PORKY WAS SITTING in one of the wooden booths, flipping through some papers that I took to be bills of lading. I took them to be bills of lading not because I had any firsthand experience with bills of lading, but because I had encountered the term in my ramble through the unshelved books in the library, liked the sound of it, and welcomed an opportunity to use it, almost as much as I did splines, ...

I SPENT MANY HOURS in the library before I admitted to myself that I wasn’t likely to find the answer to Miss Rheingold’s question in the books that were considered useful for students in the seventh grade. I had browsed pretty thoroughly, and I’d learned some interesting things along the way, but I didn’t feel any closer to the answer than I had been when I’d first slipped in through the boiler room window. ...

     My immediate problem, as I now see it, was that I had acquired over the years a number of overly simple ideas, ideas based on a view of the surface of things only, and they had become too firmly rooted in my mind—the solar-system model of the atom, for example, and the sectioned-map view of social boundaries, that sort of thing. ...

     In those days I was convinced that I was surrounded by opportunities for doing the wrong thing, and I knew from experience that I usually didn’t even notice I’d seized one of these opportunities until it was too late. The difference between the right thing and any of a million wrong things often seemed so tiny as to be nearly invisible. Anything might trip you up, and it was more likely to be a pebble than a boulder. I haven’t had much reason to alter this conviction in all the years since then. ...

I BEGAN MY RESEARCH the very next weekend. I’ve always been conscientious about such things. Give me an assignment and I get right down to it. I was one of those children who ate the lima beans first and saved the mashed potatoes for last, as a reward. I postponed work on the lighthouse until I had at least made a good start toward answering the question. ...

THAT NIGHT, I got on the phone right after dinner. It took hours, but by the end of the evening I had identified at least some of the members of every group. A competition had developed when kids decided that anyone who succeeded in figuring out all the members of the groups would get on the good side of Miss Rheingold. As a result, ...

“WELL, PETER, how was it?” my father asked that evening, calling me from the bathroom where he had been soaking his hands free of gasoline and grease from the gas station where he worked. This procedure had fascinated me since I had first seen it as a child. It produced iridescent swirls on the surface of the water in the sink. My original thought had been that this was its purpose, and that mistaken notion still interfered with my attaining a conventional understanding of washing up. As far as I was concerned, it was still playing with water.  ...

     One at a time we came to the front of the room, reached into the fishbowl, and drew a slip of paper.     When I bring to mind the moment when I reached into the bowl to get my question, I experience it all again, not as memory, but as a repetition of the immediate data of experience. I am there. ...

     Having caught our attention, she delivered a brief talk about the value and importance of science and the adventure in learning that we were about to undertake. I’ve forgotten nearly all the details of this talk—in fact, as I attempt to reconstruct it now, it seems to be largely about legs, which I know can’t be correct—

     “What do you think, Sylvester?” asked Miss Rheingold, glancing again at the class list.     “Biff,” said Biff.     Behind me, Nicky Furman said, “Sylvester?”     “All right,” said Miss Rheingold. “Biff.”     Biff said, “Millions of miles?”  ...