Because we’re leaving today, Gustav tells me to act normal. So after breakfast, I go to Marvin’s laboratory.
Marvin ignores me as I wander around his lab and look at the experiments he has set up. On one table, he has a beaker of something dark pink—like beet juice—on the boil over a Bunsen burner. On another, he has several sticks of explosives standing at attention like soldiers. On another, he has a frog, ventral side up, and a set of dissection tools.
“Do you want to cut it open?” he asks, turning in his swivel chair.
“I want to ask you questions,” I say.
“Okay.”
“Do you think my guilt organ is plausible?” I ask.
“Maybe,” he says. “I will go looking for it the next time I have a specimen.” I nod at this even though I know this means he will cut open one of his friends.
I ask, “Why do you think humans are so—”
“Dumb?” he interrupts.
“I wasn’t going to say that,” I say. I was going to ask why humans are so guilty all the time. But since he said this, I add, “Not all humans are dumb.”
“Most of them are. You know that. Why else did you come here?” he asks.
“I don’t think most humans are dumb,” I argue.
“So you think most humans are smart?”
“I think all humans have potential.”
He seems disappointed.
“I was going to ask why humans are so guilty,” I say.
“They’re guilty because they’re dumb.”
“Humans are not dumb,” I say again.
“Stop saying that!”
I shake my head and go back to walking around his laboratory. I try to think up something to say so I seem normal—just like Gustav told me to be—but I can’t think of anything.
“HUMANS ARE NOT SMART. YOU KNOW THIS!” Marvin yells.
I sigh. “I think a lot of humans are lazy, yes. I think we could do better as a species. But I don’t think I’m smarter than humans. I am human, am I not?”
“You’re a human with an IQ of one hundred and seventy-five.”
“It’s just a number,” I say.
“You shrug? You’re given this gift and you pretend you don’t have it? You think numbers mean nothing? You’re no scientist. Get out of my lab.”
“It’s an equation. Mental age divided by chronological age times one hundred,” I say.
“YES!”
“And how does this explain that you think humans are dumb and I don’t?”
“You’re young. You don’t know anything yet.”
I don’t say aloud that nearly every study ever done on IQ shows that IQ decreases with age. I don’t say anything except “You’re right.” I say it not because he’s right. I say it because Gustav told me to act normal.
I reach up to the area where my theoretical guilt-free gland is.
Marvin laughs and says, “That’s more like it!”
He tells me he’s putting a control group together this week. He tells me he thinks it’s real. A real undiscovered gland that can solve many world problems. I don’t see a spark of understanding in his eyes when he says this ironic thing.
I don’t mention that if the solution for many of the world’s problems is here, then no one else will ever be able to solve their problems. Only the seventeen people who live here.