Page 30 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Archaeontogeny

plan. Al Magnus was sending me down from harebrain heaven to be
his angel.
Recalling my unwelcome reception by Lalo Aitkens, I made sure
that Professor Cutter understood the purpose for my visit before I
arrived. If he cared to, he could already have checked the track record
of Charybdis, constructed—that sounds so much better than
forged!—to impress a person with his particular mix of sophistication
and naiveté, long before I showed my face. I had studied the
appearance of people working for the on-campus research funding
industry, mostly flacks for large corporations and non-profit
organizations, and felt I had a good grasp on how to look and act.
Thus I arrived at Holyoke late one mid-semester weekday afternoon
in a business suit no professor could afford, comporting myself with
a slightly superior air. An important person had come calling on Dr.
Cutter, and it couldn’t hurt his image to have that fact funneled into
the departmental gossip mill.
A secretary in the social sciences building directed me to the
second floor and the office of Eugene Cutter, PhD. It was halfway
down a hall of closed doors alternating with leaflet-strewn bulletin
boards and a drinking fountain. A bespectacled young lady with grad-
student slouch walked past, gazing at me like a native ogling a tourist.
I took that as a compliment: returning to a campus, even one as ivy-
leaguish as Runyoke, could easily trigger old patterns of behavior
ringing false with my disguise du jour. But, as Al Magnus surmised, I
could stay on my game long enough to close a sweet deal with a sugar
addict.
I knocked.
“Needn’t knock,” responded a basso profundo. “Come in.”
I did, ready to bowl him over with a dynamite first impression.
“I’ve told you teaching assistants a dozen times that I run things
informally; my door’s always open and you don’t have dress up. Or
are you on your way to a funeral?—no, even likelier: a job interview
with the CIA?”
The professor sat behind a desk the surface of which presented a
project in itself for archaeology, its sedimentary layers easily
stretching back to the Plasticene Era. The man responsible for those
deposits of documentary shale and detritus was only visible from the
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