Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 60, No. 1. Whole No. 344, July 1972

The Phony Ph.D. by Isaac Asimov{©1972 by Isaac Asimov.}

As predicted and promised, the Black Widowers have beome a series. To refresh your memory, the first tale of the Black Widowers, “The Acquisitive Chuckle,” appeared in our January 1972 issue and introduced the five members of the club: organic chemist James Drake, code expert Thomas Trumbull, writer Emmanuel Rubin, patent attorney Geoffrey Avalon, and artist Mario Gonzalo. (And let’s not forget Henry the waiter.) At each monthly meeting the host brings a guest for grilling. In this second story the subject scheduled for cross-examination is Dr. Arnold Stacey, Ph.D. But in this session something different happens. Dr. James Drake, Ph.D., has an academic mystery to put before his colleagues and the guest...

The meeting of the Black Widowers was marred, but only slightly, by the restlessness of James Drake.

It was a shame this had to be so for the dinner was unusually good, even allowing for the loving care with which the “Milano” served its special group every month. And if the veal cordon bleu needed anything to add the final bit of luster, it was Henry’s meticulous service, which had a plate on the table where no plate had been before, yet without any person present able to catch sight of it en route.

It was Thomas Trumbull’s turn to be host, something he did with a savagery to which no one paid the slightest attention — a savagery made particularly bitter by the fact that as host he did not think it fit to come charging in just one second before the preprandial drinks had completed their twice-around (three times for Rubin, who showed no effects).

Trumbull had exercised the host’s privilege and brought a guest for the grilling. The guest was tall, almost as tall as Geoffrey Avalon, the Black Widowers’ patent-attorney member. He was lean, almost as lean as Geoffrey Avalon. He was clean-shaven, though, and lacked Avalon’s solemnity. Indeed, his face was round and his cheeks were plump, in a manner so out of keeping with the rest of his body that one might have thought him the product of a head transplant. His name was Arnold Stacey.

“Arnold Stacey, Ph.D.,” Trumbull had introduced him.

“Ah,” said Avalon, with the air of portentousness he automatically gave to his most trivial statement. “Doctor Doctor Stacey.”

“Doctor Doctor?” murmured the guest, his lips parting as though getting ready for a smile at the pleasantry sure to follow.

“It is a rule of the Black Widowers,” said Trumbull impatiently, “that all members are doctors by virtue of membership. A doctor for any other reason is—”

“— a Doctor Doctor,” finished Stacey. And he smiled.

“You can count honorary doctorates, too,” said Rubin, his wide-spaced teeth gleaming over a beard as straggly as Avalon’s was crisp. “But then I would have to be called Doctor Doctor Doctor—”

Mario Gonzalo was mounting the stairs just then, bringing with him a faint whiff of turpentine as though he had come straight from his artist’s studio. (Trumbull maintained you couldn’t draw that conclusion, that Gonzalo placed a drop of turpentine behind each ear before every social engagement.)

Gonzalo was in time to catch Emmanuel Rubin’s statement and said, before he had quite reached the top step, “What honorary doctorates did you ever receive, Manny? Dishonorary doctorates, more likely.”

Rubin’s face froze, as it usually did when he was attacked without warning; but that was merely the short pause necessary for him to gather his forces. He said, “I can list them for you. In 1938, when I was only fifteen, it so happens I was a revivalist preacher and I received a D.D. from—”

“No, for God’s sake,” said Trumbull, “don’t give us the list. We accept it all.”

“You’re fighting out of your weight, Mario,” said Avalon with wooden amiability. “You know Rubin can never be caught in an inconsistency once he starts talking about his early life.”

“Sure,” said Gonzalo, “that’s why his stories are so dull. They’re all autobiographical. No poetry.”

“I have written poetry—” began Rubin, and then Drake appeared. Usually he was the first person there; this time he was the last.

“Train late,” he said quietly, shucking his coat. Since he had to come from New Jersey to attend, the only surprise was that it didn’t happen oftener.

“Introduce me to the guest,” Drake added, as he turned to take the drink that Henry the waiter held out for him.

Avalon said, “Doctor Doctor Arnold Stacey — Doctor Doctor James Drake.”

“Greetings,” said Drake, holding up his glass in salute. “What’s the nature of the lesser doctorate, Doctor Stacey.”

“Ph.D. in chemistry, Doctor Doctor, and call me Arnold.”

Drake’s small grizzled mustache seemed to bristle. “Ditto,” he said. “My Ph.D. is also in chemistry.”

They looked at each other warily for a moment. Then Drake said, “Industry? Government? Academic?”

“I teach. Assistant Professor at Berry University,” Stacey replied.

“Where?”

“Berry University. It’s not a large school. It’s in—”

“I know where it is,” said Drake. “I did graduate work there — considerably before your time, though. Did you get your degree at Berry before you joined the faculty?”

“No, I—”

“Let’s sit down, for God’s sake,” roared Trumbull. “There’s more drinking and less eating going on here all the time.” He was standing at the host’s seat with his glass raised, glowering at the others as each took his seat. “Sit down, sit down!” And then he intoned the ritual toast to Old King Cole in a singsong baritone while Gonzalo blandly kept time with a hard roll which he broke and buttered when the last syllable was finished.

“What’s this?” said Rubin suddenly, staring down at his dish in dismay.

“Pâté de la maison, sir” said Henry softly.

“That’s what I thought. Chopped liver. Damn it, Henry,

I ask you, as a pathologically honest man, is this fit to eat?”

“The matter is quite subjective, sir. It depends on the personal taste of the diner.”

Avalon pounded the table. “Point of order! I object to Manny’s use of the adjectival phrase ‘pathologically honest.’ Violation of confidence!”

Rubin colored slightly. “Hold on, Jeff. I don’t violate any confidence. That happens to be my opinion of Henry quite independently of what happened here last month.”

“Ruling from the chair,” said Avalon stubbornly.

Trumbull said, “Shut up, both of you. It is the ruling of the chair that Henry may be recognized by all Black Widowers as that rare phenomenon, a completely honest man. No reason need be given. It can be taken as a matter of common knowledge.”

Henry smiled gently, “Shall I take away the pâté, sir?”

“Would you eat it, Henry?” asked Rubin.

“With pleasure, sir.”

“Then I’ll eat it, too.” And he did so, with every sign of barely controlled distaste.

Trumbull leaned over to Drake and said in a low voice, “What the hell’s bothering you?”

Drake started slightly and said, “Nothing. What’s bothering you?”

“You are,” said Trumbull. “I’ve, never seen a roll taken apart into so many pieces in my life.”

The conversation grew general after that, centering chiefly on Rubin’s aggrieved contention that honesty lacked survival value and that all the forces of natural selection combined to eliminate honesty as a human trait. He was defending his thesis well until Gonzalo asked him if he attributed his own success as a writer (“such as it is,” said Gonzalo) to plagiarism. When Rubin met the point head-on and tried to prove, by close reasoning, that plagiarism was fundamentally different from all other forms of dishonesty and therefore might be treated independently, he was hooted down.

Then, between the main course and dessert, Drake left for the Men’s Room and Trumbull followed him.

Trumbull said, “Do you know this Stacey, Jim?”

Drake shook his head. “No. Not at all.”

“Well, what’s wrong, then? I admit you’re not an animated phonograph needle like Rubin but damn it, you haven’t said a word all dinner! And you keep watching Stacey.”

Drake said, “Do me a favor, Tom. Let me question him after dinner.”

Trumbull shrugged. “Sure.”

Over the coffee Trumbull said, “The time has come for the grilling of the guest. Under ordinary circumstances I, as the possessor of the only logical mind at the table, would begin. On this occasion, however, I pass in favor of Doctor Doctor Drake since he is of the same professional persuasion as our honored guest.”

“Doctor Doctor Stacey,” began Drake abruptly, “how do you justify your existence?”

“Less and less as time goes on,” said Stacey, unperturbed.

“What the hell does that mean?” broke in Trumbull.

“I’m asking the questions,” said Drake with unaccustomed firmness.

“I don’t mind answering,” said Stacey. “Since the universities seem to be in deeper trouble each year, and as I do nothing about it, my own function as a university appendage seems continually less defensible.”

Drake ignored that. He said, “You teach at the school where I earned my master’s degree. Have you ever heard of me?”

Stacey hesitated. “I’m sorry, Jim. There are a lot of chemists I haven’t heard of. No offense intended.”

“I’m not sensitive. I never heard of you, either. What I mean is: have you ever heard of me at Berry U.? As a student there?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“I’m not surprised. But there was another student at Berry when I was there who stayed on for his doctorate. His name was Faron — F-A-R-O-N. Lance Faron. Did you ever hear of him?”

“Lance Faron?” Stacey frowned.

“Lance may have been short for Lancelot — Lancelot Faron. But we always called him Lance.”

Stacey shook his head. “No, the name isn’t familiar.”

Drake said, “But you have heard of David St. George?”

“Professor St. George? Certainly. He died the same year I joined the faculty. I can’t say I knew him, but I’ve certainly heard of him.”

Trumbull said, “Hell and damnation, Jim. What kind of questions are these? Is this old-grad week?”

Drake, who had drifted off into thought, scrambled out of it. “Wait, Tom. I’m getting at something, and I don’t want to ask further questions. I want to tell a story first. My God, this has been bothering me for years and I never thought of putting it up to all of you till now — now that our guest—”

“I vote for the story,” interrupted Gonzalo.

“On condition,” said Avalon, “it not be construed as setting a precedent.”

“Chair decides precedents,” growled Trumbull. “Go ahead, Drake. Only for God’s sake don’t take all night.”

“It’s simple enough,” said Drake, “and it’s about Lance Faron, which is his real name; and since I’m going to slander him, you’ll have to understand, Arnold, that everything said within these walls is strictly confidential.”

“That’s been explained to me,” said Stacey.

“Go on,” shouted Trumbull. “You will take all night.”

Drake said, “The thing about Lance is that I don’t think he ever intended to be a chemist. His family was rich — well, I’ll tell you. When he was doing graduate work he had his lab outfitted with a cork floor at his own expense.”

“Why a cork floor?” Gonzalo demanded.

“If you’d ever dropped a beaker on a tile floor you wouldn’t have to ask,” said Drake. “Lance majored in chemistry as an undergraduate because he had to major in something. Then he went on to do graduate work in the same field because World War II was on in Europe, the draft was beginning — it was 1940 — and graduate work in chemistry would look good to the draft board. And it did; he never got into the army as far as I know. But that was perfectly legitimate; I never got into uniform, either, so I point no fingers.”

Avalon, who had been a naval officer, looked austere but agreed. “Perfectly legitimate.”

Drake said, “He wasn’t serious about it — about chemistry, I mean. He had no natural aptitude for it and he never really worked at it. He was satisfied to get straight C’s. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, and it was good enough to sweat out a master’s degree for him — which doesn’t amount to much in chemistry. But the grades weren’t high enough to qualify him for research toward a doctorate.

“That was the whole point. We all — the rest of us who were in graduate chemistry that year-assumed he would only go as far as his master’s. Then he’d get some sort of job that would keep his draft exemption going; we figured his father would help out there—”

“Were the rest of you jealous of him?” asked Rubin. “Because that kind of guy—”

“We weren’t jealous of him,” said Drake. “Sure, we envied his situation. Hell, those were the days before government grants fell about us like snowflakes. Every college semester I lived a suspense story called Can I Dig-Up-the-Tuition-or-Do-I-Have-to-Drop-Out? All of us would have liked to be rich, or have a rich father. But Lance was a likable guy. He didn’t parade his advantages and would even lend us a few bucks when we were in a hole and he’d do it unostentatiously. And he was perfectly willing to concede he was no brain.

“In return we were willing to help him. Gus Blue tutored him in physical organic — for a fee. And I must admit Lance wasn’t always scrupulous. There was one preparation he was supposed to have synthesized in lab and we all knew he bought a sample at a chemical supply house and turned it in as his own. At least, we were pretty sure he did, but it didn’t bother us.”

Rubin said, “Why not? That was dishonest, wasn’t it?”

“Because it didn’t do him any good,” said Drake, in annoyance. “It just meant another C. But the reason I bring it up is that we all knew he was not only capable of cheating but actually did cheat.”

“You mean the rest of you wouldn’t have?” interposed Stacey. There was a touch of cynicism in his voice.

Drake lifted his eyebrows. “I wouldn’t guarantee any of us if we had really been pushed. The point is, we weren’t. We all had a fighting chance to get through without the risk of cheating, so none of us did. Certainly, I didn’t.

“But then there came a time when Lance made up his mind to go on for his Ph.D. It was at a smoker. The war jobs were just beginning to open up and there were a few recruiters on campus. It meant complete security from the draft, but getting our Ph.D.’s meant a lot to us and there was always some question as to whether we’d come back to school once we got away from class for any reason.

“Someone — not I — said he wished he were in Lance’s shoes. Lance had no choice to make. We were sure he would take a job.

“ ‘I don’t know,’ Lance said, maybe just to be contrary. ‘I think I’ll stay right here and go on for the Ph.D.’

“He may have been joking. Anyway, we all thought he was, and we laughed. But we were all a little high at the smoker and it became one of those laughs without reason, you know? If one of us started to die down, he would catch someone else’s eyes and start off again. Really it wasn’t that funny. In fact, it wasn’t funny at all. But we laughed till we were half suffocated. And Lance turned red, and then white.

“I remember I tried to say, ‘Lance, we’re not laughing at you.’ But I just couldn’t. I was choking and sputtering. So Lance walked out on us.

“After that he did go on for his Ph.D. He wouldn’t talk about it but he signed all the necessary forms and that seemed to satisfy him. After a while the situation became as before. He was friendly again.

“I said to him, ‘Listen, Lance, you’ll be disappointed. You can’t get faculty approval for doctoral research with a straight-C record. You just can’t.’

“He said, ‘Why not? I’ve talked to the committee. I told them I’d take chemical kinetics under Professor St. George, and that I’d do better than C in that. I said I’d show them what I could do.’

“That made less than no sense to me. That was much funnier than the remark we had all laughed at. You’d have to know St. George. You ought to know what I mean, Arnold.”

Stacey nodded. “He gave a stiff course in kinetics. One or two of the brightest would make a B; otherwise, all C’s and F’s.”

Drake nodded. “There are some professors who take pride in that sort of thing. It’s a kind of professorial version of Captain Bligh. But St. George was a good chemist, probably the best Berry ever had. He was the only member of the faculty to achieve national prominence after the war. If Lance could take his course and get a high mark, that was bound to be impressive. Even with C’s in everything else, the argument would be: ‘Well, he hasn’t worked much because he hasn’t had to, but when he finally decided to buckle down he showed fire-cracking ability.’

“He and I took chemical kinetics together and I was running and sweating every day of that course. But Lance sat in the seat next to me and never stopped smiling. He took notes casually, and sometimes he even studied them.

“Well, it went down to the wire like that. St. George didn’t give quizzes. He let everything hang on the discussion periods and on the final examination, which lasted three hours — a full three hours.

“In the final week of the course there were no lectures and the students had their last chance to pull themselves together before exams week. Lance was still smiling. His work in the other courses had been usual Lance-quality, but that didn’t seem to bother him. We would say, ‘How are you doing in kinetics, Lance?’ and he would say, ‘No sweat,’ and sound cheerful, damn it.

“Then came the day of the final exam—” Drake paused, and his lips tightened.

“Well?” said Trumbull.

Drake said, his voice a little lower, “Lance Faron passed. He did more than pass. He got a 96. No one had ever gotten over 90 in one of St. George’s finals and I doubt anyone ever has since.”

“I never heard of anyone getting in the 90’s in recent times,” said Stacey.

“What did you get?” asked Gonzalo.

“I got 82,” said Drake. “And except for Lance’s mark it was the best in the class.”

“What happened to the fellow?” asked Avalon.

“He went on for his Ph.D., of course. The faculty qualified him without hesitation and the story was that St. George himself went to bat for him.

“I left after that,” Drake continued. “I worked on isotope separation during the war and eventually shifted to Wisconsin for my doctoral research. But I would hear about Lance sometimes from old friends. The last I heard he was in Maryland somewhere, running a private lab of his own. About ten years ago I remember looking up his name in Chemical Abstracts and finding the record of a few papers he had turned out. Run-of-the-mill stuff. Typical Lance.”

“He’s still independently wealthy?” asked Trumbull.

“I suppose so.”

Trumbull leaned back. “If that’s your story, Jim, then what the hell is biting you?”

Drake looked about the table, first at one and then at another. Then he brought his fist down so that the coffee cups jumped and clattered. “Because he cheated, damn his hide! And as long as he got his Ph.D. by fraud, mine is cheapened by that much — and yours, too,” he said to Stacey.

Stacey murmured, “Phony doctor.”

“What?” said Drake.

“Nothing,” said Stacey, “I was just thinking of a colleague of mine who did a stint at a medical school where the students regarded the M.D. as the only legitimate doctor’s degree in the universe. To them a Ph.D. stood for ‘phony doctor.’ ”

Drake snorted.

“Actually,” began Rubin argumentatively, “if you—”

Avalon cut in from his impressive height. “Well, see here, Jim, if he cheated, how did he get his Ph.D.?”

“Because there was never anything to prove he cheated.”

“Did it ever occur to you,” said Gonzalo, “that maybe he didn’t cheat? Maybe it was really true that when he buckled down he had — what did you call it? — fire-cracking ability.”

“No,” said Drake, with another coffee-cup-rattling fist on the table. “That’s impossible. He never showed that kind of ability before and he never showed it afterward. Besides, he had that confidence all through the course. He had the confidence that could only mean he had worked out a foolproof plan to get his A.”

Trumbull said, shrugging, “All right, say he did. He got his Ph.D. but he didn’t do so well later on. From what you say he’s just off in a comer somewhere, poking along. You know damn well, Jim, that lots of guys achieve high professional rank, even without cheating, who have all their brains in their elbows. So what? Why get mad at one particular guy who got away with it? You know why I think you’re off your rocker on the subject, Jim? What gripes you is that you don’t know how he did it. If you could figure it out you’d forget the whole thing.”

Henry the waiter interrupted, “More brandy, gentlemen?”

Five delicate little glasses were raised. Avalon, who measured out his allowance with an eye dropper, kept his glass down.

Drake said, “Well, then, Tom, you tell me. How did he do it? You’re the code expert.”

“But there’s no code involved. I don’t know. Maybe he — he — managed to get someone else to take the test for him or handed in someone else’s paper.”

“In someone else’s handwriting?” said Drake scornfully. “Besides, I thought of that. We all thought of it. You don’t suppose I was the only one who knew Lance cheated, do you? We all knew it. When that 96 went up on the bulletin board, after we got our breath back — and that took a while — we demanded to see his paper. He handed it over with no objections and we all went over it. It was a near-perfect job, but it was unquestionably in his handwriting and contained his turns of phrase. I wasn’t even impressed by the few errors he made. They were the sort he might have thrown in deliberately in order not to have a perfect paper.”

“All right,” said Gonzalo, “someone else somehow did the test for him and your friend copied it over in his own words and handwriting.”

“Impossible. There was no one in the class but the students and St. George’s assistant. The assistant opened the sealed test papers just before the test started. No one could have written one paper for Lance and another for himself, even if you could imagine it not having been observed. Besides, there wasn’t anyone in the class capable of turning out a 96-level paper.”

Avalon said, “If you were doing it right there, it would have been impossible. But suppose Lance managed to get a copy of the questions well before the test and then swatted away at the textbooks till he had worked out perfect answers? Couldn’t he have done that somehow?”

“No, he couldn’t,” said Drake flatly. “You’re not suggesting anything we didn’t think of then, take my word for it. The university had had a cheating scandal some years before and the whole test procedure had been tightened up. St. George followed this new procedure. He made up the questions and turned them in to his secretary the day before the test. She mimeographed the necessary number of copies in St. George’s presence. He proofread them, then destroyed the originals, both his and the original mineograph. The question papers were packaged and sealed and placed in the school safe. The safe was opened just before the test and handed to St. George’s assistant. There was no way of Lance seeing the questions.”

“Maybe not just then,” said Avalon. “But even if St. George had the questions mimeographed the day before the test, how long might he have had the questions in his possession? Or he might have used a set of questions used on a previous—”

“No,” interrupted Drake. “We carefully studied all previous tests prepared by St. George. Do you think we were fools? There was no duplication of questions.”

“All right. But even if he prepared an entirely new test, he might have prepared it at the beginning of the semester. Lance might somehow have seen the questions early in the semester. It would be a lot easier to work out answers to a fixed number of questions during the course of the semester than to try to learn the entire subject matter.”

“I think you’ve got something there, Jeff,” said Gonzalo.

“He’s got nothing there,” snapped Drake, “because that’s not the way St. George worked it. Every question in the final exam that semester turned on some particular point that some particular student goofed up on in class. One of them, and the most subtle, covered a point that I had missed in the very last week of lectures. I pointed out what I thought was a mistake in a derivation, and St. George — well, never mind. The point is, the test had to be prepared after the last lecture.”

Arnold Stacey broke in. “Did St. George always do that? If he did, he would have been telegraphing a hell of a lot to the kids.”

“You mean the students would have been expecting only questions on errors that had been made in the discussion periods.”

“More than that. The students could have deliberately pulled boners on those parts of the subject they actually knew in order to lure St. George into placing twenty-points’-worth on each phony boner.”

Drake said, “I can’t answer that. We weren’t in his previous classes, so we didn’t know if his previous tests followed the same pattern.”

“Previous classes would have passed on the news, wouldn’t they? At least, if classes in the forties were anything like classes now.”

“They sure would have,” Drake grinned, “and they didn’t.”

“Say, Jim,” said Gonzalo, “how did Lance do in the discussion periods?”

“He kept quiet, played it safe. We all took it for granted he’d do that, so we weren’t surprised.”

Gonzalo said, “What about the department secretary? Couldn’t Lance have wheedled her into telling him the questions? Or even have bribed her?”

Drake said grimly, “You don’t know the secretary. Besides, he couldn’t have. Nor could he have broken into the safe. From the nature of the questions, we could tell the exam had been made up in the last week before the exam was given, and during that last week he couldn’t have done a thing.”

“Are you sure?” asked Trumbull.

“You bet. It bugged us all that he was so damned confident. The rest of us were sea-green with the fear of flunking and he just kept smiling. On the day of the last lecture someone said, ‘He’s going to steal the question sheet.’ Actually, I said it, but the others agreed and we decided to — to— Well, we kept an eye on him.”

“You mean you never let him out of your sight?” demanded Avalon. “Did you watch at night in shifts? Did you follow him into the john?”

“Damn near. He was Burroughs’ roommate and Burroughs was a light sleeper and swore he knew every time Lance turned over.”

“Burroughs might have been drugged one night,” said Rubin.

“He might have, but he didn’t think so, and no one else thought so. Lance just didn’t act suspicious in any way; he didn’t even act annoyed at being watched.”

“Did he know he was being watched?” said Rubin.

“He probably did. Every time he went somewhere he would grin and say, ‘Who’s coming along?’ ”

“Where did he go?”

“Just the normal places. He ate, drank, slept. He went to the school library or sat in his room. He went to the post office, the bank, places like that. We followed him up and down all of Berry’s streets and roads. Besides—”

“Besides, what?” asked Trumbull.

“Besides, even if he could have gotten hold of the question paper, it could only have been in those few days before the test, maybe only the night before. He would have had to swat out the answers, being Lance. It would have taken him days and days of solid work over the books. If he could have answered them by just taking a look at them, he wouldn’t have had to cheat; and he did practically no studying in that last week.”

Rubin said sardonically, “It seems to me, Jim, you’ve painted yourself into a corner. Your man couldn’t possibly have cheated.”

“That’s the whole point,” cried Drake. “He must have cheated and he did it so cleverly that no one caught him. No one could even figure out how he did it. Tom’s right. That’s what gripes me.”

And then Henry the waiter coughed. “If I may offer a suggestion, gentlemen?”

“Yes, Henry,” said Trumbull.

“It seems to me, gentlemen, that you are too much at home with petty dishonesty to understand it very well.”

“Why, Henry, you hurt me cruelly,” said Avalon, with a smile, but his dark eyebrows curled down over his eyes.

“I mean no disrespect, gentlemen, but Mr. Rubin maintained that dishonesty has value. Mr. Trumbull thinks that Doctor Drake is annoyed only because the cheating was clever enough to escape detection, not because it existed, and perhaps all of you agree with that.”

Gonzalo said, “I think you’re hinting, Henry, that you’re so honest that you’re more sensitive to dishonesty than we are and therefore can understand it better.”

Henry said, “I would almost think so, sir, in view of the fact that not one of you has commented on the one glaring improbability in Doctor Drake’s story that seems to me to explain everything.”

“What’s that?” asked Drake.

“Why, Professor St. George’s attitude, sir. Here is a professor who takes pride in flunking many of his students, who never has anyone get above the 80’s on the final examination. And then a student who is known to be thoroughly mediocre — and I gather that everyone in the department, both faculty and students, knew of that mediocrity — gets a 96 and the professor accepts that and even backs him before the qualifying committee. Surely he would have been the first one to suspect dishonesty. And most indignantly, too.”

Drake said, “Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to admit that he could be cheated on.”

Henry said, “You keep finding excuses, sir. In any situation in which a professor asks questions and a student answers them, one always feels that if there is dishonesty, it is always the student’s dishonesty. Why? What if it were the professor who was dishonest?”

Drake said, “What would he get out of that?”

“What does one usually, get? Money, I suspect, sir. The situation as you described it is that of a student who was very well off financially and a professor who had the kind of salary a professor used to get in those days before government grants. Suppose the student had offered a few thousand dollars—”

“For what? To hand in a fake mark? We saw Lance’s answer paper and it was absolutely legitimate. To let Lance see the questions before having them mimeographed? It wouldn’t have done Lance any good — he wouldn’t have had the time to memorize the answers.”

“Look at it in reverse, sir. Suppose the student offered a few thousand dollars to let him, the student, give the professor the questions.”

“Suppose, sir,” Henry went on patiently, “that it was Mr. Lance Faron who made up the questions, one by one, in the course of the semester. He picked on interesting errors that came up in class, never talking during the discussions so that he could listen more closely. He polished the questions as the semester proceeded. As Mr. Avalon said, it is easier to get a few specific points straight than to learn the entire subject matter. Then he deliberately and cleverly included one question from the last week’s lectures, making you all sure the test had been entirely created in that last week. It also meant he turned out a test quite different from St. George’s usual tests. Previous tests in the course had not turned on students’ errors. Nor did later ones, if I may judge from Doctor Stacey’s surprise. Then at the end of the course, with the test paper completed, he simply mailed it to the professor.”

“Mailed it?” said Gonzalo.

“Doctor Drake said the young man visited the post office. So he could have mailed it. Professor St. George would have received the questions with, perhaps, part of the payment in small bills. He would then have written it over in his own handwriting, or typing, and passed it on to his secretary. From then on all would be normal. And of course the professor would have had to back the student thereafter all the way.”

“Why not?” said Gonzalo enthusiastically. “It makes sense!”

Drake said slowly, “I’ve got to admit that’s a possibility that never occurred to any of us. But, of course, we’ll never know.”

Stacey broke in loudly. “I’ve hardly said a word all evening, though I was told I’d be grilled.”

“Sorry about that,” said Trumbull. “This meathead, Drake, had a story to tell because you came from Berry.”

“Well, then, because I come from Berry, let me add something to the story. Professor St. George died the year I came to Berry, as I said, and I didn’t really know him. But I know many people who did know him and I’ve heard many things about him.”

“You mean he was known to be dishonest?” asked Drake.

“No one said that. But he was known to be unscrupulous and I’ve heard some unsavory hints about how he maneuvered government grants into yielding him a personal income. When I heard your story about Lance, Jim, I must admit I didn’t think St. George would be involved in quite that way. But now that Henry has taken the trouble to think the unthinkable from the mountain height of his own honesty — why, I believe he’s right.”

Trumbull said, “Then that’s that. Jim, after thirty years, you can forget the whole thing.”

“Except — except—” A half smile came over Drake’s face and then he broke into a laugh. “I am dishonest because I can’t help thinking that if Lance had the questions all along, the creep might have passed on a hint or two to the rest of us.”

“After you had all laughed at him, sir?” asked Henry quietly, and he began to clear the table.