As I turned through the clippings, going back twenty years, I made an interesting discovery. Starting in 1948, I found that a major news story about a child prodigy came up once every two years. The last celebrity had been Bobby Silverberg, a fifteen-year-old from Tampa, Florida. The photographs in the Look, Paris-Match and Oggi profiles might have been taken of Georges Duval. Apart from the American setting, every ingredient was the same: the press conference, TV cameras, presiding officials, the high-school principal, doting mother — and the young genius himself, this time with a crew-cut and nothing to hide that high bony skull. There were two college degrees already passed, postgraduate fellowships offered by MIT, Princeton and CalTech.
And then what?
‘That was nearly three years ago,’ I said to Judy Walsh, my secretary. ‘What’s he doing now?’
She flicked through the index cards, then shook her head. ‘Nothing. I suppose he’s taking another degree at a university somewhere.’
‘He’s already got two degrees. By now he should have come up with a faster-than-light drive or a method of synthesizing life.’
‘He’s only seventeen. Wait until he’s a little older.’
‘Older? You’ve given me an idea. Let’s go back to the beginning — 1948.’
Judy handed me the bundle of clippings. Life magazine had picked up the story of Gunther Bergman, the first postwar prodigy, a seventeenyear-old Swedish youth whose pale, over-large eyes stared out from the photographs. An unusual feature was the presence at the graduation ceremony at Uppsala University of three representatives from the Nobel Foundation. Perhaps because he was older than Silverberg and Georges Duval, his intellectual achievements seemed prodigious. The degree he was collecting was his third; already he had done original research in radioastronomy, helping to identify the unusual radio-sources that a decade later were termed ‘quasars’.
‘A spectacular career in astronomy seems guaranteed. It should be easy to track him down. He’ll be, what?, thirtyseven now, professor at least, well on his way to a Nobel Prize.’
We searched through the professional directories, telephoned Greenwich Observatory and the London Secretariat of the World Astronomical Federation.
No one had heard of Gunther Bergman.
‘Right, where is he?’ I asked Judy when we had exhausted all lines of inquiry. ‘For heaven’s sake, it’s twenty years; he should be world-famous by now.’
‘Perhaps he’s dead.’
‘That’s possible.’ I gazed down pensively at Judy’s quizzical face. ‘Put in a call to the Nobel Foundation. In fact, clear your desk and get all the international directories we can up here. We’re going to make the Comsats sing.’
Three weeks later, when I carried my bulky briefcase into Charles Whitehead’s office, there was an electric spring in my step.
Charles eyed me warily over his glasses. ‘James, I hear you’ve been hard on the trail of our missing geniuses. What have you got?’
‘A new programme.’
‘New? We’ve already got Georges Duval listed in Radio Times.’
‘For how long?’ I pulled a chair up to his desk and opened my briefcase, then spread the dozen files in front of him. ‘Let me put you in the picture. Judy and I have been back to 1948. In those twenty years there have been eleven cases of so-called geniuses. Georges Duval is the twelfth.’
I placed the list in front of him.
1948 Gunther Bergman (Uppsala, Sweden) 1950 Jaako Litmanen (Vaasa, Finland) 1952 John Warrender (Kansas City, USA) 1953 Arturo Bandini (Bologna, Italy) 1955 Gesai Ray (Calcutta, India) 1957 Giuliano Caldare (Palermo, Sicily) 1958 Wolfgang Herter (Cologne, Germany) 1960 Martin Sherrington (Canterbury, England) 1962 Josef Oblensky (Leningrad, USSR) 1964 Yen Hsi Shan (Wuhan, China) 1965 Robert Silvetherg (Tampa, USA) 1968 Georges Duval (Montereau, France)
Charles studied the list, now and then patting his forehead with a floral handkerchief. ‘Frankly, apart from Georges Duval, the names mean absolutely nothing.’
‘Isn’t that strange? There’s enough talent there to win all the Nobel Prizes three times over.’
‘Have you tried to trace them?’
I let out a cry of pain. Even the placid Judy gave a despairing shudder. ‘Have we tried? My God, we’ve done nothing else. Charles, apart from checking a hundred directories and registers, we’ve contacted the original magazines and news agencies, checked with the universities that originally offered them scholarships, talked on the overseas lines to the BBC reporters in New York, Delhi and Moscow.’
‘And? What do they know about them?’
‘Nothing. A complete blank.’
Charles shook his head doggedly. ‘They must be somewhere. What about the universities they were supposed to go to?’
‘Nothing there, either. It’s a curious thing, but not one of them actually went on to a university. We’ve contacted the senates of nearly fifty universities. Not a mention of them. They took external degrees while still at school, but after that they severed all connections with the academic world.’
Charles sat forward over the list, holding it like a portion of some treasure map. ‘James, it looks as if you’re going to win your bet. Somehow they all petered out in late adolescence. A sudden flaring of intelligence backed by prodigious memory, not matched by any real creative spark… that’s it, I suppose — none of them was a genius.’
‘As a matter of fact, I think they all were.’ Before he could stop me I went on. ‘Forget that for the moment. Whether or not they had genius is irrelevant. Certainly they had intellects vastly beyond the average, IQs of two hundred, enormous scholastic talents in a wide range of subjects. They had a sudden burst of fame and exposure and—’
‘They vanished into thin air. What are you suggesting — some kind of conspiracy?’
‘In a sense, yes.’
Charles handed me the list. ‘Come off it. Do you really mean that a sinister government bureau has smuggled them off, they’re slaving away now on some super-weapon?’
‘It’s possible, but I doubt it.’ I took a packet of photographs from the second folder. ‘Have a look at them.’
Charles picked up the first. ‘Ah, there’s Georges. He looks older here, those TV cameras are certainly ageing.’
‘It’s not Georges Duval. It’s Oblensky, the Russian boy, taken six years ago. Quite a resemblance, though.’ I spread the twelve photographs on the table top. Charles moved along the half-circle, comparing the over-large eyes and bony foreheads, the same steady gaze.
‘Wait a minute! Are you sure this isn’t Duval?’ Charles picked up Oblensky’s photograph and pointed to the figure of a young man in a light grey suit standing behind some mayoral official in a Leningrad parlour. ‘He was at Duval’s press conference, sitting right in front of us.’
I nodded to Judy. ‘You’re right, Charles. And he’s not only in that photo.’ I pulled together the photographs of Bobby Silverberg, Herter and Martin Sherrington. In each one the same balding figure in the dove-grey suit was somewhere in the background, his over-sharp eyes avoiding the camera lens. ‘No university admits to knowing him, nor do Shell, Philips, General Motors or a dozen other big international companies. Of course, there are other organizations he might be a talent scout for..
Charles had stood up, and was slowly walking around his desk. ‘Such as the CIA — you think he may be recruiting talent for some top-secret Government think-thank? It’s unlikely, but -’
‘What about the Russians?’ I cut in. ‘Or the Chinese? Let’s face it, eleven young men have vanished into thin air. What happened to them?’
Charles stared down at the photographs. ‘The strange thing is that I vaguely recognize all these faces. Those bony skulls, and those eyes… somewhere. Look, James, we may have the makings of a new programme here. This English prodigy, Martin Sherrington, he should be easy to track down. Then the German, Herter. Find them and we may be on to something.’