| OCR Text |
Show Acting Alone Page 380 of that un-American vermin which the general public has traditionally accused such humanistic institutions as theirs of harboring, and even nurturing. The boy would then be desperate, penniliess, ego-shattered, and ready to go to work for the church on the Temple project. Elder Cicerone, old-fashioned as he was, had just assumed that a seeming criminal investigation would be more than enough to get a non-tenured graduate student fired quick as you please. But he hadn't anticipated the peculiar combination of misplaced idealism and lawless amorality in the hearts and brains of the professors. They'd apparently been intending all along to get rid of the big oaf for gross negligence and incompetence in the classroom and general pugnacity in the halls and cafeteria and restrooms; but they wound up keeping him on because of the KBI! The professors, democrats all, apparently saw the whole thing as a challenge to their liberality and to the cause of academic freedom. And, Elder Cicerone presumed, the sheer excitement of having a revolutionary fouling the air around the department had been no small consideration. Such were the surprises, the lessons to be learned in applied psycho-pathology when one penetrated an alien world. Alien worlds have the power to make one feel young again, and inexperienced, and alive in a universe that still holds wonders to be explored. Under his own down-and-outward momentum, with no help whatever from the church, the Edwine boy had wound up slinking away from professorial life, anyway. He'd left the university to cohabitate illegally with the Army brat. And then, after all that bother, Heavenly Father, in his fathomless wisdom, had seen fit to give the matter yet another half-twist: |
