immy in the house with
me all day, so maybe I know him better than Jerry does. He fooled Jerry
with that business of the college textbooks, but not me. I think that
for some reason Timmy doesn't want us to know how advanced he really is.
I think he slipped up when he commented on that helical what's-it, then
covered his slip by pretending he'd only leafed through the texts and
picked up a bit here and there. I know when that boy's fooling, and I
know he deliberately fluffed the questions Jerry put to him. Timmy's
just plain lousy when it comes to dissembling, you know, as if it was
completely foreign to him to lie. All right, all right, I know what
you're going to say--fond mama building mother's-intuition fantasy
around only child.

"Well, I kept an eye on him after that and about a week later Jerry
brought home some calculus dealing with a new design he's developing. He
ran into trouble with it and sweated and swore for an hour, while Timmy
sat and read and I kept peeking in the hall mirror that lets you see
into the front room from the kitchen. After a while Jerry left the room
to look for some tables he wanted and Timmy slipped over and looked at
his work, made a single notation, then dived back to his book as Jerry
returned. Jerry started to sweat over the thing again, then suddenly did
a double-take. He made some erasures and in five minutes had the whole
thing worked out, cursing himself for misreading a figure or something.

"Now don't tell me it was just a coincidence. Timmy hadn't seen that
problem before and it should have been miles over his head anyway, yet
he gave it a quick glance, spotted the error, changed the limits of an
integration and put Jerry on the right track. Just like that."

* * * * *

Phil carefully massaged a dry plate even drier.

"So I stagger back and gasp, 'I can't believe it!' or something insane
but appropriate. The disturbing thing to me is that I not only _can_
believe it, I do believe it. Completely. I may as well tell you now
what I haven't yet told anyone else, that I've been methodically
tricking Timmy for some months past--in fact, ever since I began to
suspect that his knowledge of the sciences was, to say the least,
unusual for a boy his age. I probably led him into making that slip with
Jerry, identifying the curve. By giving him the impression that any boy
his age would know far more chemistry, math and physics than is actually
the case,