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mesh with the destructive or left-handed intellect – never!’
    ‘Well I suppose not, mm –’
    ‘So what is God? Simple. He is the vector sum of the entire network of forces turning back upon themselves to produce ultimate consciousness! I mean isn’t He? Isn’t He just the infinite acceleration of the tangential? POW! POW!’ He smacked an enormous right-hand fist into an enormous left-hand palm. There was silence. There was always silence after one of Byron Dollsly’s little lectures, which always ended
pow, pow
…
    ‘Interesting, Byron, good line of thinking there … hard to see any practical research possibilities in it just now, but…’
    As chairman, Tarr of course had the final deciding vote, which he cast for his own proposal (to study telepathy in birds). Dismissing his assistants, he prepared to write it up for thecommittee. That is, he sat cracking his knuckles, one by one, and staring out of the window.
    From here in the Old Psychology Building, he had a limited view of the Mall: a few dirty white drifts, the stump of a snowman. How many seasons had he watched from this narrow window? How many barren Winters? How many hopes shattered like icicles – Tarr was beginning to like the simile – while his career remained frozen, stiff as the heart of poor little Frosty out there, who would never come to life and sing …
    Tarr started on the left-hand knuckles. Beyond the snowman lay the façade of Economics, a dirty old building on whose pediment he could just make out three figures:
Labour
shouldering a giant gear-wheel,
Capital
dumping out her cornucopia, and
Land
applying his scythe to a sheaf of wheat or something.
    His gaze returned to the central figure. Money, that’s what it took. A little money – a tenth of the cash they lavished on the Computer Science Department, say – and he could have parapsychology really on the move. Going places. They were doing it elsewhere: Professor Fether in Chicago was testing precognition in hippos; the Russians claimed a breakthrough on the ouija board to Lenin; the ghost labs of California were fast building a solid reputation. But here, a standstill, a frozen landscape. Nobody in the entire field had ever heard of the University of Minnetonka.
    Nobody had ever heard of Dr George Tarr, either. Now and then his clipping service sent him by mistake some reference to ‘R. Targ’ or ‘C. Tart’. His own name never appeared.
    Still, here was another chance, another crack at the old cornucopia … He cracked the last knuckle and reached for his dictating machine.
    ‘Title: Research into Psychically-Oriented Flock Flight. A project proposal. G. Tarr, B. Aikin, B. Dollsly.
    ‘Ahem. Observers have long obs – noted the uncanny agility of birds flying in formation. This agility has not yet been adequately explained. How is it that a flock of up to a thousand birds, manoeuvring in perfectly co-ordinated flight at high velocities, can avoid collisions? The psychic mechanism we propose may be tested as follows …’
    *
    A man in a red hunting cap and matching face was saying to the bartender, ‘Look, just because I never went to no university that don’t mean I’m drunk.’
    ‘Just take it easy, Jack.’
    ‘Plenny of things a university don’t teach you, am I right?’
    ‘All I said was, take it easy. Take it …’
    In the back booth, Professor Rogers scratched at acne that hadn’t itched for fifteen years. ‘Up to you, of course. Just thought you might want to have all the facts.
Before
the meeting.’
    Dr Jane Hannah’s face was impassive, the face of a Cheyenne brave which, during her early years in anthropology, she had been. ‘Facts, you say. I keep hearing opinions.’
    ‘Okay, sure, if you want my opinion, we should turn them down. With all these fraud rumours, I don’t see how Fong’s people can expect special treatment.’
    She raised her martini, mumbled something over it, and took a sip. ‘Why not special treatment? Maybe what they have