Read Online First meetings in the Enderverse by Orson Scott Card - Free Book Online Page B

walked past him toward the door of the building. He followed. “Actually, we’re in the middle of your office hours right now, aren’t we?”
    “So go to my office,” she said.
    “Mind if I walk with you?”
    She stopped. “It’s not my office hours,” she said. “I knew I should have checked,” he said. She pushed open the door and entered the building.
    He followed. “Look at it this way-there won’t be a line outside your door.”
    “I teach a low-prestige, bad-time-of-day section of Human Community,” said Ms. Brown. “There’s never a line outside my door.”
    “Long enough I ended up clear out there,” said John Paul.
    They were at the foot of the stairs leading up to the second floor. She faced him again. “Mr. Wiggin, you are better than average when it comes to cleverness, and perhaps another day I might have enjoyed our badinage.”
    He grinned. A woman who would say “badinage” to a man was rare-a tiny subset of the women who actually knew the word.
    “Yes, yes,” she said, as if trying to answer his smile. “Today isn’t a good day. I won’t see you in my office. I have things on my mind.”
    “I have nothing on mine,” said John Paul, “and I’m a good listener, amazingly discreet.”
    She walked on up the stairs ahead of him. “I find that hard to believe.”
    “Oh, you can believe it,” he said. “Practically everything in my school records, for instance, is a lie, and yet I never tell anybody.”
    Again it took her a moment to get the joke, but this time she answered with one yip of laughter. Progress.
    “Ms. Brown,” he said, “I really did want to talk to you about ideas from class. Whatever you might have thought, I wasn’t coming on to you with some line, and I’m not trying to be clever with you. I was just surprised that you seem to be teaching a version of Human Community that isn’t like the standard stuff-I mean, there’s nothing about it in the textbook, which is all about primates and bonding and hierarchies-”
    “We’ll be covering all that.”
    “It’s been a long time since I’ve had a professor who knew things I hadn’t already learned through my own reading.”
    “I don’t know things,” she said. “I’m trying to find out things. There’s a difference.”
    “Ms. Brown,” said John Paul, “I’m not going to go away.”
    She stopped at the door of her office. “And why is that? Apart from the fact that I could take that as a threat to stalk me.”
    “Ms. Brown,” said John Paul. “I think you might be smarter than me.”
    She laughed in his face. “Of course I’m smarter than you.”
    He pointed at her triumphantly. “See? And you’re arrogant about it, too. We have so much in common. Are you really going to shut this door in my face?”
    She shut the door in his face. Theresa tried to work on her next lecture. She tried to read several scientific journals. She couldn’t concentrate. All she could think about was them taking her project away from her-not the work, just the credit. She tried to convince herself that what mattered was the science, not the prestige. She was not one of those pathetic on-the-make grad students who were all about career, with research serving as no more than a stepping stone. It was the research itself that she cared about. So why not recognize the political realities, accept their quislingesque “offer,” and be content?
    It’s not about the credit. It’s about the Hegemony perverting the whole system of science as a means of extortion. Not that science is particularly pure, except compared to politics. She found herself displaying the data of her students on her desk, calling up their pictures and records and glancing at them. In the back of her mind she knew she was looking for John Paul Wiggin. What he had said about his school records being a lie intrigued her. And looking him up was such a trivial task that she could do it even while fretting over what they were doing to her. John Paul