Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

Weintraub said. “I’m not personally familiar with it, but all the programs that come through here are ambitious.” He glanced absently into a room where a group of men with loosened ties sat arguing in clouds of cigarette smoke. “It’s all nonsense, really—or practically all nonsense.” His eyes moved left and right, halfheartedly checking the office doors as he and Craine passed with their coffee cups. Except for his legs, the rest of him, as he walked, seemed motionless, floating. “You’re in Bedlam, Mr. Craine.”

“I see,” Craine said, and waited.

Professor Weintraub stopped, solemnly raised his cup and drank, then lowered the cup and started walking again. He gestured toward a corridor breaking off to the right. “My office is down this way,” he said. As they moved toward it, he said, “What do we do here. Jesus, what a question!”

“Let me sketch in what I’m after,” Craine cut in. “I just want to know what kinds of problems come up, anything at all that will help me to get some idea of what it’s like to work here—for insiders, I mean. A programmer like April Vaught. The morale of the place, intrigues, disappointments …”

Professor Weintraub studied Craine thoughtfully with his slightly bugged gray eyes, then nodded, walking on. Before he’d figured out quite what to say, they’d reached his office. When they were seated, Weintraub at his desk, Craine opposite, Weintraub set his cup down, crossed his legs at the knees, and stared at the line where the wall met the ceiling. Framed in the window behind Weintraub’s head, Craine could see the chimneys of the chemistry building.

“I myself came into computers,” Weintraub said, “through mathematics. To me, computers are just large, fast calculators. They add, subtract, multiply, and so on; sort things very rapidly, by various criteria; and they remember things infallibly—in other words, they remember and manipulate formal symbols, figure out the values in a particular case of, say, F = ma or E = mc2, to say nothing of equations considerably more complex.”

Fragment Four

The minute he spotted her waiting on the porch of her apartment house, Craine knew he was in dutch. He swung the truck into the driveway almost without slowing, then hit the brake and skidded, meaning to let her know he’d been hurrying, it wasn’t his fault that he was late. It was only when he heard the gravel spitting, flying from the tires, that he realized he’d sent the wrong signal: she would assume he was drunk. Nothing could be farther from the truth, in fact. He’d jumped into the truck, turned the ignition, and jerked forward all in one crazy motion, not even thinking of taking the bottle from under the seat where it was hidden. Now as he sat bent hard over the steering wheel, his left foot on the clutch, his right on the brake, staring out the window with widened eyes as if no one could be more surprised by the suddenness of his arrival than he was, he understood that, by crimus, he’d done it this time. If she’d begun to trust him, she was finished with that now. It surprised him that she didn’t turn instantly into the house, or dart down onto the sidewalk and stride away without him. She simply stood there in the porch shadows, small and furious, clutching her armload of books and staring at him, her dark eyes sharp as an Injun’s. He thought of yelling something at her, taking the offensive, and thought in the same mental motion of calling out, Sorry I’m late! He tried to think of some lie—it was true that his watch was undependable, he thought, then backed off from the thought, somehow confused: was it or wasn’t it? And all at once he understood that he’d waited too long, it was too late now to say anything, nothing to do but sit there.

Suddenly, to his astonishment, she broke free of the pillar she’d been leaning against and came hurrying down the porch steps into the sunlight and over toward his truck. Like an eager servant, he reached over to open the right-hand side door. She climbed in. She met his grin with a black-eyed flash of anger, then turned her face forward, staring out the window, saying nothing. He shifted into reverse and hurriedly, smoothly, let the clutch out.

“Do you realize what time it is?” he heard her ask, clear as day, though her mouth never moved.

“Yes I do,” he said crossly. “I got a watch, same as you.”

She shot a startled look at him, then looked forward again.

“You’re only maybe fifteen minutes late,” he said. Part of his mind stood back from the rest, pondering the strange possibility that he’d begun to read minds. He asked, “What building’s your class in?”

“Faner,” she said.

“English class?”

“Biology.”

“I thought Faner was mostly for English,” he said, merely to be talking; he’d never thought one thing or another about what was taught in Faner. The place was too big, he realized on reflection, to be the province of any one department.

The girl said nothing, still punishing him, or punishing him and thinking. It was interesting, Craine mused, that she’d decided to ride with him in spite of her anger. No real choice, maybe. He was the only ride she had, and it was too far to walk; he’d seen enough to know she was something like obsessive about her schoolwork. Yet that wasn’t all of it. She’d stood there waiting in the shadows of the porch like an orphan, waited some twenty minutes beyond the time he’d said he’d come; and with good argument against it, when he’d come into the driveway like a crazy man, she’d decided, suddenly and sternly, to ride with him. Her skin was brown, slightly golden, as if maybe she’d spent the summer in Florida. He remembered—and thought, the same instant: There it is again, memory, live and healthy, as if it were all half an hour ago—how as a child he’d watched, furtively, those