"Dickson, Gordon - Dragon And The George Txt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

Shorles was one step above anyone else in the de- partment. He had a secretary in his outer office, who doubled as secretary to the department itself. Jim came through the door now and found her retyping something that looked suspiciously like the manu- script of Shorles' latest paper on the Etruscan roots of modem civilization.

"Hi, Marge," Jim said. "Is he in?"

Jim glanced toward the door leading to Shorles* separate office as he spoke, and saw it closed. So he knew Marge's answer almost before she gave it.

"Not just now," said Marge, a tall, sandy-haired girl in her mid-thirties. "Ted Jellamine's with him. They shouldn't be more than a little while, though. Do you want to wait?"

"Yes."

He took one of the hard seats for visitors in the outer office; and, at her desk. Marge resumed typing.

The minutes crawled slowly by. Another half-hour passed and another quarter-hour on top of that. Sud- denly the door burst open and out came Shorles, car- rying his ample belly energetically before him and closely followed by Ted Jellamine in cowboy boots and a checkered houndstooth jacket. As they headed for the outer door without pausing, Shorles spoke to his secretary.

"Marge, I won't be back this afternoon. We're headed for the Faculty Club. If my wife calls, she can find me there."

Jim had got to his feet automatically as the door opened and taken half a step in pursuit of the two men as they snailed through the room. Noticing him now, Shories gave him a cheerful wave of a hand.

"Marvelous news, Jim!" he said. "Ted, here, is go- ing to stay on another year!"

The door slammed behind both men. Jim stared at it, stunned, then turned to Marge, who looked back at him with sympathy.

"He just wasn't thinking. That's why he broke the news to you that way," she said.

"Ha!" said Jim. "He was gloating and you know it!"

"No," Marge shook her head. "No, really, you're wrong. He and Ted have been close friends for years; and Ted's been under pressure to retire early. But we're a private college with no automatic cost-of-living increases in the pensions, and with this inflation Ted wants to hang on to his job for the present if he still can. He really was just happy for Ted, when it turned out Ted could stay on; and he just didn't think of what that meant to you."

"Mmph!" said Jim, and staUked out.

He was all the way back to his parking spot before he calmed down long enough to check his watch. It was almost two-thirty. He had to pick up Angie again in half an hour. He had no time to do much of any- thing before then, either on his essay, or in the way of his duties as assistant to Shories-not that he felt over- whelmingly like doing work for Shories right now. He got into the Gorp, slammed the door and drove off, hardly caring where he went as long as it was away from the campus.

He turned left on High Street, turned left again on Wallace Drive, and emerged a few minutes later on the Old River Road alongside the Baling River: two- lane asphalt strip that had been the old route to the neighboring town of Bixley, before Highway Five had been laid over the rolling farmland on a parallel route.

The old road was normally free of traffic and today was no exception. It was even relatively free from houses and plowed fields, since most of the ground was low-lying and inclined to be marshy. Jim drove along with no particular destination in sight or mind, arid gradually the peace of the riverside area through which he was passing began to bring him back to some coolness of mind.

Gradually he brought himself to consider that pos- sibly Marge had been right and that Ted Jellamine might in his own way have been as concerned about his future and his livelihood as Jim was himself. It was a relief to come around to this point of view, be- cause Ted Jellamine was the one other member of the History Department whom Jim liked personally. Like Jim, he was an individualist.' It was only the factors of their situation that made them competitors.

But, outside of this crumb of comfort, Jim gleaned little happiness out of this new development. Perhaps it was not Ted who was to blame, but the tight eco- nomic situation which squeezed them all. Nonetheless, once again Jim caught himself wishing that life and the problems it produced were more concrete and in a position to be attacked more directly.

He glanced at his watch. It was fifteen minutes till three. Time to head back to Angie. He found a cross- road, turned the Gorp around and drove back toward the campus. Luckily, he had been driving slowly along the river road and was not that far from town. It would not do to have her standing and waiting for him, after all his insistence that she not let Grottwold keep her overtime and make him wait outside.

He pulled up in front of Stoddard Hall, actually with a couple of minutes to spare. Turning off the mo- tor, he waited. As he sat, he put his mind to work to decide on the best way of breaking the news of his latest blow to Angie. To come up with news of this kind on the same day their hopes of renting the mo- bile home had been dashed was the worst possible timing. For a short while he played with the notion of simply not saying anything about it today at all. But of course that would never work. She would want to know why he had not told her immediately; and she would be quite right in asking. They would get no- where if they fell into the habit of hiding bad news from each other out of a mistaken idea of kindness.

Jim glanced at his watch and was startled to see that while he had been sitting thinking, nearly ten min- utes had gone by. Angie was staying overtime, after all.

Something popped inside Jim. Suddenly he was completely angry-cold angry. Grottwold had pulled his delaying tactics once too often. Jim got out of the Gorp, closed the door and headed up the front steps to the Hall. Inside the big double doors was the main staircase, its shallow stair treads capped with gray granite which had been worn into hollows by student's feet over a number of years. Jim went up them two at a time.

Three stories up and thirty feet down the hall on the right was the frosted-glass door to the laboratory section in which Grottwold had a ten-foot-square cu- bicle. Jim went through, saw the door to the cubicle was closed and strode in without knocking.