Green Boy by Susan Cooper Page B

gleaming corridor and delivered us at last to an airy room filled with strange-looking computer equipment, all wires and screens and banks of levers and buttons. We found ourselves facing a small bald man with bright blue eyes and a nut-brown face. He wore a long white coat and white shoes, and he was sitting on a stool gazing at us both with great interest. He had one of those book-sized screen things in his hand. He was so obviously expecting us that when the two silent uniformed men brought us in, he just nodded at them and waved them away. And they saluted and went.
    There was nobody else in the room. Some of the equipment was humming softly. The man’s face was creased and friendly, and as our guards left, he got to his feet and held out a hand for me to shake. I took it with a firm grip, and got one back. Grand was verybig on firm handshakes, he told us they were a test of character.
    â€œYou’re Trey and Lou,” said the nut-brown man, and he shook Lou’s hand too. “I’m Dr. Owen, and I have to take some measurements. Don’t worry. Nothing to scare you. Stand here—look.”
    There were two round raised discs in the middle of the room, and he went over and stood on one of them. He beckoned to me, and pointed to the other. I hesitated.
    Dr. Owen grinned at me. “Ah come on, Trey,” he said. “Have faith. I guarantee you everything’s harmless in here.”
    Cautiously, I crossed over and stepped up onto the disc. It was a little raised platform, about a foot high.
    Dr. Owen whistled. It was a quick little two-tone whistle, the way you’d call a dog.
    There was a whirring sound, and a squat, square box came trundling toward me over the floor. It moved like that chunky round robot in the first Star Wars movie, if you remember him, but that was about the only likeness. It wasn’t cute and it didn’t have flashing lights or make squeaky gurgling noises; it was dead quiet and rather sinister. While I stood there, nervously watching, it moved slowly round me, and I noticed there were half a dozen upright wires sticking up from its top like aerials, each with a glowing light on the end. The lights swiveled sometimes, and flickered.
    Dr. Owen beckoned to Lou, and stepped off his roundplatform, and without even being told, Lou trotted cheerfully over toward him and hopped up onto it. I was baffled again by the way so few things in Pangaia seemed to frighten him; it was as if he knew what to expect.
    The moving box finished circling me, and trundled over toward Lou.
    â€œThis is Fred,” said Dr. Owen. “Fred sees all. Though not inside your head, you’ll be happy to know. Here’s what he made of you, Trey.”
    He pressed a few buttons on the book-sized thing he had in his hand, and in a wide metal cabinet against one wall, a big screen lit up. Pangaia seemed to be full of screens, as if nobody there wrote words down on paper, as if everyone thought only through pictures.
    On the screen, I saw a larger than life image of myself, a spooky hollow 3-D image drawn in thousands of intertwining lines. It moved slowly around. Then it vanished, and was replaced by columns and columns of numbers, flicking down, over and over, a new screenful every second.
    â€œVital statistics,” Dr. Owen said. “You’re a toy, to Fred. He’s figured out how you work. He could replicate you—you wouldn’t have a mind, but you’d be a perfect clone otherwise.” He peered more closely at the screen for a while, studying the numbers, and his voice changed. “I must say,” he said more slowly, “you are an interestingly obsolete model, Trey.”
    Fred was making his way round Lou, his antennaestanding up like stiff hairs. When he had finished, Dr. Owen put Lou’s strange interwoven image on the screen in place of mine. He gazed at it for a long time, playing with the buttons on his hand keyboard to move it about in different