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.”