CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It can’t be escape-proof, Danny told himself. There’s got to be a way out.
Yeah, he answered himself. But you ain’t goin’ to find it in a day or two.
Alan Peterson left the next week, but not before Danny asked him if he had ever tried to escape.
Alan smiled at the question. “Yes, I tried it a few times. Then I got smart. I’ll walk out the front gate. Joe Tenny helped to get me a job outside. You can do the same thing, Danny. It’s the only sure-fire way to escape.”
The day Alan left, Danny asked Ralph Malzone about escaping.
Ralph said, “Sure, I tried it four—five times. No go. SPECS is too smart. Can’t even carry a knife without SPECS knowing it.”
Danny asked all the guys in his classes, everybody he knew. He even asked Lacey.
Lacey grinned at him. “Why would I want to get out? I got it good here. Better than back home. Sure, they’ll throw me out someday. But not until I got a good job and a good place to live waitin’ for me outside. And until then, man, I’m the champ around here.”
Danny dropped his class in Italian. But his reading got better quickly. He found that he could follow the words printed on SPECS’ TV screens easily now. And he was almost the best guy in the arithmetic class.
Joe Tenny told Danny he should take another class. Danny picked science. It wasn’t really easy, but it was fun. They didn’t just sit around and read, they did lab work.
One morning Danny cleared out the lab by mixing two chemicals that gave off bright yellow smoke, It smelled horrible. The teacher yelled for everybody to get out of the lab. All the kids boiled out of the building completely and ran onto the lawn.
The kids all laughed and pounded Danny’s back. The teacher glowered at him. Danny tucked away in his mind the formula he had used to make the smoke. Might come in handy some time, he told himself.
The weeks slipped by quickly. Laurie came every week, sometimes twice a week. Joe gave permission for them to walk around on the “outside” lawn, on the other side of the administration building, where the bus pulled up. There was a fence between them and the highway. And SPECS’ cameras watched them. Danny knew.
Danny played baseball most afternoons. Then the boys switched to football as the air grew cooler and the trees started to change color.
Thanksgiving weekend there were no classes at all, and the boys set up a whole schedule of football games.
The first snow came early in December. Before he really thought much about it, Danny found himself helping some of the guys to decorate a big Christmas tree in the cafeteria.
His own room had changed, over the months. The bookcase was nearly filled now. Many of the books were about airplanes and space flight. His desk was always covered with papers, most of them from his arithmetic class. He had “bought” pictures and other decorations for his walls from the student-run store in the basement of the cafeteria building.
Thumbtacked to the wall over Danny’s desk was a Polaroid picture of Laurie. She was wearing a yellow dress, Danny’s favorite, and standing in front of the restaurant where she worked. She was smiling into the camera, but her eyes looked more worried than happy.
Danny worked at many different jobs. He helped the cooks in the big, nearly all-automated kitchen behind the cafeteria. He worked on the air-conditioning machines on the roofs of buildings, and on the heaters in the basements. He went back to working with the clean-up crew for a while, getting a deep tan the hottest months of the summer.
All the time he was looking, learning, searching for the weak link, the soft spot in the Center’s escape-proof network of machines and alarms. There’s got to be something, he kept telling himself.
Danny even worked for a week in SPECS’ own quarters; a big, quiet, chilled-down room in the basement of the administration building. The computer was made of row after row of huge consoles, like oversized refrigerators: big, square boxes of gleaming metal. Some of them had windows on their fronts, and Danny could see reels of tape spinning so fast that they became nothing but a blur.