Cliff

Chapter 17 -- California Tech Department of Icthyology

The motel offered them a room with two beds, and they took it. Sally felt just a little regret about this, and wondered why. Did she want to sleep with Tom after all? She was really too tired to care much, she told herself.

After a slightly less uncomfortable night than the night before, Sally & Tom checked out very early and drove back to the campus. Parking the car took some time and luck, but finding the Department of Icthyology was not hard, once they had a map of the cmapus.

The Department Secretary of an academic department in a university is a very special person. She is the office manager for a group of professors who do not want anything to do with an office. They just want whatever they want, immediately, and have no idea how anything is to be accomplished.

She is the receptionist, handling everything and everybody which deviates ever so slightly from the most rudimantary requests which student help can do.

She has several important attributes. One of them is intelligence, which, combined with a lot of experience and knowledge of the personalities in her department, enables her to work in the minefield of conflicting ideas, theorietical considerations, and simple insanity that is the halmark of a truly great university.

An even more important attribute is discretion. Over the years, she learns where all the bodies are buried, and is the only one who knows about a lot of them. The stories she could tell, but doesn't, would fill books. She is well known for knowing an awful lot more than she says. Keeping departmental politics from running the department is a major goal.

She knows all the professors in the department, and all of the graduate students by their first names. She knows all of the wives and husbands, lovers and mistresses. She puts them together, or keeps them apart, depending on the need at the time.

She can not program the computers, but can program the intercom telephone, which is much more vital. She actually can't program the telephone either, but she knows one of the other department secretaries who can, or who knows somebody who can. Possibly in the Computer Science department.

She can operate the copy machine. Big deal, anyone can operate the copy machine, except the professors. What is a big deal is that she can get paper for the copy machine off budget.

She can, if necessary, do all of this by candlelight. This is demonstrated a couple of times a year during power failures.

Graduate students without number owe their careers to her, having arrived at the last possible moment before submission date with a sudden difficency in the manuscript they have been working on for a year. Miraculous transformations occur during the final hours before a theses or disertation is presented.

Rare is the graduate student so slow or backward that he or she didn't know to show his final draft to Mother Superior before he or she shows it to his advisor. Until it gets past her, there is no earthly point in even trying to submit it to a professor.

Without her the department would stop absolutely. The department finds this out when negotiations fail and her union goes on strike.

These marvelous creatures usually have honorary titles. The one for this department was called, almost always out of her hearing, "Mother Superior". Her name was Margaret. She was not called Maggie, or Mag, or Marge, or Margie, or Peggy.

Being graduate students themselves, Sally & Tom saved themselves a lot of time by finding her first. Sally also knew that she was going to have to have a pretty good explanation for why she was here asking questions, and that the explanation was going to have to be pretty close to the truth.

Sally started out by identifying herself and Tom, and explained that they were trying to locate a disertation that probably was written by a former student in this department, who died in an accident about 10 years ago. Sally told the secretary his name, and the date of his death. She tried to do this without saying why she was interested in the disertation.

The secretary looked hard at Sally, then said "I remember First Victim, and the accident. He was a graduate student in this department, as you suggest. I didn't know him very well, but his sudden death did cause quite a stir, and I guess I remember that about him most of all. I don't remember any disertation, though. Now, why don't I remember anything about a disertation? I don't remember if he was working on one."

Sally said in the flattest voice she could manage, "We think he must have been. We were hoping you could remember who his advisor was. Possibly First Victim's advisor would remember something about his work in progress."

"Let's see, at that time, that would be Head Fish. Dr. Fish is emeritus now, but he generally comes in for an hour or two in the afternoon when he's in town. Why don't you come back around 2:00."

A small voice in the back of her mind that often spoke to her when she was dealing with an academic department spoke now, and she agreed to return after lunch. She and Tom thanked the secretary for all of her help and went to lunch.

[Of course, the draft had been submitted to Mother Superior, but she wasn't saying that until she had talked to Dr. Fish. She had it in her files, after all these years. Not that many graduate students die at exactly that point in the process, she just hung on to it for old times sake.]

Sally & Tom went off to lunch in the Student Commons.

"Sally, what do you hope to get out of Dr. Fish? I mean, what's he going to remember about an incomplete disertation ten years old?"

"I don't know, Tom. I just don't know what else to do. If we don't get anywhere here, I guess we quit, until we think of something else."

The time crawled by until 2:00 pm. At last they were back in front of Mother Superior.

"I told Dr. Fish you were asking to see him. He is expecting you. His office is at the end of the hall."

Sally knocked, and Dr. Fish invited them in.

The Department Secretary said that you wanted to see me, about a former student, was it?

Sally decided to be a direct as she could be, there wasn't any point in trying to disguise what she wanted, but she wasn't about to tell Dr. Fish the whole story, by any means.

"About ten years ago, a student you were advising at the time, First Victim, died in a skiing accident, an avalanche I believe. We are trying to trace a disertation we think he was writing at the time. We don't think it had anything whatever to do with his death, but we can't exactly tell you why we want to know about it either. We would like to see what he had accomplished when he died."

Well, it was out. It remained to be seen what Dr. Fish would make of it.

"That's a pretty strange request. He didn't publish anything. I barely remember him. I didn't remember his subject at all. Are you sure you can't tell me why you want to know about it?"

"I've been trying for hours to think of what to say about that. I can't tell you why I want to see it. I may well be very wrong about what I think. I don't want to say anything until I know I'm right. I want to compare what First Victim wrote with something else."

"Yes, I see. That could be very serious, indeed. But after all this time? Perhaps if you could show me what you have I could have a look at what I may have and tell you if we need to proceed."

"I'm sorry, Dr. Fish, but I can't do that. The people whose reputations I am trying to protect are still alive. I was hoping you would show me what you may have."

And that was as far as Sally was willing to go. In fact, she had absolutely nothing to show Dr. Fish, and didn't even quite know why she wanted to see the disertation notes, or whatever Dr. Fish had, for sure. But he had something, she now knew that.

"You seem quite serious. I'm inclined to trust you. Here's the situation. "

"I keep old papers, theses, disertations that don't get completed, and so on, just to be sure they don't reappear under different authorship. I hate to admit that, but I do. Actually, I don't do it, I instruct Margaret to do it. It isn't a perfect system, but we live in a less than perfect world. I don't advertize it."

"In this case, by coincidence, First Victim had actually 'submitted' his draft to Margaret. Graduate students often do that. She looks the paper over for form and grammar, spelling and whatnot, so the student's paper will make a better impression on me as a first draft. It's not part of Margaret's job description, but she is very kind about it, and the faculty pretends not to know about it. That's what happened in this case. She still has the draft. She never got to return it to First Victim. If I give it to you, what will you do with it?"

"We'll look at it. Ok, we'll make a copy of it. But not for publication, just because we have to. We can't do the comparison here. We will want to be very careful about that. Actually, we don't know what we are looking for exactly. We'll have to look over First Victim's draft first. We do promise that what we do we will do ourselves, nobody else will see it, now or ever, without your consent."

"Well, you certainly have my curiosity up. Give my your names, both of you, and how I can contact you. You will have to trust my descretion about that."

Sally & Tom wrote their names, addresses and where they were students. Dr. Fish took the information and silently handed over a clipped together stack of paper.

Dr. Fish explained, "All this has been researched since this draft was written. It was a pretty good topic at it's time, but it is no longer new. I'd like to hear more if you ever feel that you can tell me. Ask Margaret to make you a copy. Don't leave the office with the original."

Margaret put the draft into the copy machine. When it had made the copy, she clipped the pages of the copy together and handed it to them. They took the original back to Dr. Fish's office.

"Stay in touch. I'd like to know how this comes out. I'm trusting you guys. Don't let me down."

"We aren't going to try to publish any part of it, or use it in our work at all. We just can't tell you what we are going to do with it right now."

Sally has to have an inspiration, look up Professor Lockridge's dis in the cal tech lib, where it will not be, since he didn't go there. She will request it on interlibrary loan, where it will be in in 2 days. They loaf for that time. Tom, can we stay here for a couple of days? Sure! [Sally can't go back to Goose Cove until she sees the dis, and she can't send it there. They go to the beach. She does some reading. Tom writes a poem. It isn't so bad. Then, on Tuesday, September 20, the dis arrives. Sally looks at it. Tom is writing. Sally makes xerox of a few pages of it, including the title and signature page. She does not tell Tom, or the reader.