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school system I represented. We hadn’t yet said anything worth remembering.
    If we had folded up and vanished quietly right then and there, leaving nothing but an empty table, we might have entered the history of American science as noshows who got sick or something. There was already an empty table, which would stay empty, only 5 meters away from ours. Father and I had heard that it was going to stay empty and why. The would-be exhibitor and his mother and father were all in the hospital in Lima, Ohio, not Lima, Peru. That was their hometown. They had scarcely backed out of their driveway the day before, headed for Cleveland, they thought, with the exhibit in the trunk, when they were rear-ended by a drunk driver.
    The accident wouldn’t have been half as serious as it turned out to be if the exhibit hadn’t included several bottles of different acids which broke and touched off the gasoline. Both vehicles were immediately engulfed in flames.
    The exhibit was, I think, meant to show several important services that acids, which most people were afraid of and didn’t like to think much about, were performing every day for Humanity.
     
     
    THE PEOPLE WHO looked us over and asked us questions, and did not like what they saw and heard, sent for a judge. They wanted us disqualified. We were worse than dishonest. We were ridiculous!
    I wanted to throw up. I said to Father, “Dad, honest to God, I think we better get out of here. We made a mistake.”
    But he said we had nothing to be ashamed of, and that we certainly weren’t going to go home with our tails between our legs.
    Vietnam!
    So a judge did come over, and easily determined that I had no understanding whatsoever of the exhibit. He then took Father aside and negotiated a political settlement, man to man. He did not want to stir up bad feelings in our home county, which had sent me to Cleveland as its champion. Nor did he want to humiliate Father, who was an upstanding member of his community who obviously had not read the rules carefully. He would not humiliate us with a formal disqualification, which might attract unfavorable publicity, if Father in turn would not insist on having my entry put in serious competition with the rest as though it were legitimate.
    When the time came, he said, he and the other judges would simply pass us by without comment. It would be their secret that we couldn’t possibly win anything.
    That was the deal.
    History.

5
    THE PERSON WHO won that year was a girl from Cincinnati. As it happened, she too had an exhibit about crystallography. She, however, had either grown her own or gathered specimens herself from creek beds and caves and coal mines within 100 kilometers of her home. Her name was Mary Alice French, I remember, and she would go on to place very close to the bottom in the National Finals in Washington, D.C.
    When she set off for the Finals, I heard, Cincinnati was so proud of her and so sure she would win, or at least place very high with her crystals, that the Mayor declared “Mary Alice French Day.”
     
     
    I HAVE TO wonder now, with so much time in which to think about people I’ve hurt, if Father and I didn’t indirectly help set up Mary Alice French for her terrible disappointment in Washington. There is a good chance that the judges in Cleveland gave her First Prize because of the moral contrast between her exhibit and ours.
    Perhaps, during the judging, science was given a backseat, and because of our ill fame, she represented a golden opportunity to teach a rule superior to any law of science: that honesty was the best policy.
    But who knows?
     
     
    MANY, MANY YEARS after Mary Alice French had her heart broken in Washington, and I had become a teacher at Tarkington, I had a male student from Cincinnati, Mary Alice French’s hometown. His mother’s side of the family had just sold Cincinnati’s sole remaining daily paper and its leading TV station, and a lot of radio stations and weekly papers, too, to the