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"Ma'am!" Stricken, she looked up into her adviser's face. The doctor's eyeglasses rode low on her beak, two luminous disks under a painfully weak pair of watery pink eyes. The effect was like being stared at by two separate creatures, one of which you pitied and the other feared.
"I have been going over your laboratory reports, Miss Alderberry." Dr. Nemesis put an arm through hers, and walked her toward the front. "They are, if I may confide in you, disappointing, most disappointing in a student of your potential."
"I've been having trouble with the sophic—"
"Exactly so." They strolled out the front entrance. Distractedly, Jane realized that, cloaked within the magnetic field of Dr. Nemesis's dignity, she had effortlessly bypassed security. What would have taken calculation, daring, and risk on her part, her adviser had accomplished without even noticing.
She walked Jane to a faculty elevator and unlocked the controls. It was snug as a nut within, walnut panels polished to a glassy smoothness. The doors closed noiselessly. Silently, they ascended. Jane could dimly see her own reflection in the wood with her adviser looming beside her like a storm cloud.
"You must surely realize why I am concerned for you."
"Well…" Jane didn't really, but that double glare bored into her, waiting for an intelligent response. "I'm here on a merit scholarship, so I suppose—"
"No!" Dr. Nemesis stamped her foot impatiently. As if in response the elevator door slid open. She steered Jane outside. They were on an office level now. The walls were decorated with large unframed oils of umbrellas and sides of beef. The ru
"There's something I'm missing," Jane said rapidly. "It must surely be something elementary, something basic. If I could only understand it, if only I could see what it was, I'm certain I could keep up."
"I feel it may help, Miss Alderberry, were I to admit to you that at one time I was myself but an indifferent researcher. Oh, yes. Even I." Dr. Nemesis smiled vainly. "Lazy, unorganized, insolent—all the virtues a teaching assistant can have, I lacked."
"I was wondering could it maybe be the pontic water—"
"What set me straight was one particular incident. My adviser, none other than the wizard Bongay himself mind you, had obtained grant money from the Horned Man Foundation to create a divinatory engine in the form of a brazen head. This was, you will understand, very early in the history of cybernetics. It was all done with vacuum tubes then."
"It couldn't be my technique. I was ever so careful."
"We had taken over an unused handball court and fitted it with our equipment. There we spent most of a year, flirting with glory and never wi
"After one particularly exasperating failure, Bongay declared himself in great need of sleep and staggered off to his cot. He left me awake, though, with stern warnings to watch the head and wake him immediately should it come to life.
"I was dull with fatigue myself, but I stayed up resoldering some circuits. Vacuum tubes were fussy things. You'd be surprised how often a problem could be resolved simply by ripping out a demonstrably complete circuit and replacing it with its twin.
"Not half an hour later, the head's eyes snapped open.
"Time is," he said.
"I put down my soldering iron. To tell you the truth, I was not sure it had actually spoken, for the eyes clicked shut as soon as it was done and that noble brass face was as still as the tomb. It might have been a waking dream. But I had my orders and I went to the wizard Bongay and put my hand on his shoulder to waken him. Only then he rolled over and the blanket slipped from him and I saw how fearsomely aroused he was in his sleep.
"Bongay had the habit, you see, of gratifying his impulses as they arose. To sharpen his wits, you see. I was the first female laboratory assistant he had ever employed but I knew from experience that he would exact from me certain favors which he had grown accustomed to receiving from young male graduate students." She raised an eyebrow significantly.
"You mean—?" said Jane, not sure what she meant.
"Exactly. My hemorrhoids were in bloom. The thought of accommodating him was intolerable. So I decided I must have been mistaken. An hour passed. The head's eyes again opened. Again, he spoke:
"Time was.
"This time I was sure the head had spoken. But now—in addition to my perfectly understandable reluctance to arouse the wizard—I knew that I had committed a grievous error in not awakening him the first time. If I awoke him now, he must surely punish me for not awakening him sooner. I was in a quandary. I dithered for a good hour. At the end of which, the head spoke for a third and final time.
"Time is past, he said.
"His eyes rolled up and there was a burning smell. Heat radiated from the brazen head, greater and ever greater, until the metal did actually glow. I screamed and Bongay awoke.
"Is he aware? Bongay demanded. I must speak to him. There are things I must explain before—
"Then he saw how the head glowed and how the solder ran in little rivulets from the seams in its neck and with it the gold and silver of its circuitry. Then did the wizard Bongay himself scream, in such fury that I fled for fear of his wrath."
She laughed. "He lost tenure over that incident, and his life as well. That happened near the end of the fiscal year, and the University had been relying on that grant money. Everybody involved with that fiasco was executed by order of the Bursar."
"How did you survive?"
"They needed somebody to write the final report. The Wizard Bongay, His Brazen Head and Fearsome Doom: Some Early Lessons Learned. You may well have read it. But that was the incident that taught me. Never again was I so behindhand in my duties. Vigilance, Ms Alderberry! That must ever be our watchword—vigilance!"
"I'm sure I could catch up. If only I had a little hint what I'm doing wrong."
"Good, good," Nemesis said. "I knew our little chat would help. Only remember that we all have quotas to keep. We can show no favoritism. In order to retain you, we must let some other deserving student go. Surviving the Teind, however good a scholar you may be, is a privilege, not a right." They had come to her office. She unlocked the door, stepped inside, and turned. "And remember also, that my door is always open."
She closed it in Jane's face.
The undergraduate elevator from the classroom levels to the three floors collectively designated the Lady Habundia Residence for Female Scholars was crowded with several dozen chattering undergraduates, half of them with bicycles. Jane felt simultaneously inferior and superior to them. They were an unserious lot, most of them, and squandering their educations where she was studiously making the most of hers. On the other hand, there was no denying that they had fun and she largely did not.