Izzy got his chart back from the congratulatory crowd. Several even helped him carry it as he went away.
I laughed. Maybe that was the last Heller would ever see of him!
Chapter 7
I was quite heartened by the number of potential allies I was picking up in case everything else went wrong with my plans for Heller. Vantagio, Miss Simmons, this Izzy Epstein. I began to keep a list. When Raht and Terb called in, possibly I could greatly embellish my planning.
Heller spent the afternoon doing some more checking on class locations, obviously still trying to figure out how to be in two or three places at once and get tutored at the same time. And then he went around to the other side of what was labelled “Journalism” and found the college bookstore on Broadway.
All day he had been running into people and sticking his nose into professors’ offices and making up a list. He had been using the back side of a computer printout with the staples removed and now had this yard-long sheet with titles and texts and manuals and authors scribbled all over it. He handed it to the girl behind the counter. She was obviously some graduate student doing part-time work to handle the current rush. Pretty, too.
“All this?” she said, adjusting her horn-rimmed glasses. “I can’t read some of this writing. I wish they would teach kids to read and write these days.”
Heller peered over at what she was pointing at. Yikes! He had annotated the list over on the edge with Voltarian shorthand!
My pen was really poised. Oh, I’ve seen Code breaks in my time. Maybe a whore and a tailor wouldn’t know they were dealing with an extraterrestrial but he was in a college area and those people are smart.
“It’s shorthand,” said Heller. “The main titles and authors are in English.”
They were, too. In very neat block print.
“What’s this here?” said the girl, lifting her glasses above her eyes to see better. She was pointing at The Fundamentals of Geometry by Euclid. “We don’t have any books by that author. Is it a new paperback?”
Heller told her she’d have to help him as he didn’t know either. She went to her catalogues and looked up under “Authors.” She couldn’t find it. So she looked in a massive catalogue of alphabetical book titles. Then, cheered on by Heller, she looked up the author in the book titles. “Hey, here it is!” she said. “Euclidian Geometry as Interpreted and Rewritten by Professor Twist from an Adaption by I. M. Tangled.” She went and found a copy. “You wrote here that his name was ‘Euclid’ when it was ‘Euclidian.’ You should learn how to spell.”
They couldn’t find anything by somebody named “Isaac Newton” and the girl decided he must be some revolutionary banned by the New York Tactical Police Force. But Heller persevered and they eventually came up with a book, Laws of Motion I Have Rewritten and Adapted from a Text by Dr. Still as Translated from an Archaic English Newtonian Work by Elbert Mouldy by Professor M. S. Pronounce, Doctor of Literature.
“You should have told me it would be in the literature section,” said the girl. “You don’t even know how to read a card catalogue.”
“I’ll try to find out,” said Heller.
“Jesus,” said the girl, “they teach card catalogues in the third grade! God, didn’t anybody ever teach you anything? There’s a staff at High Library devoted to showing students how to do it. You ask them over there. I’m here to sell books, not teach kindergarten! But let’s get on, this is an awfully long list! You’re keeping others waiting!”
They did make progress, however, and the pile of books grew and grew. Finally the girl, peering between the columns of books and lifting her glasses to see Heller, said, “You can’t carry all these. And I’m not going to wrap them. So you go over to the college store and get about five rucksacks while I get an assistant to add up this bill.”
Heller did as he was told.
When he returned, he packed the five rucksacks and paid the bill. Then he began to adjust straps and finally managed to get the sacks hung around him. Other students who had been waiting made room for him disinterestedly.
“Can you manage?” said the girl. “That must be about two hundred pounds. Books are heavy.”
“Just barely,” said Heller. “But we haven’t got everything on this list.”
“Oh, the rest of that stuff. Well, take that one about thirty from the top, World History Rewritten by Competent Propagandists for Kiddies and Passed by the American Medical Association, that’s fourth grade grammar school. We don’t carry that sort of thing. You’ll have to get them at Stuffem and Glutz, the city’s authorized school supplier. They’re on Varick Street.” And she gave him the number. “My God,” she added, “how’d you ever get here not knowing those texts?”
Heller turned to make his way through the backlog of student customers who stepped aside patiently. The girl said to the next student in line, “Jesus, what we get for freshmen these days.”
“It says on your slip there he’s a senior,” said the student.
“I got it!” said the girl. I quickly and hopefully jacked up the audio. “He’s here on an athletic scholarship! A weight lifter! Hey, call him back. I was awful impolite. I need a date for tonight’s dance! Boy, am I dumb! He was cute, too.”
Yes, she certainly was dumb! She had denied me opportunity after opportunity to file charges against Heller for Code breaks! And they had watched somebody heft two hundred pounds of rucksacks like they were air and I’m sure if they had looked out the door or window they would have seen Heller running along, clickety-clack, without a care in the world to the subway. My faith in the powers of observation of college students had suffered a heavy blow. Maybe they were all on drugs. That was the only possible explanation! An extraterrestrial right under their noses making all kinds of giveaways and they hadn’t even blinked an eye!
Heller got right on down to Varick Street on the same subway. He got into the city-authorized bookstore. And he was shortly showing a half-blind old man his list. In the subway he had ticked off missing titles with a red pen and now he handed it over, Voltarian shorthand and all, for the red checks to be filled.
The old man bustled off to a storeroom. “You want thirty copies of each?” he called back.
“One will do just fine.”
“Oh, you’re a tutor. All right.” And he came back in about ten minutes, staggering under a stack of books. “I’ll get the rest now.” And he went back and came out staggering under a second stack.
Heller checked off the titles. He got almost to the end. “There’s one missing: Third Grade Arithmetic.”
“Oh, they don’t teach that anymore. It’s all ‘new math’ now.”
“What’s ‘new math’?” said Heller.
“I dunno. They put out a new ‘new math’ every year. It’s something about greater and lesser numbers without using any numbers this year. It was orders of magnitude of numbers last year but they were still teaching them to count. They stopped that.”
“Well, I’ve got to have something about basic arithmetic,” said Heller.
“Why?”
“You see,” said Heller, “I do logarithms in my head and the only arithmetic I’ve ever seen done was by some primitive tribe on Flisten. They used charcoal sticks and slabs of white lime.”
“No kidding?” said the old man.
“Yes, it was during a Fleet peace mission. They wouldn’t believe we had that many ships and it was really funny to see them jumping about and counting and multiplying and writing it down. They were more advanced than others I’ve seen, however. One tribe had to use their fingers and toes to count their wives. They never had more than fifteen wives because that was all the fingers and toes they had.”