Stops were rarely used alone. They tended to be piled on top of each other in combinations that were designed to take advantage of the available harmonics (more tasty mathematics here!). Certain combinations in particular were used over and over again. Lots of blockflцtes, in varying lengths, for the quiet Offertory, for example. The organ included an ingenious mechanism called the preset, which enabled the organist to select a particular combination of stops--stops he himself had chosen--instantly. He would punch a button and several stops would bolt out from the console, driven by pneumatic pressure, and in that instant the organ would become a different instrument with entirely new timbres.

The next summer both Lawrence and Alice, his mother, were colonized by a distant cousin--a stupendous badass of a virus. Lawrence escaped from it with an almost imperceptible tendency to drag one of his feet. Alice wound up in an iron lung. Later, unable to cough effectively, she got pneumonia and died.

Lawrence's father, Godfrey, freely confessed that he was not equal to the burdens now laid on his shoulders. He resigned from his position at the small college in Virginia and moved, with his son, to a small house in Moorhead, Minnesota, next door to where Bunyan and Blanche had settled. Later he got a job teaching at a nearby normal school.

At this point, all of the responsible adults in Lawrence's life seemed to arrive at a tacit agreement that the best way to raise him--certainly the easiest--was to leave him alone. On the rare occasions when Lawrence requested adult intervention in his life, he was usually asking questions that no one could answer. At the age of sixteen, having found nothing in the local school system to challenge him, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse went off to college. He matriculated at Iowa State College, which among other things was the site of a Naval ROTC installation in which he was forcibly enrolled.