The Mysterious Case of the Allbright Academy (13 page)

T
he nurse from the evening before was still there. Apparently she lived in. I wondered when she managed to get any sleep.

“I'm Gloria,” she said, shaking our hands as we came in. “Sorry I didn't introduce myself last night. I was a little distracted, what with the ‘wolves' and all. That was a new one, I have to tell you—though he did think Yao Ming was here once, after we'd been watching a basketball game on TV. Dr. P was very annoyed that Yao left without saying good-bye.”

She led us down the hall and into a beautiful sitting room. Dr. Planck, combed and neatly dressed, was settled in a wing chair, his head back and a
serene expression on his face, listening to classical music. Sun was pouring through the window behind him. What a difference from our first sight of him! I couldn't get over it.

“He won't remember you were here last night,” she whispered. “But he's pretty good this morning. You'll want to speak up, though. He's got the hearing aids, but he doesn't like to wear them.”

Gloria introduced us to Dr. Planck, amazingly remembering all of our names. She said we were from the Allbright Academy and wanted to “have a nice little visit” with him.

“Sit down, sit down,” he said, his voice hoarse and thin.

“Thank you,” Prescott said, taking the chair nearest Dr. Planck while Beamer started up his laptop and inserted the CD into the drive. “Sir, we have a presentation we'd like to show you. It's about the school—about the Allbright Academy. You can watch it on a laptop. Is that okay with you?”

“Sure.”

Beamer carefully placed the open computer on Dr. Planck's lap. He pushed the “up volume” arrow, then started the show. All of us except Beamer got up and stood behind Dr. Planck's chair, so we could watch it too.

Beautiful images of the campus appeared on the screen (photographed by yours truly) while
Beamer's voice began telling the history and the mission of the school—facts I had gotten straight out of an Allbright brochure. Close-ups of Dr. Gallow and Dr. Planck in their younger days came next, with a brief description of how they were cofounders of the academy. Now the camera focused in on Dr. Gallow and then pulled back out again, showing that the picture of Dr. Gallow had been part of a group photo of the Allbright administration. And standing right next to him was Dr. B, a good two inches taller than he was in her high heels, and looking stunning as always. Once again the camera came in closer. Now we just saw their two faces.

“The following conversation took place…” Beamer's narration set the scene, leaving out any mention of a certain eighth grader hiding in the closet with a cell phone.

The voices began, in mid-argument, from the moment Cal had started the recorder. Beamer had done an amazing job with the sound. It was mostly very clear, but he had put subtitles in to make sure you didn't miss a word. Dr. Planck seemed to be following it with rapt attention.

“Have you checked with the kitchen?” Dr. Gallow was saying.

“Of
course
I checked with the kitchen! Do you think I'm slow-witted? They're still serving brownies,
Horace. Nothing has changed. It's almost like the kids' bodies have somehow adapted to the moderation chemicals, and they're no longer having any effect.”

At this point, Beamer had inserted a photo of a bag of brownie mix. “The brownies mentioned by Dr. Bodempfedder are served in the dining halls every day,” he said in the voice-over. “When the brownie mix, labeled ‘Recipe Variant II,' was analyzed by a Johns Hopkins laboratory, it was discovered that three chemical compounds had been added to it.”

Now the lab results came up on the screen, while Prescott's voice read the three formulas (Beamer had been afraid he'd botch those long names, and who can blame him?).

Dr. Planck leaned forward with intense interest.

We had argued about putting the formulas into the presentation. They would be meaningless to most people, I said, and it might break the spell of the narrative. But Prescott had argued strongly for including them. Dr. Planck was our target audience, and he was very definitely not “most people.”

“Yeah,” I'd said, “but he's been retired for years. I'll bet he's forgotten all that stuff.”

“No,” Prescott had said. “Absolutely not. Numbers and formulas are like a second language to scientists. Dr. Planck won't have forgotten.”

And apparently he'd been right. The old man might have been gazing at pictures of his first sweetheart. Maybe, I thought, numbers and formulas really
had
been his first sweetheart. Maybe that's how he'd gotten to be so good at science that he won a Nobel Prize.

Now we returned to the recorded conversation.

“Well, I'll take a box of Variant One over there tomorrow morning,” Dr. Gallow was saying. “If that doesn't set things right, I can triple the dose.”

“All right,” said Dr. B.

Once again we broke away from the conversation, and up on the screen came our first “smoking gun”: a document we'd found in Dr. Bodempfedder's files, in a folder marked “HG.” We had assumed HG referred to Horace Gallow, and sure enough, it turned out to be a treasure trove of letters (and later, printed e-mails) that he had sent her. This one was dated 1986.

There was a cover letter attached to the document with a paper clip. In it, Dr. Gallow wrote that he had finally come up with a “strong moderation plan” that he felt would “meet the school's needs” far better than their “current system” (whatever that was). He apologized wryly for the “whimsical names” he had given his new compounds and asked for her thoughts on the overall concept and “its potential as a tool for successful programming.”

The document was titled “Moderation/Modification Delivery Products,” and it went like this:

Under these headings he had also listed the formulas. We had decided to leave the page up on the screen for a fairly long time so that Dr. Planck could read them if he wanted to. Apparently he did—he was leaning close to the screen again, squinting, following as he read with his finger.

Then it was back to the conversation again.

“So what's this about Toby Bannerman?” Dr. Gallow asked.

“Well, he called about the schedule for the board meeting. While we were on the phone, he mentioned that he's getting married.”

Up came a picture of Toby, taken from the yearbook—a handsome dude, I had to admit. Then, as they discussed his alumni counselor, the possibility of hiring a detective to keep an eye on him, and the change in his marriage plans, we saw newspaper
clippings about his various accomplishments over the years. Brooklyn had found them in Toby's file in Dr. B's office that night and made photocopies of them. They definitely added to the presentation.

Toward the end of the tape, where Dr. Gallow says, “It's not really ready yet, the new stuff. It might not work. It might do a lot of damage,” Beamer had inserted the Moderation/Modification Delivery Products list again. Slowly the camera panned down to the last item, “
Nuclear Option
(elixir)—still under development.”

Finally the taped conversation ended and we returned to the beautiful Allbright campus. Beamer wrapped it up with feeling:

 

The Allbright Academy: the brainchild of two great scientists with a dream, a remarkable school where future leaders of America are given the finest possible education, preparing them to take their places on the world stage.
(Rising music and a video image of an American flag flapping in the breeze.)

What has become of it now?

B
eamer took the laptop from Dr. Planck and we all stood there, breathlessly waiting for his reaction.

He smiled. “Excellent work,” he croaked. We all relaxed. “Excellent.”

“Sir,” Beamer said, “would you mind if I videotaped you discussing the presentation? For my film class?”

He waved a papery hand in the air. “Not at all,” he said. “I've been on TV before,” he added. “Many times.”

“I'm sure you have,” Beamer said, opening his tripod in record time and setting up his camera. “The light's great,” he added to no one in particu
lar, “the way it hits the side of his face.” Then he pressed the start button. “Okay.”

“So, Dr. Planck,” Prescott began, “you have just watched our presentation. Can you tell us what you thought of it?”

“You did an excellent job,” he said, nodding enthusiastically.

“I mean, about the information it revealed? About the chemicals being given to the students at the Allbright Academy to change their personalities and make them docile and accepting of authority?”

“Well, Horace is a brilliant chemist. I never doubted he could do it.”

Prescott stood there, his mouth hanging open, unable to say anything more. We had clearly miscalculated, where Dr. Planck was concerned. All the same, we might have just stumbled on a gold mine.

“Dr. Planck,” I said, stepping in as interviewer, since Prescott seemed down for the count, “did you help develop the compounds?”

“Oh, goodness, no! I'm a physicist, not a chemist. That's Horace's department. He won the Nobel Prize, you know.”

“Yes. We were aware of that.”

“I did too, of course.”

“Yes,” I said again. “And congratulations on that. But would you mind telling us—was it part of the original plan for Dr. Gallow to come up with
chemicals that would be, um, useful at the school? Or was that something he came up with later?”

“Of
course
it was part of the plan,” Dr. Planck snapped. “And it wasn't his idea, either, though he may like to take credit for it. It was mine. That's why I went to Horace in the first place. I needed a top chemist.”

“But, sir—Dr. Planck—I was just wondering. With handpicked students, and all of them so smart and everything, why did you need the chemicals?”

“To control them—help us form their characters, and their ideas, and their habits, and their world views. I've explained this to you a thousand times, Clara.”

“Uh, sir—actually, I'm not…” Beamer poked me in the back and I shut up.

“Form their characters for what purpose, exactly?” Brooklyn asked.

“To save our country from democracy, which, as you know, doesn't work.”

“Really!” I said, feeling like Alice after she fell down the rabbit hole.

“A ridiculous system. Everybody gets a vote, no matter who they are. Stupid people, uneducated people, crazy people, criminals, half-wits. The moderately stupid people vote their narrow self-interest. The
really
stupid people don't even know what their self-interest is, so they just vote for the handsome
guy with the good teeth or the candidate with the expensive ads. These people don't know squat, of course, so they choose idiots to represent them, and those idiots just pander to the stupid ideas of the stupid people, in order to get reelected. That's how we run this country. It's abysmal, really.”

I was feeling this strange sense of déjà vu. Where had I heard that stuff before? And then it hit me: Dr. Gallow's lectures! Of course, he expressed his ideas differently. Very elegant, very delicate, making scholarly references to the birth of democracy in Classical Greece, and how the voting population of Athens was only about the size of Lufkin, Texas, so it was manageable back then. Telling us how impractical it was nowadays, in a country the size of America, to manage even a representative form of democracy. And we just followed him down that philosophical path without realizing where we were headed.

Dr. Planck, on the other hand, practically hit you over the head with it. No pussyfooting around, no mincing of words—he gave you the Allbright agenda in all its ugliness. As my dad likes to say, he “put it out there where the cows could get at it.” I was momentarily speechless with horror.

“Excuse me,” Cal said. “I don't mean to sound dense here, but what's the connection between smart kids at Allbright and the, um, problems you
have with democracy?”

“Well, we can't overthrow the government!” he said. “Wish we could, but I honestly don't think it can be done. So we have to do an end run. It's the only way.”

“An end run?”

“Recruit the top students, educate them to perfection, form their ideas, and send them out into the world to hold key positions.”

“You mean, like president?” I asked.

“Not just president. We need people in science and technology, in economics and business, to build our economy. We need policy and government people, mostly behind the scenes, making the right decisions at the various agencies. Journalists and writers to help form public opinion—and, of course, politicians at the local and national level. One by one, our graduates are going to replace those idiots in Washington. No more peanut farmers like that yokel we've got in the White House now.”

“Peanut farmer…are you talking about Jimmy Carter?” I was thunderstruck.

“How many peanut farmers do we
have
in the White House?”

“But…!” I said, about to point out that Jimmy Carter was ancient history, presidentially speaking, only Beamer poked me in the back again and I came to my senses. We were trying to get Dr. Planck
to talk, and he might get really upset if I told him he was drastically out of date as to who was currently in the White House.

“Please go on, sir,” Beamer said. “Sorry for the interruption.”

“Where was I?” Dr. Planck ran his fingers through his hair, giving it the wild look of the night before. “What was I talking about?”

“The failure of democracy,” I said helpfully. “Replacing peanut farmers.” When he gave me a blank look, I added, “The Allbright Academy.”

But he just dismissed me with an irritated wave. “Enough, Clara,” he said. “I'm tired. Tell Mother I want some tea.” Then, looking at me through half-closed eyes, he added, “And send your little friends home.”

 

“Did you get what you needed?” Gloria asked as she walked us to the door.

“Pretty much,” I said. “But, I have to ask, who's Clara?”

“His sister,” Gloria said. “She died, I don't know, in the late sixties, I'd guess. He talks to her a lot.”

“Ah,” I said.

“Like I told you, he's confused about things, but I've worked in this house for more than twenty-five years, since before he got the Alzheimer's and all, and in lots of ways he hasn't changed a bit.
Still his own, true self.”

“‘Stupid people?'”

She nodded. “You got it. Stupid people. Need to have a Ph.D. to have an opinion. He can't understand why they let folks like me vote.”

“Wow,” I said, as she led us to the front door. “I'm amazed you stayed on.”

She shrugged. “Pay's good. And Beatrice, his wife, she was a real sweet lady. Now he's alone and he's old and helpless. It doesn't hurt me to hear those things. I know which of us is smart and which of us is crazy.” She looked away, with this private smile on her face. Then, almost under her breath, she added bitterly, “The
great man
.”