First Meetings Read online

  “Won’t let it interfere?” She laughed in consternation. “It took a year to get this grant, even though it’s one with obvious value for the current world situation. Even if I had a new research project on the back burner, you can’t pretend that this won’t postpone my degree by years.”

  “We recognize the problem this is causing you, but we’re prepared to grant you your degree with a project of…less…scope.”

  “Help me understand this,” she said. “You trust me so much that you’d grant me a degree without caring about my dissertation. Yet you don’t trust me enough to let me even take part in a vital project that I designed. Who’s going to run it?”

  She looked at her committee chairman. He blushed.

  “This isn’t even your area,” she said to him. “It’s nobody’s area but mine.”

  “As you said,” her chairman answered, “you designed the project. We’ll follow your plan exactly. Whatever data emerges, it will have the same value regardless of who heads it up.”

  She stood up. “Of course I’m leaving,” she said. “You can’t do this to me.”

  “Theresa,” said Dr. Howell.

  “Oh,” said Theresa, “is it your job to get me to go along with this?”

  “Theresa,” repeated the old woman. “You know perfectly well what this is about.”

  “No, I don’t,” said Theresa.

  “Nobody here at this table will admit it, but…it’s only ‘mostly’ about how young you are.”

  “So what’s the ‘partly’ that’s left over?” asked Theresa.

  “I think,” said Dr. Howell, “that if your father came out of retirement, suddenly there’d be no objection to one so young running an important research project.”

  Theresa looked around at the others. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Nobody has come out and said it,” said the dean, “but they have pointed out that the impetus for this came from the foundation’s main customer.”

  “The Hegemony,” said her chairman.

  “So I’m a hostage to my father’s politics.”

  “Or his religion,” said the dean. “Or whatever it is that’s driving him.”

  “And you’ll let your academic program be manipulated for…for…”

  “The university depends on grants,” said the dean. “Imagine what will happen to us if, one by one, our grant applications start being refused. The Hegemony has enormous influence. Everywhere.”

  “In other words,” said Dr. Howell, “there really isn’t anywhere else you can go. We’re one of the most independent universities, and we aren’t free. That’s why they’re determined to grant you a doctorate despite the fact that you can’t do your research. Because you deserve one, and they know this is grossly unfair.”

  “So what’s to stop them from keeping me from teaching, too? Who would even have me? A Ph.D. who can’t show her research—what a joke I’d be.”

  “We’d hire you,” said the dean.

  “Why?” demanded Theresa. “A charity case? What could I possibly accomplish at a university where I can’t do research?”

  Dr. Howell sighed. “Because of course you’d continue to run the project. Who else could manage it?”

  “Without my name on it,” said Theresa.

  “It’s important research,” said Dr. Howell. “The survival of the human race is at stake. There’s a war on, you know.”

  “Then tell that to the foundation and get them to tell the Hegemony to—”

  “Theresa,” said Dr. Howell. “Your name won’t be on the project. It won’t be listed as your dissertation. But everybody in the field will know exactly who did it. You’ll have a tenure track position here, a doctorate, and a dissertation whose authorship is an open secret. All we’re really asking you to do is swallow hard and get along with the ridiculous requirements that have been forced on us—and no, we will not listen to your decision now. In fact, we will ignore anything you say or do for the next three days. Talk to your father. Talk to any of us, all you want. But no answer until you’ve had a chance to get over the shock.”

  “Don’t treat me like a child.”

  “No, my dear,” said Dr. Howell. “Our plan is to treat you like a human being that we value too much to…what is your favorite term?…‘throw away.’ ”

  The dean stood up. “And with that, we will adjourn this terrible meeting, in the hope that you will stay with us under these cruel circumstances.” And he walked out of the room.

  The members of her committee shook her hand—she accepted their handshakes numbly—and Dr. Howell hugged her and whispered, “Your father’s war will have many casualties before it’s through. You may bleed for him, but for God’s sake, please don’t die for him. Professionally speaking.”

  The meeting—and, quite possibly, her career—was over.

  John Paul spotted her crossing the quad and made it a point to be leaning against the stair rail at the entrance to the Human Sciences building.

  “Isn’t it a little hot for a sweater?” he asked.

  She paused, looking at him just long enough that he figured she must be trying to remember who he was.

  “Wiggin,” she said.

  “John Paul,” he added, holding out his hand.

  She looked at it, then at his face. “Isn’t it a little hot for a sweater,” she said vaguely.

  “Funny, I was just thinking that,” said John Paul. Clearly this girl was distracted by something.

  “Is this some technique that works for you? Telling a girl she is dressed inappropriately? Or is it merely the mention of clothing that ought to come off?”

  “Wow,” said John Paul. “You saw right to my soul. And yes, it works on most women. I have to beat them back with a stick.”

  Again a momentary pause. Only this time he didn’t wait for her to come up with some put-down. If he was going to recover any chance, it would take some fast misdirection.

  “I’m sorry that I spoke the thought that came into my head,” said John Paul. “I said ‘Isn’t it a little hot for a sweater?’ because it’s a little hot for a sweater. And because I wanted to see if you had a minute I could talk to you.”

  “I don’t,” said Ms. Brown. She walked past him toward the door of the building.

  He followed. “Actually, we’re in the middle of your office hours right now, aren’t we?”

  “So go to my office,” she said.

  “Mind if I walk with you?”

  She stopped. “It’s not my office hours,” she said.

  “I knew I should have checked,” he said.

  She pushed open the door and entered the building.

  He followed. “Look at it this way—there won’t be a line outside your door.”

  “I teach a low-prestige, bad-time-of-day section of Human Community,” said Ms. Brown. “There’s never a line outside my door.”

  “Long enough I ended up clear out there,” said John Paul.

  They were at the foot of the stairs leading up to the second floor. She faced him again. “Mr. Wiggin, you are better than average when it comes to cleverness, and perhaps another day I might have enjoyed our badinage.”

  He grinned. A woman who would say “badinage” to a man was rare—a tiny subset of the women who actually knew the word.

  “Yes, yes,” she said, as if trying to answer his smile. “Today isn’t a good day. I won’t see you in my office. I have things on my mind.”

  “I have nothing on mine,” said John Paul, “and I’m a good listener, amazingly discreet.”

  She walked on up the stairs ahead of him. “I find that hard to believe.”

  “Oh, you can believe it,” he said. “Practically everything in my school records, for instance, is a lie, and yet I never tell anybody.”

  Again it took her a moment to get the joke, but this time she answered with one yip of laughter. Progress.

  “Ms. Brown,” he said, “I really did want to talk to you about ideas from class. Whatever you might have th
ought, I wasn’t coming on to you with some line, and I’m not trying to be clever with you. I was just surprised that you seem to be teaching a version of Human Community that isn’t like the standard stuff—I mean, there’s nothing about it in the textbook, which is all about primates and bonding and hierarchies—”

  “We’ll be covering all that.”

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve had a professor who knew things I hadn’t already learned through my own reading.”

  “I don’t know things,” she said. “I’m trying to find out things. There’s a difference.”

  “Ms. Brown,” said John Paul, “I’m not going to go away.”

  She stopped at the door of her office. “And why is that? Apart from the fact that I could take that as a threat to stalk me.”

  “Ms. Brown,” said John Paul. “I think you might be smarter than me.”

  She laughed in his face. “Of course I’m smarter than you.”

  He pointed at her triumphantly. “See? And you’re arrogant about it, too. We have so much in common. Are you really going to shut this door in my face?”

  She shut the door in his face.

  Theresa tried to work on her next lecture. She tried to read several scientific journals. She couldn’t concentrate. All she could think about was them taking her project away from her—not the work, just the credit. She tried to convince herself that what mattered was the science, not the prestige. She was not one of those pathetic on-the-make grad students who were all about career, with research serving as no more than a stepping stone. It was the research itself that she cared about. So why not recognize the political realities, accept their quislingesque “offer,” and be content?

  It’s not about the credit. It’s about the Hegemony perverting the whole system of science as a means of extortion. Not that science is particularly pure, except compared to politics.

  She found herself displaying the data of her students on her desk, calling up their pictures and records and glancing at them. In the back of her mind she knew she was looking for John Paul Wiggin. What he had said about his school records being a lie intrigued her. And looking him up was such a trivial task that she could do it even while fretting over what they were doing to her.

  John Paul Wiggin. Second child of Brian and Anne Wiggin; older brother named Andrew. Born in Racine, Wisconsin, so apparently he was an expert on what weather was appropriate for sweaters. Straight As in the Racine public school system. Graduated a year early, valedictorian, lots of clubs, three years of soccer. Exactly what the admissions people were looking for. And his record here was just as good—nothing less than an A, and not an easy course on the list. A year younger than her. And yet…no declared major, which suggested that even though he had enough credit hours that he could graduate at the end of this year, he still hadn’t settled on a field of study.

  A bright dilettante. A time-waster.

  Except that he said it was all a lie.

  Which parts? Surely not the grades—he was clearly bright enough to earn them. And what else could possibly be a lie? What would be the point?

  He was just a boy trying to be intriguing. He spotted that she was young for a teacher, and in his school-centered life, the teacher was at the pinnacle of prestige. Maybe he tried to ingratiate himself with all his teachers. If he became a problem, she’d have to ask around and see if it was a pattern.

  The desk beeped to tell her she had a call.

  She pressed NO PICTURE and then ANSWER. She knew who it was, of course, even though no identity or telephone number appeared.

  “Hello, Father,” she said.

  “Turn on the picture, darlin’, I want to see your face.”

  “You’ll have to search through your memory,” she said. “Father, I don’t want to talk right now.”

  “Those bastards can’t do this to you.”

  “Yes they can.”

  “I’m sorry, darlin’, I never meant my own decisions to impinge on you.”

  “If the Buggers blow up planet Earth,” she said, “because you aren’t there to stop them, that will impinge on me.”

  “And if we defeat the Buggers but we’ve lost everything that makes it worth being human—”

  “Father, don’t give me the stump speech, I’ve got it down pat.”

  “Darlin’, I’m just saying that I wouldn’t have done this if I’d known they’d try to take away your career.”

  “Oh, right, you’ll put the whole human race at risk, but not your daughter’s career.”

  “I’m not putting anything at risk. They already have everything I know. I’m a theorist, not a commander—it’s a commander they need now, a whole different skill set. So this is really just…what, their fit of pique because my leaving the I.F. was bad public relations for them and—”

  “Father, didn’t you notice that I didn’t call you?”

  “You only just found out.”

  “Yes, and who told you? Someone from the school?”

  “No, it was Grasdolf, he has a friend at the foundation and—”

  “Exactly.”

  Father sighed. “You’re such a cynic.”

  “What good does it do to take a hostage if you don’t send a ransom note?”

  “Grasdolf is a friend, they’re just using him, and I meant what I said about—”

  “Father, you might think, for a moment, that you’d give up your quixotic crusade in order to make my life easier, but the fact is you won’t, and you know it and I know it. I don’t even want you to give it up. I don’t even care. All right? So your conscience is clear, their attempt at extortion was bound to fail, the school is taking care of me after their fashion, and hey, I’ve got a smart, cute, and annoyingly conceited boy in one of my classes trying to hit on me, so life is just about perfect.”

  “Aren’t you just the noblest martyr.”

  “See how quickly it turns into a fight?”

  “Because you won’t talk to me, you just say whatever you think will make me go away.”

  “Apparently I still haven’t found it. But am I getting warm?”

  “Why do you do this? Why do you close the door on everybody who cares about you?”

  “As far as I know, I’ve only closed the door on people who want something from me.”

  “And what do you think I want?”

  “To be known as the most brilliant military theorist of all time and still have your family as devoted to you as we might have been if we had actually known you. And see? I don’t want this conversation, we’ve been through it all before, and when I hang up on you, which I’m about to do, please don’t keep calling me back and leaving pathetic messages on my desk. And yes, I love you and I’m really fine about this so it’s over, period, good-bye.”

  She hung up.

  Only then was she able to cry.

  Tears of frustration, that’s all they were. Nothing. She needed the release. It wouldn’t even matter if other people knew she was crying—as long as her research was dispassionate, she didn’t have to live that way.

  When she stopped crying she laid her head down on her arms on the desk and maybe she even dozed for a while. Must have done. It was late afternoon. She was hungry and she needed to pee. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast and she always got lightheaded about four if she skipped lunch.

  The student records were still on her desk. She wiped them and got up and straightened her sweaty clothing and thought, It really is too warm for a sweater, especially a sloppy thick bulky one like this. But she didn’t have a shirt on underneath so there was no solution for it, she’d just have to go home as a ball of sweat.

  If she ever went home during daylight hours she might have learned to dress in a way that would be adaptable to afternoon temperatures. But right now she had no interest at all in working late. Somebody else’s name would be on anything she did, right? Screw them all and the grants they rode in on.

  She opened the door…

  And there was the Wiggin boy, sitting
with his back to the door, laying out plastic silverware on paper napkins. The smell of hot food nearly made her step back into the office.

  He looked up at her but did not smile. “Spring rolls from Hunan,” he said, “chicken satay from My Thai, salads from Garden Green, and if you want to wait a few more minutes, we’ve got stuffed mushrooms from Trompe L’Oeuf.”

  “All I want,” she said, “is to pee. I don’t want to do it on insane students camped at my door, so if you’d move to one side…”

  He moved.

  When she had washed up she thought of not going back to her office. The office door had locked behind her. She had her purse. She owed nothing to this boy.

  But curiosity got the better of her. She wasn’t going to eat any of the food, but she had to find out the answer to one question.

  “How did you know when I was coming out?” she demanded, as she stood over the picnic he had prepared.

  “I didn’t,” he said. “The pizza and the burritos hit the garbage half an hour ago and fifteen minutes ago, respectively.”

  “You mean you’ve been ordering food at intervals so that—”

  “So that whenever you came out, there’d be something hot and/or fresh.”

  “And/or?”

  He shrugged. “If you don’t like it, that’s fine. Of course, I’m on a budget because what I live on is whatever they pay me for custodial work in the physical sciences building, so this is half my week’s wages down the toilet if you don’t like it.”

  “You really are a liar,” she said. “I know what they pay part-time custodians and it would take you two weeks to pay for all this.”

  “So I guess pity won’t get you to sit down and eat with me.”

  “Yes it will,” she said. “But not pity for you.”

  “For whom, then?” he asked.

  “For myself, of course,” she said, sitting down. “I wouldn’t touch the mushrooms—I’m allergic to shiitake and Oeuf seems to think they’re the only true mushroom. And the satay is bound to be cold because they never serve it hot even in the restaurant.”

  He wafted a paper napkin over her crossed legs and handed her a knife and fork. “So do you want to know which part of my records are a lie?” he asked.