"I doubt you'll finish, Charles. This test is ten pages long."

"But if we do--"

"By all means, yes."

Gary Elvin leaned back in his chair and surveyed, with satisfaction, the thirty heads bent studiously over their desks. For perhaps five minutes the idyll lasted, until Donald Schermerhorn brought his test up to the desk and asked permission to go to the library. Elvin was both amazed and disappointed; but at once he rea.s.sured himself. The test had been simply too hard for Donald.

Nonetheless, as soon as Donald was out of the room, Elvin checked his examination against the key. As he turned through the pages, his fingers began to tremble. Donald had answered everything--and answered it correctly. Before Elvin had finished checking Donald's test, ten more students had left theirs on the desk and headed for the school library.

Within ten minutes Elvin was fighting a disorganizing bewilderment far worse than the rocket-hallucination. Every examination was completed, and none that he checked had as much as one mistake. Elvin wished he could believe that whole-sale cheating had taken place, but he knew that was impossible because of the precautions he always took.

All of the tenth graders were back from the library by that time. They had each brought two or more books. Elvin's body went rigid with anger when he saw what was currently pa.s.sing among them for the skill of reading. They were methodically turning pages almost as quickly as they could move their hands from one side of the books to the other, all with the appearance of engrossed attention.

Elvin banged a ruler on his desk. One or two faces looked up. "This has gone far enough!" he cried. "You asked for the privilege of free reading, but I do not intend you to make a farce of it." A hand went up.

"Yes, Marilyn?"

"But we are reading, Mr. Elvin. Honestly."

"Oh, I see." His voice was thickly sarcastic. "And what's the t.i.tle of your book?"

"Toynbee's _Study of History_."

"You've given up Grace Livingston Hill? Could you summarize Toynbee for us, Marilyn?"

"In another ten minutes, Mr. Elvin. I still have sixty pages to read."

Elvin turned savagely to another girl. "Mabel Travis! What are you reading?"

The buxom girl looked up languidly. For a split second her big eyes seemed focused on a distant prospective. "Why--why this, Mr. Elvin." She held up her book so he could see the t.i.tle.

"_Hypnotism in Theory and Practice_," he snorted. And Mabel's I/Q was 71! "You've outgrown the comics, Mabel?"

"In a sense, yes, Mr. Elvin."

Elvin was saved from further disorientation by the interruption of an office messenger with a special bulletin announcing a second period a.s.sembly. By the time he had read it, his anger was under control. He let the reading go on and spent the rest of the period plodding through the examinations. There was not an error in any of the papers. From the prospective of the day's events, Elvin later realized that, however personally unnerving, his own particular crisis had been a minor one.

The first full scale public disaster came during the a.s.sembly, when the entire student body--nearly one hundred and fifty youngsters--was gathered in the auditorium. The princ.i.p.al, as always, rose to lead them in the Alma Mater. He was a huge, hatchet-faced, white-haired man, the terror of evil-doer and faculty members alike. He had a tendency to give a solemn importance to trivial things and to overlook the great ones; and there was no mistaking the awed, almost religious fervor with which he sang the school song--which was, perhaps, only natural, since he had written it himself.

On that disastrous morning he suddenly burst into a dance as the student body barrelled into the first chorus. He s.n.a.t.c.hed up the startled girls'

counselor and improvised a little rumba. Slowly the students' voices fell silent as they watched. Under the sweating leadership of the music teacher, the school orchestra held the pace for another bar or two, until one of the players stood up and rendered a discordant hot lick on his trumpet.

A trio of caretakers carried the struggling princ.i.p.al off the platform and shouting teachers herded the students on to their next cla.s.ses.

Thirty minutes later the word-of-mouth information was carefully spread through the school that the princ.i.p.al had been taken to the hospital for observation and he was doing nicely. But by that time his fate seemed unimportant, for the girls' tenth grade gym teacher was having hysterics on the front lawn, convinced that all her students had turned into fish; and the boys' glee club teacher had abruptly announced that the nation was being invaded by Martians. He, too, had been carried off to the hospital in haste.

The rest of the faculty was badly shaken. When they met at lunch, they unanimously wanted the school closed for the rest of the day. But the princ.i.p.al had been too small a man to delegate any of his authority; as long as he was hospitalized, the teachers could do nothing.

After the ominous activity of the morning, however, most of the afternoon pa.s.sed in relative order. True, the counselor gave pick-up tests to three tenth graders whose earlier I.Q. scores had been so low the validity had been questioned; and this time the same three outdid an Einstein. And the tenth grade math teacher was almost driven to distraction by a cla.s.sroom discussion of the algebraic symbology equating matter and time--all of which was entirely over his head.

Nothing really happened until five minutes before the end of the school day, when Miss Gerkin knocked weakly on Gary Elvin's door. As soon as he saw her face, he gave his cla.s.s free reading and joined her in the hall.

Fearfully she showed him a yellow Bunsen burner, which glowed softly in the afternoon sunlight.

"Do you know what it is, Gary?"

"It's one of those gas burners you have on the lab tables in--"

"The metal, I mean."

"Looks like gold. Aren't these rather expensive for a high school cla.s.sroom?"

She sagged against the wall, running her trembling fingers over her thin lips. "It's that tenth grade, Gary. I have them last period for general science. Bill Blake and the Schermerhorn twins got to fooling around with the electro-magnet. They rewired it somehow and added a few--well, frankly, I don't understand at all! But now when anything--metal, gla.s.s, granite--when anything is put in the magnetic field, it's changed to gold."

"Trans.m.u.tation of atomic structure? You know it can't be done!"

"Yes, I know it. But I saw it happen." She began to laugh, but checked herself quickly.

"It's a trick. I know that bunch better than you do. It's time one of us had it out with them."

He strode along the hall toward the science room, Miss Gerkin following meekly behind him. "I'm sure you're right, Gary, because the rest of the cla.s.s hardly showed any interest in what the boys were doing. I actually asked Marilyn if she didn't want her necklace turned to gold, and she said she was too busy to bother. Imagine that, from a high school kid!"

"Busy doing what?"

"Working out the application of the Law of Degravitation, she said."

"The Law of Degravitation? I never heard of it."

Miss Gerkin sniffed righteously. "Neither have I, and I've taught science all my life."

Gary Elvin flung open the door of the science room. It was one minute before the end of the period. For a moment he looked in on a peacefully ideal cla.s.sroom. Every student was at his bench working industriously.

Then, row by row, they began to float upward toward the ceiling, each of them holding a tiny coil of thin wires twisted intricately around two pieces of metal and an electronic tube. The breeze from the open window gathered them languidly into a kind of huddle above the door.

The bell rang as Miss Gerkin began to scream. Elvin fought to hold on to his own sanity as he tried to help her, but a degree of her hysteria transferred itself to him. His mind became a patchwork of yawning blank s.p.a.ces interspersed with uncoordinated episodes of reality.

He remembered hearing the bell and the rush of the cla.s.s out of the room. He remembered the piercing screams of Miss Gerkin's terror echoing through the suddenly crowded halls. Beyond one of his black gulfs of no-memory, he was in the nurse's office helping to hold Miss Gerkin on the lounge while the school doctor administered a sedative.

Slowly the integrated pattern of his thinking returned when he was driving back toward the Schermerhorn ranch. It was late in the afternoon; the sun was setting redly beyond the ridge of mountains. As Elvin's fear receded, he was able to think with a kind of hazy clarity.

He had seen a metal Bunsen burner that had been turned into gold; he had seen the crusty princ.i.p.al of the school break into a rumba, and three of his colleagues driven to hysteria; he had seen a tenth grade cla.s.s floating unsupported in the air. All of it manifestly absurd and impossible.

But it had happened. Elvin could visualize only two plausible explanations: ma.s.s insanity or ma.s.s hypnosis. Hypnosis! A sluggish relay clicked in his mind. He remembered a book. One of the tenth graders had been reading it--_Hypnotism in Theory and Practice_.

Everything seemed clear after that. The tenth grade was an obstreperous bunch of unsocial adolescents. Somehow they had stumbled upon hypnotism and learned how to use it.

The time for an accounting had come. Because of where Elvin lived, he was admirably situated to break the Schermerhorn twins first; and they were, perhaps, the weakest members of the group. He would have them alone, without the support of their peers. It would be easy. After all, he was a mature adult; they were still children. Once he had a confession from them, it would only be a minor operation to clear up the whole mess.