'Professor Paulus?' Laura said.
The frail chairman of the philosophy department looked [garbled] behind his messy desk.
'Ah, come in! Come in!'
There were loose papers covering every inch of his shelves, chairs, and couch. 'Oh, put those anywhere,' he said waving his hand. 'Have a seat. Have a seat.' His voice was raspy and had lost its vigor. He was due to retire this year, she knew. She'd heard of the scramble for his seat.
Laura put his illegible, handwritten notes on the floor. 'Thank you for taking time to see me.'
'I always have time for my students.'
'Oh, um, I'm an associate professor over in the psychology department.'
'Good lord! I am sorry.' He took his thick glasses off and wiped them with his handkerchief, putting them back on and squinting at her.
'Hmmmph,' he said after his inspection, obviously deciding his error was understandable. Laura looked younger, she knew, than her age.
'Well, what can I do for my esteemed colleague, Miss…?'
'Aldridge. Laura Aldridge.' She decided not to say 'Doctor,' fearing an appearance of pretentiousness and a perceived feminist slap at the kindly man. 'I was just wondering. It's been a long time, but do you happen to remember a student of yours by the name of Joseph Gray? He was…'
'Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant, but…' The old man was alert now, his eyes far off but staring intently at a fixed point in space.
'What?'
'Why do you ask?' he said, suddenly on guard.
'Well…' She debated whether she should tell him.
'May I see your university ID?'
'What?'
'Your ID,' he repeated, waggling the fingers of his outstretched hand like a cop to a motorist he'd just stopped. She fished it out of the fanny pack at her waist, and he looked it over.
'I'm sorry, Dr. Aldridge,' the old man said as he handed it back — his features mellowing and kindly again. 'It's just… you can never be sure these days. So many people are asking questions.'
'About Gray?' she asked, and he nodded. 'Who?'
'Our government, for one. Sent somebody by here just last Thursday. FBI. And then, over the weekend, there was that break-in. Hit your department as well, I hear.'
'What break-in? Somebody broke into our offices?'
'No, no, no. I guess I shouldn't have said anything. They want it kept hush-hush — something about not losing our security rating for defense work.' He leaned across his desk and lowered his voice.
'Somebody broke into the university network. Used that thing — the 'Web.' They browsed through computer files in the directories assigned to philosophy, linguistics, and your department — psychology?'
'What did they do with the files? Was it a prank? Vandalism?'
'No, no,' he shook his head. 'Didn't do anything, apparently. Didn't even copy any of the files, just browsed through.' He laughed, shrugging, a comical expression on his face. 'What it is in our departments' computer files that has people worried about national defense secrets certainly eludes me.'
'Well, what does any of that have to do with Gray? I mean, hackers are a real menace. They're one of the several hundred reasons I hate computers. In the last month alone, I got a notice printed on my checking account statement that the bank computer had been hacked into, and that they couldn't guarantee that people's records had been kept confidential. Then, if you can believe this, some… I don't know, loser kid, probably, with nothing better to do broke into the computers at the video store where I rent disks.'
She chuckled. 'They had this big sign posted by the door to the X-rated part of the store informing everybody. I bet there were some nervous men running around worrying about those rental records.'
Laura laughed again, but Paulus seemed ill at ease. 'Anyway,' she continued, 'I can't imagine why they'd think it might be Gray.'
The professor seemed lost in thought. He shrugged. 'You're right.' He nodded again. 'You're right, I suppose.' The old man's eyes grew unfocused, and he seemed to drift away. 'That boy…'
He shook his head. 'What?'
Paulus sighed. 'It's just a shame. A true shame. He was the most brilliant mind whose path I ever crossed, bar none.'
'Were you his teacher?'
A brief laugh burst from Paulus. 'Not really. You see, Dr. Aldridge, nobody really ever taught that boy anything that I can recall.' He shook his head again. 'Oh, he'd read. He was a prodigious reader. Fast as lightning, with truly photographic memory. I seem to recall that someone in your department once wanted to test him. A Dr. Weems? Is he still over there?'
Laura shook her head. 'No, sir. He passed away before I joined the department.'
'Well, they never did, I can tell you that, because if there was one more thing about that boy, it was that he was stubborn. Headstrong.'
'I don't understand, Professor, when you say nobody ever taught him anything. He attended class. He got a degree.'
'Oh, yes, yes. But he was just… just so far ahead, don't you see. It only stands to reason, with the amount of reading he'd do. The boy only needed four, five hours of sleep a night at most. And every night he would polish off increasingly obscure texts, gleaning some progressively more trivial points of view from an ever-narrowing set of as yet unread treatises.'
'You said he was brilliant. How did you know? I mean, you tested him, I'm sure — I mean academically.'
'Oh, yes, yes. Nothing really to compare him with, though. Just gave him the highest possible score.' He suddenly laughed again. 'Once… once a graduate teaching assistant gave Joe a B on a paper in logic. It was an upperclassman's course, and Joe had taken the most primitive tools of deductive reasoning and applied them to the most simplistic logical arguments.' He was clearly amused as he recounted the story, smiling broadly. An educator, Laura thought with a wave of self-pity, at the end of a distinguished career reminiscing about his brightest student. 'He used standard deductive reasoning, you understand. Plato's 'Aristotle was a man, all men are mortal, therefore Aristotle was mortal.' But Joe applied it to Descartes' 'Cogito, ergo sum'—'I think, therefore I am.' The point of his paper had been to fill in the missing operator — the middle argument that links the 'I think' with the 'therefore I am.'' Paulus laughed loudly. 'The graduate teaching assistant thought it was too simplistic. He hadn't used any of the more sophisticated methods of symbolic logic. He hadn't even regurgitated any of the classic fallacies. The graduate student gave a fifteen-page critique of Joe's paper, which I think was only something like seven or eight pages long. He never wrote long papers.'
'What did you do?'
'Well… I changed it to an A, of course. It was pure genius.'
'What was his conclusion about Descartes' argument?'
'He agreed with Descartes.'
After a moment's hesitation, Laura laughed, but Paulus wasn't sharing in her amusement.
'It was really quite a compliment to Descartes,' the old man said, and the smile faded from Laura's face. He was serious. 'You should have heard how he filleted poor Immanuel Kant.'
Laura was uncertain how to react. A teenager who deigned to agree or disagree with the likes of Descartes and Kant. 'So, if all he did was agree with Descartes, what was the big deal?'
'Oh, it was the way he agreed!' Paulus's voice had a dreamy quality to it. 'That was what it was like. It was so frustrating' — Paulus grabbed the air with clenched fists in front of him—'to be around Joe. It was so difficult to get things out of him. You had to pry his mind open, and even then he just gave you glimpses. He once said when I tried to draw him out that it wasn't that he didn't want to talk to people, it was just that it would take too long to define terms for them. You see' — Paulus pointed to his skull—'there were thoughts and concepts flourishing in his head that had no definition in the English language. In any language. He even said that he thought of things and then assigned to them nonverbal labels that he called… Oh, dear. What did he call them?' the old man said, looking suddenly perplexed.
