Weill put another cigarette in his mouth and bent his head to the flame of his lighter. For a moment, he sat motionless, his thin face rigid.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked. “I’m a lawyer, not a psychiatrist.”
“I want a lawyer. This is a legal matter. Whitburn’s talking about voiding my tenure contract. You helped draw it; I have a right to expect you to help defend it.”
“Ed, have you been talking about this to anybody else?” Weill asked.
“You’re the first person I’ve mentioned it to. It’s not the sort of thing you’d bring up casually, in a conversation.”
“Then how’d Whitburn get hold of it?”
“He didn’t, not the way I’ve given it to you. But I made a couple of slips, now and then. I made a bad one yesterday morning.”
He told Weill about it, and about his session with the president of the college that morning. The lawyer nodded.
“That was a bad one, but you handled Whitburn the right way,” Weill said. “What he’s most afraid of is publicity, getting the college mixed up in anything controversial, and above all, the reactions of the trustees and people like that. If Dacre or anybody else makes any trouble, he’ll do his best to cover for you. Not willingly, of course, but because he’ll know that that’s the only way he can cover for himself. I don’t think you’ll have any more trouble with him. If you can keep your own nose clean, that is. Can you do that?”
“I believe so. Yesterday I got careless. I’ll not do that again.”
“You’d better not.” Weill hesitated for a moment. “I said I was a lawyer, not a psychiatrist. I’m going to give you some psychiatrist’s advice, though. Forget this whole thing. You say you can bring these impressions into your conscious mind by concentrating?” He waited briefly; Chalmers nodded, and he continued: “Well, stop it. Stop trying to harbor this stuff. It’s dangerous, Ed. Stop playing around with it.”
“You think I’m crazy, too?”
Weill shook his head impatiently. “I didn’t say that. But I’ll say, now, that you’re losing your grip on reality. You are constructing a system of fantasies, and the first thing you know, they will become your reality, and the world around you will be unreal and illusory. And that’s a state of mental incompetence that I can recognize, as a lawyer.”
“How about the Kilroy?”
Weill looked at him intently. “Ed, are you sure you did have that experience?” he asked. “I’m not trying to imply that you’re consciously lying to me about that. I am suggesting that you manufactured a memory of that incident in your subconscious mind, and are deluding yourself into thinking that you knew about it in advance. False memory is a fairly common thing, in cases like this. Even the little psychology I know, I’ve heard about that. There’s been talk about rockets to the Moon for years. You included something about that in your future-history fantasy, and then, after the event, you convinced yourself that you’d known all about it, including the impromptu christening of the rocket, all along.”
A hot retort rose to his lips; he swallowed it hastily. Instead, he nodded amicably.
“That’s a point worth thinking of. But right now, what I want to know is, will you represent me in case Whitburn does take this to court and does try to void my contract?”
“Oh, yes; as you said, I have an obligation to defend the contracts I draw up. But you’ll have to avoid giving him any further reason for trying to void it. Don’t make any more of these slips. Watch what you say, in class or out of it. And above all, don’t talk about this to anybody. Don’t tell anybody that you can foresee the future, or even talk about future probabilities. Your business is with the past; stick to it.”
The afternoon passed quietly enough. Word of his defiance of Whitburn had gotten around among the faculty—Whitburn might have his secretary scared witless in his office, but not gossipless outside it—though it hadn’t seemed to have leaked down to the students yet. Handley, the Latin professor, managed to waylay him in a hallway, a hallway Handley didn’t normally use.
“The tenure-contract system under which we hold our positions here is one of our most valuable safeguards,” he said, after exchanging greetings. “It was only won after a struggle, in a time of public animosity toward all intellectuals, and even now, our professional position would be most insecure without it.”
“Yes. I found that out today, if I hadn’t known it when I took part in the struggle you speak of.”
“It should not be jeopardized,” Handley declared.
“You think I’m jeopardizing it?”
Handley frowned. He didn’t like being pushed out of the safety of generalization into specific cases.
“Well, now that you make that point, yes. I do. If Doctor Whitburn tries to make an issue of … of what happened yesterday … and if the court decides against you, you can see the position all of us will be in.”
“What do you think I should have done? Given him my resignation when he demanded it? We have our tenure-contracts, and the system was instituted to prevent just the sort of arbitrary action Whitburn tried to take with me today. If he wants to go to court, he’ll find that out.”
“And if he wins, he’ll establish a precedent that will threaten the security of every college and university faculty member in the state. In any state where there’s a tenure law.”
Leonard Fitch, the psychologist, took an opposite attitude. As Chalmers was leaving the college at the end of the
