Page 94 - Just Deserts

PIVOT

journal. In other words, it could either put us on the map or wipe us
off it. Therefore, since I must take ultimate responsibility for the
accuracy of everything printed here, please hold nothing back in your
critiques. Hump, you seem to be champing at the bit: why don’t you
start?”
Campbell, who had indeed been fidgeting with folders and
fruitlessly trying to get the lead out of a recalcitrant automatic pencil,
ceased his tabletop housekeeping.
“Right. I read the thing, checked a few references in the library.
The morphology is sound, I can tell you that. Experimental
procedures, as described: no problem, all according to standard. So, if
what he did really resulted in some new sort of non-Lamarckian
acquired characteristics, then my hat is off to him and he can count
on a Nobel prize not too far down the road. But there is one thing,
which I wasn’t going to bring up because I didn’t feel it should have
any influence on my decision.”
“Well, what is it?” Skinner and the others stared at a sheet of
paper the physiologist held in his hands.
“Not two days after I began reading Kingswater’s draft, I received
an anonymous letter at my apartment. I don’t know who sent it, or
how that person got my address. It doesn’t seem to be from an
educated native Anglophone, given the atrocious spelling and
grammar, so I can’t trace it to anyone I’m familiar with in academia. I
won’t read it—there are some passages which refer to me in a
somewhat insulting manner—but here is the gist. The writer claims
that Frederick Kingswater is in reality Friedrich von Konigswasser,
son of a notorious Nazi scientist who committed unspeakable
atrocities against slave laborers and concentration camp internees
during the Third Reich. That he was in fact born in Lubeck,
Germany, not Lubeck, Maine, and that he arrived in this country
illegally as an undergraduate by way of Paraguay.”
“What! That’s outrageous!” Skinner’s face purpled. “I’ve met Dr.
Kingswater: he has no trace of an accent, German or otherwise.”
“Uh, there’s more,” sighed the miserable Hump. “I did try to
check on the professor’s origins, but the county recorder in Maine
could not find the birth certificate. But the writer of this—this hate
mail goes on to accuse Konigswasser—I mean, Kingswater—of
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