Gregor had taken the only regular chair in the room and pulled it up to Jack Carroll’s side, so he could look on and talk while Jack was working. He was busy suppressing his fear and distrust of the mechanical—and his crushing sense of inadequacy in the face of machines—so that he could hear himself think.
“The real pisser about all this,” Jack Carroll was saying, “is that it’s beyond my comprehension how he manages to make all this mess. I mean, for God’s sake, Mr. Demarkian. Soldering isn’t exactly what I’d call a fine art, not most of the time. It looks like he was sitting here with a toothpick making little pieces of crap to cause me trouble with.”
“Mmm,” Gregor said. “You said the first time you saw a mess like this was this morning?”
“Not this morning, yesterday morning. I was up here with Ted Barrows, fixing the speedometer cable on my car. I drive a wreck, in case you haven’t guessed. Usually if I’m going to mess with my car, I do it down in town where I work. They’ve got a better setup. But the timing wasn’t right yesterday, so I came in here, and I found—this.”
“This this? Just like this?”
“Just like. Maybe worse. I don’t know how long it took me to clean it up. Look at this solderer—solder gun, some people call it. If you leave it all gunked up like this, you can ruin it. A couple of hundred dollars right down the drain for no good reason at all.”
Gregor was still thinking about timing, trying to make it go—but it wouldn’t. Maybe it would have if he’d known what he was getting at beyond the concrete, but he didn’t. He pushed it aside and took another tack.
“Tell me something,” he said, “according to Miss Flint, this afternoon, just before Miss Veer keeled over, you were standing near her and Dr. Elkinson in the cafeteria line.”
“That’s right. I’d gone up to get a Coke.”
“Dr. Crockett was there, too.”
“He came in while Dr. Elkinson and I were talking,” Jack said. “I think he was getting a Coke, too. It might have been lemonade.”
“You don’t remember?”
Jack grinned. “Chessey came hauling up and dragged me out of there practically the minute Ken arrived. I think she’s sort of had enough of Ken. I’m not even sure I blame her.”
“Now,” Gregor said. “Think. You were standing next to Miss Maryanne Veer.”
“Right.”
“She was holding a cafeteria tray.”
“Right, too.”
“What was on it?”
“A cup of tea,” Jack Carroll said promptly.
“That was all?”
“That was absolutely all. I remember wondering what she needed the tray for. She could have carried the cup in her hands.”
Gregor sighed. “It’s impossible,” he said. “It’s just impossible. There has to have been something else on that tray.”
“Why?”
This time, Gregor hesitated only a moment. There was no real reason not to let everyone know what he had worked out—what he knew had to be true. There were several reasons why that kind of revelation might be to his advantage. He told Jack what he had told Chessey Flint and David Markham before her, then sat back to see what Jack’s reaction would be.
Jack’s reaction seemed to be entirely intellectual, as if he’d been handed a logic problem and told that its successful solution would determine his grade in Advanced Psychological Methods for the term.
“You know,” he said, “just because there wasn’t anything on her tray when I saw it doesn’t mean there wasn’t anything later. She hadn’t reached the cash register yet.”
“She had, however, reached the end of the line,” Gregor pointed out.
“Well, yes, I know. But she was a little upset. Maybe she forgot and went back for her food after Chessey took me away.”
“What was she upset about?”
This time, Jack Carroll’s grin was broad and rueful. “Oh, well,” he said, “you’re not going to believe this, but it was Donegal Steele. I say you’re not going to believe it because Miss Veer doesn’t like him any better than I do—than any of us do. I think Donegal Steele may be the most disliked man on this campus.”
“Because of his views on the sexuality of women?”
“Because of everything,” Jack said. “The man is a crud, Mr. Demarkian. You pick a topic, he’ll be a crud about it.”
“Do you know what kind of, um, crud he is being to Miss Veer?”
“Sure. Miss Veer’s been running the administrative side of the Program since forever. Dr. Steele thinks she ought to be forcibly retired and replaced with someone a little easier on his eyes and a little more tractable about his demands. He’s always threatening Miss Veer that when he gets to be Head he’ll make her—”