"But you think," she said anyway, tentatively, "you think I'm right, though, don't you?"
"Oh, you mean about the substance of your paper? I think it's some of the most original, thought-provoking work to come out of this building in years. But do I think it was right to put it forward last summer? With the tenure committee meeting at the end of the fall semester?" He grimaced slightly and shook his head. "I told you. People aren't ready for a paradigm shift on something as fundamental as human consciousness. How would you feel sitting there and having some thirty-four-year-old associate professor tell you that there are no such things as 'moods'? That it's really another self — another personality — rising to the surface and assuming control over its host organism? 'Everybody's possessed with multiple personalities, only we don't normally notice the shift from one to the other because the different personalities' identities are so similar. We only diagnose it as multiple personality disorder when they're radically distinct like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.'" He was shaking his head. "You could've circulated a draft and gotten some input instead of just hitting them out of the blue with it."
"'Input,'" she said, frowning. "By the time they finish 'inputting,' the paper is twice as long and half as good." Laura rolled her eyes and huffed. "If I'd been gray-haired and male they would've paid attention."
"And if I'd been Grace Kelly, I would have married a prince."
"You don't know how much it hurts, Jonathan! How many times I've been in professional conferences or bullshit sessions and voiced an opinion only to be ignored. Then, fifteen minutes later, a man says the same goddamn thing and everybody feels [garbled] themselves to discuss it!"
"Me-o-ow."
"This isn't a game, Jonathan!"
"Oh, but it is!" he said, suddenly animated — on the front edge of the sofa. "It is a game. They told me not to bring my lover to the annual cocktail party with the trustees, so I didn't. They want me to be butch? No more turtlenecks or wine spritzers. A little healthy heterosexual harassment of the coeds? Sure thing, boss! You do what it takes to get tenure, and then you do whatever the hell you want."
He sat back, casting his eyes toward the ceiling again. "Being an associate professor, you see, is like being a juvenile sea squirt. You search the sea for a suitable patch of coral to make your home for life. You only need a rudimentary nervous system for the task, and once you've found the right spot and taken root, you don't even need that and you can do as the sea squirts do and eat your own brain."
Laura laid her head on the back of her chair, looking straight up at the ceiling. Taking a deep breath, she said with growing fatigue, "Thanks ever so much for the helpful analogy."
Jonathan hesitated, as if carefully considering his next words. "Burns plays the game."
"Of course he does!" Laura burst out, glaring at him. "Jesus! If you mean I have to be a Paul Burns to get tenure, I'm just not going to do that."
Jonathan huffed in feigned exasperation and sank further back into the deep recesses of the leather cushions. "God, I hate talking to people with principles. I never know what to say."
Laura felt a rising, panicked desire to take action, only she didn't know what to do. How she could salvage her career — her life.
"I screwed up, didn't I?"
After a moment's hesitation, Jonathan leaned forward with a loud noise from the leather and gently tossed the letter onto the desk. The thick sheet of stationery landed in front of her, its two folded ends rising into the air.
"So," she said, picking it up mainly just to look again at the flawless script, "what are you saying? This is my future? Psychoanalysis?"
Jonathan shrugged. "If you can make a million a week shrinking heads let me know."
"God, Jonathan," she said, looking around at the familiar surroundings of her small office. An office she would soon have to leave — forever.
She took a deep breath and let out a ragged sigh. "I can't believe this is happening." She looked down at the letter through bleary eyes. "If I take this job, it'll seal my fate, won't it?" She looked up at him. "They'll think it's a sign that I'm looking."
Jonathan shrugged. "It's not so much that as… You know, this Gray guy is like a real raper and pillager. It'd be sure to come up. I mean, why do you think he's offering a million bucks, for God's Sake?"
She looked at him, missing his point. "What do you mean?"
"Really, Laura. That's a lot of money. He probably…"
Jonathan stumbled, shrugging.
"What?" she asked, suddenly incensed. Jonathan said nothing.
"What? He's probably been turned down already? He's upped the price because nobody else is willing to take the job? What are you saying, Jonathan? I'm not his first choice?" He squirmed.
"La-a-aura…"
"Did he ask you?" she asked. Jonathan looked up at her. "He didn't, did he?" Jonathan shook his head. Laura allowed herself to sink back into the warm pool of self-pity.
Jonathan shrugged again. "Just be careful. I mean" — he shook his head—"I don't really know much about the guy, but from what I've read it sounds like he may be bad news. I mean, like, dangerous."
3
Laura's hair was still wet from her shower as she sat at a computer terminal in the main library. She had gone for her regular morning run, but it had failed to burn off her anxiety.
With a deep sigh, Laura logged onto the Web. The massive computer network — the "information superhighway" connecting millions of smaller networks into one high-speed global system — was occasionally useful, but it was hardly the revolution it had been touted to be. Laura frowned, staring at the cursor-turned-hourglass and waiting some time before finally getting a query screen.
"Gray, Joseph," she typed, hit Enter, and surreptitiously took a bite of the sandwich she'd snuck into the building. The computers response was delayed an inordinate length of time. Laura chewed, waiting. She hated computers.
"10,362 entries" finally appeared on the screen.
"Damn," she mumbled, her mouth an full. It was much more than she'd counted on. How could she look through that many? Maybe she could search some other parameters to narrow the list down. She tried, but couldn't think of any. She wanted to know something about the man, she just didn't know what.
Laura waded into the articles. The most recent was ten days old.
Forbes magazine listed Gray as the richest man in the world at forty to seventy billion dollars' net worth. Commercial electronics, telecommunications, Internet access, satellite launch, computers, robotics, space exploitation. Laura's eyes returned to the last word.
"Exploitation," she reread, having first read it to say "exploration."
"With no government backing, the Gray Corporation has bankrupted virtually all competition from the U.S., Japan, and Europe in the direct broadcast, high-definition television market. With its one-inch-thick, one-meter-square phased-array satellite antenna and user-selectable block-compressed high-definition television programming and Internet downloads broadcast from a network of over one hundred low-altitude satellites, the Gray Corporation can expect worldwide sales of over $50 billion this year alone. Joseph Gray is the sole shareholder of the Gray Corporation, which is essentially debt-free."
There was a telephoto picture of a strange-looking flat-sided rocket sitting at its gantry. "A single-stage, liquid-fueled reusable rocket," the caption read. There was no picture of Gray. Laura scanned the article for more. She found his birth date.
He is thirty-seven years old, she thought — momentarily pausing in amazement.
Laura took a large bite of her sandwich and skipped a few hundred articles — going back in time. As she read the article from two years ago, she remembered now where she had first heard Gray's name.