Whitburn didn’t take the hint. Instead, he paced back and forth, storming about the reporter, the newspaper owner, whoever had given the story to the paper, and finally Chalmers himself. He was livid with rage.
“You certainly can’t imagine that when you made those remarks in class you actually possessed any knowledge of a thing that was still a month in the future,” he spluttered. “Why, it’s ridiculous! Utterly preposterous!”
“Unusual, I’ll admit. But the fact remains that I did. I should, of course, have been more careful, and not confused future with past events. The students didn’t understand. …”
Whitburn half-turned, stopping short.
“My God, man! You are crazy!” he cried, horrified.
The period-bell was ringing as he left Whitburn’s office; that meant that the twenty-three students were scattering over the campus, talking like mad. He shrugged. Keeping them quiet about a thing like this wouldn’t have been possible in any case. When he entered his office, Stanly Weill was waiting for him. The lawyer drew him out into the hallway quickly.
“For God’s sake, have you been talking to the papers?” he demanded. “After what I told you. …”
“No, but somebody has.” He told about the call to Whitburn’s office, and the latter’s behavior. Weill cursed the college president bitterly.
“Any time you want to get a story in the Valley Times, just order Frank Tighlman not to print it. Well, if you haven’t talked, don’t.”
“Suppose somebody asks me?”
“A reporter, no comment. Anybody else, none of his damn business. And above all, don’t let anybody finagle you into making any claims about knowing the future. I thought we had this under control; now that it’s out in the open, what that fool Whitburn’ll do is anybody’s guess.”
Leonard Fitch met him as he entered the Faculty Club, sizzling with excitement.
“Ed, this has done it!” he began, jubilantly. “This is one nobody can laugh off. It’s direct proof of precognition, and because of the prominence of the event, everybody will hear about it. And it simply can’t be dismissed as coincidence. …”
“Whitburn’s trying to do that.”
“Whitburn’s a fool if he is,” another man said calmly. Turning, he saw that the speaker was Tom Smith, one of the math professors. “I figured the odds against that being chance. There are a lot of variables that might affect it one way or another, but ten to the fifteenth power is what I get for a sort of median figure.”
“Did you give that story to the Valley Times?” he asked Fitch, suspicion rising and dragging anger up after it.
“Of course, I did,” Fitch said. “I’ll admit, I had to go behind your back and have some of my postgrads get statements from the boys in your history class, but you wouldn’t talk about it yourself. …”
Tom Smith was standing beside him. He was twenty years younger than Chalmers, he was an amateur boxer, and he had good reflexes. He caught Chalmers’ arm as it was traveling back for an uppercut, and held it.
“Take it easy, Ed; you don’t want to start a slugfest in here. This is the Faculty Club; remember?”
“I won’t, Tom; it wouldn’t prove anything if I did.” He turned to Fitch. “I won’t talk about sending your students to pump mine, but at least you could have told me before you gave that story out.”
“I don’t know what you’re sore about,” Fitch defended himself. “I believed in you when everybody else thought you were crazy, and if I hadn’t collected signed and dated statements from your boys, there’d have been no substantiation. It happens that extrasensory perception means as much to me as history does to you. I’ve believed in it ever since I read about Rhine’s work, when I was a kid. I worked in ESP for a long time. Then I had a chance to get a full professorship by coming here, and after I did, I found that I couldn’t go on with it, because Whitburn’s president here, and he’s a stupid old bigot with an air-locked mind. …”
“Yes.” His anger died down as Fitch spoke. “I’m glad Tom stopped me from making an ass of myself. I can see your side of it.” Maybe that was the curse of the professional intellectual, an ability to see everybody’s side of everything. He thought for a moment. “What else did you do, beside hand this story to the Valley Times? I’d better hear all about it.”
“I phoned the secretary of the American Institute of Psionics and Parapsychology, as soon as I saw this morning’s paper. With the time-difference to the East Coast, I got him just as he reached his office. He advised me to give the thing the widest possible publicity; he thought that would advance the recognition and study of parapsychology. A case like this can’t be ignored; it will demand serious study. …”
“Well, you got your publicity, all right. I’m up to my neck in it.”
There was an uproar outside. The doorman was saying, firmly:
“This is the Faculty Club, gentlemen; it’s for members only. I don’t care if you gentlemen are the press, you simply cannot come in here.”
“We’re all up to our necks in it,” Smith said. “Leonard, I don’t care what your motives were, you ought to have considered the effect on the rest of us first.”
“This place will be a madhouse,” Handley complained. “How we’re going to get any of these students to keep their minds on their work. …”
“I tell you, I don’t know a confounded thing about it,” Max Pottgeiter’s voice rose petulantly at the door. “Are you trying to tell me that Professor Chalmers murdered some Arab? Ridiculous!”
He ate hastily and without enjoyment, and slipped through the kitchen and out the
