder construction, foundation laying, and load-bearing ratios.
She didn't really believe that Cadel could have sabotaged the building. This seemed impossible, however smart he might be. But she couldn't help fretting over what seemed to be a slightly sinister coincidence. She couldn't get it out of her mind. Especially since Cadel was strutting around with a more self-satisfied air than usual.
The last important event that occurred during Cadel's brief spell in eleventh grade was his creation of an online dating service called Partner Post. After spending two years observing the kids at school, reading the personal ads in newspapers, and studying soap operas, romance novels, and sociology textbooks, Cadel felt ready to try out his new idea. He had decided to start a service that claimed to link paying clients with other paying clients. The secret to success, he told Thaddeus, would be to make sure that every client found his or her perfect match.
"They'll have to fill in a really good assessment form," Cadel explained. "If it's good enough, it can tell me all I need to know. And I was thinking, maybe you could help me with the wording? If I paid you? I could pay you out of the profits."
Thaddeus smiled. In the six years that Cadel had known him, the psychologist's hair had become much grayer, and his face more lined. But his eyes were still as sharp as arrowheads as he blinked lazily up at Cadel from his crimson couch, which had grown rather shabby.
"So you've decided to make money from your study of human behavior, at long last," he murmured. "Very wise."
"Yes, that's just it," Cadel replied eagerly, his voice cracking on a high note. "I think this would be profitable, as well as educational." Thaddeus's sudden laugh made Cadel frown. "What?" he demanded. "What's so funny?"
"Nothing." The psychologist waved his hand. "Most of the time, Cadel, it's hard to remember that you're still a child. And then occasionally the way you talk reminds me. Yes, of course I'll help. If you think it's worthwhile. But the hard part, surely, will be kicking off? What happens if you start with five clients and none of them suits each other? Won't that be a problem?"
"Oh no," said Cadel dismissively. "That's my point. Because it's online, I can make up the partners. I can put them in Bulgaria or something."
Thaddeus's eyes narrowed. "I see," he said.
"I bet you half these people will be using an online service because they're ugly or old," Cadel continued. "Because they don't even
want
to meet people face-to-face. It'll be easy. I'll just have to make up characters. Characters who sound lovable and interesting—you know."
Thaddeus nodded. It suddenly occurred to Cadel that he knew almost nothing about Thaddeus. The psychologist had never mentioned a wife or children.
When Cadel tried to picture Thaddeus carrying a grandchild, he couldn't. He couldn't even imagine Thaddeus's house. Was it an old house? A modern one? Did it have a big garden around it and a grayhaired wife inside it? Why hadn't Cadel ever considered these questions before? Why had they never even crossed his mind?