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a Novel by Varkel
Fall, 2001



Chapter 6:  To the University


"What is it, Clara?" I asked, pausing at the foot of the stairs.
Alice clattered against me.

The woman held up a hand and said into the telephone receiver,
"Did he tell them where Tim had gone?"

At that question both Alice and myself grew quiet and watched
Clara's face for clues from her expressions.  She listened to the
rattling instrument.   "Yes," she said, "but they'll find that
tutor I hired to administer the exams.  We gave his name and
address to the school board."

She listened, returning our stares.  Her eyes were apprehensive.
"I agree, and we shall immediately.  But Frank, what _could_ they
be after?"

Alice suggested in my ear, "The cops again."

"In that case they're after you," I guessed -- wrongly.

Clara was speaking.  "But the _F.B.I._, Frank!  Surely they don't
investigate merely because a lad suddenly shows unexpected
brilliance."

Alice and I looked wonderingly at each other while Clara listened
to a longer exposition.  She sighed.  "You may be right, though
such an intense reaction is hard to believe.  Thanks very much
for calling, Frank.  We shall leave tonight."

"No," she declared decisively after a short pause, "if it's an
espionage issue they may be here before morning.  I'll call you,
and thanks again."

She hung the phone and turned to us.  Her fists were clenched.
"Tim, run upstairs, dress for a trip and pack enough clothes for
two or three days.  Alice, you do the same.  Oh.  You have no
suitcase.  That's all right, we'll pack your stuff with mine."

"What is it?" I asked.  "Surely not the F.B.I.!"

"But I'm afraid it is.  That was your father.  Two agents
questioned your school principal about you this afternoon.
Apparently he didn't care for their tone.  He was kind enough to
call your father this evening.  Now hurry!  In the car I'll tell
you everything your father said."

"Where will we go?"

"To my house in Chicago, about a week before we would have gone
anyway."

"If they trace me here, can't they find you there from the real
estate records?"

"This is 1947, Tim: no computers.  Besides, that house is still
in my husband's uncle's name.  Now do you still want to be
planning this when the agent knocks?"

* * *

I drove first, perched atop my "driver's pillow," while the two
females, Clara in the seat beside me, alternated in brushing the
other's hair.  We got away about ten.  Traffic was light and a
drizzling rain isolated us in our steel cocoon.  It was the
second week in November, before the first snowfall, but the trees
were almost bare.  When the car engine heated, the warm air
flowing over our legs was most welcome.

The facts reported by Dad had been brief.  Two F.B.I. agents had
appeared in Schiffman's office just after school let out.  They
wanted to know all about me including grades and relations with
teachers and peers.  Apparently Schiffman had bristled at their
demanding demeanor and volunteered nothing -- surprising to me in
light of his reverence for governmental authority -- but they had
inquired about my class schedule, leading to the disclosure that
I had been excused from further attendance, that in fact I had
passed the examinations for a high-school diploma at the age of
twelve.  According to Dad's report, that news had lit their faces
like sunshine, as described by the principal, who denied knowing
where I had gone with my freshly-printed diploma.

Clara asked me, "Did you reveal in your science class that you
knew how to build an atomic bomb?"

"I started to," I admitted, "but I claimed the information came
from a comic book.  Don't tell me it got back to the F.B.I.!"  I
had told Dad about that incident.

"Your father speculated something like that must be behind their
interest.  What else could it be?"

What indeed!  Alice asked sarcastically, "Must you always be a
know-it-all, Timmy?"

"Only about you," I replied.  "What does 'gur-r-rk' mean when
you're coming?"

She answered tartly, "That I'm trying to suck in at all
openings."

"Oh, is that how it feels to a girl, like she's sucking in?"

Beside me Clara laughed stronger than the weak exchange
justified.

I asked poutingly, "Well, how _does_ it feel?"

"I am merely appreciating your old man's well-developed
defense-mechanism against accusation."

"My what?"

"See?  You don't even notice it.  You change the subject
automatically."

"That reminds me," I said, changing the subject.  "I've been
meaning to ask you if the original Clara's ancestors emigrated to
New Zealand."

"Huh!" sniffed Alice.  "Why would they do that?"

"Because everyone on Earth in Ellen's time must have derived from
the New Zealand survivors or perhaps from someone returned from
space."

"Oh."  Alice leaned forward in her seat to search the woman's
face in the occasional light of oncoming cars.

"You're right, of course," Clara admitted with an indulgent
smile.  "Sally Whitmond was born in 1917 in Christchurch.  Ellen
Lundquist reverted into her mind when Sally was 14.  I convinced
her she had to leave, not too difficult a task.  She was a shy
student, and her homelife was unhappy.  In 1933, I lied about our
age and Sally's experience and secured employment as a scullery
maid on a visiting passenger liner bound for San Francisco.  That
was an interesting experience because of the men.  I knew I was
too early for you, Tim, but I saved my maidenhead nevertheless
because of the premium set upon virginity in your era.  In
America I simply jumped ship, changed my name and made my way to
Hightower University, where I found your father already married,
although you were not yet conceived.  I almost threw myself upon
him but realized in time that although he might give me a child,
it could never be you."

"My god!" Alice exclaimed in a voice of awe.  "You worked passage
across the Pacific on an ocean liner?"

Clara chuckled.  "I was a healthy 16 year-old.  The work was
arduous but hardly complex.  The ship took nearly a month,
stopping in Papeete and Honolulu.  The problem was the men, both
passengers and crew.  It was impossible for a young scullery maid
to fend off the men in such a closed environment in 1933 -- or
probably any other time!"

"But you managed it?" I said.

"Not quite."  She laughed.  "I told you the truth about my sexual
experience except in one respect.  I have known only three
separate men vaginally, and indeed you took an anal virginity,
Tim.  But on that voyage I swallowed semen 89 times."  She
sniffed.  "Can you believe it never occurred to me to spit?"

"My god!" breathed Alice, now with her arms crossed and elbows
resting on Clara's seatback.

"89 times -- how precise!" I remarked.

"In 26 days," Clara added, "two of which were spent tied to the
dock in San Francisco.  I had become so popular that it was hard
to get off the ship.  One rich man offered to set me up in
business with a ladies' hat shop.  This is apparently how you
establish your mistress if you're wealthy."  She chuckled.  "It
gave me a certain confidence on my way to Hightower.  I felt I
could always fall back on the oldest profession."

I think I've remarked that Clara does give surprisingly good head
on those few occasions that Alice permits her.

She also picked up on that.  "What about it, Tim?  Is the
confidence deserved?"

I tried to be diplomatic.  "The mouth is not a woman's best
orifice."

She sniffed.  "I guess it depends on who's coming and who's
going.  Actually, Clara, in 26 days I'm surprised you only had to
satisfy 89 men.  Didn't the big liners carry hundreds?"

"1037 souls," the woman averred, "according to the manifest.  But
it also bore a great many women.  I think the entire female crew
and no small number of passengers entertained men at night.
Maids and the like were selected for complaisance.  That was
obvious from the purser's questions when he hired me."

"Such as?" I asked curiously.

She deepened her voice, pretending to masculinity.  "'Pleasing
the passengers is what you are really hired for.  I want to know
if there is anything you might refuse to do for them.'  The girl
in front of me said, 'Yes.'  He didn't ask her what she would
refuse.  He said, 'We can't use you.  Please depart by that
companionway.'  When it was my turn, I knew the right answer."

"My god!" declared Alice again.  "Was it an American line?  You
should've sued them."

"This was 1933, in the height of the depression, and the ship was
in New Zealand, which was then still British enough to believe
that serving-girls were hardly more than whores.  Besides, I was
curious to see what it was the other girl would have refused.  I
found that out the first night we stood to sea."  She laughed.
"When I suggested oral relief instead, the man, who happened to
be the same purser, seemed surprised but agreed immediately.  I
was pleased at the ease with which I obtained his emission.  All
the others were the same.  Perhaps it was the sea air."

And perhaps it was something more personal to Clara.  I had not
forgotten how easily she obtained _my_ emission in the kitchen
after curing my dick of the soreness from using Alice as a 
wheelbarrow not half an hour before.

We drove all night, spelling each other, taking a pit stop in a
small town with an all-night gasoline station and another in the
actual bushes, where I squatted along with the females because
the bushes were only waist high.  We arrived in the outskirts of
Chicago shortly after dawn.  The rain had ceased and the sun was
peeking through the clouds when we pulled into a Pancake House.
I ate four eggs scrambled in cheese and sausage, toast, real
butter, jelly and coffee with real cream.  Clara fed the three of
us, including my meal adequate for two, and paid with two
one-dollar bills, including tip.

Watching me devour the food, Alice observed, "Good for you."  At
ten she still picked bird-like at her breakfasts despite frequent
exercise as a wheel-barrow and lap-squatter.  "Clara and I shall
take full benefit from all that cholesterol."

"You're thinking of oysters," I corrected.  "Besides, cholesterol
hasn't been invented yet."

Clara regarded me askance.  "Perhaps Tim is about to undergo a
growth spurt."

Alice leered.  "Oh, he'll spurt, all right!"

"Where's that waitress?" I asked, looking around ostentatiously.
"Maybe they do serve oysters."

Alice managed to laugh despite a yawn.  "I need my beauty sleep.
How much farther is your place, Clara?"

"God, listen to yourself!" I directed in disgust.  "'Are we there
yet, Mommy?'"

Automatically, without the slightest thought of consequences, she
kicked my shin under the table.  Anthropologists claim that the
principle task of females in all human societies has ever been to
keep the male clean.  Maybe so, but keeping the male _silent_
figures in there somewhere too.

* * *

Clara's house was in Hyde Park, about four blocks from the
University of Chicago's campus.  It was a two-story, set in a
small lot surrounded on three sides by high hedges for privacy.
Clara was driving, so she gave me the key and sent me to open the
attached garage.  When she had killed the engine, I groused,
"Surprised you don't have a remote control door too."

"I've hardly lived here," she answered, smiling despite my ill
humor, produced by lifting the amazingly heavy door.  No wonder:
its panels were solid oak!  She added, "Perhaps you'd like to
build it for me."

I agreed dryly, "The weight of this door is certainly an
incentive!"

The house was furnished with dust covers pulled over everything.
"It belonged to my husband's uncle and has hardly been used since
he died.  It has three bedrooms.  Take whichever one you want.
They're all the same distance from the bathroom."

I had to sigh.  "In a house full of females!  I'm going to miss
your three bathrooms, Clara."

She shrugged.  "Then we'll just add a couple more."

When we had chosen bedrooms, we spent the day uncovering
furniture and stocking the bare larder.  Finally after a tasty
supper at a nearby Italian restaurant we fell together on the
large bed that by common agreement had been reserved for Clara.

By this time our sexual threesomes had shaken down to a few
common patterns.  My immature cock seemed to fit best in Alice's
even more immature pussy, which of course was yet incapable of
conception.  I had already mentioned the risk to Clara, who
seemed unconcerned nevertheless, but by common consent Alice
usually received my first, richer discharge.  So our first sex in
Chicago occurred between Clara's legs.  Alice and I lay in
coition on our sides, aided by the pressure of the woman's knees,
our heads together at her groin, two childish tongues licking her
labia, clit and each other's faces as fingers pulsed in the
mature vagina and anus.  What a sweet tangle!  I was becoming
jaded, however, so that despite such thorough sensual contact,
the females achieved two or three climaxes while I produced one.
I don't suppose full adults could manage such a coupling unless
one of them was quite a large woman --  or a man, who could also
play the central role except of course that it would kill him.

When we disconnected to catch our breath, Clara excused herself
and went downstairs, presumably to the bathroom.  Alice, her head
on my shoulder, murmured, "I called my mother today."

"You _what_?"

"While we were at the market, between Clara's calls to the
university.  Imagine using a nickel at a pay phone!"  She noticed
my expression and chuckled.  "Don't worry, Tim.  I'm sure you
remember how long it took to trace a call in this era.  We didn't
talk nearly that long, even if the cops are monitoring her line,
but why would they be?"

"She's still at home, then?"

"They put her away long enough to dry out.  To no one's surprise,
that cured her irrationality.  She was so glad to hear from me
that she cried.  I can understand that, of course.  So would I,
if it were one of my kids.  I felt sorry for her.  I want to send
her some money.  Will you help me explain it to Clara?"

"I see no problem.  We'll set up an account she can draw on.  Is
she staying off the sauce?"

"She wasn't drunk today.  But, Tim, Clara is in love with _you_,
not me."

"Isn't she?  That raises an interesting point."  I studied her
sweet face.  It would never possess great beauty but with or
without wrinkles it was infinitely precious to me.  "How do _you_
feel about Clara?"

She didn't ask me what I meant.  She smiled slightly.  "I confess
to some ambivalence.  She is my lover, my confidante, my only
girlfriend and at the same time my surrogate mother.  She is also
my greatest rival."

A soft finger on my lips stopped my protest.  "I know you said I
have none, but in fact she _is_!"  The girl took a deep breath.
"Tim, I accept her despite it, because in a way you're right.
I'm beginning to understand that she'll never take you away from
me."

I kissed her tenderly.  Alice had not said exactly what I wanted
to hear, but at least a split between my women apparently was not
in the cards.

Clara established a ten-year annuity for Alice's mother with a
draw-down of $50 per week, adequate in that low-cost time even to
afford a visiting housemaid.

* * *

We had disturbed a lot of dust during the first day or two of
removing and storing furniture covers.  On the third morning
Alice and I prepared the eggs, sliced bread and bacon, and Clara
cooked our breakfast of French toast at the antique electric
range while the two "children" set the table.

"When did you do this?" I asked Alice as we waited, pointing to
the clean dinette tabletop, constructed of the enameled sheet
metal typical of that era.  The previous evening she had spilled
a glass of milk in sleepy clumsiness on that surface, to which
she had taken a few swipes with a rag.  Now it gleamed
spotlessly.

She followed my fingertip and looked up with raised eyebrows and
a smile.  "I guess I did a better job than I realized."

Or Clara came along behind you, I did not say.  But when did she
have time?  I shrugged and forgot the issue as the woman laid
plates before us loaded with aromatic squares already buttered
and syrupped.  I had always loved sweet breakfasts, and this one
was superb.

But I recalled the incident latter that day and added to it a few
more.  The dust that we had continued to disturb during the
second day was now conspicuously absent.  Furniture and walls
glistened as if new or newly painted -- without a tell-tale odor.
I entered the kitchen for a coke and found the considerable mess
of breakfast, pans and dishes left soiled in the sink, now
removed.  The kitchen was spotless as the rest.  That should have
been at least a half-hour's work even for an experienced
housemaid, but Clara had been apart from us hardly at all.  I
realized that the same phenomena had been apparent in her home in
Hightower.  Alice had even remarked on it: everything constantly
spotless without an apparent causative agent.

Considering all this, I had to grin.  At least I had never been
asked to do it!

As we waited in the parlor for Clara to apply makeup in the
bathroom preparatory to further investigation of dinner
restaurants, Alice pulled me into the hall.

"What is it?" I demanded, annoyed by her forceful tug.

"Open this closet."

"Huh?"  I twisted the knob and pulled.  It didn't budge.
Suddenly I recognized a high-quality inset lock to match the
closet door in Hightower.  I declared in amazement, "That wasn't
here yesterday!"

"Put your ear against it," she directed.

It hummed within, the same as the closet in Hightower.

She saw the amazement in my eyes and asked, "What should we do
about this?"

"Ask Clara, what else?  Although I cannot imagine how she managed
it.  We haven't been out of the house today.  No one could hollow
out the door for this lock without attracting attention."

She shook her head.  "No."

"What do you mean, 'No?'"

"You agree that she has to have done it or had it done?"

"Who else?  _I_ didn't do it!"

"But she said nothing about it, did she!"

"What are you up to, Alice?"

"I'm thinking that when she wants us to know, she'll tell us."

I took a deep breath and nodded -- despite my amazement that
_Alice_ could so restrain her own curiosity!  Then I had to
laugh.

"What's funny?"

"Myself -- how easily I forget you're not the little girl you
seem."

* * *

"This should be it," I said with relief, "244."

"'Begley Seminar Room,'" Alice read from a plate on the door.
"It had better be.  I was beginning to think just finding it was
the first test."

Clara, standing behind us, groused, "How silly it is to make you
appear before them empty-handed, as if a scientist would ever
experiment without access to references!"

I grinned at her.  "Don't tell me you're nervous!"

She shook her head.  "I just hope you're not overconfident."

Alice sniffed.  "I hope he avoids blatant anachronisms."

We had already discussed both these points to death.  I knocked
and we waited.  We stood half-way down a long hall on the second
floor of the Physics Building, lit by morning sunlight streaming
through a latticework of windows at one end.  A clock somewhat
further along showed ten, the appointed hour.  We were its only
occupants, which rather surprised me.  Most colleges of my
experience liked to change classes promptly on the hour.  Perhaps
Chicago was different or perhaps no class met on this floor.  But
the building certainly was not empty.  Distant voices, sonorously
lecturing, accompanied by bangs and thuds, filled the background.

The door opened and a fairly tall man looked out over our heads.

"Down here," muttered Alice.

He lowered his gaze to Clara.  "Ma'am, are you perhaps on the
wrong floor?  I think the nursery is in the basement."

I could top that.  "Oh?  Do you mean to say that the
gravitational focusing experiment is discontinued?"

"The grav--"  He blinked down at me.  "It was operating
yesterday."

I inserted maximum sarcasm.  "Next to a _nursery_?"

His stare became a twinkle.  "I may be mistaken about the
nursery.  Is it possible I am addressing Mr. Timothy Kimball?"

"In person."  I advanced Alice slightly with a hand at her back.
"Along with Miss Alice Edgeworth and our aunt, Mrs. Clara
Edgeworth."  Alice had adopted Clara's adopted last name because
the Chicago police were looking for Alice M. Colsen.
Unfortunately, despite the FBI's interest, it was too late for me
to change my own last name.

He took a breath.  "I am Perry Ellison, Assistant Professor of
Physics.  Pleased to meet all of you.  I'm sorry for the insult.
Now I understand some cryptic references in the dean's request."
He stood back.  "Won't you please come in."

We filed in before him.  It was a small room with a central table
and six chairs around it.  A tall but narrow window in the back
admitted daylight as a steam radiator hissed beneath it.  Two men
waited at the table, one with a shock of gray hair, the other
dark with black hair and eyes, possibly an East Indian.

With a gesture Ellison said, "These, ah, small people are the
applicants, accompanied by their aunt, Mrs. Clara Edgeworth.
This is Dr. Carrington, Professor of Physics, and here is Dr.
Charkhandra, Professor of Mathematics."

I spoke gravely despite my piping voice, "We are very pleased to
meet you gentlemen."

Charkhandra nodded, one eyebrow cocked in reservation, but the
gray head uncoiled and rose to his feet to start around the
table, muttering in evident disgust, "I have better things to do
with my time than this."

I remembered him.  He had almost discovered the pion.  "Roy
Carrington?"

He stopped, half-way around the table.  "Yes."

I shook my head sadly.  "A cloud chamber simply doesn't have
enough resolution.  But you can buy Powell's emulsions from the
Ilford Photographic Lab."

His face contorted and he literally ground his teeth.  His
expression would have been comical under other circumstances.
"Who would've ever thought to stack photographic plates --  Are
you sure about that photo lab?  Where's it located?"

"I'm sure.  _Ilford_.  Ask for the Nuclear Research Emulsion."  I
shrugged.  "Somewhere in England.  I'll bet the information
operator can get you the number."

Oops!  Did trans-Atlantic telephone exist in 1947?  At least the
idea of calling didn't seem to faze him.

"How can you possibly know this?" he demanded.

I grinned deliberately.  "You need to take the time to read your
copies of _Nature_.  Check the May issue.  That's where Powell
describes the pion."

His eyes narrowed in calculation.  "Just what _is_ a pion?"

"Powell calls it the 'primary meson' of a chain, with a mass of
over 200 electrons."  I quickly decided not to tell him that the
word would be consigned eventually to identifying only the
lightest meson.  Roy Carrington had tried very hard to elucidate
the postulated "meson chain," only to have the English researcher
Cecil Powell beat him to the pion and the resulting Nobel prize
in one of science's little-known personal tragedies.

He blinked at me and took a deep breath before turning to
Ellison.  "I'm satisfied.  My report will recommend accepting the
lad -- and the girl too on his say-so.  Now please excuse me.  I
need to set up a phone call."

He rushed past us out of the room.

"Well!" our greeter expostulated.  "You certainly snowed
Carrington!"  He chuckled.  "But I guess we'd better ask at least
a _few_ questions.  Won't you take seats?"

He alternated between Alice and me.  His questions were fairly
elementary.  I had boned up on the Periodic Table as currently
understood and avoided all the high-end traps.  Precision demands
respect from most people.  That I could quote from memory the
atomic weight of U235 and Plutonium to four places impressed him
immensely -- which of course anyone in my place might have
anticipated.  He, ludicrously enough, had to check in his
reference book.

Then he turned the floor over to the mathematician, who surprised
us.  He grinned at Alice and said, "What was Fermat's last
theorem?"

"May I use the board?" she asked coolly.

"Of course."

At the blackboard she wrote the basic equation, then flipped her
head around to Charkhandra in a characteristic gesture that
bounces her hair like a horse's tail.  I recalled it from the
many years of our previous association.  It conveys disdain
better than anything else I ever saw, while maintaining a
perfectly neutral countenance.  She said, "Fermat conjectured
that _n_ can never be greater than two."

"Very good."  The dark face nodded.  "Do you know the story of
his claim to proving it?"

"Not enough room on the margin of his letter for the proof to
fit, or so he said."

"Well, I shall prove it," the dark man declared positively.  "I
am very close and I need an agile young mind to help me.  How you
would like to work with me on this?  Your thesis might describe
your contribution."

No doubt this was a wonderful opportunity for the average
supplicant.  But Alice knew even better than I that Fermat's last
theorem was never proven until 1995.  She answered immediately,
"No, thank you, Dr. Charkhandra."

His eyes widened.  "Must you reply so quickly?  Why not?"

She raised her chin.  "My thesis is already planned.  It will
describe a method for interpreting certain recent discoveries in
cosmology."

"Cosmology!" he repeated derisively.  He took a breath and shook
his head.  "I trust your interpretations will have a mathematical
basis."

"Oh, yes.  They will be well grounded in the statistics of
stellar fluctuations."

The man sighed and sat quietly looking down at the tabletop.

Ellison asked, "Do you have any questions for us?"

Clara had one.  "What's next?"

"We'll submit our reports to the dean and he'll interview you
before he makes his decision.  Dr. Dell is not one to dally.  You
should hear from him in a few days."

We took our leave with smiles and thanks.  Charkhandra never
looked up.  Outside on the way to the car, Clara asked me, "When
did you hear that the atomic weights of Plutonium and fissile
Uranium had been declassified?"

Oops!

* * *

Almost a week later, leading us through the bewildering quads to
find the dean of graduate studies, Clara became hopelessly lost.
I could not direct her because that office, fifteen years later
when I was a graduate student, was located in a newer building.
In desperation she accosted a young man, either an older student
or a newer member of the faculty who wore an Ike jacket with an
Eighth Army shoulder patch.  Alice and I stood back as she asked
directions.

"What do you know about this dean, Peyton Dell?" Alice asked in a
whisper.  "I don't remember him."

"He was before my time too," I replied, "although I do recall
hearing that he got caught up in the McCarthy business.  He may
have been some kind of historian."

"The Red Scare!" she responded vehemently and almost spat.
"We're back in the stone age, Timmy."

Before I could correct her historical allusion, Clara returned
looking much relieved.

"It's through that gateway ahead and at the far end of the next
quad."  She managed her first smile in half an hour.  "Let's
hurry or we'll be late."

We walked quickly, at "double-time," as they said then.  After
entering a rather nondescript doorway and ascending a flight of
stairs we found ourselves in front of a windowed door that
declared in precise black lettering, _Dean of Graduate Studies_.
An attractive blond woman in a chastely buttoned nylon blouse
beamed at us from behind a massive wooden desk as we entered.
Filing cabinets lined the walls around her.  Alice stifled a gasp
and clutched my arm.  I feared my knees would buckle.

"I'm Margery Holmes, Dean Dell's secretary," she announced to
Clara after a cursory glance at Alice and me.

Clara acknowledged the woman.  Alice and I hovered near the door.

"Oh my god!" I whispered to the staring little girl.  "She's much
younger now, but that was my first woman at Chicago."

"Mine too," Alice almost squeaked.

"We'll have to wait a few minutes, children," Clara announced,
addressing us in that superior manner for the benefit of Miss
Holmes.  We had discussed Clara's manner toward us in public and
decided that treating us as the children we seemed to be would
attract the least attention.

"You may sit on that bench," Margery offered with a gracious
sweep of her arm.

We accepted dutifully and silently.  Clara took the seat closest
to the desk.

"We rarely see people here so young," said the lovely blonde,
beaming first at Alice then at me.  I recalled that same intimate
smile from many years in her future.

"Perhaps you will see more of these two," Clara responded
proudly.

The woman's eyes widened.  "_They_ are the graduate applicants?"

"Indeed they are."

Margery shook her head.  "The war has caused so many changes in
people."

The war?  The idea that a war had put two such genius applicants
before her was almost amusingly ingenuous.  But Clara fielded it
well with the story of her own terrible loss, gaining immediate
sympathy.  I recalled Margery's pillow talk of three lovers lost
during WWII, though somehow never a husband that might pay the
widow's bonus.

Alice, one leg thrown over the other, wagged her right one
energetically.  I looked at her vacant face, wondering if she
were trying to masturbate as she remembered a future tryst with
that remarkable woman.  I fell into a reverie of my own memories.

"Tim, Tim!"  Clara's voice brought me back.  "The dean will see
you now."

Alice and I stood to join Clara.  Marge rose behind the desk,
went to the adjacent door and turned the knob.

"Your two thirty appointment is here, sir," she announced crisply
into the open doorway and moved aside for Alice and me to enter.
Clara waited on the bench.  Our invitation had specified that
applicants must face the examiner unassisted.

As I passed, Margery placed a hand affectionately on my head.
Instantly I wondered whether she was attracted to an underage but
pretty boy.  Why not?  By her own admissions, twelve years later,
she responded to anyone who evidenced attraction to her.  I
hesitated long enough to cut smiling eyes up to her oddly young
face, causing her own eyes to widen slightly -- until Alice, well
aware of my thoughts, pushed me forward irritably.

Peyton Dell was a man in his late fifties, perhaps a little
older.  The fringe of gray hair around his bald pate lent him a
monkish appearance, except that the carnival barker's pencil thin
mustache confused the image.  I instinctively concluded he was
not trustworthy.

"Come, you two," he said, half rising and gesturing at chairs in
front of his desk.  "Sit down here so we can talk."

His voice and manner were patronizing, and I could feel Alice
bristle stiffly beside me.  We sat and stared mutely at the man
who was overweight although not obese.  He returned the stare
with piercing blue eyes and thumped his cheek with a dark wooden
letter opener.

A polite phrase rose to my lips to break the icy confrontation,
but the ball was in his court.  We simply returned his stare
until he placed the implement firmly on the desk and cleared his
throat.

"You children have impressed two of our most senior professors,"
he began.  "The words 'scientific prodigies' were used more than
once in my conversation with them."

He said this without a glimmer of a smile, as if it were an
accusation.  I twisted in the uncomfortable chair and resisted
expressing the annoyance I felt.  When Alice opened her mouth to
speak, I kicked her foot lightly as a warning.  But the man
actually smiled in a manner that appeared sincere.

"I gather you resent being called children, but there's no
denying it.  Ages ten and twelve, I see."  He studied an open
folder on his desk top.

A heavy silence endured for another minute as he leafed casually
through the papers.  He closed the folder decisively, pushed it
aside and looked into our faces with fingers steepled beneath his
chin.

"You're simply too young for graduate studies, I'm afraid,
despite this university's reputation for welcoming early
entrants."

He struggled with the bleak words and was on the verge of
continuing when I interrupted.  "What deficiency have you
detected?  Our intellectual capacity to succeed in the program is
amply demonstrated to the satisfaction of men whom you call
senior professors."

"Yes, but ..."  He shook his head.  "You are still too obviously
just children."

I hunched forward in my chair.  "That is merely a social
distinction.  We shall be living with our Aunt Clara, of course.
We have no desire or intention to interact socially with the
other graduate students except in the most perfunctory manner.
You needn't worry about us becoming prey to, ah, any
irresponsible persons who might be on campus.  We are indeed
children, but we possess a far greater sophistication than you
realize."

"Yes, yes, so it seems to you, without doubt."  He waved his
hands dismissively.  "But you are inadequately educated in the
broad sense that we expect of our graduate students.  A unique,
genius agility in science and mathematics is simply not enough.
If, for example, you intend to write a dissertation in
astrophysics that depends as all do upon Copernican discoveries,
we need to know of your familiarity with the seemingly irrelevant
ideas of Copernicus along with the society in which he lived, in
order to judge the gravity of your ideation.  The University of
Chicago does not confer academic degrees on _idiots savants_."

"_Idiots savants_!"  Alice jumped to her feet, hands clenched in
outrage.  "Does it award them to conclusion jumpers?  Perhaps you
would care to examine us in your area of specialization.  I know
a bit of history!"

Dell straightened in his chair with a sneer.  "I'm not an
historian, little girl.  I hold the Charles Grayson Dunne Chair
of Theology in the Divinity School, and examining you in that
subject would be pointless, don't you agree?"

"Just as well, Professor Dell," I responded politely, hoping to
mollify the man.  "Alice and I have never studied theology,
although our general knowledge is superior to many of Chicago's
best undergraduates."

"Are you so certain, young man?"  He grinned briefly.  "We like
to think our undergraduate curriculum is more rigorous than that
of Harvard or Yale."

"Which is of course laudable," I countered, "considering this
university was founded with Rockefeller money as a Baptist school
less than fifty years ago."

Dell stifled a choke.  "You are just about correct in that
scornful assertion, Mr. Kimball, but we have come a long way
since then."  He leaned forward with elbows on the desktop.
"Would you perhaps be familiar with the leading composers of the
period in which this university was founded?"

"You mean Mahler and Richard Strauss?" I shot back.

"Or Stravinsky, even Puccini?" Alice added.

He extended a hand palm outward and shook his head.  "This is not
the way to proceed," he said half to himself.   He glared at us.
"I suppose your heads are crammed with trivia."

"What can I say, Professor Dell?  Alice and I are also
sophisticated far beyond our years in social and cultural
matters.  We have not simply accumulated data through rote
learning.  Surely the results of our special examinations attest
to that.  If any body of knowledge is in fact no more than an
ordered collection of trivia, you will find that our trivia is
very well organized."

 From his point of view, of course, he was correct.  There was as
yet no reason for him to think Alice and I were anything beyond
_idiots savants_ or well-coached parrots.  Still his tone annoyed
me and I resolved to wreak havoc with his comfortable smugness.

I began in the voice of a college lecturer despite its boyish
pitch.  "The earlier part of the sixteenth century, the time of
Copernicus, was intellectually stressful for the great minds of
the period.  The allure of classical antiquity remained as
compelling as the exciting new discoveries that marked this the
beginning of a truly modern age."

"Vesarius mentioned that in his _Lives of the Artists_," Alice
interrupted brightly.

Dell hunched forward with elbows on the desk.  He stared at us
with confusion and no little suspicion.

"Machiavelli recommended the rejection of early firearms and
advocated the readoption of Roman military practice," I
continued,  "whereas some decades later the English abandoned a
definitely superior weapon, the longbow, in favor of firearms
just because they were considered modern.  And Copernicus ..."

"Just a minute!"  Dell spoke up a bit too loudly.  "You say the
longbow was superior to firearms?  That sounds more than a bit
far-fetched."

"I could cite Benjamin Franklin as an authority, Professor Dell.
He considered the bow superior to the musket two hundred years
after the English put military archery aside.  It is not well
appreciated today that the real advantage of personal firearms in
that period was not their firepower but the ease with which
tolerable skill might be acquired.  Proficiency with the longbow
required a lifetime of practice, beginning as a stripling.

"But returning to Copernicus, we find a scientist definitely of
modern rank.  Solely from rational observation, the basis of the
modern scientific method, he challenged Ptolemaic cosmology that
had endured from the time the Alexandrian Library still existed."

Alice piped up, "But there was a third intellectual force at
work, Timmy, one that stood entirely apart from the contention
between modernity and antiquity."

"Yes, of course, the Roman church, determined to preserve its
traditional authority and justifications against its own
challengers, astronomers as well as the religious protestants."

"The execution of Giordano Bruno for holding stubbornly to the
notion of physical infinity was a monstrous travesty!" she
asserted.

"Of course that occurred later, but it served as a lesson for
Galileo."

Alice and I talked back and forth to each other in this
sophomoric manner while Dell gaped incredulously from one to the
other with a slack mouth.

"Superstition died slowly," I continued, "even among educated
men.  In the mid sixteenth century Sigismund von Herberstein
published his famous _Rerum Moscovitarum_ which remained a
standard treatise on Russia for a hundred and fifty years.  He
had woodcuts in that work depicting what he called Siberians
whose faces were implanted in their chests."

"You are interested in Russia?" Dell asked with sudden
intentness.  "What about current events?  You wish to be
scientists.  Have you given any thought to the role of science in
the postwar world?"

Alice squirmed in the chair.  "Are you referring to scientific
competition with the Soviet Union?" she asked and immediately
shut up.  She realized her mistake.

I held my breath anxiously.  The Cold War had not yet begun.
Numerous Americans considered our wartime ally to be friendly.
People were still mulling Churchill's iron-curtain speech.

"Scientific competition with the USSR?"  Dell was incredulous.
"That brave country is a shambles and its recovery will require
decades of unrelenting toil.  I know.  I served with the OSS in
Moscow throughout the war."  He literally looked down his
considerable nose at us.  "And I did not evacuate with the others
to Kiubyshev when the Nazis were at the gates," he added smugly.

I too spent several years in Russia, albeit after it had thrown
off the Soviet yoke.  So I asked Dell in fluent Russian, "Did you
not indeed!  Then you must have already been a Moscow resident
before we entered the war in December of 1941."

His chin dropped a full inch.  He stuttered but replied, also in
Russian, "I went to Russia with the first Lend Lease planners in
October of that year.  I was naturally reassigned to the OSS when
the U.S. declared war.  I remained in the city as liaison."

"Then how is it, may I ask, that you speak Russian with a
pronounced Leningrad accent?"

He actually blushed.  "My secretary and comrade, who, ah, taught
me so much, was raised in Leningrad."   But he straightened up
stiffly.  "That is as nothing in comparison to the
twelve-year-old who can tell the difference.  Was your mother
perhaps Russian?"

I didn't want to tell him that I had also enjoyed the lingering
favors of a female comrade from Leningrad -- St. Petersburg when I
was there.  Deprecatingly I gave him part of the truth.  "I have
a talent with languages too."

"_Ochevidno_," he agreed, though his eyes were somewhat glassy.

I reverted to English.  "I assume you share Henry Wallace's
opinion of that country and how the United States can cooperate
with it in rebuilding the world."  I put it as a matter of fact,
because such a view was socially and politically admissible in
1947.

"Wallace?"  Dell sat up straight.  "There's a great man!  He
would be president now had the Democrats not bounced him from the
ticket in '44, in favor of that haberdasher."

"You don't care for Truman?" Alice asked a bit coyly.

"Truman is very dangerous."  Dell actually looked over his
shoulder.  A hand across his mouth muffled his voice.  "He and
the people around him."

"I might agree with that, Professor Dell," I spoke up, "if you
valued a child's political view."

He stared at me searchingly.  "You are no child."  His gaze
turned to Alice.  "And you, Miss, ah, Miss Edgeworth.  Are you
the mate of this one?"

"In every way," she declared flatly, staring into his eyes.  "And
when he is a Nobel laureate, I shall stand beside him."

He chuckled slightly.  "You expect to win next year, I take it."

"Very soon," she retorted.  "My own discoveries in cosmology will
knock their stocks off in Stockholm."

"Their _stocks_!  Yes, very good."

He seemed to relax for the first time.   Although it was evident
we had shocked him into a new appreciation of our intellectual
capacity, he leaned back in the chair with hands clasped behind
his head and smiled at us.

"Perhaps we can accommodate you two at Chicago after all," he
said almost cheerfully, "although we can't formally accept you
into the graduate program, at least not at first.  You say you'll
be living with your aunt.  Is she with you?  I'd like to speak
privately with her."

So we filed out.  Clara was alone in the anteroom.  I told her,
"We're in.  His nibs wants a word with you.  Where's Mar-- ah,
Miss Holmes?"

"Congratulations!  With _me_?  He'll get no gossip from me!
Margery went to the bathroom."

We waited after the door closed behind Clara.  Alice grinned
knowingly at me.  "Show off!"

"You too."

"That guttural crap was Russian, wasn't it?"

"Yeah."

"That you learned off that little chippy, Solayeva."

"Chippy!  She had more scientific degrees than I did!"

"I know which degrees she had more of!  Why did he blush?"

"He let slip that he also learned Russian from a little chippy."

"These foreign women!  What've they got that I don't?  And don't
you dare mention boobs."

I shrugged.  "Nothing.  Except opportunity at the time."  I
grinned at her.  "I thought _I_ was the one skirting
anachronisms."

She tossed her head.  "We're supposed to be precocious, aren't
we?  _He_ knew what I meant."

Clara came charging through the door.  "Come on!" she ordered
brusquely, sweeping past us.  A red spot stood out on both her
cheeks.  I had hoped to exchange a few words with Margery but
they would wait.  Alice and I vaulted to our feet and followed on
Clara's heels.

"What's the matter?" Alice asked when we were clear of the
building.

The woman took several deep breaths, slowed down and grinned
sheepishly.  She shook her head.  In a moment she giggled.
"Actually it was flattering.  I ought to go back and kiss him."

"Damn it, Clara," I complained, "what in hell did he say to you?"

"He asked if I would name the man who fathered you two upon me."

-- 
Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights
reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.
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