years previous. It was a tall brick building, shackled with ivy that
seemed to spring out of the earth like green, clutching hands. Its
narrow windows were more like gun slits than real windows, and
Amberson seemed to frown at the newer buildings with their glass
walls and curvy, unorthodox shapes.
The new zoology building, Cather Hall, had been completed eight
months before, and the process of transition would probably go on
for another eighteen months. No one was completely sure what
would happen to Amberson then. If the bond issue to build the new
gym found favor with the voters, it would probably be demolished.
He paused a moment to watch two young men throwing a Frisbee
back and forth. A dog ran back and forth between them, glumly
chasing the spinning disc. Abruptly the mutt gave up and flopped
in the shade of a poplar. A VW with a NO NUKES sticker on the
back deck trundled slowly past, heading for the Upper Circle.
Nothing else moved. A week before, the final summer session had
ended and the campus lay still and fallow, dead ore on summer's
anvil.
Dex had a number of files to pick up, part of the seemingly endless
process of moving from Amberson to Cather. The old building
seemed spectrally empty. His footfalls echoed back dreamily as he
walked past closed doors with frosted glass panels, past bulletin
boards with their yellowing notices and toward his office at the end
of the first-floor corridor. The cloying smell of fresh paint hung in
the air.
He was almost to his door, and jingling his keys in his pocket,
when the janitor popped out of Room 6, the big lecture hall,
startling him.
He grunted, then smiled a little shamefacedly, the way people will
when they've gotten a mild zap. 'You got me that time,' he told the
janitor.
The janitor smiled and twiddled the gigantic key ring clipped to his
belt. 'Sorry, Perfesser Stanley,' he said. 'I was hopin' it was you.
Charlie said you'd be in this afternoon.'
'Charlie Gereson is still here?' Dex frowned. Gereson was a grad
student who was doing an involved--and possibly very important--
paper on negative environmental factors in long-term animal
migration. It was a subject that could have a strong impact on area
farming practices and pest control. But Gereson was pulling almost
fifty hours a week in the gigantic (and antiquated) basement lab.
The new lab complex in Cather would have been exponentially
better suited to his purposes, but the new labs would not be fully
equipped for another two to four months... if then.
'Think he went over the Union for a burger,' the janitor said. 'I
told him myself to quit a while and go get something to eat. He's
been here since nine this morning. Told him myself. Said he ought
to get some food. A man don't live on love alone.'
The janitor smiled, a little tentatively, and Dex smiled back. The
janitor was right; Gereson was embarked upon a labor of love. Dex
had seen too many squadrons of students just grunting along and
