"Please don't be offended," Sear whispered. "Who wouldn't choose to be mad like Enos Enoch instead of sane like Dr. Spielman and me? Besides, there's another kind of hero that we didn't mention: the tragic kind." I was not consoled. To Max he added, "They never got their due in the Cum Laude Project, either, when Eierkopf had us all working on that flunkèd GILES. But if you ask me, the only sane heroes are the tragic heroes." He nodded his elegant thin head towards the stage, where now a man taller than the others, with a greatly pained expression on his mask, had stepped forth from a central door in the background to approach the seated gathering.
"There's the best example of all," Dr. Sear whispered to me; "that's Taliped Decanus."
4
Taliped's my name: the famous Dean
of Cadmus College. You're the ad hoc team
(department-heads and vice-administrators)
whom I named last year as evaluators
of our academic posture. Maybe you knew
these things already. Notice I've come to you
in person: that's because I itch to find
out what, if anything, is on your mind,
and why you're camping on the Deanery stoop.
You, there: you're head of the Speech and Forensics Group
and closest to retirement; speak without fear
or rhetoric: What on Campus brings you here?
"A modern translation," Max remarked. "I hate it." But Dr. Sear declared that idiomatic translation of the classics was much in fashion in the College, and that while he agreed that the modernization could go too far, he approved of the general principle. I observed that the line-ends seemed to rhyme, more or less, in pairs.
"Heroic couplets," Dr. Sear explained. "Nothing modern about them."
"Ah."
Now an old chap, not unlike Max in appearance, with white beard and wrapper, spoke for the assemblage:
COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: Ahem. I am most proud, Dean Taliped
and honored colleagues, to have been the head
of this, my last committee, whose report
and urgent recommendations —
TALIPED: Make it short;
I've little time: appointments, letters, lunch
with six assistant deans, and then a bunch
of meetings until five. Get to the facts.
COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: [Aside]
Respect for his elders is what this fellow lacks.
[TO TALIPED]
I mean to, Mister Dean. The facts are here
in our report: complete, unvarnished, clear — -
TALIPED: [Aside]
And laced with purple passages, I'll bet.
Of all the speech-professors that I've met,
here in Cadmus and back where I used to teach,
not one could make a clear, unvarnished speech.
[TO COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN]
No need to read it: summarize what's in it.
COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: [Aside]
We waste two weeks; he can't spare a minute.
[TO TALIPED]
Very well, sir; I'll forego analysis
of our problems, and of certain fallacies
inherent in some proposals for relief —
though it's quite worth hearing. Also, to be brief,
I'll skip our truly moving peroration
and read you these last pages of summation,
done in a post-Philippic courtroom style…
TALIPED: Let's skip that too, okay? I swear that I'll
be just as moved to hear in a word what's what.
COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: In a word, sir: Cadmus College has gone to pot.
TALIPED: To pot, you say?
COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: Quite utterly to pot.
Shall I say more?
TALIPED: I know you will. But not
in post-Philippics. Lay it on the line.
COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: [Reads from last page of report]
Item: our fruits are dying on the vine —
TALIPED: So's the Department of Plant Pathology.
COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: Agronomy reports that there will be
another field-crop failure — - rusts and blight.
Item: Dairy Research declares we might
lose half our stock to hoof-and-mouth disease…
I clutched Max's arm. "That's terrible!"
"Oh well," sighed Dr. Sear, "at least the tickets didn't cost us anything."
COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: That means we'll lack for beef and milk and cheese.
TALIPED: / know what it means!
COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: It means, sir, that we'll die
of malnutrition soon — - or plague, if I
correctly read those secret, censored portions
of the epidemiologists' report. Item: abortions,
both spontaneous and not, are much
more common every term; so too are such
once-rare events as murder, arson, cheating,
robbery, riot, rape, divorce, wife-beating.
Morale is low, inflation high; vice thrives;
we're losing accreditation and our wives.
Famine, stillbirth, crime, despair, the pox —
fact is, sir, Cadmus College is on the rocks.
TALIPED: What else is new?
COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: Well, sir, to be sure,
we understand that, while you're brilliant, you're