The apparition entered silently from the room behind them. It must have been Hal’s face that gave them the first sign, because I know I kept mine under control. It did not really matter, though, because it spoke even as Zeemeister’s head was turning.
“No!” it said, and “Freeze! Drop it, Jamie! One bloody move for your gun, Morton, and you’ll look like a statue by that Henry Moore chap! Just stay still!”
It was Paul Byler in a dark coat, his face thinner and sporting a few new creases. His hand was steady, though, and it was a .45 that he was pointing. Zeemeister assumed an eloquent immobility. Jamie looked undecided, glanced at Zeemeister for some sign.
I almost sighed, feeling something tending in the direction of relief. In fair puzzles there should always be a way out. This looked like it for this game, if only-
Catastrophe!
A mass of lines, nets, buoys and disassembled fishing poles made a scratching, sliding noise overhead, then descended on Paul. His head jerked upward, his arm swayed-and in that moment Jamie decided against discarding his gun. He swung it toward Paul.
Reflexes I usually forget about when I am on the ground made a decision for which I take neither credit nor blame. Had the matter gotten beyond my spinal nerves, though, I do not believe I would have jumped a man with a gun.
But then everything was going to turn out all right, wasn’t it? It always does in the various mass-entertainment media.
I sprang toward Jamie, my arms outstretched.
His hand slowed in an instant’s indecision, then swung the gun back toward me and fired it, point-blank.
My chest exploded and the world went away.
So much for mass entertainment.
Chapter 9
It is good to pause periodically and reflect on the benefits to be derived from the modern system of higher education.
I guess it can all be laid at the feet of my patron saint, President Eliot of Harvard. It was he who, back in the 1870s, felt that it would be nice to loosen the academic strait jacket a bit. He did this, and he also forgot to lock the door when he left the room. For nearly thirteen years I had granted him my gratitude once every month in that emotion-charged moment when I opened the envelope containing my allowance check. He it was who introduced the elective system, a modest tonic at the time, to a rigid course of forbidding curricula. And, as is sometimes the case with tonics, the results were contagious. And mutable. Their current incarnation, for example, permitted me to rest full-burnished, not grow dull in use, while following the winking star of knowledge. In other words, if it were not for him I might never have had time and opportunity to explore such things as the delightful and instructive habits of Ophrys speculum and Cryptostylis leptochila, whom I encountered in a botany seminar I would otherwise have been denied. Look at it that way, I owed the man my life-style and many of the agreeable things that filled it. And I am not ungrateful. As with any form of indebtedness impossible to repay, I acknowledge it freely.
And who is Ophrys? What is she? That all our swains commend her? And Cryptostylis? I am glad that you asked. In Algeria there lives a wasplike insect known as Scolia ciliata. He sleeps for a time in his burrow in a sandbank, awakens and emerges around March. The female of the species, following a fashion not peculiar to the hymenoptera, remains abed for another month. Her mate understandably grows restless, begins to cast his myopic gaze about the countryside. And lo! What should be blooming at that time in that very vicinity but the dainty orchid Ophrys speculum, with flowers that amazingly resemble the body of the female of the insect’s species. The rest is quite predictable. And this is the fashion in which the orchid achieves its pollination, as he goes from flower to flower, paying his respects. Pseudocopulation is what Oakes Ames called it, the symbiotic association of two different reproductive systems. And the orchid Cryptostylis leptochila seduces the male ichneumonid wasp, Lissoplmpla semipunctata, in the same fashion, for the same purpose, with the added finesse of producing an odor like that of the female wasp. Insidious. Delightful. Morals galore, in a strict philosophical sense. This is what education is all about. Were it not for my dear, stiff Uncle Albert and President Eliot, I might have been denied such experiences and the light they constantly shed on my own condition.