Skios

18

“Wilson Westerman…” “Darling Erlunder…” “Peter Comax…”

At every moment the cloud of names hanging about Oliver’s head became more tangled and less attached to all the smiling faces and outstretched hands.

“Dickerson and Davina…” “And I’m Smoky…” “Chuck … Chuck who? Chuck nobody! Just Chuck…!” “Chuck Friendly, in fact — he’s too modest to say…” “Kate Katz…” “Kate Kurz…” “Morton Rinkleman, and you may have met Kellogg Rinkleman, who is in fact my second cousin…”

“Hi,” said Oliver — no, Dr. Wilfred, Dr. Wilfred. “Hello, there. How nice to meet you. Hi.”

“A great honor…” said the smiling faces. “A real pleasure … We’re all so excited…”

Dr. Wilfred remained alert and braced. It would get harder than this, obviously. Sooner or later there would be questions put to him, and he would have to find answers.

“I believe you know Senator Hauptmayer, sir?” said one of the faces.

And here it was — a question. A perfectly easy one to deal with, however, even though he so rarely resorted to lies.

“How is the senator?” he asked.

“Poorly, as you know.”

“Give him my best regards.”

“I will, sir.”

Another face: “I read your book … What was it called…?”

Harder, but not impossible. Dr. Wilfred spread his hands helplessly and smiled. He didn’t know, either. Everyone laughed.

“Anyway,” said the face, “you know the one I mean, and I wanted to ask you: when you wrote this book, what were you trying to tell us?”

He could put this one away in the same fashion as he had the last one.

“Heaven knows,” he said. More laughter. “Only whatever it was I was trying to tell you, I obviously wasn’t trying hard enough.”

Another hit. On the edge of the group, behind all the unfamiliar faces, was one that he knew. Pleasantly open eyes, watching him and smiling. He gave her a little wave, and a small special smile that she would be able to see was different from the smiles he was handing out to all the others. She did; she quickly looked away to hide how pleased she was.

Another face: “Now, I’ve read that book, and I was somehow expecting you to be … well, I don’t know … different…”

“No,” said Dr. Wilfred. “I’m pretty much the way I am.”

They loved it. Another face coming up, though: “You won’t recall this, Dr. Wilfred, but we have met before.”

Ironical, obviously. Means he’s met Dr. Wilfred and it wasn’t me. On the other hand … “Where was it? Not at that thing in Mexico?”

“Montreal,” said the face.

“Montreal … In the bar?”

“In the hot tub!”

“I wonder you recognized me with my clothes on.”

“I never forget a face. Though, yes, you’ve changed.”

“Changed? Have I?” The dark depths waiting below the high wire. The audience watching expectantly.

“You’ve got younger, Dr. Wilfred!”

“Hot tubs, obviously.”

Unbelievable, thought Dr. Wilfred. You were who you said you were, even if they knew you weren’t! And even as he thought this he realized that it was Dr. Wilfred who was thinking it. He was Dr. Wilfred not just for the people around him. He was becoming Dr. Wilfred for himself.

It was all too easy! More danger, more danger!

“Just a quick question, if I may,” said a small man in a pair of spectacles held together by sticking plaster. “Oh — Professor Norbert Ditmuss, Department of Applied Dynamics, University of West Idaho. Emeritus, but I like to keep in touch with the subject. Now, sir, you say in your book Planned Innovation, Chapter Seven, I think it is, page 179, am I right, in the footnote on your statistical methodology, that assigning a value of between seven and ten to the theta function in a Wexler Distribution, given that lambda is negative and mu is greater than phi, will yield a solution remarkably close to Theobald’s constant. Now, my question to you, sir, is exactly how close?”

“Oh,” said Dr. Wilfred. “As close as a dog and a flea.”

Everyone laughed respectfully. Except Professor Ditmuss. “Yes, but seriously,” he said.

“Seriously?” said Dr. Wilfred. “An inch and a half.”

“I really do need an answer to this question, Dr. Wilfred,” said Professor Ditmuss, “because I am writing a paper that will reference your work, and I don’t want to be unjust. So would you be kind enough to take us step by step through your calculation?”

“Well…” said Dr. Wilfred.

There was an easy way round this question, just as there was to all the others, but for some reason Dr. Wilfred couldn’t see what it was. He seemed to have come rather suddenly to the end of the golden pathway that had stretched out before him.

Everyone around the table had turned to watch him. None of them had understood a word of the question, and they looked forward to the brilliance that Dr. Wilfred would display in providing an answer not a word of which any of them would understand either.

“Well…” said Oliver, since Oliver was what Dr. Wilfred was now rather swiftly subsiding back into.

“I hate to interrupt,” said a soft and welcome voice. Nikki had stepped forward. “But I shall have to ask you two gentlemen to discuss technical questions at some other time. I’m whisking Dr. Wilfred away for a rather important meeting.”