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done as well as he might have?
    He did! He remembered wanting to complain about it at the time, but since he’d passed the tests he hadn’t bothered. The day of the test a sparrow had got into the auditorium. It kept flying witlessly back and forth, back and forth, from one sealed window to the other. Who could concentrate with that going on? They decided that Birdie would apply to be retested on both the Stanford-Binet and the Skinner-Waxman. If for any reason he wasn’t feeling confident on the date the Regents office slotted him into, he could take a rain check. Mr. Mack thought that Birdie would find everyone ready to bend over backward.
    The problem appeared to be solved and Birdie was ready to go, but Mr. Mack was obliged, for form’s sake, to go over one or two more details. Beyond hereditary factors and the Regents tests, both of which measured potentiality, there was another group of components for accomplishment. Any exceptional service for the country or the economy was an automatic twenty-five points but this was hardly anything to count on. Similarly, a demonstration of physical, intellectual, or creative abilities markedly above the levels indicated by et cetera, et cetera.
    Birdie thought they could skip that too. But here, beneath the eraser, here was something to consider—the educational component. Already Birdie had five points for finishing high school. If he were to go on to college—
    Out of the question. Birdie wasn’t the college type. He wasn’t anybody’s fool, but on the other hand he wasn’t anybody’s Isaac Einstein.
    In general Mr. Mack would have applauded the realism of such a decision, but in the present circumstances it was better not to burn bridges. Any New York City resident had a right to attend any of the colleges in the city, either as a regular student or, lacking certain prerequisites, in a General Studies Annexe. It was something for Birdie to bear in mind.
    Mr. Mack felt terrible. He hoped Birdie would learn to look at his reclassification as a setback rather than a permanent defeat. Failure was only a point of view.
    Birdie agreed, but even this wasn’t enough to obtain his release. Mr. Mack urged Birdie to consider the question of contraception and genetics in the broadest possible light. Already there were too many people for the available resources. Without some system of voluntary limitation there would be more, more, disastrously more. Mr. Mack hoped that eventually Birdie would come to see that the Regents system, for all its obvious drawbacks, was both desirable and necessary.
    Birdie promised to try and look at it this way, and then he could go. Among the papers in the gray envelope was a pamphlet, “Your Regents,” put out by the National Educational Council, who said that the only effective way to prepare for his reexamination was to develop a confident, lively frame of mind. A month later Birdie kept his appointment on Centre Street in a confident, lively frame of mind. Only afterward, sitting by the fountain in the plaza discussing the tests with his fellow martyrs, did he realize that this had been Friday, July 13th. Jinxed! He didn’t have to wait for the special delivery letter to know his score was a cherry, an apple, and a banana. Even so, the letter was a mind-staggerer. He’d gone down one point on the I.Q. test; on the Skinner-Waxman Creativity Scale he’d sunk to a moron-level score of 4. His new total: 21.
    The 4 riled him. The first part of the Skinner-Waxman test had involved picking the funniest punch line from four multiple choices, and ditto the best endings to stories. This much he remembered from before but then they took him into a weird empty room. Two pieces of rope were hanging from the ceiling and Birdie was given a pliers and told to tie the two ropes together. You weren’t allowed to pull the ropes off their hooks.
    It was impossible. If you held the very end of one rope in your hand, you couldn’t possibly get hold of the