The interview was short and to the point. Michael could not be permitted to attend kindergarten with the rest of the children. He was a disruptive influence. He corrected the teacher when she left some little detail out of a story. He already knew how to read and write. He would have to be sent to a special school, or take his chances in the higher grades immediately. His parents decided to send him to a special school.
At the age of nine, when the other boys were running into the street with baseball gloves or footballs, Michael Rogan would leave his house carrying a genuine leather briefcase that had his initials and address stamped on it in gold. Inside the briefcase was the text of whatever subject he was studying that particular week. It rarely took him more than a week to master a subject that normally required a year’s study. He would simply memorize all the texts by reading them once. And it was only natural that such a boy was considered a freak in his neighborhood.
One day a group of kids his own age surrounded Michael Rogan. One of them, a chunky blond boy, said to him, “Don’t you ever play?” Rogan didn’t answer. The blond boy said, “You can play on my side. We’re gonna play football.”
“All right,” Michael said. “I’ll play.”
That day was a glorious day for him. He found out that he had good physical coordination and that he could hold his own playing football or fighting with other boys. He came home for supper with his expensive leather briefcase smeared with mud. He also had a black eye and puffy, bloody lips. But he was so proud and so happy that he ran to his mother shouting, “I’m going to be on the football team! They picked me to be on the football team!”
Alice Rogan took one look at his battered face and burst into tears.
She tried to be reasonable. She explained to her young son that his brain was valuable, that he should never expose it to any danger. “You have an extraordinary mind, Michael,” she said. “Your mind may someday help humanity. You can’t be like other boys. What if you should hurt your head playing football? Or fighting with another boy?”
Michael listened and understood. When his father came home that evening he said almost the same thing. So Michael gave up all thoughts of being like ordinary boys. He had a precious treasure to guard for humanity. Had he been older he would have realized that his parents were being pompous and a bit ridiculous about this treasure, but he had not yet acquired that kind of adult judgment.
When he was thirteen the other boys started to humiliate him, taunt him, knock his briefcase from his hands. Michael Rogan, obeying his parents, refused to fight and suffered humiliation. It was his father who began to have doubts about how his son was being brought up.
One day Joseph Rogan brought home huge, puffy boxing gloves and taught his son the art of self-defense. Joseph told him to stick up for himself, to fight if necessary. “It’s more important that you grow up to be a man,” he said, “than to be a genius.”
It was during his thirteenth year that Michael Rogan discovered he was different from ordinary boys in another way. His parents had always taught him to dress neatly and in an adult fashion, because he spent so much of his time studying with adults. One day a group of boys surrounded Rogan and told him they were going to take off his pants and hang them from a lamppost, a routine humiliation most of the boys had undergone.
Rogan went berserk when they put their hands on him. He sank his teeth into one boy’s ear and ripped it partly from the boy’s head. He got his hand around the ringleader ’s throat and throttled him, despite other boys kicking and punching him to make him let go. When some grown-ups finally broke up the fight, three of the group and Rogan had to be hospitalized.
But nobody ever bothered him again. He was shunned not only as a freak but as a violent freak.
Michael Rogan was intelligent enough to know that his rage was not natural, that it sprang from some deeper source. And he came to understand what it was. He was enjoying the fruits of his extraordinary memory, his intellectual powers, without having done anything to deserve them, and he felt guilty about it. He talked of his feelings with his father, who understood and started to make plans for Michael to lead a more normal life. Unhappily, Joseph Rogan died of a heart attack before he could help his son.
Michael Rogan, going on fifteen, was tall, strong, and well coordinated. He was absorbing knowledge on the advanced levels now; and under the complete dominance of his mother, he really believed that his mind was a sacred trust to be guarded for its future use to humanity. By this time he had his MA and was studying for his MS. His mother treated him like a reigning king. That year Michael Rogan discovered girls.
In this he was perfectly normal. But he discovered to his chagrin that girls were afraid of him and treated him with giggling teenage cruelty. He was so intellectually mature that once again he was regarded as a freak by those his age. This drove him back to his studies with renewed fury.
At eighteen he found himself accepted as an equal by the seniors and graduate students at the Ivy League school where he was completing studies for his PhD in mathematics. The girls, too, seemed to be attracted to him now. Big for his age, he was broad through the shoulders, and could easily pass for twenty-two or twenty-three. He learned to disguise his brilliance so that it would not be too frightening, and at last he got into bed with a girl.
Marian Hawkins was a blonde who was dedicated to her studies, but she was also dedicated to all-night parties. She was his steady sex partner for a year. Rogan neglected his studies, drank a great deal of beer, and committed all the natural stupidities of a normal growing boy. His mother was distressed at this turn of events, but Rogan did not let her distress bother him at all. Though he would never admit it to himself, he disliked his mother.
The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on the day Rogan was assured of his doctorate. By now Rogan had tired of Marian Hawkins and was looking for a graceful way out. He was tired of training his mind and tired also of his mother. He was hungry for excitement and adventure. On the day after Pearl Harbor he sat down and wrote a long letter to the chief of Army Intelligence. He made a list of his academic awards and achievements and enclosed them with the letter. Less than a week later he received a telegram from Washington, asking him to report for an interview.
The interview was one of the bright moments of his life. He was interrogated by a crew-cut Intelligence captain who looked over the list Rogan had sent with a bored expression. He seemed unimpressed, especially when he learned that Rogan had no background of athletic activity.
Captain Alexander pushed Rogan’s papers back into a manila folder and took it into the inner office. He was gone for a while, and when he came back he had a mimeographed sheet in his hand. He put it on the desk in front of him and tapped it with his pencil. “This sheet is covered with a coded message. It’s an old, outdated code we no longer use. But I want to see if you can figure it out. Don’t be surprised if you find it too difficult; after all you’ve had no training.” He handed the sheet to Rogan.
Rogan looked it over. It appeared to be a standard cryptographic letter substitution, relatively simple. Rogan had studied cryptography and the theory of codes when he was eleven years old, for mental kicks. He picked up a pencil and got to work, and in five minutes he read the translated message to Captain Alexander.
The captain disappeared into the other room and returned with a manila folder from which he took a sheet of paper containing only two paragraphs. This was a more difficult code, and its brevity made it that much harder to decode. It took Rogan almost an hour to break it. Captain Alexander looked at his translation and disappeared again into the inner office. The next time he came out he was accompanied by a gray-haired colonel, who sat in a corner of the reception room and studied Rogan intently.
Now Captain Alexander handed Rogan three sheets of paper covered with symbols. He smiled a little this time. Rogan recognized that smile; he had seen it on the faces of teachers and specialists who thought they had Rogan in a spot. So he was very careful with the code, and it took him three hours to break it. He was so concentrated on his task that he didn’t notice the room filling up with officers, all watching him intently. When Rogan finished he handed his yellow work sheets to the captain. Captain Alexander scanned the translation swiftly and without a word handed it to the gray-haired colonel. The colonel ran his eyes down the paper and then said curtly to the captain, “Bring him to my office.”
To Rogan, the whole thing had been an enjoyable exercise, and he was startled to see the colonel looked worried. The first thing he said to Rogan was, “You’ve made this a bad day for me, young man.”
“I’m sorry,” Rogan said politely. He didn’t really give a damn. Captain Alexander had irritated him.
“It’s not your fault,” the colonel growled. “None of us thought you could break that last code. It’s one of our best, and now that you know it we’ll have to change over. After we screen you and accept you in the services maybe we can use the code again.”
