If he can talk at all

He glanced at the timekeeper inside the front cover of the manual.  Come on,  Kit said.  I have to get back to school.

And you have to feed me.

Normally Kit would have laughed at this, yet another ofPonch s stratagems to get an extra meal. But the laughter had been knocked out of him by the unexpectedness of what he d just seen.Since when do the Powers That Be dump an autistic kid into an Ordeal 

 Come on,  Kit said toPonch . They went home.

After school Kit went straight to Tom and Carl s, the discreet way, to tell him what he d found.

 Physically, he s there all right  mostly,  Kit said, sitting at the table with Tom again.  Or soPonch says. I m still working on what he meant by that conditional description he gave me.But Darryl s problem  Why didn t anything about it turn up in the manual before 

 Need-to-know restrictions, possibly,  Tom said.  And often enough themanual ll let you find outsomething for yourself, rather than just tell you about it. That approach can keep you from prejudging a situation. He paged through his own manual to Darryl s entry.  Certainly it confirms that he has an individualized type of autistic disorder. The manual says it s a fairly recent development. He hasn t been autistic from a very young age: It seems to have come on him suddenly, shortly after he turned eight.

 So the Ordeal itself didn t have anything to do with it 

 I don t know that for sure. It wouldn tseem to be connected  but we could be wrong there. At any rate, because the manual doesn t say anything further, it suggests that the Powers That Be don t think we need any more detail on that particular facet of the situation. Or that what you discover during investigation may be more valuable than whatThey already know.

 It doesn t seem fair somehow,  Kit said after a moment, trying to find words for what was making him so uncomfortable.  You d think he has enough problems. Why s he been stuck in the middle of an Ordeal, on top of everything else