One Coffee With

All this was not a deliberate shortchanging on Administrations' part. Not entirely. By a sort of unspoken agreement Art balanced its unyielding attitude toward Administrations' officiousness by not clamoring for more amenities. Most members of the department were happy to relinquish bigger offices and fancier furnishing in return for their relative independence.

With Mike Szabo trailing her like a shaggy brown dog. Sandy entered this shabby warren of offices by the first door, lifted a cup from the tray he still carried and stepped aside to let the Hungarian pass through to the main office.

"You can just set the tray on the bookcase," she called"after him. "The broken chair's that one on the other side of the encyclopedias."

"Hokay," replied Szabo, who'd given Professor Simpson a cheerful salute in passing.

Sandy smiled at the gray-haired professor also and set the cup marked C/W/SUG on his desk in the front corner of the nursery.

Juniors were usually stuck with the early-morning or late-afternoon schedules; they rarely got the desirable midday classes, so the room was empty now except for Professor Simpson. He looked up from a thick tome as Sandy placed his coffee on a desk cluttered by student themes, IBM grade cards, folders and stacks of books with scrap-paper markers fringing their ends.

Albert Simpson had once carried much weight on a large frame. The weight was gone now, and his boniness made him look older, as if he'd shrunk into himself. He seemed to embody the idea of the absentminded professor whose suits were always untidy, whose socks might not match, and who forgot contemporary dates, but who could make dead eras come alive with thousands of intimate details. The elderly classicist had been working on his book about Roman art for almost thirty years, yet it had never progressed beyond the research stage. He kept wandering down too many fascinating side paths ever to organize his mass of findingsi nto a publishable manuscript; but he was David Wade's graduate advisor, and Sandy was fond of him, so she defended him whenever Professor Qui

"Is David in this morning?" Simpson asked now, peering over his glasses at an outdated schedule taped to the wall above his desk. "I've just come across another passage in Maiuri that supports his thesis."

"No, he's taking in that exhibition at the Metropolitan," Sandy said. She made a mental note to replace the three-year-old schedule with a new one, and this time she'd tape it up herself instead of just handing it to him to get lost on his desk again. "He should be in around noon, though."

"Good, good," murmured the old scholar, already reabsorbed in his text. He probably wouldn't think of the coffee again until it was stone-cold, Sandy thought.

She turned and almost collided with Mike Szabo, who now carried a battered wooden chair over his head. One of the legs had come unglued and was hanging by its stretchers, the result of some too strenuous roughhousing among the teaching fellows and graduate assistants.

"I have it fixed good for this afternoon," Szabo promised, and Sandy smiled her thanks.

Leaving the nursery, she skirted the mail rack and paused by a long, waist-high bookcase beside the chairman's door. It was another castoff-battered looking but sturdy and capacious enough to hold the department's Brita

Lemuel Vance was a vigorous fifty, with thick black hair only lightly sprinkled with gray. He was more of a technician than an intellectual, but he knew as much as any living man about how to achieve every subtle effect possible in the realm of graphics. He raged, bellowed, cursed, had even been know to deliver a stinging smack to the backsides of his most talented students when they slacked their standards; but he was an effective, respected teacher, and he got results. Over the years many of his former students had carved out quite respectable niches in the art world.

Sandy found the barrel-shaped printer lusting over a glossy catalog of heavy equipment and preparing his a

"You could type up the requisition order, slip it in with some other stuff, and Oscar'd never notice he's signed it," Vance said, continuing an earlier argument.

"I still don't see what's wrong with the printing press you have," Sandy smiled.

"Are you kidding? Eighteen inches-that's the biggest plate that antediluvian junk heap can take. Now this beauty," he crooned, touching a picture in the catalog with inkstained fingers, "can take plates twice that big."

Sandy studied the description. Most of the technical terms were beyond her. The astronomical price she could understand, though, as well as the machine's gross shipping weight. "Could the floor support that much extra weight?"

"So they have to put jacks under it, sow hat?" Vance said impatiently, dismissing what would certainly be screams of outrage from Modern Languages directly beneath the printmaking workshop. "Come on. Sandy, help me talk Oscar into it. How can I teach etching without a decent press?"

"Professor Nauman isn't a dictator, Lem. Something this expensive he'd want the whole department to vote on. Anyway, you know Professor Qui

"Those parasites! Without artists where would those damn historians be?" he asked darkly. "Riley Qui

Vance was still griping at 10:43 when Sandy slipped down the hall to wash her hands. Considering the lavatory's location and clientele, the caricatures and graffiti decorating its walls weren't too pornographic. Figure classes increased one's draftsmanship but took a lot of fun and spice out of anatomical nudes. Of course, someone had rather wittily combined Piers Leyden's reputation for romantic dalliance with a well-known Pompeian wall painting of Priapus; and someone else's despairing scrawl 'I hate periods!' had been answered by a brisk Then try semicolons-they're more artistic.'

With her mind elsewhere Sandy barely noticed the decorations. She dried her hands and hurried back down the hallway. Professor Simpson didn't look up from his books as she repassed him, and his unopened coffee was still sitting exactly where she had placed it.

Inside her own office she took the cup marked BLK from the tray and set it and the cheese Danish on her desk. The last two cups – both labeled C/W/SUG – she left on the bookcase for Professors Nauman and Qui

As she distributed mail among the pigeonholes of the large rack at the front of the office, a noise drew her attention to a weak-mouthed young man who had appeared behind her by the closed door to the i

"Oh, Harley," she said. "I tried to call you before."

"What about?" the graduate student asked suspiciously. Harley Harris was shorter than she, with petulant eyes and beardless baby-smooth cheeks. He had tried to coax his lank brown hair into an Afro, but it was uncooperative and merely looked messy.

"I called your house three times," Sandy said, "but no one answered. That meeting you wanted with Professor Nauman at eleven-he's scheduled to see the dean of faculties at 11:15 so you'll have to wait till two to meet with him. I'm sorry, Harley."