Дэймон Найт - Orbit 6

Gradually the volume of sound diminished, and when only a few diehards were holding out he rapped gently for order. Some of them, he knew, considered that an undemocratic procedure, but it was not forbidden yet, and clearing his throat simply did not work. By a gesture he called on a girl in the front row, choosing her because he knew she had a clear, sweet voice which would help quiet the noisier boys. She rose gracefully, a courtesy he could not demand but appreciated, and parted the long hair hanging over her face before she spoke. “I thought—” she said, and then paused, embarrassed. She was wearing the broadest possible belt, and in spite of the painted arrows stabbing inward on her thighs it seemed probable that she had not yet rejected completely the conservative influence of an old-fashioned family — an impression reinforced by the demure pink pastel she had selected for her breasts.

“I thought it was just lovely,” she finished. “The lovely park, whatever it was—”

“The Champs Elysées,” he prompted.

“Yes, and the lovely old carriage the woman rode in — I mean, I thought it was just shattering.” She sat down abruptly.

He nodded in appreciation and said, “Let’s see it again, shall we?” touching a button on the console before him. Instantly the scene filled the wall in front of the class, an ink drawing filled in with broad splashes of tempera. From memory he quoted, “The idea of perfection which I had within me I had bestowed, in that other time, upon the height of a victoria, upon the raking thinness of those horses, frenzied and light as wasps upon the wing, with bloodshot eyes like the cruel steeds of Diomed, which now, smitten by a desire to see again what I had once loved, as ardent as the desire that had driven me, many years before, along the same paths, I wished to see renewed before my eyes at the moment when Mme. Swann’s enormous coachman, supervised by a groom no bigger than his fist, and as infantile as Saint George in the picture, endeavored to curb the ardour of the flying, steel-tipped pinions with which they thundered along the ground.”

The legend over Mme. Swann’s head, enclosed in a balloon whose outlines were of the puffy sort used to indicate thoughts rather than speech, seemed hardly necessary — the cartoonist had conveyed them well enough in the look she directed toward a strolling group of high-hatted gentlemen — but his students were rereading them nonetheless, as he saw by their moving lips: “ ‘Oh yes, I do remember quite well; it was wonderful!’, to another: ‘How I should have loved to! We were unfortunate!’, to a third: ‘Yes, if you like! I must just keep in the line for a minute, then as soon as I can I will break away.’ “ Far in the background the slender figure of the young Marcel expressed mute admiration.

He was about to wipe out the picture when he sensed a disturbance far toward the back of the room, where the tiered seats rose in semicircles. Heads were turning toward the door leading to the corridor belt and he heard a girl giggle nervously. Then something black and shapeless entered and sat down. There were more giggles.

For a moment he did not know what to do, then stabbing his fingers down at random he replaced Mme. Swann’s victoria with another scene and announced briskly: “Student dialogue on this one; Shepherd and Weeks.” Shepherd and Weeks were two of the brightest as well as the most talkative; they could be depended upon to keep their discussion going without him for as long as needed. The picture the projector had produced was of Marcel stealing glances at the former Princesse des Laumes as she sat with her feet on the tomb of Gilbert the Bad. He left it on long enough for the class to study it, then changed to a magnified view of the room itself with Shepherd and Weeks in the foreground. When they were well under way (“She represents the unattainable woman to him — he’s more comfortable with that”), and the class had been at least partially distracted, he switched his personal monitor to a camera covering the back of the room.

In the last row, in the seat nearest the door, sat a figure completely draped in black cloth. Instead of the sandals worn by most students the feet were shod in black, very formal and rather old-fashioned, masculine shoes; and under the cloth, apparently, something like a box was worn over the head. Its square outline could be seen just above the triangular holes which allowed the wearer to see.

Twisting a knob, he zoomed the image in until he seemed to stand alongside the shrouded figure. The student — surely only a student would undertake such a prank — sat motionless, utterly quiet in his broad-armed chair.

It was, as he realized after a moment, a particularly difficult situation. Any of the fifty thousand students at the university could monitor any class he chose; the right had been acquired as the result of undergraduate demonstrations at some time in the remote past, and in theory aided them to decide whether or not to register for the subject in a future semester. In practice it was most frequently used by campus agitators who wished to disrupt a class without paying tuition for it. He could ask the student under the cloth to establish that he was a student, but if he was it would gain nothing; and he might be walking into a trap, since if, as seemed likely, the student was an agent provocateur for some dissident group, this challenge was presumably what he was expecting and awaiting.

But for the time being at least he was well behaved and quiet; the wisest course was probably to ignore the whole matter until some overt action changed his own position from that of presumptive aggressor. Abstractedly he thought of how the boy must be sweltering under his shroud. His own clothing, tropical-weave coveralls whose design imitated the sweatshirt and jeans of more formal times, oppressed him in the underground heat. Still watching the monitor, he plucked at it to draw cooler air in at the neck. More conservative — and perhaps better salaried — faculty members stuck to the time-honored slogans for their shirts, the more respected because they were outmoded: things like GET OUT OF VIETNAM and GOD GROWS HIS OWN. The legend on his own chest read: MAKE LOVE NOT SLUDGE. Not prestigious, but the National Sewage Authority paid him a stipend for the space.

The remainder of the period seemed to pass without leaving an impression on his memory, and although he was certain afterward that he had asked the normal questions to begin discussions and elucidated correctly the few points referred to him, he could recall nothing of it when the class was shuffling out into the hall. He remained at the console, waiting to see if the dark figure at the back of the room had left with the others, and by some trick of thought he felt he had been watching the proceedings himself through the eyes behind those black holes, and had found them remote and inconsequential.

The dark figure had not gone, but was still seated and, it seemed, staring at him across the long rows of empty chairs.

This was his last class of the day, and he was conscious of an overpowering urge to finish it without a disturbance; to go home and talk to Ruth and rest. The eyeholes which were the only visible feature of that strangely shaped, hooded head seemed to hold no malice or even impulse of activity, and for a moment he wondered if the student behind them could be asleep. Slowly he got up and walked toward an exit, ignoring him as well as he could. He reached the door and risked a glance over his shoulder. The black figure was standing now; he went out, grateful for the soft shushing the door made behind him.

He was halfway to the elevator when he heard the slow tread of heavily shod feet, very different from the patter of sandals or bare soles. He walked faster, pressed the elevator button, and was fortunate enough to have the doors open immediately. When they closed, the black figure was still fifteen feet or so away.