3 x T

One thing the discreet individual had not been briefed about was Professor Fogelman's weak kidneys. As he usually did, Fogelman woke up in the middle of the night. The light downstairs bothered him. He sometimes left his computer up, but he thought he'd turned it off before he went to bed. Muttering to himself, he went down to check.

The discreet individual heard him coming, of course, and shot him through the head with a discreetly silenced weapon when he appeared in the study doorway. Fogelman lived alone; his neighbors would never notice the small noise he made falling. The discreet individual went back to what he had been doing.

When he was through, he efficiently ransacked the place?he had not been paid not to?and left through the same window he'd used to enter.

Unlike the luckless Fogelman, he had no trouble sleeping when he got home.

Stavros was the first one to the seminar room, which showed how eager he was to get on with his presentation. Cooling his heels outside while the group inside finished, he wondered if eagerness was cause enough to drum him out of the grad students' union. It probably was, he decided.

The session in the room broke up, and the students came out excitedly discussing something or other that wasn't anthropology and made very little sense to Stavros. He pushed through them and found a seat.

One by one, the other members of the seminar drifted in. Some wanted to talk about their presentations. Others were too nervous about speaking in public to care to put out their conclusions more than once. Stavros kept quiet, too; he was saving his ammunition for Fogelman.

He was no poker player, though. "You look like the cat that ate the canary," the girl from Earth said. She was sitting across from him.

"The what?" he said foolishly, not following the idiom. What was her name? He'd only heard it at the meeting last week. "You're Andrea Dubois, aren't you?"

She smiled, pleased he remembered. She was a big pink blond girl and thus seemed strange to Stavros; most of New Thessaly's population was Hellenic, as slim and dark as he was. "How's this?" she said. "You look like someone sitting there waiting for the Academic Medal to go on your chest."

"I think I did a good piece of work." He still didn't want to talk about it, but she was pretty, obviously bright or she wouldn't be here, and so he didn't want the conversation to end either. "You speak beautiful Basic?you sound like the instruction tapes I learned from."

"Thanks." She smiled again. "I wish I could take more credit for it, but I just happen to come from Perth, and everyone in Australia talks this way. At home we call it English."

"I'm jealous."

"It's not as big an advantage as you think," Andrea said. "Because I use Basic all the time and never had to learn another language, I'll probably have more trouble than you in picking up alien languages."

"Well, maybe," Stavros said dubiously.

Without heat, they argued about it for a while until Andrea looked at her watch and said in some surprise, "Professor Fogelman is very late."

"He makes a habit of it." Stavros chuckled. But when Fogelman did not show up after another ten minutes, he began to wonder himself.

The door opened. But it was not Fogelman who came into the seminar room?it was one of the administrative aides from the anthropology department. The fellow looked shaken; his voice wobbled as he said, "May I have your attention, please?"

The class quieted. He went on, "I'm extremely sorry to have to tell you that Professor Fogelman died last night. His body has just been found at his home."

The seminar group exclaimed in shock and dismay. Stavros crossed himself. He had grown agnostic since coming to the university, but childhood habits still returned in times of stress. "What did he die of?" someone called.

The aide looked unhappier yet. "Professor Fogelman appears to have been murdered, apparently in the course of a robbery. Police investigations are continuing."

The second round of gasps and groans was louder and longer than the first. Stavros was too stu

Andrea apparently accepted the idea more quickly, but then, Stavros didn't think she'd done her undergrad work on Hyperion, so she'd seen Fogelman only once or twice. "What does this do to our enrollment in the seminar?" she asked.

"Professor Richardson has agreed to take over the course," the aide said. Andrea looked relieved. Odds were the girl from Earth didn't know Richardson either, Stavros thought. Richardson specialized in physical anthropology, and thought the cultural half of the discipline a waste of time.

"Get ready for fifteen weeks of potsherds and middens," Stavros whispered to Andrea.

The aide left. The grad students trailed after him, still struggling to accept what they'd heard. "If I'd known he was going to get himself killed, I wouldn't have worked so hard," one said.

"Nice pragmatic fellow," Andrea said, rolling her eyes.

"We both know how he feels," Stavros said. "A lot of the time, I'd agree with him. Not now, though."

"No?" Andrea gave him a curious look. "You are carrying something big there, aren't you?"

Stavros hesitated. Sometimes professors ended up publishing work graduate students did. Sometimes other grad students pulled the same stunt. He sometimes thought anybody who wasn't a little paranoid had no business in grad school. But Andrea was right?he did have a blockbuster in his briefcase, and he felt he'd explode if he didn't show it to someone.

"Do you really want to see it?" he said. "Let's go over to the Bistro. What they do to dolmades is a crying shame, but they're cheap and close."

It was Andrea's turn to pause, but after a moment she laughed and said, "All right, you've got me curious. And what are dol-whatevers?"

"Grape leaves stuffed with lamb and rice. They're an ancient dish; the recipe goes back to Greece, the Earth region the settlers from New Thessaly came from. The cooks at the Bistro don't season them right, though."

"How long has New Thessaly been settled?" she asked.

He shrugged. "A couple of thousand years. Why?"

"Just that I'd be surprised if your people didn't use native spices in their cooking. Everybody does. For all you know, these dolmades may be more like the originals than the ones you're used to are."

That almost made him angry, as if she had somehow maligned his home planet. A few seconds of reflection showed she was right, but that did not help much. "Come on," he said gruffly.

Again, he didn't quite know how to take the appreciative noises she made over the Bistro's dolmades. After a couple of glasses of red wine, he worried less. He fiddled with his briefcase. "Are you ready yet?" he asked.

"Eager, eager, eager," she teased, but good-naturedly. "Yes, show me your great mystery, now that I'm not distracted by starvation."

He got out the hard copy of his paper, and ordered baklava?not even he could fault the way the Bistro made baklava. Andrea paid him the highest compliment of all: she left hers untouched while she read.

She looked up after a couple of pages. "You're sure you're not exaggerating this?"

"It's all straight from the report. If anything, summarizing it cuts the impact because so much of the documentation and supporting detail boils away."

She gave an absent nod; she was reading again. When she was done, she knocked back the wine in her glass with a single gulp. "You weren't kidding," she said quietly. "What are you going to do now?"

He shook his head. "I just don't know. I was going to ask Fogelman, but now?what a mess this is."

He felt the inadequacy of the words, but Andrea understood what he meant. "If I were you, I'd be careful about showing this to a lot of people, at least ones you don't know you can trust."