“Kissing ass?” Mayfair said, spinning sharply on Donna.
“No,” Donna replied, looking outraged. “Why were you so curt to her?”
“Was I? I thought I was simply stating what was true.” She looked at Corliss. “What say you?”
“I think we’re all going to suffer from cabin fever more than we think,” Corliss said. “Irritability is a symptom despite the many opportunities for expansion, some new ones surprising.”
Mayfair smiled. She knew what Corliss was implying. She looked at Donna, who had grasped it as quickly if not more. Only instead of smiling, she looked worried.
“You expand from within,” Donna recited. “There are worlds within us yet to explore. We don’t have to look outside ourselves.”
“Right off the brochure,” Corliss said.
Donna blanched.
“Yes,” Mayfair said. “ ‘How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world that has such people in it.’ ”
“The Tempest, Act Five, Scene One,” Corliss recited.
They both laughed and looked at Donna, who protested, “Mock me if you will, but I know you know, just as I do, that we are very lucky being here and shouldn’t be so cavalier about losing the opportunities.” She continued to eat, now ravenously, mostly out of nervous anger.
Corliss shrugged. “Too much of any good thing is eventually bad,” she said. “Even too much water—hyponatremia. You dilute sodium levels in your blood.”
“Osmosis then draws water from the blood into body cells to equalize sodium levels,” Mayfair continued.
“And the cells swell. Bloating in the brain can be fatal.”
Donna looked at the full glass of water before her, picked it up, and spilled half into Mayfair’s glass. All three laughed.
“Where are you off to this morning?” Mayfair asked Corliss.
“Still toying with Tryon’s and Rosenthal’s experiments with rats, separating the bred superior from the dull and then mixing with new variables. Actually,” she said, leaning in, “I find a clear analogy between the rats and us.”
Donna stopped eating. “What are you saying? They want to breed us? Encourage us to mate with one another? There’s no empirical evidence to support that thesis. None of the three of us comes from parents with superior IQs. Genes don’t make up the whole explanation.”
“Don’t sound so outraged with her analogy, Donna,” Mayfair said. “And don’t be so jumpy. Each of us has admitted to past love indiscretions, and all three of us have not had what you would call successful romances with so-called normal males. Inevitably, the young man you fancy will feel inferior and resent you. The only logical solution is to mate with an exceptionally gifted guy. Then you would be left only with the normal competitive challenges in life.”
“You said you dreamed that your Mr. Taylor would continue your romance,” Donna shot back.
Mayfair sat back thoughtfully and nodded. “I did. Back then. But when I analyze it now, I understand that he tossed me because he realized I would make him feel inferior. It’s not in the male psyche to permit that.”
“She’s right,” Corliss said. “Men have domination built in.”
Donna grimaced. “I’m not having the man I’m attracted to take an IQ test before I commit to a relationship. ‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove.’ Some Shakespeare for you two.”
“Romantic drivel,” Mayfair said, smiling. “Reality is thunderous. By the third time you correct him about something, he’ll be looking elsewhere. And don’t think you can prevent yourself from doing it,” she quickly added. “That, Donna dear, is what’s built-in with us.”
Donna’s look of frustration brought a smile to Corliss’s face, too.
“Maybe that’s true for you, but it’s not for me,” Donna insisted. “We are not rats in a maze. We are not absolutely predictable. At least, I know I’m not.”
“Relax,” Corliss said, and then suddenly brightened. “Wait. This is brilliant. Thank you, Donna.”
“What is?” Mayfair asked. “What am I missing?”
Corliss leaned in, and the other two did the same. They looked like conspirators.
“We’re not predictable, but everything we do here is carefully controlled. You might laugh at my analogies, Donna, but don’t tell me you don’t feel observed a lot of the time. We are in a maze of sorts. Where we go, why we go there, what we do there, how we react to others, it’s all being planned and analyzed. Especially by our good friend Dr. Marlowe. She obviously singled us out just now. We’re under her microscope. Mayfairy?”
“She’s right.”
Corliss nodded. Her look of real excitement affected both Donna and Mayfair.
“I’m not saying we weren’t under microscopes of sorts at our public schools and at home, but it was nothing as complete and scientific as this,” Corliss said. “Don’t tell me you don’t feel like you’re in a fishbowl sometimes, and then there’s our psychologist, Dr. Lester, continually exploring our feelings about everything we do or hear about ourselves. Sometimes I want to reach out, grab her neck, and shake the questions out of her.”
She sat back. The other two did, too. Neither could disagree.
“What are you thinking?” Mayfair asked. “What’s your solution?” For the first time in a long time, she felt excited, and she had yet to learn why.
“We step out of the maze.”
“How?”
“The ditch under the fence,” Donna said. Mayfair looked at her, a little annoyed that she had realized what Corliss meant before she did. “Right, Corliss? That’s what you’re implying.”
“Exactly. Serendipity. We were meant to find it this morning.”
“You don’t really believe that, do you?” Donna asked. “Serendipity and a ditch?”
“Part of what I’m studying with the maze experiments is the accumulated impact of choice as opposed to coincidence or, if you want, fate, some sort of divine intervention. When people are lucky, they thank God.”
“So?” Donna said. “I don’t see the relationship with the discovery of a ditch under the fence. It certainly isn’t divine intervention to me.”
“Who can say absolutely what is and what isn’t? Once, when I was with my father coming home from the studio, it was raining hard,” Corliss said. “People in Los Angeles drive terribly in the rain, because they don’t see as much of it as other people do in other places. At least, that’s my father’s explanation.
“Anyway, we were driving on a very curvy road, and as we came around a turn, someone in a pickup truck in the other lane had his brights on, blinding my father and me enough that neither he nor I saw the coyote in the road. As a consequence, we ran over it.”
“Ugh,” Donna said.
“Yes, ugh. My father is the type of person who would have swerved to avoid hitting it, and we would have gone head-on into the pickup truck. The truck’s lights really saved us. Coincidence? Divine intervention? He immediately said, ‘Thank God for that idiot leaving his brights on.’
“Look,” she continued, “I’m certainly aware that statistics and logic easily disprove divine intervention, unless you accept that you do not have the intelligence to understand divinity, a clergyman’s fallback answer to everything. But the truth is that bad people are just as lucky as good people, often more so. How did Hitler escape being killed at least the six cited times it was attempted?”
“I like where this is going,” Mayfair said. “Fascinating.”
“All I’m saying is we three have been through dreadful experiences with men, some our age, some older.”
“Some men,” Donna qualified. “So?”
“I suggest that it’s enough to make us question whether that’s our fate, inevitable fate. Let’s find out. Along comes this opportunity for an experiment that we can control ourselves.”
“I like this,” Mayfair said.
“Stop saying that,” Donna insist
ed. “What’s the experiment?”
“We go to the village and mingle with the normal alphas and betas and maybe some gammas and deltas. Just no epsilons. That’s too much democracy, even for Brave New World citizens. If we do it together, we can help one another analyze and make the right decisions. Let’s see how we do, what we do. Until now, none of us had anyone even close to our intelligence to rely on for advice. The benefit is we’ll have three opinions that we all respect before any of us does anything. Assuming we respect our own opinion,” she added with a smile.
Mayfair nodded. “I—”
Donna shook her head. “Don’t say it.” She thought for a moment while the other two waited. “We don’t have to sneak out. Let’s propose it to Dr. Marlowe. Ask that we be permitted to spend some time in Piñon Pine.”
“It would be under her control, if she even considered it, which she won’t. We have to be on our own, make our own rules. If we did it under someone’s supervision, we wouldn’t have the variables we need,” Corliss said.
“I like it,” Mayfair said quickly, and looked at Donna.
“Look, having the courage to violate the rules and do this is already a step out of the maze,” Corliss said. “Right?”
Donna looked down at her food. “I’ve got to get to the math lab. I’m doing a problem in topology.”
She stood and picked up her tray. She started to turn away, then stopped to turn back to Corliss and Mayfair.
“You’d better think hard and long about this. You could lose everything.”
“But that’s the question, isn’t it, Donna?” Mayfair asked. “What does everything mean to you?”
Donna pursed her lips and then took a deep breath and walked away to deposit her tray.
“Even if she doesn’t come along,” Mayfair said, “we still go?”
Corliss nodded. “We plan, and then we go.”
They rose together. Maybe it was just her imagination, but when Mayfair looked at Dr. Marlowe across the room, she thought she was staring particularly hard at them. For a wild moment, she wondered if their conversations were bugged. She looked at the plain table at which they had sat.
“Wait,” she said, and forced her fork to fall off the tray.
She bent down to pick it up and searched the underside of the table. As far as she could tell, there was nothing there, nothing she could see.
Corliss knew what she was doing. “We’ll know pretty soon if our conversations are bugged in this place, won’t we?” she asked when Mayfair stood.
“How?”
“The ditch, Mayfairy. It will be filled in,” Corliss said, and started away.
Mayfair smiled, looked at Dr. Marlowe, and then headed out of the cafeteria, too.
Corliss and she didn’t see each other again until dinner. For a few moments, they questioned whether Donna was going to join them at their table. She looked their way, hesitated, and then turned to talk to Kelly Boson before she started toward them.
“How has your day been?” Corliss asked her as she sat.
“Dr. Martin singled me out for a compliment in math. He said I had solved the problem with a unique approach, something he has never seen or thought of. He wants me to move deeper into quantum physics now.”
“Terrific,” Mayfair said. “You sound like you’re going to be extra busy.”
“No, not any more than usual,” Donna replied. She looked at Corliss and then at Mayfair. “You two were just teasing this morning, right?”
“Actually, no,” Corliss said. “I’ve done some private investigating, research. Once when I had left the Darwin Trail before you two had arrived, I took a shortcut back. Didn’t quite finish the run. It brought me out on the southeast rear of the building. I had a flash of memory this afternoon thinking about it and realized there are no cameras on that section, an older section. The door goes to the cafeteria and the kitchen pantry. Used for deliveries, I guess. Also, there are no motion lights.”
“That doesn’t sound too bright,” Mayfair joked.
Donna didn’t even smile.
“We could slip out that door and head back to the fence, to the ditch, easily, and we can return the same way. I say we take our first exploratory trip tonight. It should take us about forty-five minutes to get down to the mall. We’ll spend an hour or so and return,” Corliss summed up.
Donna seemed to freeze in her chair.
“I wonder what I’ll wear,” Mayfair said. “You guys will have to help me choose from my pathetic wardrobe.”
“I haven’t much money,” Donna said. “We don’t need money here. Why go to a mall?”
“You don’t always go to a mall to buy things. There are hangouts, right, Mayfairy?”
“No worries anyway. I have an ATM card with a thousand-dollar limit daily. Plenty of money,” Mayfair said. “I know what I’ll do. I’ll buy something new right away. You two will help me pick it out. I’ll change right there, dump the clothes I wore, and then we’ll explore the sperm throwers, whether they be alphas or deltas. That’s the way it was in Brave New World.”
“Great. It’s better if we go separately through the cafeteria to the pantry,” Corliss said. “Less chance of attracting attention. We’ll synchronize our watches. Be sure you wear something warm. It still dips at night in the desert this time of year.”
“I didn’t say I would go,” Donna said. “I just said I have no money to spend at a mall.”
“So say it,” Mayfair challenged her.
Donna looked at Corliss and then at Mayfair. “What time would we meet?”
Corliss looked at her watch. “Seven forty. It will take about six minutes to get to the pantry from our rooms.”
“Great plan. The kitchen pantry. Someone will surely be there. Dinner hours end at seven thirty,” Donna said.
“Cafeteria workers. They’re not going to question our comings and goings. We could be doing something school-related. They barely look at us.”
“Sounds okay with me,” Mayfair said. “When you look like you know what you’re doing, people don’t question you. Just don’t look sneaky, Donna.”
“I wouldn’t be able to help it,” she said, shaking her head. “I would be sneaking.”
“No false-face ability. How will you survive in this world?” Mayfair asked.
“We’ll wait until exactly seven forty-one,” Corliss said, not hiding her impatience with Donna. “With you or without you, we’re gone.”
Donna looked like she had lost her appetite. She stared at her food. The other two ate with renewed hunger.
“Got to get nourished for the journey,” Mayfair said, and Corliss laughed.
Mayfair and Corliss hurried up to their rooms after eating. Donna lingered and then followed slowly, obviously still deciding. Mayfair put on some warmer clothing and her running shoes and then actually, for the first time here, put on some lipstick and took a brush to her hair.
She was out first and down the stairway. The cafeteria was empty. She saw the employees going about cleaning up and circled carefully around to slip through the kitchen and to the pantry. As Corliss had predicted, no one paid any attention to her. The students at Spindrift were surely a curiosity to the employees who did the cleaning, maintenance, and food preparation. They had some vague understanding of how brilliant the students were. But the employees were afraid to ask too many questions of any of them, not only because they feared they might look stupid but also because they were afraid of offending one of them. They were convinced that they could be fired for something like that; these students were special and important.
Corliss appeared right on time. “Anyone see you?” she asked Mayfair.
“They looked at me, but they didn’t see me.”
“Exactly. Me, too.” Corliss looked at her watch. “She’s not coming. Let’s go.”
They went to the door, looked back, and then slipped out, making sure the door didn’t lock behind them. It was a partly cloudy evening, but in the high desert, where there were no stre
etlights, it took only moments for their eyes to adjust to and benefit from the starlight. Corliss started for the woods, Mayfair a step or two behind. They were almost there when they heard the door open and close behind them.
They froze. Were they being watched all the time? Was Dr. Marlowe coming after them? Had their table indeed been bugged? Maybe even their rooms?
The silhouetted figure stepped out of the shadows.
It was Donna, hurrying to catch up. “Just go,” she said, anticipating some wise-ass remark about her surge of courage.
“Did you make sure the door didn’t lock behind you?” Mayfair asked.
“Of course. You’re not the only one who can think ahead, Mayfairy.”
Corliss smiled to herself and led them through the brush until they reached the Darwin Trail and made their way back to the ditch. It was there that Corliss paused and looked at the other two. Sneaking out of the building was one thing; this was quite another. She held out her hands. Mayfair understood the gesture, grasped them, and looked at Donna. After a moment, she clasped hands with them, and then the three went through the ditch and made their way to the incline.
“Careful,” Corliss said. “It’s not steep, but you could ruin your makeup.”
“Oh, so funny,” Donna said.
They started down. Halfway there, the sounds from below grew louder—car horns, music, and voices of people going to and from the mall. It was a sea of life that was in direct contrast to the silent halls of Spindrift, designed to be conducive to reading, analyzing, and creating. There was an excitement below that each of them admittedly missed.
They broke out at the edge of the rear parking lot and paused. All three looked back up the hill.
“Yes, it’s easier coming down,” Corliss quipped.
“It always is,” Mayfair said. “Especially when you’ve been moved to Mount Olympus.”
“We’re no Greek goddesses,” Donna said. “At least, I don’t feel like one.”
Hovering close to one another, they started around the corner of the mall and then felt like they had exploded in the light and action. Corliss took Mayfair’s hand, and she took Donna’s. They hurried to the main entrance and burst into the mall, laughing, more like three refugees who had finally made it to the free world or something.