by Smiley, Jane
Money was one aspect of present universality. The uncles in their crewcuts had been succeeded by other uncles in Afros, ponytails, razor cuts as up-to-the-minute as any on Wall Street, as well as by aunts in bobs or curls or chignons, aunts in blue jeans whose locks flowed to their waists, even, on one memorable occasion, by an aunt who clipped her hair very close—one quarter of an inch—and put a note on her office door advising students who desired to meet with her that she could be found on the university rifle range. Uncles and aunts all over the university taught in a universal diversity of accents. The students responded in kind.
And the university shamelessly promised everything to everyone, and charged so much that prospective students tended to believe the promises. While a state university, unlike an Ivy League institution, did not promise membership in the ruling class (Wasn’t that the only real reason, Ivar thought, that four years at Harvard could cost $100,000?) Ivar’s university, over the years, had made serious noises to all sorts of constituencies: Students would find good jobs, the state would see a return on its educational investment, businesses could harvest enthusiastic and well-trained workers by the hundreds, theory and technology would break through limits as old as the human race (and some lucky person would get to patent the breakthroughs). At the very least, the students could expect to think true, beautiful, and profound thoughts, and thereafter live better lives. At the very very least, students could expect to slip the parental traces, get drunk, get high, have sex, seek passion, taste freedom and irresponsibility surrounded by the best facilities that money could buy. Its limits expanding at the speed of light, the university could teach a kid, male or female, to do anything from reading a poem to turning protein molecules into digital memory, from brewing beer to reinterpreting his or her entire past.
Over the years, Ivar thought, everyone around the university had given free rein to his or her desires, and the institution had, with a fine, trembling responsiveness, answered, “Why not?” It had become, more than anything, a vast network of interlocking wishes, some of them modest, some of them impossible, many of them conflicting, many of them complementary. Ivar himself resisted neither the wishes nor those who offered funds to pay for them. The most that he could say for himself was that, from time to time, he had felt obscurely uneasy.
Dr. Bo Jones was a well-meaning old coot, no more or less benign than anyone else, inquisitive and eccentric, not unusually greedy or calculating. He had found a way to ask the questions he wanted to ask at university expense. No one had stopped him. Ivar dialed Mrs. Walker, out in the office. He said, “Mrs. Walker, try and find out who is paying for Dr. Jones’ trip to, where is it?”
“Kirghizia, Ivar. I’ve looked into it. He seems to have gotten a grant from Mid-America Pork By-Products, which is a subsidiary of Western Egg and Milk, which is a subsidiary of—”
“The TransNationalAmerica Corporation.”
Simultaneously, Ivar and Mrs. Walker sighed two large, knowing sighs. Ivar said, “Where do you think he is?”
“Well, I did speak to Mrs. Jones, and she did get a cable last night which read, ‘Have found horses and guides. Setting out early in the a.m. for the mountain districts. Have received assurances that rumors of warring clans are much exaggerated.’
“Thank you,” said Ivar.
67
Deus ex Machina
IT HAD NOT escaped his secretary that Dean Nils Harstad was but a wreck of the complacent, self-important know-it-all that he had once been. The schedule that he had formerly maintained, which suited her right down to the ground because it left her plenty of time to pursue her own calling, which was selling Amway products over the telephone, had been shot to hell, and her sales had fallen off by a third. At this rate, her vacation in Cancún was in serious jeopardy. The Hellmich woman had been gone for weeks, but it looked like Dean Harstad was going to be sitting in her office with her working through every little detail of his abandonment until she quit or he retired, whichever came sooner.
It was for this reason that she felt no qualms about ushering a guy in overalls named Joe Miller into the dean’s office and letting him sit there until the dean finally came in. At that point, just as the dean was hanging up his coat and readying himself to colonize his usual chair beside her desk and begin his lamentation, she said, “Oh, sir, someone is waiting for you in your office. He’s been waiting since—” The dean glanced wanly through the open doorway, and looked as though he might sit down anyway, but she stopped him. “Really, sir. He’s got important papers.”
The dean sighed a martyred sigh, but he did go in. Moments later, she heard him intone, “Sir, I don’t know you, but let me ask you if your most cherished dreams have ever been blasted—”
“I don’t know about that—” began Joe Miller, and Dean Harstad’s secretary got up to close the door before pulling her client list out of her purse and dialing an outside line.
An hour later, Dean Nils Harstad, transformed into a dynamo, shot out of his office with a roar of purposefulness, pushing Joe Miller ahead of him and saying to his secretary, “Call Ivar. Tell him I’m on the way over. Tell him to stay right where he is and not move a muscle. Tell him to call the president of the university and the university lawyer and get them there.”
• • •
“WELL,” said Joe Miller to the phalanx of Ph.D.’s and such sitting across from him at the university’s big walnut meeting table, “We’ve been picking up Mr. Stroop’s mail at the post office all along, ever since he had that stroke he had, and went up to the rehab center. And I would take it over there, and sometimes open it for him, and he would nod if I was to keep it for him, and shake his head if I was to throw it away. And the other thing was that he took me to a place in his house where all his important papers were kept not long before he died. He didn’t have a lawyer, because, as you may know”—here he nodded to Dean Harstad, the palest man Joe had ever seen next to Provost Harstad; he made a mental note to tell his wife about them, they were a sight—“he did believe that lawyers were always being paid off to show their clients’ files to the FBI, the CIA, and the big ag companies.”
Nils smiled warmly, as if this particular trait in Loren Stroop were especially endearing to him.
“So he had all his papers in his house, and, you know, farmers of my father’s generation and Loren’s generation were pretty mistrustful after their experiences in the Depression—” He coughed, reminding himself to get to the point. “Anyway, here’s the will, assigning all rights in the machine to the university, with Dean Harstad here as the agent. He was a real believer in the land grant idea. He talked about it all the time. And here’s the description of the machine.”
The president said, “I guess I don’t really understand what this machine does. I’m a mathematician, you know.” He smiled his brightest fund-raising smile.
“Here’s what it does,” said Nils. “It plants three-foot-wide rows of corn, soybeans, and rye grass or some other groundcover, and this tail here?”—he pointed to a paragraph in the description Loren had painstakingly written out—“That covers the wheel tracks with a short, thick-growing grass. Later on, when the harvester comes in, it rides on this mat of grass.”
“Lovely,” muttered the president, in a tone Ivar knew was meant to suggest comprehension, but really revealed that the man was not only at a loss, but bored, too. Ivar decided to get his attention. He said, “If we can patent this machine, it could earn the university millions.”
“Oh, really?” said the president, casually but unmistakably bringing his full attention to bear upon the papers on the table in front of Nils. He held out his hand. “Why is that?”
“Well,” said Nils, “if it works, this machine is going to revolutionize American agriculture.”
“Oh,” said Joe Miller, “it works. Loren used it to plant every year for the last four years. I never saw him planting, though, because he planted in the middle of the night.”
“But no one farms like this,” said
Just Plain Brown. “Who’s going to manufacture this machine? Who’s going to buy it?”
Nils smiled. He said, “As a matter of fact, the extension arm of the university performs a powerful educational function.”
Joe said, “I noticed over the years that on his more sloping fields, he got a kind of terracing effect after a while. And his yields were pretty good, too, considering how chintzy Loren was with inputs.”
Nils said, “If we could get hold of the man’s machine, we could try it on some test plots this planting season. Bill Darling, over in Agronomy—”
The president put down the papers and gazed off into the middle distance, a smile playing over his lips.
The university lawyer said, “Maybe we should take a little ride out to Mr. Stroop’s farm and have a look at the machine?”
Really, Ivar thought, millions. He tried to feel doubtful, uneasy, skeptical. There was no patent, there were no plans among the papers Joe had brought. And he tried to focus on the truths he had just been groping toward that morning, but it was like trying to look into a blazing light and see a small dark object. It was so hard that the effort came to seem futile, and the object started to vaporize and disappear. It was easier to catalogue the programs that would, or could, be saved—women’s studies, art and graphic design history, Italian and Portuguese, volleyball, tennis, theater performance, nuclear engineering, medical engineering, wildlife biology, the swim team. After all, could you really resist the money, the expansion, the heavy, rumbling momentum of the whole enormous machine? All he could do realistically, he thought, was to honor his uneasiness by pausing a moment before he said, “Maybe we should get Elaine in here.”
Bob Brown said, “No, no. This is big time. This baby is big enough for Jack Parker to really sink his teeth into.”
“The thing is—” said Joe Miller, “and this is why I thought I should come over here today—the thing is, some people came this morning and took away the machine. Some outfit from Minnesota. When I tried to stop them, the guy showed me a paper that he called a confiscation order.”
A dead silence fell over the table.
“Who would do that?” moaned the president, his face in his shoes.
“Well,” said Joe, “if you’d of asked Loren, he would of said, the FBI, the CIA, and the big ag companies.”
“Where are the plans? There must be blueprints somewhere, or building plans,” said Ivar.
“My wife and I have looked high and low for any sort of drawing. You know, he did all his fieldwork in a bulletproof vest. Drawings like that are just the sort of thing the old guy would have hidden, but we can’t find anything, even though my wife and I have turned his place upside down. You’re welcome to help us look.”
BY A COINCIDENCE that was truly no less than astonishing, Dr. John Cates was, just at that moment, staring at the plans of Loren Stroop’s machine. Dr. Cates hadn’t thought about the plans again after taking them from the student—wasn’t that around Christmastime?—and laying them on his desk. What with conferences and meetings and directing the work in his lab, he had hardly been in his office.
But just today he was in a funny mood, a newly awakened sort of mood. He’d thrown off the aftereffects of the unpleasantness in Orlando fairly quickly—it had been reassuring to be home, after all, where he could focus on his work and where Daniel spent most of his day in school (a Jekyll-and-Hyde sort of kid, he did pretty well there and had a reputation for good behavior). Surrounded by all the emblems of his success—his Volvo, his lab, his spacious house, his respectful students, grad assistants, postdoc researchers—he’d found his focus again and sensed a bonus in the offing, as well—a hypothesis was coming on, complete with ideas for experiments, thoughts about funding, all the accoutrements. What if silicon—? he thought. What if there was a temperature range within which small clusters of, say, six, twelve, and eighteen atoms of silicon exhibited the properties of both liquids and solids? And you could use benzene as a probe molecule, the way Hahn and Whetton did in California. Other ideas would come. All he had to do was wait for them. The waiting sometimes drove him crazy, but over the years he had learned that this was how he worked.
He had no anxieties about cutbacks. The right man in the right place, from the day he started the first desegregated kindergarten in St. Louis right up to today, Dr. John Cates was history’s darling, and if, like all explosions, the civil rights explosion had fallout, then through the daily exercise of disciplined focus, Dr. John Cates had minimized the intrusion of that fallout into his life. The results were there for everyone to see—he was at the top of his field. He did real science. He was a credit, and not only to his race.
The hog, though, the hog in the paper was something he had not been able to get out of his thoughts. The hog in the paper was interfering with the incoming hypothesis, distracting him when he needed to be concentrating, focusing. He had even snapped at Daniel this morning when Daniel asked him about it. He had said, “Well, how should I know where the hog came from?” And Daniel had said, “Why don’t you ever know anything, Dad? You just never know anything!”
Dr. John Cates had begged to differ, but then he couldn’t actually think of a specific thing he did know that Daniel might be interested in, so he made the mistake of saying, “What don’t I know?” and Daniel had said, “You don’t know who the Fine Young Cannibals are,” and it was true, he didn’t.
He picked up the drawing on the desk and stared at it. He had no idea what it was, either. His hand jerked in an aborted urge to throw it down, but he didn’t.
Looking at it was almost a physical sensation, his gaze moving over lines like feet walking along paths, drawn ineluctably toward the center of the drawing, which was also the center of something else, something even more interesting than the familiar objects he began to pick out here and there—a bicycle wheel, an upside-down carburetor. Cates gazed and gazed.
After a while, he realized that he was gazing into another human mind, as odd and unique as his own, a mind for which some things were clear and some things were murky (even with no knowledge of the object depicted, Dr. Cates could see a couple of connections that could be shortened and simplified), a mind that had crept over one idea in all its parts month after month, year after year, as his mind had crept over the chemistry of atomic structure year after year, and so a mind that knew the habit of perseverance. All around the mind’s object were smudges, wrinkles, stains, the relics of a life, and those drew Dr. Cates, also. The object bulking large in the center, the life scattered around the periphery. Cates’ gaze shifted, hypnotized, from one to the other. After he had looked long enough at the plan, it came to seem to Dr. Cates a remarkably beautiful drawing, as beautiful as any he had ever seen.
His first thought was to keep it and frame it.
His second thought was to find the artist and see if there was another one he could buy.
He sat back and looked out the window, feeling the morning’s unpleasantness with Daniel slip away, and trying to think who might know, or know someone who might know. His gaze travelled along the roof lines of the buildings across the quad and settled on the cupola of Lafayette Hall.
He picked up the phone, got an operator, and said, “Hi. Would you please give me Mrs. Loraine Walker in the provost’s office?”
MRS. WALKER PICKED UP the phone on the first ring. The Gang of Five (Ivar, Nils, the president in his mint green short-sleeved shirt, the university lawyer, and Just Plain Brown) were emerging from the meeting room talking about some machine. The lawyer was saying, “The patent and ownership problems could be solved, even without the machine, if we just had some sort of plans.”
“… looks like some sort of plans,” said Dr. Cates, on the other end of the line. “I would love to find the artist, and—”
“Just a minute,” said Mrs. Walker. She could hear an almost audible click as her fabled intuition locked into place. “Ivar?” She nearly whispered, but the five suits froze, like dogs hearing a distant whistle. “If I
’m not mistaken, this is the very person you want to speak to.”
“Who is it?” said Ivar, eagerly.
Mrs. Walker shrugged and moved her finger so that it touched the hang-up button on the telephone like a trigger. After a significant nanosecond, she looked into the eyes of Just Plain Brown. His smile disappeared as if it had never been there, and the knowledge that he was the hostage shot around the group of men like an electrical signal. Ivar suppressed a smile, Nils’ face relaxed, the university lawyer adopted a mask of neutrality, and the president looked from Just Plain Brown to Mrs. Walker, then back, understanding at once the very high price someone was about to pay. He sucked his teeth for a second, then smiled. That someone, after all, didn’t have to be him. He said, “Mrs. Walker, I don’t think your value to this university can be overestimated, really. Wouldn’t you agree, Fred?”
The university lawyer gave a deliberate nod.
Mrs. Walker took that as a promise.
But then, just for a second, she wondered if she really did want to save them. She could see the certainty that they would be saved return to their faces as fast as their neurons could carry it, so quickly that maybe none of them would remember this pivotal, even definitive, moment. Her finger trembled on the button with the very force of her dilemma. What was best? What did they deserve?
Mrs. Loraine Walker glanced at Ivar. He, of all of them, looked as if he didn’t know the answer to that question. For that, and for that alone, she moved her finger off the trigger and held out the phone to him.
68
Paperwork
State Journal, April 23, 1990: In a surprise move, Governor Orville T. Early today eased the two-month-old budget crisis at the state university by repealing a measure that would have reverted FY 89 funds already allocated to the university back to the state. The funds, amounting to some $3 million, will enable the university to avert the widespread layoffs and program cuts that were expected to take effect early next week. In addition, the governor held out the hope that he would reinstate funds reverted earlier in the fall, and also allow the university budget to grow slightly in FY 90. He suggested, however, that “The people of the state are watching those pinheads, and they had better watch their step.” When asked if he meant “eggheads,” a common term for university intellectuals, Governor Early said, “Pinheads, eggheads, knuckleheads, what’s the difference?”
