The Prisoner's Dilemma (10 page)

Now Sticky was ready to try again. Taking a deep breath, he rapped on the table with his knuckles and tensed as if bracing for a blow.

“Is it ice cream?” Constance asked. “Ice cream and pie?”

“Of course not,” Sticky said wearily, and he sank back into his chair. “Forget the sweets and try to focus on
me,
will you?”

“I
was
focusing on you! How do you know I wasn’t?”

“You guessed ice cream and pie, Constance!”

They began to bicker, their tones growing more strident with every word, and Reynie was grateful for the distraction when Moocho Brazos swept into the dining room, all muscle and mustache, and swarthy as a sailor. Over his elegant tailored shirt and trousers Moocho wore the bright red apron the children had given him for his birthday. He wielded an ice cream scoop and a spatula (in his huge hands they looked like a child’s playthings) but observing Sticky and Constance in the midst of their heated argument he lowered the utensils and shook his head.

“I see they aren’t quite ready,” Moocho intoned. He chuckled and took a seat (or rather, two seats) next to Kate. “I trust you enjoyed yours?”

“You know we did!” Kate laughed, reaching up to smooth a stray lock of Moocho’s well-oiled black hair. She and the strong man had been friends for years, and she felt very motherly toward him.

“I’m so glad,” said Moocho, and idly inspecting his spatula he said, “By the way, I believe I’ve finally solved that riddle you gave me last night. The answer is ‘love,’ isn’t it? What a relief! If I’d known anything about tennis, perhaps I’d have managed sooner, but sadly I ignored that part for the longest time—’in tennis it’s nothing,’ after all.”

“That threw us, too,” said Kate. “Or some of us, anyway. How did you finally figure it out?”

“I consulted an encyclopedia. Imagine my surprise when I learned that in tennis ‘love’ is a score of zero! Suddenly everything made sense! Or almost everything, I should say. Most of the lines came clear right away—a person can
fall in
love and so on—but a few aspects still puzzle me: the hole in the middle, the clover, and the part about starting over.”

“Shall we tell you?” Reynie asked, speaking up to be heard over Constance, whose voice had gone quite shrill. “Or would you rather figure them out?”

“Oh no, if you please, I’m anxious to be rid of them. They’ve been hanging over me like a cloud.”

“Well,” said Reynie, “the hole in the middle is the letter O in ‘love.’ So the bit about ‘falling in it’ refers to falling in love—just as you guessed—and not to falling in the hole. You can read that first line either way.”

“Clever,” said Moocho, writing out “love” in the air with his spatula. “Although, in my defense, the O is not precisely in the middle but slightly to the left.”

“Funny, that’s what Constance said,” Kate observed. (Moocho stiffened ever so slightly.) “Anyway, the last line of the poem does the opposite—it refers to the O, not to ‘love.’”

“You can’t start over without an O? Why not?”

“Try writing the word ‘over’ without the O,” Reynie said. “It’s hard to start, isn’t it?”

Moocho slapped his forehead with the spatula.

“As for the clover,” Kate went on, laughing, “take a close look at the word and you’ll find ‘love’ in it. Bees, princes, and love—they’re all in clover, just in different ways.”

Moocho thanked them heartily for the explanations, and after a brief exchange about the weather (Constance had predicted rain by evening), the conversation turned to some meat scraps Kate had asked to be set aside for Madge. Reynie quickly tuned it out and dove into his own thoughts, for after so long with nothing new to consider, he suddenly had much more to think about than he had time to think. Last night he’d lain awake for hours thinking about that strange incident with Constance, and in his few spare moments today he’d been trying (true to their assignment) to reflect on the solution to the riddle.

Mr. Curtain had kept S.Q. around out of
love
? It seemed impossible—Mr. Curtain seemed incapable of love. But if you could make yourself believe otherwise, then Mr. Curtain’s tolerance of S.Q., his least competent Executive and now his last remaining one, no longer seemed so mysterious. Still, just as Mr. Benedict had said, sometimes the answer is only the beginning, and Reynie found that the riddle’s solution raised even more questions in his mind than it answered.

He would have given a lot to be able to put those questions to Mr. Benedict, but since yesterday afternoon Mr. Benedict had spent every waking moment (and no doubt a few sleeping ones) down among the computers in the basement. At supper Number Two had taken a plate to him, and at breakfast this morning Rhonda had. Not even when they told Rhonda about Constance’s latest feat had Mr. Benedict made an appearance; in fact Rhonda hadn’t even summoned him.

“Don’t get me wrong, what you’re telling me is important, but he’s asked not to be disturbed except in certain cases,” Rhonda said, without specifying what those cases might be. “He has a great deal of work to do in a very short time and is permitting himself few breaks.”

Rhonda wouldn’t tell them what Mr. Benedict was doing or why it was so urgent, but in last night’s meeting of the Society Constance had speculated he was seeking the remedy for his narcolepsy. She hoped so, anyway, since he would lose his chance forever once the Whisperer was taken away. She had spent the rest of the meeting railing bitterly against Mr. Gaines “and that twitty committee,” for Constance loved Mr. Benedict (though she never exactly said so aloud) and felt every bit as protective of him as Number Two and Rhonda did. In fact she would have been his adopted daughter by now if only the authorities would recognize her existence, but due to the mysterious absence of certain official papers they had refused to do so. This was yet another reason for her bitterness. Few things infuriated Constance more than being ignored, and having her exis-tence denied struck her as the worst insult imaginable.

“An empty box!” Constance cried now, breaking in on Reynie’s thoughts. She and Sticky had finally resolved their argument and resumed the exercise. “An empty box, sort of tilted to the side!”

“Yes!” Sticky said with obvious relief, but then his face fell. “Oh, great, but now I have to tell you about the memory.” Mustering his resolve he began, “One time in a quiz championship I was asked to draw a rhombus. I froze up from the pressure—you know how I used to do that sometimes…”

“Oh yes,” said Constance with an arch look. “You
used
to do that.”

Ignoring this comment, Sticky pressed on, “Well, instead of a
rhombus,
which is an equilateral parallelogram—that’s the tilted box shape you saw—I got it into my head that I was supposed to draw an
omnibus.
”

Constance frowned. “What’s that?”

“A bus—’omnibus’ is essentially an old-fashioned word for ‘bus.’ I knew what a rhombus was, of course, I just got so flustered and…” Sticky grimaced and reached for his spectacles. “When I think of how carefully I drew the wheels,” he muttered, “how I even put little faces of people in the windows, thinking I was being creative, while everyone there must have been shaking their heads, appalled that I thought this was a rhombus…”

Constance was staring at Sticky with a look of extreme disappointment. “That’s it? Your empty box is just a dumb old rhombus? That’s the most boring embarrassment I’ve ever heard of!”

Sticky’s eyes flashed, and he was about to argue when he suddenly realized that he’d gotten lucky. “You think so? Well, sorry, Constance, that’s the story.” For a moment he contemplated his spectacles, which he’d removed without thinking. He put them back on again. “And guess what? We get our pie and ice cream now.”

“You’re right!” Constance exclaimed. “I guessed all three! Moocho, did you hear that? I guessed all three!”

“Congratulations,” said Moocho with a grin, and to Sticky he said, “and also my sympathies. Allow me to give you both your just desserts.” He wriggled his heavy dark eyebrows, obviously pleased with himself.

“Moocho!” Kate cried, laughing boisterously and clapping her hands. “What a joke! Oh, I wish I’d thought of that!
Just desserts!
Did you hear that, everyone?” She followed him into the kitchen and back, repeating his play on words over and over and laughing afresh each time.

A short time later, having already eaten all of her ice cream and most of her pie, Constance was staring at her remaining few bites with exaggerated dejection. “Moocho didn’t give me as much ice cream as you,” she complained to Sticky, “and now I don’t have any to eat with the rest of my pie.”

Leaning across the table, Reynie pretended to study her bowl. “I think you just misjudged your pie-to-ice-cream ratio, Constance. You took two bites of ice cream for every one bite of pie.”

“Moocho gave you both the same,” said Kate, who was in the corner of the dining room doing handstand push-ups. “I saw him scoop the ice cream.”

“No, he didn’t!” Constance snapped. “Sticky’s scoops were bigger!”

Warily, Sticky slid his bowl closer to him and shielded it with his arm. “Well, you’re not getting any of mine.”

“Oh no? Maybe I should just fish out some more of your embarrassing memories,” Constance growled, leaning forward and poking her finger at him. “I’d love telling people about them!”

“Constance!” cried Reynie and Kate, horrified. “You wouldn’t!”

The forceful reproach in their tone and the expression on Sticky’s face—an unsettling blend of revulsion, fear, and fury—cowed Constance a bit. “All right, all right,” she said, leaning back again. “I wouldn’t do that, I guess.” But she felt angry and resentful now, and she scowled at Sticky with a ferocity unusual even for her. She crossed her arms, her face turned bloodred, and with her nose wrinkling and her pudgy cheeks bunching up, she narrowed her bright blue eyes to slits.

Reynie was impressed, but Sticky didn’t seem to notice. He was staring at his ice cream, blinking uncertainly, as if considering whether he could even enjoy it under the circumstances. And then, much to Reynie’s surprise, he seemed to come to that very conclusion.

“Here,” Sticky said, shoving his plate toward Constance, who set upon the ice cream with a look of triumphant glee. “I don’t much like vanilla, anyway.”

“You don’t?” Kate said, amazed. She dropped onto her feet and walked over to see what was going on.

“I thought vanilla was your favorite,” Reynie said.

Sticky’s eyes widened, and he looked at Reynie in confusion. “It… it
is
my favorite. Why did I say it wasn’t? For a second I actually believed it.”

Slowly, disbelievingly, they all turned to Constance, who had already finished half the ice cream and was now clutching her head, much as Kate had done earlier. Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut.

“What’s the matter, do you have a cold headache from eating
my ice cream
?” Sticky said, his voice rising. “It serves you right, if you just did what I think you did!
Did
you, Constance? Did you make me think I didn’t like vanilla?”

Constance opened her eyes, the anguish in them so apparent that Sticky drew back in surprise. “I did!” she wailed, and to Sticky’s even greater astonishment she burst into torrents of tears. “All right? I told you to think that! Now stop talking! Please! My head is splitting! Oh, it’s horrible, really horrible!”

“Whoa,” Kate murmured, with a worried look at Reynie. “She said please.”

Disconcerted, Sticky was frantically patting Constance’s arm, trying to soothe her. “Easy, Constance. You’ll be okay. You can… you can eat the rest of my ice cream, okay? Don’t you want it?”

But this only made Constance sob all the more. “I can’t! I feel too sick! My head… my stomach… oh, I feel just
awful
!”

The little girl’s wails had brought all the adults running, including Mr. Benedict (panting from the stairs), and straightaway she was carried up to her bed, where she lay moaning and crying for more than an hour, until finally, with Mr. Benedict holding her hand and her friends listening anxiously at the door, she mumbled, “I don’t believe I’ll do that again,” and fell into a fitful sleep.

H
ours later, Constance awoke looking as though she’d been ravaged by the flu. Pasty pale skin, red-rimmed eyes, hair a tangled mess. Nonetheless she felt much improved, and was surprisingly well-mannered, even meek, as she listened to Mr. Benedict’s stern admonitions. She quite agreed that she’d behaved badly and must never do that sort of thing again, and at any rate nothing could induce her to risk another bout of such agony.

“But what caused it?” Constance asked, kicking free of her tangled sheets. “I mean, hearing people’s thoughts and all that never hurt me—it’s just sort of like having a conversation. But when I changed Sticky’s mind…” She shuddered and hugged her knees.

“I suspect the main difference was the intensity of focus and mental effort involved,” Mr. Benedict said, patting her arm reassuringly. “If telepathy is like a mental conversation, then changing someone’s mind—essentially hypnotizing someone, as you did with Sticky—is like winning a long and exhausting argument, except that the entire argument is compressed into the space of a moment. In other words, I believe your sickness was simply the result of strain, my dear.”

“So you think I can avoid it? Is that what you’re saying?”

“If you are careful and prudent,” said Mr. Benedict. He raised an eyebrow. “Do you think you can be prudent? You haven’t had a great deal of practice.”

“Oh, I can be!” Constance said. “I will be!”

Reasonably satisfied, Mr. Benedict went back to his work, though not without some reluctance and a final, concerned glance from the doorway. “We’ll leave aside the mental exercises for now,” he said mildly, “and return to them when I can be more fully involved. In the meantime, my dear, rest and play—rest and play.” And with Number Two attending him he left Constance with the other children and hurried down to the basement.

“You don’t have to say it,” Constance muttered to Sticky as soon as they were alone. “I’m sorry, okay? I really am.”