A Handful of Time (21 page)

Whereas Arthur, who made all this possible, was convicted by the people of Arkansas under an old witchcraft law. It was the final ignominy for Arthur, that his life’s work should be dismissed by the people of Arkansas as witchcraft.

And so he died, despised, misunderstood, a figure of tragic irony, but returning, we hope, to the reality from which he sprang, the eternal hallucination.

I
T WAS,
Dr. Hodges reflected, absurd that Smith should have been stabbed with the only good paper cutter in the office, a lovely, sharp instrument, and actually a genuine Mycenean dagger. It was by no means absurd that Smith had been done in. No, indeed, Dr. Hodges thought in German, ancient Greek and Bantu, for he was a linguist. The surprising thing was that Smith had survived so long. But with the Mycenean dagger!

His thoughts were interrupted by the appearance of Dr. Morris from physics. “I say, would you mind reading this Roman numeral for me? Some idiot in France has started using Roman numerals for that new subspace mathematics and nobody knows…”

“Ha!” Dr. Hodges exclaimed happily. “When the journals started using Arabic numerals we were practically forgotten. Let’s see. That’s five hundred and sixty-eight. Oh and while you’re here, we’ve got a little problem. Remember Smith? Joachim Smith? Or did you have him?”

Dr. Morris frowned at some unpleasant memory. “Smith. The one who always asked, ‘Now if you
reversed
the process, what would happen?’ and read a comic book while you sweated out the answer.”

“That’s him.”

“I had him for freshman cultural science. Why?”

“Well, we have him now for a graduate student. And
look
what someone has done.”

Dr. Hodges moved aside and waved an arm at Smith’s body, sunk into an attitude of unaccustomed humility in the chair near Dr. Hodges’ cluttered desk.

Dr. Morris leaned down for a good look. “My God! Can you imagine…!”

“I know,” Dr. Hodges said sadly. “My Mycenean paper cutter. Pretty inconsiderate, don’t you think?”

“Your
paper cutter!
Is that all you can think about? This is murder! Oh, I see. You didn’t… ?”

“Oh, no. Actually, I didn’t think of it. But if I had, I would certainly have used some less valuable weapon.”

“Trust Smith to die with the most possible inconvenience to everybody,” Dr. Morris said irritably. “Police all over. Everything in the paper. The trustees in a rage. People leaving their money to Harvard instead of to us. Damn Smith, anyway.”

Dr. Hodges was thinking fast. An idea occurred to him in Anglo-Saxon. He turned it over in Provencal, ran through it quickly in Old Icelandic, straightened it out in Greek and finally brought it to birth in English.

“Look,” Dr. Hodges said, “nobody will miss Smith, not even his wife. Wouldn’t it be simpler and safer all the way around just to dispose of the unpleasant remains?”

Dr. Morris looked pensive. “I can’t help but agree with you. But how? I mean, that’s always the problem with dead bodies.”

“I have the perfect solution,” Dr. Hodges went on eagerly. “Don’t you people in physics have that Time Machine?”

“Yes. But Good Heavens, man, it’s still in a highly experimental stage. All the white rats have died.”

“So what? Smith has nothing to lose at this point.”

“But man, we can’t go interfering with the past like that. I mean his clothes and the paper cutter and everything. It might make whorls in the stream of history. You know, if people in the past got hold of something that wasn’t invented yet.
I
don’t know.”

“Got you there,” Dr. Hodges said, closing the door with the sudden realization that he was plotting something that ought to be secret “All he’s got on is the graduate student’s robe. That we can throw in the dispenser. They get thrown in every few weeks for reprocessing, anyway. And
I
will make the supreme sacrifice to preserve the integrity of history. I will let him go with the Mycenean paper cutter in him, and we can send him back to Mycenae. Could you do that?”

“Oh, we could do it. And you’d have to sacrifice the weapon anyway. Too risky, with the blood and all that.”

“So they’d have a dead body and a very common sort of dagger somewhere in Mycenae. What could be more usual?”

“Would that be usual in Mycenae?”

“Well, certainly not improbable. After all, look what happened to Agamemnon.”

“This isn’t my field, you know.”

“Agamemnon’s wife stabbed him in the bath when he came home from Troy. His wife was Helen of Troy’s sister.”

“Cozy little family,” Dr. Morris said dryly. “Well, if you’re sure about the paper cutter, we’ll try it. If it doesn’t work,
you
explain it to the police.”

Later, sliding down the ramp to the car lot, Dr. Hodges reflected that it was just as well Dr. Morris did not know certain things. There was, for instance, the matter of Smith’s wife. Dr. Hodges never permitted himself even to think about Phyllis except in Annamese so there were few, if any, people who knew he once had wooed her. Even she, unfortunately, did not know it.

This circumstance came about through Dr. Hodges’ preoccupation with his profession. It never occurred to him, unless someone pointed it out directly, that other people did not always follow his thought processes. When, therefore, he met Phyllis at a party for first-year graduate students, it was the most natural thing in the world for him to approach her shyly in Gaelic, become more ardent in medieval Latin and finally break into passionate Provencal. It was one of those typical sodium pentothal parties that start out so companionably and end up with everybody asleep. He had thought Phyllis looked at him tenderly as the capsule of pentothal emptied slowly into her arm. But just as he was waxing actually poetic, her eyes closed and her hostess put her down the laundry chute. As fate would have it, Smith was waiting at the bottom of the laundry chute.

Dr. Hodges held his key against the electronic beam and waited for his old combustion engine car to come up the lift.

After that party Smith had pursued Phyllis in the relentless way he pursued everything but knowledge. And Phyllis, who was as worldly as a gilt shepherdess, fell for him. Yes, indeed, Phyllis was fragile and eighteenth-century all the way through. She was meant, at worst, to have her lock raped, but certainly
not
for the sort of tragedy marriage to Joachim Smith involved.

Dr. Hodges started his battered old car and pointed it in the general direction of his bachelor apartment, his mind occupied with thoughts of Smith.

Smith had been annoying merely to look at. He was excessively thick-set and had put such attention to his muscular development that he could hardly move. In a dim light, he had a number of times been mistaken for a robot.

Dr. Hodges drove absently down the middle of the street. Oncoming traffic slunk far over to the curb and pushed anger buttons. The Fire Music from
Die Walkure
blared all around. Dr. Hodges nodded forgivingly at his ill-tempered fellow motorists and pushed his only button, a very obscure Elizabethan madrigal. But forgiving as Dr. Hodges could be about everyone else, Smith rankled.

Smith had a way of running into the library before class and looking up some very obscure and learned point. Then he would say something in class like, “Professor, wouldn’t you say that the most influential and important character of ancient times was Incitatus?” And if you did not happen to recall that Incitatus was Caligula’s favorite horse, Smith would so inform you and proceed to blame the fall of the Roman Empire on the character of Caligula’s horse. All of which would make Smith appear profound and clever, the professor a silly fool and leave the class so disrupted and full of sniggers they couldn’t take intelligible notes.

Well, Smith had at last been sent to a nameless obscurity, and the thought was a sweet one. Except for the paper cutter. That was Dr. Hodges’ prize possession. Still, it was a small triumph for the dead Smith to take him to eternity.

Dr. Hodges triumphantly remembered to get out of his car before it sunk into its parking place in front of his apartment house. When the lift deposited him gently in his living room, he peeled off his coat and was about to throw it on the amoeboid sofa when he noticed something was in the way.

“Phyllis!” he cried, and broke into a stream of Old Low German, as he was apt to do when surprised.

Phyllis turned a wan face toward him, her skin like Pentelic marble, her permacolored mouth exactly the hue from a late sixth-century red-figured Attic vase.

“Dr. Hodges,” she said, “I’ve got something absolutely
ghastly
to tell you.”

“And I,” Dr. Hodges said cheerfully, “have a really nice little bit of news for you. Me first?”

“Oivov?” Anaximander asked rustily, rolling in from the kitchen.

“I’m sorry,” Dr. Hodges explained to Phyllis, “he doesn’t speak anything but fifth-century Greek. Would you like a glass of wine?”

Phyllis nodded, her mouth pinched tight and her cheeks slightly puffed out, as though she were holding a mouthful of words that could be neither swallowed nor spit out.

“See here,” Dr. Hodges said, sitting entirely too close to Phyllis and then occupying himself with stretching the amoeboid sofa to a decent distance. “Your husband. Smith? Joachim?”

Phyllis nodded, her mouth beginning to tremble.

“Dead!” Dr. Hodges said triumphantly. “Gone. Nothing to worry about any more.”

“Vffvfft!” Phyllis cried, unable to contain any longer whatever was in her mouth. She began to sob a little.

“Oh, sorry,” Dr. Hodges said. “Shock. De mortuis, of course, but after all, it is rather a windfall for all of us, isn’t it? Anaximander! Bring the lady a paper napkin or something.”

Anaximander rushed in with the wine and one of those new paper napkins that curl around your face when you try to use them.

“I
know
he’s dead,” Phyllis finally managed. “In your office. That’s why I came to see you. That’s the ghastly thing I wanted to tell you. St… st…
stabbed.”

“Oh, that. See here, Phyllis. I don’t blame you a bit. Fine thing for all of us. And about the paper cutter‌—‌well, there are other things in the world besides genuine Mycenean daggers. We’ll just forget it. No regrets?”

“Dr. Hodges, you don’t…
I
didn’t do it.”

“You didn’t? Well, then, I guess we’ll never know who did. Anybody walking down the hall might have popped in and…”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Just anybody doesn’t step in an office and commit murder. You get jetted off to a penal asteroid for that sort of thing.”

“Well, maybe he did it himself. Be just like Smith.”

“It happens,” Phyllis said, “that I know who did it. And it also happens that my fingerprints are on that dagger.”

“So are mine, come to think of it.”

“It’s your paper cutter. That’s easy to explain.”

“If you know who did it, then who? And why are your fingerprints on the dagger?”

“That pilot student robot did it, that’s who. The humanoid one that’s sent around to test lecture content.”

“I’ve heard the administration had those things planted around. And I always said even the administration wouldn’t stoop so low.”

“They did. Everybody in Joachim’s class knew about it. It’s your advanced-Greek Drama course. The other boys used to kid Joachim about looking like a robot himself.”

“He did, you know.”

“Yes, and the real robot didn’t like it one bit. You see, this student robot has some built in infantile reactions. That’s so his lecture absorption is normalized to average student level. And as soon as Joachim found out he could get a rise out of this robot by teasing him‌—‌well, you know Joachim.”

“Ah, yes,” Dr. Hodges answered with a shudder.

“So today after class I met Joachim. He leaves his extra books on my desk where I work over in the library, and I had to bring them to him between classes. Well, this student robot was there and apparently Joachim had been needling him about something because he had that jerky arm movement robots have when their tapes move too fast. And the robot said, ‘O.K. Can you do
this?
’
And he picked up that antique coat rack with one hand and then Joachim laughed and picked it up with one hand, too, because you know he’s terribly muscular and I remember that’s the thing that struck me about him that time when he was waiting for me at the bottom of the laundry chute.”

“Leave that part out,” Dr. Hodges said painfully, “and get back to what happened after my ten o’clock Greek Drama class.”

“Well, the robot didn’t like that at all, and he recited the entire second chorus of the
Agamemnon
and Joachim laughed and said that part was easy, though I happen to know Joachim would
never
have been able to do it. The only part Joachim knew at all was the death scene and that isn’t much at all because you just hear Agamemnon say he’s been struck down, but Joachim managed to give the impression that he could have recited on for pages. He’s good at that, you know.”

“Was,” Dr. Hodges commented laconically.

“Then Joachim told the robot that he, Joachim, was actually the pilot student robot and the other was an outmoded model, ready to be reprocessed. I really thought the robot was going to hit Joachim and frankly, I was on the robot’s side. But Joachim
is
terribly muscular and it might have turned out the other way, so I said, ‘Speaking of death scenes, Dr. Hodges has the very dagger that stabbed Agamemnon.’ And Joachim said, ‘It wasn’t a dagger at all, it was an ax.’ And the robot said, ‘Not necessarily,’ and I said, ‘It has
bloodstains
on it.’
 
”

“Where did you get all this about my paper cutter?”

“I made it up,” Phyllis said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world for a gilt shepherdess to make up complicated lies. “So they went in your office and of course Joachim sat in the only chair, because you have papers stacked all over all the others. And I said, ‘Well, I’ve used up my coffee break and I have to get back to the library.’ But before I left I picked up the paper cutter and handed it to the robot. And the thing is, robots don’t have fingerprints.”