A Reuter’s correspondent, anticipating a fight over Mike’s status as an heir, tried to sneak in his own test of Mike’s competence: “Mr. Smith? What do you know about the laws of inheritance?” Mike knew that he was having trouble grokking the human concept of property and, in particular, the ideas of bequest and inheritance. So he stuck to the book—which Jubal recognized as “Ely on Inheritance and Bequest,” chapter one. Mike recited what he had read, with precision and no expression, for page after page, while the room settled into silence and his interrogator gulped. Jubal let it go on until
...more
