“Are you implying that I’m a liar?” Whitburn bristled.
“I’m pointing out that you made a pair of contradictory statements, and I’m asking how you could do that knowingly and honestly,” Weill retorted.
“What I meant,” Whitburn began, with exaggerated slowness, as though speaking to an idiot, “was that yesterday, when those infernal reporters were badgering me, I really thought that some of Professor Chalmers’ students had gotten together and given the Valley Times an exaggerated story about his insane maunderings a month ago. I hadn’t imagined that a member of the faculty had been so lacking in loyalty to the college. …”
“You couldn’t imagine anybody with any more intellectual integrity than you have!” Fitch fairly yelled at him.
“You’re as crazy as Chalmers!” Whitburn yelled back. He turned to the trustees. “You see the position I’m in, here, with this infernal Higher Education Faculty Tenure Act? I have a madman on my faculty, and can I get rid of him? No! I demand his resignation, and he laughs at me and goes running for his lawyer! And he is a madman! Nobody but a madman would talk the way he does. You think this Khalid ib’n Hussein business is the only time he’s done anything like this? Why, I have a list of a dozen occasions when he’s done something just as bad, only he didn’t have a lucky coincidence to back him up. Trying to get books that don’t exist out of the library, and then insisting that they’re standard textbooks. Talking about the revolt of the colonies on Mars and Venus. Talking about something he calls the Terran Federation, some kind of a world empire. Or something he calls Operation Triple Cross, that saved the country during some fantastic war he imagined. …”
“What did you say?”
The question cracked out like a string of pistol shots. Everybody turned. The quiet man in the brown tweed suit had spoken; now he looked as though he were very much regretting it.
“Is there such a thing as Operation Triple Cross?” Fitch was asking.
“No, no. I never heard anything about that; that wasn’t what I meant. It was this Terran Federation thing,” the major said, a trifle too quickly and too smoothly. He turned to Chalmers. “You never did any work for P.S.P.B.; did you ever talk to anybody who did?” he asked.
“I don’t even know what the letters mean,” Chalmers replied.
“Politico-Strategic Planning Board. It’s all pretty hush-hush, but this term Terran Federation is a tentative name for a proposed organization to take the place of the U.N. if that organization breaks up. It’s nothing particularly important, and it only exists on paper.”
It won’t exist only on paper very long, Chalmers thought. He was wondering what Operation Triple Cross was; he had some notes on it, but he had forgotten what they were.
“Maybe he did pick that up from somebody who’d talked indiscreetly,” Whitburn conceded. “But the rest of this tommyrot! Why, he was talking about how the city of Reno had been destroyed by an explosion and fire, literally wiped off the map. There’s an example for you!”
He’d forgotten about that, too. It had been a relatively minor incident in the secret struggle of the Subwar; now he remembered having made a note about it. He was sure that it followed closely after the assassination of Khalid ib’n Hussein. He turned quickly to Weill.
“Didn’t you say you had to go to Reno in a day or so?” he asked.
Weill hushed him urgently, pointing with his free hand to the recorder. The exchange prevented him from noticing that Max Pottgeiter had risen, until the old man was speaking.
“Are you trying to tell these people that Professor Chalmers is crazy?” he was demanding. “Why, he has one of the best minds on the campus. I was talking to him only yesterday, in the back room at the Library. You know,” he went on apologetically, “my subject is Medieval History; I don’t pay much attention to what’s going on in the contemporary world, and I didn’t understand, really, what all this excitement was about. But he explained the whole thing to me, and did it in terms that I could grasp, drawing some excellent parallels with the Byzantine Empire and the Crusades. All about the revolt at Damascus, and the sack of Beirut, and the war between Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and how the Turkish army intervened, and the invasion of Pakistan. …”
“When did all this happen?” one of the trustees demanded.
Pottgeiter started to explain; Chalmers realized, sickly, how much of his future history he had poured into the trusting ear of the old medievalist, the day before.
“Good Lord, man; don’t you read the papers at all?” another of the trustees asked.
“No! And I don’t read inside-dope magazines, or science fiction. I read carefully substantiated facts. And I know when I’m talking to a sane and reasonable man. It isn’t a common experience, around here.”
Dacre passed a hand over his face. “Doctor Whitburn,” he said, “I must admit that I came to this meeting strongly prejudiced against you, and I’ll further admit that your own behavior here has done very little to dispel that prejudice. But I’m beginning to get some idea of what you have to contend with, here at Blanley, and I find that I must make a lot of allowances. I had no idea. … Simply no idea at all.”
“Look, you’re getting a completely distorted picture of this, Mr. Dacre,” Fitch broke in. “It’s precisely as I believed; Doctor Chalmers is an unusually gifted precognitive percipient. You’ve seen, gentlemen, how his complicated chain of precognitions about the death of Khalid has been proven veridical; I’d stake my life that every one of these precognitions will be similarly verified. And I’ll stake my professional reputation that the man is perfectly sane. Of course, abnormal psychology and psychopathology aren’t my subjects, but. …”
“They’re not my subjects, either,” Whitburn retorted, “but I know a lunatic
