Connie Willis - In the Late Cretaceous

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 computer-learner 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.