Free Mortal Fear by Mortal Fear Page A

couldn’t hear anyone screaming behind us. Miles didn’t say anything for about two hours after that. We just walked along the weedy turnrows dividing the cotton fields, rapping the hard, knobbed stalks everybody called nigger knockers against the rusty barbed wire. I went home at dark. I don’t know if Miles went home at all.
     But they made out okay. Annie even managed to pay Miles’s way through private school until she realized that the school would pay to have him. Because Miles Turner was a genius. I say that because, though I did well in school without much effort, Miles did not try at all . In the ninth grade he could answer “reading” problems in algebra after scanning them once. He never put anything on paper. After we all took the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, some army major from Washington telephoned down to the school, talked to the principal, and asked to speak to Miles. He said something about Miles having a home in the army just as soon as he came of age. Miles told the major he wouldn’t join the army unless Russian paratroopers landed in his mother’s yard. The major said that might not be such a remote possibility. He also told Miles that Greenville was a confirmed Russian nuclear target because of its bridge over the Mississippi River. Miles said if the Russians wanted to nuke Greenville, he might consider joining the army after all. The Russian army.
     Okay, he was a smart-ass. But that doesn’t make him a killer. He was just born in the wrong town. And he knew it. We both graduated high school as National Merit scholars, and could have gone to college anywhere in the United States for next to nothing. But there our paths diverged. I was so into girls that summer that I hardly gave college a thought, and since my parents were having their own problems at the time—financial and marital—they ignored the issue as well. I’d always done well in school, thus I always would. In the end I went to Ole Miss sight unseen, and because I had waited so long to decide, my father even had to pay for the privilege.
     Miles applied for and was awarded a full academic scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While I farted around Oxford, Mississippi, with scatterbrained, Venus-shaped sorority girls and drunken Young Republicans, Miles Turner was fanatically programming, tearing apart, and rebuilding big clumsy metal boxes that I would not even have recognized in 1978.
     Computers.
     It seems natural now, but at the time it was odd. He spoke the language of bits and drives and floating memory at a time when those words were as foreign to the general public as Attic Greek. The really odd thing is that Miles thinks I’m smarter than he is. I have no idea why. This is not false modesty. I will frankly admit that I have above-average intelligence, just as I will admit I have a poor sense of direction. I can look at a problem, analyze it—for patterns, usually—and given enough time, solve it. Miles doesn’t analyze anything. He looks at something, and he just knows . He grasps physics and numbers the way I do people and music—wholly by intuition. It’s as though his asocial childhood allowed him to tune into some subrational channel of information that is beyond the rest of us.
     When I took the sysop job, I was looking forward to getting to know him again. I’d only seen him a handful of times in the past fifteen years. But for whatever reason, it hasn’t worked out that way. We occasionally exchange e-mail—sometimes using the satellite video link that his techs installed here when I took the job-slash-hobby—but on balance, I know him no better now than I did when we were kids. Maybe my hopes were misplaced. Maybe you can never know anyone more deeply than you know them in childhood.
      
     By the time Drewe arrives, I’ve put together a bastardized stir-fry of broccoli and pork and lemon. We eat it on the front porch, which is thick with heat despite the