David remembered that the doctor had started by taking the E-shaped white piece and fitting the D-shaped blue piece into one of its grooves. Then had come the yellow piece, but David didn’t recall what to do with it; he sat there a moment, puzzled, until Dr. Hittner obligingly flashed him a mental image of the proper manipulation. David did it and the rest was easy. A couple of times he got stuck, but he was always able to pull the answer out of the doctor’s mind. Why does he think he’s testing me, David wondered, if he keeps giving me so many hints? What’s he proving? When the globe was intact David handed it back. “Would you like to keep it?” Dr. Hittner asked.

“I don’t need it,” David said. But he pocketed it anyway.

They played a few more games. There was one with little cards about the size of playing cards, with drawings of animals and birds and trees and houses on them; David was supposed to arrange them so that they told a story, and then tell the doctor what the story was. He scattered them at random on the desk and made up a story as he went along. “The duck goes into the forest, you see, and he meets a wolf, so he turns into a frog and jumps over the wolf right into the elephant’s mouth, only he escapes out of the elephant’s tushie and falls into a lake, and when he comes out he sees the pretty princess here, who says come home and I’ll give you gingerbread, but he can read her mind and he sees that she’s really a wicked witch, who—” Another game involved slips of paper that had big blue ink-blots on them. “Do any of these shapes remind you of real things?” the doctor asked. “Yes,” David said, “this is an elephant, see, his tail is here and here all crumpled up, and this is his tushie, and this is where he makes pee-pee.” He had already discovered that Dr. Hittner became very interested when he talked about tushies or pee-pee, so he gave the doctor plenty to be interested about, finding such things in every inkblot picture.