again. No, I did not just get back in town from Australia. See?'
He shook his head.
'You have a simple, almost classic life-style, too. What sort of trouble are you in this time? Irate husband? Mad bomber? Syndicate creditor?'
'Nothing like that,' I said.
'Worse? Or better?'
'More complicated. What have you heard?'
'Nothing. But your adviser phoned me.'
'When?'
'A little over a week ago. Then again this morning.'
'What did he want?'
'He wanted to know where you were, wanted to know whether I had heard from you. I told him no on both counts. He told me a man would be stopping by to ask some questions. The university would appreciate my cooperation. That was the first time. The man showed up a little later, asked me the same questions, got the same answers.'
'Was his name Nadler?'
'Yes. A federal man. State Department. At least, that is what his I.D. said. He gave me a number and told me to call it if I heard from you.'
'Don't.'
He winced.
'You didn't have to say it.'
'Sorry.'
I listened to the strings.
'I haven't heard from him since,' he finished a few moments later.
'What did Wexroth want this morning?'
'He had the same questions, updated, and a message.'
'For me?'
He nodded. He took a sip of his drink.
'What is it?'
'If I heard from you I was to tell you that you have graduated. You can pick up your diploma at his office.'
'What?'
I was on my feet, part of my drink slopping over onto my cuff.
'That's what he said: ‘graduated.' '
'They can't do that to me!'
He hunched his shoulders, let them fall again.
'Was he joking? Did he sound stoned? Did he say why? How?'
'No-on all of them,' he said. 'He sounded sober and serious. He even repeated it.'
'Damn!' I began to pace. 'Who do they think they are? You can't just force a degree on a man that way.'
'Some people want them.'
'They don't have frozen uncles. Damn! I wonder what happened? I don't see any angle. I've never given them an opening for this. How the hell could they do it?'
'I don't know. You'll have to ask him.'
'I will! Believe me, I will! I'm going down there first thing in the morning and punch him in the eye!'
'Will that solve anything?'
'No, but revenge fits in with a classic life-style.'
I sat down again and drank my drink. The music went round and round.
Later, after reminding the merry-eyed Irish Setter who worked as night watchman on the first floor that we had an arrangement involving tails and blankets, I sacked out on the bed in the back room. A dream of wondrous symbolism and profundity came to me there.
Many years earlier I had read an amusing little book called Sphereland by a mathematician named Burger. It was a sequel to the old Abbott classic Flatland, and in it there had been a bit of business involving the reversal of two-dimensional creatures by a being from higher space. Pedigreed dogs and mongrels were mirror images of one another, symmetrical but not congruent. The pedigreed mutts were rarer, more expensive, and a little girl had wanted one so badly. Her father arranged for her mongrel to be mated with a pedigreed dog, in hope that it would produce the more desirable pups. But alas, while there was a large litter they were all of them mongrels. Later, however, an obliging visitor from higher space turned them into pedigreed dogs by rotating them through the third dimension. The geometric moral, while well taken, was not what had fascinated me about the incident, though. I kept trying to picture the mating that had taken place-two symmetrical but incongruent dogs going at it in two dimensions. The only available procedure involved a kind of canis obversa position, which I visualized and then imagined as rotating, whirligig-like, in twodimensional space. I had employed the mandala thus achieved as a meditation aid in my yoga classes for some time afterward. Now it returned to me in the halls of slumber, and I was surrounded and crowded by pairs of deadly serious dogs, curling and engendering, doing their thing silently, spinning, occasionally nipping one another about the neck. Then an icy wind swept down upon me and the dogs vanished and I was cold and alone and afraid.
I awoke to discover that Woof had stolen the blankets and was sleeping on them off in the corner by the potting kiln. Snarling, I went over and recovered them. He tried to pretend it was all a misunderstanding, the son of a bitch, but I knew better and I told him so. When I glanced over later, all that I could see was his tail and a mournful expression among the dust and the potsherds.
Chapter 8
They were waiting for me to say something, to do something. But there was nothing to say, nothing to do. We were going to die, and that was that. I glanced out the window and along the beach to the place where the sea stacked slate on the shore and pulled it down again. I was reminded of my last day and night in Australia. Only then Ragma had come along and provided a way out. In fair puzzles there should always be a way out. But I saw no doorways in the sand, and try as I might I could not make the puzzle fall fair.
'Well, Fred? Do you have something for us? Or should we go ahead? It is up to you now.'
I looked at Mary, tied there in the chair. I tried not to look at her frightened face, look into her eyes, but I did. At my side, I heard Hal's heavy breathing stop short, as though he were tensing to spring. But Jamie Buckler noted this also, and the gun twitched slightly in his hand. Hal did not spring.
'Mister Zeemeister,' I said, 'if I had that stone, I would tie a bright ribbon around it and hand it to you. If I knew where it was, I would go get it for you or tell you where to find it. I do not want to see Mary dead, Hal dead, me dead. Ask me anything else and it's yours.'
'Nothing else will do,' he said, and he picked up the pliers.
We would be tortured and killed, if we just waited our turns. If we had had the answer and we gave it to them we would still be killed, though. Either way ...
But we would not stand there and watch. We all knew that. We would try to rush them, and Mary and Hal and I would be the losers.
Wherever you are, whatever you are, I said in my shrillest thoughts, if you can do something, do it now!
Zeemeister had taken hold of Mary's wrist and forced her hand upward. As he reached for a finger with the pliers, the Ghost of Christmas Past or one of those guys drifted into the room behind him.
Stamping out of Jefferson Hall, cursing under my breath, I decided that a State Department official named Theodore Nadler was the next man I was going to punch in the eye. Making my way around the phountain and
