The Number of the Beast

IX

Most males have an unhealthy tendency to obey laws.

Deety:

Aunt Hilda and I finished reprogramming in the time it took Zebadiah and Pop to design and make the fail-safes and other mods needed to turn Gay Deceiver, with the time-space widget installed, into a continua traveler- which included placing the back seats twenty centimeters farther back (for leg room) after they had. bee~p~11ed out to place the widget abaft the bulkhead md ~~eld it to the shell The ~P~essing contiols and triple verniers wcic

remoted to the driver's instrument board-with one voice control for the widget, all others manual:

If any of our voices said, "Gay Deceiver, take us home!" car and passengers would instantly return to Snug Harbor.

I don't know but I trust my Pop. He brought us home safe twice, doing it with no fail-safes and no dead-man switch. The latter paralleled the "Take us home!" voice order, was normally clamped closed and covered-but could be uncovered and held in a fist, closed. There were other fail-safes for temperature, pressure, air, radar collision course, and other dangers. If we wound up inside a star or planet, none of this could save us, but it is easy to prove that the chances of falling downstairs and breaking your neck are enormously higher than the chance of co-occupying space with other matter in our native universe-space is plentiful, mass is scarce. We hoped that this would be true of other universes.

No way ahead of time to check on the Number-of-the-Beast spaces-but "The cowards never started and the weaklings d~jed on the way." None of us

ever mentioned not trying to travel the universes. Besides, our home planet had turned unfriendly. We didn't discuss "Black Hats" but we all knew that they were still here, and that we remained alive by lying doggo and letting the world think we were dead.

We ate breakfast better each morning after hearing Gay Deceiver offer "null report" on news retrievals. Zebadiah, I am fairly certain, had given up his cousin for dead. I feel sure Zebadiah would have gone to Sumatra to follow a lost hope, were it not that he had acquired a wife and a prospective child. I missed my next period, so did Hilda. Our men toasted our not-yet bulging bellies; Hilda and I smugly resolved to be good girls, yes, sir!-and careful. Hilda joined my morning toning up, and the men joined us the first time they caught us at it.

Zebadiah did not need it but seemed to enjoy it. Pop brought his waistline down five centimeters in one week.

Shortly after that toast Zebadiah pressure-tested Gay Deceiver's shell-four atmospheres inside her and a pressure gauge sticking out through a fitting in her shell.

There being little we could do while our space-time rover was sealed, we knocked off early. "Swim, anybody?" I asked. Snug Harbor doesn't have a citytype pool, and a mountain stream is too cooold. Pop had fixed that when he concealed our spring. Overflow was piped underground to a clump of bushes and thereby created a "natural" mountain rivulet that passed near the house; then Pop had made use of a huge fallen boulder, plus biggish ones, to create a pool, one that filled and spilled. He had done work with pigments in concrete to make this look like an accident of water flow.

This makes Pop sound like Paul Bunyan. Pop could have built Snug Harbor with his own hands. But Spanish-speaking labor from Nogales built the underground and assembled the prefab shell of the cabin. An air crane fetched parts and materials from an Albuquerque engineering company Jane had bought for Pop through a front-lawyers in Dallas. The company's manager drove the air crane himself, having had it impressed on him that this was for a rich client of the law firm, and that it would be prudent to do the job and forget it. Pop bossed the work in TexMex, with help from his secretary-me- Spanish being one language I had picked for my doctorate.

Laborers and mechanics never got a chance to pinpoint where they were, but they were well paid, well fed, comfortably housed in prefabs brought in by crane, and the backbreaking labor was done by power-who cares what "locos gringos" do? Two pilots had to know where we were building, but they homed in on a radar beacon that is no longer there.

"Blokes in Black Hats" had nothing to do with this secrecy; it was jungle caution I had learned from Mama: Never let the revenooers know anything. Pay cash, keep your lips closed, put nothing through banks that does not appear later in tax returns-pay taxes greater than your apparent standard of living and declare income accordingly. We had been audited three times since Mama died; each time the government returned a small "overpayment"- I was building a reputation of being stupid and honest.

My inquiry of "Swim, anybody?" was greeted with silence. Then Pop said, "Zeb, your wife is too energetic. Deety, later the water will be warmer and the trees will give us shade. Then we can walk slowly down to the pool. Zeb?"

"I agree, Jake. I need to conserve ergs."

"Nap?"

"I don't have the energy to take one. What were you saying this morning about reengineering the system?"

Aunt Hilda looked startled. "I thought Miss Gay Deceiver was already engineered? Are you thinking of changing everything?"

"Take it easy, Sharpie darlin'. Gay Deceiver is finished. A few things to stow that have been weighed and their moment arms calculated."

I could have told her. In the course of figuring what could be stowed in every nook and cranny and what that would do to Gay's balance, I had discovered that my husband had a highly illegal laser cannon. I said nothing, merely included its mass and distance from optimum center of weight in my calculations. I sometimes wonder which of us is the outlaw: Zebadiah or I? Most males have an unhealthy tendency to ob&y laws. But that concealed Lcannon made me wonder.

"Why not leave well enough alone?" Aunt Hilda demanded. "Jacob and God know I'm happy here... But You All Know Why We Should Not Stay Here Longer Than We Must."

"We weren't talking about Gay Deceiver; Jake and I were discussing reengineering the Solar System."

"The Solar System! What's wrong with it the way it is?"

"Lots of things," Zebadiah told Aunt Hilda. "It's untidy. Real estate going to waste. This tired old planet is crowded and sort o' worn in spots. True, industry in orbit and power from orbit have helped, and both Lagrange-Four and -Five have self-supporting populations; anybody who invested in space stations early enough made a pile." (Including Pop, Zebadiah!) "But these are minor compared with what can be done-and this planet is in worse shape each year. Jake's six-dimensional principle can change that."

"Move people into another universe? Would they go?"

"We weren't thinking of that, Hilda. We're trying to apply Clarke's Law."

"I don't recall it. Maybe it was while I was out with mumps."

"Arthur C. Clarke," Pop told her. "Great man-too bad he was liquidated in The Purge. Clarke defined how to make a great discovery or create a key invention. Study what the most respected authorities agree can not be done- then do it. My continua craft is a godchild of Clarke via his Law. His insight inspired my treatment of six-dimensional continua. But this morning Zeb added corollaries."

"Jake, don't kid the ladies. I asked a question; you grabbed the ball and ran."

"Uh, we heterodyned. Hilda, you know that the time-space traveler doesn't require power."

"I'm afraid I don't know, darling man. Why were you installing power packs in Gay Deceiver?"

"Auxiliary uses. So that you won't have to cook over an open fire, for example."

"But the pretzel bender doesn't use po~er," agreed Zebadiah. "Don't ask why. I did, and Jake started writing equations in Sanskrit and I got a headache."

"It doesn't use power, Aunt Hilda," I agreed. "Just parasitic power. A few microwatts so that the gyros never slow down, milliwatts for instrument readouts and for controls-but the widget itself uses none."

"What happened to the law of conservation of energy?"

"Sharpie," my husband answered, "as a fairish mechanic, an amateur electron pusher, and as a bloke who has herded unlikely junk through the sky, I never worry about theory as long as machinery does what it is supposed to do. I worry when a machine turns and bites me. That's why I specialize in fail-safes and backups and triple redundancy. I try never to get a machine sore at me. There's no theory for that but every engineer knows it."

"Hilda my beloved, the law of conservation of mass-energy is not broken by our continua craft; it is simply not relevant to it. Once Zeb understood that-"

"I didn't say I understood it."

"Well... once Zeb stipulated that, he raised interesting questions. For example: Jupiter doesn't need Ganymede-"

"Whereas Venus does. Although Titan might be better."

"Mmm... possible."

"Yes. Make an inhabitable base more quickly. But the urgent prob1em~:

Jake, is to seed Venus, move atmosphere to Mars, put both of them through;, forced aging. Then respot them. Earth-Sol Trojan points?"

"Certainly. We've had millions of years of evolution this distance from the Sun. We had best plan on living neither closer nor farther. With careful attention to stratospheric protection. But I still have doubts about anchoring in the Venerian crust. We wouldn't want to lose the planet on Tau axis."

"Mere R. & D., Jake. Calculate pressures and temperatures; beef up the vehicle accordingly-spherical, save for exterior anchors-then apply a jigger factor of four. With automatic controls quintuply redundant. Catch it when it comes out and steady it down in Earth's orbit, sixty degrees trailing-and start selling subdivisions the size of old Spanish Land Grants. Jake, we should gather enough mass to create new earths at all Trojan points, a hexagon around the Sun. Five brand-new earths would give the race room enough to. breed. On this maiden voyage let's keep our eyes open."

Aunt Hilda looked at Zebadiah with horror. "Zebbie! Creating planets in~ deed! Who do you think you are? Jesus Christ?"

"I'm not that junior. That's the Holy Ghost over there, scratching his belly., The Supreme Inseminator. I'm the other one, the Maker and Shaper. But ii~ setting up a pantheon for the Celestial Age, we're going to respect women'S rights, Hilda. Deety is Earth Mother; she's perfect for the job. You are Moofl Goddess, Selene. Good job, dear-more moons than earths. It fits you. You'r~ little and silvery and you wax and wane and you're beautiful in all your phaseS~ How about it? Us four and no more."

"Quit pulling my leg!"

My husband answered, "I haven't been pulling your leg. Come closer and I will; you have pretty legs, Step-Mother-in-Law. These things Jake and I have been discussing are practical-once we thought about the fact that the spacetime twister uses no power. Move anything anywhere-all spaces, all times. I add the plural because at first I could not see what Jake had in mind when he spoke of forced aging of a planet. Rotate Venus into the Tau axis, fetch it back along Teh axis, reinsert it centuries-or millennia-older at this point in 't' axis. Perhaps translate it a year or so into the future-our future-so as to be ready for it when it returns, all sweet and green and beautiful and ready to grow children and puppies and butterflies. Terraformed but virginal."

Aunt Hilda looked frightened. "Jacob? Would one highball do any harm to this peanut inside me? I need a bracer."

"I don't think so. Jane often had a drink with me while she was pregnant. Her doctor did not have her stop until her third trimester. Can't see that it hurt Deety. Deety was so healthy she drove Jane home from the hospital."

"Pop, that's a fib. I didn't learn to drive until I was three months old. But I need one, too," I added. "Zebadiah?"

"Certainly, Princess. A medicinal drink should be by body mass. That's half a jigger for you, Sharpie dear, a jigger for Deety, a jigger and a half for Jake- two jiggers for me."

"Oh, how unfair!"

"It certainly is," I agreed. "I outweigh Pop-he's been losing, I've been gaining. Pick us up and see!"

My husband took us each around the waist, crouched, then straightened and lifted us.

"Close to a standoff," he announced. "Pop may be a trifle heavier, but you're more cuddly"-kissed me and put us down.

"There is no one more cuddly than Jacob!"

"Hilda, you're prejudiced. Let's each mix our own drinks, at the strength required for our emotional and physical conditions."

So we did-it wound up with Hilda and me each taking a jigger with soda, Pop taking a jigger and a half over ice-and Zebadiah taking a half jigger of vodka and drowning it with Coke.

While we were sipping our "medicine," Zebadiah, sprawled out, looked up over the fireplace. "Pop, you were in the Navy?"

"No-Army. If you count 'chair-borne infantry.' They handed me a commission for having a doctorate in mathematics, told me they needed me for ballistics. Then I spent my whole tour as a personnel officer, signing papers."

"Standard Operating Procedure. That's a Navy sword and belt up there. Thought it might be yours."

"It's Deety's-belonged to Jane's Grandfather Rodgers. I have a dress saber. Belonged to my Dad, who gave it to me when the Army took me. Dress blues, too. I took them with me, never had occasion to wear either." Pop got up and went into his-their bedroom, calling back, "I'll show you the saber."

My husband said to me, "Deety, would you mind my handling your sword?"

"My Captain, that sword is yours."

"Heavens, dear, I can't accept an heirloom."

"If my warlord will not permit his princess to gift him with a sword, he can leave it where it is! I've been wanting to give you a wedding present-and did not realize that I had the perfect gift for Captain John Carter."

"My apologies, Dejah Thoris. I accept and will keep it bright. I will defend my princess with it against all enemies."

"Helium is proud to accept. If you make a cradle of your hands, I can stand in them and reach it down."

Zebadiah grasped me, a hand above each knee, and I was suddenly three meters tall. Sword and belt were on hooks; I lifted them down, and myself was placed down. My husband stood straight while I buckled it around him-then he dropped to one knee and kissed my hand.

My husband is mad north-northwest but his madness suits me. I got tears in my eyes which Deety doesn't do much but Dejah Thoris seems prone to, since John Carter made her his.

Pop and Aunt Hilda watched-then imitated, including (I saw!) tears in Hilda's eyes after she buckled on Pop's saber, when he knelt and kissed her hand.

Zebadiah drew sword, tried its balance, sighted along its blade. "Handmade and balanced close to the hilt. Deety, your great-grandfather paid a pretty penny for this. It's an honest weapon."

"I don't think he knew what it cost. It was presented to him."

"For good reason, I feel certain." Zebadiah stood back, went into hanging guard, made fast moulinets vertically, left and right, then horizontally clockwise and counterclockwise-suddenly dropped into swordsman's guard- lunged and recovered, fast as a striking cat.

I said softly to Pop, "Did you notice?"

Pop answered quietly. "Know saber. Sword, too."

Hilda said loudly, "Zebbie! You never told me you went to Heidelberg."

"You never asked, Sharpie. Around the Red Ox they called me 'The Scourge of the Neckar."

"What happened to your scars?"

"Never got any, dear. I hung around an extra year, hoping for one. But no one got through my guard-ever. Hate to think about how many German faces I carved into checkerboards."

"Zebadiah, was that where you took your doctorate?"

My husband grinned and sat down, still wearing sword. "No, another school ."

"M.I.T.?" inquired Pop.

"Hardly. Pop, this should stay in the family. I undertook to prove that a man can get a doctorate from a major university without knowing anything and without adding anything whatever to human knowledge."

"1 think you have a degree in aerospace engineering," Pop said flatly.

"I'll concede that I have the requisite hours. I hold two degrees-a bacca

laureate in humane arts... meaning I squeaked through... and a doctorate from an old and prestigious school-a Ph.D. in education."

"Zebadiah! You wouldn't!" (I was horrified.)

"But I did, Deety. To prove that degrees per se are worthless. Often they are honorifics of true scientists or learned scholars or inspired teachers. Much more frequently they are false faces for overeducated jackasses."

Pop said, "You'll get no argument from me, Zeb. A doctorate is a union card to get a tenured job. It does not mean that the holder thereof is wise or learned."

"Yes, sir. I was taught it at my grandfather's knee-my Grandfather Zachariah, the man responsible for the initial 'Z' in the names of his male descendants. Deety, his influence on me was so strong that I must explain him- no, that's impossible; I must tell about him in order to explain me... and how I happened to take a worthless degree."

Hilda said, "Deety, he's pulling a long bow again."

"Quiet, woman. 'Get thee to a nunnery, go!"

"I don't take orders from my step-son-in-law. Make that a monastery and I'll consider it."

I kept my blinkin' mouf shut. My husband's fibs entertain me. (If they are fibs.)

"Grandpa Zach was as cantankerous an old coot as you'll ever meet. Hated government, hated lawyers, hated civil servants, hated preachers, hated automobiles, public schools, and telephones, was contemptuous of most editors, most writers, most professors, most of almost anything. But he' overtipped waitresses and porters and would go out of his way to avoid stepping on an insect,

"Grandpa had three doctorates: biochemistry, medicine, and law-and he regarded anyone who couldn't read Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and German as illiterate."

"Zebbie, can you read all those?"

"Fortunately for me, my grandfather had a stroke while filling out a tax form before he could ask me that question. I don't know Hebrew. I can read Latin, puzzle out Greek, speak and read French, read technical German, understand it in some accents, swear in Russian-very useful!-and speak an ungrammatical smattering of Spanish picked up in cantinas and from horizontal dictionaries.

"Grandpa would have classed me as subliterate as I don't do any of these well-and I sometimes split infinitives which would have infuriated him. He practiced forensic medicine, medical jurisprudence, was an expert witness in toxicology, pathology, and traumatology, bullied judges, terrorized lawyers, medical students, and law students. He once threw a tax assessor out of his office and required him to return with a search warrant setting forth in detail its constitutional limitations, He regarded the income tax and the Seventeenth Amendment and the direct primary as signs of the decay of the Republic."

"How did he feel about the Nineteenth?"

"Hilda, Grandpa Zach supported female suffrage. I remember hearing him

say that if women were so dad-burned foolish as to want to assume the burden, they should be allowed to-they couldn't do the country more harm than men had. 'Votes for Women' didn't annoy him but nine thousand other things did. He lived at a slow simmer, always ready to break into a rolling boil.

"He had one hobby: collecting steel engravings."

"Steel engravings'?" I repeated.

"Of dead presidents, my Princess. Especially of McKinley, Cleveland, and Madison-but he didn't scorn those of Washington. He had that instinct for timing so necessary to a collector. In 1929 on Black Thursday he held not one share of common stock; instead he had sold short. When the 1933 Bank Holiday came along every old-dollar he owned, except current cash, was in Zurich in Swiss money. Eventually U.S. citizens were forbidden by 'emergency' decree to own gold even abroad.

"Grandpa Zach ducked into Canada, applied for Swiss citizenship, got it, and thereafter split his time between Europe and America, immune to inflation

and the confiscatory laws that eventually caused us to knock three zeros off ~ the old-dollar in creating the newdollar.

"So he died rich, in Locarno-beautiful place; I stayed with him two summers as a boy. His will was probated in Switzerland and the U.S. Revenue Service could not touch it.

"Most of it was a trust with its nature known to his offspring before his death or I would not have been named Zebadiah.

"Female descendants got pro-rata shares of income with no strings attached but males had to have first names starting with 'Z'-and even that got them not one Swiss franc; there was a 'Root, hog, or die!' clause. Zachariah believed in taking care of daughters, but sons and grandsons had to go out and scratch, with no help from their fathers, until they had earned and saved on their own-or accumulated without going to jail-assets equal to one pro-rata share of the capital sum of the trust before they shared in the trust's income."

"Sexism," said Aunt Hilda. "Raw, unadulterated sexism. Any FemLib gal would sneer at his dirty old money, on those terms."

"Would you have refused it, Sharpie?"

"Me? Zebbie dear, are you feverish? I would have both greedy hands out. I'm strong for women's rights but no fanatic. Sharpie wants to be pampered and that's what men are best at-their natural function."

"Pop, do you need help in coping with her?"

"No, Son. I like pampering Hilda. I don't see you abusing my daughter."

"I don't dare; you told me she's vicious at karate." (I am good at karate; Pop made sure that I learned all the dirty fighting possible. But not against Zebadiah! If I ever do-Heaven forbid!-find myself opposed to my husband, I'll quiver my chin and cry.)

"On my graduation from high school my father had a talk with me. 'Zeb,' he told me. 'The time has come. I'll put you through any school you choose. Or you can take what you have saved, strike out on your own, and try to qualify for a share in your grandfather's will. Suit yourself, I shan't influence you.'

"Folks, I had to think. My father's younger brother was past forty and still hadn't qualified. The size of the trust made a pro-rata of its assets amount to a requirement that a male descendant had to get rich on his own-well-to-do at least-whereupon he was suddenly twice as rich. But with over half of this country's population living on the taxes of the lesser number it is not as easy to get rich as it was in Grandpa's day.

"Turn down a paid-for education at Princeton, or M.I.T.? Or go out and try to get rich with nothing but a high school education?-I hadn't learned much in high school; I had majored in girls.

"So I had to think hard and long. Almost ten seconds. I left home next day with one suitcase and a pitiful sum of money.

"Wound up on campus that had two things to recommend it: an Aerospace R.O.T.C. that would pick up part of my expenses, and a phys. ed. department willing to award me a jockstrap scholarship in exchange for daily bruises and contusions, plus all-out effort whenever we played. I took the deal."

"What did you play?" asked my father.

"Football, basketball, and track-they would have demanded more had they been able to figure a way to do it."

"I had thought you were going to mention fencing."

"No, that's another story. These did not quite close the gap. So I also waited tables for meals-food so bad the cockroaches ate out. But that closed the gap, and I added to it by tutoring in mathematics. That gave me my start toward piling up money to qualify."

I asked, "Did tutoring math pay enough to matter? I tutored math before Mama died; the hourly rate was low."

"Not that sort of tutoring, Princess. I taught prosperous young optimists not to draw to inside straights, and that stud poker is not a game of chance, but that craps is, controlled by mathematical laws that cannot be flouted with impunity. To quote Grandfather Zachariah, 'A man who bets on greed and dishonesty won't be wrong too often.' There is an amazingly high percentage of greedy people and it is even easier to win from a dishonest gambler than it is from an honest one... and neither is likely to know the odds at craps, especially side bets, or all of the odds in poker, in particular how odds change according to the number of players, where one is seated in relation to the dealer, and how to calculate changes as cards are exposed in stud.

"That was also how I quit drinking, my darling, except for special celebrations. In every 'friendly' game some players contribute, some take a profit; a player determined to take a profit must be neither drunk nor tired. Pop, the shadows are growing long-I don't think anybody wants to know how I got a worthless doctorate."

"I do!" I put in. "Me, too!" echoed Aunt Hilda.

"Son, you're outvoted."

"Okay. Two years active duty after I graduated. Sky jockeys are even more optimistic than students and have more money-meanwhile I learned more math and engineering. Was sent inactive just in time to be called up again for the Spasm War, Didn't get hurt, I was safer than civilians. But that kept me

on another year even though fighting was mostly over before I reported in. That made me a veteran, with benefits. I went to Manhattan and signed up for school again. Doctoral candidate. School of Education. Not serious at first, simply intending to use my veteran's benefits while enjoying the benefits of being a student-and devote most of my time to piling up cash to qualify for the trust.

"I knew that the stupidest students, the silliest professors, and the worst bull courses are concentrated in schools of education. By signing for largeclass evening lectures and the unpopular eight am. classes I figured I could spend most of my time finding out how the stock market ticked. I did, by working there, before I risked a dime.

"Eventually I had to pick a research problem or give up the advantages of being a student. I was sick of a school in which the pie was all meringue and no filling but I stuck as I knew how to cope with courses in which the answers are matters of opinion and the opinion that counts is that of the professor. And how to cope with those large-class evening lectures: Buy the lecture notes. Read everything that professor ever published. Don't cut too often and when you do show up, get there early, sit front row center, be certain the prof catches your eye every time he looks your way-by never taking your eyes off him. Ask one question you know he can answer because you've picked it out of his published papers-and state your name in asking a question. Luckily 'Zebadiah Carter' is a name easy to remember. Family, I got straight 'A's' in both required courses and seminars... because I did not study 'education,' I studied professors of education.

"But I still had to make that 'original contribution to human knowledge' without which a candidate may not be awarded a doctor's degree in most socalled disciplines... and the few that don't require it are a tough row to hoe.

"I studied my faculty committee before letting myself be tied down to a research problem... not only reading everything each had published but also buying their publications or paying the library to make copies of out-of-print papers."

My husband took me by my shoulders. "Dejah Thoris, here follows the title of my dissertation. You can have your divorce on your own terms."

"Zebadiah, don't talk that way!"

"Then brace yourself. 'An Ad-Hoc Inquiry Concerning the Optimization of the Infrastructure of Primary Educational Institutions at the Interface Between Administration and Instruction, with Special Attention to Group Dynamics Desiderata."

"Zebbie! What does that mean?"

"It means nothing, Hilda."

"Zeb, quit kidding our ladies. Such a title would never be accepted."

"Jake, it seems certain that you have never taken a course in a school of education."

"Well... no. Teaching credentials are not required at university level but-"

"But me no 'huts,' Pop. I have a copy of my dissertation; you can check its

authenticity. While that paper totally lacks meaning it is a literary gem in the sense in which a successful forging of an 'old master' is itself a work of art. It is loaded with buzz words. The average length of sentences is eightyone words. The average word length, discounting 'of,' 'a,' 'the,' and other syntactical particles, is eleven-plus letters in slightly under four syllables. The bibliography is longer than the dissertation and cites three papers of each member of my committee and four of the chairman, and those citations are quoted in part-while avoiding any mention of matters on which I knew that members of the committee held divergent (but equally stupid) opinions.

"But the best touch was to get permission to do field work in Europe and have it count toward time on campus; half the citations were in foreign languages, ranging from Finnish to Croatian-and the translated bits invariably agreed with the prejudices of my committee. It took careful quoting out of context to achieve this, but it had the advantage that the papers were unlikely to be on campus and my committee were not likely to go to the trouble of looking them up even if they were. Most of them weren't at home in other languages, even easy ones like French, German, and Spanish.

"But I did not waste time on phony field work; I simply wanted a trip to Europe at student air fares and the use of student hostels-dirt cheap way to travel. And a visit to the trustees of Grandpa's fund.

"Good news! The fund was blue chips and triple-A bonds and, at that time, speculative stocks were rising. So the current cash value of the fund was down, even though income was up. And two more of my cousins and one uncle had qualified, again reducing the pro-rata... so, Glory Be!-I was within reaching distance. I had brought with me all that I had saved, swore before a notary that it was all mine, nothing borrowed, nothing from my father-and left it on deposit in Zurich, using the trustees as a front. And I told them about my stamp and coin collection.

"Good stamps and coins never go down, always up. I had nothing but proof sets, first-day covers, and unbroken sheets, all in perfect condition-and had a notarized inventory and appraisal with me. The trustees got me to swear that the items I had collected before I left home had come from earned money- true, the earliest items represented mowed lawns and such-and agreed to hold the pro-rata at that day's cash value-lower if the trend continued-if I would sell my collection and send a draft to Zurich, with businesslike speed as soon as I returned to the States.

"I agreed. One trustee took me to lunch, tried to get me liquored up-then offered me ten percent over appraisal if I would sell that very afternoon, then send it to him by courier at his expense (bonded couriers go back and forth between Europe and America every week).

"We shook hands on it, went back and consulted the other trustees. I signed papers transferring title, the trustee buying signed his draft to me, I endorsed it to the trustees to add to the cash I was leaving in their custody. Three weeks later I got a cable certifying that the collection matched the inventory. I had qualified

'Five months later I was awarded the degree of doctor of philosophy, summa cum laude, And that, dear ones, is the shameful story of my life, Anyone have the energy to go swimming?"

"Son, if there is a word of truth in that, it is indeed a shameful story."

"Pop! That's not fair! Zebadiah used their rules-.-and outsmarted them!"

"I didn't say that Zeb had anything to be ashamed of. It is a commentary on American higher education. What Zeb claims to have written is no worse than trash I know is accepted as dissertations these days. His case is the only one I have encountered wherein an intelligent and able scholar-you, Zeb- set out to show that an 'earned' Ph.D. could be obtained from a famous institution-I know which one!-in exchange for deliberately meaningless pseudoresearch. The cases I have encountered have involved button-counting by stupid and humorless young persons under the supervision of stupid and humorless old fools. I see no way to stop it; the rot is too deep. The only answer is to chuck the system and start over." My father shrugged. "Impossible."

"Zebbie," Aunt Hulda asked, "what do you do on campus? I've never asked."

My husband grinned. "Oh, much what you do, Sharpie."

"I don't do anything. Enjoy myself."

"Me, too. If you look, you will find me listed as 'research professor in residence.' An examination of the university's books would show that I am paid a stipend to match my rank. Further search would show that slightly more than that amount is paid by some trustees in Zurich to the university's general fund... as long as I remain on campus, a condition not written down. I like being on campus, Sharpie; it gives me privileges not granted the barbarians outside the pale. I teach a course occasionally, as supply for someone on sabbatical or ill."

"Huh? What courses? What departments?"

'Any department but education. Engineering mathematics. Physics OneOh-One. Thermogoddamics. Machine elements. Saber and dueling sword. Swimming, And-don't laugh-English poetry from Chaucer through the Elizabethans. I enjoy teaching something worth teaching. I don't charge for courses I teach; the Chancellor and I understand each other,"

"I'm not sure I understand you," I said, "but I love you anyhow. Let's go swimming."