The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (48 page)

Robert came in, carrying his suit jacket and looking out of breath. “You will
not
believe what happened to me,” he said.

“You got a parking ticket,” Sarah said. “Were you able to find out anything about this Dr. King?”

“He’s an educational consultant,” Robert said. “What
is
the point of spending eighty dollars a semester for
a parking sticker when there are never any places to park in the permit lots? You know where I had to park? Behind the football stadium! That’s five blocks farther away than my house!”

“An educational consultant?” Sarah said. “What’s the dean up to?” She stared thoughtfully at her strawberry. “An educational consultant…”

“Author of
What’s Wrong with Our Entire Educational System,”
Dr. Albertson
said. He took a plate and put a spinach puff on it. “He’s an expert on restructionary implementation.”

“What’s that?” Chuck said, making a sandwich out of the liver pâté and two bacon balls.

Dr. Albertson
looked superior. “Surely they teach you graduate assistants about restructionary implementation,” he said, which meant he didn’t know either. He took a bite of spinach puff. “You should try
these,” he said. “I was just talking to the dean. She told me she made them herself.”

“We’re dead,” Sarah said.

“There’s Dr. King now,” Dr. Albertson said, pointing to a lumbering man wearing a polo shirt and Sansabelt slacks.

The dean went over to greet him, clasping his hands in hers. “Sorry I’m late,” he boomed out. “I couldn’t find a parking place so I parked out in front.”

Dr. Othniel
suddenly emerged from the wing chair, looking wildly around. Sarah beckoned to him with her toothpick, and he stooped his way over to them, sat down next to the brie, and went back to sleep.

The dean moved to the center of the room and clapped her hands for attention. Dr. Othniel jerked at the sound. “I don’t want to interrupt the fun,” the dean said, “And
please
, do go on eating and drinking,
but I just wanted you all to meet Dr. Jerry King. Dr. King will be working with the Paleontology Department on something I’m sure you’ll all find terribly exciting. Dr. King, would you like to say a few words?”

Dr. King smiled, a large friendly grin that reminded Sarah of the practice jaw in Field Techniques. “We all know the tremendous impactization technology has had on our modern society,”
he said.

“Impactization?” Chuck said, eating a lemon tart the distinguished-looking gentleman had just brought out from the kitchen. “I thought ‘impact’ was a verb.”

“It is,” Sarah said. “And once, back in the Late Cretaceous, it was a noun.”

“Shh,” Dr. Albertson said, looking disapproving.

“As we move into the twenty-first century, our society is transformizing radically, but is education?
No. We are still teaching the same old subjects in the same old ways.” He smiled at the dean. “Until today. Today marks the beginning of a wonderful innovationary experiment in education, a whole new instructionary dynamic in teaching paleontology. I’ll be thinktanking with you dinosaur guys and gals next week, but until then I want you to think about one word.”

“Extinction,” Sarah murmured.

“That word is ‘relevantness.’ Does paleontology have relevantness to our modern society? How can we make it have relevantness? Think about it. Relevantness.”

There
was a spattering of applause from the departments Dr. King would not be thinktanking with. Robert poured a large glass of sherry and drank it down. “It’s not fair,” he said. “First the Parking Authority and now this.”

“Pilots make
a lot of money,” Sarah said. “And the only word they have to think about is ‘crash.”

Dr. Albertson raised his hand.

“Yes?” the dean asked.

“I just wanted Dr. King to know,” he said, “that he can count on my support one hundred percent.”

“Are you supposed to eat this white crust thing on the cheese?” Chuck asked.

Dr. King put a memo in the Paleontology Department’s boxes the next day. It read
“Group ideating session next Mon. Dr. Wright’s office. 2 P.M. J. King. P.S. I will be doing observational datatizing this Tues. and Thurs.”

“We’ll all do some observational datatizing,” Sarah said, even more alarmed by Dr. King’s preempting her office without asking her than by the brie.

She went to find her TA, who was in her office eating a Snickers. “I want you to go find out about Dr. King’s
background,” she told him.

“Why?”

“Because he used to be a junior-high girl’s basketball coach. Maybe we can get some dirt on him and one of his seventh grade forwards.”

“How do you know he used to be a junior-high coach?”

“All educational consultants used to be junior-high coaches. Or social-studies teachers.” She looked at the memo disgustedly. “What do you suppose observational datatizing
consists of?”

Observational datatizing consisted of wandering around the halls of the Earth Sciences building with a clipboard listening to Dr. Albertson.

“Okay, how much you got?” Dr. Albertson was saying to his class. He was wearing a butcher’s apron and a paper fast-food hat and was cutting apples into halves, quarters, and thirds with a cleaver, which had nothing to do with depauperate fauna,
but which he had seen Edward James Olmos do in
Stand and Deliver.
He had been very impressed.

“Yip, that’ll do it,” he
was saying in an Hispanic accent when Dr. King appeared suddenly at the back of the room with his clipboard.

“But the key question here is
relevantness,”
Dr. Albertson said hastily. “How do the depauperate fauna affectate on our lives today?”

His students looked wary. One of
them crossed his arms protectively over his textbook as though he thought he was going to be asked to tear out more pages.

“Depauperate fauna have a great deal of relevantness to our modern society,” Dr. Albertson said, but Dr. King had wandered back into the hall and into Dr. Othniel’s class.

“The usual mode of the tyrannosaurus rex was to approach a herd of hadrosaurs from cover,” Dr. Othniel,
who did not see Dr. King because he was writing on the board, said. “He would then attack suddenly and retreat.” He wrote “1. OBSERVE, 2. ATTACK, 3. RETREAT,” in a column on the board, the letters of each getting smaller and squinchier as he approached the chalk tray.

His students wrote “1. Sneak up, 2. Bite ass, 3. Beat it,” and “Todd called last night. I told him Traci wasn’t there. We talked
forever.”

Dr. King wrote “RELEVANTNESS?” in large block letters on his clipboard and wandered out again.

“The jaws and teeth of the tyrannosaurus were capable of inflicting a fatal wound with a single bite. It would then follow at a distance, waiting for its victim to bleed to death,” Dr. Othniel said.

Robert was late to the meeting on Monday. “You will not believe what happened to me!” he
said. “I had to park in the daily permit lot, and while I was getting the permit out of the machine, they gave me a ticket!”

Dr. King, who was sitting at Sarah’s desk wearing a pair of gray sweats, a whistle, and a baseball cap with “Dan Quayle Junior High” on it, said, “I know you’re all as excited about this educationing experiment we’re about to embarkate on as I am.”

“More,” Dr. Albertson
said.

Sarah glared at him. “Will this experiment involve eliminating positions?”

Dr. King smiled
at her. His teeth reminded her of some she’d seen at the Denver Museum of Natural History. “‘Positions,’ ‘classes,’ ‘departments,’ all those terms are irrelevantatious. We need to reassessmentize our entire concept of education, its relevantatiousness to modern society. How many of you are using
paradigmic bonding in your classes?”

Dr. Albertson raised his hand.

“Paradigmic bonding, experiential role-playing, modular cognition. I assessmentized some of your classes last week. I saw no computerlearner linkages, no multimedial instruction, no cognitive tracking. In one class”—Dr. King smiled largely at Dr. Othniel—”I saw a blackboard being used. Methodologies like that are extinct.”

“So are dinosaurs,” Sarah muttered. “Why don’t you say something, Robert?”

“Dr. King,” Robert said, “do you plan to extend this reorganization to other departments?”

Good, Sarah thought, send him over to pester English Lit.

“Yes,” Dr. King said, beaming. “Paleontology is only an initiatory pretest. Eventually we intend to expand it to encompassate the entire university. Why?”

“There’s one department
that drastically needs reorganization,” Robert said. “I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but the Parking Authority is completely out of control. The sign distinctly says you’re supposed to park your car first and
then
go get the daily permit out of the machine.”

“What did you find out about Dr. King?” Sarah asked Chuck Tuesday morning.

“He didn’t coach junior-high girl’s basketball,” he said,
drinking a lime Slurpee. “It was junior-high wrestling.”

“Oh,” Sarah said. “Then find out where he got his doctorate. Maybe we can get the college to rescind it for using words like ‘assessmentize.’”

“I don’t think I’d better,” Chuck said. “I mean, I’ve only got one semester till I graduate. And besides,” he said, sucking on the Slurpee, “some of his ideas made sense. I mean, a lot of that stuff
we learn in class does seem kind of pointless. I mean, what does the Late Cretaceous have to do with us, really? It might be fun to role-play and stuff.”

“Fine,” Sarah said. “Role-play this. You are
a coryhosaurus. You’re smart and fast, but not fast enough because a tyrannosaurus rex has just taken a bite out of your flank. What do you do?”

“Gosh, that’s a tough one,” Chuck said, slurping meditatively.
“What would you do?”

“Grow a wishbone.”

Tuesday afternoon, as soon as her one o’clock class was over, Sarah went to Robert’s office. He wasn’t there. She waited outside for half an hour, reading the announcement for a semester at sea, and then went over to the Parking Authority office.

He was standing near the front of a line that wound down the stairs and out the door. It was composed mostly
of students, though the person at the head of the line was a frail-looking old man. He was flapping a green slip at the young man behind the counter. The young man had a blond crew cut and looked like an adolescent Himmler.

“…a heart attack,” the old man at the head of the line was saying. Sarah wondered if he had had one when he got his parking ticket or if he intended to have one now.

Sarah
tried to get to Robert, but two students were blocking the door. She recognized one of the freshmen from Dr. Othniel’s class. “Oh, Todd,” the freshman was saying to a boy in a tank undershirt and jeans, “I knew you’d help me. I tried to get Traci to come with me—I mean, after all, it was her car—but I think she had a date.”

“A date?” Todd said.

“Well, I don’t know for sure. It’s hard to keep
track of all her guys. I couldn’t do that. I mean”—she lowered her eyes demurely—”if you were
my
boyfriend, I’d never even think about other guys.”

“Excuse me,” Sarah said, “but I need to talk to Dr. Walker.”

Todd stepped to one side, and instead of stepping to the other, the freshman from Dr. Othniel’s class squeezed over next to him. Sarah slid past and worked her way up to Robert, ignoring
the nasty looks of the other people in line.

“Don’t tell me you got a ticket, too,” Robert said.

“No,” she said. “We have to do something about Dr. King.”

“We certainly do,” Robert said indignantly.

“Oh, I’m so
glad you feel that way. Dr. Othniel’s useless, He doesn’t even realize what’s going on, and Dr. Albertson’s giving a lecture on ‘The Impactization of Microscopic Fossils on Twentieth-Century
Society.’”

“Which is what?”

“I have no idea. When I was in there, he was showing a videotape of
The Land Before Time.”

“I had a coronary thrombosis!” the old man shouted.

“Unauthorized vehicles are not allowed in permit lots,” the Hitler Youth said. “However, we have initiated a preliminary study of the incident.”

“A preliminary study!” the old man said, clutching his left arm. “The last
one you did took five years!”

“We need another meeting with Dr. King,” Sarah said. “We need to tell him relevance is not the issue, that paleontology is important in and of itself, and not because brontosaurus earrings are trendy. Surely he’ll see reason. We have science and logic on our side.”

Robert looked at the old man at the counter.

“What is there to study?” he was saying. “You ticketed
the ambulance while the paramedics were giving me CPR!”

“I’m not sure reason will work,” Robert said doubtfully.

“Well, then, how about a petition? We’ve got to do something, or we’ll all be showing episodes of
The Flintstones.
He’s a dangerous man!”

“He certainly is,” Robert said. “Do you know what I just got? A citation for parking in front of the Faculty Library.”

“Will you forget about
your stupid parking tickets for a minute?” Sarah said. “You won’t have any reason to park unless we get rid of King. I know Albertson’s students would all sign a petition. Yesterday he made them cut the illustrations out of their textbooks and make a collage.”

“The Parking Authority doesn’t acknowledge petitions,” Robert said. “You heard what Dr. King told the dean at the reception. He said,
‘I’m parked right outside.’ He left a note on his windshield that said the Paleontology Department had given him permission to park there.” He waved the green paper at her. “Do you know where 1 parked? Fifteen blocks away. And I’m the one who gets a citation for improperly authorizing parking permission!

“Good-bye, Robert,” Sarah said.

“Wait a minute! Where are you going? We haven’t figured
out a plan of action yet.”

Sarah worked her way back through the line. The two students were still blocking the door. “I’m sure Traci will understand,” the freshman from Dr. Othniel’s class was saying, “I mean, it isn’t like you two were
serious
or anything.”

“Wait a minute!” Robert shouted from his place
in line. “What are you going to do?”