NERD CAMP.(Short Story)

Another Saturday afternoon, and time again for Mandatory Fun. The High Math boys were sprawled on a patch of grass in front of their dormitory, waiting glumly for the games to begin. It was summer in Baltimore, and the wettest spring in memory had left the lawns at Johns Hopkins University deep green and as soft as velvet. Halfway across the quad, some High Verbals were waving banners in the sun, babbling excitedly and chasing one another around with high-pitched squeals. Michael Scarito watched them for a moment and yawned. Then he turned to his friend Andrew Hunter. "There must be a wireless network around here somewhere, but I can't seem to hook into it," he said. "Maybe it's encrypted." Hunter looked up from his fantasy novel and smirked. "If that were true, you'd still be able to pick it up with your Wi-Fi card."

On sunny days like this, the Center for Talented Youth--or nerd camp, as most of the attendees called it--could almost pass for some Indian-themed summer camp in the Catskills. But Scarito and Hunter weren't your typical campers. Scarito, at fifteen, was already a licensed computer technician. Two years ago, he had installed a server for his mother's medical office, in York, Pennsylvania. ("They got quotes from Dell and Gateway, but he way underbid them," his father told me.) Hunter, who was also fifteen, was an avid programmer who helped administer his high school's computers. Sitting on the grass side by side, they looked like a young Laurel and Hardy: Scarito short and stout, with thick black locks hanging in front of his eyes; Hunter tall and knobby, with buzz-cut hair and eyebrows screwed into a look of perpetual disbelief.

Like the other High Math boys, Scarito and Hunter were here to study engineering, and they had run a gantlet of tests for the privilege. The center accepts only the top one per cent of all students--those who score as well on the S.A.T. in junior high as the average student does as a high-school senior--and not every camper is accepted with equal enthusiasm. Some qualify only for humanities courses, some only for math or science courses, and some score so high (above 700 on the math or verbal portion before the age of thirteen) that they take part in a long-term project, the Study of Exceptional Talent.

The boys on the lawn were among the top math scorers at the center. They had spent the past two weeks building cardboard mousetraps and spaghetti bridges, measuring the strength of uncooked pasta in compression and testing girder designs with a truss calculator. They had relished sitting through six-hour daily classes, doing a college semester's work in three weeks. They just couldn't get their minds around Mandatory Fun.

Today's event was the Woohoo! Olympics. Any minute now, the head resident would come charging out of camp headquarters, bearing a mock torch of black and orange chiffon. Then the students would spend three hours competing in sack races, water-balloon tosses, hula-hoop contests, and tugs-of-war.

Only later, in one of the dorms, while the rest of his team was busy playing Ping-Pong and pool, would Scarito find what he was seeking. "Check this out," he murmured, shuffling past Hunter with a twisted smile.

They made their way to the back of the room, shoulders slumped with suspicious nonchalance. When they reached what looked like a closet, Scarito glanced around at the other campers, then opened the door a crack. Inside, a tall bank of sleek machinery stood behind tinted glass, flickering with green L.E.D.s in the darkness: the fabled computer router. They gazed at it in silence, their minds racing. "If we can find a D.H.C.P. server, we can finally get on the Internet," Scarito said. "But I might have to manually reconfigure my card." Hunter grinned; if anyone knew how to do that, it would be someone at nerd camp.