“Here comes the punching bag,” somebody said when he came into the classroom.
“Look at that shiner!”
“Tough luck, Danny. You showed a lot of guts.”
“First time Lacey’s ever been knocked down.”
“Goin’ to fight him again next month?”
Danny let himself sink into one of the chairs. “Not me. Next fight I have is goin’ to be with somebody a lot easier than Lacey. Like maybe King Kong.”
Mr. Cochran came in, looked a little surprised at seeing Danny there, and then put them all to work.
Laurie was shaken up when she visited that week and saw Danny’s eye. But he laughed it off and made her feel better. By the time she came back, the following week, Danny’s face was just about back to normal.
By that time, Danny had enough of Joe Tenny’s voice on tape to do the job he wanted to. One afternoon he went back to the language classroom. It was empty.
The booths in the back of the room had big tape recorders in them. Danny worked for more than an hour, taking Tenny’s words off his pocket recorder and getting them onto the big machine’s tape in just the right way. Finally, he had it exactly as he wanted it to sound:
“SPECS,” said Dr. Tenny’s voice, “I want you to turn off all the alarm systems right now.”
It didn’t sound exactly right. Some of the words were louder than others. If you listened carefully, you could hear different background noises from one word to the next, because they had been recorded at different times. Danny hoped SPECS wouldn’t notice.
He got his faked message onto the tape of his pocket recorder and erased the tape on the big machine. Then he headed back toward his room.
“Tonight,” he told himself.
It was nearly midnight when he tried it.
“SPECS, you awake?”
The TV screen at the foot of his bed instantly glowed to life. “I DO NOT SLEEP, MR. ROMANO.”
Danny laughed nervously. “Yeah, I know. I was only kidding.”
“I AM NOT PROGRAMMED TO RECOGNIZE HUMOR, ALTHOUGH I UNDERSTAND THE BASIC THEORY INVOLVED IN IT. THERE ARE SEVERAL BOOKS IN MY MEMORY BANKS ON THE SUBJECT.”
“Groovy. Look… Dr. Tenny wants to talk to you. Can you see him here in the room with me?”
“THERE IS NO TV CAMERA IN YOUR ROOM, SO I CANNOT SEE WHO IS THERE.”
“Well, you know Dr. Tenny’s in here, don’t you?”
“MY SENSORS CANNOT TELL ME IF DR. TENNY IS WTTH YOU OR IF YOU ARE ALONE.”
“Okay, take my word for it. He’s here and he wants to tell you something.” Danny flicked the button of his pocket recorder.
Dr. Tenny’s voice said, “SPECS, I want you to turn off all the alarm systems right now.”
Danny found that he was holding his breath.
“ALL THE ALARM SYSTEMS ARE SHUT DOWN.”
Without another word, Danny dropped the recorder onto his bed and rushed out of his room.
He made his way swiftly toward the fence. It was a warm night, and he knew every inch of the way, now that he had put in so many weeks on the clean-up crew. It was dark, cloudy, but Danny hurried through the trees and got to the fence in less than twenty minutes. He had taken an asthma pill just before calling SPECS, and had the bottle in his pants pocket.
He got to the fence and without waiting a moment he jumped up onto it and started climbing.
A strong hand grabbed at his belt and yanked him down to the ground.
Danny felt as if a shock of electricity had ripped through him. He landed hard on his feet and spun around. Joe Tenny was standing there.
“How… how’d you…?”
Joe’s broad face was serious-looking. “You had me fooled. I thought you were really starting to work. But you still haven’t got it straight, have you?”
“How’d you know? All the alarms are off!”
Shaking his head, Joe answered, “Didn’t you ever stop to think that we’d have back-up alarms? When the main alarms go off, the back-ups come on. And SPECS automatically calls a half-dozen places, including my office. I happened to be working late tonight, otherwise the guards would’ve come out after you.”