Dr. Chase came in with his usual bounding step, head thrown back as though he were starting out on a marathon walk, almost incredibly hearty. "Hail, pale Herodotus of the imagined past," he declaimed. "How wags thy world?"
"I sat in on a rather hectic conference between Shalmanesar and his mother, Hilprecht has a new theory, and I'm offering you a drink," said Finch, doing his best to play up.
"No—oh, well a homeopathic dose—about one c.c." He sipped, mulled and swallowed. "Ohio barley, 96 proof," he pronounced and reached for the bottle. "Ah, correct! Hilprecht always has a new theory. We on the project board were rather hoping you'd outshine him; that's why we placed him as your junior. What have you been developing?"
Finch drank and smiled. "Nothing much yet but a rhyme for remembering the Kings of Assyria. But the show isn't over yet; I'd rather wait for the fall of Troy before writing my Iliad."
"Curb that poetic tendency, my boy," said Chase, shaking his finger. "It will get you into trouble; leads to scientific inaccuracy for the sake of structure. Science generalizes on what it has, then uses additional data to magnify the generalizations while an approximation of truth is asymptotically approached. But what's the rhyme? Verse often has some educational value for its mnenomic effect."
"Oh, well, you remember the one about the English Kings:
"Here, here," interrupted Chase, "don't revise the classics. It was 'William the Norman.' "
"But weren't you the one who was complaining about the lack of scientific accuracy in verse? I give you that he was more clearly a bastard than a Norman."
"Touche," laughed Chase. "All right, go ahead with your Assyrians."
Finch blinked and began:
Finch finished with a beam and a sensation, under the liberating influence of Ohio barley, that the room was rocking slightly on unseen gimbals. Chase laughed. "The terminal couplet limps a trifle, but I should think With a little revision, the educational department might use that."
"What kind of revision?" demanded Finch, the suspicious pride of has authorship waking up.
"The use of such words as 'iniquitous,' 'haughty' and 'turbulent' is hardly scientific, is it? That's the trouble with verse: I should really have said that it sacrifices precision to emotionalism instead of structure." His face went serious and he swashed the last of his drink around in the glass. "As a matter of fact, that's one of the things I came over to you to talk to you about tonight. You know, Dr. Finch, we on the project board think pretty well of you; you've done some excellent work. But one or two of the board members think they detect a certain willingness on your part to set aside the scientific approach for the emotional ... as in this matter of Miss Bow's part in the re-enactment."
The room had grown very still, and outside somewhere a train whistled. Finch was suddenly cold sober, with a feeling that something was gripping him around the chest. "What is the status of that?" he managed to ask, .keeping his voice even with an effort.
"Very promising. Thoroughly successful in the psychological, hyper-receptivity for languages. As the time when she must enter the set in your General Zilidu's procession was so very near, we waived the bio-chemical, and she went over to Indoctrination this afternoon."
The pressure had closed in on his chest. "Without leaving any word for me!" was wrung from him.
Chase looked up, and his pleasant, high-spirited face was frozen. "Dr. Finch. As I said before, we value your talents rather highly. But it is hardly fair to any group of scientists you are associated with to subject them to the strain of dealing with emotionalisms. You will pardon my saying it, but you are behaving like an adolescent ..."
"The pile of heads. Impale him. My God!" "My dear man, what in the world are you talking about?"
Bzzzzp! went the indicator over the door and the pencil of light scrawled "W. Beaure—" with the rest of the letters piled together for lack of space on the signature plate. Finch pressed the button, and for the moment there was that armed truce of silence which the approach of a third party always imposes on a quarrel between two men.
Washington Beauregard said: "Greetings, Dr. Finch," then his big eyes rolled as he saw the psychologist. He added slowly: "Good evening, Dr. Chase."
"Hello," said Chase, getting up and offering a hand.
"You're Longstreet, aren't you?—no, excuse me, Beauregard."
"That is my cognymic," said the astrologer, with immense dignity. "Dr. Finch, I inferventiously completed those horoscopes, and they excruciated me so I tarried not in bringing them. No sir."
The thought flashed through Finch's mind that he might have preferred some other method of bringing the matter up before the psychologist, but he said: "What did you find?"
"The ingraduation of favorable omens for you and Miss Bow. Mars is in Scorpio; Saturn is in conjunction with Venus and in quartile with the Sun. Saturn is the lord of your ascendancy. The inclination of the celestial is you and Miss Bow should instantaneously get married, and it would even be better if you forgot all about this-here project."
Chase's eyebrows shot up. "Let's see that chart a minute, will you?" he said. "It was my impression the staff astrologers checked Dr. Finch's horoscope before the project was undertaken ... Look here, you said Mars was in Scorpio; according to this chart you've drawn it's in Saggitarius."
"No sir. The doctrination of astrology eliminates your contention. This is one of those printed forms that goes by signs instead of constellations. Me, sir, I am a constel-lationist, like the Babylonian founders of the science. That means that Mars is in Scorpio, which is the joy of the lesser infortune. Miss Bow is a Mercury, which is hostile to Mars—"
"Yes, yes. I know there are differences of detail in practice, but I'm trying to get at your general principle. Aren't the signs and the constellations congruent?"
Beauregard laughed louder than he needed to. "Dr. Chase, you do not comprehendify the background of scientific astrology, indeed you do not. The signs and the constellations were congruential in the historical days of the foundations. But no more, no more. The equinoxes, they pro-cess—"
"Precess," said Chase and Finch, absent-mindedly and together.
"I beg your pardon for the misalinguology. The equinoxes defined a precession, and whereinheretofore the sun had entered Taurus at the vernal equinox, he presently arrived in Aries at that time. At the time of illustrious Hipparchus astrological scientification agreed that the sun's vernal equinoctial position should deliniate the first point of Aries. Well, that did not do much to change the mind of the sun; it just went right along precessing, and as we stand today, the constellations are thirty degrees off phase, in a purely astronomical sense, absolutely astronomical, so that it does not de-validify astrological calculations."