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Show 11 Liller says nothing; his face grows ambivalently serious. "I've asked them to save thirty pages in the September Reports," Robeck confides. Liller knows what this means. "It's February now," he says. But Liller has come with other news, though it is not especially good. "The institute wants to know when you'll be ready to move to the emeritus suites in the Berkeley Building." "I never said I'd be ready." "They didn't give you a choice." Robeck remembers the letter, but not very clearly; he opens the only drawer of his desk which is not perfectly ordered, into which he stuffs the miscellaneous correspondence and memoranda he does not want to confront. He finds the letter; it speaks of "reassignment" to "more suitable office space," though it does not mention the absence of laboratory facilities, or the fact that all one's office-mates would also be old. The emeritus suites, thinks fad. he pictures Robeck, a bald hallway in a disused wing of the old administration building, where they farm out the aging researchers into a kind of geriatric scholars' nirvana. "Tell them I won't be ready." "They've already reassigned this office to somebody else," Liller says. "They just want to know when they can schedule the move. I thought you knew." Robeck surveys the nearly-completed manuscript, the rows of books, the laboratory paraphernalia, the office he has occupied for nearly 50 years. "Tell them I won't need to move. They can have this office in September." |