“George. It’s time to go. Are you ready?”

George was in his room, working on a model airplane.

“Sure, mom. Be there in a minute.” He kept working on the model. The last thing in the world he wanted to do was go, but he knew he had no choice.

Midsummer exams. The most cruel, disgusting thing that anyone could have dreamed up. Mr. Smith, the school principal at Bartletville Middle School, had come up with the idea a few years back of giving a test to all of his pupils in the second week of July to see if they were retaining what they had learned over the previous school year. Every parent in town had been excited about the idea, but to the students themselves, test day was like finding a big spot of mold on your sandwich after you had already eaten half of it.

“George!” called his mother again. “Come on! You’re going to be late!”

“All right,” answered George wearily, putting down the model airplane. He knew there was no way of avoiding it. As he passed his dresser on the way out of his room, he noticed the clear rock he had found at the fallen star. He picked it up. It felt cold as always, and again caused his fingers to tingle. He put it in his pocket, then went out to meet his fate.

The tests were every bit as disgusting as George had expected them to be. The history portion was full of questions about Lewis and Clark that George struggled with. He didn’t do much better in the science portion on earthquakes. But all of that was easy compared to the algebra questions in the math portion of the test. George just sat in helpless frustration, looking at question after question that he couldn’t answer. They hadn’t covered any of this last year in school! How could he be tested on something he had never learned?

As George sat staring helplessly at the math questions on his desk, he suddenly realized there was something very hot in his pocket. Reaching inside, he found that it was the clear rock from the fallen star, which had been cold as an ice cube just a short time before. George took the rock out of his pocket and put it on his desk. It was almost too hot to touch. Then he went back to trying to answer—or rather, guess—the impossible math questions.

After making a few wild guesses, George moved the rock and turned the page. The page was crinkly and wouldn’t stay down. George slid the rock over the page, on top of some of the questions. It made a good paperweight.

George was staring absently at the rock, trying to decide what to guess on question 33, when he suddenly noticed that he could see numbers on the page through the rock. At first he assumed he was just seeing the math questions on his test, but when he looked closer, he realized that there were other numbers as well. In fascination he moved the rock—which was still very hot—across the page. Whenever he moved it over a test question, he saw not only the question itself through the rock, but the answer as well! When he moved the rock away, the answer disappeared.

This was impossible. How could a rock answer math questions? George’s hand was trembling, even though it was not cold. This was clearly no ordinary rock. What was it? Why had he been drawn to it, and felt such a strange fascination every time he gazed through it? Could it hurt him? Was it his for a reason?

George heard a noise from the front of the class. Mr. Dalton, the teacher giving the test, was staring at him in an unfriendly way. Quickly George picked up his pencil and went to work on the math questions. At first he set the rock aside and went back to trying to guess the answers. But the rock almost seemed to beckon to him to use it, and soon he was sliding it across the paper over the questions he did not know, rapidly writing down the answers he saw through it.

Then a sudden thought occurred to George. What if the answers were wrong? After all, how could a rock do math, or know what the right answers were? Flipping back the page, George moved the rock over the easiest question, the only one he felt reasonably certain he had gotten right. He could see the question and his handwritten answer through the rock. He then moved the rock to the next question, one he had guessed at. This time he saw not only the question and his handwritten answer through the rock, but a red line through his answer and the correct answer written next to it!

George stared at the rock again. It had corrected his answer. This was impossible. Slowly, George wrote down the correct answer, then after correcting a few more of his first guesses, flipped back to the page he had been on. He continued to work his way through the test, writing down the answers he saw through the rock.

This was definitely better than guessing. Suddenly a new thought came into George’s mind. Was this cheating? After all, he was being helped to answer questions he otherwise could not have done. George pondered for a moment, not sure what to think. Finally, he went back to answering the test questions. All he knew was that he had never studied any of this in school last year and he didn’t know any of the answers, or even how to do this type of math. He finished the entire math portion of the test just as it was ending.

While waiting for the next part of the test to start, he stared at the rock in fascination. Clearly this was no ordinary rock. But where had it come from, and why had it come to him?

The next section of the test was spelling, one of the few subjects George felt confident about. Once the test began, he immediately moved the rock over the first misspelled word to see what would happen. All he saw through the rock was the same misspelled word. He tried the next one, and the next. The result was the same. There were no answers. George also noticed that the rock was cooling down, and was no longer as hot to touch, although it still caused his fingers to tingle. He wrote down a wrong answer to one question and moved the rock over it. There was no correction this time.

What could it all mean? Could the rock do math, but not spelling? Or had it just decided to give no more answers for the day—if a rock could decide anything. With a sigh, George pushed the rock aside and began working on the misspelled words. He didn’t have time to try to figure out the secrets of the rock now.

Spelling was the last portion of the test, so George didn’t have a chance to try it out again. When the test ended, he put it back into his pocket. The rock was once again as cold as ice. George didn’t know what it all meant, but knew that he would try out the rock on everything he could think of when he got home.

Over the next several days, George tried the rock on everything. He held it over the crossword puzzle in the newspaper, but saw nothing underneath (except the empty crossword puzzle, of course). He held it up to the TV screen during game show questions, but never saw anything different through it. He got out one of his dad’s old college algebra books and held it up to the questions, but there were never any answers underneath. He held it over newspapers and magazines, books and ingredients labels on cans of food. Nothing. He even held it up to Door Jam’s eye and to the back of his sister’s head (when she wasn’t looking) to see if he could see any evidence of intelligent life through it. But other than a twinkle in Door Jam’s eye, he saw nothing out of the ordinary through it either time.

What could it be, he asked himself again and again. Why would it show him the answers to his midsummer math exam, but nothing else? Why was it always cold as ice, but had been hot during the math test when it gave him the answers? More than ever, George wanted now to go back to the fallen star where he had found the rock, to see if there were any other rocks like it, or any clues about what it was or where it came from. But his mother had again forbidden him to go there after she read an article in the newspaper that scientists from the university had found it, and were saying that it contained strange trace elements that even they could not identify.