Free Miracle Man by William R. Leibowitz

accommodate any dietary restrictions or special requirements.”
    Peter, Edith and Bobby gazed at the array of food.
    Waving her arms excitedly, Edith said, “This looks like the buffet at the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas.”
    Bobby beamed as he looked in the direction of the desserts. “I’m going to get really fat here. Forget learning, I’m just going to eat.”
    The cafeteria was going a long way to clinch the deal, but the closer was coming. Uhlman gave Vanderslice a conspiratorial wink.
    “Dean, is there any chance we could give Robert a demonstration of the planetarium?” Bobby’s eyes gleamed. He had never been to a planetarium.
    When the planetarium show was over and the lights came back on, Bobby looked as if he had been sedated. He sat motionless, staring straight ahead. Edith tapped him on his shoulder, and then shook him gently. Bobby snapped back to the present and said, “That was the most wonderful thing I have ever seen in my whole life.”
    “Well, Robert. For those students who display a particular interest and aptitude for astrophysics and astral mathematics, our planetarium is programmable to interface with our computer laboratory for real-world type testing of formulas and theories. It’s a unique capability that we have here,” said Vanderslice.
    Uhlman smiled. The look on Bobby’s face said everything. The Institute had a new enrollee.
    10

    A s Uhlman had predicted, Bobby was in a different league from all of the other students at the Institute. Even in this rarified environment peopled by the most profoundly gifted children in the country, Bobby, the youngest student at the Institute, was like an eagle among blind bats. By his seventh birthday, he had exhausted all of the Institute’s teachers and Dean Vanderslice had shifted most of his daily schedule to graduate classes at MIT and Harvard. The time he continued to spend at the Institute was mainly under his own auspices, working in the computer lab and experimenting with the planetarium interface. Dean Vanderslice repeatedly had to admonish several of the Institute’s teachers to stop interrupting Bobby to seek his help when they were stumped on their own research projects.
    As was in keeping with the OSSIS’ mandate for the Institute’s students, three-quarters of their studies focused on mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and astronomy. Bobby’s facility in science and math was uncanny. The Institute’s teachers and his professors at MIT and Harvard had never encountered a child or, for that matter, any student, who could conceptualize as Bobby could. His agility in the realm of abstract reasoning confounded them. He was a transcendental thinker, and his intellectual powers appeared to be growing with each passing month. His mind moved at a fantastic speed, sorting through, tossing out and deleting what he considered redundant information as he coalesced the essence of a problem. He became increasingly interested in the inter-relationships between the various sciences, and by nine years of age, expressed the view that all divisions among the sciences were artificial, and that mathematics should be the common language to express all scientific phenomena. The problem he said was that the vocabulary of mathematics had not yet been developed sufficiently to become the unifying bridge between the disciplines.
    But just as Bobby’s intellectual vision was intensifying, so were his demons. Within his first few weeks at the Institute, he had to be moved to private dormitory quarters because his fitful cries at night scared the children he was rooming with. Dean Vanderslice had him placed in a two-bedroom apartment, and the second bedroom was manned each night by a volunteer from a circle of grad students who were assisting at the Institute. When Bobby ran to the other bedroom sweaty and wild-eyed with fear, there was someone to calm him down. On a good night, he would get six hours of sleep, but when the nightmares were particularly