“Relax,” Corliss said, and then suddenly brightened. “Wait. This is brilliant. Thank you, Donna.”
“What is?” Mayfair asked. “What am I missing?”
Corliss leaned in, and the other two did the same. They looked like conspirators.
“We’re not predictable, but everything we do here is carefully controlled. You might laugh at my analogies, Donna, but don’t tell me you don’t feel observed a lot of the time. We are in a maze of sorts. Where we go, why we go there, what we do there, how we react to others, it’s all being planned and analyzed. Especially by our good friend Dr. Marlowe. She obviously singled us out just now. We’re under her microscope. Mayfairy?”
“She’s right.”
Corliss nodded. Her look of real excitement affected both Donna and Mayfair.
“I’m not saying we weren’t under microscopes of sorts at our public schools and at home, but it was nothing as complete and scientific as this,” Corliss said. “Don’t tell me you don’t feel like you’re in a fishbowl sometimes, and then there’s our psychologist, Dr. Lester, continually exploring our feelings about everything we do or hear about ourselves. Sometimes I want to reach out, grab her neck, and shake the questions out of her.”
She sat back. The other two did, too. Neither could disagree.
“What are you thinking?” Mayfair asked. “What’s your solution?” For the first time in a long time, she felt excited, and she had yet to learn why.
“We step out of the maze.”
“How?”
“The ditch under the fence,” Donna said. Mayfair looked at her, a little annoyed that she had realized what Corliss meant before she did. “Right, Corliss? That’s what you’re implying.”
“Exactly. Serendipity. We were meant to find it this morning.”
“You don’t really believe that, do you?” Donna asked. “Serendipity and a ditch?”
“Part of what I’m studying with the maze experiments is the accumulated impact of choice as opposed to coincidence or, if you want, fate, some sort of divine intervention. When people are lucky, they thank God.”
“So?” Donna said. “I don’t see the relationship with the discovery of a ditch under the fence. It certainly isn’t divine intervention to me.”
“Who can say absolutely what is and what isn’t? Once, when I was with my father coming home from the studio, it was raining hard,” Corliss said. “People in Los Angeles drive terribly in the rain, because they don’t see as much of it as other people do in other places. At least, that’s my father’s explanation.
“Anyway, we were driving on a very curvy road, and as we came around a turn, someone in a pickup truck in the other lane had his brights on, blinding my father and me enough that neither he nor I saw the coyote in the road. As a consequence, we ran over it.”
“Ugh,” Donna said.
“Yes, ugh. My father is the type of person who would have swerved to avoid hitting it, and we would have gone head-on into the pickup truck. The truck’s lights really saved us. Coincidence? Divine intervention? He immediately said, ‘Thank God for that idiot leaving his brights on.’
“Look,” she continued, “I’m certainly aware that statistics and logic easily disprove divine intervention, unless you accept that you do not have the intelligence to understand divinity, a clergyman’s fallback answer to everything. But the truth is that bad people are just as lucky as good people, often more so. How did Hitler escape being killed at least the six cited times it was attempted?”
“I like where this is going,” Mayfair said. “Fascinating.”
“All I’m saying is we three have been through dreadful experiences with men, some our age, some older.”
“Some men,” Donna qualified. “So?”
“I suggest that it’s enough to make us question whether that’s our fate, inevitable fate. Let’s find out. Along comes this opportunity for an experiment that we can control ourselves.”
“I like this,” Mayfair said.
“Stop saying that,” Donna insist
ed. “What’s the experiment?”
“We go to the village and mingle with the normal alphas and betas and maybe some gammas and deltas. Just no epsilons. That’s too much democracy, even for Brave New World citizens. If we do it together, we can help one another analyze and make the right decisions. Let’s see how we do, what we do. Until now, none of us had anyone even close to our intelligence to rely on for advice. The benefit is we’ll have three opinions that we all respect before any of us does anything. Assuming we respect our own opinion,” she added with a smile.
Mayfair nodded. “I—”